“Dark Crimes” illustrates what it looks like when a star knows he picked a poor project, but is contractually obligated to expend minimal effort anyway.

“Revenge” wants to dare you to see it as shallow just so it can shame you through sheer force of cinematic style.

“Anon” encases its monotone mystery in a drab setting whose dourness only amplifies the script’s dullness.

The film’s exhausting dullness hooks lifelessly draining melodrama into an IV of incredibly anemic horror.

Were someone to ask my opinion of “Gehenna: Where Death Lives” in civilian circumstances, I’d mumble “meh” and move on.

This review may not be worth much now, but it should be handy to have when we need a memory jog to distinguish this flat flick from every similar Sasquatch-related thriller.

There is a subtly inebriated haze flavoring the film with an intentionally weird wooziness, like the birth of a buzz following the first two beers.

The head-on collision of Eastern and Western pop culture composes a disorienting kaleidoscope of eclectic action and eccentric spectacle.

“Downrange” takes a demented detour into a bonkers final third by going for broke with midnight movie moxie.

“Ready Player One” is the entertainment equivalent of cotton candy: consumed more for the nostalgic flavor than for its actual taste or nutritional value.

“#Screamers” suffers from a severe real estate problem.  Namely, it has 81 minutes worth of space and only ten minutes of content with which to fill it.

By creatively incorporating a carefully calculated amount of weirdness, “Vampire Clay” hits a sweet spot of satisfaction between fun and freaky.

“Ghost Stories” features a freshly novel concept for framing an anthology, where the bookends ingeniously motivate each piece of the movie.

“Gonjiam” is a virtual ‘Greatest Hits,’ or ‘Worst of’ depending on perspective, featuring every cliché “found footage” has to offer.

Kept taut using a duo of dialed in performances and a nearly relentless rhythm, the movie satisfies with straight razor suspense.

To populate an “it’s like” equation for “Wildling,” one could describe it as “Room” meets “Raw,” except with werewolves instead of cannibals.

“Marrowbone” feels like a motion picture made for your mother’s book club to mull over with a glass of rosé and charcuterie spread.

The documentary is an entertainingly insightful, just broadly basic, look at the impressive effort that goes into envisioning an epic.

It’s fitting that Sam Worthington, perhaps the most vanilla male lead to ever front a movie, headlines “The Titan,” which basically boils down to being a flavorless film.

While some of these experiments go up in a puff of smoke, cinematic sincerity shines through independent of each piece’s success or failure.