Ben Kenigsberg

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

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.

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

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

Mostly, the movie, directed by Zeljko Mirkovic, consists of a barely organized series of interviews with notable Serbs and Serbian-Americans, and name-checks of others.

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

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

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.

Even without Mr. Rice in the news, No Good Deed would be damaged goods: an inert “Cape Fear” rehash that can’t seem to choose its favorite contrivance.

Weather seems to exert an only intermittent influence in this insipid holiday love story, directed by Gabriela Tagliavini and set in the run-up to Christmas — at least in theory.

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.

Directed by Brad Anderson, Worldbreaker is committed above all to shortchanging its themes, along with excitement and visual interest, a showy Steadicam shot notwithstanding.

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.

An unfortunately contrived Holocaust drama that labors under the delusion that the subject matter lends itself to uplift.

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.

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.

It’s sweet, personal and tedious.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Ironically, Leiner's two monuments to pothead delirium seem vastly more coherent than this hazy attempt to mine the zeitgeist, a film every bit as pointed as its nounless title.

This superficial movie plays like a fashion shoot with robes.

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.

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

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.

Nothing concrete emerges from this haze of oblique editing and barely written scenes, acted by cast members who are not up to making the dialogue sound convincing or filling the voids left in place of their characters.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The look is drab, the action is barely coherent.

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.

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

The movie has not bothered to connect its ideas.

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

Whether it's the guitar-strum soundtrack, "lyrical" cornfield shots, or arrhythmic performances, Steal Me has at least one indie-film cliché too many.

"It is a study of the psychopathologies of perversions," co-director Federico Sanchez says in the press notes for Eternal, which is certainly one way to rationalize a trashy lesbian vampire flick.

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.

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

Pity, or prayer, couldn’t change the fact that Faith Ba$ed is abysmally unfunny.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

A testosterone cocktail of reactionary sound bites and incoherent action that even Michael Bay might have rejected as too amped, Peter Berg’s Mile 22 makes for an appalling referendum on the state of commercial cinema in 2018

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Depp’s turbocharged archness is basically the whole show.

Jessabelle is depressingly rote.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Fuu . . . cryin' out loud, this movie's dumb.

Feels motivated by envy more than anything else-it's a sour, petty act of mockery that values its own ineptitude over genuine cleverness, travestying Quentin Tarantino and others simply for dreaming up gimmicks that worked.

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.

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

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

Blatant product placement, unconvincing bird effects and awful soundtrack selections all undermine a potentially wrenching, difficult premise with utter bogusness.

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

Come Back to Me has seamier goals, employing a quasi-religious conceit to justify its shocks of gore and sexual assault. In that regard, at least, it is grotesquely predictable.

In drag or out of it, the soft-spoken star has rarely been less convincing than when locking and loading from his home arsenal or dangling from a decaying Detroit edifice.

The movie clearly intends to send a serious message about how draconian immigration policies tear families apart. But a hard-hitting drama would be preferable to this strenuously wacky bromance.

The only thing grimmer than the material in Phil is its execution.

Jake Squared combines the most grating tendencies of meta navel-gazing with the sexism of reality television — pushing the limit of viewer tolerance to zero.

It is difficult to believe that an actual first encounter with interdimensional beings would be such a complete waste of time.

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

If “Daddy’s Home” (2015) played like a distant, wayward cousin of “Step Brothers,” Daddy’s Home 2, again directed by Sean Anders, is the sort of relative you might disown.

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.

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.

Tourism is what it has to sell.

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.

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.

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

All Apollo 18 has to offer is endless radio crackle and visual incoherence. And what's out there, tormenting the astronauts? The answer is dumber than a box of moon rocks.