Joe Leydon

To put it simply and gratefully: Braven is the sort of unpretentious yet thoroughly professional popcorn entertainment that brings out the best in everybody involved.

Equal parts 1960s-style Spaghetti Western pastiche and ’80s-style “Mad Max” knockoff, Scorched Earth is the sort of divertingly hokey post-apocalyptic B-movie that would have amused undiscriminating Blockbuster Video renters a generation ago, and now might pass muster as the pilot for a weekly SyFy series.

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.

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

This low-key and deeply felt indie is unsentimentally blunt while addressing the humiliating debilitations that often define geriatric life. At the same time, however, it scrupulously eschews excessive grimness and shameless heart-tugging, and elicits more than a few laughs in the bargain, while focusing more often on how the title characters deal with last chances and unfinished business.

Forever My Girl is a sweet but slight romantic drama that got lost on its way to the Hallmark Channel — or, more likely, was rebuffed by that channel’s gatekeepers for being, even by their standards, entirely too predictable — and wound up in theaters instead.

What Lies Upstream is a quietly devastating documentary that’s all the more attention-grabbing for being such a scrupulously restrained and slickly polished piece of work.

By the end of this meandering yet fascinating documentary, viewers are left with the impression that such attempts to bridge gaps and heal wounds, however well-intentioned, will have, at best, extremely limited success.

If Hangman were just a tad less formulaic, and settled for a slightly smaller body count, it might pass muster as the pilot movie for a basic cable police procedural.

Some bad movies trigger swells of anger and outrage, while others prompt industrial-grade snark and scorn. And then there are leaden clunkers like Just Getting Started that provoke an ineffable sense of sadness as one considers how much time, money and talent has been squandered on something so thoroughly useless.

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.

Written and directed by sibling filmmakers Ian and Eshom Nelms with equal measures of respect and skepticism for pulp conventions, the movie comes across as neither pastiche nor parody, but rather as a seriously down-and-dirty crime story with a savage sense of humor.

A fascinating and heartfelt documentary.

A smartly constructed and sardonically funny indie with attitude that somehow manages the tricky feat of being exuberantly over the top even as it remains consistently on target.

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.

There’s a point beyond which it’s difficult to believe anything that happens on screen, and impossible to care what is supposed to be real or not. Unfortunately, the movie continues for a lengthy stretch after that, until it literally trudges into a deep, dark hole.

Taken strictly on its own terms, the film adaptation is an arrestingly and sometimes excruciatingly suspenseful psychological thriller lightly garnished with horror-movie flourishes...and driven by a compelling lead performance that is entirely worthy of a description too often misapplied to lesser work: tour de force.

Against the Night isn’t a terribly good movie — it’s mostly a patchwork of clichés, stock characters and low-voltage shocks culled from dozens of similar small-budget thrillers — but it isn’t an entirely useless one, either

Gun Shy is the sort of leaden misfire in which actors labor mightily to transform themselves into cartoon caricatures in a desperate (and largely unsuccessful) attempt to make viewers think, despite all evidence to the contrary, they are watching a comedy.

More apolitical moviegoers are likely to simply enjoy the runaway train of action set pieces that Wu propels with his flimsy but serviceable plot, and dismiss all the jingoist chest-thumping as roughly akin to John Rambo’s stated desire to refight the Vietnam War — and, dammit, win this time! — in “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”

The final scenes of Dealt are all the more affecting for illustrating Turner’s newfound willingness to accept things he once deemed unacceptable without significantly compromising his personal code of honor.

Director Steve Gomer’s well-crafted faith-based film is affecting without undue heartstring-yanking, almost entirely saccharine-free and, perhaps most impressively, not entirely predictable.

"Sidemen” is an exceptionally entertaining and captivating tribute to the men and their music — and that there’s more than enough of said music here to please blues aficionados and recruit converts.

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.

[An] uneven but ultimately winning comedy.

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.