NEW YORK (CNS) -- Director David S.F. Wilson's passable Valiant Comics adaptation "Bloodshot" (Columbia) mostly avoids gore. But its protagonist's drive for revenge, which is front and center in Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer's script, is only partially made less problematic by twisty plot developments.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- Director Craig Zobel's parable "The Hunt" (Universal) offers clever commentary on contemporary political and cultural divisions in the United States.
Unfortunately, as scripted by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the film is also deliberately outrageous in its gruesome portrayal of characters being maimed and killed. So the overall effect winds up being more sadistic than satiric.
The premise is as simple as it is wild. Led by disgruntled wealthy executive Athena (Hilary Swank), a group of elite fat cats kidnaps a dozen red-state types, aka "deplorables," and hunts them for sport.
NEW YORK (CNS) -- In keeping with the song and book from which it takes its title, nondenominational affirmations of faith permeate the fact-based romantic drama "I Still Believe" (Lionsgate), making the film congenial fare for Christians of various stripes.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- Though it reaches a heartwarming conclusion, the trajectory of the animated adventure "Onward" (Disney) is not all upward. Instead, the film is loaded down with an overly detailed mythos, values focused primarily on self-empowerment and a passing allusion to a same-sex relationship that, though brief, amounts to propaganda aimed at youthful viewers.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- To call the humor in the road-trip comedy "Impractical Jokers: The Movie" (WarnerMedia) uneven would be an understatement. In fact, the quality of the escapades in director and co-writer Chris Henchy's adaptation of the eponymous truTV series varies from flat-footed to somewhat inspired -- though some of the set-ups veer into bad taste.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- The reasons the church continues to honor the Apostle of Ireland more than 1,500 years after his death shine forth in the film "I Am Patrick" (CBN), a docudrama screening in theaters for two nights only, March 17 -- St. Patrick's Day -- and March 18.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- Whose life doesn't involve a crazy mixture of heartbreak and joy, despair and hope, death and life, weakness and redemption? Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck), the protagonist of the sports drama "The Way Back" (Warner Bros.), can surely relate to all those shared highs and lows.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- "Emma" (Focus) is a delightful screen version of Jane Austen's classic novel, lovely to look at and abounding in gentle humor. Only the momentary introduction of a bit of visual earthiness, presumably meant to balance off the overall painterly elegance of the picture, hinders endorsement for younger viewers. That's a shame because this is otherwise a perfect entree into Austen's delicate world.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- A fervent performance from Elisabeth Moss drives writer-director Leigh Whannell's remarkably absorbing monster movie "The Invisible Man" (Universal). Yet, while his film, which bears only a very distant relationship to H.G. Wells' 1897 novel, is far more intelligent than many thrillers, it's also filled with the kind of graphic mayhem that casual moviegoers will not care to witness.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- The rough atmosphere of writer-director Andrew Heckler's drama "Burden" (101 Studios) makes it anything but a family film. Yet the harsh realism with which the movie portrays the hardscrabble world its working-class characters inhabit serves to make its uplifting conversion story all the more striking.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- The antique doll of the title once again proves to be more terrorist than toy in the lackluster horror flick "Brahms: The Boy II" (STX). While there's little to object to in a sequel that most teens can likely handle, there's not much entertainment value to the proceedings either.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- "Never was there such a dog," says grizzled Yukon explorer John Thornton (Harrison Ford), admiring the antics of Buck, the canine star of "The Call of the Wild" (Twentieth Century).
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- Not that the intended core audience of children is likely to notice, but many of the adults who take them will find that there's something oddly mechanical and even maladroit about "Sonic the Hedgehog" (Paramount).
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- Film fans looking for the cinematic equivalent of rich Corinthian leather will be sadly disappointed by the muddled horror flick "Fantasy Island" (Sony). This attempt to transform the ABC drama series that aired in the late 1970s and early 1980s into a dark chillfest turns out to be an incoherent mess.
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NEW YORK (CNS) -- Aesthetically impressive but morally flawed, "The Photograph" (Universal) is a mature romantic drama leavened with some canny humor. While most of the lessons writer-director Stella Meghie sets out to convey are worthy, her film's outlook on the physical expression of love is tainted by lax values.
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