Abby Garnett

Analeine Cal y Mayor's bland, faux-quirky dramedy's most distinguishing set piece is a kitschy historic house museum dedicated to an erstwhile Mexican crooner named Guillermo Garibai.

Lawson's wishy-washiness about tone doesn't prevent the actors from nailing the comic exchanges.

Writer-director Cameron Labine seems to want to prove the obsolescence of the lovable-slacker stereotype even as he flogs it for entertainment value.

A lightweight Big Chill reworked for today's young professional set, which proves too clumsy and self-conscious to live up to its weighty subject matter.

The Love Punch is too sunny and self-effacing to be truly toxic.

The message is more pedestrian than passionate: Life is long, and full of instant messages.

Daniel Cohen's Le Chef does little more than illuminate the superficiality of the restaurant business.

However you view the western in American filmmaking — as a moth-eaten relic or an eternal form to be resurrected every few years — there's something stale about Kane Senes's tepid historical drama Echoes of War, which utilizes the genre's symbols without delivering on its potential for moral or narrative satisfaction.

Though mildly engaging, this Reversion doesn't delve deep enough to distinguish itself.

Too low-stakes for horror, too lamebrained for satire, and too incoherent to be didactic, The Maid's Room simply uses Drina and then throws her away.

Reisberg assumes we'll believe that in "real life" (as in, when he's not deceiving anyone about his whereabouts) Craig isn't this selfish, but watching him lie, cheat on his girlfriend, and enthusiastically provide beer to teenagers says otherwise.

I Am Happiness on Earth's script is mostly filler between explicit, intensely choreographed sex acts.

Toby's eventual comeuppance feels as preordained and empty as the preppie/townie dichotomy regurgitated here from so many outdated teen-media artifacts.

For all its postures of humanism, the film is remarkably cold toward the victim herself, who appears only briefly.

The film is dragged down by its awkwardly paradoxical story, which tries too hard to care too little.

There's simply too much going on to establish characters.

Last of the First is effective as a classroom tool for conservationist ideals (Jane Goodall herself gives an interview, as does the director of the African branch of the Nature Conservancy), but it fails to interrogate the forces that make those ideals necessary.

Over the course of the film, Koenig, a sallow, heavy-lidded youth who looks like he could be aged anywhere between 19 and 36, is revealed to be both an unspiring artist and an odious protagonist.

There's not much to be said about Sonny Mallhi's languid psychological drama — moonlighting as a possession-centered horror film — that hasn't already been said by the title.

Like the ravings of a keyed-up screenwriter, there's conviction, if not logic, in its madness, and that makes it fun and fascinating.