Inkoo Kang

Meet the Mormons isn't substantial enough to screen on the first day of LDS 101; the church's most basic tenets — and controversial aspects — are elided completely.

For all its cheap talk about the importance of innovation, Agent 47 just feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

This character study in rom-com's clothes is ambitiously formula-averse, but too shaggy and unfocused to be satisfying.

The invitingly loud Melendez posits herself as both a victimized failure and a triumphantly persevering pioneer, and though one can certainly be both, the film doesn't say anything new or meaningful about the industry she's been dying to join for the last two decades.

Despite its outstanding performances, The Quiet Ones remains the very thing its protagonist scoffs at: a pointless story about “evil begetting evil for the sake of evil.” Evil can be defeated, but emptiness always prevails.

The gratingly underdeveloped plot has all the dramatic effect of a toddler with her hands behind her back chirping, "Guess what I've got?" for more than an hour.

"When the Game” is like a bad seven-layer salad: it's tempting in theory, but it's really just a jumble of random ingredients that wind up supremely unappetizing in the aggregate.

Sex Tape is a hustler of a film — it works very hard for its laughs — but it's so haphazardly directed (by Jake Kasdan) and written (by Kate Angelo and Segel and Nicholas Stoller) that it can easily be divided into three distinct sections.

A misguided attempt to spin a nightmare scenario into a cutesy rom-com premise, this British production takes place in a harrowingly claustrophobic world where personal growth ends at age 18, and you meet everyone you’ll ever become friends with in your whole life during high school.

Franco is a fine reader, but ultimately the film adds little more than his handsome face and trite confessional origins to Williams's experiential vernacular. When the words are so direct, powerful, and inviting, who needs Franco's books on video?

Without that emotional groundwork to establish the contours of Cathy and Jamie’s relationship, “The Last Five Years” is largely a numbing experience.

It's good for a couple of fart jokes and otherwise utterly forgettable.

Neither good nor bad, nor campy nor scary enough to be in any way memorable, The Boy Next Door is a lot like our own neighbors, just there. You could make the effort to sneak a peek, but it probably wouldn’t be worth your while.

Bring a notebook and some tissues — the mission to protect the queen becomes a tangle of shifting alliances between local and British forces that might require visual aids, while the snail-slow realization of gloomy prophecies may well tear you up in boredom.

American exceptionalism certainly deserves to be deconstructed, but that can most assuredly be accomplished with a lot more nuance than it is here. As an exercise in liberal self-flagellation, hey, whatever floats your boat. But as a political call-to-arms, I believe in America: We can do better.

Director Trevor White frames the former teen gang member's life as an uplifting coming-of-age prison drama that feels entirely disconnected from the realities of incarceration.

Too earnest to be satisfyingly arch and too scattered to succeed as parody, Thorpe's goofy musical comedy only manages a sporadic charm through the occasional bon mot or a madcap flight of fancy.

By the film's end, Black or White raises only one question: Is its racial-baiting disingenuous or oblivious?

A timid and slapdash musical.

If nothing else, Dirty Grandpa is consistent: it maintains a tone of aggressive charmlessness from start to finish.

Ambo's argument is frayed by her arbitrary recommendations of meditation as a panacea for unrelated psychological difficulties. Even more baffling, the director neglects to define this culturally and geographically variable practice with any exactitude.

It's time to return this old painting to the attic.

Aspires to be a consciousness-raising documentary but is only as deep as a tube of lipstick.

The careless diminishment of every other character that isn't Chávez — including wife Helen, played by an utterly wasted America Ferrera in a grape-sized role — might be worth overlooking if the film provided any insights into its subject.

The social construction of illness is certainly a worthy topic, but Carter situates his characters far from any semblance of a plot and even further from his heart.

A Case of You is a disappointing romantic comedy that aspires to social relevance until the third act, when it settles for pat Freudian revelations.

This film's eagerness to please functions as a slow poison, draining The Millers of its vitality by rendering its characterization uneven, its potential undeveloped, and its plot predictable and stupid.

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.