Ben Kenigsberg

12 Mighty Orphans is a plodding football drama in which the characters talk to one another like folksy social workers.

It’s the movie’s open-endedness and literary vestiges that sit uneasily with its repetitive goosings, which manifest in exceedingly familiar ways.

For a movie that revolves around a notoriously violent sport, Michelle Walshe and Justin Pemberton’s profile takes a soft, superficial approach. It makes a rote installment of ESPN’s “30 for 30” look like Pulitzer-worthy muckraking.

An endorsement of milquetoast vigilantism that’s not nearly as knotty as it presumes to be, the French thriller “My Son” is so reserved in its storytelling and vague in its details that all it elicits is a yawn.

Roos forecasts and explains every development with a title card, a device not unlike having someone yammering in your ear throughout the entire feature run time. In a more self-effacing director's commentary, he might have asked us, at least, to forgive the pun.

This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.

Hangman is riddled with holes — blank spaces, if you will.

Absent formal rigor, the “Paranormal Activity” concept doesn’t offer much else.

Mortal isn’t really a movie proper as it is ponderous scene-setting for a potential sequel.

This too-chummy documentary, promoted on Johnson’s website, offers the more familiar reverse sensation of having 90 minutes of your life taken from you. By the time it’s over, you will be older, a progression that if anything the movie feels like it hastens.

At 83 minutes, Love Hurts falls somewhere between making a virtue of brevity and wheezing its way to the finish line.

Muddy sound contributes to the atmosphere of confusion, while the script (credited to the director, Nick Gaglia, along with Mr. Gallagher and Ms. Donohue) goes nowhere.

Although independently funded, it was directed by a longtime collaborator of Mr. Kamen’s with the clear purpose of getting the word out about the product.

That The Miracle Season is based on a true story makes it tough to endure and to review, because it’s no pleasure to report that filmmakers have turned real-life tragedy and tenacity into a manipulative weepie.

What’s especially peculiar about the focus on Shulan is that, in other respects, The Outsider is an ensemble piece, distributing screen time among a half a dozen people planning for the museum’s opening.

Ms. Cotillard can be magnetic even when playing an unplayable character, but when Gabrielle falls for a veteran (Louis Garrel, who has perfected the facial expression of someone looking for another conversation), the chasm between her abilities and her co-star’s is mountainous.

This is crudely mounted, earnest advocacy, getting its points across at any cost.

Whatever charms the filmmakers envisioned are nowhere apparent in these 83 cringe-worthy minutes.

How, and in whose apartment, Diana and Ben will confess their emotions is the subject of Ms. Brooks’s pallid dramedy, which leaves its actors looking somewhat stranded, as if waiting for Neil Simon zingers that were never written.

If it’s annoying to watch a follow-up snark at itself while implicitly snarking at viewers for buying tickets to a crass-ified Peter Rabbit, the conceit offers evidence that things might have been worse. At least Gluck doesn’t send Peter into space.

The Hero of Color City cannily distills the children’s movie to its lowest common denominator: bright colors flashing on screen.

Mr. Young’s slapdash style, which suggests a Roger Corman movie crossed with dinner theater, extends to the clanking sound effects and flagrantly fake backdrops.

A tedious muddle.

Other than product placement, the movie’s primary goal seems to be delivering 1990s nostalgia.

Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but Longing strains credulity well past the breaking point.

A natural ham, Grammer only amplifies what is grandiose and bogus in this material.

With a barrage of title-card identifications, 6 Days can feel closer to a re-enactment than a thriller. To the extent that the movie has a political angle, it’s perhaps gratuitously jingoistic.

Mr. Farina gives Authors Anonymous a sharpness it otherwise lacks.

Chases, shootouts and showy camera moves are executed deftly enough, but given the frugal trappings, they play as overambitious — an attempt to make a storage tank of lemonade from one lemon.

The narration promises surprises (“This story may challenge what you think you know about the roles men and women play in Mormon homes”), but the movie might have started by examining its straw-man conception of the audience.

Less a self-contained movie than a pilot for a show that already exists. The quality of the acting can only improve.

As an awareness tool, The Valley feels simple-minded. As a drama, it feels exploitative.

Based on characters created by Rodriguez's then-seven-year-old son, Racer Max, the film doesn't belong in wide release. It belongs on a refrigerator door, alongside "100%" spelling tests, old lunch menus, and notices from the PTA.

It’s possible to imagine a tight, suspenseful version of this home invasion chestnut, but Survive the Night is paced to run out the clock.

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, the writing-directing feature debut of Henry Dunham, strands seven actors in a warehouse to bark exposition at one another. Listening closely is necessary: The monotonously dark visuals barely function to carry the story on their own.

The logistics of raising money and securing permits for the cause are not the most compelling or irreverent subject. The movie’s goal is straightforward advocacy.

Cartoonish in its depiction of class disparities, A Little Game gains some subtlety from its performers: Mr. Abraham, an old pro, does fine work alongside Ms. Ballard, a newcomer.

The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson is the latest product off the crime documentary assembly line to raise the question of why it exists and what it ever hoped to achieve.

Reviewing Lemon feels like taking a sucker’s bet, treating the film with a reverence it never even asks for.

It’s possible that Baggio: The Divine Ponytail will resonate with soccer fans. But the protagonist’s reputed greatness has not made it to the screen.

New evidence for the case that computer animation is homogenizing children’s movies, robbing them of visual interest, this harmless, charmless movie plods along well-trodden turf.

What Lieberstein has made is a self-help manual disguised as a comedy.

For a film about mouthwatering cuisine, it offers only fleeting delectable sensations.

Despite eclectic casting and occasional experiments with objective camera, the director, David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), can’t breathe similar life into this risible mix of pseudoscientific hokum and supernatural freakouts.

The look is drab, the action is barely coherent.

The absence of laughs can’t be blamed on a lack of talent.

Come Play feels secondhand in its overarching conceit, its scare tactics and even its sentimentality.

What Ouija lacks in wit and originality, it makes up in volume — a trademark of the “Transformers” director Michael Bay, who is one of the producers.

There's no guiding power at work here; it's Evolution without a shred of intelligent design.

It simply does not have the budget or craft for the scale it requires.

Less methodical and witty than its predecessors, Patient Zero often turns its infected characters into mindless, lurching zombies.

Some sports movies build to inspirational speeches; Under the Stadium Lights treats platitudes as the main event.

There’s a way to tell this story that wouldn’t come across as soggy or manipulative. However well intentioned, Louder Than Words doesn’t find that tone.

Tourism is what it has to sell.

While the carnage demonstrates some imagination (can ice cauterize wounds? Did a hat just turn into a table saw?), the rules, extending even to whether death is permanent, are so arbitrary that nothing matters. Test … your patience.

True, Johnny Knoxville gets power-hosed down a slide and catapulted into a barn for our amusement, but the inventive, stake-raising, borderline surrealist gags of the old “Jackass” are gone.

It’s sweet, personal and tedious.

The heart of this movie, directed by Eytan Rockaway, is the relationship between the writer and his subject. So it’s dismaying when Lansky turns out to include flashbacks, with John Magaro (“First Cow”) playing a much flatter version of the mobster as a young man.

Depp’s turbocharged archness is basically the whole show.

Flashbacks and fantasy sequences undercut the claustrophobic atmosphere. What’s left is amateurish play acting — pointless for anyone who hasn’t seen “Portrait of Jason” and redundant for those who have.

While the oafish men come off poorly, the treatment of women as nothing more than schemers and monstrous Martha Stewart clones seems woefully past its expiration date.

Unfortunately, poor execution prevents the movie from achieving an authentic throwback feel. Although the principal cast members are Broadway veterans, here they struggle with technological and tonal issues.

Part of the thrill of heist movies is in watching a caper take shape before its execution. But the director, Steven Quale, rushes through the planning stages; there’s no obstacle that can’t be overcome with a quick line of exposition.

This superficial movie plays like a fashion shoot with robes.

The movie finally undermines all pretensions of satire with its geeky eagerness to subvert expectations.

Laugh Killer Laugh is a tired parody that seems to have been constructed from received notions of noir and mob movies. Even the jazzy score sounds like an affectation.

[An] inert, exasperatingly proportioned phantasmagoria from Roland Joffé.

The overall vibe is scarily close to what happened when “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” on “The Simpsons” added Poochie, except this time the pandering is not a joke.

Akin may deserve credit for not flinching from the grotesque; other serial-killer-adjacent entertainments, like “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Zodiac” or “Mindhunter,” tend to concentrate on the cerebral mechanics of crime solving. But sordid details, undermined by snickers, aren’t in themselves illuminating.

Tiger Lily Road aims for the bleak humor of a Coen brothers film, but a jaunty sitcom score spoils the tone. There’s barely an action that doesn’t strain credulity.

The fantasy sequences are duller than the campy images from the present action.

The scariest thing in the movie is a cameo by Scott Baio.

Saving Christmas seems determined to win any perceived war on Christmas through brute force.

Although the internet and cellphones exist in the movie, there’s a dated quality to the premise.

Content to be yet another great-man biopic, the movie would rather sanitize than probe.

Jessabelle is depressingly rote.

While the film aspires to a clipped complexity, it comes across as gimmicky and amateurish — a chain of miseries passed off as tough truths.

An exploitation film that proceeds as if it were a solemn memorial, The Secrets We Keep doesn’t do right by the Holocaust history it invokes — or much else.

A pastiche of western tropes too tongue-in-cheek to sell its dramatic intentions, but just sincere enough to smother any intimations of parody, The Escape of Prisoner 614 never commits to a consistent tone. Or even a consistent setting, really.

Question the film and you’re a chump, it implies. But anyone who sits through its nearly two hours of unprovable claims is a chump of a different sort.

The gimmick is that The Union, in addition to being an action film, is also a sort of comedy of remarriage for Roxanne and Mike, except that the screenwriters, Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, haven’t brought much in the way of levity to the relationship. Nor have they applied much ingenuity to the big set pieces.

The movie has not bothered to connect its ideas.

The medical tidbits, however awkwardly presented, are the most distinctive aspects of the script. The flat direction, alas, is not the work of a filmmaker.

Devil’s Knot is an inert exercise, visually and dramatically on par with "Drew Peterson: Untouchable."

What’s hypnotic for five minutes at the Whitney Museum does not necessarily carry over to an 80-minute movie, and Visitors might conceivably run half that length without the slow motion. Reggio’s film premiered in Toronto with live musical accompaniment, a gimmick that probably enhanced the experiential aspect of what’s otherwise a glorified installation piece.

This is 1 hour and 44 minutes of Pikachu short-circuiting your brain.

If Burnette’s formal instincts are suboptimal — the pervasive backlighting and underlighting keep much of the action in shadow — his dramatic instincts are worse.

In essence, Marmalade pretends to be more dunderheaded than it is, then acts as if it’s been smart all along, in a shift that takes it from insulting to incoherent.

Cringeworthy feel-good weepie, which finds Kate Hudson's vivacious ad-pitch whiz questioning her life choices after being diagnosed with terminal colon cancer.

Even those inclined to sympathize with that premise politically may feel insulted by the plot hole-a-palooza offered here to support it.

It’s an open question as to whom the film insults the most: the principals (Marion gullibly believes that Abel does his own stunts; Abel is so spoiled he can’t perform basic household tasks); the public (depicted as clamoring for brainless celebrity gossip); or you, the viewer, from whom so little has been demanded.

Among Ravens claws itself to death with sophomoric symbolism.

The atmosphere is thoroughly sleazy without being distinctive, and everything about the movie — the emotionless line readings, the half-baked back stories — exudes a terse functionality.

Hodge is not always on Shkreli’s side, but he appears convinced he’s made a well-rounded portrait, as opposed to a dubious, bottom-feeding, bro-to-bro testimonial.

His closing dedication—“For my daughter”—turns this into something actively creepy, as opposed to merely brainless, boring and inept.

In trying to build a smarter Chucky, the filmmakers have assembled something unfathomably dumb.

The answers aren’t satisfying, and The Pyramid, despite an unpretentious matinee vibe, is mostly interesting in seeing how little light can be on screen before a bare minimum of suspense and coherence dissipates. There is, truly, not much to see in this movie.

Constant close-ups give the sense that the movie itself is violating viewers’ personal space, while an earnest moral suggests that online communication can’t substitute for face-to-face interaction: a topic Friended to Death doesn’t seem to know much about.