Michael Rechtshaffen

An unpleasant exercise in self-indulgence

Oliver Parker’s Swimming with Men is a lazily formulaic male-bonding comedy.

For a film about one of the fastest guns in the West, the dramatically lightweight Hickok is mighty slow on the draw.

This evangelical "Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam" by way of "The Dukes of Hazzard" takes a mighty ridiculous route to righteousness.

Chief Zabu may have been buried for the past three decades, but this tiresomely talky would-be satire is no treasure.

With a dirge-like pace that provides ample opportunity to figure it all out well ahead of the protagonists, you keep wishing somebody would buy a vowel to hurry things along.

With the exception of a decent train-top chase, Torque is all vroom and no action.

Lopez’s first feature comes across as fragmented and overwrought, with characters and performances that seem to have been egged on by the score’s achingly purposeful piano.

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder may have worked together in the past (most notably in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”), but Destination Wedding, a painfully indulgent anti-romantic comedy about a pair of miserable misanthropes who bond over their shared contempt of the universe, forces their screen chemistry well beyond any reasonable limits of tolerance.

Gratingly unfunny groaner littered with zero-dimensional, unlikable characters and hackneyed, threadbare comic setups.

Scrape away the soggy one-liners, generic CGI and cheesy musical numbers and what remains has all the briny allure of reheated fry oil.

In the end, you'll either succumb to the silliness of it all and cheer Johnny B. on to his green card or, more likely, be in desperate need of your own exit visa.

Smultaneously silly, ostentatious and terribly boring.

Director Kishan SS has made Care of Footpath 2 (a.k.a. Kill Them Young) as a bombastic, overlong melodrama that doesn't recognize the occasional need to takes things down a decibel or three.

Although the production establishes the requisite lived-in, small town feel, it has also chosen to take its dramatic cue from the seemingly sedated gaze of its lugubrious, aliens-obsessed protagonist, whom Le Gros portrays with a remarkable economy of expended energy.

A decent premise — and a game Gina Carano — get left in the dust kicked up by Scorched Earth, a dull, draggy post-apocalyptic western set in the not-too-distant, environmentally toxic future.

Perhaps in the unique case of The Healer, it could just be said that although the cause may be noble, the end effect is decidedly less rewarding.

This first feature is populated by blandly underdeveloped main characters who tend to recite their lines rather than inhabit them.

Taking aim at American society’s seriously broken criminal justice system, Iroc Daniels’ well-intentioned multi-character drama The System compensates in compassion for what it lacks in a more accomplished delivery.

Comprising reclaimed bits from "Blade Runner," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Children of Men" and glibly served up with hyper Guy Ritchie attitude by first-time feature director Miguel Sapochnik, the resulting in-your-face mess never knows what it wants to be when it grows up.

What might have been a pertinent, evenhanded examination of the notion of free speech on today’s college campuses wastes little time in exposing an overwhelmingly right-leaning bias in the disappointingly sensationalistic agitprop that is No Safe Spaces.

While the film, with its preponderance of potty jokes, might placate the very young already primed by boisterous singing chipmunks, older viewers will likely find it all harder to, uh, bear.

The childhood years of Brazil’s national treasure have been given a lamentably pedestrian big-screen treatment by Pelé: Birth of a Legend.

The star wattage quickly dims in this slick-looking but ringingly hollow affair that starts off generically at best before collapsing into a convoluted heap of shrill screen cliches.

[An] annoyingly oblique exercise in arty affectation.

Unfortunately in the hands of writer-director Adam Alecca, this overly talky, slackly executed game of cat-and-mouse comes off as cheesy rather than chilling.

Proves to be more prone to malfunction than dysfunction.

The sci-fi drama 400 Days ultimately disintegrates upon impact because of a lazy payoff.