Jeannette Catsoulis

A deadpan take on suburban hell — I hesitate to call it a comedy, black or otherwise — the movie takes competitiveness to such excruciatingly surreal lengths that every would-be joke feels agonizingly strained.

Not even John Newman’s distressingly awful dialogue can slow Cage’s roll to a histrionic finish.

The film version is now being granted a limited release. Exactly how limited will depend on your tolerance for tasteless behavior, extravagant overacting and a decibel level to rival the unveiling of Oprah’s Favorite Things.

This drippy drama presents precisely the kind of prettified portrait of death that Teague’s candid writing sought to rebut.

Seriously depleting the skanky-villain bin at central casting, the moronic thriller Gone stars Amanda Seyfried as Jill.

Unspooling with an angry intensity and without a single sympathetic character, “Unfreedom” (originally titled “Blemished Light”) is a hard-line thriller derailed by messy editing and narrative silliness.

Caught between a hero with no personality and a villain with way too much (Fletcher’s slobbering performance has to be seen to be believed), Raymond comforts himself with shots of people gazing pensively at clues and pulling grisly things from drains.

Handsome cinematography and a highly competent supporting cast — including Michelle Monaghan, Nathan Lane and Alex Karpovsky — can’t save The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, a tortured mystery dripping with pretentiousness.

The movie's amoral momentum is fatally slowed by an acronym-heavy script and flimsy characterizations that offer fine actors -- including Rip Torn as Tom's contemptuous father and Naomie Harris as his missed opportunity -- little to play.

Hancock is wasted here, as are the meaty dramatic threads that Elizabeth O’Halloran’s formulaic screenplay never bothers to pull.

Even when the ghost of a point materializes — that recording ephemera can be a self-soothing behavior — VHYes is too unsophisticated to develop it.

Newlyweds are slaughtered, a child kidnapped and a suicide bombing foiled, all of it advanced by chunks of clumsy dialogue and embarrassingly labored acting.

The movie speeds up and slows down as though controlled by a director in the grip of competing medications. For those who make it to the final beatdown, however, the only pill worth taking is the one that makes you forget.

Maddeningly muddled and frustratingly counterintuitive... the story shuttles between Hong Kong and mainland China without a noticeable gain in logic or reduction in decibels.

James Cameron upstages the ocean in Deepsea Challenge 3D, a shallow vanity project that invites us to join him in marveling at his own daring.

As depressing as the résumés of its 9-to-5 characters, The Strip sweats to wring laughs from overworked themes and underwhelming performances.

There’s scarcely a behavior or line reading in this exasperating relationship drama that doesn’t feel like affectation. Fraudulence might be a plot point, but only the writer and director, Emma Forrest, knows why it has to permeate the entire movie.

A story that kicked off two years ago at a reasonable gallop has now slowed to barely a limp.

Aiming for a moody portrait of psychological distress, Mark Jackson directs with a sluggish pace, an abstract style and a dismal aesthetic that rebuff involvement.

As for LaBute, a once incisive chronicler of male cruelty and ineptitude, his continued dabblings in genre are lamentable. Perhaps the kindest thing to do is pretend this dud never happened.

Without Mr. Roberts and his grinning insouciance, this well-meaning mess would have no heartbeat at all.

A hodgepodge of pseudoscientific twaddle and variously shifty murder suspects, Rememory satisfies neither as science fiction nor as psychological drama.

Top-heavy with big names (Tina Fey, Jon Hamm) and set in a nondescript small town populated primarily by sad sacks and losers, the movie struggles to get out of second gear.

A painfully gauche, galumphing attack on factory farming, meat eating, animal experimentation and human supremacy.

Smooth and folksy, it traffics in broad, unchallenged claims that serve a single purpose: to persuade us that the only thing wrong with today’s farming methods is our misinformed perception of them.

In grabbing for the heart this one-size-fits-all fable sadly ignores the mind.

From its "once upon a time" beginning to the anticlimactic end, Footprints remains fatally lodged in La-La Land.

Harnessing mostly fine actors to a wholly asinine script, the directors, Melisa Wallack and Bernie Goldmann, have created a movie as spineless and dithering as its benighted namesake.

For the first 20 minutes or so — a blitz of eye candy and ear worms — its breezy action and the performers’ good cheer are enough to entertain. Too soon, though, the movie drifts into narrative doldrums that derail its momentum and drain the cast’s energy.

Pointing at everything and elucidating nothing, Hello Herman arrives freighted with the anti-bullying agenda of its director, Michelle Danner.

The Tomorrow War is betting its flash will blind us to its vacuity.

Narrative ellipses and a slew of visual clichés — like vague shapes, ghostly footprints and disorienting flashes of light — make Mary (the name shared by the ship and the couple’s younger daughter) a particularly unsatisfying possession yarn.

At fault is a threadbare, irritatingly vague script (by the director and artist Ben McPherson) that simply strings together a series of generic setups and forgettable characters.

Last Breath is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic.

An unfortunately clunky, relentlessly corny salute to Rani Laxmibai.

A dreary, interminable drama written and directed by Eva Aridjis, is exactly one-third of a good movie. That third is Frank Wood's beautifully modulated and modest central performance.

Despite the typically elevating presence of Helen Mirren, this super-silly feature (the fifth from the Australian brothers Peter and Michael Spierig) stubbornly resists being classed up.

Underdog may have been originally created to sell cereal for General Mills, but this latest incarnation couldn't sell Frisbees at a dog park.

Unevenly directed by Isaac Feder, Sex Ed droops.

The entire film seems to be happening on the other side of a dirty window - good news for the dreadful computer-generated effects, if not for our eyes.

Rehashing characters and plots from the "Law & Order" playbook, the director, Rafal Zielinski, supplements his material with religious iconography and more gauzy close-ups than a Barbra Streisand marathon.

This bizarre sort-of satire featuring insane characters doing incomprehensible things might be forgivable if it were even mildly amusing. It's not.

Despite a thoroughly modern central character, this impeccably costumed, wishy-washy period piece feels like it emerged from a PBS storage trunk, wrapped in tissue paper and reeking of mothballs.

Lively, noisy, dark and daft, this gloopy creature feature from the British director Neil Marshall plays like a loose, if vastly inferior callback to his two best films, “Dog Soldiers” (2002) and “The Descent” (2006).

The writing is so poor and the visual embellishments so few that some of the violence, like the frequent attacks on the base by local villagers, make little sense.

Gives you the creeps, the giggles and the groans in almost equal measure.

Sweetness and whimsy fill the screen to capacity in I'm Reed Fish, a rural coming-of-age tale that's so laid-back that its cast is almost horizontal.

Saving most of its special-effects pennies until the final five minutes, Hangar 10 struggles to build a science-fiction movie from little more than a ghost of an idea and an infamous location.

A shallow commentary on how an artist’s talent can be subsumed by the desire for fame and fortune. Or maybe just by the need to make a movie.

Mr. Kitamura, an action enthusiast who prefers to show rather than tell, seems unaware that the film’s dialogue is laughable, its characters unfathomable and the acting often less than optimal.

There’s barely a whiz-bang punch line or smoothly executed setup to be found in a movie that longs to be a sparkling bedroom comedy and winds up a tortured, fizz-free farce.

Smothered by a storm of visual tics — and the tiniest of nods to “Rear Window” (1954) — any social commentary takes second place to multitasking gimmickry.

As any Neeson watcher will tell you, you don’t mess with his action characters once their dander is up. Sadly, Neeson’s dander is no match for a hackneyed plot, poorly visualized stunts and characters whose behavior can defy common sense.

The film has a bare-bones look that only intensifies its nearly painful sincerity.

However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone.

Mr. Van Sant has always had a sentimental streak — reaching some kind of apogee with “Restless,” in 2011 — but a better script might have replaced literalness with the emotional intelligence that the film badly needs.

Unlovely and uninvolving, Level Up is a running-man cocktail of brutality spiked with low-level humor.

This first feature from Will Forbes is a big slice of ham.

This soulless, sterile romantic comedy has slipped under the wire to give audiences a headache and Matt LeBlanc’s reputation a relapse.

LaBeouf, like his castmates — in particular, the talented Chelsea Rendon from the STARZ drama, “Vida” — is constrained throughout by the weight of the stereotyping and dialogue that doesn’t stand a chance against the violence.

This blah trudge from cradle to stage will be catnip to his fans and Ambien to everyone else.

Expelled is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike.

The movie has been thoroughly eclipsed by "Captivity" the marketing.

The film never finds its dramatic footing. Nor, sadly, its common sense.

A Whale of a Tale is a rambling blend of complaint, tourism and straw-men arguments. What it’s not is persuasive.

The characters are so flimsy, and so wearyingly familiar . . . that Michell is incapable of giving their conflicts life.

This dissociation leaves the supporting cast to its own devices, with no one suffering more than the appealing Eva Mendes as Johnny's true love, Roxanne. If Ms. Mendes ever finds a director willing to allow her to perform with her shirts fully buttoned, there will be no stopping her.

Given that the finale of Michael Polish’s spies-on-the-lam thriller, Alarum, teases the unwelcome possibility of a sequel, please consider this review a mercy killing.

Feeding over-the-top language to underdeveloped characters, Deon Taylor’s Supremacy dramatizes racism with an unvarying intensity that quickly becomes wearing.

Dated, despondent and pretty much a disaster, Cell plays like a series of nods to other science fiction-horror hybrids, notably “The Matrix” (1999) and Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.

Boutella is a pleasingly game and lithesome heroine, but the movie around her feels curiously indifferent, a crammed, compressed delivery system for its maker’s dorm-room dreams.

The most polished superpower on display in the defiantly unexciting Secret Society of Second-Born Royals is the ability to say its title without spitting.

Not even a dewy heroine and a youth-friendly vibe can disguise the essential ugliness at its core: like the bloodied placards brandished by demonstrators outside women's health clinics, the film communicates in the language of guilt and fear.

Screaming "vanity project" from every hackneyed frame, Drawing With Chalk is yet another example of midlife American males doing all they can to avoid acting their age.

Striving to dramatize a real-life battle that occurred in 2002 near Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea, the writer and director, Kim Hak-soon, stirs corn and cliché into a paean to patriotism.

As derivative as its title and as implacable as its declining hero, Blood and Money suffers from near-calamitous narrative lapses.

To borrow RuPaul’s delightful catchphrase, the only possible response to a project like this is to advise it to “sashay away.”

All right, then, let’s rip off the Band-Aid: Destination Wedding is torture. And not just because this would-be romantic comedy is grating, cheap-looking and a mighty drag: it also turns two seasoned, likable actors into characters you’ll want to throttle long before the credits roll.

Filmed on Hatteras Island, N.C., Vacation! meanders like an endless summer's day; even its tragic conclusion feels incongruously fragile.

This quivering effort from the director John Erick Dowdle only increases in impenetrability whenever anything mildly curious occurs.

Features annoying characters navigating unbelievable situations.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett direct with competence but a dispiriting lack of originality.

Dreary, derivative and flat-out dopey, this dragged-out torture tale will disappoint even those whose hearts race whenever they see a female character strapped to a bed.

A derivative and dogged horror movie that reverts to rote with wearying regularity.

As artificial as the inseminations it celebrates, Delivery Man is a soggy comedy more focused on stimulating your tear ducts than your funny bone.

The Captive seems tailor-made to explore the psychological damage that a child can suffer over a lengthy confinement, but instead leans too heavily on the chilly desolation of Paul Sarossy’s cinematography. What’s going on in the victim’s mind, or anyone else’s, is as invisible as what lies beneath the snow.

A bit of low-budget Nordic nonsense that only makes you appreciate the visual finesse and rowdy discipline of the History channel’s “Vikings.”

The writer and director, Joby Harold, claims to have been inspired to write the film while suffering from a particularly painful kidney stone. Watching it may be for some a comparable experience.

Jay Alaimo’s sour tale of suburban greed and marital disappointment, can’t even deliver a temporary high; mired in the blahs, the blues and the midlife crazies, this poor man’s “American Beauty” slowly sucks your will to live.

This sad slasher is as lacking in scares as in ideas.

Like much of Ms. Cody’s work, Paradise plays out in quippy sound bites, only this time they feel entirely unsuited to Lamb’s sheltered background.

The look is grimy and the atmosphere is grim; but what could have been a moody character study or a taut conspiracy thriller is instead a dreary procedural, a misbegotten mush of flashbacks, voice-overs and dead ends.

Spectacularly uninteresting...this dreary Antipodean curiosity is a yob-filled slog of hard-man posturing, all of it bathed in an oppressive testosterone funk. And I haven’t even mentioned the hairy buttocks.

In lieu of tension, the film is stuffed with crazed musical crescendos, amateurish structural feints and pregnant pauses that cry out for the familiar “chu-CHUNG” of a “Law & Order” scene change.

A limp urban comedy not nearly as whimsical as its title.

This stultifyingly earnest movie makes its points with such a heavy hand that its horrors struggle to resonate.

If you drink every time you’re reminded of Monty Python’s 1979 Judean jaunt, “Life of Brian,” you might just make it through to the end.