Gabe Toro

About Alex is about too much and too little, a sandbox for its considerable cast, but ultimately just following the reunion rulebook.

It feels like this is a short film idea stretched to feature length, and the padding doesn't work.

Being played by Gregg himself makes the transition more organic than it was for Rockwell in "Choke," but it still rings false.

What's distinct about Mr. Jones is that it lengthily utilizes three separate storytelling techniques... Given the sloppiness of Karl Mueller's directorial debut, it feels less like innovation and more like an attempt to cover up shortcomings.

When Lotz is not onscreen, Stephens is miserable company. But James does reveal a deep fascination with the robotics that suggests the threadbare story was a chance for him to explore the very real advances in artificial intelligence.

Ultimately, the picture becomes an old-fashioned Bible Belt actioner, a shift towards genre that works on its own, but is tonally a peculiar place to take the events of the film following a string of several shocking and not-so-shocking revelations.

Black Out ultimately limps to feature length, burying its intriguing leading man underneath endless mishaps and shenanigans.

Karr came up through documentary filmmaking, and he knows how to turn the switch on an event to make it feel immediate and dangerous. Unfortunately, the picture strands its characters in the middle of this event, building to a climax that seems open-ended if only because the story, and its skimpy characters, has nowhere to explore.

Van Damme’s an arresting presence in his old age... His performance is a wonder, showcasing a man who has never found his physical equal, and how amuses himself by telling stories that ultimately mock opponents.

He (Fishburne) rips into his dialogue like steak, savoring every word as if he were paid by the syllable. For a moment, we’re in a different movie, one where someone has decided to singlehandedly deconstruct a cliché. It’s a very short moment.

The picture isn’t plotted with story beats, only shock moments.

You get the feeling that if there were less fighting and more character work, not only would Bell knock it out of the park, but Raze would be a better, more interesting movie.

Caught In The Web grows slack as its premise evolves.

It’s as if “The Man Of Steel” was ninety minutes of supervillians shit-talking Superman, then casually sticking kryptonite in his face without even pretending it’s a surprise.

Forgetting the Girl ends up building towards a massive revelation, one that suddenly gives up the ghost and allows the film to define itself as one specific genre. Not romance or thriller or comedy, mind you, but that type of indie that plays peek-a-boo with its topics for long enough before springing something that allows the final twenty minutes to be occupied by bargain-basement pop psychology.

Bad Milo! is ultimately a fairly pedestrian film, but in those moments where Milo takes action, if you squint, there’s just a little bit of that old-fashioned movie magic.

Exceptionally gorgeous and exceptionally silly.

It's a film that plays equally to both sides of the political spectrum, and it feels like pandering either way.

A crude sketch of a film that could barely withstand a short-form, but instead has been stretched to agonizing feature length by directors Robert Wilson and Jason Lapeyre.

Hell Baby works as a joke factory first and foremost, a collection of tropes (some mocked) second, and a movie a distant third.

The sloppy reveals of the third act can be seen from miles away, turning this into a low-impact actioner where characters are turned into chess pieces, and the narrative’s aim is to strategically assemble the parts like a play set.

For Scenic Route, it doesn’t seem to be the journey as much as the destination: seeing two sorta-friends wailing on each other feels like the shortcut a better movie never made.

Ultimately, the cumulative effect is deadening, just another chapter in an endless battle between overtasked and underpaid good guys, and cowardly baddies; the only real humanity in the film comes from Hudgens’ Cindy, who seems like a wild card of sorts, her character’s dimensions suggesting a world outside of the lurid details of this case. Refreshingly, she’s the only one in the film who refuses to be defined by the death and tragedy surrounding her.

The crime isn’t that Kick-Ass 2 is vulgar (which it is), but that it’s for so little gain.

The little action in 'Percy Jackson' wouldn’t be out-of-place in a superhero film, which is to say it’s mostly functional, and sometimes quite diverting.

There’s nothing about 2 Guns that doesn’t feel prefab, like someone poured a packet of Insta-Movie into a glass of water.

Even given the shapelessness of the picture, Hoback does the best he can in providing an imperfect timeline to a possibly worsening issue.

Director Mark Steven Johnson can’t seem to balance a tone here, which is a pity because for the most part he stands back and lets the two stars go at each other.

Directors Kramer, Miller and Newberger prefer embellishment, allowing personal stories about Downey to fuel animated re-enactments that trivialize rather than penetrate.

Ultimately, American Mary simply reveals itself as a film with little on its mind, content to scare rubberneckers into contemplating the backstory of the more outlandish body manipulation jobs they’ve seen in public. A documentary would have sufficed.

The film progresses to the point where it feels less like father and son, and more like a young boy listening to an inspirational audiobook.

The project seems compromised by a meager budget and limited scale.

The cast alone deserves to be recognized more than the notes of “Speak It, Don’t Leak It.” And yet, here I am, humming it.

Most of Tomorrow You’re Gone moves incredibly slow for a ninety minute movie.

Down The Shore at least deserves credit for its strong performances.

Unfortunately, Would You Rather is content with being a risible borderline torture porn horror film.

There is a lived-in quality to Supporting Characters that comes from either a strong cast or days of rehearsal – unclear as to whether they had the latter, though they definitely have the former.

An oddity recommended for only the most fervent, undemanding comedy junkies.

The film similarly boxes itself in when it feels the need to mimic the third-act occurrences of "Paranormal Activity" when it's obvious that improv had the film going in an entirely less predictable direction, clearly pointing out the fallacy of A Haunted House: you can't parody something and also try to emulate it as well.

Like another Tribeca hit given a quiet release, last year's "Puncture," Any Day Now feels the need to take its compelling true story and stack the deck in favor of what we know is the outcome, presenting all obstacles as engineered by sneering, callous villains with disdain for those who would trumpet a more progressive cause.

It's an audaciously broad topic, and at less than eighty minutes, you wonder what exactly Split gives us that we haven't received from countless other political documentaries.

17 Girls is mostly fueled by grrl-power, from it's nineties-era femme-centric alt-rock, to it's marginalization of boys as sperm-deposit devices, unfair but a natural corrective to years of women onscreen as purely sexual objects.

It is a credit to Snowman's Land that it's plot twists are, for the most part, not entirely predictable, nor do they ever come across as far-fetched.

Temple and Panabaker are quite good in their lead roles, to the point where you start to hate the fact that the movie's thesis thrives on the girls being damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

What dooms Hit and Run, which, charitably, is not as generic as it's name implies, is that the film itself comments on its own sincerity.