Ben Kenigsberg

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The look is drab, the action is barely coherent.

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.

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

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.

Serious subject matter aside, the movie is as bogus as Alex’s prospects of being an astronaut.

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.

Matriarch opens by watching a nude figure descend into a pond of black muck, but the slog that follows in this derivative, tar-flow-paced thriller from Britain is strictly for the viewer.

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

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

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.

The movie has not bothered to connect its ideas.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Rogue Hostage is shoddy work.

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

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.

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