Ben Kenigsberg

Honorable Men: The Rise and Fall of Ehud Olmert is a rare instance of a two-hour documentary that should have been an eight- or 10-hour mini-series, because it would take that long to clarify all the issues it raises, then present persuasive evidence.

"Five Seasons” is least dull when capturing the artist at his most spontaneous, showing his joy, for instance, at seeing Texas wildflowers. But the director Thomas Piper, whose credits include another documentary that deals with the High Line and a film about the artist Sol LeWitt, never finds a way to convey the excitement of his subject’s innovations.

Basic sympathy is where the usefulness of The Rachel Divide ends. Ms. Brownson hasn’t figured out how to construct a movie around a figure who essentially owes her fame to the obfuscation of her past. Anything Ms. Dolezal says has to be taken with such a large grain of salt that it’s not clear why it’s worth listening.

Slick production values can’t disguise the lack of imagination.

On why what now looks like a tenuous, bluster-based business model would appeal to Wall Street, the director, Jed Rothstein, spends less time than he should.

Korine achieves what he set out to do, which is locate a strange liminal zone between avant-garde filmmaking and searing viewers’ faces with a frying pan.

For a movie about proud outcasts, Slash is a little square.

Even as hagiography, Soros is unfocused.

Rapid editing leaves little time to absorb vocabulary (such as “deadstock,” a new shoe that has never been worn) or intricacies of design.

Annabelle is less cluttered with creepy bric-a-brac than “The Conjuring.” (The original director, James Wan, produced here.) But Mr. Leonetti embraces the potential of negative space.

The Good Boss provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile.

More of a poem or a city symphony than a documentary, it drifts freely, sometimes frustratingly between captured and fictionalized moments.

In a film this hapless, it’s hardly a surprise that no one can keep Bucharest and Budapest straight.

The relentless contrast of banality with horror seems to be Wheatley’s signature move, and like his "Kill List" (2011), Sightseers can claim a sizable fan base, especially in its native U.K. But the humor here, ironically, doesn’t travel well.

With casting this unconvincing, no one is watching to get a lesson in the horrors of war.

Both the martial arts and the slightly dull narrative patchwork are too choppily edited to gain much of a foothold.

While the movie’s morose mysticism is tolerable enough, once “Clara” starts arguing for following feelings instead of data, it puts on its own tinfoil hat.

"Heading Home” is not a movie with much interest in geopolitics. It roots, roots, roots for its home team — and does little more.

The frat house atmosphere eventually gives way to tedious bloodletting. In that regard, The Predator hasn’t evolved at all.

Life’s a Breeze is ultimately about as cutting and memorable as its title.

The movie looks and sounds great, but greatness and depth elude it.

The insight that social media fosters false intimacy is old news. The film shows only a half-formed sense of how careers have changed in 30 years.

Mr. Pegg, normally a live wire, makes an affable hero, but the movie often forces him into blandly earnest mugging.

This Nickelodeon production may be designed for short attention spans, but must the characters have them as well?

My Art invests far too much in the conceit. (The re-creations look like unfunny “Airplane!” parodies.) Part of the problem is that Ms. Simmons has surrounded herself with more interesting actors, including a scene-stealing Parker Posey.

There is something admirably perverse about a movie that treats the killings of Hitler and Bigfoot as secondary to a character study of a crusty old man and his regrets, but that doesn’t make the film less dull or deflating to watch.

Digressions involving suicide, child abuse, immigration and unions muddy the film’s meaning rather than illuminate it.

Often laughably overwrought rehash of "An Officer and a Gentleman," ekes out enough of a subtext on competition to qualify as a non-fiasco.

Clearly well-intentioned, The Devil Has a Name means to deliver an inspirational lesson about the depravity of big industry and the power of the little guy. But it’s mostly a muddle.

Visually, Walking With the Enemy resembles a TV mini-series, a sense enhanced by the director Mark Schmidt’s habit of cutting away from bloodshed. Constant title cards introducing historical figures suggest the work of a completist rather than a filmmaker who has focused the material.

The film is yet another ode to the restorative magic of wine country sunshine, which apparently also has the power to expose the story’s egregious midlife-crisis clichés.

It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.

Occasionally, the nostalgic back-patting makes way for a few good jokes.

A case of excellent actors’ straining to elevate a contrived screenplay.

The real good liar is whoever convinced Mirren and McKellen to class up such thin and arbitrary material.

The film plays as if it’s been smothered under a pile of rocks.

The lack of energy suggests the film might as well have been constructed from outtakes.

The labored screen adaptation shows regrettably few signs of personal fire, and many signs of a work that has been sapped of the intimacy of live theater.

It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near-universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but Knives and Skin owes so much to David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks,” that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum.

What Touch the Wall lacks is an inventive or compelling presentation. Heavy with platitudes about goals and attitude, it could easily be a short special on ESPN.

It’s a testament to Williams’s energy that even in an unfortunate part as Virgil, an angry, alcoholic dad, he comes across as the most vivid member of the cast.

Most of the movie’s pleasures come from Ms. Kull, a better actress than the one she plays, and the convolutions of the plot, which has a few good feints and dodges.

Watching Izzy’s frenzied pratfalls often feels like watching a documentary of Ms. Davis — always great — running a hamster wheel that powers uninspired comic material.

The movie doesn’t credit any source material, but it plays like a poorly dramatized magazine exposé.

In 3-D, the firefighting scenes are visually striking — with plumes of smoke and chemical dust — though the backgrounds, like other aspects of the film, lack dimension.

The climax quickens the film’s pulse but doesn’t exactly grow organically from what’s proceeded it.

The issue of national atonement is a sprawling topic, one ill served by the film’s unfocused and amateurish presentation. At times, the movie seems less like a full-fledged documentary than like a pitch session.

Nonstop scheming and some grimy New Orleans locations prevent The Lookalike from being boring. But the movie, instead of embracing its budgetary limitations, gives off a distracting sense of trying to punch above its weight class.

While being cynical about a wise-octopus movie is probably unfair, being bored by it isn’t great, either.

Judged strictly as a movie, Francesco comes across as shapeless and secondhand — a missed opportunity to present a closer look at the daily work of being pope and perhaps to demystify elements of the papacy.

It’s hard to imagine other performers bringing so much to this setup. They give a true impression of two people who have spent their lives together and know how to talk each other.

La Bare takes its title from the club it chronicles, a male strip joint in Dallas. The name proves unfortunately apt for a rambling, superficial documentary that straddles the line between exposé and infomercial.

Romania has delivered some of the most bracing filmmaking of the past 20 years (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), but Queen Marie shows that its cinematic output also extends to stiff, exposition-clotted biopics.

Back in Action has a better cast than its (often mawkish) writing earns. Mostly, the familiarity takes its toll.

Ms. Henson does what she can with a role that keeps her anger at a low simmer until requiring her to go full banshee within basically one scene. You can’t accuse her or Acrimony of being boring, but the film falls short of a design for living.

The impression is less of calculated ineptitude than of seasoned professionals (director Tod Williams made The Door in the Floor) playing dumb, as a checklist of household items-frying pans, endlessly shutting doors, a pool cleaner with a mind of its own-test viewers' reflexes.

Straining to find a correlation, even metaphorical, between teenage hedonism and economic collapse, Affluenza never coheres.

The film is at once overly eccentric and underdeveloped. It starts as an exercise in bleak absurdism and ends as a Frank Capra Christmas special, with little originality in between.

Waiting for Anya is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity.

If this earnest and forgettable road movie represents a meaningful tribute to taking pictures, we ought to go back to cave drawing.

It is just as awash in murky computer imagery, stupefying exposition and manipulative sentimentality as the average Hollywood tentpole.

While the film may speak to viewers with a spiritual investment in these events, it does little to bring them alive for others.

The movie, written by Neil Forsyth, was surely intended as a tribute, but it plays more like an effort to reduce Beckett to easily comprehensible terms — the sort of terms he most likely would have resisted.

The Word is never boring, though that has as much to do with the mounting absurdities and ripe acting as it does with the resourceful use of crosscutting by the director, Gregory W. Friedle.

If any creativity went into Choose or Die, a by-turns creepy and hacky feature debut from Toby Meakins, it appears to have been directed solely toward nastiness.

A high school send-up more gleefully incorrect than "Heathers" and considerably less articulate than "Election," Pretty Persuasion is a hand grenade lobbed at no place in particular.

For more than an hour, schmaltzmeister Luis Mandoki (Message in a Bottle) directs as if on assignment for Miramax.

There is still intermittent joy to be found in their autumnal bromance.

A turgid, foursquare naval epic.

Brightly lit and anchored by Mr. Stevens’s infectious, live-wire performance, the film, directed by Bharat Nalluri (“Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”), nevertheless proceeds like a television holiday special, designed to distract children while winking at their parents.

The remake remains cursed by a fatally hokey concept.

With shadowy imagery that pushes the boundaries of visibility and a mumbly lead performance from Ben Foster that strains the limits of intelligibility, Galveston goes past film noir and lands at film murk.

Tepid lesbian comedy.

Disorientation is a double-edged sword, especially when the ostensible reorientation is as unsatisfying as it is here.

The Transporter Refueled is crass and nonsensical, but it is hard to hate a movie in which a medical anesthetic is administered with a nightclub fog machine, the weapons include a ringed life preserver, an escape from a moving plane continues by car onto a jetway and the touch-screen banking software appears expressly designed for double-crossing.

The look of Freud’s Last Session could make one doubt the presence of a cinematographer.

Only during a brief scene of a man catching a fish outside his flooded house does the movie seem interested in anything more than raising awareness.

“Into the Abyss,” which mixes material from Juice WRLD’s tour stops with interviews and hangout and recording vignettes, isn’t particularly focused.

Werner Herzog's "Wheel of Time" was, in a sense, the Buddhist equivalent of this film, as well as a more illuminating look at the power and transience of ritual.

Even with a few late twists, concept exceeds execution.

Mostly the movie is a drizzle of platitudes.

The humor of this situation — or of any of the movie’s strained wackiness — doesn’t particularly translate. It also does little to illuminate the more serious commentary on immigration, the legacy of colonialism and the tensions within the country’s Algerian communities.

Whether the material is “Much Ado About Nothing” or “When Harry Met Sally,” if your story requires keeping true loves apart, it is often polite to pass the time with a steady flow of comedy.

The talking heads, who discuss events in the past tense, sap the protest material’s momentum, and a score by Serj Tankian (who appears as a commentator) is unnecessarily manipulative.

Looking for plausibility in a movie called Dracula Untold is as pointless as looking for humor or personality in Mr. Evans’s dour performance.

Is Bullet Head good? In truth, it’s drab, derivative and more than slightly silly, but it’s tough to dislike like a movie that proceeds as if the 1990s cycle of Quentin Tarantino knockoffs never ended and that uses the prospect of gory canine violence in service of loud and persistent pro-dog cheerleading.

The story is invented, and not particularly exciting as such.

At times, Mavromichalis himself seems starstuck, to the extent that he can’t distinguish the disarming from the banal.

Qualifies as the most indulgent kind of homemade project, laden with tediously inspirational dialogue and visuals that seem shot through half-fizzled Yuengling. Kudos to Gores, at least, for acquitting himself as an actor.

Laden with references to race, class and the legacy of slavery, Spell, directed by Mark Tonderai from a script by Kurt Wimmer (a pen on the “Point Break” and “Total Recall” remakes), is stronger on maintaining suspense and a macabre atmosphere than it is at following through on its ideas, which give it a thin veneer of topicality.

Alas, unlike the duo's Crank films - also about a hero on the verge of explosion - Spirit of Vengeance lacks a solid gimmick to unify their transgressive gambits.

Gets points for originality but quickly succumbs to terminal self-amusement.

When Dead Man’s Wire ends with footage of the real Kiritsis and Hall, it is hard not to conclude that a much crazier, livelier film could have been made.

The unrealized potential makes the rote line style and stagnant backdrops seem all the blander.

A case in which a production designer and prosthetics team showed up for work but the screenwriters might as well have crowdsourced their ideas from fanboys.

Signs of life are few. A desaturated palette makes Rodin as monotonous to look at as it is to endure.

This vague, arty horror film from Jason Banker (“Toad Road”), who shares a story credit with his star, Amy Everson, is at once underwritten and overconceptualized.

A clever but aesthetically murky remake of Haskell Wexler's scorching McLuhan pastiche "Medium Cool" (1969).

Because the metaphysics driving it are so fuzzy, this is the rare horror film where even sludgy viscera elicit only yawns.

The finale, in which blood rivalries are redressed in an absurdly literal manner, fatally strains credulity.

Not without its moments of elemental dread, Apocalypse is also obviously padded, too long on action, and painfully short on irony. The satirical element still packs a minor jolt.

A computer-animated feature of bright hues, hectic action and only occasional charm.

The movie’s determination to make stripping mundane has a way of infecting the film. Even the dancing sequences, often shot in poor lighting as if on a smartphone camera, look perfunctory.

The usual pop-culture jokes, disco tunes, and sarcastic narrator are on hand to prevent atrophy, but by the time the sky really does start "falling"--courtesy of an alien invasion-- Chicken Little's frantic efforts to stay farm fresh have started to wear on the nerves.

There are a few powerful images.

While Kosinski’s prose renders the grotesque vivid by understatement, this adaptation often seems to have little purpose beyond literal-minded visualization.

More of a raspberry than a reboot, The Banana Splits Movie, available to buy (and later to rent) on multiple digital platforms, is far less crazy than it wants to be and far more soporific than a synopsis would suggest.

While the movie makes a winning case for the passion of its subjects, it bears hints of smoothed-over complexities.

The movie has no apparent destination in mind; it ends with a complacent shrug having barely reached feature running time. Ms. Tomei, Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Geraghty get stray laughs, but “Loitering With Intent” mostly plays like an excuse for its makers to hang out.

Pallenberg is finally in focus. But the picture is tough to look at.

Imagine a Kaurismaki with less humor and a slower pace, and you’ll have a sense of how singular yet insubstantial In the Aisles ultimately appears.

It’s contrary to the movie’s spirit to judge Bert, but the evasive treatment of his wartime experiences plays like a dodge: His past exists as a kind of amorphous trauma, reduced to shorthand in shamelessly placed flashbacks.

Elements that have the potential to become running gags . . . either languish or are dropped, as if Apatow simply cut together what he felt were inspired improvisations without regard for flow (or the uncharacteristically cheap-looking visuals).

Many documentaries have dealt with real-life ambiguity by making it part of their structure and argument. This one treats it as an afterthought.

Dahan, who also wrote the screenplay, provides a serviceable overview of Veil’s accomplishments and ethical sense (partly shaped by her experiences in the camps), and of the barriers she overcame in misogynistic civic spheres. But her biography deserved a more considered treatment — and a considerably less heavy hand.

Cooking that makes diners uncomfortable hasn’t inspired comparable creativity of cinematic form. “Stage” makes you want to eat, not watch.

The question of whether the couple will consummate their relationship isn’t a sufficient source of tension.

Mr. Klapisch lingers his camera lovingly over shots of grapes being harvested and stomped, all the while employing story mechanics and flashbacks indelicate enough to suggest the churn of a factory juicer.

The actors — the deft Mr. Brühl and the charming Ms. Herzsprung — add what levity they can.

Hover is reasonably resourceful for its first hour, during which it appears to have turned budget restrictions into an asset, keeping the focus on ideas instead of effects. The last act, though, is a total whiff — too rushed, too riddled with plot holes and too incongruously hopeful to take seriously.

Whoever Opus is supposed to be sending up, its aim is a bit wide of the mark. But even if the movie’s only real goal is to frighten, it bets far too much on its eventual twists.

"The Fugitive,” to which “Angel” owes perhaps even its rooftop finale, is a template against which this movie inevitably falls short.

An ugly-duckling fable populated with grotesques out of John Waters, Pizza attempts an unlikely mode: earnest camp.

Mostly, Retaliation accords Bloom a chance to deliver some impressive, anguished monologues, although the scenes focusing on those around him (particularly a late conversation between Montgomery and Ferns’s characters) hint at a more expansive, unrealized complexity.

The dispiriting experience of watching Champions is slowly realizing that, notwithstanding an off-color line here or there (a player with Down syndrome introduces himself as “your homie with an extra chromie”), it’s exactly the sort of formulaic crowd-pleaser that just about anybody might have directed.

Lucha Mexico often plays less like a character study than like a simple promotional effort, with repetitive platitudes.

This British thriller is a high-concept tease that slogs its way through a morass of barely differentiated characters and visuals before reaching an unsatisfying conclusion.

It would be easy to dismiss the movie’s perspective as limited and jingoistic, but “The Road Between Us” never pretends to offer more than an in-the-moment chronicle of a violent clash. The bigger problem is that its slickness cheapens the most harrowing recollections.

The movie starts by noting Leonardo’s intent to leave a memory of himself in the minds of others. That’s a benchmark Inside the Mind of Leonardo won’t meet.

There is less to The Bay of Silence than meets the eye.

In keeping with his apparent ambition to play each character more berserk than the last, Pacino can't discuss wine choice without sounding on the brink of aneurysm.

The narrative has been fashioned mostly in Mr. Pacquiao’s favor, although there are mentions of overwork, infidelity and gambling. Banal, stentorian narration by Liam Neeson (“Once victory is stolen from you, what are you left with?”) mostly gives the sense that it’s the viewer being carried around the ring.

Said to be intended as a reflection on shifts in Turkish history and identity, it is too diffuse and withholding to add up to a cogent result.

The Baltimorons aims for bittersweet rather than wacky. Didi is lonely; Cliff struggles with sobriety. And while the film has clear affection for its Baltimore locations (it’s dedicated to the workers killed when the Key Bridge collapsed in 2024), considerably less thought has gone into creating convincing situations for those backdrops.

Outside of the Jordan inner circle, this family-versus-business parable comes across as slight, familiar, and in dire need of seasoning.

Barbaro and Boneta’s charm offensive never amounts to much, though. The eagerness this film has to please could never match how pleased Feingold clearly is to be making a movie like it.

Mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.

At once disarming and calculated, Strange Magic is a film of commodified feelings, evoking memories of other experiences — whether of Shakespeare, the original songs or authentic enchantment.

The omnibus film The Year of the Everlasting Storm assembles pandemic-made shorts from around the globe. But with just two decent segments out of seven, this anthology uncannily replicates the sensation of feeling trapped.

Even the profanity has lost its zing in this cut-rate retread, which mostly prompts admiration for how far Mr. Zwigoff ran with one joke.

The only urgent message in Gringo Trails would seem to be the screamingly obvious one: Visitors should behave themselves.

This sluggish, self-serious job-gone-wrong movie could itself stand to be jolted to life.

Calamy has by far the livelier part, and the energy dissipates whenever Magalie isn’t drawing attention to herself.

While Mr. Laaksonen devoted his life (1920-91) to challenging conventions, the film is committed to honoring them.

However worthy or political its intent, Al Di Qua is too overwrought to seem anything but trivializing.

The sensations that Strangers on the Earth means to evoke are not well suited to the cinematic medium, at least not to a documentary that barely runs more than an hour and a half.

Not quite a romance by numbers, Prime is nevertheless a movie we need like a hole in the head.

Evidently, as this muddled movie tells it, the climactic lesson of the Nuremberg trials was that America had a friend, too.

It proceeds dryly and largely chronologically through her life, sometimes with an awkward sense of proportion.

The director Adam Rifkin wrote this showcase for Mr. Reynolds, who, like Vic, was a college football player. The Last Movie Star effectively allows the ever-assured actor to score a touchdown on an empty field.

It’s neither a secret masterpiece nor a laughable disaster.

The Wasted Times plays like a movie carved out of a much larger mini-series, whose segments are then shown out of order.

While the plot is absorbing, the movie continually has characters voice their motivations, leaving little to subtext.

While What Men Want starts off as a stinging critique, it undermines that message with one of Hollywood’s favorite idiotic subplots.

There’s much more dead air than laughs, despite a certain anything-goes enthusiasm from the leads.

Mitte, who played the son in “Breaking Bad” and himself has cerebral palsy, sells Mike’s tenacity, but the contrivances around him let him down.

For a film rooted in a personal story, Salvation Army feels awfully remote.

This is a concept in search of a movie, and an academic exercise that doesn’t give observers much to work with.

An honorable but dull attempt to translate a neglected literary source to the screen.

This derivative comedy, in addition to not being particularly funny, gives off a sense of telling us more than we needed to know.

Apart from a hi-def night-vision gimmick, returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman don't take advantage of either upgrade.

While the movie provides encouraging evidence of how much societal sensibilities have changed, it is fundamentally dressing up well-worn material.

Even in this would-be subversive comedy. Success means getting the guy. Getting good grades (as Bianca does) is not enough, nor is writing the front-page article in the school paper.

It’s tough to build a character study around an unconvincing character.

The theft that inspired the movie has been called one of the biggest in Denmark’s history. It deserved a sleeker film.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

"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.

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.

The Apparition turns out to be nothing more than a series of feebly constructed "Boo!" scenes tacked together to achieve (barely) feature length.

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 movie tries to do for amateur cooking contests what “Best in Show” did for dog competitions, but the strained folksiness and tired stereotypes couldn’t be further from the snap and wit of prime Christopher Guest.

The conspiracy thriller The Gandhi Murder begins with a claim to be “based on verified facts.” Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.