Justin Chang

Grittily propulsive filmmaking and solid performances from Owen Wilson and Lake Bell aside, there’s no escaping the movie’s hand-wringing manipulations and pandering sense of privilege.

Rebecca Hall's enjoyably bubbly lead performance lends the picture an occasional frisson of amusement.

Although funnier and mercifully shorter than its 2012 battle-of-the-sexes predecessor, this third collaboration between manic comedian Kevin Hart and director Tim Story (hot on the heels of their January hit “Ride Along”) is an exceedingly formulaic and ultimately exhausting thing to experience.

A cute but disposable item were it not for the story’s weird racial undertow.

The body count runs high at Brangwyn boarding school, but tension, surprise and viewer interest are the real casualties in The Moth Diaries.

This painfully well-meaning but largely unpersuasive bid for cross-generational understanding feels at once of-the-moment and too obvious by half, like a less overblown version of “Crash” for the information superhighway.

It’s astonishing how little tension or even momentary menace Trevorrow is able to mine from individual action sequences, how tame even T. rex now seems in its late-franchise dotage. The mix of practical and computer-generated effects used to bring these behemoths to life has evolved by leaps and bounds, but their ability to stir and scare us — much less provoke even a moment’s thought — is a thing of the ancient past.

One could imagine a context in which some of this belabored mayhem might be funny, maybe a dinner-theater stage with lots of booze and a strong audience-participation element. Seen from the vantage of your living room, however, the spectacle of Aniston and Sandler bumbling their way through one strained, busy set-piece after another becomes a deflating, even depressing experience.

Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.

Josh Stolberg launches a scalding attack on the stodgy conservatism of the American public school system, only to end up stacking the deck in egregiously smirky and simple-minded ways.

A ludicrous melodrama that begs to be handled as an over-the-top sex farce is instead treated with the solemnity of a wake, albeit one with a rather lenient dress code.

What rankles most about Amelia is the timidity and lack of imagination with which Nair approaches one of America's most exceptional and intriguing celebrity life stories.

Falls somewhere between stale retread and half-hearted parody of superhero-movie formulas.

Resulting mish-mash of exposition and speechifying opts to summarize rather than dramatize; one spends nearly as much time reading indigestible lumps of onscreen text as one does listening to the often distractingly post-dubbed dialogue.

A clumsily edited feature-length version of five episodes from History’s hugely popular 10-hour miniseries “The Bible,” this stiff, earnest production plays like a half-hearted throwback to the British-accented biblical dramas of yesteryear, its smallscreen genesis all too apparent in its Swiss-cheese construction and subpar production values.

Like a beautifully tailored suit that starts to smell funny after a few minutes, this sumptuous but stultifying lark sets up a quasi-Hitchcockian intrigue between two strangers abroad, but smothers any thrills or sparks in a haze of self-regard.

Waist Deep packs considerable energy and style into its tale of an ex-con forced back into a life of crime to rescue his kidnapped son. Yet the kinetic direction and occasional sly humor can't disguise the tale's banal brutality or pump much excitement into its routinized pileup of shoot-outs and car chases.

A capably assembled if ultimately unremarkable thriller.

Intermittently stirring and undeniably well made as it slowly unspools a multi-pronged drama set during the 1999 outbreak of the Second Chechen War, the picture has run-of-the-mill pacing and storytelling lapses that are compounded by its ultimately hectoring, didactic approach.

Jessabelle serves up a murky and underwhelming cauldron of Southern-fried voodoo-horror claptrap.

A depressing reminder of what Hollywood considers “original” material these days, “Red Notice” plays one of those self-consciously convoluted, ultimately derivative long cons that strain so hard to seem breezily insouciant they wind up wearing you out. By the end, it’s the clichés that warrant a rest.

Narrative incompetence is one of the more venial sins of big-budget filmmaking, but there is something particularly ugly and cynical about the sloppiness of The Cloverfield Paradox, as if its status as a franchise stepping stone excused its blithe contempt for the audience's satisfaction.

It’s as hard for us to get invested in his journey as it is for the film to find a narrative foothold.

The future looks alternately grim and hysterical in Aeon Flux, a spectacularly silly sci-fier that plays like "The Matrix" crossed with "The Island" and reinterpreted as a long-lost Michael Jackson video.

Even the Brit-wit chemistry of Russell Brand and Helen Mirren can't offset the self-conscious degree to which this tame, calculated effort sticks to its source.

Another blandly competent, thoroughly forgettable low-budget sci-fier assembled from the stray parts of other, better movies.

Nowhere near as much fun as its title, playing out like an unusually obtuse episode of "The Wire."

The movie is just a big, empty declaration of corporate dominance, a whirling CGI tornado that — like a much stupider Tasmanian Devil — ingests, barely processes and then promptly regurgitates everything in its path. It’s Upchuck Jones.

Sex Tape is an unaccountable drag — strained, toothless and far too tame to achieve the sort of outrageous, raunchy-titillating effect it’s aiming for.

Unable or unwilling to match the visceral chops and moral provocations of superior serial-killer chillers, Righteous Kill is content to be a twisty genre exercise; it's like "Seven" as reimagined by M. Night Shyamalan.

Well-made, often intensely gripping genre piece.

Unfortunately, it’s an anticlimactic conclusion at best, full of tacked-on thriller shenanigans that, once they’ve petered out, make you wonder exactly why this story drew the filmmakers’ attention to begin with. The answer to that, happily, can be found in Portman’s every glimmer of nuance.

What's onscreen feels as half-assed and juvenile as it was probably always envisioned to be, suggesting an umpteenth retelling of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" by way of "The Hangover," or perhaps a far less inspired version of "Attack the Block" transplanted to small-town Ohio.

This overplayed, underachieving laffer feels thoroughly manufactured to Disney specifications.

The deftness with which the helmer manipulated time in his earlier pics eludes him in this generic procedural context... leaving us with obfuscation but no genuine sense of mystery.

Revisiting the book of Exodus in a feverish Southern-gothic context, this lurid, often ludicrously entertaining slab of Biblesploitation builds an earnest case for spirituality in a skeptical age.

A flashy, lunkheaded sci-fi extravaganza sure to appeal to teenagers who like their interplanetary warfare bloodless, their high-school soaps squeaky-clean and their numbers countable on one hand.

Led by a trio of lackluster performances from Alan Rickman, Rebecca Hall and “Game of Thrones” thesp Richard Madden, this awkward, passionless drama conveys neither the sensuality nor the drawn-out sense of longing required by its period tale of a young secretary who falls in love with his employer’s wife.

This crudely made thriller plays like a stilted Cantonese riff on organized-crime cliches, substituting blood and brutality for novelty or insight.

A sporadically amusing, more often grating romantic comedy.

Directed with flat, joyless competence by Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland,” “Gangster Squad”), “Venom” brings with it a laborious, decades-spanning development history. A movie this long in the works should arrive on-screen feeling like more than just an afterthought.

The gender politics are as appealing as the rock-solid trio of lead actors (Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss), even when the movie itself proves less than persuasive.

This slickly assembled exploitation-movie wankfest gets some mileage out of its star’s fully committed performance, though not enough to offset the grim, monotonous tenor of the proceedings — or the glib, fetishistic recycling of Asian thriller tropes.

This is the sort of numbskull non-entertainment that considers it worthwhile to fly in a martial-arts superstar like Jet Li and have him sit around firing a machine gun, pausing every so often to deliver the most awkward line readings of his career.

A draggy, generally laugh-free outing that wastes a perfectly good Anna Faris.

A bland and innocuous small-fry outing that retains a measure of the original Hanna-Barbera cartoon's charm, though scarcely enough to justify the time, expense and visual-effects trickery it must have taken to inflate an endearing 2D cartoon into a dopey 3D extravaganza.

A well-cast but clumsily assembled buddy-for-hire comedy that increasingly smacks of desperation as it approaches its big-day climax.

First-time director Jason Zada does generate an intermittently spooky sense of mystery that not even the muddled scripting can fully demolish.

Director Ron Maxwell’s adaptation of Harold Frederic’s 1893 novel elicits a certain amount of admiration for its old-fashioned carpentry and earnest, worthy approach, but its stilted dramaturgy and endless speechifying defeat the committed efforts of a sprawling ensemble.

In short, this is a Shyamalan movie minus the bravado, the swagger; there are no audacious attempts to pull out the rug from under the audience, no ham-fisted lessons about the importance of religious belief or the power of storytelling.

From start to finish, the movie exudes a stiff, joyless coherence.

A stylish surface goes only so far to disguise the fact that we’re being sold some pretty cut-rate goods.

Whatever one makes of Get Hard’s contribution to our ongoing national debate about race, class and sexuality, there’s no denying that too much of it simply feels cheap, flailing and tired.

True torture-porn aficionados will be disappointed, as editor Tariq Anwar cuts away right before blade meets flesh -- a move that feels a tad, well, gutless under the circumstances. But elsewhere, "Citizen" proves startlingly graphic, even by R-rated standards.

It's really not all that bad. Ultra-derivative bigscreen transplant of one of the most successful (and controversial) games ever made plays like a mutant cross between a biotech thriller and a zombie movie, with all the alien autopsies, blood-gushing protuberances and meaningless scientific jargon that come with the territory.

At every turn the filmmakers have simplified, banalized and sentimentalized Alice and her psychological landscape in ways that reek of ignorance at best and cynicism at worst.

Bland, canned but studiously professional sequel retains most of the principals from Fox's family-friendly 2003 hit, including the ever-reliable Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt.

That Jung and his collaborators haven’t found any new angles to explore in this endlessly overworked religio-horror claptrap would matter far less if they had a firmer grasp of form and technique.

The results may delight those who believe recycled gags and endless cameos to be the very essence of great screen comedy, but everyone else will likely recognize Stiller’s wannabe Magnum opus as a disappointment-slash-misfire, the orange mocha crappuccino of movie sequels.

Meandering at the same draggy pace as its titular gay zombie, eroto-horror-satire mixes movie-within-a-movie machinations with graphic sex scenes that will titillate anyone who's ever wanted to see someone shagging an open wound.

Safe Haven offers an unsurprising but not unsatisfying tour through recognizable Sparkville terrain.

The film's noisy, slam-bang approach and lack of imagination in all nonvisual departments will keep it from rounding up a fresh generation of thrill-seekers.

Mira Nair’s latest immigrant saga saddles itself with a laborious narrative structure and half-baked thriller elements in a misguided attempt to open up what should be an intimate, introspective story.

The pacing of the individual scenes and the direction of the actors feel so clunky and amateurish, you may wonder after a while if “The Space Between Us” is meant to indicate the yawning emotional chasm between the actors, struggling to connect across a galaxy’s worth of wretched dialogue.

RV works up an ingratiating sweetness that partially compensates for its blunt predictability and meager laughs.

A ludicrous, borderline-nonsensical supernatural concoction with a slightly redeeming sense of its own silliness.

While the fine cast teases out glimmers of nuance here and there, Mary Agnes Donoghue’s film plays like a series of hand-holding growth exercises for closed-minded conservatives, and relies too heavily on its tying-the-knot finale for both dramatic momentum and emotional closure.

As directed by Stuart Hazeldine, even its jolts of surrealism feel curiously stilted; what it needed was a director whose reverence would be tempered by a healthy sense of the ludicrous, an ability to tap into and draw out the material’s stranger undercurrents.

Another tired, witless and potentially lucrative attempt to spin an exhausted buddy-cop template into action-comedy gold.

A witless undead retread served up as a vulgar revenge-of-the-dorks comedy.

Clearly, Passion means to be a hoot, a wet-dream thriller for cinephiles. But by the time it reaches its overwrought final act, the picture has generated neither the tension of its forebears nor the audacity that would allow it to transcend its silliness.

Not unlike the shiny snow globe at its center, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is a thing of consummate craftsmanship, a smoothly engineered and fundamentally lifeless object that's nevertheless capable of giving even the grinchiest moviegoers a brief attack of the warm-and-fuzzies.

A juiceless quasi-remake of George Romero's 1968 classic that, cardboard glasses aside, brings absolutely nothing new to the party.

Writer Aaron Sorkin, director Danny Boyle and star Michael Fassbender have given their subject the brilliant, maddening, ingeniously designed and monstrously self-aggrandizing movie he deserves.

There are stretches of tedium in this lumpy and derivative mythology, to be sure. But there are also immersive IMAX 3-D backdrops, striking ambiguities and irresistible moments of straight-faced lunacy. The line between hack work and labor of love may be perilously thin, but you can sense the difference in the way Jones earnestly, wholeheartedly embraces the magic that powers this realm.

For the most part, Cats is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious. Every so often it does paws — ahem, pause — to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot.

A comedy with its heart in the right place and everything else bizarrely out of joint.

This ultra-gory speculative noir is, at its infrequent best, certifiably nuts; the rest of the time, it's one numbingly brutal slog.

The only real tension you feel in Dying of the Light is that between the thoughtful, tough-minded character piece Schrader presumably thought he was making and the bruised, indifferent hackwork that has ultimately made it to the screen.

Stylishly made, armed to the teeth and ludicrous in the extreme.

While only the converted will likely see the redemption behind the manipulation, picture delivers a strong enough dose of spiritual saccharine to yield solid if not heavenly returns from its trusty target audience.

If liberation is the endgame of Fifty Shades Freed, most of the time we feel trapped right alongside the characters, immobilized by the pointless, suffocating beauty and the stultifying dramatic inertia of the world James has created for them.

Neither a particularly good movie nor the pop-cultural travesty that some were dreading.

All in all, it could have been worse. Puerile, crotch-fixated and very occasionally, inanely funny, Adam Sandler's raunchiest star vehicle in years has a small saving grace in Andy Samberg's performance.

Directed by Eli Roth with the same knowing smirk that has informed his previous exercises in self-satisfied bloodletting ("Cabin Fever," "The Green Inferno," the "Hostel" movies), the movie is a slick, straightforward revenge thriller as well as a sham provocation, pandering shamelessly to the viewer's bloodlust while trying to pass as self-aware satire. Your time, to say nothing of your outrage, is much better spent elsewhere.

This madcap romp runs out of steam well before the finish, but its combo of sweetness and high spirits -- not unlike the chemical composition of the dope-infused brownies that serve as a key plot device -- proves sufficiently ingratiating to satisfy viewers.

This Hellboy can be something to see. It can also be a giant bore.

At no point do the filmmakers seem to evince any real interest in the emotional misery they inflict on their characters; trauma here is just the quickest means to an uplifting end, or in this case, a montage’s worth of wretched epiphanies.

A self-serious eco-thriller assembled with a competent but heavy hand, A Dark Truth decries corporate corruption and Third World oppression in an all-too-obvious manner.

The best miracles are those that creep up on you unexpectedly rather than endlessly announcing themselves, and the ones in Winter’s Tale are fatally obvious and self-congratulatory.

Plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air.

Chaves is a solid craftsman with a weakness for easy jolts, but also a gift for filling the frame with strategically unnerving pools of light and shadow; he can turn even a daylit room into something ominous and suggestive.

Director Kriv Stenders’ tiresome tale of scheming adulterers, cruel spouses and one bemused hitman (Simon Pegg) feels like poser noir all the way, never achieving the darkly comic flair or freshness of style needed to sell its fatalistic twists.

Compacts nearly three years' worth of globe-trotting interviews into an often visually vibrant but rhetorically muddled package. So intent on giving (almost) every perspective a fair shake that it winds up saying little of consequence.

The problem here isn’t theological; even if it were in service of a different message entirely, the sheer gracelessness of Monteverde’s storytelling would be a massive turnoff.

Adorable and annoying, patently unnecessary yet kinda sweet, it's a calculated commercial enterprise with little soul but an appreciable amount of heart.

Evan Jackson Leong’s film makes the most of its superior access and exciting basketball footage, overcoming repetitive stretches by sheer dint of a tremendous underdog story.

Leaving no heartstrings untugged and no doggie-fart jokes uncracked, scruffy pic reps a very mixed breed of obvious humor, gently moving father-son drama and sub-"Backdraft" trial by fire.

Boorish and crass, homophobic and misogynistic, the very definition of sloppy seconds — par for the course where the present generation of male-driven, R-rated, “Hangover”-aping franchise comedies are concerned. That it somehow manages to send you out of the theater feeling tickled rather than sullied may be a mystery as impenetrable as the cosmos.

Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day is crammed with enough melodramatic incident for three movies, all of them seemingly scripted by Tyler Perry in a very foul mood.

Bringing together some of the least compelling dinner guests in recent memory at a world-class restaurant that’s about to permanently close its doors, this blandly seriocomic misfire from Spanish co-writer/director Roger Gual is too lazy to rise to the level of farce, too banal and insincere to work as drama.

Intermittently enjoyable hokum at best.

Happiness means steering clear of Hector and the Search for Happiness.

Helmer Donald Petrie seems at times to be making the modern-day equivalent of a Doris Day comedy, setting the pic in a lacquered fantasy New York, piling on cutesy-coy dialogue and mining a fluffy premise for all manner of far-fetched cleverness.

This tale of two former lovers reuniting after a 21-year separation also functions as a study of two terrific actors struggling to overcome the relentless mediocrity of their material.

Insofar as Hitman: Agent 47 is about anything, really, it’s about the pleasures of being on location — from the gratuitous image of Ware taking a dip in a five-star-hotel swimming pool to the sight of Singapore’s staggering Gardens by the Bay.

The script doesn’t reincarnate so much as it recycles, drawing freely on the nested realities of “Inception,” the free-your-mind metaphysics of “The Matrix” and the amnesiac-assassin revelations of the Jason Bourne movies. Maybe watch one of those tonight instead.

Its principal ambition — basically, to make movies like “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Starsky & Hutch” look like rigorous masterworks of screen-to-screen adaptation by comparison — may be as shallow as the gutter. But from time to time, the movie does throw off its own crazy, moronic verve.

No matter how many non-sequitur jolts they manage to squeeze into these jumpy proceedings, the ability to sustain a sense of dread, to create tension that lasts beyond the immediate moment, seems dispiritingly beyond their grasp.

A dispiritingly lazy high school comedy.

Proficiently made but fatally unpersuasive in its portrayal of internecine gang warfare, this thuggish melodrama piles on the foreign accents and paint-by-numbers brutality, all served up with a grim, operatic self-seriousness that gives Cage’s antihero little room to maneuver.

Where Sandler once exulted in our outrage (and frequently, our laughter), he now seems barely capable of mustering enough effort to carry a scene, let alone advance to level 255 of “Galaga.” There’s no joy left in his shtick.

Last Knights is a fairly ludicrous mystery and a so-so action movie, but it’s nonetheless been constructed with an earnest attention to detail that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

If the film’s trio of new screenwriters (replacing series mainstay Ehren Kruger) have seamlessly upheld the crass and juvenile “Transformers” sensibility, then Bay’s visual sensibility has, if anything, matured, to the point of demanding and earning your exasperated surrender.

A modestly affecting reconciliation drama wrapped in a so-so sports movie by way of a misogynistic romantic comedy, Playing for Keeps can't stop tripping all over itself.

A lazy attempt to milk a few more laughs and bucks from the enormously lucrative property spawned 10 years ago by "Meet the Parents."

There are probably some moviegoers who can laugh at the sight of a groin-punching, breast-grabbing baby, possibly even find it cute. Everyone else should steer clear of Little Man, which welds Marlon Wayans' head to a diminutive body double, offering up the creepiest bigscreen dwarf since the last David Lynch movie.

A clumsy but inoffensive romantic comedy.

Alas, even Murphy's largely wordless, physically adroit performance can't redeem this tortured exercise in high-concept spiritualist hokum.

A handful of solid performances and some subtle ’70s period detailing are hardly enough to recommend this flat, predictable drama.

Completely disposable yet rousing on its own crude, testosterone-saturated terms.

The didactic presentation, grim speechifying and tacked-on love story all signify a less-than-healthy regard for the audience's intelligence.

“Oh, Toto, this doesn’t look like the Oz I remember,” Dorothy murmurs at one point. Truer words were never spoken.

There’s nothing wrong with Moms’ Night Out that couldn’t be fixed by a massive rewrite, preferably one that involves a lobotomy for the main character.

Acquits itself well enough. Gratuitously gory and derivative to the core, Venom manages to deliver some effective frights in between large swaths of voodoo gibberish.

At no point does the movie manage even a single sequence of sustained tension, or a frisson of genuine terror.

A thoroughly derivative and unengaging fantasy.

This scrappy, draggy study in soul-crushing failure and disappointment is noteworthy primarily as a showcase for its lead actor’s most quintessentially Keanu performance in years.

This is by any measure a dreadful movie, a chintzy, CG-encrusted eyesore that oozes stupidity and self-indulgence from every pore. Yet damned if Proyas doesn’t put it all out there with a lunatic conviction you can’t help but admire.

Dull and tamped down throughout, Scott convinces well enough as a guy who wants be put out of his misery, and there isn’t an actor here who doesn’t look ready to join him.

From beginning to end, American Skin is a jagged symphony of false notes, each one struck with a sledgehammer. The most charitable thing that can be said about it is that if Parker is attempting to simulate the work of a bad or inexperienced filmmaker, he succeeds beyond his wildest dreams.

Overplotted and underwhelming, Breaking Point is the type of movie that finds it necessary to invent a far-reaching legal/political conspiracy just so one guy can redeem himself by overthrowing it.

This movie doesn’t rise to the level of so-bad-it’s-good. But no less impressively, perhaps, it’s just bad enough that you actually wish it were worse.

A wretched waste of time and talent.

This risibly long-winded drama is perhaps above all a profound cultural insult, milking the lush green scenery of Japan’s famous Aokigahara forest for all it’s worth, while giving co-lead Ken Watanabe little to do other than moan in agony, mutter cryptically, and generally try to act as though McConaughey’s every word isn’t boring him (pardon the expression) to death.

If it’s true, as Kevin Smith noted in his lengthy introductory remarks at Sundance, that “failure is just success training,” then he should be in the best shape of his career after Yoga Hosers, an imbecilic, strenuously wacky helping of see-what-sticks juvenilia.

This dire battle-of-the-exes action-comedy severely tests audience goodwill by running an indulgent 110 minutes, crammed as it is with half-baked thriller subplots and aimless supporting characters, as if to distract from the central duo's nonstop bickering.

Heigl’s performance as a coolly murderous model housewife is the only real reason to even consider watching Home Sweet Hell, an otherwise flailing and risible tale of adultery, extortion and suburban malaise that suggests a poor woman’s “Gone Girl” — one stripped of all tension, style and subtext, and instead rendered with a level of over-the-top gore that would give even David Fincher pause.

Veering from broad small-town comedy to heavy-handed vigilante dramatics, and marbled with the sort of spiritual epiphanies typically mastered in Sunday school rather than seminary, this Canadian indie seems unlikely to galvanize the faithful.

As flat as a tortilla and considerably less nourishing.

[A] torturously unfunny exercise, which doesn’t even rise to the level of competent misogyny.

Less a movie than a ill-advised lab experiment in which classic children's stories are injected with Bond-movie stylings, inane wisecracks and martial-arts mayhem, this manic misfire takes storybook revisionism to ever more irritating ends.

At half the length or twice the budget, this CG-animated musical mash-up of fairy tales would still be a pretty pathetic excuse for children’s entertainment, short on charm and utterly devoid of magic.

A clumsily told story of friendship and wartime remembrance that has a tough time serving up a halfway believable moment, let alone a moving and powerful testimony about the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

While roving interviewer Ben Stein extracts some choice soundbites from scientists on both sides of the creation-vs.-evolution debate, the film's flippant approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in facts than in emotional appeals.

A dismally stupid and sexist romantic comedy.

So far-fetched as to make "Kindergarten Cop" look comparatively austere.

Muddled and most unmagical offering.

The scenery ain’t bad but the laughs are tumbleweed-sparse in The Ridiculous 6, a Western sendup so lazy and aimless, it barely qualifies as parody.

From awkward start to merciful finish, Mother's Day is a grim, listless affair that may leave you pining for the relative pep and coherence of its predecessors (both of which were scripted by Katherine Fugate), or at least a few of their incidental pleasures.

Conveying zero grit, atmosphere or texture (exterior shots are repetitively bathed in cobalt blue), and gathering little in the way of force or dramatic momentum, “Vice” barely engages with its potential ideas beyond the most blandly expository, bullet-ridden level.

Nothing aired by WikiLeaks could possibly be more destructive to Sony’s reputation than the release of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, the sort of movie that goes beyond mere mediocrity to offer possible evidence of a civilization in decline.

An innocuous abduction of viewers' time, if nothing else, King's Ransom is an appealingly cast but terminally bland farce.

At a time when the world offers us no shortage of examples of what actual religious persecution looks like, for a film to indulge in this particular brand of self-righteous fearmongering isn’t just clueless or reckless; it’s an act of contemptible irresponsibility.

Audiences not inclined to laugh at the sight of a baby’s head catching fire are encouraged to at least chuckle at the various gags made at the expense of Jody and Dan’s housekeeper (a game Lidia Porto), who satisfies many of the picture’s comedic-target prerequisites by being plus-sized, hysterically religious and Latina.

From first frame to last, “Some Kind of Beautiful” is some kind of hideous, a perfect storm of romantic-comedy awfulness that seems to set the ailing genre back decades with the sheer force of its ineptitude.

A numbingly obtuse experience, a feat of maddeningly indulgent non-storytelling hiding behind a symphony of bared midriffs and jiggling derrières. ... Kechiche doesn’t just sell out his characters, his story and his collaborators; he sells out his own talent.

Nicely shot, atrociously written, shoutingly acted and intrusively scored (to classical selections and the heavy synth accompaniment of Fall on Your Sword), this roundelay of misery drowns itself in cliche after cliche.

Schlocky yet resourceful.

A mostly dull-blade exercise that offers little to think or scream about.

Advocacy cinema at its most searingly direct, The Trials of Darryl Hunt is a powerful and unsettling chronicle of the 20-year struggle to free a man twice convicted of a crime he didn't commit.

Andrew Lancaster's helming bow looks smart but lacks confidence in its melodrama and, professional editing aside, resembles a meandering rough cut.

As it is, your monthly rent is probably scarier than what writer-director Michael Taverna has cooked up in this inept and derivative tale of a Detroit flat that mysteriously drives its tenants to suicide.

A carefully constructed and beautifully acted tale of two very different sisters brought together when their aging father falls seriously ill.

Over the course of its generally absorbing if overlong 117-minute running time, it offers a brief and appreciably sympathetic take on the lure of fantasy, the pleasures of role play and the thrill of commanding the multitudes — which is to say that it’s, among other things, a film about filmmaking.

Director Yuya Ishii takes a considerable step forward in terms of budget and ambition with this simple, sometimes sentimental yet wise and full-bodied comedy-drama, which movingly testifies to the ways in which dedication, focus and an extreme attention to detail can achieve something of lasting value.

Structurally, the film is somewhat rambling and unfocused even within its tight 40-minute running time, cutting away periodically to address the ways in which overfishing and rising water levels have severely impacted the reef and its ability to support plant and animal life. The lessons are valuable and necessary, but they’re not particularly well integrated.

A blandly executed action-thriller whose cast names (Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe) and mild ’80s Louisiana flavor offer only modest compensations for the story’s workmanlike construction and routine twists.

The love and dedication that the filmmakers (including Dominguez’s wife and exec producer, Shelley Morrison) have poured into this project are more than evident onscreen; what it needs now is the sort of strong, supple cinematic vision that could tie its disparate strands together.

Benson displays more energy and assurance behind the camera than he does in front of it; even still, his tonal command of his own narrative is wobbly at best, employing cynical humor and climactic eruptions of violence to jazz up what is ultimately an overly earnest and predictable cautionary tale.

A mildly intriguing thriller of comeuppance that leaves you wanting more — not more archly stylized violence or repetitive revenge fantasy, perhaps, but more insight into the connection between the eponymous assassin (Abigail Breslin) and her highly skilled mentor (Wes Bentley).

If the outcome of the film feels at once daring and more than a little preposterous, Davis just about pulls it off, largely by treating the emotional fallout in completely rational, even realistic fashion.

Watching Sion Sono’s unruly telepathic sex comedy The Virgin Psychics is a bit like having a dog hump your leg for the better part of two hours; it’s filthy and monotonous and fairly interminable, but after a while you’ve been so thoroughly numbed that you have to admit it’s kind of sweet.

What makes Furlough such a wan, dispiriting experience is how indecisive and fundamentally timid it seems. Rather than subtly braiding drama and comedy together, as real life often does, the movie oscillates jerkily between the two modes, as though hesitant to commit to either one.