The best scenes in this movie show that Guðmundsson has a talent for make-believe, drug trips and fantasy scenarios, and if there were more such set pieces in Beautiful Beings, then it might have been something more distinctive rather than the latest in a very long line of films about young people left on their own.

The Freedom to Marry is a movie that discourages complex thinking or contradiction, but there are little hints here and there of something more frightening and unstable.

It’s the movie equivalent of a multi-course banquet of colorful foams: wisps of flavor emerge here and there, and admiration reigns, but in the end you’re unlikely to believe you’ve actually had a meal.

A thriller without thrills is merely a drama, and The Wedding Guest is a dull drama at that.

The sheer number of artisans creating great work on this film does become a disappointment, though. Without a proper story or dialogue, what good is skin-deep beauty?

It works in the hits, and it casts singers who make those hits sound virtually identical to the original versions. What the movie doesn't do is answer the question, “Why did I just spend 134 minutes watching the Frankie Valli episode of ‘Behind the Music'?”

Tells the story of Amy Winehouse but shows no passion in telling it and has nothing to say about the events that transpire. It’s the utter minimum of what a biopic can be.

If Boyd’s perspective is limited, his focus is sharp.

Whatever nuance existed in the original novel, whatever detail regarding the complicated emotional existence of actual human beings, is reduced here to not-quite-suspenseful-enough plot points and an impossible forbidden romance that makes almost no sense.

Unfortunately, The Deer King fatally (and repeatedly) stalls as its plot starts winding down and its creators lunge for a character-driven moral to a symbolically freighted parable.

The failure of Catfight lies not with the leads, then, but with wasted opportunity.

Like its villain, Kung Fu Panda 4 can do an imitation, but we can tell it’s not the genuine article.

Dolan shoots in tightly held close-ups, forgoing spatial staging for the immediate pleasures of fabric and light. Whereas similar imagery filled his previous films with energy and life, here it just makes the somber piece feel more claustrophobic and inert.

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase is clearly made by people who have thought through the material and tried to make it enjoyable and palatable, but the set-up at the end for further sequels feels a little too hopeful.

It’s a horror movie for people who want to watch a scary movie but are hanging out with someone who gets scared very easily, and so they decide to compromise. Not too scary, not too silly, not much of anything really, but not much to complain about either.

Graham, Robinson, and Barantini’s thematic concerns about how restaurants work are strong enough ingredients. It’s too bad they’ve been subjected to the one-note flavoring of a single-take movie.

This is a movie that shows the Curies’ work changing the world, but then has Marie say, “I can feel our work … changing the world.”

If anything, “Don’t Die” may work better as a cautionary tale of what happens when you give your entire identity, thinking, and online persona to playing an avatar of fitness. It’s a shame that Smith seems to see such radical actions as mostly harmless.

If only Anything’s Possible had been content to depict this relationship in all its newness onscreen without burdening these two appealing characters with a pile-on of issues more suited to a newspaper editorial than a narrative feature.

Rogue Agent is plenty fascinated by the abridged version of this saga — bad men are out there — but you’ll wish for that darker, less cleanly shaped telling the more you think about its scarier contours.

The film largely squanders Woodley's considerable talents by having her talking about (but never showing us) the numb but open wound that is Kat's relationship with her mother. More disappointingly, the film never figures out how to translate Kat's lack of emotion into something that makes us feel anything other than distant pity.

Brice’s script boasts a few surprises, but this is essentially a highly competent film about boring people’s boring problems.

A capably rendered, urgently argued portrait in courage that never quite rises above curious-footnote status.

In superlative previous films like “The Host” and “Mother,” Bong elevated, then transcended, the humble genres of the monster movie and the murder mystery by refashioning them into exquisitely heart-wrenching human drama. Disappointingly, then, his alchemical touch is absent here. Snowpiercer warms the heart, but doesn't penetrate it.

"Art Addict” may be encyclopedic, but it’s all-too-rarely insightful.

The documentary is so outwardly focused, so intended for Western audiences, that it barely transcends the nature of a Wikipedia page, afraid to push back or to show anything that might complicate the notion of what a female leader has to do either to get work done or to be respected (or ideally both).

It speaks the language of climbers everywhere, but in the process reduces its very real historical innovators to two peevish regional managers in a sniping session, a dry duel set in the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The most impressive aspect of James Franco’s In Dubious Battle is, by far, its cast.