Jeannette Catsoulis

More focused on philosophy then feeding, “Kiss” marries a mash-up of undead clichés (I know, let’s have another lingering shot of the moon!) to hilariously stilted conversations.

Even if you resist the film's claims of being based on one family's actual experiences, The Possession is eerily enjoyable pulp. Perched somewhere between "The Exorcist" and "The Amityville Horror" - and with a dash of "The Unborn" - the story benefits from an unusually restrained sound design and special effects that enhance but never obliterate its troubled-family center.

This one is for Hank Williams fanatics only, and Mr. Thomas puts a dark and subtle sheen on a disappointingly watery script. Cover versions of Williams's songs - several sung by his daughter, Jett - remind us why he mattered, even as the movie fails to do the same.

In trying to have it both ways, Brice has created a messy, overstuffed parody of moral policing that squanders the promise of its cleverly executed opening.

Strewn with some surprisingly decent effects, this unevenly paced film delivers, if nothing else, on the promise of its title: lots of surgically enhanced nude dead women strutting their stuff.

Cruelly amoral and only marginally credible, Flower is nevertheless wildly entertaining and at times even touching.

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

With its bleak, yearning tone and defiantly cloudy color palette, “England Is Mine” has a pleasingly granular feel for its era and location. But its imagining of Morrissey as a self-pitying narcissist, a curiously passive intellectual who can’t get out of his own way, soaks the movie in a wearying inertia.

Kyle Warren’s screenplay is potent enough to generate several moments of suspense, and Watts, an exceptional actor sidelined too often by poor choices, is not the problem here. That would be the decision to jettison the children’s most creative cruelties — and consequently much of the movie’s tension — and a director, Matt Sobel, who’s determined to steer the audience toward a specific interpretation of events.

Written and directed by Brit McAdams, Paint is a comedically inert parody of male privilege that’s all sight gags and very little substance.

Another ruin-and-rehab tale, one that initially tantalizes then flatly disappoints.

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.

Fat, Sick may be no great shakes as a movie, but as an ad for Mr. Cross's wellness program its now-healthy heart is in the right place.

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.

At its grungy heart, Alessandro Celli’s Mondocane is about the dissolution of a friendship. Yet this cynical, near-future crime thriller, with its Hunger Games morality and Mad Max aesthetic, is too busy glamorizing cruelty to allow its central relationship to resonate.

The movie's lack of subtlety is countered by an unswerving commitment to impartiality.

Queenpins might have been a snappy little comedy had it lost 20 minutes and found a point beyond glorifying grand larceny. Erasing the lead character’s smug-perky narration wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Shot with a camera as excited as a squirrel-chasing dog, Cheerleaders has a girls-gone-wild energy and a twisted sense of humor.

A beautifully filmed and patiently explained assessment of a proposal to build five hydroelectric dams in the Patagonia region of Chile.

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.

Drawing much of its energy from an eclectic and fully integrated soundtrack, Skills Like This gazes indulgently on 20-something aimlessness and the comfort of assigned roles. In Mr. Miranda's hands sloth can be more appealing than you might think.

The film’s loose naturalism and strong acting — Chris Browning, as a liaison between the F.B.I. and the reservation, is especially enjoyable — are slyly seductive.

In a movie as happy to resurrect characters as rub them out, nothing is of consequence, and the glibness grows numbing.

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.

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.

More a designer frame for actors than nourishing entertainment. Like the Chinese food the leads are always arguing over, the story leaves you hungry for more.

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.

Stripped down and edited for disequilibrium rather than clarity, “Play” is less interested in pandering to gorehounds than in highlighting our reluctance to view children as anything other than innocent.

Mainly, it has Ralph Fiennes to ensure that the center holds. As Orlando, Duke of Oxford and the spy agency’s founder, Fiennes might read more cuddly than studly, but he lends a surprising gravitas to this flibbertigibbet feature.

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.

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

Bland photography and perfunctory writing are the very least of my issues with Next Goal Wins, a movie-shaped stain on the class of entertainment known as the sports-underdog comedy.

This dull dig into human nature owes more to the aesthetics of Calvin Klein than the terrors of outer space.

Lousy with stereotypes and filthy language, the sordid Pimp wraps 21st-century blaxploitation in a lesbian love story as unconvincing as every other relationship on screen.

Stagy, stiff and marinated in egg cream.

It may leave many bases uncovered (a section on groundbreaking European legislation is inadequately explained), but it will also leave you looking a lot more closely at what you put on your skin, in your mouth and underneath your sink.

Even more inadvisable was the decision (whether made by Mr. McLean or his backers) to transform the mercurial psychopath Mick Taylor (a truly menacing John Jarratt) into a roguish cartoon.

13 Sins is occasionally inventive but mostly uninvolving.

What we need is for the writer and director, David Pomes, to wallow less in aimless dialogue and lowlife sordidness. What we need is a point.

A lesbian-foodie fairy tale that keeps its appetites well under control. The title may hint at naughty pleasures, but the director, Pratibha Parmar, is more interested in pappadams than passion.

A serviceable burst of high-end hokum, Devil classes up a flimsy, religion-themed plot (by M. Night Shyamalan) with the kind of limber cinematography only someone like Tak Fujimoto can deliver.

Dark, airless and packed with psychological hurt that seems to spring from nowhere, this angry morality play, tucked inside a police procedural, suffers from a crippling lack of back story and characters whose relationships are fraught with unexplained complexity.

Pleasantly charming but instantly forgettable.

The splatter is deployed cautiously and sometimes wittily, the story moving briskly from wishes granted to costs exacted with the help of familiar faces (including a warm Sherilyn Fenn as Clare’s surrogate mother) and a sympathetic lead.

Working with four interchangeable Deweys, the filmmakers create a sufficient number of lively stunts to keep the kiddies amused, though the film's wittiest moment -- a canine parody of Dudley Moore's first glimpse of Bo Derek in "10" -- will be appreciated only by their parents. In trying to straddle both age groups, however, Firehouse Dog proves decidedly less nimble than its furry star.

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

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.

This stylistic restraint may help deflect accusations of exploitation (though the film's two pivotal sex scenes both feel uncomfortably extended, the initial crime lasting a squirm-inducing six minutes), but it also impedes our connection with the victims.

Having devoted much of their lives to combating lupine myths by introducing Koani to wonder-struck schoolchildren, Mr. Weide and Ms. Tucker are ill served by a director who reduces the anti-wolf lobby to caricature and the debates over reintroducing wolves to the Northern Rockies to grossly biased clips.

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.

The film embraces humor — would you want a one-legged man guiding you through a minefield? — without surrendering sensitivity. The screenplay may echo with atrocities, but it’s not consumed by them.

The director, Marc Forster (who wrote the script with Sean Conway), fashions such a languid, tipsy aesthetic around the seemingly happy marriage of Gina and James (Blake Lively and Jason Clarke) that it’s easy to keep watching.

The director, Craig Saavedra, generates surprising warmth from the familiar tropes of the odd-couple road movie. Shooting mostly in the verdant sweep of California's wine country -- and with a superb supporting cast -- he allows Mr. Le Gros room to engage.

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.

A limp sci-fi comedy with fewer laughs than a meeting of Abductees Anonymous.

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.

Offsetting its outlandish premise with believable performances, Rage (Rabia) delivers a heavy-handed metaphor for immigrant invisibility.

At its best when merging shocks with social commentary, this halting compilation improves significantly as it nears the end of the alphabet.

Automatons is driven less by its hints of suicide bombers than by its rigorous adherence to a time when robots were played by inverted dustbins and battles were represented by dots converging on a crackling screen. This lack of sophistication is enormously endearing, leaving us with the comforting notion that the end of the world will look a lot like the beginning of television.

Vita & Virginia takes a passionate, real-life affair between two enormously gifted writers and proceeds to throttle the life out of it.

A minimalist setup delivers maximum fright in Frozen, a nifty little chiller that balances its cold terrain with an unexpectedly warm heart.

Against the Sun is a groaningly tedious survival story that will at least leave you with a renewed commitment to wearing sunscreen.

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.

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.

A movie that has neither a coherent point nor an authentic character.

A brief appearance by Joey Lauren Adams adds a welcome warmth to the standard therapist role, but otherwise all is bewilderment and repetition.

Perhaps stifled by the cultural and commercial clout of its source material (a multimedia juggernaut of books, movies, television shows and a stage musical), Death Note feels rushed and constricted.

This lovingly made homage to avarice feels strangely limp. Instead of gushing, it trickles.

Bathed in a funk of testosterone, and heaving with homophobia and misogyny, My Father Die is a trashy jewel.

Gone is the original’s joyful sense of mischief; what’s left is an inoffensive piece of twaddle that never fully appreciates the ineluctable bond between community spirit and a drop of the hard stuff.

Bathed in a nostalgic glow that just avoids maudlin, the group’s problems — a sexless marriage, an unexpected job loss — bark but don’t bite. Scenes flirt with cliché, yet the writing has spark.

Spouting stiltedly clichéd dialogue...the actors struggle to sell their characters. Only Mr. Harris eventually succeeds, conveying, in a single speech, what it must be like to be the parent of an addict.

Coarsely merging social-media critique and slasher comedy, this shallow take on the evils of internet addiction is as unoriginal as it is unfunny.

Edge of the World plugs its narrative gaps with corn and cliché.

There’s a pleasing humility and introspection to this Bruce — a ruler no longer sure if his patriotic purpose is worth the carnage. His joints may be stiffer than his resolve; but, in placing the warrior temporarily aside, Macfadyen and his director have helped us more clearly to see the man.

An eagerly prurient dip into the sex-trafficking trough, Trade teeters between earnest exposé and salacious melodrama. Minus the film’s near-visible weight of conscience, success in the second category would have been virtually guaranteed.

Trite, charmless and entirely without grace, Mafia Mamma weaves a wearying string of Mob chestnuts into a shallow empowerment narrative.

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.

Willets Point may not be the slickest of movies, but what it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in heart.

Ms. Nichols is consistently appealing in the kind of role Zooey Deschanel has pretty much cornered, and Philippe Rousselot's nighttime shots of highway tragedy are dreamily atmospheric. If only Roger Towne's screenplay had focused less on the metaphysical import of Lyman's savior impulses and more on the physical rewards of his salvaged life.

The result is a sometimes punishingly theatrical experiment that teeters on the verge of surreality, transfixing us with the promise of something terrible lurking just beyond those ratty curtains.

Advancing without a single original idea or surprising moment, Austenland seems torn between poking fun at the British and lampooning Austen’s many American fanatics — a riskier enterprise, considering that they’ll be needed to fill theater seats.

Characters are simply triggers for the overwrought action sequences, though between the Edward Scissorhands editing and occasional wobbling background, even those are less than distinct.

Niall MacCormick's direction, while unfocused, locates a sweet center in the bonding of the two young girls, effortlessly capturing the way unexpected friendship, like first love, can completely alter the look of the world.

There is something cozy and a little claustrophobic about Henry Jaglom's indulgent Hollywood satires.

Alternately tedious and illuminating, this deeply honest and scattered movie revels in its lack of purpose.

The writing might be a tangle of limp clichés, but the actors — especially Woodley and the terrific Wendie Malick as Daphne’s mother — sweat to sell every line.

The result might feel overlong and overwrought; yet thanks to Bader’s clever plotting and fruity dialogue — as well as strong supporting players — this grimy picture climaxes more satisfyingly than expected.

The audience, given not an ounce of human warmth nor one person to care about, finally has no choice but to cheer for the anonymous cyberbully who wants them all dead.

She’s Missing is slow and dreamy and frustratingly opaque. Yet it has a potent sense of place and an ominous atmosphere of impermanence.

Replacing the earlier movie's more depraved sequences with sustained tension and truly unnerving editing, the director proves adept at managing mayhem in cramped spaces.

Hobbled by a lack of visual oomph or verbal sparkle, A Little White Lie pokes feebly at impostor syndrome and writerly insecurity.

Mixing war movie, coming-of-age drama and gangster thriller, Akin and Hajabi’s screenplay is a dispiriting brew of repellent behavior and odious rap lyrics.

A weird, wordy but oddly compelling thriller.

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

Add the magnificent Christine Baranski to the mix and A Bad Moms Christmas, while still a slog of base sight gags and lazy profanity, becomes marginally more bearable. Only marginally, given that this pitiful follow-up to last year’s “Bad Moms” is even less able to distinguish between crass and comedic.

An indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.

Splinterheads gains traction from an eclectic cast that knows how to work a line.

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.

A novel teenage comedy with an astute understanding of adolescent sexual confusion and the nebulous nature of desire, Zerophilia suggests an elastic view of gender that's alternately gleeful and terrifying.

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).

For all its many irritations, You Wont Miss Me has undeniable punch, a frayed energy that feels janglingly unstable. Is Shelly crazy or just a pain in the neck? We're not really sure, and neither is she.

That it eventually - if barely - succeeds is due more to the resilience of its actors than to the discipline of its makers.

Bedazzled or otherwise, clichés are still clichés, and this debut feature from Andrew Desmond is strewn with them.

Methodical and efficient, the script (by Mr. Young and Adam Frazier) gets some mileage from its generic setting and zombie-infection theme, even if the croaking order is easily predicted.

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

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

On one level, a stereotypical mash of Greek cruelty, queer poetry slams and rabid activist rhetoric. But beneath the tired crudeness and college-romp clichés, the movie is gently perceptive about the malleable nature of sexuality and the barriers we construct to hide our confusion.

Pitching uncertainly between cute and creepy, engaging and weird, this farcical story draws energy from a wickedly eccentric Ann-Margret, having a high old time as Ben's doting mother.

A work of glaring artifice, Miller’s Girl, written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate.

Boorish, bigoted and borderline pornographic.

The combined skills of the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, and his cinematographer, José David Montero, can’t surmount a story that gives us no one to invest in.

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

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

Luridly earnest and laughably immoral, Illegal Tender is an old genre movie with a new look. Call it Hispanixploitation.

Clueless, directionless and altogether pointless.

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

Embracing outraged victimhood the way Angelina Jolie embraces a close-up, Ms. Basinger, doing double duty here as an executive producer, appears oblivious to the script's idiocies.

The romance may be risible, but the scenes of mass panic and political desperation are slickly disturbing.

Mr. Kaufman’s talent can be debated, but his love for his job is stamped on every garish, oozy frame.

Table 19 is so awkwardly structured and tonally off-kilter that its moments of catharsis feel wholly unearned.

This archipelago of maneuvers, however jaw-dropping, never coheres into a real movie.

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.

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.

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

Sharp yet overdetermined, Blumenthal doesn’t breathe naturally — it’s a comedy in a box. Just not a box that everyone will want to open.

The dialogue is dreadful (though we are at least spared the usual hokey Russian accents) and the wrap-up ridiculous, the only mystery being why this peculiarity was ever greenlighted at all.

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

A gay tragedy in three acts and more than a dozen excellent songs, House of Boys conveys an emotional honesty that overrides its dated style.

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

A mess from start to finish — though, judging by the ending, this story won’t be over any time soon — Insidious: Chapter 2 is the kind of lazy, halfhearted product that gives scary movies a bad name.

The film's sweetness is endearing but too featherweight to engage.

Well acted and sporadically amusing - especially when Olivia Wilde's profanity-spewing stripper is around - Butter alternates between looking down its nose at Midwestern passions and cooing over smugly liberal values.

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

Essentially, we’re watching dead people refuse to lie down, yet the acting isn’t terrible, and Scott Winig’s photography is satisfyingly bleak and grimy.

Smothering insightful moments in verbal and musical treacle (courtesy of Harriet Schock’s sticky songs), Mr. Jaglom displays an endearing lack of cynicism but an equal lack of discipline.

Why Him? is trite, crass and insultingly moronic.

A stunningly witless revival of the infamous British film series about a girls’ boarding school.

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.

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

The violence is quick and occasionally inventive, with little of the attenuated nastiness that characterizes so many genre pictures, and the photography ranges from brightly sun-kissed to down-and-dirty.

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

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.

Despite the ripeness and flammability of its material, the movie feels oddly distant, the screenplay marred by weak scares, graceless plotting and dashed-off characters.

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.

Playing characters with no real substance, the actors struggle to develop a sense of shared peril.

Ms. Riesgraf, who at times recalls the young Teri Garr, is gutsy and committed, but not even Meryl Streep could make this hokum credible.

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

Like most of LaBute’s work, Out of the Blue is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine.

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

Filmed in and around New Orleans, “The Visitor” isn’t a terrible movie, just a tired one.

This dreary spy drama is as flat and airless as the concrete bunker in which it unfolds.

Whether on a Middle Eastern battlefield or the streets of New York, characters converse in stilted, expository mouthfuls that smother emotion.

Treacly and manipulative, Dear Evan Hansen turns villain into victim and grief into an exploitable vulnerability. It made me cringe.

A Rubik’s Cube of shifting sexual orientation and elaborate sex fantasies, “Sloppy Seconds” gathers all the accouterments of soft pornography -- cheesy music, low-rent acting and attractively framed genitals -- into a plot of stunning imbecility.

Unlike their spring 2018 fashion collection, Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s first foray into moviemaking, “Woodshock,” is depressingly dull and terminally inarticulate.

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.

Soured by its enervated star and uninspired writing, the movie offers only tiny moments of joy, like a hailstorm of gumballs that's unexpectedly magical.

Even those viewers who share the film's conviction that preparing a collection for New York Fashion Week is inherently fascinating may lose interest long before the final frock is fitted.

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.

What some may see as an examination of loss and legacy, others will view as a portrait of psychological coercion: overbearing men riding roughshod over the wishes of a grieving woman.

Alternately rancid and ridiculous, strident and sickly sweet, Our Family Wedding”offers plenty that’s old, borrowed and blue; it’s the something new that’s missing.

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

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

Pathetically inept.

A Michael Keaton outing is always cause for celebration, no matter how ramshackle the vehicle ("First Daughter," anyone?) or paper-thin the role.

Feels passé and lacks a charismatic lead. Too bad Daniel Radcliffe is an only child.

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

The Citizen is a heartfelt plea for charity, tolerance and all-around loving kindness — admirable aims sadly shackled to Sam Kadi’s inexpert direction.

Free of blood, bruises and visible trauma, DOA revels in its fakery. And though the film presents more exuberant female flesh than hiring day at Hooters, it's strictly for titillation.

Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.

Roiling with jealousy, suicide and latent lesbian urges, The Moth Diaries dances on the border between hallucination and reality without fully committing to either. Yet the film's narrative frailties are offset by impeccable performances and a consistently eerie tone, helped along by a location as forbidding as the "Overlook."

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.

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.

A depressing slog that could have been so much more.

Freeman, never the most animated of performers, gives his specific brand of passive British miserabilism free rein. But it’s Melissa Rauch, as Charlie’s safely dull, place-holder girlfriend, who steals the show.

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

You may see scarier movies this year, but none so redolent of decomposition.

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.”

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

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

A mawkish drama hobbled by a thoroughly unpleasant and uncharismatic lead performance.

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

Swift and stealthy P2 is a canny exploitation of one of the urban woman’s greatest fears: the after-hours parking garage. Throw in a car that won’t start, a creepy security guard and a filmmaking team with perfect synchronicity, and the result is a minimalist nightmare.

Plagued by clunky action sequences and a porous plot the cast visibly wilts.

The comedy is forced, the drama nonexistent and the actors melt into a yapping clan that seems to go everywhere en masse — a gesticulating blob of upraised shoulders and upturned palms.

Mr. Shoaf wastes an excellent cast (and one cute aardvark — you knew there’d be one) in a movie of astonishing vacancy.

Taking a credibility-straining premise and running with it, the Dutch director Arne Toonen gives Black Out way more energy than sense. Luckily, his antihero, Jos (Raymond Thiry), lacks neither.

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.

This witless installment features the usual ultra-slow-motion mayhem and helpful freeze-frames to allow us to admire the extra dimension. Fans will not be happy, however, to learn that Ms. Jovovich is more decently clothed this time around.

Audiences will be either captivated or irritated, depending on their tolerance for high-concept whimsy and high-energy theatrics. By the end of the wake itself, they may be wishing Binew’s illness were running ahead of schedule.

This setup is simple, but what follows is less so: an impressionistic battle between imagination and brute force that too often veers from enlightening to exasperating.

This sickly sweet concoction sets your teeth on edge.

Rambling, frustrating and wholly uninvolving, The Face of an Angel (based on Barbie Latza Nadeau’s nonfiction account of the murder) swarms with ideas that have no place to land.

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

Battling a preposterous plot and second-tier performances that are, at best, serviceable, this roll-along thriller from Scott Mann works its keister off to turn beef jerky into chateaubriand.

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.

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.

"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.

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

Enigmatic and imperfect, but nonetheless absorbing and consistently unsettling, Cordelia offers a haunting visualization of a breaking-apart psyche.

Silly beyond words, Wolves is indifferently acted and unconvincingly realized.

Were it not for the charming Patrick Bruel as a no-nonsense security expert and Alice’s unlikely suitor, this spun-sugar concoction would be well nigh unwatchable.

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.

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.

Playing the evil entity with convulsive movements and a killer manicure, the contortionist Marina Mazepa turns in the movie’s most entertaining performance. That’s if you don’t count Morgan looking genuinely baffled as to what he’s doing here at all.

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

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

An uncomfortable blend of sickness and silliness, this dancing-past-the-graveyard comedy suggests that the many travails of aging can be endured if you only gather enough friends and surrender enough dignity.

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.

Staggeringly silly and visually disordered.

For all the shooting, knifing and nattering about sleeper cells, the film feels weirdly static and terminally tired.

Before Silver hijacks the plot, Rodrigo Cortés's smart, talky screenplay and tense direction hold our attention, as much for the unpredictability of the story as the ease with which Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy slide into their roles.

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.

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.

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

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.

Burdened by a ludicrous script and messy direction, Ms. Kirkland — a headstrong veteran performer who is nothing if not game — has proved that she can play this kind of role in her sleep. If only the movie around it were worthy of her efforts.

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

This convoluted clash of competing interests, though, is so poorly explained it’s as arduous to untangle as it is to enjoy.

Saw IV is bloody proof that Jigsaw may be dead, but his well of corporeal abuses has yet to run dry.

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.

Imaginatively filmed by Peter Sova, Push has a dizzying, chaotic energy that pulls you along. Paul McGuigan directs with maximum efficiency and minimum use of computers, creating effects that feel satisfyingly tangible.

Robert Nathan’s Lucky Bastard is a sorry-looking found-footage thriller as unconvincing as its characters’ thrashing orgasms.

An unappealing jumble of sex, regret and hero worship, “Bert Stern” is an odd tribute to brilliance muffled by lust.

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.

Truth or Dare is a wearying slog through crushed feelings and mangled bodies.

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

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

Every so often, a movie comes along that isn’t particularly good, yet somehow gets to you — even as your eyes start to roll, they can’t look away. “Dirt Music” is one of those, a strangely fascinating delivery system for so much visual beauty that its flaws scrabble to gain a purchase.

This poor-surfers-make-good drama from Morgan O’Neill and Ben Nott relies more than it should on toned thighs and taut gluteals. Be grateful; there’s nothing to see on dry land that’s anywhere near as compelling.

Ms. Bledel works her “Gilmore Girls” charm to the hilt, but no amount of cerulean-eyed sparkle can transcend this level of thudding mediocrity.

Teeming with smart American humorists - and a passel of Arquettes - all unconditionally admiring. What's astonishing, then, is that not one of them stepped in to dissuade their friend from participating in such an embarrassingly awful project.

This lifeless adaptation only proves that making entertaining movies out of hard-to-swallow ideas is as challenging as you might think.

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

A minor chiller and major downer from the talented Alexandre Aja.

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.

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.

An unruly mash-up of terrific anecdotes and terrible teeth, grainy film and garish memories, Who Killed Nancy? cares less about investigating a death than about vindicating an accused killer.

This spinoff from the story of a magical kingdom besieged by an evil empire is too ludicrous for words.

Despite excellent stunt work and a too-brief appearance by Orlando Jones as an unflappable cop, the movie -- unlike Mr. Douglas’s hairdo -- never rises above mediocrity.

It’s all just so much empty eye candy.

Silly, slack and unforgivably tedious, Thomas Harris's screenplay is padded with interminable flashbacks and a bombastic score that telegraphs every emotion Hannibal represses. And there are a lot of them.

Bitter Harvest feels awkward and parochial.

Thunder Force, the latest in a string of dismal comic collaborations between Melissa McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone, does nothing to improve upon its predecessors.

Crisply shot and surprisingly well acted, Mother's Day suffers from an overly long script (a tornado hovers off screen to no apparent purpose) and annoying glitches in continuity.

Fans typically expect well-executed jump scares, fun plot twists and the occasional rubbery monster. What they probably don’t expect is the sophisticated allegory that Imaginary appears to be flirting with — and comes close to pulling off — before losing its nerve.

Dim in wits and lighting, The Possession of Michael King strains our eyes, spits on our intelligence and saps our generosity of spirit. Relatively untaxed, however, is the part of the brain that processes new experiences: There’s scarcely a shot or an idea in this first feature from David Jung that we haven’t seen many times before.

Unevenly directed by Isaac Feder, Sex Ed droops.

In David Blue Garcia’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre the blade is more active than ever. But while Leatherface, the homicidal head case who fashions masks from the skin of his victims, might be busier, his ability to scare has waned considerably.

Despite Ms. Janssen's fine taste in music - it's lovely to hear Jorma Kaukonen's "Genesis" on the soundtrack - her film's downfall was ensured by a leading lady who will always be more credible chasing zombies than the American dream.

Sparing with scares and judicious with gore, the director, Ben Ketai (working from a screenplay by Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano), proves better at summoning atmosphere than developing characters.

This saga, set in Berlin, is more committed to its bloodletting than to any of its characters.

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

Though the film's final, disturbing image forces race to the forefront and belatedly raises wider issues of persecution, its most controversial suggestion is not that Jesus might have been black but that he might have been a really terrible actor.

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.

Playing like a mashup of tropes from far superior small- and large-screen entertainments (Scandal, House of Lies, Ides of March), this clunky feature from Bill Guttentag is satire at its most soft-bellied and toadying.

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.

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.

Viewed solely as a string of action sequences, Erased delivers the kind of dryly efficient, wearyingly familiar entertainment that already clogs too many of our movie screens.

There is so much recycled material in “Fatal Affair” that its carbon footprint must have been zero.

As she learns the value of public schools and pickup trucks, her erstwhile friends in Philadelphia seem happy to be rid of her. By movie's end, you'll feel exactly the same.

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

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

Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is "Romeo and Juliet" with fewer manners and more exotic dentition.

Allan Loeb’s script is glib and grating.

As the uniformly annoying characters stumble around, screaming and cursing, we don't give a hoot for their survival. Quite the reverse: we're counting the minutes until the asylum's ghostly inhabitants silence them for good.

Fusty research, aging interviewees and decades-old advertising campaigns offer background to the uninitiated, but Mr. Warrick's muddled, undisciplined approach destroys even the possibility of a cogent overview.

The barnacle-encrusted plot...is dumbed down to the studs.

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.

Yawningly directed by Jim Isaac, Skinwalkers is a slavering mess that buries its clunky addiction metaphor beneath a welter of genre clichés, all delivered in extra-slow motion.

Ornamenting its flimsy back story with assaultive sound effects and asinine behavior, Out of the Dark strains to shock.

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.

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

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

The shocks are short and sharp, the acting is strongest where it counts, and the director of photography, Adam Marsden, washes everything in a swampy green that makes spooks pop.

A movie so hopelessly late to the coming-out party that you want to haul everyone connected with it into the 21st century.

All in all, this is a movie best enjoyed with a snoot full and a morbid disposition.

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

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.

Notwithstanding a lively turn from Charles Dance as a chatty brain-tumor sufferer and a perfect Charlotte Rampling as a tranquil guide to oblivion, Euphoria gives up the ghost well before either of its unhappy heroines.

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.

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

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.

Ms. Basinger commits to her disturbed character. But the script (by the director, Anders Morgenthaler) makes Maria’s behavior so reckless — at times, she’s practically begging to be mugged or worse — that we have no chance of sympathizing with her.

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

A toothless examination of marketing and morality, Álex de la Iglesia’s As Luck Would Have It combines lecture, farce and soapy sentiment in a single misshapen package.

Too slight to persuade, The Unbelievers is also too poorly made to entertain. The rational roots of atheism deserve a much better movie than this.

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.

The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is loud, lazy, profane and well nigh incoherent. It’s also at times quite funny, with a goofy vulgarity that made me giggle.

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.

Jolene's skin may smell like warm milk to Brad, but to the rest of us it has curdled long before she leaves his bed.

As popular as this window-fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior “9 1/2 Weeks” instead, then I will have done my job.

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.

Propelled by an eccentric cast of characters and increasingly seamy locations, Fix dashes headlong through Los Angeles with a little charm and a lot of verve.