Martin Tsai

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

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.

With Snyder-Starr producing the film, My Way impresses as an exercise in narcissism.

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

Even if you do manage to make sense of the plot, it still doesn't make the film any more watchable.

Amid thespian antics, it contemplates weightier ethical dilemmas such as personal tragedy versus collective grief, artistic license versus historical responsibility, revisionist history versus corrective narrative, forgetting versus moving on. It's one creative way to do justice to such a monumental topic when full-blown reenactments aren't within the budget.

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.

Director Daniel Monzón delivers a conventional genre exercise — albeit a very effective one, with twists and turns that manage to surprise.

With a succession of tangential flashbacks, the film gradually disengages viewers from the plot.

Even the most talentless and narcissistic fame seekers on reality television are not nearly as vile, reprehensible or worthless as a film that actively wishes harm on them.

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

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

Laughter can break down barriers, but don't count on director Matthew Ladensack to help bridge differences.

The film's apparent faithfulness is admirable, but interviews with actual survivors shown during the end credits provide more impact and resonance than the rest of the film can muster.

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.

The movie can't do much to address the inherent flaws in the premise.

Bollywood veteran Jackie Shroff, assuming Nick Nolte's part as the recovering alcoholic father, delivers the kind of acting reel that would guarantee an Oscar nomination for some Hollywood actors. It's a pleasure to marvel at his performance alone.

Searching for Home: Coming Back From War touches on wide-ranging veterans' issues, but goes no deeper than that.

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

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

There isn't a whole lot to the script, and the exasperating direction by Natalie Bible only makes the film look like an extended trailer that teases but never delivers.

The personality flaws of the characters and the dysfunctions of the household are instantly recognizable from this very capable cast, yet they never come off as cliché.

Though not as thrilling as the original, this third installment is an improvement over the paint-by-number 2013 direct-to-video “12 Rounds 2: Reloaded.”

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

This rollicking crowd-pleaser might just be smart and substantive enough to be one of the year's best.

Director Timothy Wheeler manages to wrangle for interviews some active and reformed egg offenders along with authorities, conservationists and volunteers. Some are quite the characters, indeed.

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

As can be gleaned from snippets of news footage shown during the end credits, Ding has done an outstanding job re-creating the events and conveying the complexity and prudence of the cops' investigative chess moves.

Shark Lake lacks bite. Its audience doesn't even get to revel in blood and guts; the whole thing seems like it was edited for broadcast.

A one-dimensional movie painted in painfully broad strokes and whizzing, hurry-scurry action sequences.

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.

The pedestrian writing and acting prove even more cringe-worthy and dreadful than the special effects.

His runners' successes speak volumes, but the film never ventures outside of his inner circle to gain more perspective.

Seemingly meant for the stage, the film feels unnaturally theatrical with characters stiltedly reciting each line of dialogue even when supposedly conversing. But with Mahoney's pedestrian, shot-reverse-shot direction, these scenes play out like situational skits from an instructional video made for ESL students.

It's tough to stomach in more ways than one.... A capricious, counterintuitive narrative also renders the film nearly unwatchable.

Since his due-diligence efforts were rebuffed by the American Dental Assn. and the Food and Drug Administration in their declining of interview requests, director Randall Moore doubles down on the already ex parte narrative with heavy-handed editorializing.

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

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

Writer-director Claudia Sparrow prefers to pay more mind to the abstract.

Coming off like a hodgepodge of rejected spec scripts for "The Walking Dead," Anger of the Dead reveals particularly misogynistic and misanthropic filmmaking.

The temporal puzzle is enough to distract from the artless direction, visibly cheap set designs and tacky special effects. But if the expository scenes are any indication, his writing could benefit from some refinement.

It's little more than an artsy but hollow Lifetime cable movie.

Mastretta does beautifully realize the fluidity and messiness of coupling.

Offering more than a portrait of a woman about town, Rokah gradually exhumes the hardship of surviving the streets of Los Angeles for four decades and the associated stigma and shame that have prevented Haist from reaching out to family.

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

Easily the most thrilling thriller in recent memory, Crush the Skull seems destined for cult status.