Jeannette Catsoulis

A faux documentary grounded in ethnicity and mired in absurdity, Finishing the Game is a terrific idea still waiting to be fashioned into a real movie.

A raunchy romantic comedy that, like its heroine, rarely has both feet on the ground.

Proceeding in a tone of unrelieved misery, Coldwater is a punishing, predictable drama that’s almost rescued by strong acting and good intentions.

What could have been a moderately entertaining short film is yanked to intolerable lengths in Killing Bono, a shapeless rock-music caper that, like its deluded antihero, just doesn't know when to stop.

Reuben is a whiny and uncoordinated prodigal son. His constant chafing at himself and the world is the film's biggest problem; by the midway point we're all wishing him back in Finland where he belongs.

Despite the strange, echoing beauty of its images ... "Luz" is, as a whole, visually numbing and mentally taxing.

Though not without substance, National Security is marred by writing that’s not nearly as creative as the torments it portrays.

Palely photographed and anchored by a quiet, rather weary performance from Ms. Keener, Little Pink House is a peculiarly enervated affair. The structure is choppy, and there are odd moments of tonal dissonance.

Intermittently beautiful but frustratingly leaden, Shutterbug labors ineffectually to promote authenticity over artifice. A heavily stylized paean to undoctored images, the movie never quite clicks as a succession of moving ones.

Imagine spending an afternoon watching a bunch of vagrants putter around on an abandoned city lot, and you've pretty much nailed the viewing experience of Earthwork, a painfully dull account of a year in the life of the Kansas crop artist Stan Herd.

Leave it to the feted British theater director Trevor Nunn to flatten the intrigue and dampen the lust that could have made Red Joan zing.

Unfocused and repetitive, this feature-length commercial by Jeremy Snead uses a muddled timeline and bargain basement graphics to produce a horn-tooting, “Aren’t games awesome?” tone.

An awkward blend of anti-Semitic atrocities and identity-swapping absurdity, the World War II drama My Best Enemy struggles to find a convincing tone.

As if all its artistic energy had been gobbled up by the fornication, Love has nothing left with which to build its characters or set them in motion.

The movie’s occasional chills do little to obscure the thin plotting, problematic pacing and a central mystery that’s left aggravatingly vague.

Mr. Defa and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, are united in their disdain for information over mood: as the camera skitters spastically around its troubled schlub, the film becomes a muddy, minimalist moan of desperation.

With slapstick smothering the scares, [REC 3] is further marred by a plot in which the muted Catholicism of its antecedents is turned up to full blast.

This mawkish rom-com mines class, ethnic and ambulatory boundaries for cheap laughs and cheap-looking visuals.

Dipping no more than a toenail in the philosophical waters surrounding personhood, the movie is at once ideologically vague and maddeningly self-serious.

However thoughtful and well-intentioned, this debut feature is too airless and long-winded to excite.

No arguments, frustrations or consequential disappointments mar the film’s unvaryingly upbeat tone. This leaves us with a movie that feels more like a marketing tool for her self-designed brand of dominoes than a nuanced portrait of an unusual talent.

Viewers...are unlikely to be more than marginally amused by its fair-to-middling acting, enervated plot and forcibly diverse group of drifting souls gathered on the fictional Greek island of Khronos.

Puzzles more than it pleases.

Employee of the Month is more tired than a Wal-Mart greeter at the end of a Saturday shift. One can only hope its halfhearted suggestion that winning isn't everything is some comfort if the movie's grosses are as disappointing as its jokes.

That it’s bearable at all is entirely because of the superlative acting skills of James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan as an unnamed couple forced to endure an extended London lockdown.

Joyride, a grievously schematic blend of odd-couple comedy and life-affirming road movie, traverses the Irish countryside with a small degree of charm and a boatload of blarney.

Matt and Mara is less a movie than an idea for one. It doesn’t help that neither character is likable, or that the director and writer, Kazik Radwanski, fills the screen with close-ups in lieu of information.

Pairing a dull romance with an even duller sport (at least as represented here), this cliché-ridden vanity project is more suited to the ABC Family channel than to the inside of a movie theater.

We’ve seen it before: Faces, substances and locations may change, but the self-destructive behavior and dreary vibe are pretty much constants.

If some of the characters won't be returning for the sequel, no matter. In all likelihood, neither will the audience.

Kudos to Q, though, for a performance anchored in classy disdain for the baloney around her.

Puberty causes an exponential increase in evil -- and in incoherence -- in The Grudge 2.

A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, Malcolm & Marie, is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow.

Too much of the film feels like shorthand, a trail of teasing crumbs to lead us to the inevitable sequels.

This well-acted debut feature from Michael Connors (a former Army captain) is too limited in ambition and scope to satisfy our expectations.

"Section 31,” bravely directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, is a dog’s dinner of head-snapping reversals and explanatory dialogue — a movie with little on its mind but mayhem.

The film strains to inject even a modicum of drama.

A movie singularly lacking in rock-doc unpredictability and verve.

Taking place almost entirely inside computer-simulated global locations, "Retribution" moves closer than ever to its airless video game roots.

A low-budget horror anthology with segments both ghastly and moronic.

Red Hook Black crawls forward by means of stilted conversations and vacuous exchanges.

Whether psychological drama or sexual farce — and, really, there’s no way to tell — Sibyl is a soapy mess.

Easy on the eyes but brutal on the ears.

The turtles themselves may look prettier, but are no smarter; torn irreparably from their countercultural roots, our superheroes on the half shell have been firmly co-opted by the industry their creators once sought to spoof.

An intermittently interesting but fatally clichéd comedy of personal and professional suicide.

Directed, with workmanlike efficiency, by Len Wiseman, “Ballerina” is at once insultingly facile and infuriatingly obtuse, its unmodulated tumult leaving little room for nuance or personality.

What should be a volcano of betrayal and acrimony never fully erupts; even Moore’s brief meltdown feels staged, and Isabel is so irritatingly tranquil that Williams has no room to breathe in the role.

The best antidote to all the glowering and posing is Eva Green: As Ava, the titular dame, she’s nothing short of a godsend.

Unfocused and too often unbelievable, Amy Poehler’s Moxie feels like a battle between two competing visions: go-girl crowd-pleaser and serious high-school harassment drama. Neither wins.

Idolized in some quarters and reviled in others, Mr. Korine, now 37, may be a bit long in the tooth for the enfant terrible act.

Though at times pleasingly quirky, the story is too slackly written and insipidly photographed to entertain.

While Derrick Borte’s filmmaking is bluntly efficient — and the vehicular stunt work impressive — the character is a windup toy, a dumb and dirty symbol of male grievance.

Anna feels more like a device than a person, a collection of eccentric behaviors (her job involves counting molehills) that support an aesthetic of excessive cuteness.

Hounddog is never more than a sluggish dawdle from shack to swimmin' hole and back again.

An old-fashioned wartime romance whose plot highlights are recognizable from outer space, this gleaming dollop of prestige comfort food is neither logically coherent nor emotionally satisfying.

Randau’s script, though, is an implacable plod from one bashing to another.

Only the efforts of Ewan McGregor and, especially, Ethan Hawke, as the estranged half brothers of the title, save this doleful drama from sinking entirely into bathos.

Programmatic and groaningly trite, What They Had, the debut feature from Elizabeth Chomko, would be impossible to swallow without its star-studded cast. Even so, it requires all their considerable skills to stop this soapy family drama from sliding into complete banality.

Part infomercial, part public-service announcement, Trade of Innocents carries such a suffocating human-rights burden that it never had much chance of becoming an actual movie. Yes, child trafficking is horrific; but embedding your raise-the-alarm mission in a film this inept runs the risk of arousing more amusement than activism.

This is screenwriting by numbers. Unlike, say, Ken Loach’s marvelous “Bread and Roses,” Under the Same Moon is too busy sanctifying its protagonists and prodding our tear ducts to say anything remotely novel about immigration policies or their helpless victims.

Weighed down by the worthiness of its intentions, The Promise is a big, barren wartime romance that approaches the Armenian genocide with too much calculation and not nearly enough heat.

The journey from page to screen may have battered Mr. Welch’s novel, but its lamenting heart beats loud and clear.

Offering neither balance nor solutions (a segment on the overuse of medications like Ritalin is especially powerful, but especially in need of counterargument), The War on Kids questions what kind of citizens we are producing.

Bitter Harvest feels awkward and parochial.

Rapace’s jangly, one-note performance is rendered bearable by Yvonne Strahovski’s warmly natural turn as Lola’s increasingly furious mother.

Sappy and silly, Eternity made me thank heaven for Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as the quick-witted coordinators tasked with guiding our threesome to perpetual bliss. They’re a comic delight, and they aerate a movie that’s most touching when it’s least frantic.

A warning to parents everywhere about the dangers of indulging irrational behavior, Opal Dream is a sickly sweet tale of deep dysfunction masquerading as family solidarity.

This crackpot thriller from the usually competent Jim Sheridan leaves only one mystery unsolved: what on earth was he thinking?

The women share their dreams, their thoughts on relationships and some of the hazards of their work. The serious, thoughtful responses carry the film.

Notable at least in part for its fumbled potential, this health-care-industry melodrama possesses all the right ingredients: an idealistic young lawyer, a corrupt corporate villain and a sympathetic victim. It just fails to assemble them into a compelling whole.

Adapted from Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel (and based on a true story), Alone in Berlin is dour and flavorless.

Robert Schwartzman’s direction is blah, his story labored and the supporting characters one-note.

Like a feature-length version of the television sitcom “My Name Is Earl,” only Canadian -- and not funny.

Adding a fairy-tale cast to a generic horror setup is of no benefit to Hunted, Vincent Paronnaud’s unpleasant merger of slasher movie and survival thriller.

Predictable to a fault, the movie coasts pleasurably on Neeson’s seasoned, sad-sweet charisma — an asset that’s been tragically imprisoned in mopey-loner roles and generic action thrillers.

The writer and director, Daniel Noah, creates no space for the story’s darker corners, or for his star to delve beneath the surface of Max’s depression and anger. Then again, who cares? It’s Jerry Lewis, so everyone can just shut up.

Jack & Diane offers a glaring example of a writer and director, Bradley Rust Gray, unable to trust in the simple strength of his material.

Say what you like about "America's Next Top Model," any single episode of Tyra Banks's campy confection offers more insight into objectification and disposability than this film in its entirety.

Mr. Donaldson has proven deftness with panting plots and knife-edge tension, but this cobbled-together noir does him no justice at all.

Whether viewed as empowerment tools or aphrodisiacs, stress relievers or deadly bodyguards, these weapons and their owners never cohere into an actual point.

Measured against the often mediocre standards of today’s glut of reboots and reimaginings, “Believer” is slickly professional, its young performers more than up to the task. It’s also disappointingly, if unsurprisingly, cautious, gesturing only wanly toward the original’s potent weave of puberty, religion and corporeal abuse.

Mundane conversations and outings drag on while the central mystery takes baby steps forward, suggesting that a shorter running time or a more developed script might have better served the originality of the premise.

Awash in blood and revoltingly misogynistic dialogue, this latest redneck ruckus (his seventh feature) is a grindhouse slog of unrelenting bad taste.

Sincere performances elevate an underdeveloped script and awkward filmmaking in The Dry Land, a coming-home drama as inexpressive as its traumatized lead.

The lack of chemistry between the two leads is less damaging than Ms. Bennett’s inability to commit to a tone.

Resistance feels disjointed and dated.

Occasionally cute and almost instantly forgettable, “People,” tidily directed by Brett Haley, offers less-than-witty dialogue.

This debut feature from Matthijs van Heijningen is as stiff as the Antarctic tundra. Where the earlier film pulsed with precisely calibrated paranoia and distinctly drawn characters, this inarticulate replay unfolds as mechanistically as a video game.

Placidly photographed and lacking in urgency, "Survival" shows us the living flailing at fate and the dead just flailing.

An animated twist on the Frankenstein story that never sparks to life.

Simultaneously preposterous and dull, Dear Dictator is the kind of movie where music and wardrobe choices — like the mean girls’ stridently visible underwear — substitute for character.

The message may be clear -- suppress the past at your peril -- but the execution is a mess. As for the line-dancing soldiers, your guess is as good as mine.

A coming-of-age tale so treacly it doesn’t just tug your heartstrings, it attempts to glue them to your ribs.

On land and underwater, the verisimilitude of the violence is numbing.

The result is a movie that isn't crummy, exactly, just blah: when the freakiest teeth on screen belong not to one of Walt Conti's animatronically realized sharks but to a good-ol'-boy called Red, you know you have a problem.

Set in North Florida and based on a book by Harry Crews, The Hawk Is Dying is a dreary study of male angst groaning beneath the weight of its own symbolism.

Glowing with grandiose pronouncements and uplifting sentiment, Return to Space, a draggy documentary about America’s first manned spaceflight since 2011, could be easily repurposed as promotional material for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Lacking dialogue to deepen the characters or reinforce their motivations, Luther: The Fallen Sun whooshes past in a rush of serial-killer clichés: an underground lair, a torture room, a masked maniac

For the thickheaded thriller Assassin's Bullet the Bulgarian actress Elika Portnoy dreamed up a story with three roles for herself and fails to convince in any of them.

The movie imprisons its talented cast (including Alia Shawkat as Danny’s overlooked soul mate and Brandon Hardesty as his worldly best friend) in roles that leave little room for anything but caricature.

Reeking of self-righteousness and moral reprimand, Michael O. Sajbel’s Ultimate Gift”is a hairball of good-for-you filmmaking.

The sledgehammer message is clear: Best friends can help when you need a McMansion, but only God can help when your husband needs a man.

Jungle Cruise is less directed than whipped to a stiff peak before collapsing into a soggy mess.

This pointless parody dumps us in the fictional town of Sporks, Wash., a location lousy with vampires and werewolves.

In this blood-splattered wasteland, neither original ideas nor acting skills flourish.

Political menace stalks youthful idealism in Putin's Kiss, a portentous, rather creepy documentary that masks its lack of historical context with an atmosphere of accumulating threat.

The Whole Truth plays like an especially claustrophobic courtroom procedural, drably photographed and generically framed.

However good the intentions, this sluggish documentary about the stigma of substance abuse and the barriers to recovery never comes close to catching fire.

Despite smatterings of wit and a stable of skilled performers, C.O.G. struggles to find a consistent tone, its episodic structure veering from farcical to poignant to dangerously raw.

Despite [Fanning's] commitment to the role — and the generally fine supporting performances — this timorous tale sidesteps uncomfortable realities in favor of soothing whimsy and preordained uplift.

A strangely listless vampire tale that unspools with some style and precious little sense.

Unfortunately, in keeping its inflammatory subject matter at arm’s length, Provoked does exactly the same to its audience.

Always Be My Maybe feels a lot like a movie propped up by a stunt, a high-gloss romantic comedy so mired in triteness and unconvincing emotions that its main recommendation is the appealing diversity of its cast.

The upshot is an oppressive, inscrutable puzzle that made me more curious about the inside of Alcazar’s head than that of his tortured subject — the kind of movie that, in some circles, might inspire fetishistic rewatching. Just don’t forget to fire up the bong.

Sluggish and derivative, I Am Number Four is another elaborate puberty metaphor with superpowers substituting for testosterone.

His (Jackson) doleful revenant is in almost every scene, and this hardworking actor seems to know that the film around him should be a light-footed caper instead of a grim noir with a side order of deviance.

A love triangle with fangs but no bite, the German import We Are the Night is mostly infatuated with its own stylish excesses.

Offensive only in Mr. Wortham's dreadful acting, Now & Later is part of a series at the Quad called "Unrated: A Week of Sex in Cinema" - a title that should ensure plenty of backsides on seats.

Self-consciously edgy and romantically limp.

Flash Point”attaches coldly professional visuals to a narrative so baffling that it’s rarely clear who is pounding on whom or why.

A deeply silly time-travel weepie buoyed solely by the soapy warmth of its performances.

There’s precious little to laugh at in The Sasquatch Gang, a sad attempt to board the loser-nerd comedy bandwagon.

Louder and more literal than its inspiration, The Eye benefits from a spiky performance by Alessandro Nivola as Sydney’s rehabilitation counselor. “Your eyes are not the problem,” he tells her at one point. He is so, so right.

The problem with these my-family-was-messed-up-and-I need-to-share projects is that they require an audience of complete strangers to give a damn. And while we sometimes do, it’s usually because the material is inherently compelling (“Tarnation”) or the filmmaking uncovers truths beyond the template of family therapy (“51 Birch Street”). Sadly, Phyllis and Harold fulfills neither requirement.

If the 20-odd seconds of blank screen squatting pointlessly amid the opening credits aren't enough warning that you're in for some seriously sluggish storytelling, then the adoption of a snail as one of the central motifs should drive the point home.

This admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment.

Exhaustive and exhausting, the new energy documentary Switch is so monotonous it makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like "Armageddon."

More tribute than parody, this over-egged farce whips slapstick and cheese into an authentic soufflé of tastelessness.

The Boogeyman, extrapolated from a minor 1970s short story by Stephen King, might conceivably make sense to viewers with no access to proper lighting or functioning windows. For the rest of us, though, this near-indecipherable movie — as murky in plot and payoff as in setting — demands such a total suspension of rationality that its few scary moments struggle to land.

Lawrence’s commitment to authenticity may be laudable (he filmed almost the entire project on the move in Canada), but it’s clear that he was so busy honoring the book, he forgot to entertain the audience.

This latest recycling of foreign-grown frights shows less interest in horror than in healing.

the Australian drama Felony proves only that skilled actors and slick photography can tart up even the most problematic script.

An ostensible romantic comedy that's really just a grating portrait of an irredeemable jerk.

An ill-advised sequel to "Are We There Yet?" and a feeble fable of better parenting through home improvement.

An odd-couple caper of staggering dopeyness that makes you long for the snap and sizzle of the buddy movies of the 1980s.

A depressing, downbeat thriller that hustles from one violent act to the next with only the flimsiest of narrative throughlines, the latest from the French Canadian director Maxime Giroux is an unfortunate misfire.

Whenever the movie tries to say something insightful about racial integration — or education, or any number of issues — it backs off or bogs down. It’s so tonally and ideologically unfocused that its ideas just slip away.

Nonnas serves up ethnic comedy on a platter of ham and cheese.

Finch is sweet, yet disappointingly uneventful.

Set in the American Southwest in 1879, The Kid feels less like an actual movie than a table-napkin idea for one.

The Trotsky runs 20 minutes too long and several rungs above the head of its target audience. And though Mr. Baruchel can be very funny in small doses -- a slacker sidekick in “Knocked Up,” a gung-ho kid in “Tropic Thunder” -- here he swiftly becomes insufferable, a neurotic nudnik in funeral director attire and John Turturro hairdo.

This uninvolving thriller is as lacking in tension as credibility.

If wallowing in the creative hiccups of tortured scribblers is your moviegoing goal, there are much better options.

Working from Peter Bognanni’s 2010 novel, the writer and director, Peter Livolsi, has created a painfully quirky tale that’s so contrived you can almost hear the gears of the plot grinding.

Glancing social commentary — like the difficulties of cultural assimilation and the invisible wounds of war — is welcome, but the script (by Ireland and Damian Hill, who died in 2018) is too cluttered for it to resonate and too mired in a muddle of sin and redemption.

A numbing torrent of largely unidentified film clips and poorly labeled commentary, Rob Garver’s overstuffed tribute to the life and work of America’s best-known — and most written about — film critic is at times barely coherent.

Belonging more in the realm of tragic melodrama than true crime, The Sicilian Girl is hobbled by sluggish direction (by Marco Amenta, who previously addressed Atria's story in his 1997 documentary, "One Girl Against the Mafia: Diary of a Sicilian Rebel"), and a revulsion to nuance.

Heartfelt but enervated, Song One noodles around the Brooklyn music scene without stirring up magic.

Unable to shape these events into a dramatic structure, the director, Camilo Vila, resorts to a meandering tale of random indignities suffered by a lead so bland he comes across less as principled than as stupendously naïve.

Like one of those machines that can inhale a car and spit out a tidy cube of squashed components, Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a near-indigestible lump of clips and quips and snipped opinions.

Eyes popping and mouths agape, Martin Lawrence and Raven-Symoné mug their way through College Road Trip as if it were a silent movie -- which, come to think of it, would have been a lot less irritating.

A hilariously awful collision of soap opera and horror movie, Amelia’s Children teeters so precariously on the cliff top of comedy that one wishes the director, Gabriel Abrantes, had dared to kick it over the edge.

The result is a movie that feels more like a free-market sales pitch than like a critical look at one weapon in the poverty-fighting arsenal that may or may not offer long-term hope.

Waffling between anger and pathos, dry humor and dead-eyed violence, Fatman feels tonally befuddled.

Our hero’s quest, however — updated to the 1980s, when the country’s corporations enjoyed unprecedented government benefits — never ignites, mostly because of Mr. Lee’s acting deficits.

This collection of eight mini-sermons falls flat.

Slow to get moving and dramatically slack, Jungle cares only about Yossi, whose solo suffering and speed-enhanced hallucinations dominate the narrative.

Stagy, stiff and marinated in egg cream.

Leaving no cliché unturned, Coffee Date provides cheesy music, chats about "gaydar" and the obligatory are-you-looking-at-mine? urinal scene.

Though both actors deliver performances more credible than the plot that frames them, their authenticity only highlights the script's affection for improbable coincidences and an ending even Garry Marshall might consider too pat.

Woefully short on excitement and long on — well, just long — “Amundsen,” away from the blizzards and chattering teeth, is a pompous parade of stiff collars and stuffy rooms.

The best thing about Small, Beautifully Moving Parts is its admission that a positive pregnancy test is not always cause for giddy celebration; the worst thing is that, even at a lean 73 minutes, this flimsy road movie feels at least 43 minutes too long.

Ms. Enos is a credibly fraying voyeur, all anxious looks and nervous starts, but “Never Here” is too emotionally antiseptic to engage.

Strangled by good intentions and teachable-moment clichés, Conor Allyn’s No Man’s Land turns the border between Texas and Mexico into a gateway to racial empathy.

Working ostensibly from the viewpoint of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend, Liz Kendall (an excellent Lily Collins), [Director] Berlinger never fully commits. Instead, he appears as seduced by Bundy as virtually everyone else in the movie.

Alien invasion is just an excuse for romantic farce in Extraterrestrial, a tiresome roundelay of lies, lust and leaping paranoia.

A thumb to suck in troubled times, Summerland offers a digit of nostalgia that many viewers will latch onto with something approaching relief.

This sci-fi twaddle, soothingly framed by rolling sand dunes and a slash of crystal coastline (dreamily photographed by David Chambille), eventually tests our patience.

Whichever side of the aisle you inhabit, you will leave The Iron Lady feeling disgusted; you will also feel cheated - of information, insight or even an identifiable point of view.

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.