Martin Tsai

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.