Marya E. Gates

Frankly, the musical, with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and book by Steven Levenson, itself is where the fault lies. There were few redeemable qualities to begin with, and Chbosky’s dreary, washed-out direction adds nothing to its already bleak, vapid existence.

Like a magpie, it takes bits and pieces from better films and cobbles it together with some paper-thin characters into something that is a movie in definition only.

Philip Noyce is a natural choice for this kind of film. He’s great with actresses in peril and at keeping tension ramped up to eleven. But using the collective trauma of a generation of parents and children as the backdrop for a real-time thriller, whose lives have proven time and again to matter less than the right to own an AK-47, remains unconscionably distasteful.

A morality play wrapped up in gothic horror tropes, “The Dreadful” is definitely committed to the bit, and its darkly medieval setting is a refreshing change of pace. I just wish it were a medieval tapestry that worked as a whole, rather than just in fits and starts.

It’s nice to see McCarthy and O’Dowd in roles that showcase their emotional range; one just wishes it were in a project worthy of their talents.

Mildly diverting from time to time due to its beautiful production design, The School for Good and Evil is mostly an unmitigated slog, filled with underdeveloped characters, absolutely terrible dialogue, and a world that feels both completely ripped off from better things and unnecessarily complex.

Incoherently directed, thematically muddled, and poorly acted, writer/director/producer/star Livia De Paolis’ drama The Lost Girls should have stayed on the page.

While it doesn’t quite live up to its grand ambitions, it’s refreshing to see a movie so beautifully and sleekly filmed attempt to wrestle with humanity’s deeper questions. Foxhole might not be in the top tier of the great anti-war film canon, but it's not too far away.

Allen’s mawkish performance aside, the rest of the cast do the best they can within this all too easy structure.

The unfortunate misfire What Comes Around, from director Amy Redford and screenwriter Scott Organ, is what happens when filmmakers lack tact and land squarely in the realm of exploitation.

At first, it seems Carpet Cowboys, the debut documentary from co-directors Emily MacKenzie and Noah Collier, intends to merely tell the unsung story of this niche industry and the quirky artists, businessmen, and scientists who earn their living working in it. But the filmmakers use it as a launching pad to chart the deconstruction of the American Dream.

Whatever it is that Mizrahy finds interesting about this subject remains frustratingly oblique, ultimately leaving "Space: The Longest Goodbye" a muddled bag of contradictions and underdeveloped threads and themes.

While the script from John Gatins, who wrote "Flight," is mostly decent (there is some laughable dialogue peppered throughout), Dean Israelite's direction is so fussy, frenetic, and disjointed that it renders moot any charm the story may have once contained.

Frustratingly, despite being jam-packed with facts, there is not much insight into what makes Bird tick, what makes her a great player, or what her legacy actually means to the sport.

It's a pity, then, that Gorman's direction isn't always this razor sharp as there is a current of mordant humor throughout Williams' script that could easily have made this whole affair a pitch-black comedy.