Nick Schager

An aesthetic showcase whose repetitive nature winds up diminishing the excitement of its breathtaking feats of mountainous flight.

Any transformation feels like a device, and any modest hopefulness comes across as simply the unearned wishful thinking of the filmmaker.

Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone.

The film's interests are mainly relegated to wallowing in the frigid-starvation-suffering of its protagonists.

Director Arcel handles the material with a stately grace that compensates for the story's predictable trajectory, though humdrum period detail and monotonous pacing too often leave the proceedings feeling only partially aroused.

Little girls never stop loving their daddies in Festival of Lights, a drama that never stops loving soap-opera-style melodramatics.

Winds up turning itself into just a rote thriller about psychos learning that, appearance notwithstanding, every family has dysfunctional problems.

The film risks self-importance, but when Peralta admits through tears just how much he loves his skater charges, it imparts what every parent knows: that even better than achieving one's own success is shepherding the success of others.

Although enthralled by brooding, self-absorbed teenagers, the film doesn't present a single believable one.

As with its narrative, Wreck-It Ralph's themes don't develop by branching out in wild, unpredictable ways; instead, they simply become narrower and more monotonous.

With horror altogether absent and a plot drowning in insipid convolutions, it's a film whose early warning to Heather should be heeded: "Don't go to Silent Hill."

There are good intentions here, but too little nuance.

Long Shot confirms that achieving one's goals is rarely possible without the staunch support of others.

Director Jaume Balagueró's film is nothing if not a well-executed bit of escalating craziness.

Pusher faithfully mimics Nicolas Winding Refn's 1996 Danish crime saga while missing its nasty, grungy spirit.

Sex and love are both novel experiences for two high schoolers in this talky affair that suggests a hybrid of Before Sunset and Some Kind of Wonderful.

Alternating between time periods and geographic locations, all of it connected by McElwee's narrated thoughts, the film proves a bracing and sometimes uncomfortable peek into private fears and regrets about mortality and missed opportunities. It's also, in its portrait of wayward Adrian, further proof that there's nothing more difficult, frustrating, messy, and insufferable than teenagerdom.

Less inept than its worst-of-the-year title suggests, 3, 2, 1 . . . Frankie Go Boom nonetheless proves too ramshackle and aimless to ever achieve true absurdity.

Michael J. Gallagher's half-cocked horror fiasco is filled with clichés, pitiful dialogue, and clumsy aesthetics.

Plays like one long, slow descent into cloying moralizing and uplift that's well past its expiration date.

Roberto Faenza shoots his Manhattan-set action with a glossiness that's as bland as the soundtrack ballads.

Escape Fire winds up feeling like only one half of a larger argument.

Writer/director Ursula Meier uses a stripped-down, naturalistic aesthetic full of well-organized compositions that pay close attention to shifts in character mood, comportment, and behavior.

Boasts an evocative sense of environment and the feel of working with one's hands, but otherwise rummages around in search of substance and subtlety.

Tim Burton's sense of playfulness feels forced throughout, and as the film progresses, any humor or inventiveness takes a backseat to tumultuous set pieces that reference Frankenstein.

All the while, Fisher and his kin's incessant, contentious bickering exposes the ongoing difficulty of reconciling with inherited trauma, though such squabbling's protracted prominence also, ultimately, suggests the need for a bit more editorial trimming.

The result being a film that, devoid of both laugh-out-loud humor and the righteous indignation that characterizes most agitprop efforts, winds up being just a voting-for-dummies primer.

Just an extended dramatization of the 1980s anti-drug PSA that memorably cautioned "I learned it by watching you!"

The story places a premium on delivering its disreputable sex-and-violence goods with a minimum of fuss or pretension.

An insufferable import indebted to "Mrs. Doubtfire" in which a man in prosthetics helps a family cope with, and overcome, divorce.

O'Nan and Weston's rapport is engagingly prickly but their "Shins meets Sesame Street" tunes have a tweeness also found in the director's music montages and lens flares. Only in its even-handed treatment of Alex's fundamentalist-Christian brother (Andrew McCarthy) does the film feel like something less than a corny cornucopia of manchildren-grow-up clichés.

The lesson here, apparently, is that driven women just need to lighten up and stop being selfish - a message that really does feel backward.

Anderson utilizes slow-motion 3-D to hyperbolic effect while again casting Jovovich as the epitome of badass sexiness.

For a film about a stand-up comedian to be mirthless is dispiriting; more problematic, however, is that The Stand Up doesn't make up for that absence of humor with any legitimate drama.

A documentary -- based in part on Jian Ping's autobiographical book of the same name -- whose poignancy is lessened by its awkward formal devices.

While that mood is ultimately a bit too monotonous to be completely persuasive, a strong cast convincingly captures the many ways in which adulthood proves far more complicated than what's imagined at 18.

The film folds narratives on top of narratives in a vain attempt to mask the fact that there's nothing to read between its graceless lines.

Narrative unevenness notwithstanding, those hang-ups are given delicious life by a superb Rush, Davis, and Rampling (the latter often confined to a bed and encased in elderly makeup), who prove a regally dysfunctional trio par excellence.

Jirí Barta's film is a disturbing through-the-looking-glass reflection of traditional fairy tales.

Bornedal's fondness for punctuating abrupt cuts to black with a solitary piano-key note is so pathological that it soon turns risible.

The film is anchored and greatly bolstered by Bloom, who delivers a performance of quietly escalating madness.

Enduring this brainless kid's film is akin to witnessing the end of the world.

Too derivative to be amusing and too earnest to be parodic, it assumes the form of countless other teen comedies minus any wit or drama.

Further confirmation that agitprop documentaries have become wedded to a template that undermines their very arguments.

The director's DV cinematography can be rough and ungainly, but it provides sterling glimpses of both family intimacy and its larger social context.

A film of precious, romanticized misery and squalor.

Even caped do-gooders couldn't save Supercapitalist, a dramatic dud whose title refers not to some big-business hero but rather to wheelers and dealers living lives of swank suits, fast cars, loose women, plentiful drugs, and goofy corporate-espionage spy games.

Incapable of energizing Mark Poirier's leaden script (based on his own novel), Christopher Neil directs with a mechanical blandness made more tedious still by a score of gentle guitar strumming so aggravatingly benign it might inspire you to partake in one of Wendy's climactic, cathartic primal screams.

An alternately evocative and lumbering portrait of a multifaceted community.

While the Nitro Circus's many achievements are impressive, they pale in comparison to those of Knoxville and company's.

Fans of incessant flashbacks and endless whooshing zooms into close-ups will find much to love about Assassin's Bullet; less satisfied, alas, will be those with a fondness for lucid plotting, compelling intrigue, and credible performances.

Despite occasional lapses into showy expressionistic slo-mo, Guerrero's direction demonstrates a patience and attention to emotional detail that allows the two young leads' performances to develop naturally.

Chen's attention to character over spectacle pays minimal dividends and is compounded by the fact that his battles - full of standard-issue slow motion and hacked-off limbs - are as dull as an overused blade.

Raunchy dude comedy is hardly the sole province of American cinema, as Klown all too dispiritingly reconfirms.

Christopher Nolan's capper of his Batman trilogy is a summer blockbuster of grand inclinations in both form and content.

It remains a rousing portrait of creative renewal and, specifically, the way in which - by attempting something daring and new in the face of an opera culture deeply invested in tradition - Lepage proves that classic art can survive and flourish in a marriage with modern technology and imagination.

By ultimately softening its stance toward McIver, Grassroots disingenuously has it both ways, reducing politics first to a David-versus-Goliath adventure, and then to an everyone-is-cool bowl of mush.

The film shrewdly opts not to proffer its own hypothesis about the true reasons behind the Gibson family buying Frédéric Bourdin's story.

A musty ghost story that morphs into a sluggish serial-killer mystery, Nicholas McCarthy's film tries to distinguish itself by minimizing dialogue and settings, a stripped-down approach that extends to sketchy characters and a script rife with convenient, easy-to-assemble clues.

With graceless melodramatist Rob Reiner at the helm, it's predictably ironic that The Magic of Belle Isle champions the unparalleled power of imagination while displaying absolutely none of its own.

Newcomer Russell, at once tough and vulnerable, canny and damaged, delivers a performance of nuanced naturalism that starkly conveys the sorrow and sacrifice that sometimes come with learning to achieve self-sufficiency.

No mutation is necessary to clearly see that Marvel's "reboot" of their signature franchise is an unimaginative remake of Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man.

Seth MacFarlane's comedic modus operandi is to shock with outrageousness and pander with TV and movie citations via one non sequitur after another, a strategy that leads to a few laughs but nothing approaching lasting humor.

Although Angèle's religious faith and Frédéric's belief in luck seem like strained attempts at adding heft to the material, the film nevertheless works up a potent dramatic restlessness, derived from the push-pull between an entitled, obsessive Frédéric and Bellucci's quietly chaotic Angèle.

The script leaps forward with an absurdity almost as great as Lincoln's own strength.

That's My Boy lazily exists in a fantasyland of Adam Sandler's perpetual adolescence, even as it generates some moderate comic friction from Sandler and Andy Samberg's testy back-and-forth.

If the Adam Shankman film's debasement of its subject into campy kitsch is the unavoidable fate of all culturally dangerous art, that doesn't make it any less palatable.

Soling and co-director David Hilbert divide their screen into multiple visual quadrants, an aesthetic strategy that soon becomes a wearisome affectation that's barely mitigated by their refusal to romanticize the landscape or soft-pedal the hazardous hardships of Ik life.

El Velador doesn't pass judgment or manipulate emotionally, instead choosing simply to consider the arduousness of survival in a land wracked by slaughter.

A coherent characterization of Robert Pattinson's striving schemer is nowhere to be found in this pedestrian period piece.

Unfortunately, mocking jibes and cutaways to Team America and Wonder Woman (among other movies and TV shows) establish a jokey attitude that weakens the overall case.

Despite referring to the tribe as "my people," Routh is wholly miscast, yet his ill-fitting presence is part and parcel of the plotting's general illogicality.

As sure as marijuana gets you high, you can count on weed-themed comedies cropping up every few years, each hoping to become a stoner-classic staple--a fate to which High School falls far short of achieving.

With the faux-verité aesthetics of [Rec], the American-tourists-in-Eastern-European-hell setup of Hostel, and the brain of a mushy radioactive mutant zombie thingie, Chernobyl Diaries is little more than decomposed horror leftovers.

The trio's mourning feels more like immature self-absorption.

The mood is generally melodramatic and ends as mushy, aided by the soft-focus cinematography that drenches it all in melancholic nostalgia.

Weaver's story slowly begins to buckle under the weight of its own self-seriousness and familiarity, concluding with a showdown and resolution marked by one implausible and unsatisfying been-here-done-that twist after another.

Shamelessly mimics Michael Bay's larger-than-life dialogue, sweeping cinematography, cornball romance, and military fetishism.

Makes a compelling case for games as not only clever hand-eye coordination exercises, but also as manifestations of their creators' emotional and philosophical viewpoints.

Overlapping story threads, voices, and imagery result in an atmosphere of disquieting psychological confusion.

Unfortunately, its tale is so slight and simple that it also fails to say anything particularly poignant about life.

The real scam was the filmmakers tricking Rebecca Hall (and a cameoing Amanda Seyfried) into participating in this blunt instrument of an indie.

Nadine Labaki's film awkwardly hybridizes somber politizized drama with regional humor in the style of "Waking Ned Devine" and "Calendar Girls."

By wholeheartedly taking its main character's side instead of complicating or censuring his homicidal vigilante crusade, it proves inanely one-note and preachy.

Girl in Progress operates like a training-wheels melodrama for genre-uneducated tweens.

Chris Fisher so over-directs his material that the action takes on the sheen of a parody or, at least, of a film that doesn't realize its clichés are being exaggerated to the point of absurdity.

Why anyone would want to spend time with a foursome whose bathetic misery is, like the overly mannered visuals of writer-director Dennis Lee (Fireflies in the Garden), defined by such insufferable quirkiness is anyone's guess.

The result is a film that eschews in-depth insight in favor of easily digestible who's-going-to-win suspense, a tack that's aided by Kargman's rather poignant (and visually graceful) evocation of pre-performance anxiety but ultimately leaves the material feeling deflated once the winners emerge.

Frank De Felitta's guilt over having aired the footage is moving, yet it's ultimately countered by this piercing film's stance - promoted by the subject's proud children and grandchildren - that Wright's statements, far from a slip of the tongue, were an intentional act of courageous defiance.

It's not clear what Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale values more - endless preaching about ancestral spirits or gruesome CG decapitations.

Its commentary on our fascination with law-breakers is virtually nonexistent, except to the extent that the film itself revels in the doomed romanticism of its own protagonist.

Safe's primary contribution to the burgeoning Jason-Statham-kicks-everyone's-ass subgenre is setting three of its set pieces in crowded New York City venues (a subway car, a hotel dining room, and a Chinatown nightclub) where shootouts lead to believable mass-exodus pandemonium.

Bluff's portrait of street life has a grungy off-the-cuff realism that's only compromised by some obviously staged incidents.

A documentary saga of heartbreaking concentration-camp horrors, Inside Hana's Suitcase attempts to preserve Holocaust memories through frustratingly fractured means.

There's no surer way to murder horror than to literalize it, a mistake incessantly made by The Moth Diaries.

Whether to let go and follow your own path is a stock dilemma, and an implausibly hopeful conclusion winds up undercutting the realism of this immigrant song.

The paeans about national pride and brotherhood may be regional, but constant slow-motion battle scenes and squishy sentimentality are strictly wanna-be Tinseltown.

A poignant sense of time's unyielding forward progress and a mood of deep adolescent sorrow aren't enough to overshadow the insufferable blankness of Goodbye First Love's navel-gazing protagonists.

A lost-dog drama so insufferable it makes one wish its human characters would also run off and never return.

Hong Sang-soo once again corroborates auteurist theory at the same time that he reveals the potential shortcomings of its practice.

Admirable only for its sincere responsibility-over-selfishness message and for giving "The Wire" alums Chad Coleman and Jamie Hector some big-screen work, Life, Love, Soul otherwise proves to be just a low-rent Tyler Perry–style melodrama.

Mickey Rooney's own ordeal of being swindled by his wife's son gives the material a tiny bit of star power, but his mismatched interview clips merely exacerbate the earnest but graceless documentary's editorial clumsiness, aesthetic flatness, and endless repetition.

Something happens here, but it isn't life.

Luc Besson's producing career has been so geared toward lean, tough genre films that it's somewhat apt that he'd ape--or, if we're being kind, pay homage to--John Carpenter's preeminent sci-fi actioner Escape from New York with his latest, Lockout.

Pablo Larraín employs ultra-widescreen cinematography for constricting close-ups and inhospitably alienating compositions that generate a nasty chill, the director keeping the army's brutality off screen to amplify a sense of oppressive malevolence.

P. David Ebersole so busy flitters from one point of interest to another that Hit So Hard never coheres into anything other than a collection of rock-star clichés.

Funnier than its prior two predecessors, if gratingly awash in demographic-pandering late-'90s alt-rock hits ("Closing Time," "Freshman"), American Reunion flounders with its earnest melodrama.

A young boy's nonchalant attitude toward having a friend stick a loaded gun in his mouth as well as a man's numerous knife scars courtesy of his beloved wife definitely cut through the clichés about "thug life" to capture how violence is an integral, corrosive part of inner-city life.

Morgan Spurlock has little to say about Comic-Con other than that its attendees value it on a par with Christmas.

If both good and evil characters don't behave in ways that make sense vis-à-vis their circumstances, any sense of terror quickly dissipates.

A true-crime documentary of invigorating analytical clarity and evenhandedness.

For all its heavy-handed gloom and stylistic unevenness, Fear and Desire has a certain fierceness that's hard to shake.

Olaizola pans across peeling building facades to subtly enhance her portrait of characters crumbling under the weight of self-destructive habits and solitude - a weight that might only be lifted through the selfless compassion of others.

A second-rate dude comedy in which an untalented knucklehead becomes a star through brute violence.

The schmaltzy and benign tale of a ballroom dancer who accepts and transcends her unexpected disability through the power of art and love.

Now that Zooey Deschanel has taken a detour into TV land, is Audrey Tautou the most insufferable pixy presence in cinema today?

The film's tossed-off look and clunky editorial construction are still secondary to the sheer silliness of its story.

The FP has a one-note joke of a conceit, and when that runs out, it has few actual jokes to fill the humorless void.

Alterman's camerawork, panning and zooming about Christiaan's ants, rabbits, birds, and other assorted mecha creatures, conveys a sense of ominous religious awe.

Writer-director Michael A. Nickles may momentarily shout out to Peeping Tom via a shot of its DVD, but Playback is merely a voyeurism-tinged horror film of dismal direct-to-video quality.

The Lorax is a modest gem, failing to significantly enhance its source material's ideas but still delivering a zany, rollicking, multi-character version of Seuss's environmental cautionary tale.

Like its title, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? purports to ask a question but is only interested in forwarding its predictable agitprop answer.

Art, politics, and craziness conspire to form a rather mechanical melodrama in Black Butterflies.

Comedy and shifting-allegiances intrigue more than compensate for the dearth of rousing action in this 1920s-set film.

Intimacy doesn't completely give rise to insight in this loving, if largely for-fans-only, posthumous portrait of Memphis-bred punk rocker Jay Reatard.

In the race to achieve unadulterated fourth-wall breakage, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is the new pack leader.

The icy fatalism of film noir is turned to slush by Thin Ice, a crime saga that reduces its chosen genre to a series of atonal, old-hat clichés.

Ultimately, though, they never cohere into something more than a moderately engaging for-fans-only tour diary.

With the survivors' physical presence amongst Nazi slaughterhouses as its own powerful statement, Buried Prayers is a nonfiction work that confronts Holocaust atrocities from a piercing ground-level view.

Prizes computer-generated wizardry above logical plotting or thoughtful character development, a misguided set of priorities exacerbated by the fact that said digital effects prove so chintzy.

Doesn't waste a moment on recognizable reality, consumed as it is with checking off various items from its list of clichés.

If Defa's aesthetics are mundane, his leads' performances are not, especially in the case of Audley, whose darting eyes and hushed, stuttering speech express confused longing with transfixing train-wreck magnetism.

Flirty bickering is rampant but, courtesy of Heigl's inert performance, there's no heat or humor to the proceedings, just an avalanche of grating big-hair-and-bad-accent New Joisey caricatures.

A coming-of-age tale that, with every landscape cutaway and twinkling note from its xylophone-heavy score, begs to be taken as a dreamy slice of countryside profundity.

While it may make the City of Light look beautiful, ultimately, this insufferable indie auteur's navel-gazer is just another faux-kinky vanity project in which its creator's neuroses are placed on an undeserved pedestal.

The apparent byproduct of watching too much Bad Boys II, The Viral Factor is a cops-and-criminals saga slathered in glossy Michael Bay-isms.

Nearly every scene is clunky, and the film's commentary about TV as the unifying glue of American culture is embellished through lame incidents of sex and violence that eventually validate the Chinese tourists' anti-U.S. critiques.

Coming across as a promotional showcase for a gaggle of young up-and-coming singer-actors, Don't Go in the Woods tethers together numerous indie-rock musical numbers with a backwoods-horror-film framework that's the definition of an afterthought.

Heist, swindle, and other like-minded genre films thrive or flounder on the mechanics of their story's dangerously elaborate scheme, a fact ably proven by Contraband, a tale of high-seas smuggling without a clever thought in its leaden, derivative head.

Michael Corrente's film is a mush of poses. The director's saga revels in cornball romance, imitation tough-guy attitude, and awkward flashbacks.

A slice of slight character-driven conventionality in which directorial sensitivity and drama rooted in tense conversations and intermittent blow-ups prove incapable of imparting depth to a tale that plays like a series of simplistic stock gestures.

Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.

No matter how sensitive the orchestral-string score gets, the film can't locate the bone-deep sense of tragedy of Leslie Schwartz's novel - it just keeps belching out empty, grief-stricken histrionics devoid of insight.

Wither the rollicking verve and whip-crack humor in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?

Unlike AMC's Breaking Bad, meth here doesn't reflect current, perilous economic realties; rather, it's just a low-rent drug used by degenerates whose lives say nothing about anything.

Far more concerned with pratfalling animal shenanigans and unearned uplift than crafting a single complex or amusing moment, it's a film caged in by formulaic plotting and plentiful pap.

Palmer's grainy, handheld camerawork won't win any aesthetic prizes, but it's in tune with his subject.

Reprinting its entire script would be the only way to properly convey the unintentionally hilarious awfulness of Red Hook Black, which complements its stilted and goofy writing with equally inept performances.

A feeble stab at topicality from that master of overripe Gallic melodrama, Cédric Klapisch.

The only thing more narcissistically indulgent than the film's repugnant protagonists is Mark Pellington's iPod-scored, visually flashy, thoroughly hollow directorial celebration of them.

The Tickells' style is a predictable grab bag of interviews with outraged experts and journalists, TV news footage, and scenes in which the filmmakers (and, during one trip, fellow activists Peter Fonda and Amy Smart) make faux-daring journeys into the fray to bring back supposed realities that corporate America seeks to hide.

Though his film's feel is pure Iraq and Afghanistan, Fiennes doesn't push those parallels unduly, and his central performances prove clear, nuanced, and incisive.

A yuletide fable that boasts Aardman Animation's peerless mix of whip-smart comedy and cheery heart.

The intersection between drug-company profiteering and lobbying, and governmental and private-sector desires to protect people from deadly diseases, is navigated too cursorily by the documentary.

Whether sleuthing or smacking around thugs, Sisley makes a dashing hero, but this glossy action flick is heavy on tedious convolutions and depressingly light on character depth, suspense or political-economic intrigue.

Hell is family in Another Happy Day, a portrait of one clan's reunion for a wedding that overflows with characters even more repugnant than the irony of its groan-worthy title.

It's a dull drag-show routine headed nowhere until Pacino (playing a self-important version of himself) begins stalking Jill.

Cohabitation "commandments" and talk of "chick flicks" further send the material into a cutesy tailspin, with the script's low point an egregious scene featuring Nate sneaking a peek at a silhouette of Jenny undressing behind a curtain.

Content to be a typical piece of tween rural-versus-urban fluff from the old Hannah Montana: The Movie mold. Such lazy complacency is almost enough to make you see red.

Is Josh "Skreech" Sandoval the least deserving documentary subject ever?

Overflows with inspired craziness, doling out an all-night odyssey of sex-centric crises, death-defying conflicts, and Neal Patrick Harris-centered insanity with snowballing momentum, as bits pile on top of bits with intoxicating verve.

Justin Timberlake can't elevate what amounts to relatively simplistic, formulaic material, but his headlining turn exhibits sufficient charisma and wit to make In Time a passably diverting action-packed waste of time.

All's Faire in Love's lackluster compositions and absence of rhythm are a perfect match for writer-director Scott Marshall's script (co-written with R.A. White and Jeffrey Ray Wine), which operates according to a Revenge of the Nerds-style us-versus-them template almost as stagnant as Ricci's phoned-in turn.

Long on hopefulness but short on sobering realities, Elevate proves a compelling if superficial look at the arduous path traveled by Senegalese teens hoping to make it to America for a higher education and an NBA career.

The resultant smorgasbord is a misshapen mess, short on humor, tension, or chemistry among its bickering protagonists.

Taking the notion of toilet humor literally but incapable of delivering its promised religious satire, The Catechism Cataclysm is more muddled than its tongue-twister title.

It's a saga whose clichéd corniness would be practically sinful if not for the mighty Gugino, who almost counteracts the material's pap with megawatt charm and steel-tough resolve - exemplified by a low-angled intro shot of the poised, strutting, tight-sweater-sexy actress.

A portrait of the eve of 2008's financial crisis that plays out with funereal inevitability, Margin Call loves speechifying, but the film is far more assured when lingering in the silence of its morally compromised characters.

There's no spark or humor to the film's situations, just the sense of capable actors trying to make the best of a hopeless situation.

Like Shlain's hand-written diagram in which lines twist and knot while linking various subjects, the film resembles not a coherent thesis but a tangle of semi-related ideas.

Despite an A-list roster, the performances are universally one-note, a fact largely attributable to a script overflowing with blunt dialogue and heavy-handed symbolism.

Chalet Girl is just a compendium of genre clichés - minus the usual racism and t&a.

Texas Killing Fields's mood is one of drowning in quicksand, though said atmosphere is the byproduct of both Ami Canaan Mann's often dreamy direction and an editorial structure that intermittently devolves into elliptical incongruity.

If familiarity is endemic to this feel-good drama, there's nonetheless also something to be said for competent amalgamation and regurgitation of tired genre tropes.

As a director, Estevez exhibits a bland visual sense, but he does manage to convey some of his scenic locations' multifaceted textures. Mostly, though, his dramatically inert, spiritually generic The Way seems like it was far more fun to shoot than it is to endure.

The star and co-director appears hopelessly out of place, trapped in a variety of awkward-fitting uniforms while forced to offer up laughably obvious battlefield advice ("Avoid gunfire!").

Blackthorn's last-man-standing circumstances, far from a cautionary tale about the cost of the gunslinger life, are glorified as the height of macho nobility.

Borderline creepy, Courageous endlessly expounds on the importance of God in men's lives but fails to answer the more pressing question of why religious sagas such as this treat subtlety as a sin.

Dream House also manages to commit a cardinal thriller sin: casting well-known actors in ostensibly inconsequential roles, which in this case reveals the real culprit before the mystery proper has even begun.

As rigorous and stimulating as its thematic inquiries are, A Dangerous Method ultimately rests as much on its performances, and in that regard, it succeeds far more than it fails.

Flip-flopping traditional genre dynamics in a manner more cute than uproarious, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil charts the Three's Company-style shenanigans that ensue when two West Virginia bumpkins cross paths with a group of camping college kids.

Writer-director Guy Moshe's crime saga is a work of second-generation derivation, weaving together scraps from homages to Westerns, film noir, samurai films, gangster pics, and class-warfare dramas.

If its plotting can be slight, the film's restraint and earnestness help prevent it from ever tipping over into outright mawkishness, and its performances similarly avoid over-the-top histrionics.

Purportedly about a quest for spiritual enlightenment and the question of what binds global religions, In Search of God is instead defined by simplistic philosophizing and rampant narcissism.

Even at 78 minutes, White Wash pads its material through repetition but remains a proficient portrait of how increased social, economic, and geographic opportunity fosters diversity - in life and out on the waves.

Wholly uninterested in puffing up his subjects into an iconic rock outfit on a par with their idols Led Zeppelin and the Who, Crowe instead merely tells their story free from the constraints of rise-fall-rise clichés.

The burgeoning relationship between both the athletes, bonding over a kindred "otherness," is handled tastefully by director Kaspar Heidelbach, though the lack of new insights on the subject of National Socialism's wickedness ultimately reduces a well-staged film to a historical footnote.

The repeated sight of people watching video monitors or communicating with others via laptops becomes a stilted, gimmicky affectation, and there are only so many times you can watch a camera panning and zooming over still photos before your tolerance for the Ken Burns effect reaches its limit.

Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.

Shut Up Little Man! fails to legitimize its topic as one of any significance.

Gus Van Sant's cinema, which of late has been fixated on immersing viewers in particular times and spaces, takes a detour into excruciating quirkland with Restless.

Dax Shepard delivers an I'm Still Here-style mockumentary of staggering incompetence with Brother's Justice.

From hairstyles and clothes to autumnal-hued cinematography and a raft of clichéd incidents involving pills, suicide, sneaking out, and blackmail, everything feels dainty to the point of stale.

Twelve long years after "The Blair Witch Project" pushed the first-person-POV subgenre to horror's forefront, and four years after [Rec] expertly refined the formula, Grave Encounters can't even pretend to be anything other than hopelessly derivative.

O'Conner continues to exhibit a deft knack for melding interpersonal drama with athletic competition in ways that, despite his tales' clichés, earn their melodramatic manipulations through genuine empathy for characters' plights.

His (Gonzalo López-Gallego) this-is-authentic conceit is by now a tediously corny device, and his story delivers no scares during the interminably long, uneventful build-up to its deflating climax.

The overweight, gays and little people are cheerfully mocked while writer/director Siddique ratchets up his story's disparate comedy-romance-action elements to an insanely over-the-top degree.

Zaldana is such a sultry and surprisingly heartfelt executioner that she often finds a way to make this by-the-numbers genre retread feel, if not fresh, then at least sporadically electric.

Avoids funny one-liners like the plague, choosing in their place to deliver only squishy faux-outrageousness that, like Sudeikis's one-note stud, exudes an unwelcome air of self-satisfaction.

Its performances are resourceful and affecting, with Chastain and Worthington in the past sequences, and Mirren and Wilkinson in the later chapters, exuding a complicated mess of responsibility, guilt, sacrifice, revenge, and regret.

The way in which the action indulges in long, underlined silences furthers the overriding sense of trying too hard to muster up a suspenseful mood from a conceit better suited to a half-hour television program.

The fawning personal-life segments are overdone, and undermine the film's compelling reportage about Madoff's ruse and downfall.

Since Mehran's embrace of hardline Islam is never dramatized or elaborated on in any insightful way.

The Hedgehog ultimately illuminates only the continued lameness of employing out-of-leftfield tragedy for cheap bathos.

An Egyptian feminist tale told with both affecting compassion and made-for-TV corniness.

Subscribes to the belief that moderation is a four-letter word, flying about with an abandon that begets exhilaration as well as exhausting messiness.

Asif Kapadia's documentary is ultimately less affecting and insightful on a universal thematic scale than on an individual, personal one.

Yet as is so often the case with the frat-boy genre to which this film panders, so many gags feel like desperate, self-conscious attempts to be outrageous that the effect of its abundant cursing and boob shots is more depressing than delirious.

Based on a true story that culminated with the expulsion of 3 million Germans from Czechoslovakia, the film leaps through years with a rapidity that negates a good deal of its sweep.

Gosnell directs as if every scene must be either a nauseating roller-coaster ride or a syrupy melodrama, resulting in a seesawing tone that's not stabilized by the presence of Neil Patrick Harris.

The phoniness of their cross-country saga is compounded by a gaggle of cipher sidekicks.

Though two late plot developments are borderline-contrived, Green's direction is marked by mature dramatic and aesthetic understatement.

At its best, Magic Trip evokes the freewheeling, idealistic, psychedelic vibe of an era's origins; at worst, it's a film in which people narrate their own druggie home movies.

Evan Glodell's debut has the sweetness of a lullaby reverie and the blazing ferocity of a monster-car nightmare, a first-comes-elation, then-comes-madness structure that resembles that of "Blue Valentine," another tale focused on the commencement, and then collapse, of an affair.

For anyone hoping that Jean-Claude Van Damme's self-reflexive turn in Mabrouk El Mechri's postmodern JCVD heralded a new career direction for "The Muscles from Brussels," Assassination Games puts those dreams firmly to rest.

Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it.

From the outset, Streitfeld hopscotches back and forth over her tale's 24 hours with a self-conscious aesthetic affectation (overlapping imagery, shifting camera speeds, elliptical edits) that demolishes any intelligible character or plot development, resulting in a story comprised of pretentious meditative fragments.

Fred Cavayé shoots his action with both vigorous propulsion and visual lucidity. Unfortunately, however, his story's revelations, all of which are related to a recent corporate bigwig's assassination, arrive at least two-to-three scenes after they've already become obvious.

The Guard is John Michael McDonagh's caustically funny riff on cop and crime films.

Tommy Lee Jones provides wisecracking levity as Rogers's commanding officer, Hayley Atwell supplies the aforementioned buxom chest and accompanying tough-girl grit as Rogers's British love interest, and Johnson directs with flair, his set pieces defined by both muscularity and clarity.

Riley shrewdly maintains focus on how the players co-opted the merciless tactics of their invective-hurling adversaries for their own, and the region's, self-actualization.

Michael J. Weithorn's direction underlined its understatement via self-consciously patient camerawork and a doleful score, all in order to further the mournful mood.

A comedy whose cliché-embracing stupidity borders on the surrealistic.

As its titular tyrants, Spacey, Aniston, and Farrell all revel in their over-the-top noxiousness, though the latter is mysteriously given short shrift even though his performance is far and way the most novel and gonzo.

By making John such an unrepentant freedom-opposing monster, Ironclad denies itself any moral thorniness.

There's minor amusement in the suggestion that entrepreneurial criminality begins with a preference for Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal" over the Bible.

Mistaken-identity shenanigans and gooey romance are Monte Carlo's prime commodities.

Love is both a many-splendored and painful thing according to Love Etc., a multi-subject documentary about the various states of amour that, while never succumbing to glibness, also fails to rise above superficial geniality.

At least Roberts has some star wattage to burn; her megawatt smile is the only thing that ultimately pierces, however faintly, the film's blinding schmaltz.

Though it boasts its fair share of shots that approximate the turtle's first-person point of view, the film's most dominant presence is its heavy-handed maker.

Despite aping its title in order to suggest quality by association, Bad Teacher has nothing in common with "Bad Santa" -- including, alas, a genuinely nasty sense of humor.

Self-aware narcissism has rarely been this unjustified-or insufferable.

Shining an intimate light on an individual in order to reveal greater truths about life and the world, Raw Faith focuses on progressive-minded Portland, Oregon, Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell.

The Best and the Brightest's sharp one-liners and strong cast, especially McDonald's gleefully lecherous performance as an unabashed Republican pervert, help make it a sturdy bit of subculture-tweaking silliness.

Notwithstanding John Turturro's amusingly smug Italian F1 speedster and a few lighthearted jabs at Japanese TV and technology, Cars 2 generally remains stuck in neutral.

Can't mask that, at heart, it's merely a trifling tour documentary that gives further excessive attention to the late-night star's 2010 ouster as The Tonight Show host.

If not for its lack of self-awareness, The Art of Getting By would seem to be a spoof of ennui-inflicted teen dramas, because how else to explain the fact that Gavin Wiesen's debut is comprised of only clichés of clichés?

Class, gender and ethnic issues get pushed to the sidelines in favor of rote who-will-win suspense; all that finger-crossing and Lucky Charms flavoring, however, doesn't keep Jig from being just another in a long line of nonfiction soft-shoe routines.

The only faint upside to this excruciating dud is that, in its movie clips of Charlie Chaplin - who the mesmerized birds view as a kindred waddling spirit - the film might hopefully function for some kids as a gateway to superior comedy cinema.

Its scenario and criminals devoid of any representational depth, and without any substantial ideas underlying its carnage, the film ultimately just assumes the sadistically pragmatic POV of its one-dimensional thugs, pitilessly doling out brutality as a practical means to an end.

J.J. Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects.

Like many similarly twisty tales, Reversion's narrative logic is undermined by its characters' irrational behavior.

The incessant tumult drowns out any real message for the kids - or pleasure for their parents. It's a film so obnoxiously frantic that its most restrained element is a banjo-strumming elementary school teacher played by none other than '90s tween-mugging icon Jaleel "Urkel" White.

Rather than a mature, multifaceted approach, the director's portraits of Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, and Cairo are heavy on still-photo montages comprised primarily of smiling young people and spontaneous encounters with random jokesters.

Well acted and wise enough to not excessively linger in its atmosphere of genial camaraderie and underlying regret and nostalgia, Turkey Bowl accomplishes its small-scale goals with aplomb.

As if written by a robot whose frame of reference wasn't human reality but merely fairy-tale romantic comedies, Love, Wedding, Marriage strips genre tropes down to their scrawny, brittle bones.

The director's righteous anger is less restrained than his conventional vérité aesthetics and less off-putting than his one-sided approach to the issues at hand - an advocacy for alternative wind-turbine energy is suspiciously sketchy - yet he smartly allows coal-exploiting bigwigs plenty of screen time to properly hang themselves.

At first glance, Tuesday, After Christmas seems, in both form and content, only a modestly ambitious endeavor. Yet the singular attention with which it carries out its aims-and the rigorous success it ultimately attains-is nonetheless unsparing, and bracing.

If The Hangover was a boorish blackout fantasy for our binge-drinking age, The Hangover Part II is something like the contents of a fraternity house's toilet the morning after an insane kegger-namely, regurgitated elements of a more entertaining prior adventure.

From overwrought flashbacks of Third Master and Madame Kang's initial meetings (and sexual encounter), to the present-day arguments and maneuverings of Lord Kang, Empire of Silver is so determined to stage its material with reverence that it embalms any flickers of passion or tension.

Loren's performance is as tonally off as the rest of Bergmann's jokey lark, which strings together characters and twists with amateurishly chaotic abandon.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson's sequel delivers a bevy of superpowered set pieces that are dexterous and delirious, as well as tonally confident.

At once a disturbing vision of escape, a cautious portrait of liberation, and an exploration of authenticity and artificiality.

Kirkpatrick's color-deficient visual scheme is sturdy, but it can't compensate for a mechanical, unsubtle script.

As the seductive and conniving Angelica, Cruz is luminous, albeit not enough to compensate for Marshall shrouding virtually every major set piece in nighttime fogginess.

Director Leanne Pooley's documentary on the sisters and their "anarchist variety act" is definitely a formulaic bit of portraiture, but given its engaging, pioneering subjects, gimmickry is hardly needed to spice things up.

In countless over-the-top set pieces, Yuen delivers striking combat clarity without sacrificing the visceral editing and crazy digital effects of modern bloodbaths.

Suffice it to say, life's too short for such self-indulgent glibness.

Agent-turned-director Tony Krantz has a penchant for stylization that quickly slides into a velvet-painting cheesiness, which-along with the script's pseudoprofound Philosophy 101 maxims-renders the atmosphere less noirish than ridiculously cartoonish.

Jessica Alba gets plain-Jane crazy for An Invisible Sign, a syrupy "A Beautiful Mind" redux in which the starlet sports big brown bangs and Pippi Longstocking pigtails.

Michael Goldbach's pretentious take on identity development is woefully lacking in either subversive humor or genuine pathos; the overwrought end-of-the-world backdrop of a rampaging serial killer and a toxic industrial fire only poisons the concoction further.

Further marred by second-rate 3-D and the sort of cornball one-liners that even a fairy godmother couldn't love, it's a tolerance-testing tale that puts the grim in Grimm.

The movie's infrequent martial-arts centerpieces deliver the feeblest of punches.

That visual beauty helps compensate for a script that wastes no opportunity for heartstring tugging, often in the form of adorable tykes playing with each other and cuddling with their elders in close-up.

Rife with classic-cinema shoutouts, the film is a cutesy, toothless variation on "Mulholland Drive," one whose attempts to pay tribute to movie magic are ultimately undercut by stagey aesthetics and narrative theatricality.

Too timid to be either inspired or outrageously inept, Rio is merely a bird of a familiar feather.

The film succeeds only in turning one's stomach via implausibilities, inanities and the unwelcome sight of Brian Dennehy's naked ass.

In its didactic narration and constant on-screen introductions, the film loses a good deal of the very silence and mystery it venerates.

The film's recognition of its (and its makers') own failings doesn't stop them from being unbearably accurate.

If not for its outsize IMAX presentation, this handsome nonfiction film would be little more than an uplifting episode of PBS's "Nature."