Deadpool is one of those movies that’s all the more successful for how easily it could have gone so very wrong. It’s suffused with an arch, self-aware wit...yet it takes its romance and revenge storylines just seriously enough to keep us engaged.

The scenery is nice. Everything and everyone is very clean. Walker and Palmer, as the lovers, work with what little they’ve been given. But none of those elements are of any real consequence. There is no surprise, and there is nothing to care about.

This movie is so crushing mainly because it was made by obviously smart people who are trying to dumb themselves down, and there’s nothing more excruciating than that.

Despite arriving a decade too late, there’s a version of the small-town coming-out comedy 4th Man Out...that could feel relevant. But first-time director Andrew Nackman’s emotionally shallow, vaguely misogynistic take isn’t it.

The Coens revel in both the glamour and the squalor of post-war Hollywood with a film that more than makes up in wit and flash what it might lack in substance.

Jane Got a Gun takes long pauses in the action to chronicle through flashbacks how this love triangle comes to defend a single home. The film’s greatest surprise is that these unabashedly emotional flashbacks work.

A slapdash movie that’s more unbearable than the heavy-breathing best-seller and its emotionally timid screen adaptation.

As cinema, it’s an avalanche of feel-good clichés, but as an audience-pleasing machine, it relentlessly pursues its goal and will probably win over viewers who surrender to it.

Certain Women gives us female characters who are smart and complicated and funny and imperfect, and it never hand-delivers a message regarding what we’re supposed to think about them.

The movie really belongs to Mortensen, who allows Ben to be exasperating, arrogant and impatient but also warm, loving and caring. He’s a tough but adoring father, a grieving widower and an angry defender of his wife’s final wishes, and Mortensen plays all these notes and more with subtlety and grace.

Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny spin intrigues, break hearts and flirt with scandal just as effectively in the 1790s setting of “Love” as they did in “Disco,” which took place in the early 1980s.

Along with an ending that some will find either enigmatic or unsatisfying, the movie could benefit from some minor re-editing. But there’s still much that works here, from the chillingly droning score to a uniformly strong cast.

Nearly free of gore, the film taps into the deep and always welcome vein of the opulently bizarre things that rich, emotionally stunted people get into when they’ve got too much money. Stacey Menear’s script is careful and clever about revealing what Brahms really is, for he’s certainly got a mind and will of his own.

If nothing else, Dirty Grandpa is consistent: it maintains a tone of aggressive charmlessness from start to finish.

Like a bad orange, this adaptation of the series-spawning novel by Rick Yancey lacks both juice and flavor.

Depending on what you need from horror like this – shock followed by relief, or a brutalization fix – Martyrs is bait-and-switch, or it’s a drawn-out tease that makes good. Either way, it’s a sop to vile tastes.

This is the sort of film in which we’re told that a certain action is impossible, until it isn’t, or that a certain thing would never happen, and then it does, so even with all those lives on the line, the movie can’t effectively build up stakes or consequences.

It’s cohesive and cathartic enough to make a fourth entry unnecessary, but at the same time, it’s entertaining and gorgeous enough to make the prospect of same something to welcome.

The Masked Saint didn’t screen for critics, but it’s no worse than any other faith-based film, which as a canon tends to sacrifice story for the sermon. A movie that can finally combine the two — now that’d be a miracle worth beholding.

While writer-director Andrew Renzi’s feature narrative debut is problematic whenever Gere isn’t onscreen (and even sometimes when he is), the veteran star exudes a damaged magnetism reminiscent of the character studies that thrilled discerning moviegoers in the ’70s.

Occasionally Norm and everyone around him will break out into a dance, and you have to wonder if these numbers were scheduled as bathroom breaks.

In terms of anything that has to do with characterization, Chuck Hogan‘s script is punishingly rote. But as bombastic, shoot-‘em-up spectacle, 13 Hours is a visceral, well-paced and often beautiful action-thriller.

The film’s most genuinely funny moment involves A.J.’s ringtones, which should perhaps come as no surprise — the stakes, and the laughs, are so small that Ride Along 2 was apparently designed to be watched on your phone.

The accusations of cultural tone-deafness wind up being fairly moot, since The Forest turns out to be so generally inept and non-scary that to boycott it would give the film more attention than it deserves.

One of those rare films so unfathomably ghastly you could write a better one while sitting through its interminable 110 minutes. I’d rather re-watch Elton John's "Gnomeo & Juliet" 110 times.

Most essential to telling this story are Rampling and Courtenay, both of whom convey pages and pages of backstory and emotion with the most fleeting of glances.

The first “Point Break” was absurd and hyper-macho, but the director committed to the story enough to make it, at the very least, vibrantly watchable. This remake offers nothing but the absurdity, along with a handful of impressive stunt sequences that are both its reason for being and a complete distraction from what little story is happening here.

Ferrell and Wahlberg are both game, but the material only sporadically lets them let loose and do something truly creative, while poor Cardellini transitions from naggy to unreliable.