Gary Goldstein

Playing It Cool is a strained romantic comedy that seems to exist only to show how many talented, successful actors — first and foremost "Captain America" star Chris Evans — can be featured in one unworthy movie.

Writer-director David Hayter revisits much-trod territory with wan results in Wolves, a werewolf tale that quickly loses its initial bite.

Addicted doesn’t know whether it wants to be a modern-day bodice-ripper, a morality-tinged cautionary tale or a serious snapshot of sexual compulsion. Whatever the case, it fails on all fronts.

A depressingly slick and empty house of cards that collapses under the weight of its muddled intentions.

To his credit, director Andy Fickman (“The Game Plan,” “Parental Guidance”) keeps the inanity moving apace and there are a few chuckles to be had courtesy of the supporting cast. But, as is so often the case with big, star-driven studio laffers, “Cop 2” needed several more spins in the comedy punch-up machine before cameras rolled.

Although it aspires to be a kind of latter-day “Love Story,” the rote, overly earnest drama New Life exists largely on the surface.

This often risible head-scratcher never cracks the surface of its muddled ambitions, largely wasting its iconic settings on a series of motley interactions, Tinseltown trivia and self-conscious philosophizing.

It's all rather low-rent and generic, not particularly distinguished by its overused Bayou setting.

When the film, directed by Jason Winn, should accelerate, it turns sluggish, attempting to dot a few too many i's — thematically, emotionally, racing-wise — in telling its only marginally compelling story, with the lackluster Tom-Jeremy dynamic driving too much of the action.

With its deeply creaky gender and racial themes, this strained film evokes something unearthed from several decades ago, if not before.

It opts for too many broad, clunky or far-fetched beats to move the story and its requisite emotional needs forward, rather than weave a more organic, effectively lived-in and, yes, genuinely funny tale.

Tunick’s clearly budget-conscious choice to shoot largely inside the couple’s nicely appointed home compounds this routinely shot and edited film’s stagy, static quality.

The good news about After Words is that it offers Marcia Gay Harden a rare film lead. The bad news: Harden's role in this groan-worthy dramedy is so dreary and ill-conceived that even her formidable talents can't bring it to life.

This indulgent, overlong film takes a solid hour for its bigger themes of love, loss and guilt to settle in. By then, however, the movie has tried our patience to the point that many may not care.

Moms' Night Out is a hectic mess that does just the opposite of what it clearly set out to do: It makes motherhood seem like one of the most ill-conceived ideas since New Coke.

Its timely messages become muted amid a kaleidoscope of settings, characters, brusque action scenes, blunt speechifying and wan romance.

For all the attempted intrigue and mayhem, the film is dullsville, mired by a poky script, unremarkable action and, the hard-working Garcia aside, uninspired performances.

Unfortunately, much of the acting (save by Bagatsing and Rachel Alejandro as Quezon’s vigilant wife, Aurora) is so spotty that it undermines the story’s potential tension and emotional heft.

Casanova, Last Love, which looks at the famed 18th century philanderer’s infatuation with the supposed “one true love of his life,” is a dull and uninvolving portrait that, despite its sumptuous settings and costumes, never takes flight.

[A] tedious cinematic exercise.

Beyond the Reach is a grueling, unsatisfying thriller that fails the logic test in spectacular ways.

The film's first half is so annoyingly glib and faux-amusing, it sets a misguided tone that distances instead of engages.

This tonal mishmash is a misfire of literally gross proportions.

Despite all the mayhem, Mortimer never whips up any real sense of dread or tension.

Despite a few strong emotional beats, the crime drama American Heist proves as undistinguished as its generic title.

Sadly, there's not an ounce of tension or a single decent scare to be found amid any of this convoluted mayhem.

There's a late-breaking twist that might seem impressive if it didn't make all the previous mayhem feel so intensely pointless.

This flatly shot picture remains cramped by its homespun roots.

A sluggish film that incessantly tries but never quite hits its big-as-a-barn emotional targets.

Call it a dark farce, human comedy or wartime satire. But however you slice it, the ill-conceived morality tale A Farewell to Fools is a bust.

Far too broad and simplistic to enjoy as the offbeat soufflé it so desperately aims to be.

Far too much of this plodding picture is spent on odd couple Chip and Alex's road trip transporting Mine That Bird to Kentucky. Forced atmospherics, clichéd action bits and some tone-deaf slapstick weigh things down as well.

A frantic, badly constructed, slightly offensive muddle that doesn't so much end as run out of things on a checklist.

The story might have had some thematic heft if we knew or cared anything about the characters. But all we can glean about the disastrous Kostis is that he’s had hard times, while Anna is a total cipher.

The Curse of Sleeping Beauty is a hard-working but dreary horror-thriller inspired by the classic Grimm’s fairy tale.

The historical saga can feel cursory, at times unconvincingly rendered given how many events and far-flung locales this overly ambitious film strains to cover on a seemingly limited budget.

The crime thriller Bent, not to be confused with the acclaimed Holocaust-era drama of the same name, is a routine programmer filled with surface characters, generic tough-talk and forgettable plotting.

For all its gore and violence, stabs at tension and nightmarish intrigue, the film proves a slow-going, largely unsatisfying ride.

The uninvitingly titled Chlorine is a flat, undercooked suburban comedy. Or is it a drama? Or maybe a kind of satire? Regardless, it's short on style, substance or any clear raison d'être.

Not to be glib, but sitting through the art-centric chamber piece The Time Being is truly like watching paint dry.

The movie's grandiose emotional quotient never feels any more real than its ham-fisted dialogue, dubious accents, strained "Kumbaya" moments or eclectic hairdos.

Battle Scars is an uneasy mix of military drama and low-rent crime thriller whose seamy elements, under-examined characters and forced plot turns undercut its attempted messaging about war-induced post-traumatic stress disorder.

Although writer-director Scott Walker seems committed to not overly exploiting his lurid subject matter, the movie is just too dreary, disjointed and generically creepy to be persuasive.

The underwhelming, would-be political satire Knife Fight plays more like a failed network TV pilot than the savvy feature it clearly set out to be. Think: Aaron Sorkin-lite, uh, really, really lite.

Unfortunately, the climactic table-turning here feels more mechanical than cathartic and does little to elevate the film’s undistinguished narrative.

Despite a skillful use of color, lighting, framing and music, the movie’s artificiality might have played in a short film but becomes tedious and pretentious when stretched to 90 minutes.

The endless sharing and chaotic conflicts that ensue among these largely uninviting men prove more tedious than convincing, with flashback bits that are more redundant than enlightening.

Despite scads of stiff exposition and constant proclamations of Salvador’s genius, the brash, eccentric, weirdly mustachioed artist remains an elusive and puzzling force. That he’s played, unconvincingly from teen years to death, by an often annoying Joan Carreras doesn’t help.

First-time feature writer-director Morgan Dameron attempts to craft a love letter to her native heartland and to sisterhood, but falls short on both fronts, rarely digging beneath the surface of small-town bonhomie and what makes Millie and Emma tick.

Only during the movie's sweet epilogue do we get a sense of what Friended could have been had the filmmakers taken a smarter, gentler, more human approach.

For all the emotional onion-peeling here, little is revealed that's surprising, unique or particularly deep.

Self-conscious, tonally uncertain and thematically vague, The Big Ask is a premise in search of a movie, one that co-directors Thomas Beatty and Rebecca Fishman never quite find.

Convoluted doesn’t begin to describe the sci-fi drama Bliss, which starts off intriguingly enough but loses its way once it attempts to explain itself, before surprising us entirely in the end — and not in a particularly satisfying way. How this loopy film got made may prove its biggest mystery.

Contrived and predictable yet fairly tense.

The film’s narrative engine remains too choppy and clunky, and the characters too cursorily developed, to hold attention.

Shedding light on world atrocities is vital, but spelling them out in neon is deadly.

Director Jaki Bradley can’t quite pull the story’s disparate strands together to form an effective narrative, much less a lucid finale. There’s a potentially nifty gay noir lurking about, but this “Ferry” misses the dock.

[Martini's] filmmaking instincts, undercut by the script’s meandering, episodic structure, prove too self-indulgent and heavy-handed to tell the kind of emotionally involving tale about post-traumatic stress disorder among returning soldiers that he clearly had in mind.

First-time writer-director John Alan Simon simply doesn't have a strong enough grip on the movie's narrative, pacing or performances to surmount the pitfalls of this ambitious, budget-conscious effort.

It’s only October but your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived. It’s called She Came to Me, a mishmash of flimsy, fanciful and far-fetched notions dressed up as a screwball New York rom-com. Given its pedigreed cast and filmmaker, the results are doubly sad.

Depressing and airless.

For much of the movie's running time, I wished I were watching Mel Brooks' classic take on Shelley's yarn, "Young Frankenstein." At least that one was intentionally funny.

Schmaltzy, overlong and a bit tedious.

With its muddy timeline, kaleidoscope of fantasies, flashbacks and hallucinations, broad characterizations and sitcom slickness, the film never settles down long enough to congeal, much less feel remotely connected to reality.

Any potential enjoyment here is fatally undermined by the film's barely developed characters, self-conscious dialogue ("I will wax his tugboat!") and repetitive imagery.

Perhaps most egregiously, director Mike Sears, working from Martin Dugard's awkwardly structured, subtext-free script, builds little excitement for the game of lacrosse, which comes off here as all sticks and legs and bad camera angles.

Sure, this frequently improvised spoof isn't intended to be taken seriously, but it's also not funny or incisive enough to counter the unappealing persona the actor-comedian has concocted here: an impulsive, clueless narcissist on a journey to reinvent himself as an action star.

This poky, clichéd, slackly told picture, directed by Emilio Aragón, would've felt dated a few decades ago; now it feels like a downright relic.

A sluggishly paced collection of go-nowhere sight gags, flat-footed set pieces and incoherent business chatter that offers few laughs and little real payoff.

Streak and Cooper are meagerly drawn characters, first-draft dialogue abounds, and the story proves more tedious and head-scratching as it goes.

Writer-director P.J. Hogan may have based Mental on an actual incident from his childhood, but the crazy quilt of a movie that resulted feels anything but real.

The neo-noir crime comedy Kill Me Three Times works overtime to seem unique and clever. The result, however, is a derivative, gimmicky, at times dizzying puzzle that fails to engage.

It’s a valiant but awkward effort.

There's plenty of action, some ping-ponging romance and even a bit of tension as Silver Circle spins its muddled tale. But it's all so overwhelmed by the rudimentary, computer-generated animation (characters don't so much walk as lurch and glide) that, well, the medium becomes the message.

A muddle of tired themes, bad behaviors and gruesome set pieces.

Writer-director Norman Gregory McGuire needed to better flesh out his inconsistent main characters, clarify their goals and motivations, and deepen their journey with more vivid set pieces and fewer clichés.

Good People goes from being simply pedestrian to outright preposterous without batting an eye.

It's a no-go from the get-go with its labored stabs at humor and satire, doltish characters, utter disconnection from reality (even for a spoof) and scenes stretched to the breaking point.

The story of The David Dance might have seemed more timely and vital when first presented as a play in 2003. Today, however, the delayed film version (it was shot in 2009) feels remarkably dated. It’s also logy, stagey and overlong.

Good intentions go just so far when a movie is hobbled by such risible, place holder dialogue, contrived plot points, wildly uneven performances and awkward camera work.

The movie mostly plays so strained and corn pone that it undermines its sincere emotional core and good intentions.

The grand Mirren is, truth be told, miscast and Pesci is misdirected as Grace and Charlie Bontempo.

Your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived on schedule and it's called The Nutcracker in 3D.

A grating and witless would-be spoof of religion, male-bonding and, it seems, horror movies.

Amid the choppy action and whirl of sketchy characters lie muddled messages about revenge, greed, war, hubris and the endless ripple effects of 9/11.

Dufils vividly captures the locale’s seedy, swampy vibe, with its dive bars, shabby homes, ubiquitous convenience stores and underground fight spots. If only there were a more compelling, engaging narrative to match.

This choppy film, which is saddled with a subplot about a dogged insurance agent (Richard Portnow), becomes more mechanical than emotional, leapfrogging time, logic and process as it scrambles to its too clever-by-half conclusion.

Spotty acting and casting, many thinly drawn or over-the-top characters, weak stabs at humor, and some awkward editing and dialogue further undermine this well-intentioned effort.

It all feels forced and fabricated.

When it comes to finesse or originality the first-time filmmaker falls desperately short, relying on hoary clichés; dreadful, chicken-fried dialogue; and an often cracked moral compass.

The worthy, potentially exciting subject matter would certainly have lent itself to either a straight-on documentary or a seriously budgeted narrative feature. Instead, producer-director-editor Tristan Loraine (he also cowrote the dreadful script with Viv Young) clumsily tries to meld the two approaches - minus the big bucks.

It’s Jasmine’s inept and unprofessional behavior during the film’s climactic trial that really sends the film into absurdist territory. It’s outdone only by a final sequence of events with a horror-show twist that might best be described as bonkers.

For all its loaded potential to evolve into a gripping look at life in a correctional facility plus an atypical spin on gay longing, the film squanders much of its running time with thin, repetitive scenes of young men behaving badly.

The performers fully commit to their unlikable parts but, at least as written, even the best actors couldn't create compelling, relatable characters out of this messed-up bunch.

Just when you think the film has gratefully escaped its most inevitable turn, it goes there, adding one final kernel of corn to this ho-hum horse tale.

Spotty acting, flashes of crass dialogue, some questionable camera work and awkward storytelling — including a surfeit of phone conversations — further sink this well-meaning effort.

Brick Mansions, Paul Walker's penultimate film (prior to "Fast & Furious 7"), is a dumb and ugly action picture that works strictly as a reminder of the late actor's head-turning good looks and modest charisma.

Too many roles remain underdeveloped — if developed at all. A lack of cohesion or camaraderie among the inmates compounds the film's impersonal vibe.