By turns giddily coy and disarmingly frank, the movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a kinder, gentler Apatow or go full Farrelly.

It’s just charming enough, just exciting enough and just funny enough to not be a flop, but DreamWorks — the studio that has shown it can challenge Pixar when it comes to pushing the animation envelope — has chosen to play it safe here, rather than try to win the summer family film sweepstakes.

The power of the story, such as it is, is not enhanced by the nonlinear narrative structure. In fact, it makes it needlessly confusing.

Overloaded with incidents, effects and explosions, “The Creator” fails to develop the personalities and relationships that would give its central characters an affecting humanity. The movie’s attempt to touch the heart comes off as, well, artificial.

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

Faraway...is vaguely deflating, a film that doesn't build to a powerful climax so much as gradually run out of air.

The title of the film “Mending the Line” refers to an adjustment to a fly-fishing line to counter the effects of water currents. But there’s a lot more than the placement of a filament that needs to be remedied in this well-meaning but inert PTSD melodrama.

For all its feminist pretense as a parable of empowerment, Priscilla’s still caught in a trap, even when the heroine can — and does — walk out.

Director Nimród Antal (“Predators”) does a serviceable job of keeping everything interesting and suspenseful, if not exactly fresh.

The monster, an obvious HR Giger rip-off, looks completely different every time it’s onscreen; of course, it’s supposed to be continually mutating, but mostly it looks too immobile to be menacing.

Fremont has the demeanor of a kitchen-sink drama but is laced with deadpan absurdism.

If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.

The movie never exactly loses sight of Bayard Rustin, but neither does it ever let us get inside his heart.

Migration will be remembered as neither great nor terrible. It will simply fade into the cinematic ether like so many ducks in the wind.

The plot, in which Swank is given little more to do than guzzle Costco-size bottles of liquor and mope, proceeds in somewhat somnambulist fashion, generating surprisingly little suspense even when Paige confronts a suspect whose identity has been telegraphed throughout the film. This comes as a disappointment, at least for viewers who have watched a movie or two before.

There just isn’t a whole lot to say about this deliberately lowbrow, gleefully low-budget expansion of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s half-hour stage play, originally performed by the duo in 2015 under the auspices of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv and sketch comedy group.

It’s the right kind of bonkers for the right kind of audience, a gaga genre hodgepodge that, not for nothing, taps Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” as its showstopping anthem and reminds us of a truism, of both cinema and life: Adding a dog or two — or 60 — can make just about anything better.

As a straightforward biopic of a woman whose name is much better known than her story, “Cabrini” fulfills its mission with the same purposeful earnestness of its subject. It’s a movie even the most secular of humanists can love.

Boy Kills World, a cheeky and extremely bloody action extravaganza, keeps an audience so off-balance for so long that you may throw in the towel well before the final bad guy falls.

There’s the potential for some real emotion here, as well as a touch of real-world commentary about a woman with 21st-century sensibilities trapped in a 19th-century world that feels, at times, medieval. But we can only catch glimpses of it beneath all the flickering layers of paint.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who co-wrote the screenplay with Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers and Zach Baylin, has constructed a work that suffers from the same tunnel vision as other movies of this ilk.

At times, the film feels less like an homage to a beloved legacy than a 1 1/2-hour piece of advertainment.

Maybe there’s an epic novel in his head, but what [Costner's] given us with “Chapter 1” is a table of contents instead.

Watching it, you feel as if you were being forced at gunpoint to flip through hundreds and hundreds of back issues of National Geographic.

Viewers of “Session” may find it harder to take solace from (or to find entertainment in) this stagy jar of slightly pickled discord, directed by Matt Brown, based on the 2011 play by Mark St. Germain (itself inspired by Armand Nicholi’s 2002 book “The Question of God”).

It’s a critic’s failure to gauge the movie he wishes had been against the movie that is, but in this case the movie that is is disappointingly bloodless, cold rather than chilling, with a payoff that isn’t shocking so much as an admission that we’ve spent 90 minutes we’ll never get back.

The new film is professionally made, well-acted, entertaining enough, and possessed of no earthly reason to exist aside from the care and feeding of intellectual property.

Greenaway's narrative and his direction of actors -- two elements which only recently has he concerned himself with -- are without foundation. After the effects of the visual presentation have worn off, the film becomes rather tiresome to follow.