Joe Leydon

Criminally short on laughs as it tries to wring humor from dull activity by dim bulbs.

With plenty of cheap shocks but little real suspense, Hoboken Hollow is nothing more than an uninspired cavalcade of carnage, much of it shamelessly gratuitous.

Sometimes shaky, sometimes smooth handheld DV lensing (by Drews and Krybus) gives the pic an immediacy that greatly enhances its dramatic and emotional impact.

There's scarcely a boxing-movie cliche left unrecycled by the end of From Mexico With Love, an inaptly titled and thoroughly predictable indie drama directed by vet stunt coordinator and fight choreographer Jimmy Nickerson.

A modestly amusing dramedy that is all the more pleasant for its fleeting detours into cheeky fantasy.

Equal parts hagiography and hatchet job.

Even by the freewheeling, mood-swinging standards of Bollywood, the pronounced disparity between the pre- and post-intermission halves of Jab tak hai jaan is more than a tad jarring. Indeed, viewers may feel they've been treated to an oddly matched double bill -- a delightfully vivacious romantic dramedy, followed by an Old Hollywood sort of psychological melodrama.

Charged by alternating currents of nostalgic bemusement and wistful melancholy, TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer evinces all the amiable enthusiasm and discursive rambling one might expect from a do-it-yourself labor of love.

Will Wallace's turgid indie tells an earthbound and anemic story about an orphan's progress in small-town Texas.

It seems even more slapdash and desperately unfunny than their earlier work.

The film deserves more than just a passing grade, and is a good deal better than any plot synopsis might make it sound.

A strictly members-only entertainment for a dedicated target audience, Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’ will impress the uninitiated as very loud and very colorful, but not nearly fast-paced enough.

Khan conveys equal measures of cynical wit and authoritative gravitas as Kumar.

This well-crafted documentary from director Harold Crooks (“Surviving Progress”) offers a concise, engrossing and occasionally infuriating overview of the ways multinationals avoid taxes by stashing profits in offshore havens.

It’s quite possible that two or three generations of extended families will be entertained during group home-screen viewings of this antic and exciting trifle.

Mostly due to the limp direction by Timothy Woodward Jr., Traded never really offers much in the way of suspense or excitement. But the sporadic outbursts of bloody violence are efficiently rendered.

Scene after scene (or, if you prefer, round after round) of “The Fight Within” is clunky and didactic, and the movie as a whole has appreciably less mainstream appeal than several other recent, and much better, faith-based dramas.

An aggressively sincere but off-puttingly saccharine drama.

Hicky presents welcome surprises throughout The Grace of Jake, often introducing plot developments that would lead to melodramatic outcomes in more conventional films.

NOLA Circus (the title refers to both a lead character and the abbreviation for New Orleans) is the kind of hideously unfunny folderol in which most cast members are encouraged to act at the top of their lungs to compensate for the witless script.

Illicit is too tepid to qualify as an erotic thriller, or even a guilty pleasure, and the performances range from over the top to tiresomely obvious.

Savage Dog is a good deal less than watertight in terms of logic and credibility, but Adkins’ blunt-force physicality is sufficiently impressive to make it entirely believable that Tillman could emerge victorious when battling bigger and/or bulkier opponents.

Misfortune is what it is, a small-budget neo-noir so generic that one half-expects to see a bar code rather than closing credits at the end.

A by-the-playbook, family-friendly basketball comedy that never strays outside the paint, Thunderstruck likely won’t score much coin during its limited theatrical runs. Still, this lightly amusing confection — a Warner Premiere presentation that all too obviously resembles a typical made-for-homevid product — could rebound during playoffs in smallscreen platforms.

This drama about the spiritual awakening of “the world’s most famous atheist’” is predictably simplistic and maudlin in content. But it should satisfy the target demographic with an inspirational family-values message wrapped in a sudsy narrative.

Inoperable is insufferable.

First-time filmmaker Jason Headley, directing from his own screenplay, keeps his concoction moving briskly and humorously, with a light sprinkling of acceptably sweet sentimentality here and there.

Around the halfway mark, Desolation stops making sense altogether and spins off into the realm of free-form absurdity.

Imagine a standard-issue romantic comedy drained of humor and suffused with sincerity, and you’ll know what to expect from The Competition, a ponderous trifle that plays very much like the cinematic equivalent of a 45 RPM record spun on a turntable set at 33 1/3.

Huge swaths of “Agnyaathavaasi” are jaw-droppingly absurd, but those are preferable to the stretches that are dull and/or obnoxious.

The movie, while giddily entertaining and exciting in fits and starts, fails to coalesce into a satisfying whole.

Imagine a Troy Donahue-Sandra Dee teen romance of the early ‘60s with an inoffensive undercurrent of social consciousness, and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect from director David L. Cunningham’s thoroughly predictable but lightly enjoyable tale of love and prejudice in 1920s Hawaii.

Beautifully Broken enthusiastically and unabashedly celebrates the power of faith and forgiveness, and the potential for reconciliation and redemption. But it never comes across as simplistic (or simple-minded) in its boundless optimism. Rather, the movie is dramatically and emotionally satisfying.

For all its recycled elements and predictable narrative stratagems, this diverting Diwali-timed extravaganza stands on its own merits as a lightly satisfying popcorn epic — provided, of course, you have a taste for such over-the-top amusement.

As tedious as rush-hour traffic and as bland as a communion wafer.

The film sustains more than enough dramatic tension from scene to scene to keep a viewer intrigued, despite the sporadic fuzziness of motivation and plot specifics.

Movies as diverse as “Short Cuts,” “Weekend at Bernie’s,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Magnolia” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth” are among the source material that inspire wink-wink allusions and tonal disruptions throughout Super Deluxe, an overextended and wildly uneven Tamil-language extravaganza that manages to impress largely because it’s such a shoot-the-works, go-for-broke mess.

Despite the preponderance of sets and costumes spectacular enough to make Baz Luhrmann weep with envy, and a handful of thrillingly choreographed production numbers that sporadically quicken the movie’s pulse and boost its eye-candy quotient, the attractive yet underwhelming lead players are too hampered by the lethargic narrative to sufficiently distract viewers from their awareness of time passing and interest diminishing.

The final scenes stop far short of providing the cheap thrill of a feel-good wrap-up, and are all the more effective for that.

Chronic cynics and inveterate snarkers would do themselves — and everyone else — a great big favor by steering clear of Mission Mangal, an entertaining and ingratiating feel-good movie about the 2013 launch of the Mangalyann space probe, an against-all-odds triumph of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

Trace Adkins looms large in a dark and brooding sagebrush saga with a healthy dose of Spaghetti Western fatalism.

By turns viscerally exciting and predictably formulaic — and, quite often, both at once — Danger Close is an efficiently crafted and consistently involving old-school war movie propelled by matter-of-fact professionalism on both sides of the cameras.

As Malti, Indian superstar Deepika Padukone relies less on exceptionally convincing makeup than straight-from-the-heart conviction to give her multifaceted performance the solid ring of truth.

A deliberately paced and stealthily involving saunter through familiar territory.

Emerald Run is one of the weirdest hodgepodges to make its way to theater screens and digital platforms in quite some time.

A pleasantly predictable faith-based dramedy.

Here and there, amid the tedious sound and fury, you can spot some genuinely witty touches. Lynch and Shapiro are initially portrayed as flirty happy warriors who clearly delight in working with each other, and it’s a pity the movie didn’t make more of the chemistry generated between Robinson-Galvin and Benjamin.

Paydirt is a crime drama with darkly comical touches that possibly will be enjoyed best while you’re periodically distracted by other things — microwaving leftovers, feeding pets, washing face masks — and are unable to constantly focus on arrant contrivances and gaping plot holes.

Some people just don’t have the patience for lead performances that are as broad as a “Yellowstone” barn, and as hammy as a butcher shop specialty. I laughed unashamedly throughout the entire film. But your mileage may vary.

The very best thing in the entire movie is Rourke’s surprisingly affecting and consistently riveting portrayal of Kaden as a melancholy monster who is at once painfully self-aware and unapologetically amoral.

Dutch is dreadful. It’s a shambling, rambling recycling of clichés and conventions from ’70s Blaxploitation fare mixed with stilted murder-trial melodrama and half-baked morsels of sociopolitical topicality. But, really, to describe this rancid slice of ineptitude that way is to risk making it sound a lot more interesting than it is.

Once again, Lee prefers to canter rather than gallop as he spins his storyline, allowing his well-cast leads enough time to reveal themselves in sometimes leisurely, sometimes suspenseful dialogue exchanges.

As inspirational college sports movies go, Heart of the Champions doesn’t go, or row, nearly far enough off the beaten path. It’s every bit as boilerplate as its generic title might indicate.

It’s a marked improvement over Feifer’s own “Catch the Bullet,” released just last September — and it features a ferociously nasty turn by Bruce Dern in a role that recalls a character from yet another golden oldie, Walter Brennan’s vicious Old Man Clanton in “My Darling Clementine.”

One thing leads to another, at a pace that somehow feels frenetic and ponderous all at once.

High Heat is a hoot. Though it may sound in synopsis like standard-issue genre fare suitable for quick-serve consumption on digital and streaming platforms, this satisfying mashup of crime thriller and dark comedy plays almost like a wink-and-a-nod sendup of such cookie-cutter time-killers.

Using archival material and fresh interviews — including testimonials from at least two of his former lovers — Kates and Singer underscore Rustin’s matter-of-fact courage and self-effacing pragmatism.

Throughout much of The Ballad of Davy Crockett, it’s hard to shake the impression that an hour’s worth of plot has been padded to feature length.

A revealing and fascinating documentary portrait of James Carville.

This half-baked potboiler leaves one with the nagging suspicion that it was produced simply to meet some sort of quota, and cast with actors who came on board only because they lost bets.