Dennis Harvey

Its screaming-queen stereotypes will look pretty retro in most Western markets, even if an earnest pro-tolerance message disarms potential offense.

As a spiritually “lost” man searching for a more literally lost woman, Hawkes has just the offhand gravitas required for a noir hero. Yet in a movie where character backstory and plot coherence hardly figure, any emotional realism the actor provides is wholly his invention.

It’s the kind of enterprise that has everything but a single fresh idea, or even moment. ... The sombre tone feels forced rather than earned, because everything here comes out of The Giant Golden Book Of Coulda Beena Contenda Cliches.

There are potentially funny ideas, but the barely-there script, performances and direction go for a deadpan tenor that's not supported by much actual wit.

That this mashup of too many familiar action-thriller elements doesn’t emerge a generic mess is a credit to all involved. That it’s passably entertaining but also instantly forgettable comes as less of a surprise.

The problem here isn’t the fairly apparent budgetary limits — it’s the limitations of style and imagination.

Energetic but poorly structured.

Nick Cassavetes’ slick adaptation certainly maintains the book’s mix of lurid incident and pontificating pretentiousness — albeit without the kind of intensity that might have made this far-fetched story credible, or the atmospheric style that might’ve pulled it off as a fevered nightmare à la David Lynch instead.

Forgettable PG-13 pic will particularly strike fans of harder-edged recent horror pix as much ado about not much.

Grief doesn't rate high among emotional states suited to high-octane presentation; hence the disconnect between excessive style and sober content in Burning Man, a feature-length montage posing as a serious drama about loss and anger.

There are certainly no fresh ideas risked in this first directorial feature by voice actor-turned-scenarist David Hayter (“X-Men,” “Watchmen”), but Wolves could be worse, being as fast-paced and polished on a “B” budget as it is forgettable.

Clearly, director Nolan is aiming for something else. But the delight in sheer gamesmanship that marked his breakout "Memento" doesn't survive this project's gimmickry and aspirations toward "Les Miserables"-style epic passion.

August, whose English-language films have seldom compared well to his distinguished Scandinavian ones, can’t elevate this material much above the flat, pat TV-movie earnestness it seems content to aim for.

There's a great deal of on-the-nose talk here about faith, rationality, sin and so forth. But Chapman's sincerity is undercut by the crudely melodramatic explanations of why his principals believe as they do.

Duly offbeat without ever being very compelling in content or aesthetic.

The fact that the film isn’t quite boring is about the most one can say for it.

The emotions we witness and feel should have more force given the obviously stressful circumstances depicted. But they feel like all the edges have been sawed off to flatter both the subjects and principal actors.

This muscular yet monotonous "Kane" just isn't much fun.

If the horror aspects are underdeveloped, so are Johnston’s other major ideas.

Within the film’s modest scale, the period trappings feel apt, and its aesthetic packaging is attractive enough. But particularly for a movie largely about repression, “Bees” is so full of forced emotions that it teeters on the brink of cliche-riddled camp.

Serviceable but uninspired, this latest version of Emile Zola’s much-adapted 1867 novel “Therese Raquin” sends its characters to their doom on schedule without stirring much sense of tragedy or emotional involvement.

Even by its genre’s comfort-food standards, this movie feels blandly circumscribed, almost child-proofed, as if any sharper reality or wit might be harmful to the intended audience.

Resourceful and energetic, All the Devil’s Men is better than it might have been. But it’s still not very good.

“Brothers'” script hardly provides enough to hang a short on.

A handsome contraption that's never very engaging, let alone convincing.

What at first looks like a standard missing-person suspense tale turns out to have a more complicated agenda — but it is so haphazardly advanced and clumsily articulated, the film itself seems to be fumbling around for a cohering structure or mood.

Eating Out: All You Can Eat somewhat departs from the series' gay spin on the raunchy teen sex comedy in favor of semi-sincere romantic comedy -- after a crass and abysmal first stretch, that is.

The problem is that this watchable indie isn’t all that funny, clever or surprising despite its outré premise.

This genial but very silly gorefest looks like it was fun to make — practically the entire population of Charleston, Mississippi, seems to have pitched in. Still, horror fans will have to be in a generous, perhaps beered-up mood to feel the same way about watching it.

Considering its theme and setting, there's something very wrong with a Good that seems merely competent, uninspired and a bit old-hat.

A by-the-numbers ensemble dramedy that hits every underdog and gay-fish-out-of-water cliche on the nose.

If the original could be accused of having a real point (even a subtext), the uninspired redo has none whatsoever.

Minimally funny comedy feels like a Disney Channel pic that got boosted to theatrical after Lohan scored a hit opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in the "Freaky Friday" remake.

This offbeat effort proves more admirable for its ambition than anything else, as the uneasy mix of satire, allegory, grittiness and redemption never quite jells.

This teen romance proves perilously short on substance, insight and novelty, unless you count its characters being afflicted with a case of "Juno" mouth.

Newcomers will find this adapted tale’s fantasy logic arbitrary, its plot convoluted, and the sum effect wildly unconvincing without being nearly so fun.

Ultimately it seems a message movie not quite willing to deliver any clear message, as well as a genre film shy about admitting as much. It’s too melodramatic to be taken as gritty realism, yet not suspenseful enough to work as a straight thriller.

Real suspense and shocks are MIA in a movie that’s eventful but lacks the atmospherics needed to be scary.

Pleasant but slim in running time and substance, this very first-person documentary raises some interesting issues it doesn’t pursue very far.

Real, inspired strangeness — not to mention laughs, and an actual point — prove elusive here, while the musical elements feel so inessential they might be excised entirely without notable loss. Wanderland deserves credit for trying something different. But such an effort shouldn’t end up so innocuous and inconsequential.

Tulip has the conviction as well as the artlessness of a saber-rattling speech at a political fundraising dinner, one that preaches fire and brimstone to inflame the already converted. Those seeking a more nuanced portrayal of the challenges facing the country will be less satisfied.

Has a whole new director, cast and crew, with slightly higher production polish and more familiar faces onscreen. Nonetheless, it's consistent with its predecessor as a somewhat awkward translation of Ayn Rand's 1957 novel to our current era, handled with bland telepic-style competency.

A typical grab bag of works of varying depth, all of them breezy and entertaining.

The result is at once fun and fatiguing. Scary it’s not, and many viewers will find their patience tested by the character they most hope will be dealt a quick demise being the one we’re principally stuck with.

Beyond the participants' friends and co-workers, it's hard to imagine an audience for this professionally packaged exercise in navel gazing.

A watchable but super-silly mix of superheroics and evil-child horror that mashes together singularly uninspired ideas from both.

One part inspiration to two parts exasperation, Andrew T. Betzer’s debut feature, Young Bodies Heal Quickly, is an initially arresting road trip for some off-the-wall characters that takes its sweet time going nowhere in particular.

As the celluloid universe spun from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” continues to accrue remakes, spin-offs, addendums and miscellany, “Boys” does provide one potentially compelling footnote. But its execution feels like a missed opportunity.

To the Stars needn’t have taken itself so seriously, but the fact that it ultimately does is exactly what turns it from a potentially charming, bittersweet fable to a pretentiously overblown yet undercooked Amerindie soap opera.

Lautner’s earnest turn, as well as those of familiar TV faces Johnson (“Bates Motel,” “The Shield”) and Zimmer (“Entourage,” “UnReal”), are hamstrung by writing that demands a certain emotional urgency while providing the performers little opportunity for surprise or nuance.

The "Hostel" similarities may strike some as too close for comfort, not only in plot outline but also in general mix of xenophobia, sexploitation, sadism and gore.

Competently crafted, Tammy is too glib to be poignant and too defeatist to be amusing.

All of this is silly, borderline senseless, lively, and without any real rooting value at all. The supposedly lovable misfits here aren’t, no matter how the cast members feign hilarity at their potty-mouthing. Not that it matters — because nothing does in this expensive toy of a film, which ultimately works on the level of a disco ball. It’s shiny, it moves, and is accompanied by much noise.

By the time we see them playing “truth or dare” anew over dinner, Strike a Pose begins to feel like a rather flimsy, gimmicky exploitation rather than a thoughtful exploration of a shared, shining-moment-in-the-spotlight past.

An exercise in bad taste that takes itself just seriously enough to be offensive.

Inspiration is running thin in comedian Margaret Cho's fourth concert film, a routine stand-up set that compares poorly to her oft-hilarious first two.

The short running time means there’s nary a dull moment, but also that no new (or even old) ideas get explored in more than drive-by fashion, the occasion pause for gore aside.

This anything-goes exercise isn't dull -- one just wishes the outrageousness were more consistently funny.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with Anderson’s documentary — save that after 96 minutes, any viewer could well obliviously walk right past its principal subjects on the street, so fleeting an impression do they make in this surface-level portrait.

What ultimately keeps “Land” from rising above mediocrity — even to the level of guilty pleasure — is that Ian Patrick Williams’ screenplay is such a stock compilation of gangster tropes, the film has little chance of developing a personality all its own.

Alan White’s polished but pedestrian pic mines little real suspense and few surprises from a formulaic script.

A serviceable youth pic that's marginally less dumb than November's urban quasi-musical "Honey."

Ultimately less dependent on suspense or even scares than on squirm-inducing grossouts, this tale of Yank hardbodies vs. carnivorous creepers should flower briefly in hardtops, then spread like an invasive weed in ancillary.

This is a competently crafted movie too shallow to come up with much reason why we should root for these people, and too derivative to make their vertiginous rise and fall more than forgettable formula entertainment.

This plotless reverie is easy to admire texturally, including an original soundtrack composed with the helmer’s spouse, singer-songwriter Maria McKee. But despite those virtues, and the pic’s determinedly idiosyncratic take on autobiographically inspired material, most viewers will find the script’s narrative shapelessness and pretentiously poetic dialogue hard to take.

Lee crafts actions and situations that are credible without being particularly engrossing -- recognition doesn't necessarily translate into absorbsion.

Contrastingly notable for their absence are emotional depth, narrative cogency or non-scatological humor — lacks that much ultra-violence and a surprising amount of sexual content can only distract from so much over such a long, bombastic, shallow course.

The result is an earnest, sometimes skillful effort that nonetheless often feels slack and underwritten, as well as ultimately less-than-rewarding.

The Last Matinee is less effective as a straight horror film than it is as a self-conscious genre homage, providing excitement more of the eye-candy design than the visceral ilk. Still, it’s adequately diverting fare for those who’ll grok its somewhat insular appeal.

Though never outright dull, A Haunting in Cawdor manages to provide few incidents of genuine interest while leaving potentially rewarding character and thematic elements unexplored.

Drones is a middling real-time thriller.

When crises start occurring at the halfway mark, they pile on too quickly to underwhelming effect, sacrificing credibility for excitement that never really materializes.

A simple misfire rather than a world-class fiasco. This misguided attempt to remake Lina Wertmuller's corrosive 1974 satire as a wistful romance is only unintentionally funny in the last reel.

Harold's thriller does have an attention-getting plot hook, but piles on too many narrative gimmicks to maintain suspense or credibility.

The results don’t feel disjointed so much as oddly undernourished and a bit toothless for what’s intended as a bold (mostly) comic expose.

Pleasant enough overall, if also somewhat gratingly old-fashioned.

Comedic and sentimental beats are as predictable as the storytelling is sloppy.

It’s hectic, unsubtle, borderline cartoonish.

Stan Brooks’ first directorial feature provides scant psychological depth, drawing its characters and staging their incidents in crude fashion, despite superficial production gloss.

The script has some familiar, vaguely disapproving things to say about latchkey kids (both the teen leads are under-supervised by workaholic or absent parents), depersonalizing technology, and the pursuit of fatuous social-media fame. But there’s not much real suspense stirred here by a premise that straddles recent found-footage thrillers and “Rear Window.”

Justin Lo is -- in descending order of competence -- producer, director, editor, writer and star of debut feature The Conrad Boys. He should've hired a better actor for the lead, but then this low-budget indie would lack its vanity project raison d'etre.

Though slick and more expansive in some ways, with bigger action sequences, it proves an overlong, uninvolving entry, in which any attempted fresh wrinkles to this fantasy universe offer scant viewer reward.

Its rags-to-riches-to-near-ruin storytelling is simplistic, the celluloid craftsmanship B-grade, the acting nothing to write home about. Still, there’s a sense of a fertile cultural moment being captured for posterity, however routinely.

This uninspired detour into impersonally commercial English-language terrain for Bosnian director Danis Tanovic (an Oscar winner for 2001’s “No Man’s Land”) should provide Patterson’s fans and undemanding miscellaneous viewers with an acceptably slick if not-particularly-suspenseful crime potboiler for home viewing.

The result is a movie that seems unaware just how generic the should-be-distinguishing details of its earnest eco-cautionary tale have turned out.

Writer-director Brendan Muldowney’s latest lacks the thick atmospherics that might have punched across a sketchy screenplay, which falls short in expanding the premise of his 2004 short “The Ten Steps.”

A walk on the "dark side" that moves far more slowly than limited character insight requires.

Pic's air of connoisseurist homage overwhelms a haphazard screenplay and characters who are hard to warm up to.

Utterly routine futuristic horror-thriller The Colony substitutes the term “ferals” for plain old zombies (the modern, fast-moving kind), and that’s about it for originality.

The result is more flashy and shallow than ingenious, let alone terrifying. Yet it’s also a committed effort, one whose energy and style command some appreciation even when they overwhelm the shaky story gist.

Isn't an embarrassment. Rather, it's an acceptably executed, thoroughly routine time-killer.

This slick-enough mediocrity will pass the time tolerably for less discriminating genre fans. But it’s a little sad to see Antonio Banderas reduced to a B movie with grade-C material.

As generic in every aspect as Brian De Palma's original was inventive.

Weak even by the standard of uninspired recent Asian-horror remakes, The Uninvited is more likely to induce snickers and yawns than shudders and yelps.

One can guess how the elements here might have been alluring on the page, but helmer/co-scenarist Michael Knowles' third feature doesn't find the distinctive tone needed to make its eccentric characters less than irksome and its plot more than arbitrary.

This potentially intriguing concept is given disappointingly bland, flat treatment in the Kickstarter-funded project, in which Towne brings professionalism but little personality to both her on- and offcamera roles.

Neither fish nor fowl, slick yet strangely rudderless Ghostlight sounds interesting in description but lacks fascination in actual viewing.

It works hard stylistically to provide a good time. But that would have been a better bet had at least as much effort been put into a screenplay whose ideas, both comic and macabre, remain undernourished.

Another theater adaptation that remains stuck to the boards, despite the considerable talent and energy on tap..... equal parts diverting and strained, most likely to please the same niche audiences who have given the material a modest stage shelf life for the last quarter-century.

Overlong, undercooked Rabid can’t settle on a unified tone for its actors, let alone its narrative. Even its misanthropy ultimately feels indecisive and trifling.

What this still modest yet considerably slicker upgrade gains in surface gloss and FX, it loses in psychological intensity and suspension of disbelief — qualities heightened by the prior film’s handmade origins.

The best thing the film has going for it is editor Avner Shiloah’s scrambled channel-surfing assembly, which seldom sticks with any bit long enough for it to get too stale. Still, VHYes feels overextended even at the 66 slim minutes it takes to reach the final credits.

The movie’s pileup of dislocating side-swipes from any tangible here/now is intriguing and well-crafted to a degree many genre fans will find exciting. But others will be justified in wondering if all this stylish, increasingly frenetic sleight-of-hand obscures scant substance.

This pileup of frustrations is variably funny, often just mildly so, but rooting value is slight since floppy-haired Jamie is such a passive figure, one defined by little more than his constant cell-phone rambling and general brospeak.

Kim’s film is a slick concoction that affords moderate guilty-pleasure fun for a while, though it goes on too long to diminishing effect.

Baskin becomes something of a monotonous dirge. Diverting to an extent, the film’s horrors aren’t shocking or distinctive enough, its surreal atmospherics not quite strong enough to cover for the sketchy script.

A colorful, lurid and ultimately so-what look at obnoxious personalities careening down their own road to ruin.

This isn’t a dull film, but it lacks personality as well as originality.

Director and cast do their best — well, maybe not their best, but their competent professional duty — with a formulaic, contrived screenplay. Still, the results do no one much credit, landing closer to overripe cheese than taut suspense, or even guilty-pleasure terrain.

Helmer Michael Polish and his spouse-star, Kate Bosworth, were reportedly attracted to the project for the change-of-pace role it afforded her. But even beyond its sketchy screenplay, the pic’s main problem is that Bosworth lacks the villainous authority required to make Mike Le and Amy Kolquist’s tricky if undercooked screenplay work.

Ultimately too underdeveloped and slight to have much impact, though the helmer's impressionistic uses of image and sound are appealing.

Played flatly head-on with some poetic pretensions, the concept never becomes particularly credible or appealing.

As it episodically flirts with absurdism, black comedy, and other offbeat flavors, Level Up seems to be simply trying on different attitudes without owning them.

It’s less than the sum of its attractive parts, with scant overall insight or weight. Like an old handmade sweater, this is a movie that might unravel too easily if you gave any single element a hard tug.

Thinly amusing, The Strongest Man stretches a short’s worth of potentially funny ideas to feature length, where they slowly and surely lead nowhere in particular.

Part of the problem is that since everything is at so incessant a fever pitch, suspense flattens rather than builds, and we don’t care much about characters who spend nearly all their time yelling instructions at each other.

There’s more repetition and ponderousness than compelling intrigue in the end result here.

The film’s hyperbolic style and convoluted storytelling tend to exhaust patience rather than build intrigue, making for a muddle whose too-many twists and turns ultimately seem meaningless as well as implausible.

Dull casting and cliche-ridden writing drain everyone of vividness.

Justin Routt’s Mississippi-shot feature is competently made. But neither its staging nor its performances transcend the limitations of Adrian Speckert and Cory Todd Hughes’ script, leaving mediocre material unredeemed by any special thrills, style, or character detailing.

The thing-a-ma-jigs have it out with the whatch-a-ma-call-its -- as several humans scurry and scream between -- in Alien Vs. Predator, the kind of two-for-one dogfight (last repped by "Freddy Vs. Jason") that usually does more to bury a franchise than revive it.

Reprising high-school slasher cliches dating back at least to 1980’s “Prom Night,” minus any particular invention or irony, this new entry is a slick-enough but disappointingly unimaginative effort that can’t even be bothered to reference the mythology established in the prior films.

Reaching for the grandiose, it never grasps anything beyond the generic.

When Animals Dream lacks peasants bearing flaming torches to hunt down Frankenstein’s monster outside the terrorized village. But it also lacks the depth to avoid seeming just as corny, albeit in a dressed-up, self-consciously important way.

Scary Movie 4 finds horror parody overshadowed by ho-hum groin blows, C-list celebrity cameos, slapstick child abuse, soon-to-be-forgotten hip-hop personalities, plus scatalogical and gay jokes; real laughs are few.

In the end, Silent Hill degenerates into an overblown replay of all those "Twilight Zone" and Stephen King stories in which outsiders stumble upon a time-warped location from which there's no escape.

The film has a very good idea in using a single soldier’s perspective to explore how tension and boredom can lead to such extreme misconduct, but it doesn’t go far enough, in the end leaving a disgraceful chapter just dimly illuminated in psychological terms.

That original was split between charms and minuses, suffering primarily from careless scripting. Here, those faults are indulged wholesale, with so little attention paid to overall narrative development or individual scene-shaping that the bloated pic often suggests a crowd-funded venture existing solely to pay back (and showcase) the crowd.

For all its street edge, GhettoPhysics pretty much delivers the usual New Age seminar sleight-of-hand, providing a temporary, generalized sense of empowerment without any practical tools to improve one's lot.

The conflicts come to no interesting fruition, and occasional comic flourishes (Bobby dancing to a “Soul Train” broadcast, vomiting after drinking alcohol) fall flat.

Nearly two decades after the original “Blair Witch,” it’s a mystery why any filmmaker feels the need to be “purist” about the found-footage format when it’s been done to death.

Crudup does a lot to keep things watchable, playing with a slightly acidic wryness that suggests the character’s humor has only been heightened by his grieving hopelessness.

Palahniuk's antic absurdism is duly present, but the hurtling pace and barely-underlying nihilism that transferred to screen so vividly in "Fight Club" aren't much in evidence here.

Where helmer Adam Wingard's prior "Pop Skull" used a jittery style to convey its delusional, possibly meth-addled protagonist's mindset, here, too much handheld camera wobble and wavering image focus only alienate the viewer from this somewhat sluggish tale.

Surprises are reserved for the final half-hour, at which point the slow-paced Palmetto has long since fossilized as a routine exercise in ceiling-fan, sweaty-forehead noir-by-numbers.

Guns & Moses can be accused of implausibility, tonal missteps and sporadic heavy-handedness — but you can’t say it lacks chutzpah.

It's a bad heterosexual date movie (more a date-gone-wrong), has too limited a gay angle for that demographic, and is about characters who are not particularly likable as individuals or as a couple.

Helmer/co-writer Doug Langway's first feature has the right basic elements for niche DVD and cable success, but its overly digressive storytelling cries out for considerable tightening.

The result is a watchable, albeit unsatisfying, vehicle for two stars who’ve now made a pair of movies together in which their skills constitute the main attraction, yet who aren’t particularly well-served by either film.

Unfortunately that blast-off heralds an orbit to nowhere, with initial delight fading as pic runs out of ideas all too soon, never building a sense of momentum or narrative thrust.

This glossy doc uncovers very little conflict or depth in a personality more colorful than it is interesting, at least as presented here.

Ensuing action is tamely PG-13 in terms of graphic violence. Despite competent performances and packaging, dialogue and situations in Aimee Lagos’ script are too routine to create much excitement.

The very definition of a well-made movie that nonetheless really needn’t have been made at all, Rocher’s entry into the canon will attract a few zombie completists, but provide little fun for the average genre buff and underwhelming reward for art-house audiences.

Those involved got to spend weeks at a Bora Bora luxury resort; all we get is this not lousy but unmemorable tropical-vacation comedy.

It’s a decently acted and crafted drama that nonetheless seems built on a foundation of phony pathos, revolving around doomed lovers whose fate seems more a matter of contrived miserabilism than authenticity.

An exercise in canned cuteness, Because I Said So pushes its normally appealing stars, Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore, over the edge of sitcom hysteria.

An awkward blend of documentary and genre pic.

Worth seeing for its wealth of archival footage hitherto little-seen outside Communist bloc nations, Fidel nonetheless errs badly by slapping a quasi-objective journalistic tenor onto content so flattering and uncritical it might pass for an old "This Is Your Life" episode.

Does get slightly better as it goes along.

There’s no complexity to anyone or anything here. Even the hint of family conflict in the portrayal of our heroes’ children as bratty teens goes nowhere in the director and Cain DeVore’s screenplay, which at times teeters on the edge between simple and simple-minded.

Bloopers under the closing credits reveal how much improvisation was involved here — and how that’s a poor substitute for a good script, no matter how talented the cast.

The wait for laughs lasts the entire length of Waiting ..., first feature from writer-director Rob McKittrick that aims to be a "Clerks"-type comedy set in a chain restaurant but ends up somewhere below a "Porky's" sequel.

Boarding School includes an odd mix of narrative elements within a classically Grimm child-endangerment scenario that would work best played as a modern fairy tale. Yet Yakin chooses to pace the film more slowly as a serious drama, which keeps the suspense from building real momentum and exacerbates the script’s implausibilities.

With Mariel Hemingway a credible Sapphic Stallone, this passable action trash should satisfy as fun original programming for gay-targeted Here! cable net.

In “Corpus Christi,” Bielenia was electric, but then he had Mateusz Pacewicz’s great script to work with. Here, he retains some charisma in a hard-working performance, but it’s not enough to singlehandedly provide this screenplay with meaning.

Has a quasi-verite, improvisational feel that appears truthful. But it doesn't lend much sympathy, or depth, to characters who never seem worth knowing.

Doesn't compare favorably with David Schisgall's similarly themed "The Lifestyle," released to arthouses last year.

The script unfortunately suffers from its own case of arrested development, barely getting out of the gate before stalling, and never building enough laughs or narrative impetus to justify feature length.

This decent if derivative scare machine should benefit from a lack of genre competition.

The script has been written compactly if without great imagination by Nicolas Aaron Mezzanatto, and directed likewise by actor-turned-helmer Donowho, whose work here reps an uptick from his prior, mostly B-grade horror features.

The lead actors are solid as usual, but you can feel them all knocking their heads against the low ceiling of material that’s afraid to take any risks — playing it so safe that the film ends up lacking anything in the way of real personality, scares or plot surprises.

Rude, heavily contrived, pretty funny, just remotely connected to real-world youth life.

McNamara’s second directorial feature (following 2003’s Aussie “The Rage in Placid Lake,” another teenage-misfits-make-good comedy) winds up a poorly mixed bowl of mismatched ingredients that is nonetheless tepidly, forgettably digestible.

Rote character writing, voicing and animation devalue the more impressive design elements of Joe Pearson’s long-aborning project.

Even the weakest "Desperate Housewives" episode packs more heat than this tepid romantic comedy-fantasy, whose basic plot gimmick has been done as far back as "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."

There’s no free-at-last rain dance for Darcy, but just about every other lyrical cliche appears on cue.

A blandly cast and crafted remake of the same-titled 2004 Thai pic that itself emulated J-horror norms, which seemed a lot fresher back then.

On the one hand, it’s nice that in 2020 this hook should (despite our current political chaos) seem no big deal. On the other, one does wish this exercise in blase attitudinizing paid a little more attention to suspense, thrills, plot, mythology, and the other basic horror elements it leaves underdeveloped.

The overly finished language and theatrical intensity levels that might be potently effective onstage lose any pretense of naturalism under the camera’s unblinking gaze.

This tale of a Long Island dental hygienist dealing with various family crises is likable enough, but never really distinctive in character delineation, tone, atmosphere or plotting.

A low-pulse thriller that evaporates from memory with the last credit.

Surely the least excitable beauty-meets-Bigfoot film ever made.

This action spectacular seems hellbent on containing every possible marketable genre element, with no concern for whether they cohere or cancel one another out.

It’s an inspired goof — for a while, before it turns into waaaaaay too much of a good thing.

It’s the kind of narrative leap that can make or break a film. But here it overcomplicates a narrative that should’ve better developed its basic elements, rather than lunging for a big-picture profundity it falls short of. Beautifully atmospheric to a point, handsomely produced, “Ghosts” gradually disappoints because its thematic ambitions add more clutter than depth to a story that’s most effective at its simplest.

In trying to succeed as something both metaphorical and very literal-minded, the movie ends up being neither one nor the other — not psychologically deep enough to succeed as pure drama, and too earnest to offer the usual rewards of a genre film.

A few droll and/or silly moments poke through the general boredom. But Martin and Peranson’s snarkfest doesn’t really offer any critique that Hopper didn’t already aim at himself, however incoherently, in the supremely self-conscious “Last Movie.”

Though slick and diverting in some aspects, increasingly silly pic has trouble meshing disparate elements --- horror, superhero fantasy, straight-up action --- into a workable whole.

This first feature for videogame designer/writer Christian Cantamessa has an intriguing premise and two capable stars, none of which is utilized as memorably as one might hope.

Lacking the knockout lead perfs or more whimsical tone that might have transcended script's dubious logic, pic comes off as a so-so theatrical stunt delivered via the wrong medium.

All this adds up to a big “whatever.” Don’t Go isn’t sure whether it wants to be a frightening fantasy or a poignantly warm-and-fuzzy one.

A mediocre ensemble comedy-drama that's not particularly funny, involving or even nostalgic.

It's a picture that's akin to a terrarium of plastic flowers -- gaudily decorative, but airless and lifeless.

Mature in terms of production polish and pro performances, writer-director Rob Margolies' feature debut, Lifelines (until recently called "Wherever You Are"), stumbles in a familiar way: It crams in so many family dysfunctions and plot crises in search of cathartic impact that credibility is stretched to the breaking point.

Grim in theme yet seldom effective or convincing in execution.

For a supernatural thriller that spends so much time on material that is neither supernatural nor thrilling, there’s not nearly enough effort put into credible, complex character writing, leaving the cast only so much ability to fill in the gaps.

Instead of emphasizing tense action and atmosphere — the usual limited-budget solutions — the filmmakers here seem to think having their characters nervously chatter on about their situation in reams of clumsy dialogue will do the trick. It does not.

So little happens in The Boy, and so little suspense is effectively built around its central figure, that by the time things finally do heat up the movie has flatlined too completely for us to care.

The leads are given the thankless task of maintaining grim poker faces through scene after scene of high contrivance and cliche-ridden dialogue.

A mean-spirited farce whose strenuous bad taste seldom translates into actual laughs.

Lazy Susan aims hazily between the sad-sack valentine likes of “Muriel’s Wedding” and something more satirically misanthropic, missing a target it never quite commits to in the first place.

Blandly competent in assembly, Baja has only pedestrian comic ideas, and even those aren’t executed well.

This crude, shrill day in the life of three ill-matched Manhattan women will prove as irksome to most viewers as it is to the protags.

By-the-numbers slasher picture Smiley starts by borrowing the key concept of "Candyman," ends with a denouement heavily indebted to "Scream," and stuffs its middle with a dismayingly high quotient of lazy false scares.

The Toy Soldiers sports a basic competence in assembly that slightly elevates its material. The same can’t be said of the performers, though they try, some achieving a semblance of naturalism, others more inept or hammy.

This undeniably slick, energetic contraption plays somewhere between grating and numbing.

The director and star’s efforts may have lifted the German-language edition, but this static, lost-in-translation revamp just comes off as effortful, for little reward.

The main thing early reels have going for them isn’t any actual cleverness or wit, but Neff’s pleasant riffing within a stock slacker-bro role. When his character stops having fun, so does the audience. Though needless to say, the unimaginative references to prior/better horror flicks just keep on a-comin’.

Nothing feels fresh here — not even Christopher Plummer hamming it up as a crusty-coot grandpa — and Philip Martin’s routinely polished direction only underscores the cliche-composting of Richard D’Ovidio’s script.

There’s a big twist at the end, but like everything else here, it aims for a shock effect that the film is simply too clumsy and psychologically far-fetched to pull off.

Sparing no maudlin contrivance in a quest to jerk tears that remain stubbornly dry, this hokum is slickly executed by producer Mark Williams in his feature directorial debut. But the result never rises above polished plastic, formulaic, and pedestrian.

The fact that none of this usually-surefire mindless stimulus is remotely inspired — let alone that the plot feels like a barely-there afterthought — turns so much cheerful sound and fury into near-senseless din.

Braid does look great. But Mitzi Peirone’s debut feature is so void of any substance beyond the pretentiously pictorial that one suspects her real calling is in music videos or advertising.

As directed by Nick Moran in obvious imitation of executive producer Danny Boyle’s most hyperbolic style, scripted by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, this apparently loose interpretation of the subject’s memoir becomes a hyperventilating “Behind the Music” caricature, all familiar flash and precious little substance.

Too underground in feel.

While most performers are fine within the material’s limitations, principal villains Avgeropoulos and Montesi are notably underwhelming.

Writer-director Nancy Kissam's inexplicably named feature feels a tad Frankensteinian, sewing second-hand ideas together most inorganically.

A crude concoction sewn together from the severed parts of prior horror/serial killer pics.

Its central theme being the struggle between Christianity and homophobia -- though what's onscreen is far too vanilla in both content and execution to spark much enthusiasm.

Short on thrills and energy despite its title, this slick yet sluggish feature often seems barely interested in the horror elements that are, after all, what will primarily lure viewers in.

All this sounds like a surefire recipe for knowing, trashy fun, but something got burnt in the oven.

A stilted, heavy-handed parable about fascistic intolerance.

While competently made, Dark Summer makes no effort to lend its characters any psychological complexity, or even much distinguishing personality. Nor are the proceedings very scary.

Although it’s being marketed as a horror film, The Curse of Downers Grove turns out to be something else — a messy hash of teen soap opera, stalker thriller and whatnot whose titular, possibly supernatural aspect is basically irrelevant.

Picture aims for nonstop thrill ride, but for all its brainless brawn, it has plenty of stops and few real thrills.

Eye candy without much to offer the brain or emotions, Hell Fest is a competently crafted slasher film rendered instantly forgettable by its disinterest in character, plot, and motivation, let alone original ideas.

While there have been worse-crafted, even more routinely formulaic Netflix horror efforts, this one takes the cake for sheer whateverness of barely-there plot, concept, character detailing and so on.

Blue Iguana strains to be antic in every joint, from gimmicky editorial and camera choices to a soundtrack cluttered with early ’80s New Wave tracks by the B-52’s, Violent Femmes, Only Ones — great stuff, but they can’t get a party started that’s already flatlined.

Worse things have happened to Oscar winners, but it’s still unfortunate to see both Richard Dreyfuss and Mira Sorvino flailing in the inept muddle of Crime Story.

Its humor and sentimentality equally labored, this by-the-numbers picture will look better, albeit still not good, as a latenight cable or streaming time-killer.

There’s enough sex and violence here to hold attention for an hour and a half, but the care or conviction to explain why it all happens — let alone why viewers should care — proves elusive.

Emerges as an oddly sour, unappealing road-trip scenario.

Jared Leto gained some 70 pounds. Seemingly following his lead, the pic itself is heavy, lethargic, and exasperating.

The Pact 2 simply stretches out rather than elaborating on its predecessor’s already thin premise, creating holes that are poorly patched over with false scares and unconvincing character behavior.

If outrageous concepts were all, this latest fillip in the oft-eccentric history of Japanese "pink" (softcore sexploitation) cinema would be genius. But the crazy ideas in Takao Nakano's script just fitfully amuse under Mitsuru Meike's draggy direction.

Michael Polish’s film gamely tries to compensate for unspectacular production values with a lot of action — but its staging is pedestrian at best. Alexander Vesha’s script never convinces, and the competent actors fail to spark, despite Sylvester Stallone’s presence as a reluctantly reunited former colleague.

A generically conceived horror thriller distinguished only by its belief that more hysteria equals a more frightening movie.

This shameless knockoff marches lock-stepped through moves that were already looking as tired as the Macarena.

This overlong tale spends most of its nearly two hours as a somewhat draggy, talky mystery before finally deciding to be a thriller, with credibility lacking throughout.

The polished, bland low-budget presentation doesn’t raise much tension, and the script springs no real surprises

It's equal parts wacky, sappy and sniggery.

It’s the rare kind of sprawling, costly hot mess that achieves instant camp gratification other fiascos must wait decades to ripen toward.

Leaves nothing to the imagination: Michael Myers is always right there in plain sight, committing mayhem sans suspenseful buildup or mystique.

Really, it’s sad that the best Hollywood can come up with for so much seasoned talent is this stale shake-and-bake combining upscale-lifestyle porn with some tepid smirky humor.

Rob Zombie truly loves horror movies. But he still hasn’t made a good one, and “31” is a perfect encapsulation of the reasons why: It’s a fanboy’s highlight reel of homages, without any of the credibility or context that made most of the films he’s inspired by so fine.

At times plays as if it were aimed at children, but more often simply seems to be aiming blind at whatever genre cliche the five credited writers fix upon in any given scene.

A little too imitative of “Superbad” ... Good Boys lacks that film’s wit and heart. It’s a lively, slick package, yet crude and obvious at every turn.

Pic's complete lack of cinematic verve, along with bland tech work, do much to drain the juice out of what should have been a fierce, fun battle of the sexes.

Offers plenty of splat with its slapstick. But this strenuous zombie yukfest is no more sophisticated than its nail-on-head title -- making it a joke no smarter than the movies it riffs on.

Despite all rough edges, you want to root for a project that’s so clearly homegrown. (It was shot in Philly’s First Corinthian Baptist Church, which filmmaker Frank’s family has attended for decades.) But The Church’s problem isn’t so much that it lacks polish or spectacle, or even that its special effects look like something a kid developed as an unenthusiastic school project.

A rote, overstuffed compilation of genre cliches with pedestrian handling of action elements and frequent notes of maudlin contrivance.

This first feature from “Walking Dead” thesp-turned-writer/director Pollyanna McIntosh (who played the feral captive in “The Woman”) proves an increasingly wobbly mix of comedy, horror and social critique, its heavy-handed indictment of stereotypical religious hypocrisy finally dragging the enterprise into caricature.

There are some unintentional laughs to be had from this hectic, silly, defiantly un-scary mashup of stock “cabin in the woods” and alien-invasion formulae. But that dubious plus won’t be enough to soften the scorn of horror fans who plunk down hard cash for this feeble, somewhat amateurish if enthusiastic retread.

A technically competent but painfully broad dramedy about a larcenous mother-and-son duo in the Midwest. This gender-flipped, latter-day "Paper Moon" lacks that film's judicious restraint, among other things, alternating hick Americana cartoonishness with maudlin appeals to the tear ducts.

Yields few surprises, compensating with de rigueur false scares, unmemorable deaths and the kind of improbably exaggerated gore.

Slick but derivative and forgettable on all levels.

A starry cast and glossier production values simply work against the black-and-white original's strengths in this stillborn thriller about a deadly game of chance.

Seance proves a disappointingly boilerplate retro slasher that’s pedestrian on every level from concept to execution.

This soggy stab at neo-noir finds Italian-born writer-director Emanuele Della Valle out of her element in a pretentious meller set on the Jersey shore.

Fans of the original will no doubt tune expecting more high-grade guilty-pleasure fun, only to get way too much of a no-longer-very-good thing instead.

Without the songs, the underdeveloped bisexual triangle would seem shapeless. Even with the music, the film is a poorly crafted grab-bag of ideas barely elaborated upon enough to sustain a 20-minute short.

Goosed by a couple gratuitous interludes of gory amateur surgery, the movie is eventful, with a high body count. But there’s never the baseline authenticity of atmosphere or character depth that might make so much action meaningful, or even particularly exciting.

Likely lack of much critical enthusiasm or positive word-of-mouth will induce quick theatrical falloff, with better news likely down the line for rental merchants.

All evidence here suggests that Marshall-Green needs a strong collaborator — or maybe just someone else’s screenplay — the next time he gets behind the camera.

This not particularly well shot/organized feature isn't very engaging on the human level, either.

It’s a slick film that’s forgettable at best, annoyingly broad and unfunny at worst.

Julio Medem’s film is a smiling-through-tears saga whose generally tasteful execution can’t ultimately salvage a whopping load of maudlin contrivance, all designed to burnish the halo around St. Penelope.

Johnson (who scripted "Grumpy Old Men") flattens out any promise so completely that the feature resembles nothing so much as a subpar "Hallmark Hall of Fame" entry.

As willfully lowbrow dumb fun goes, it’s pretty painless.

[A] rather sleazy time-killer.

Nothing gels, as the film careens from cartoonishness to violent peril to attempted satire to sentimentality and so forth, all of it hyperbolic and inorganic.

Even in a more fluid package, this mix of camp comedy and bathos would seem artificial.

A lot of interesting, funny performers aren’t very interesting or funny in director Kat Corio’s A Case of You.

Much of this makes little sense, but it's hard to care.

It doesn’t strike an assertively comic tone either, resulting in a superficially colorful but hollow pile of contrivances that are neither clever nor convincing enough to achieve more than time-passing diversion.

Will Wernick’s film not only fails to use that format in clever or suspenseful ways, it blows the basics of maintaining plausibility and viewer interest.

When not serving up sentimental contrivance, Shirin in Love is just tepidly cute, with wan comic situations and lines that provide little opportunity for a game-enough cast.

The three director-producers’ inability to come up with stronger narrative or thematic organization makes “It’s Better to Jump” play like the professionally polished side product of a vacation stay.

Only those scared of being bored to death need fear Locker 13, an omnibus of horror stories that could hardly be more tame, talky and tepid, both individually and as a whole.

Air Strike feels like a movie whose populist yet complicated narrative elements have been haphazardly pared to the nub, while the money shots — all things that go boom, as a great many do here — were left intact.

At best routinely assembled -- at worst barely competent. The slapstick is labored, and the bigger setpieces flat.

Even more empty a luxury vehicle than its predecessor, M:I 2 pushes the envelope in terms of just how much flashy packaging an audience will buy when there's absolutely nada inside.

Equal parts gory mayhem, convoluted mystery and rote romance, none of which gel together very well.

The pic provides lots of sexy, neon-hued eye-candy but not many images of deeper resonance.

Timlin bears a good-enough resemblance, and gives as much of a rounded performance as she can. But this conception provides no insight into any real HRC, past or present, and seems trite even as a fictionalized act of hostility toward whatever she represents to the filmmakers. Which is, in a word, murky.

If the film had a loopier or more fable-styled atmosphere, the concept might have seemed easier to swallow. But Fleming treats Stephen Zotnowski’s script with a glossy literalism that doesn’t do it or the actors any favors.