Gary Goldstein

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.

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.

Overall pacing is flaccid and too many scenes peter out when they should punch. But perhaps the movie’s biggest infraction is that there’s hardly a chuckle in it.

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.

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.

The movie is disturbingly reckless, needlessly brutal and deeply homophobic. Later attempts to wedge in a few nice moments between James and Kareem fall flat.

The movie, filmed over several start-and-stop years (credited director Eric Etebari completed the shoot) contains lots of weak dialogue, heavy-handed faith talk, awkward voiceovers, thin characterizations and illogical plot turns. Any questions?

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.

Schmaltzy, overlong and a bit tedious.

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.

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.

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

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.

Save Mailer’s pushy “New Yawk” accent, the leads do what they can with their unconvincing characters and the rusty plot, but it’s a hopeless effort. Nice opening title sequence though.

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.

With its overly arch dialogue and characterizations, airless gentility and forced period trappings it seems that the harder writer-producer Karen R. Hurd and director Barry Andersson strive for authenticity — on what’s clearly a deeply limited budget — the less convincing the film feels. The often stodgy acting doesn’t help.

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

Actions and emotions turn on a dime, chuckles are few and it’s clear this predictable film, directed by John Asher, doesn’t quite realize how retrograde and often offensive it is — which makes it all even worse.

[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.

This astonishingly bad film, adapted by writer-director Raghav Peri from a novel by Michaelangelo Rodriguez, mishmashes such big topics as genocide, homosexuality, teen pregnancy, child abuse, alcoholism and mental illness into a painful, inadvertently laughable stew.

It’s a valiant but awkward effort.

It’s a potentially warm and delicate story that required a scalpel, but saw the blunt end of a sledgehammer instead.

Write When You Get Work doesn’t work. Not as a romance, not as a Robin Hood-tinged caper flick, not as a social commentary on racial inequity or classism, and not as a male-buddy picture — all elements director Stacy Cochran attempts to wedge into her often muddled, under-focused script.

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.

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.

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

The aggressively awful London Fields is, once again, proof that not every successful novel should become a movie.

The movie, based on the novel “Seventy Times Seven,” is so laden with hoary gay stereotypes and references (enough with “The Golden Girls”!), anachronistic name-checks (Charo? Jeff Stryker?), groan-worthy silliness, overplayed emotion and amateurish crafting it never had a prayer.

Angels on Tap is an ill-conceived comic-fantasy filled with strained and creaky humor, cardboard characters, an inane framing device and, as directed by Trudy Sargent, zero cinematic style.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The cast, including Jason Biggs as a dorky social studies teacher, does what it can with the toothless, painfully unfunny, thoroughly unconvincing material. How some movies get made is truly a mystery.

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.

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

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.

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.

Writer-director Dito Montiel, adapting his novel, takes an ill-conceived premise and drives it into the ground with a painful, tone-deaf approach to both social satire and romantic comedy.

Ameer may be aiming for a profound look at self-hatred, denial or the perils of the gay closet, but his story and characters are too superficially etched to make an impact.

Writer-director Douglas Mueller's tedious drama Repatriation seems unsure of what it wants to say or how to say it — much less how to effectively shoot or edit it.

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.

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.

There’s barely a convincing — or amusing — situation or interaction, including the film’s climactic nuptials, which also turn fatally contrived.

Alternately crass and treacly, overbearing and under-finessed, the film, penned by headhunter-turned-screenwriter Bill Dubuque and directed by Mark Williams, is on life support from get-go.

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

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.

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.

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 time-travel stoner comedy Ripped blows a potentially funny idea on slapdash filmmaking and lazy storytelling. If much of this overly broad eye-roller wasn’t made up on the fly, it sure looks that way.

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

The largely Russian- and Kazakh-speaking cast is so incongruously dubbed into English it evokes an old Japanese monster movie.

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 main achievement of The Institute is that its cast kept straight faces long enough to shoot this risible gothic chiller. A

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.

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.

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

As it stands, this abysmal romantic comedy serves as an abject lesson against vanity filmmaking.

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

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.

That the World War II-era drama Ithaca was directed by actress Meg Ryan may prove the most notable yet least successful thing about this oppressively sentimental journey.

Noah’s awkward, unconvincing script aside, Lewis is the true weak link here as he struggles to sell Max’s wobbly lines and emotions. This is a thoroughly painful experience.

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

This spectacularly dumb and unfunny film will likely bore even the staunchest fans of the “Hangover” movies, of which “Search” is a kind of distant, fatally impoverished cousin.

That the film looks good matters little when director Peter A. Dowling’s script, based on the novel by Sharon Bolton, is filled with so many thinly drawn characters, blunt warning signs and telegraphed plot points.

This strained, often crass comedy traffics in broadness and inconsistency far more than anything smart, clever or dimensional. That might be more forgivable if the film was at least funny. It's not.

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

There's such mechanical artifice at work that it's hard to do more than squirm and groan at the couple's ultimate travails.

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

The supernatural thriller The Forest begins with an intriguing premise and fun, ghost story-type potential but quickly devolves into convoluted hokum that produces more laughs than scares.

Director Steven C. Miller, working off a script by Max Adams and Umair Aleem, keeps things moving at a breakneck pace in an attempt, it seems, to help mask the film's convoluted plotting, one-note performances and bad dialogue.

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.

The Diabolical is a tepid horror-thriller that never manages to sell, much less clarify, its potentially ambitious concept.

Momentum is a spectacularly generic action-thriller that, despite its sleekly shot and edited mayhem, lands with a giant thud.

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

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

Although this well-meaning film may appeal to its intended audience on a spiritual level, the result is a sluggish, clinical, largely dreary portrait that tends to mistake trauma for drama.

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

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

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.

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

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

Tension is low, pacing uneven and the acting — LaSardo's eerie work aside — proves subpar.

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.

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.

It all feels forced and fabricated.

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.

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

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.

With the excruciating gal-pal comedy Apartment Troubles, writer-director-stars Jess Weixler and Jennifer Prediger have created such blurry, unappealing characters that their film is hamstrung from the get-go.

Had Daskaloff found an appropriately campy groove, he might have eked out some sexy-silly fun. As it stands, the film proves a cheesy, half-baked and decidedly retrograde effort.

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

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.

Treehouse is a lackluster backwoods thriller that takes far too long to get — well, not very far. There's more tension in a round of Final Jeopardy.

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

Aside from too many characters and story strands, the dialogue is hackneyed and the acting subpar, starting with the movie's lead.