Jeannette Catsoulis

An imbecilic misfire.

Marshall, a world away from the dank dread and crawling terror of his 2006 spelunking stunner, “The Descent,” directs like a dog at a squirrel convention, charging gleefully from one witlessly violent encounter to the next. Ian McShane, as Hellboy’s adoptive father, does what he can to calm the chaos, but the movie left me alternately baffled and battered.

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

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.

The soullessness of the enterprise is staggering. Making clichéd, cynical gestures toward romance, Mr. Harris (whose last feature was almost a decade ago) tortured me for a full 96 minutes.

Puzzles more than it pleases.

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.

The plot, unlike its execution, is not terrible.

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

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

Despite Mr. Stormare’s valiant efforts, “Dark Summer” (directed by Paul Solet) feels listlessly plotted and insipidly performed.

An exhausted pileup of rock-movie clichés, The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll presents artistic self-destruction with the solemnity of a movie that has invented a spanking-new genre.

There used to be entertainment in the dodging and wit in the scripts; now there’s 3-D.

Proceeding with a strained quirkiness that infects much more than the names of its main characters, this first feature by Justin Reardon is a paean to the kind of narcissism that sucks the air out of every scene.

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.

A moody thriller with more emphasis on mood than thrills.

Neither remotely credible nor more than minimally entertaining, Stacy Cochran’s New York City romance, Write When You Get Work, presents rich folk as gullible idiots and blue-collar crooks as heroes.

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.

A tired mash-up of every men-behaving-badly sitcom ever to grace a third-tier television network, Speed-Dating tries to coax laughs from characters so dated even Eddie Murphy would balk.

As one bloody encounter treads on the heels of the next, all that remains is a tiny indie undone by its own vicious ambitions.

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.

Offers agony in a vacuum, a villain without a motive and a hero with more personal problems than lines of dialogue.

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.

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.

Airless, senseless — and seemingly endless — this clumsy heist movie, directed by the prolific schlockmaster Brian Trenchard-Smith, manages to make even the magnificent coastline of Queensland, Australia, feel dreary.

An exhaustingly pretentious heave of artistic self-involvement, The Time Being takes an exceptionally handsome journey to nowhere at all.

Dumb as dirt and just as generic, Hitman: Agent 47 trades brains for bullets and characters for windup toys.

A raft of marquee names — including Seth Rogen, James Franco and Will Ferrell — can’t save Zeroville, a maddeningly surreal head trip through Hollywood history and movie-fan insanity.

Struggling to connect the filaments of past and present, youth and maturity, Dolan seems lost, his signature vivaciousness and sense of fun almost entirely muted. Instead, what lingers is a feeling of being lectured to — which isn’t much fun at all.

The title is bad enough, but it’s all downhill from there in the revolting Belgian farce Mother Schmuckers. I would say words fail me, but they don’t. It’s just that most of them are unprintable.

Suffers from abusive close-ups, repetitive fight sequences and uninspired demon design.

Borderline incoherent and unrepentantly lewd, this buddy-cop comedy (based on the 1977-83 television series of the same name) substitutes cars, ’copters and motorcycles for actual characters

An overwrought, undercooked tale of crazy love and crazier revenge.

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.

According to the press notes, pandorum means “Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome”; whatever that is, by the end of the movie I was convinced I had caught it.

With little furtherance of the plot beyond confusing flashbacks to a creepy childhood triad, “Chapter 2” is hackneyed and silly, relying heavily on Petsch’s sneakily resilient scream queen.

Tame and inoffensive, The Haunting of Molly Hartley is no more than a big-screen lasso for the "Gossip Girl" and "Supernatural" demographic.

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

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.

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.

Too leaden for adults and too baffling for kids.

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

Female-empowerment fantasy or just plain prurience, "Grave" is extremely efficient grindhouse. If there is any message here at all, it's don't mess with a novelist: being creative is her job.

A futuristic vomitorium of bosoms and bullets.

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

Easy on the eyes but brutal on the ears.

An unfortunately clunky, relentlessly corny salute to Rani Laxmibai.

Featuring more twists than a 1960s dance marathon, Terminal is a flashy, hyperstylized bore.

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

Features annoying characters navigating unbelievable situations.

Directed by Ross Katz and filmed like an ad for erectile-dysfunction medication, The Choice is almost repellently synthetic.

Memory is an inane, sluggish mess.

Surplus buffoonery and a new ending add nothing to the original, leaving us with a movie that obsesses over death while showing all too few signs of life.

If you are going to be this mean-spirited, you had better deliver the jokes, but the film's attacks on pretentious parents - not to mention put-downs of hardworking immigrants - consistently come off as more hateful than humorous.

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.

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.

A tiresome blend of overacting and underwriting, The Salon moves from one predictable conversation to another -- the lack of available black men, the wondrousness of Bill Clinton -- without originality or comic rhythm.

Hilary Brougher’s Innocence (based on Jane Mendelsohn’s 2000 novel) moves to the formulaic beats of the second-rate TV movie, albeit one cloaked in an ultra-glossy sheen.

A minimalist mood poem to loss and alienation.

Radiating a distinctly retro vibe, this throwaway thriller from the German director Christian Alvart tosses a bone to Renée Zellweger, who chews it to a nub as Emily Jenkins, a harried social worker.

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.

Despite solid acting (including John Cusack as a plainclothes detective), Arsenal is hobbled mainly by its director’s histrionic tendencies.

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

If Petitjean’s dialogue is problematic, its delivery is no less so: at times, the discord between a character’s words and lip movements suggests that some line readings had to be dubbed.

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

Failing to expand on the intriguing notion that evil can find physical form online, Smiley, like its sutured monster, is sadly more to be pitied than feared.

Other People’s Children desperately wants to take a deep dive into a young woman’s pain and the solace of artistic expression. For that to happen, though, would require much better actors and a much smarter script.

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

In this achingly inept thriller, you will see Naomi Watts do what she can to sell a plot of such preposterousness that the derisory laughter around me began barely 20 minutes in.

While fragments of past, present and who-knows-what events flash past, Cage, bless him, fully commits to the nuttiness.

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

Clogged with court transcripts, medical records and repetitive (if moving) patient testimony, Burzynski tickles the mind only at the cost of trampling the eyes.

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.

He might as well be describing the act of watching this grating round robin of connubial dysfunction and romantic disappointment.

[A] regrettably hokey first feature from Bryan Anthony Ramirez.

This sickly sweet concoction sets your teeth on edge.

A poker-faced puzzle whose biggest shock is the absence of Sarah Michelle Gellar.

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

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.

Oppressively mirthless, Outlaws can nevertheless be enjoyed, after a fashion, as a surreal tapestry of macho garbling.

After a particularly brutal, attention-grabbing start, Breaking Point quickly devolves into a flavorless stew of murder, corruption, blackmail and baby tossing.

Filled with sappy dialogue and screeching strings, Truth is a puerile excavation of secrets and sickness.

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.

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.

Cuter than a basket of puppies licking a litter of kittens, An Invisible Sign is an excruciatingly whimsical collision of adult themes and kid-friendly aesthetic.

Tailor-made for those who like their violence multifaceted and their women monosyllabic.

Substituting sex for suspense and pop music for ideas, the director Christian E. Christiansen drags The Roommate from limp beginning to lame conclusion.

Dan Kay’s filament-thin story, accessorized with flapping vultures and disturbing graffiti, relies entirely on Mr. Cage’s desperate-dad energy.

Sadly, the only thing audiences are likely to find horrific is the acting. Or the possibility that any of these people might make another movie.

Dry as new bank notes and doggedly uncinematic, Simon Yin's $upercapitalist approaches the seamy side of international finance with a story as stale as the subprime meltdown.

With a peephole-riddled set and a flashback-heavy screenplay, Black Christmas smothers terror beneath a blanket of unnecessary information, revealing too much and teasing too little.

Shatteringly stupid and repulsively misogynistic, Martyrs mashes revenge, torture and the supernatural into one solid, quasi-religious lump.

While you might leave with several unanswered questions, the most concerning one is how this fiasco was ever financed in the first place.

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.

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.

A scorching affront to Italians, Iraqis and the intelligence of movie audiences everywhere.

Featuring the usual fractured visuals, generic victims and pinballing cameras — both hand-held and mounted on bike helmets — Exists nevertheless has an unusually dreamy opening and a few surprisingly entertaining tweaks.

Soulless, joyless and depressingly graceless, Alien Girl plays like an early Guy Ritchie knockoff without the jokes or Cockney accents.

Not even the august presence of Maximilian Schell can dispel the odor of fusty smut that clings to House of the Sleeping Beauties, a clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence.

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

National Lampoon’s Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj harnesses smut and silliness to an oddly innocent tale of true love.

Unless you’re trapped on an airplane or enjoying movie night at the penitentiary, you have no excuse for watching Killers. A brain-deadening collision of high concept and low standards.

Mashing limp romance and artless satire into a ludicrously contrived plot, The Clapper lurches from one mirthlessly eccentric scene to another.

Arriving as inevitably as puberty, Bratz introduces the swollen-headed, fashion-addicted dolls of the title to a live-action movie.

Missing no stops on the road from cloying to annoying, Harlem Aria has waited more than 10 years for domestic release. Maybe its destiny has been written.

Subtle as a sledgehammer and shallow as a saucer, Asking for It is painted in such broad strokes that — with just a smidgen of humor — it would pass for satire.

By the midway point, viewers will be questioning whether they would rather remain in their seats or put their eyes out with a fork.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Really, how slovenly is it to use invisible aliens? If you're going to tease us with nothing but pinwheels of light for three-quarters of the film, you'd better have one heck of a reveal up your sleeve.

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

Evidencing more bullets than brains, Vice — a bit of ephemeral science-fiction twaddle directed by Brian A. Miller — has absolutely nothing to recommend it.

This fiasco from the writer and director Mark Edwin Robinson will persuade you that the title refers not to a place without light (though there’s precious little) but to a story without reason.

Reveling in the vivid Bangkok locations, Geoff Boyle’s photography is crisp and bright, and Dion Lam’s action choreography unusually witty.

The movie offers less gore than the average Band-Aid commercial and fewer scares than the elimination episodes of "Dancing With the Stars."

Men are pigs, and women are sick of it, says Girls Against Boys, a dumb, dreary, let's-get-back-at-them slasher in which pulverized genitals pass for feminist critique.

Prostitutes are not the only things butchered in The Lodger, a spooky story ruined by lumpen dialogue, cloddish performances and a director and writer (David Ondaatje) oblivious to both.

Pretentious and inane.

London Fields, directed by Matthew Cullen and adapted from Martin Amis’s 1989 novel, is, quite simply, horrendous — a trashy, tortured misfire from beginning to end.

Pathetically inept.

A horror movie of such ineptitude that it invites sympathy for even its least gifted participants.

Neither suspenseful nor even comprehensible, John Swetnam’s dashed-off script (carelessly directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi) throws up plenty of red herrings — and a stupendously idiotic ending — but not a single character worth caring about.

A cheapie hostage drama with a lot more swagger than substance, The Killing Jar strains to wring tension from a tired premise and an airless script.

A movie that feels like punishment for a crime you can't remember committing.

This laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism and hardscrabble survival replaces story with outline and characters with place holders.

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

Oconomowoc has one thing going for it: a running time of just 79 minutes, even if every one of them feels like an eternity.

The director, Vic Armstrong — whose lengthy résumé hews primarily toward stunt work — displays no facility with actors and even less with pacing.

I wouldn’t dare to predict who might cough up admission for this; but if watching prostitutes guzzle Twinkies and swallow handguns is your thing, then by all means come on down.

Unlike Michael Knowles's similarly plotted and vastly superior "Room 314," The Trouble With Romance is visually stagnant and tonally bewildered.

"How are we going to get out of here?" Sarah squawks at one point, a question that Mr. Dourif ought to have asked his agent long before the cameras began to roll.

Told with multiple flashbacks and minimal taste, this exuberantly scuzzy thriller - shot in less than two weeks with a budget as micro as the women's skirts - pits sleazy cops against fun-loving disrobers in the middle of scraggly foliage.

Veering from ridiculous to revolting, The Tortured would like to be about more than singed nipples and seared skin. And it is: It's also about cracked toes and lanced eardrums.

Overkill is what Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer do best: as the uncontested titans of the parody genre (with fingers in everything from the “Scary Movie” franchise to the more recent “Epic Movie”) they continue to prove that ridiculing other movies is much easier than making your own.

Dopey dialogue and less-than-scrupulous continuity augment the ramshackle vibe of a movie that’s too inept to qualify as camp or cult.

Custom designed for its smirking star (who is also an executive producer), this tasteless train wreck asks only that she preen and prance on cue.

A cringingly awkward tale of sexual predation and female lunacy.

A film with nothing to please the eye and even less to excite the mind.

A caldron of unspeakable acts and unpalatable language, The Human Centipede 3 takes the bottom-feeding standards of its previous chapters (released in 2010 and 2011) to new lows of debasement.

Insulting several nationalities and most of the filmgoing public, Tied to a Chair lurches through acting atrocities, continuity glitches and narrative gaps with grating insouciance.

It’s a poorly acted grab bag of shopworn ideas and hyperbolic behaviors that not even Ryan Murphy could translate into entertainment.

Keir Moreano’s muted yet moving record of his father's experience as a volunteer doctor in Vietnam, documents a journey that's substantially more philosophical than medical.

Everyone’s sorry about something in Forgiveness, a glum drama about the way repentance can do more damage than the sin that precedes it.

An unusually perceptive scrutiny of absence and emptiness.

Border Post is notable for representing all of Yugoslavia's former member republics among its producers and for a tone that juggles humor and harshness without sacrificing either.

In images veering from literal to cryptic to surreal, the movie presents a society where the weak are exploited and the vulnerable unprotected.

Art house meets grind house in Cargo 200, Alexey Balabanov’s morbidly compelling thriller set in the Soviet Union.

Though not without its charms -- the scenes in Mumbai are comically chaotic -- Offshore might have raised more chuckles when it was made, in 2006, than in the economic chill of 2009. And not only in Michigan.

Trafficking in irresponsible inferences and unsupported conclusions, the filmmaker Brent Leung offers himself as suave docent through a globe-trotting pseudo-investigation that should raise the hackles of anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the basic rules of reasoning.

A creative tour de force, an intellectual high-wire act as astonishing as it is entertaining.

Filled with clear, bright images and moments of skewed genius, this delicate debut effortlessly evokes those languid summer doldrums, when even a rotting girlfriend is better than no girlfriend at all.

The plot of Mars owes at least as much to bodily fluids as it does to science fiction.

Best appreciated drunk or otherwise impaired, Satan Hates You is the kind of horror movie that appears to have been shot in someone's basement using a box of old Halloween costumes.

Ms. Uberoi's straight-shooting style is a perfect match for her salt-of-the-earth subject, a hard-working husband and father with more on his plate than most.

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.

It's the film's geometrists who enthrall most, revealing that many of the shapes - one of which famously made the cover of a 1990 Led Zeppelin album - hold entirely new answers to Euclidean problems.

More successful at conjuring atmosphere than at plot, We Go Way Back is nicely acted but frustratingly slight.

Against all reason, Byron's televangelist-led quest for clarity compels us to follow, the film's melting, naturalistic images softening the occasional scream of dialogue repeated beyond all necessity.

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

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

Filled with joyless people in drab rooms (Josh Silfen's grubby cinematography doesn't make things any cheerier), Silver Tongues takes a novel idea and uses it to jerk us around. Swirling with unease, its scenes set us up for a payoff that never materializes and strand its actors in a bitter present.

Though speckled here and there with uneasy comedy, Toll Booth is a psychological pressure cooker that could blow its lid at any moment.

Filmed in high-definition black and white, Ms. Menkes's often exquisite compositions - a single, attenuated shot of the aftermath of a car crash is a miracle of choreography - drive a narrative mired in poverty and spiritual desperation.

The film takes 70 minutes and a lot of silly chatter to conclude what every woman well knows: wearing hooker heels will have most men eating out of her hand. Or, if she's lucky, licking her aching feet.

More grounded in simple observation than in fanciful theories, this effortlessly engaging story of sudden tragedy and halting recovery wisely focuses on the facts and leaves the wonder to the audience.

Unfolding in New England over four vibrantly represented seasons, "Feelings" is a small-scale wonder. Pivotal events play out in the spaces between scenes, leaving only emotional imprints that we interpret within a timeline that may not be entirely linear.

Narrating as he goes, his humor as warm and dry as the ground beneath his feet, Mr. Soling is an unconventional explorer whose interactions with the long-suffering Ik - the women quiet and watchful, the men seamed and talkative - are politely deferential. He's clearly not there to engage in scientific study; he's simply reaching out across continents on a hunch that even eminent scientists can get it wrong.

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

Neither educational nor engaging.

An unabashed sales pitch for international adoption, Thaddaeus Scheel’s Stuck aims for the heart much more than the mind.

A warm thank you to those whose work is mostly invisible and entirely necessary.

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

Three Sisters documents extreme poverty in rural China with the compassionate eye and inexhaustible patience of a director whose curiosity about his country’s unfortunates never seems to wane.

A Pan-Asian romantic melodrama that virtually pokes you in the eye with its fakery.

Cinematographer Du Jie delivers moments of visual ecstasy that almost make us forget that they’re framing a reckless cipher.

Cool and cerebral, Apparition stubbornly resists our desire to connect with its troubled characters... Even so, the film’s sophistication creates space for us to ponder deeper, unanswered questions.

The undisciplined shooting style and underdeveloped script confound the actors at every turn. Despite their best efforts, they never overcome the limitations of a movie more intent on cutting corners than fleshing out a story.

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

Predictable musical montages fail to deflate an exceptionally subtle script (by Mr. Vallely) and Ms. Ynoa’s astonishingly mature, hard-to-pin-down performance.

A mildly engaging lowlife odyssey that struggles not to choke on its own style.

Interweaving Inuit life today with re-enactments of the culture 100 years ago, People of a Feather warmly portrays a cold, uncertain present and a worrying future.

Some predictable plot turns aren’t as damaging as they could be, thanks to solid acting (there isn’t a weak performance in the bunch) and lead characters with distinct personalities and motivations.

Respectful and thorough, this unembellished true-crime story might have only regional appeal, but its depressing reminder of our failure to prevent similar calamities will resonate nationwide.

Messy in parts and at least 15 minutes too long, Personal Tailor is also cunningly acted and lushly photographed (by Zhao Xiaoshi) in dazzling candy-bright colors.

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

Even if we can get past unlikely details (like a mental institution that allows patients to play with scissors), the drab locations and dull performances suck the air out of a story (by Mr. Irving and Rick Santos) that’s every bit as troubled as its unappealing heroine.

A biting, sometimes droll look at the allure of humiliation, Ape appears simple, but its underlying machinery is joltingly clever.

Amid a cacophony of accusations and justifications, it’s the children’s broken limbs, ladderlike scars and disfigured, emaciated bodies that paradoxically hold the film together.

If we brush aside the unanswered questions, what we’re left with is a simple tale of two men: One who may have been lost, and one who only felt that way.

Charmingly slight and casually confessional.

If the twisty finale underwhelms, Mr. Carreté’s enigmatic style and textured images offer their own doomy rewards.

Ms. Weisman offers a deluge of information. But for those not already versed in the lingo or the people involved, the movie plays like a blurry primer to an anarchic, mysterious world.

A blue collar poem threaded with old-timer memories and present-day pain, Braddock America pays bittersweet tribute to a once-thriving Pennsylvania steel town and those who stuck around to bear witness to its decline.

Rather than present an evenhanded assessment of the issues at stake, the director, Todd Darling, is so busy fist-pumping for urban farming — and so dazzled by his granola heroes — that naysayers must be demeaned and denigrated.

Directing with an old-fashioned tenderness toward his unassuming star, Ken Ochiai conjures a swan song to a waning art form and those who practice it.

Little more than an archipelago of historical set pieces linked by a syrupy causeway of sentiment, JK Youn’s Ode to My Father may have slain them in South Korea, but its packaged pain and bullet-point structure are likely to leave Western audiences cold.

These drifting, unresolved stories may lack dramatic punch, but Mr. Nikolic, who teaches film at the New School, draws lovely performances from his cosmopolitan cast and oodles of atmosphere from a spare piano-and-strings soundtrack.

A tiny, piercing study of dawning desperation that’s all the more remarkable for being virtually silent.

Communicating much with very little, Guidelines (“La Marche à Suivre”) presents a profoundly hopeful view of education as a civilizing force and a haven for transformation. There have been many more eventful high school movies, but rarely one that’s more absorbed in the forming of adults and the shaping of citizens.

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.

The rambling, uncertain tone engendered by Ms. Sichel’s striving to align her Buddhist beliefs with the harsh realities of terminal illness also weakens her story’s gravitational pull.

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.

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.

Slow and sincere, The Debt bites off more plot than it can dramatically chew, its characters — especially the go-between played by the excellent Argentine actor Alberto Ammann — diluted by political maneuvering.

Dependably genuine, and suffused with Mr. Jaglom’s increasingly mellow intelligence, this lighthearted backstage drama will feel to his fans like a gathering of familiars.

Narrated, rather annoyingly, by the Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, Huntwatch feels dismayingly one-sided. Yet as we hear of animals being skinned alive and see a bludgeoned pup linger in agony, any pro-hunt argument seems emphatically beside the point.

Guided by the work of a handful of burr-like journalists, this dense and disturbing documentary dives into the regulatory quagmire of California water rights with more courage than hope.

This first feature from Ari Issler and Ben Snyder (who both wrote the script with Mr. Almanzar, a military veteran) refuses to revel in violence.

Though disappointment and loneliness guide its conversations, the movie isn’t bleak; it’s a touching and tender commentary on the need to be seen and the desire to be heard.

Working a low body count and a slow burn, Desolation is a decent short film that’s been unwisely expanded to feature length.

Small and stagy and claustrophobic, Shining Moon is visually rough yet oddly enticing in its experimental awkwardness.

Though the movie’s loose, sampling style can leave regions and varieties poorly differentiated, its real stars are the vintners. Young or old, entrepreneur or family-only producer, all are passionate and poetic about their beloved beverage.

Watching the men as they work, attend 12-step meetings and struggle to repair frayed familial bonds, she unearths moments of raw revelation that quietly highlight our shameful lack of effective help.

While most movies of this type simply peter out, “Instructions” maintains such an unswerving commitment to its dark purpose that its final, gorgeously tenebrous images will leave you wobbly for days.

Using real experiences shared by the homeless in story workshops, Omotoso — who was also a creator of the South African television series “A Place Called Home” — directs with empathy and without sentimentality.

High on music and hot with the thrill of discovery, A Tuba to Cuba swarms with shiny happy people.

Yet underneath the plotting and internecine tussles of the would-be escapees lurks something much more interesting: the story of a seduction.

Shot mostly in black and white and with an improvisational feel, My Friend the Polish Girl is cool and clever, feigning social realism with winking calculation.

Unspooling over the course of a few lazy summer days, the film offers an enigmatic examination of youthful alienation, its plot irresolute and unpredictable.

The cliché of the volatile chef riding roughshod over his subordinates receives a thorough airing in Nose to Tail, a resolute but finally punishing wallow in self-destructiveness and obnoxious male behavior.

Roth is never less than a treat as a woman whose veil of class and privilege is being slowly lifted to reveal her misplaced loyalties. The Crimes That Bind might feel leaden, but Alicia’s transformation feels lighter than air.

Cemetery is primarily a slow and lovingly detailed immersion in the sights and sounds of the jungle and the mahout’s devoted attention to his animal.

Wordy and stilted (it was derived from a stage play), this low-budget debut nevertheless benefits from a mesmerizing central performance by Suzan Anbeh.

Wise viewers will not be expecting an action movie, but The Marijuana Conspiracy is worse than inert: It’s shallow and tone-deaf. Attempts to highlight the sexism and discrimination of the time are either embarrassingly awkward or troublingly facile.

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.

By turns alarming and poignant, Alex Parkinson’s infuriatingly deferential film recounts how Carter — passionately attached to Lucy and admittedly clueless about how to facilitate her adjustment — abandoned her life to live with Lucy on a remote island. Her devotion is extraordinary, but her obliviousness is shocking.

An insufferable movie.

Tipping his hat to the Italian thriller genre known as giallo, Contenti (who wrote the unfussy script with Manuel Facal) sets up a string of witty, highly specific slayings of audience members unaware they’re both voyeurs and prey.

Shaping personal and geographical history into sun-drenched dollops, the director Heinz Brinkmann fashions a charmingly quirky guide to his island home.

While there is much to admire in this scrappy, micro-budgeted debut feature, its sci-fi shenanigans are too convoluted and its visuals too claustrophobic to sustain interest.

Sad and strange and deeply upsetting, “Side A” profits from Claudio Beiza’s velvety, gray-green images and a soundtrack pulsing with heartbeats and the distressing whine of Ulysses’s hearing aid.

Calzado uses more experimental techniques to expand his narrative, paralleling the flickering impermanence of filmed images with physical and psychological decay.

A sequel so dumb that no effort by Willis could reasonably be expected to save it.

The durable director Lloyd Kaufman lobs multiple notions at the screen to see what sticks. In a movie held together with this many slimy fluids, pretty much everything does.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about Sophia Banks’s Black Site — a dreary, underwritten thriller — is an ending that suggests a sequel might already be in the works. For the sake of its beleaguered star, Michelle Monaghan, I can only hope not.

Familiarity might be the point, but a screenplay this coarse leaves the actors little wiggle room, reducing them to mouthpieces for recycled jokes.

The running time is too long, and the finale’s screaming too prolonged; but, unlike childbirth, this good-natured movie delivers a dry, funny and utterly painless experience.

More tingly than terrifying (and more than a smidge off-the-wall), “Dark” has a cheeky boldness. Rea, a prolific independent filmmaker, deploys the gore judiciously and his actors are above reproach.

A trashy treat coated in a high-art gloss, The Attachment Diaries gleefully kneads melodrama, noir, horror and sexual perversion into a pathological romance between two deeply damaged women.

The style is stilted, the look rudimentary, with Abhilasha Dewan’s cheeky animation supplying an occasional visual lift. Yet as Wilson’s former errand boy guides us around her onetime fiefdom — conjuring an area fizzing with smut until doused by Giuliani — we may sense the milieu, but its matriarch remains stubbornly indistinct.

The Inner Cage isn’t exactly a feast for the senses. Even so, if you’re in the mood to listen, the film’s careful conversations occasionally serve up food for thought.

While Wolfe is an engaging screen presence, the movie is too clumsy and clichéd to conjure tension.