Gary Goldstein

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

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.

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.

Alexander Sokurov's Faust is a grueling side show of a film, a morbid, mightily uninvolving piece.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 mostly plays like a slapdash mockumentary crossed with a bad reality TV show.

This tonal mishmash is a misfire of literally gross proportions.

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.

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.

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

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.

Schmaltzy, overlong and a bit tedious.

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.

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.

Ironically, the only thing that makes much sense about the DIY effort Oconomowoc is its baffling title.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Depressing and airless.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Director John Suits seems more concerned with plying eyeballs with creepy atmospherics, showy visual effects and sexy interludes than with propulsive pacing or roiling tension.

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.

Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club is a sitcom masquerading as a feature film... Too bad he didn't just spare us the awfulness of this flat and phony slices-of-life dramedy and go right to series, where half-hour bites might have helped mitigate the pain.

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

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[An] earnest but terribly ham-fisted drama.

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

[A] tedious cinematic exercise.

It all feels forced and fabricated.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A laughably cheesy, empty-headed follow-up that makes the mediocre prior film shine in comparison.

A movie of such snowballing stupidity that it's a wonder the actors could keep straight faces while shooting it (outtakes, please!).

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

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.

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.

It's not the worst idea for a revenge fantasy, but Jim's payback is so lacking in logic and reality, not to mention tension, that it proves more laughable than cathartic.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Avoid this one like, well, a yeast infection.

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.

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.

K-11 has the makings of a cult movie campfest but little of the authentic wit, edge or outré vision it would take to get there. What's left is a dreary jailhouse drama that somehow managed to imprison a few notable actors within its lurid walls.

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.

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.

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.

Cavemen writer-director Herschel Faber has sketched such a thin and unfunny look at L.A. singles, it should mark the death knell for movies about child-men on the make.

Contrived and predictable yet fairly tense.

Behaving Badly is a dreadful sex comedy that gets worse and worse as its dopey story snowballs into relative incoherence.