Martin Tsai

If director-co-writer Karim Aïnouz has set out to depict soulless gay lives, he has more than succeeded.

Earnest and well-meaning, The Congressman devolves into predictable schmaltz.

Writer-director Jonas Carpignano glosses over much of the sociopolitical context in his depictions of the chain of events.

By ambitiously aiming to encompass the full scope and complexity of the social pandemic, Lost and Love winds up being all over the map.

Even during the fantasy musical numbers, which give cover to stray from the overall aesthetics of the film, Phillips is just incapable of delivering the genre’s requisite razzle dazzle that would surely complement Joker’s persona.

The film seems to have an entire deck of cards up its sleeve, and they're dealt out with more tedium than fun.

More filmmakers should treat the zombie subgenre as allegorical, the way George A. Romero intended. But Extinction and "Maggie" both arrive at the same conclusion about fatherhood, thereby confirming it as a cliché rather than a coincidence.

[Minn] runs around with a microphone in hand like an if-it-bleeds-it-leads ambulance chaser, playing out that local news reporter stereotype often spoofed in mockumentaries.

With the mixing of the sprawling family tree with geopolitical imbroglios already proving daunting for viewers, the filmmaker exacerbates the confusion by eschewing a linear chronology.

If you are a cinephile or an aspiring filmmaker looking for some behind-the-scenes edification, there's little.

The film's colorblindness does not make up for its latent sexism.

It's far more invested in elaborate historical reenactments, hypothetical dramatizations and special effects than interviews, research and data.

Through a first-person narration, Bialis makes much of the film about herself. Her account certainly turns the daily travails of living in Sderot into something tangible for viewers. But at the same time, her life-experience narrative proves a distraction and a disservice to the promise of the film's title.

Director Brett Harvey has gotten the documentary look and format down pat, complete with generic and gratuitous nature and cityscape shots. Where he shows an amateurish hand is in the term-paper-like voice-over narration and the inclusion of underqualified talking heads.

The mood is somber, as cued by the contemplative voice-over narration. Sights of rubble, tent cities and an orphanage are devastating. But these seem to be mere backdrop for a very different movie.

There are tangible improvements in the techniques of writer-director Terron R. Parsons. But some of the nagging plot holes remain unresolved.

Director Sanjay Rawal also allows the likes of Eva Longoria (an executive producer of the film, as is "Fast Food Nation" author Eric Schlosser) and members of the Kennedy dynasty to hijack the farmworkers' story. It's a reductive strategy that ultimately insults viewers' intelligence.

The film blurs lines between documentary, reality television and "Candid Camera," with Vargas instigating the proceedings.

Although director and co-writer Cutter Hodierne tells the story from the pirates' viewpoint, he adds no more dimension to them than the one we saw in "Phillips."

With a 21/2 -hour running time, Work Weather Wife does not lack ambition. But for a film deliberately channeling Bollywood, its scope seems rather Lilliputian.

It's hard to tell if director and co-writer Ariel Kleiman is being serious or sarcastic with a story this preposterous.

Not unlike most of its Hollywood counterparts, though, this Hong Kong import can't resist the urge to dumb down a fascinating premise for the sake of mass consumption.

The film is most effective when Bauer and Cartwright are battling the surroundings instead of each other.

A "Saw" knockoff without the torture porn.

Little parallelism or consequence can be gleaned from Kwak's narrative that crosscuts points between 1963 and 2010. Seeing as his surrogate in the first film is absent in the sequel, the shared cultural memory has also given way to genre exercise.

When a director merely goes through the motions, even Chekhov can be reduced to daytime soap.

Making sense was never a top priority for "K," and its sequel is just as much of a hot mess.

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.

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.

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

First-time filmmaker Tony Aloupis, formerly frontman of the New Jersey rock band Shadows of Dreams, serves up Americana like a stale slice of apple pie.

The film, unfortunately, treats the important and complex subject of post-traumatic stress disorder in an oversimplified and reductive way.

Familiar paternal regret gets ratcheted up here with an illogical and gratuitous investigative exercise.

Flashily shot and cut like a long-form music video, the film is merely an empty vessel for a Guy Ritchie-esque stylistic exercise.

Writer-director Diane Bell suggests that these women are so steeped in low self-esteem and codependency that they would not be able to leave their men if they didn't have each other.

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.

The film hardly scratches Abu Ghraib's surface.

The Curse of Downers Grove seems to be jumping on that 1990s teen slasher bandwagon two decades too late.

The performances are cringe-worthy, the appeal of the material marginal.

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.

Touted as a documentary "about the crowd revolution," Capital C devotes its entire running time to just one aspect of crowd-funding: small entrepreneurs raising capital.

Dela Torre tinkers with some of the undead's best-known traits, yet his reinvented wheel still feels like a retread.

There's no characterization to the cartel members beyond freeze-frame title cards; they are interchangeable and expendable.

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.

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.

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.

The film has the vibe of something you might see on Nickelodeon or ABC Family but with a lower budget.

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

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

The film never gives a real sense of the daily travails associated with traumatic brain injury.

The film might have gained some heft had director Ruby Yang let the transformations unfold before our eyes instead of force-feeding us testimonials.

Novice screenwriter Craig Walendziak has followed England's template, charting the daily worsening of the symptoms. But he doesn't get that the 2013 "Contracted" was special because it was much more than a zombie flick.

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.

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.

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

Filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods water down the element of surprise, even if they get the found footage shtick down to a science.

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

Director Hilarion Banks dutifully captures all of it in a series of nicely shot extended takes, which would have been fine if the cast had been able to interact in some sort of uniform tone.

It's essentially a glorified PowerPoint presentation that juxtaposes archival footage — an echo chamber of interviews, readings and performances taken entirely out of context — with amateurish stock footage and a short running time.

Although this film doesn't miss the whole point of found footage as the recent "Into the Storm" did, Jung does little to help suspend our disbelief.

Corrado Jay Boccia's directorial debut strikes as almost passable, with a relatively known cast and elaborate stunts. But his inexperience rears its ugly head as the film never musters real suspense and urgency.

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.

There are rich veins to mine here had writer-director David R. Higgins bothered.

The obnoxious sound design and score divest the film of much of its suspense, and perhaps more important characters have no survival instincts. The audience never has a chance to build some false hope that someone might make it out alive.

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

Tidbits that would make the film interesting have been squandered. Instead, we get the standard-issue haunted-house fodder. The ghosts manifest in so many different ways that it seems like the movie is grasping for straws.

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.

Rountree and Banks have come up with a nonsensical and pointless genre exercise.

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

Unfortunately for English speakers, nothing here is lost in translation. Everything is exactly as lame as it sounds.

There's little going on in the final product other than good intentions, as Jeta Amata always seems overreaching for the right buttons to push.

Writer-director Larry Brand is all too eager to show off his cleverness. Bad dialogue and Cinemax aesthetics make all the clichés seem even more clichéd.

The Business of Disease seeks to cast suspicion on Big Pharma, but it proves to be a glorified PowerPoint presentation interspersed with commentary by people of questionable qualifications who aim to incite paranoia with propaganda, conspiracy theories and straw-man arguments.