Neil Genzlinger

After turns out to be working territory that, while emotionally fraught, has already been pretty thoroughly mined.

In truth there isn’t much story here, or much insight either; the kind of alienated teenagers wandering through this film exist in movies far out of proportion to their number in real life.

The film, though, is so padded with cheerleading that it doesn't have time for a serious exploration of poker's place in the broader culture or the consequences of its rapid rise and global reach.

This might be more entertaining if any of the three main characters were at all likable.

A new, not very engaging movie featuring a lot of blue skin and household-name voices.

Disorganized and somewhat annoying.

The film, by Jody Shapiro, seems so hagiographic that when it finally gets around to its 20 minutes’ worth of interesting stuff, you’re not sure whether to trust it.

If the point of Call for Help is to glorify a handful of off-the-grid heroes, it fails. If the point is to follow some young people who took their aimless wanderlust to a trouble spot and perhaps created more problems than they solved, it succeeds.

The story, too, undercuts the actors.

Alas, the dancers have to stop sometimes to allow the utterly unoriginal story to be told, and the romance at the center of it inspired Amanda Brody, the screenwriter, to produce dialogue so cheesy as to be laughable.

Scott Glenn handles the balancing act required of him in “The Barber” with his usual skill... The film, though, delivers its plot twists muddily and doesn’t really distinguish itself from the countless other creepy-killer tales out there.

The purpose was no doubt more spiritual than the film conveys; if so, the execution doesn’t do the effort justice.

Once the proselytizing takes over, so does the predictability.

The director and writer, Noah Buschel, has no fresh insights to add to the well-worn dynamic and doesn’t give the actors or the audience much to work with.

This film doesn’t seem to trust the inherent likability of his story. The director, Dexter Fletcher, and the writers, Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton, load it up with tropes that actually make it less endearing.

A starry father-son pairing is largely squandered in Forsaken, an old-school western that is a little too old school for its own good.

It's like being trapped in a roomful of teenage girls for 80 minutes.

Cold Turkey has some fine actors who put effort into their roles, but it’s getting harder and harder to care about or laugh at adult characters who have botched up their affluent lives and are still obsessed with events from childhood.

It’s possible to make a great movie out of family dysfunction, but this one is too short on insight to rank with the best of the genre.

The whole enterprise has a get-off-my-lawn feel; it tries to pass off whining and a rose-colored-glasses view of the past as insight.

It's the kind of stuff an amateur screenwriter reaches for when he has nothing original to say, because he's seen it work in other movies. It sure doesn't work here.

Cess Silvera, the film's writer and director, doesn't find any of the humanity or inner demons that would allow the characters to rise above B-movie exploitation.

Mr. Dern is fine in his crotchety-old-man mode, but the rest of the acting is labored, and the story is an unfocused mishmash.

It’s hard to root for a protagonist who is focused only on his own narrow needs and seems indifferent to the broader issues his tale raises.

The actors work hard to make us feel their fear of a creature that, for much of the movie, we don’t get to see. We don’t really need to see it, because we’ve seen it or something like it before.

The Taqwacores aims for a provocative, anarchic cool by juxtaposing Islam and punk rock. But the storytelling is so muddled and the filmmaking so unpolished - and not in a good way - that mostly this movie is just unpleasant. It's also not nearly as insightful as it thinks it is.

Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but the script, by Sheldon Cohn and Gary Wolfson, is tepid stuff, and Michael Manasseri, the director, doesn’t find a way to enliven it.

A slight movie that could have been significantly better with a little story doctoring.