Eric Hynes

This drama is as listless and self-regarding as its protagonist, flitting among underdeveloped characters and subplots and indulging in rote emo shots by the pool, yet never figuring out how to dive into the deep end.

A movie sorely bereft of ideas, laughs and justification for the comic duo’s undifferentiating self-regard.

Cloyingly crude and dispiritingly typical ensemble Hollywood farce.

Neither Janney nor Keener can rise above the rote hatefulness of their madwoman caricatures, whereas Laurie and Meester fare better at playing liberated dreamers who go against the dreaded grain. But shooting fish in a barrel tends to unintentionally conjure sympathy for the fish - or, in this case, for perfectly unhappy suburbanites.

No one expects a Samuel L. Jackson thriller to be Shakespeare, but David Weaver's wanna-be '70s-grindhouse cheapie doesn't even achieve serviceability.

Outside of a few spirited celebrity cameos - Favreau seems convincingly affronted by Dax's ineptitude, Bradley Cooper gamely tussles with him on a suburban lawn - this meta-vanity project isn't funny so much as counterproductive. It's no less a work of wankery for winking at us.

Only old pros James Brolin and Jane Seymour, as Eva's colorfully squabbling parents, occasionally rouse the film beyond its fate as fodder for a Snuggie-wrapped slumber.

Except for two brief summits between Alba and Messina's pillowy lips, however, An Invisible Sign fails even to pander effectively.

Schwimmer is so committed to telling grim truths about modern living (whither goes humanity in the age of Twitter and sexting?!?) that he abandons the film's tantalizing slide into B-movie exploitation.

Radnor tries to pin a tail of significance on this donkey, but he seems content with light comedy and mere proficiency. To which we can only reply: Nothankyounomoremilquetoast-please.

Inane dialogue, extraneous scenes and wooden performances make for an experience that's less edge-of-your-seat than one very long, amateur hour and a half.

A mess of arrhythmic editing, mopey first-person inserts and distractingly choppy narration, all making a heady topic that much more difficult to follow. To focus or not to focus should have been the first question.

It's less a film than one long advertisement for itself-and for the fact that mindless entertainment truly knows no borders.