Martin Tsai

Unfortunately, directors Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick have squandered a worthy subject.

At a different time, I might have been more inclined to entertain Reijn's proposition seriously. But it's just her luck that the great Catherine Breillat, who has devoted her illustrious career to investigating these taboos, dropped a far superior film on the same subject matter, Last Summer, just a few months prior, beating Reijn to the finish line.

If it only had a brain, a heart and the nerve.

The slickly produced documentary Farmland often comes off like lobbyist propaganda, profusely extolling the virtues of the independent American farmer.

Ghoul can't decide whether it should be about cannibals, serial killers, ghosts or demons.

While fans can appreciate all the winks and nudges, the film is a wreck for the uninitiated.

Since the rally ultimately proved ineffectual, the film could at the least serve as a sobering postmortem on where it fell short. But filmmaker Amir Amirani instead gives protesters a figurative pat on the back by insinuating that they helped inspire the Egyptian revolution some eight years later.

Miles Away comes off like some low-budget take on "Trapped in the Closet" or a Tyler Perry movie, except it treats kitsch with all sincerity and seriousness.

SlingShot has about enough material to fill one interesting "60 Minutes" segment.

So instructional is the film, directed by Brook's son, Simon, that it feels like one of those P90X or Insanity home fitness programs: Try this at home. You too can perform on stage.

Perhaps the vapid existence of millennials is precisely the point that co-writers Erik Crary and Steven Piet (who also directs) are driving at, but the film itself proves inarticulate and unsubstantial.

The film is a disingenuous, thoroughly dramatized reenactment at best and a reality show at worst.

Barker just hammers home the human-interest angle with a stirring score that serves to instruct the appropriate emotional response to each scene. The tacked-on uplift in the end is beyond comprehension, given that some of its subjects remain in peril.

The method to Von Trier's madness is that he provokes thought alongside outrage in his parables. Here, Gebbe musters only outrage, as her antagonists are without nuance, mercy or any redeeming quality.

We get too little character development to be invested in the story and barely a glimpse at the horrific plight of enslaved people.

Reckless cultural insensitivities aside, Stone and Hopper’s writing is simply not smart or funny. Poop and fart jokes comprise the core of their repertoire, and if you’re curious how reliant the film is on this material, Paramount is literally handing out whoopee cushions to promote the film.

Everything we can gather seems to nullify any virtues we saw in the original film.

A "Saw" knockoff without the torture porn.

At its best, the film seems as dreary a travelogue as that Nia Vardalos vehicle "My Life in Ruins." At its worst, Chaplin of the Mountains feels like an overambitious film-school thesis with superfluous political and philosophical posturing.

Andrew Douglas, who directed the 2005 "The Amityville Horror" remake, mishandles the standard noir as straightforward drama and gives it an unfortunate after-school-special vibe.

Whereas the original "Monsters" was a road movie about an odd couple fleeing an alien-infested zone, "Dark Continent" cribs from contemporary war movies like "The Hurt Locker" and "American Sniper," then tosses in extraterrestrials as an afterthought.

By cramming in as many tangents as imaginable, Olvidados ultimately loses sight of what the story is even about.

If only writer Stacey Menear and director William Brent Bell took the very real horrors of domestic abuse as seriously as they do the virtual horror of paranormal activity.

Whereas Haneke's films grapple with the blunt force of violence, novice filmmaker Markus Blunder just lets the violence snowball all the way down a slippery slope.

The script, the special effects and Jack Heller's direction simply don't add up in the profile of the mythical creature. It's quite obvious the filmmakers didn't put a lot of thought into it and went straight for the cheapest thrills.

Although Beef and Conan are far from stereotypical, the quirkiness and eccentricities ascribed to them by writer-director Kenny Riches harp on their otherness all the same.

The film is measured and executed effectively to satiate horror fans' bloodlust, yet its underlying messages are just so repugnant.

The film persistently misses the mark as a raunchy comedy amid all the side commentaries and Park's earnest tone. Yet it's equally clumsy at making sense of its portrayals of the indignities that Asian Americans routinely endure.