Ernest Hardy

So what do the tea leaves say? They're hard to read through the over-the-top grossness and weak acting, but it's probably that gentrification is good, poor people and assorted lowlifes don't deserve prime real estate, and Sean Penn's baby girl needs a better agent.

The thread holding it all together is endless, repetitive, interminable fight scenes whose limp choreography is spiced up with Matrix-style slow motion -- in 2015. For all that -- fists flying, bullets dodged, gratuitous female nudity -- the film is oddly inert.

It is impossible to overstate how grating Nia Vardalos is as the title character in Helicopter Mom. Throughout her career, her default setting has been something like "Jack Russell terrier after an amphetamine bender." No surprise that she's exhausting here.

Death of a Tree, written and directed by John Martoccia, is filled with so much unintentional humor that it quickly slips into the realm of parody — and stays there.

Patterson seems more concerned with getting the surfaces right (costume design, production design) than tapping any of the adrenaline that should be pumping through bank robberies, love scenes, and confrontations with barking loan sharks — adrenaline we should feel even if the protagonist is meant to be cucumber-cool.

Walter's self-conscious efforts at quirkiness...and cartoonishly drawn characters...try too hard while falling far short of their marks.

Politically simplistic (if not naive) and aesthetically sterile.

The acting is community-theater-level, and the sets look phony, but there's unintentional humor in counting the clichés as they mount.

Playing like the redundant child of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room, Americons has its heart and justifiably outraged politics in the right place; it just lacks artistry or real insight.

Too bad that Josh's story, ostensibly the core of the film, is overshadowed by Calloused Hands' retro racial views.

The story is unnecessarily muddled and confusing in the telling, and the athletically gifted Yen is overshadowed by largely mediocre CGI effects. Revisit the original instead.

There's a lot of potential in the idea of exploring asexuality in the modern world, but The Olivia Experiment loses it in a sea of clichéd characters.

The World Famous Kid Detective is a poorly written, acted, and directed kid flick with one cool idea: It's chock full of snippets from old detective noir flicks.

Superficiality and cliché mark the film's notions of family, dysfunction, and even survival.

Welcome to the Jungle, directed by Rob Meltzer from a script by Jeff Kauffmann, is satanically bad.

Guinzburg's retool is full of unintentional humor, high-school-theater level acting, and shoddy writing.

Wrong Cops is a tedious exercise in self-consciously hip lowbrow comedy.

Its soap-opera plot is old hat, and the largely amateurish acting of the ensemble makes it hard to connect with many of the characters.

The film ultimately plays less as female empowerment than it does a narrative in which the comeuppance doled out is likely to be received as a digestif for those in the audience who got off on the gendered violence in the first place.

Still, the vibrantly shot Lucky Star could have been a mildly entertaining bit of escapism, were it not for the fact that Sophie isn't naïve so much as infantile, a point driven home by her wardrobe.

From concept to execution to tone, writer-director Liz W. Garcia's The Lifeguard is a lifeless misfire.

This is a film at odds with itself, wanting to be a 99 percenter rallying cry but wallowing in and fetishizing 1 percenter accoutrement at every turn.

Trite dialogue, stock characters, and bad-to-middling special effects make Stranded more tedious than scary or nerve-wracking.

The film isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and its characters are painfully generic.

It's a movie by people who lifted almost all their ideas from much better movies, and lean too heavily on "based on a true story" to pave over their film's weaknesses.

Ross's on-the-nose script offers little subtext or nuance, and the film—for all the inherent drama of the situation—has very little real-life grit.

Full of familiar tropes, exhausted rhythms, self-conscious references to genre forebears...Language of a Broken Heart, directed by Rocky Powell from a screenplay by Juddy Talt, is pure product.

The film, directed by Jesse Baget, aims to be a satiric look at racism but at every turn flaunts the laws of logic and believability.