Tom Russo

The title might trumpet Harley Quinn’s emancipation, but she again feels like a character trapped in a movie that’s mediocre at best.

It’s a diverting if slightly undercooked throwback that could offer more genuine intrigue, but that’s still worth it to see the cast gamely chuck out the window manners and vanity.

If there’s any way that Roach slips back into a creative pigeonhole, it’s by being overly keen on sticking his actors in prosthetic makeup. Richard Kind’s Rudy Giuliani, for one, elicits an unintended chuckle. And while Theron’s makeover is, again, uncanny, Kidman’s cleft chin is needlessly distracting. We’d buy her performance without it.

Middling cop thriller, whose attention-grabbing city-on-lockdown premise is undercut by thin plotting and forced performances from the supporting cast.

What’s most entertaining here, ultimately, is the performance that Stewart turns in as outspoken, play-it-loose Sabina, a completely unexpected, who-knew mash-up of sexy and offbeat.

Not surprisingly, Doctor Sleep splits the difference, dutifully attempting to honor both King’s writing and Kubrick’s film simultaneously. The movie actually manages to pull it off for a time, until in the last act revisited concepts start to play more like ill-advised retreads.

What we’re left with, then, is yet another “Terminator” far easier to appreciate for isolated bits of inspiration than for any stroke of genius it manages overall.

Pattinson and Dafoe dig into their roles, all right, with both actors crazily, mesmerizingly toggling from workaday to recriminating to maniacal and on and on. Together with Eggers they deliver a masterful study of souls trapped on a rock alone, but also trapped together, with all the twisty complexities involved.

This franchise might be all about shedding light on lost details, but “Mistress of Evil” sometimes leaves us in the dark.

The filmmakers and a nifty cast give the characters some clever, amusing flourishes — it’s definitely diverting seeing the Addamses rendered in state-of-the-art animation, given their cartoon origins — but it ultimately isn’t enough to keep the mood from turning dull.