That face-off between two comics legends becomes but one in a series of big things bashing into other big things, which is what Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer mistake for storytelling. The trio do manage to cough up an acceptable number of ooh-that’s-cool moments, and fans who will be satisfied with those will be satisfied with those, but any other ideas and characters the movie might offer get lost in the rubble.

Most of this new House Party is relatively uninspired, a modest and mediocre comedy that relies more on its high-concept plot to capture the audience’s attention than on interesting characters or, you know, jokes.

Audiences in the mood to be scared will certainly send their popcorn flying during a few tense moments of The Meg. But they’ll also wish the movie had bothered to find an equivalent to Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis speech in “Jaws.” When the human characters are reduced to chum, it’s hard to care about them getting eaten.

It’s great to have an animated female lead that does for science what Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” did for reading, but ultimately, Over the Moon wanes more than it waxes.

For a film that tries to be a bravura piece of genre-hopping cinema, “Encounter” too often feels confused rather than assured.

Argylle is fun in spurts with a strong cast of characters that help you get through the overly exaggerated runtime. But the script boxes itself into a corner too often and falls into repetition.

The goals of Fatman exceed its grasp; it wants to be funny but also grim but also realistic but also about Santa Claus. Had the film moved a few degrees in either direction, upping the dark humor or concentrating more on minimalist despair and brutal action, the Nelms brothers might have been onto something.

Although the filmmakers return to outsize wackiness too frequently, the film mercifully isn’t one chaotic gag after another.

There are quick cuts and CG imagery and bro-ing out in nearly equal proportions; I found some of this excess to be heady and exciting, but by the end of the film’s running time, it all became a bit tiresome, to say nothing of tiring.

Rather than take the time to let us really get to know and understand its complicated title character, the movie instead goes for cheap, gotcha plotting that undermines the entire project.

Viewers interested in martial-arts action are bound to find the combat-with-a-C to be lackluster in that way that hand-to-hand fighting tends to be when it gets drowned out by digital effects. More likely to have fun with this latest Mortal Kombat are Sam Raimi enthusiasts who can appreciate the comedy in over-the-top geysers of fake blood, which the film unleashes with increasing regularity as the fights get more serious.

Smallfoot provides more complex food for thought than most mainstream animation, but the overall results are still disappointingly bland.

In the fraught relationship between controlling subject and probing filmmaker who start out as comrades in activism, the tension should be explored, not glided over. It leaves “Risk” feeling like the outline for a dozen different documentaries, instead of a complete one itself.

Everyone’s so damn happy and grateful to have been meddled with that it undercuts both the comedy and the drama in this film from writer-director Lorene Scafaria.

A big heart and strong cast go a long way towards elevating its prosaic approach.

Perhaps the biggest issue for The Mauritanian is that the screenplay by M.B Traven and Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani tries to accommodate too many protagonists.

It’s a spooky, entertaining, but totally goofy entry in “The Conjure-verse.”

There’s nothing wrong, in other words, with the idea of setting an all-ages haunted house-style chase movie in a corny bulk retail store. The main thing holding back Spirit Halloween: The Movie is that its young stars never get to convincingly act their age.

It feels derivative and only superficially invested in its big ideas about second chances and the conundrum of appropriating the bodies of individuals whom society has deemed irredeemable.

If all else fails, at least it’s a movie smart enough to know that, frankly, you can’t beat Charlize Theron, covered in gold, shooting lethal spiky tentacles out of her midriff.

If an algorithm recommends The Emoji Movie, Weitz’s film argues, there’s something very, very wrong with that algorithm — and there’s no denying that logic.

While the film sometimes seems to be stretching to find problems in every corner of the environmental movement (apparently, no company that claims to be green can also plug into the power grid), it does a brutally effective job of suggesting that a dream of endless renewable energy may be unattainable.

There are few surprises or misdirects or red herrings involved with this all-too-solvable mystery, let alone subtext or commentary. With Marlowe, a very talented cast of actors and a legendary filmmaker have assembled to make a Philip Marlowe movie you can fold laundry to.

Ultimately, Daniels has made a touching and forceful film about three generations attempting to overcome familial and societal trauma. It’s only the Devil who underdelivers.

Anyone who sees this new movie without having watched the original will certainly enjoy the lead performances, but they’ll be getting the frozen-watered-down version of the story.

You can only linger so long with such a parade of oddities making ever stranger choices before your eyes grow weary of gawking at a pageant of hideous beauty, and you start checking the clock.

Stewart’s whole career is based on the idea that political commentary and humor go together. Yes, they do – but as Irresistible shows, they do it better when they’re in the moment.

The balance between the humanistic and academic is way off.