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.