Geoff Berkshire

Brightest Star, has all the trappings of a contemporary romantic comedy, but also the good sense to strive for a deeper examination of a young man’s search for his place in the universe.

“Lazarus” shamelessly steals from superior genre efforts and lacks any distinguishing traits beyond a wildly overqualified cast.

Exploiting Lawrence's newfound fame is the only hope this ill-conceived, poorly executed venture has of connecting with audiences before poisonous word of mouth sends potential buyers in search of a more attractive address.

The Gallows isn’t without a certain amount of atmosphere, it simply feels borrowed wholesale. That would matter less with a better script, but the four main characters are paper-thin even by genre norms.

Neither warm and fuzzy in the best holiday movie traditions, nor edgy and irreverent a la “Bad Santa” (coincidentally also co-starring Graham, to better effect), it’s something of a mystery what audience A Merry Friggin’ Christmas intends to serve.

Even a brisk running time, barely topping 80 minutes, is too long to ask audiences to stay in the company of these characters and their terrible self-inflicted predicaments.

Sanchez’s thoroughly conventional approach here does little to elevate a dismally generic script from frequent collaborator Jamie Nash.

With plot elements cobbled together from recent animated hits, the blandly executed pic might as well be titled “Happy Minions of Madagascar’s Ice Age.”

An aggressively obnoxious tone undermines a decent concept and appealing cast.

An utterly unevolved romantic comedy, “Cavemen” tries to split the difference between raunchy and sweet and fails miserably on all counts.

At least the narrative sloppiness and ineptly delivered themes in the script by Brian Bird and Lisa G. Shillingburg (freely adapted from the novel by Jim Stovall) feel of a piece with the entire production.

This confused and confusing pic delivers no thrills, chills or anything remotely surprising.

Sidney Hall strings its audience along on a tedious journey that runs out of steam long before reaching an embarrassingly overwrought finale.

Writer-director Eli Morgan Gesner (a clothing designer and skateboarder who previously helmed the skateboarding and hip-hop doc “Concrete Jungle”) could have milked the premise for gleeful counterculture exploitation (like a 21st-century “Basket Case”) or campy John Waters-style gross-out comedy, but settles for mean-spirited banality.

Lack of originality feels like a fairly meaningless complaint when Roth’s film was derivative enough to begin with.

Jack’s predicament is both revolting and claustrophobic, but he never emerges as any kind of hero or villain, just a passive victim, which makes the pic’s most off-putting quality its endless tedium.

The lovingly crafted documentary Why We Ride ultimately chokes on the fumes of bombastic self-seriousness.

Essentially a homemovie cobbled together with bland talking-head interviews, director Yuliya Tikhonova’s film offers little to interest jazz aficionados or those simply curious about the band’s lineup of veteran sidemen from the era of classic jazz.

An alternately enchanting and exhausting anime adventure in which cutesy characters and peppy vocal turns belie a darker, angst-ridden narrative.

Its compassion and careful sidestepping of exploitation tropes can’t make up for a fundamental lack of depth and urgency in the storytelling.

Eschews hysteria, preachiness and self-importance in favor of calm, persuasive scientific arguments.

Eric Chaney’s debut feature, Indigo Children, doesn’t so much copy Terrence Malick as swallow the filmmaker’s stylistic tics whole and vomit them out onscreen in an ungainly if mercifully brief mess.

The second feature from writer-director Tenney Fairchild (“The Good Humor Man”) actually attempts to be an emotionally resonant relationship tale, but lives down to its title by delivering nothing but inane comedy and insufferable drama.

Veteran filmmaker Greg MacGillivray (“Everest”) seizes the opportunity with striking imagery, which goes a long way toward compensating for his frequently over-earnest messaging.