Film is effective in its own right, but as with most sequels, it lacks freshness. American actress Burt is any adolescent boy’s fantasy seductress. Rest of the cast is adequate, but a letdown compared with the original’s.

Low-key and bland in the extreme, it’s strictly for film buffs.

Effervescent performances from an ebullient ensemble make Finding You a palatable and compelling female coming-of-age tale.

It has a pleasing brawn and sweep, and you get caught up in it. As meat-and-potatoes escapism, it’s good diner food served with extra ketchup.

The cumulative assassinations begin to ache like a mysterious bruise, making the audience feel the psychic weight of living in fear. Yet, the style of the film is more teen soap opera than vérité miserablism.

The Lover, a sophisticated adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ bestselling memoir about her love affair as a 15-year-old with a rich, older Chinese man, lacks the distinctive voice and ambiance of the book, but the abundant sex – soft-core and tasteful – and the splendid sets make up for the film’s banal style.

Blind Fury is an action film with an amusing gimmick, toplining Rutger Hauer, as an apparently invincible blind Vietnam vet who wields a samurai sword with consummate skill.

Kevin Kline as an unorthodox but indispensable detective tracking a serial strangler infuses this improbable Gotham-set romantic policier with personality.

Beauvois brings everything together in the movie’s final minutes, although it’s hard to shake the feeling that Drift Away has dodged what should have been its central social concern. Renier, a former child actor who began his career a quarter-century ago in the Dardenne brothers’ “La Promesse,” only gets better with age.

Quite what we gain from the experience is uncertain, with most viewers likely to leave the film understanding little more of the Unabomber than they did two hours before. Still, Ted K is impressive and oppressive in equal measure.

Murphy and the filmmakers clearly want to establish Murphy as an action hero in the mold of Stallone and Van Damme (Carter wrote the Stallone starrer “Tango & Cash” and co-scripted the Van Damme feature “Nowhere to Run”), but they lack the courage of their convictions. Pic is bracketed by scenes of Eddie the funny man, just in case anybody forgets the performer’s roots.

Erich Kästner’s slim novel originally translated in 1932 as “Fabian. The Story of a Moralist” is a brilliantly astute rendering of life in Weimar Berlin, straightforward and yet surreal, witty and perverse. To tackle it in cinema would seem like an impossible task, and while Dominik Graf’s Fabian – Going to the Dogs is to be commended for getting quite a lot right, the movie is blowsy where the book is succinct, awkwardly paced and portentous where Kästner is consistently rhythmical and unpretentious.

Writer John Cassavetes wants to show that there’s nothing like the purity of first love, but he doesn’t provide his triangle sufficient psychological motivation to ground their otherwise erratic behavior. The script feels incomplete, and is further marred by a missing third act and a lack of discernible point of view.

Roger Spottiswoode, vet editor who co-authored a respected book on the subject with Karel Reisz, makes a competent directing debut here.

Kier isn’t panhandling for laughs by playing some tired gay stereotype. There’s a heart-on-his-sleeve sincerity to the performance that’s better than the material merits, for Stephens has written an earnest but anemic script.

There’s bravery in Bateman’s willingness to explore this state of mind, to put so much of herself on the table, but she rolls credits just as things were getting interesting: when Violet blocks out the voices and finally starts listening to herself.

It’s so removed from having a dark side that you know you’re getting the feel-good version of a Tom Petty portrait.

Underplayed is too gentle a probe to risk targeting industry leaders or fandom for more than a moment here or there.

An interesting plot premise holds out considerable promise for this Alfred Hitchcock production, but I Confess is short of the suspense one would expect.

It’s friendly and diverting and formulaic, in an inoffensive and good-natured way, and it’s a totally minor affair.

Warners give the pic its usually nifty productional accoutrements, and that includes casting, musical scoring and Howard Hawks’ direction but the basic story is too unsteady.

Within its modest boundaries, Bloodthirsty does a creditable enough job balancing supernatural suspense with the drama of a young artist’s insecurities at a key early career juncture.

Although the journey feels rather drawn out in the film’s 142-minute running time, and is strewn with one ear-splitting brawl too many, the mystery of each protagonist’s true intentions, and the unpredictability of their course of action, keep tensions on a continuous simmer.

What’s good about the movie is that Crystal, who co-wrote and directed it, has an inside knowledge of the showbiz comedy world (as he demonstrated in 1992 when he directed and starred in the acerbically accomplished “Mr. Saturday Night”), and the prickly vivacity with which he portrays it roots the movie in something real.

This is the umpteenth in Meyer’s vixen series. But are they satire, as Meyer would have one believe, or fantasy, or both? If anything, they are funny and though a bit too long, Meyer, who does everything (directs, edits, photographs and produces), keeps the action fast and furious.

Men have been gorging on righteous, blood-splattering pulp action rides like this one for decades, and if women are now looking for the equivalent, Gunpowder Milkshake fits the bill. Its message is that there are a lot of Bills to kill.

Where Edge of the World distinguishes itself is in its evocative visuals of Borneo’s unspoiled beauty (courtesy of cinematographer Jaime Feliu-Torres) and the lived-in intensity of Meyers. If the film can’t help but feel like a relic from a bygone era, that’s ultimately part of its appeal.

A Hero, for all that’s good in it, is a Farhadi movie that speaks to our heads (and sometimes has us scratching them) more than it does our hearts.

Fabian’s film is charming enough, though his attempts at romance remain earthbound as he makes a clean break from the TV version, offering a different interpretation of the character.

It’s as uplifting and threadbare as a feel-good viral video stretched to feature length, yet Makijany’s ability to rally the troops, get solid performances from first-time actors, and simply get the film made is worth a genuine cheer.

To say that Resort to Love is slight would be akin to snatching a romance novel out of your closest friend’s hands while she sits reading and sipping a margarita on a beach. Why would you do that? It’s summer. Leave the girl her pleasures.

While The God Committee routinely resides on the precipice of preachiness, Stark’s script (via St. Germain’s source material) avoids one-note sermonizing and characterizations at most turns, instead maturely investigating the messy intersection of medicine, morality and commerce.

In most respects, Eggers is a unique artist with strong, singular ideas of how to script, stage and pace his films, and while The Northman is nothing if not a signature addition to a most original oeuvre — no one but Eggers would or could have reimagined “Hamlet” thus — it lacks the element of surprise that made “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” feel like instant classics.

The blood and grunge run thick on the mean streets in Romeo Is Bleeding. This heavy dose of ultra-violent neo-noir gives Gary Oldman a face-first trip through the gutter that would make Mickey Rourke drool, but the far-fetched plotting eventually goes so far over the top that pic flirts with inventing a new genre of film noir camp. Gramercy release will find a cadre of devotees who will groove on the hot cast, high style and low-down macho fantasies, but more people will be turned off by the excessive gore and progressive facetiousness.

A tortured examination of the disintegration of a Mid-western family, The Indian Runner is very much actors' cinema. Rambling, indulgent and joltingly raw at times, Sean Penn's first outing as a director takes a fair amount of patience to get through but has an integrity that intermittently serves it well.

Fear Street in general and the 1978 chapter in particular are at their best when forging their own path, which makes it a shame when they’re too reluctant to walk it.

No Sudden Move, for all its pleasures, doesn’t quite make the old seem new again.

Samaritan is basic enough that it often plays like a video-game film in which someone forgot to add the CGI. But the movie builds to a very good twist, and Stallone, in his way, brings a vibe to it, complete with an ’80s kiss-off line (“Have a blast!”) delivered in a growl so deliberate it practically etches itself into the scenery.

In the case of Don’t Breathe 2, one reason the movie, for all the operatic (and often absurd) grisliness of its second half, isn’t quite as good as the original is that the original didn’t have a trace of that franchise self-consciousness.

Though the high-concept relationship movie frequently trips over its own well-meaning sentiments, the sweet, earnest performances and sharp technical craftsmanship deliver a blissful feeling when the material comes up short.

Its final beat, like the entirety of its fabulous, tragic final act, is as masterful as it is heartbreaking. As a whole, though, it remains too stilted, like a painstakingly staged tableau vivant of late-19th-century Mexico and the patriarchal power structures that undergirded it.

Overall, Roth crafts a resonant picture, purposefully threading in themes centered on identity and degradation with a sensitive, deft touch. Where it falters in properly contextualizing its pervading sentiments, it often finds resilient strength in the smart parallels between animal and human.

Anchored by another in a series of committed performances from Adam Driver and an ensemble of suitably menacing prehistoric beasts that chase him for just over 90 minutes, Beck and Woods’ adventure delivers requisite thrills even if its creativity seems stuck in the distant cinematic past.

For all the film’s playful artistry, the effect is more scattershot.

It is really Savage, best known for his role as the little boy in The Princess Bride, who is particularly winsome as the smart-alecky Dad stuck in his kid’s pint-size body.

The movie’s mostly just meant to be fun, and that it is, skewing young while giving lifelong fans (including those who grew up on the Turtles) plenty to geek out about.

There’s a valedictory glossiness to the film that sometimes underserves the warts-and-all power of the work in question – as a fan-centric retrospective, it hits plenty of the right notes; but as a chance to more thoroughly explore a complicated, still-influential landmark, it never digs quite deeply enough.

A lively saga about a young coding wizard who’s charged with saving his family’s gaming business, this celebration of old- and new-school creativity doesn’t break novel ground in any respect. Fortunately, though, its good humor, spry pacing and likable performances should appeal to its pre-high-school target audience.

There’s not a lot here that’s wholly new, and the film’s tone of melancholy, offbeat uplift signals from the outset that we shouldn’t expect any grand revelations. Instead its pleasures come in smaller packages.

Of the three “Jurassic World” movies, “Dominion” is the least silly and most entertaining. But that’s not saying much. This “stop to ask if they should” cycle’s human characters were never especially interesting, and why should we trust Trevorrow to suddenly make them so?

Gundala packs a few too many characters and side-stories into the mix but as the first entry in a planned series it’ll do very nicely.

Borden sugars her pill with clean, crisp, often witty recording of brothel action and shop-talk. All acting is credible and the camerawork is smooth, the non-action a bit on the long winded side.

A lively, bittersweet meditation on an impoverished childhood that is still rich in innocence and imagination, it feels old-fashioned in a way that does not quite gel with its bid for contemporary grit.

Even as the twists and turns get ever more preposterous . . . Dale’s direction and Fox’s commitment go a long way toward making Till Death a glossy, entertaining lark. Just maybe not one with anything of substance to say about marriage as its cheeky title suggests.

Vacation Friends does earn a fair share of guffaws with its familiar mix of R-rated raunch and feel-good sentiment, and it’s lightly amusing to see the well-cast players breathe a satisfying degree of fresh life into a predictable scenario that recalls “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” “What About Bob?” and a dozen or so similarly contrived comedies.

Despite its doctoral dissertation-style title, “All the Streets Are Silent” lacks a thesis: less a sociological study of the rapper-skater convergence than a celebration of a very specific type of guy in a very specific fragment of space and time.

Boys in the Band drags. But despite its often tedious postulations of homosexual case histories instead of realistic dialog, and the stagey posturing of the actors, the too literately faithful adaptation of Mart Crowley's off-Broadway swish-set piece has bitchy, back-biting humor, fascinating character studies, melodrama and, most of all, perverse interest.

As a 16mm cinema verite of four rock musicians in a studio jamming a bit, trying to get their music together, clowning and rapping a little, and finally doing a brief concert, Let It Be is a relatively innocuous, unimaginative piece of film.

Once again displaying the kinetic grace, authoritative physicality and heavy-duty footwear that have made her a cult favorite for fans of the “Underworld” franchise, Beckinsale is fun to watch in both the real and fantasy fight sequences that take up much of the briskly paced Jolt.

Peter Yates’ direction and uniformly good cast partly overcome a William Goldman script [from Donald E. Westlake’s novel] that has many exciting and funny bits, but lacks a clear, unifying thrust.

There’s a bombast built into the material, but let it be said that the “Transformers” movies have been transformed. They’re no longer the kind of fun you have to hate.

Lewis Teague, a former second-unit director, guides his large cast reasonably well through John Sayles’ craftsmanlike script.

A seductively lensed but emotionally uninvolving drama about two male Peking Opera stars and the ex-prostie who comes between them, Chen Kaige's fourth feature, Farewell to My Concubine, reps a stylistic U-turn compared with his earlier abstract parables like Life on a String and Yellow Earth.

Originality may indeed be scarce in writer-director Abdelhamid Bouchnak’s debut narrative feature. Yet this gory goulash of city slickers, creepy yokels, editorial jolts and cannibalism largely transcends its derivative basic elements, thanks to his astute, richly atmospheric handling.

It’s an effective, if predictable paranoid fantasy. The film’s social statement may be hopelessly muddy, but its adroit sense of fun and thrills cannot be discounted.

The film is formally beautiful almost to a fault, giving it a schematic quality that’s at odds with its roiling emotions.

Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception is a strange, stifling but frequently intriguing attempt to find a cinematic match for the literary voice of Philip Roth, from his autofictional 1990 novel of the same name.

Vortex doesn’t let us off the hook. Gaspar Noé never does. But if he did, he might transcend his “Behold, you will know the dark side” brand.

Army of Thieves is one of those bombastically blithe and fanciful Netflix action movies, in this case with a romantic heart.

Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement.

Wayne delivers one of his customary rugged portrayals, a little old, perhaps, to have such a young brother as Anderson but not so old that he lacks the attributes of a gunman. Martin, who plays his part with a little more humor than the others, is equally effective in a hardboiled characterization.

A docufiction that tenderly, wordlessly and rather too obliquely recreates a 1961 speleological expedition to measure the depth of an unexplored crevasse in Italy’s Calabria region.

Merkulova and Chupov deliver the visceral aspects of this Dostoevskian tale particularly well ... But 'Captain Volkogonov Escaped' is so attuned to the physical that the more metaphysical aspects of Volkogonov’s journey are underdeveloped by comparison.

While it generally lacks dramatic oomph and the story is confusing at times, Yakuza Princess delivers plenty of visual excitement.

Copshop is a processed slice of genre meatloaf with the gravy occasionally dribbled in ornate patterns. It’s junky and synthetic, but it fills you up.

As impressive as Homefront is in the way it envisions a distorted world, its fully-realized digital design is all exterior display, whereas Expressionism at its best transforms disturbed psychological states into a nightmarish reality.

On the whole, Abu-Assad is less successful in braiding the respective tales of Reem and Huda through Eyas Salman’s editing. But eventually the seams show and clumsy jumps between the two locations feel strangely episodic, losing Huda’s Salon some of the urgency it has claimed in its earlier moments.

What holds Ida Red together and gives it solidity is the relationships between Wyatt, Jeanie and Darla, which might not be entirely original but they don’t need to be thanks to good ensemble performances, with Hartnett very much at ease and Hublitz making an impression in her biggest role to date.

What Zeros and Ones does do — deliberately, calculatedly, in the kind of messy intuitive manner that’s been the director’s signature of late — is reproduce the general state of unease and insecurity that’s plagued most of us during lockdown.

Vitaletti’s storytelling, and ability to drum up tension or scares, is less potent here than his attention to evoking a general climate of close-minded religious hypocrisy.

Gyllenhaal’s impressive, but The Guilty almost certainly would have been more effective if he’d dialed down the intensity a bit.

The film is most effective when its narrow focus on a single, desperately poor Yakut couple allows it space to be fascinated by the straightforward ethnographic details of this little-seen time and place. But its value as human drama wanes as its allegorical impulses become more insistent and the characters are reduced to ciphers in the end, more important for what they represent than for who they are.

Julia offers us glimpses of a complex, brittle personality beneath the robust persona, but is either too cautious or too genuinely besotted with the latter to pry it out.

Becoming Led Zeppelin is full of essential stuff, but on some level it feels like a Led Zeppelin infomercial.

It’s prosaic and conventional and a touch stolid, but it stays true to the facts and the spirit of the man (he’s both sinner and saint), and the saga they add up to is singular in the history of sports.

For all the purity of its pedigree, and as agreeable and lightly touching as it sometimes is, I wish that Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile didn’t still seem, at heart, like a likable movie that had come out of the processor.

As a portrait of sisterly trust, obligation and estrangement, and the difficulty of carrying familial dependencies into adulthood and beyond, the film is measured and thoughtful, lifted by performances of characteristic sensitivity by Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon.

What might have seemed a familiar if sad drama in live-action form benefits from this relative novelty of presentation, which lends a certain universality, as well as heightened viewer access, to Salomon’s story. But the rather pedestrian animation here also makes Charlotte a bit of a disappointment.

The filmmakers raise some interesting points, but it becomes an exercise in frustration to interpret the calculated connection between disordered eating, the metaphysical, and religious, medieval martyrdom. With nary any tangible scares, or much to truly unnerve or unsettle except from an empathetic humanistic standpoint, this feature-length directorial debut is assured, but far too ambiguous for its own good.

Pink, a veteran TV director who takes a rather self-important “a film by” credit on what feels like a first feature (it’s his fifth), shows almost no intuition for how to block or shoot a scene, inserting songs where silence would have been more effective. His clumsiness leaves the actors looking slightly amateurish, despite the strong, vulnerable performances they deliver.

The audacity of de Silveira’s concept — in which enrollees at an upscale Christian college indulge in secret, moralizing vigilante mayhem — and her deliberately over-the-top aesthetic render Medusa a compelling mixed bag. It may miss the bull’s-eye, but not for lack of intriguing ideas or style.

It’s a horror ride that holds you, and it should have no trouble carving out an audience, but I didn’t find it particularly scary.

Expect no surprises in Falling for Figaro, a corny, cute-enough carpe diem comedy, in which it’s a lovable ensemble — led by Danielle Macdonald, and spiked by a deliciously imperious Joanna Lumley — that brings the grace notes to a pretty standard-issue script.

A curious blend of Technicolor wild-westernism, frontier town skullduggery and a troupe of Harvey restaurant waitresses who deport themselves in a manner that's a cross between a sorority and a Follies troupe.

Crisply made and gutsily performed as it is, this slender 78-minute film too often feels like pointed social allegory in search of a really good cover story.

"Gensan” lands solid punches for the rights of disabled athletes and excels with its depiction of rigorous training and fierce combat. But we learn very little about the fighter’s life when he’s not wearing gloves.

The script is constructed too much like a novel, which slows the pace of the early, establishing sections. Director Bill Condon works too hard to tie all the plot strands into a neat bow.

It appears that the idea here is to expose and debunk the Buffalo Bill legend, revealing it for the promotional distortion which, in some ways, it most certainly has to have been.