Noel Murray

Mainly, Good Dick just proves that TV actors like Ritter make good indie-film hires, because they'll go along with whatever ridiculous nonsense a novice filmmaker concocts.

It's neither conceptually bold nor slyly satirical when Billy dresses up as a Southern evangelical and sings made-up hymns about "the shopacalypse."

In short, this is a movie about bruised people bruising each other, and if Downloading Nancy had more of an openly pulpy sensibility, then the repugnant premise might’ve had some lasting impact.

The movie's more damnable problem is it irrelevance.

Salvation Boulevard doesn't seem to have any higher aspiration than illustrating how religious people can be hypocrites. (Gosh, who knew?)

In nearly every way—from how the movie’s being released to the way it approaches the whole satanic possession subgenre — The Vatican Tapes is dispiritingly ordinary. It’s the rote B-movie that Neveldine up to now has tried so hard not to make.

The faux-documentary aspect of Radiant City is a huge gamble that doesn't pay off. If anything, the movie's observations about the corrupting social influence of cluttered mall spaces get undercut by the fact that Burns and Brown feel the need to INVENT characters to prove their truth.

This isn't really a movie made for audiences; it's for casting agents and studio execs, to show off one man's acting chops and his skill at writing dialogue.

If Misconduct were more lurid — or more shamelessly idiotic — it might at least be a guilty pleasure. But instead it’s slow-paced, and the filmmakers’ idea of cheap thrills is to make Emily a masochist, who gets turned on by being spanked and slapped around.

LaLiberte is the best thing about Girls Against Boys. She has an unforced coolness, even when Chick sticks her with sub-Quentin Tarantino business, like having a conversation about the nutritional value of Captain Crunch, or singing along to not one, but two Donovan songs.

The film isn't erotic or profound. It is occasionally comic, though-like reading the finalists for one of those Bad Sex In Fiction awards.

Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.

Give Fitzgerald credit for ambition and good intentions, but for all its truth-to-power saber-rattling, 3 Needles is distressingly dim.

The characters Lehmann and company use as generational mouthpieces bear no relation to any people who have ever existed, and they barely work as parody.

The result is either one of the most self-indulgent vanity projects in the history of the Hollywood star system, or a rare revealing look at a distinguished actor who usually keeps his real self out of the spotlight.

It's a rare moment when the STORY makes the point, not the speeches.

Poor Demi Moore — playing the self-centered CEO of a failing company — comes off as stiff and shrill, setting the tone for a movie that’s stilted from start to finish.

Strong lead performances by Aaron Paul and Emily Ratajkowski are squandered in Welcome Home, a low-tension suspense picture with pretensions of saying something profound about broken relationships.

The teen-targeted fantasy-romance The School for Good and Evil is an exhaustingly long, overstuffed movie that probably would’ve worked better as a TV series.

At every turn in Speed Kills, director Jodi Scurfield and a team of screenwriters sand the edges off a complicated, multi-decade saga, making a featureless knockoff of seemingly every sweeping true-crime movie of the past three decades.

This movie’s about as scary as a jackhammer.

It’s as though we’re supposed to already know these people — as if The Crusades were a sequel to a movie we haven’t seen. There is some visual panache here, and scenes that show promise. But too much is missing.

The overall vibe here ends up being less “good dirty fun” than “foul-mouthed teenager trying to look cool.”

Primal ends up being more exhausting than awesome.

The characters, the plot, and — unfortunately — the star are all interchangeable with the elements of hundreds of other international thrillers.

Turning this movie off before it starts is actually a good idea: not because it's dangerous, but because it's lousy.

Lundgren can play these kinds of driven, tortured loners in his sleep. But he still needs a story worth telling, in eye-catching locations, with action sequences that pop. “The Tracker” has none of those three.

The movie was inspired by a real person but nearly everything that happens here plays as phony.

The lack of any likable characters ultimately undoes Urge. Kaufman and Stahl have made a classic party-throwers mistake: overrating the entertainment value in watching other people get high.

Aside from a few good jump-scares and a couple of original plot twists, Wrecker spends most of its running time cutting between footage of the roadster and footage of the truck, apparently assuming viewers will take those images and use them to imagine something more exciting.

When the long-promised global barrage of tornadoes, lightning strikes, tidal waves and extreme temperatures hits in the final half-hour, the special effects are stunning. But the razzle-dazzle arrives too late, and is strangely unmoving.

These vignettes are only sporadically entertaining, and sap a lot of the narrative momentum before the extended climax — which itself is largely a retread of the first film’s big finish.

London is adequate (if not exactly magnetic) as the lead, and director Patricio Valladares gives the film a rich, shadowy look that almost compensates for the turgid pace and distractingly incessant score.

Ultimately, Wastelander is a movie for fetishists, who likely won't care about the emptiness at its center so long as its surfaces are as smothered with cheese as the straight-to-VHS junk they loved as a kid.

Not even a winning lead performance by Andrew Lawrence can keep this film from feeling as dreary and programmatic as a PSA.

Writer-director Nathaniel Atcheson has found a clever way to tell a lot of story without many resources — although the end result is still more exhausting than enticing.

There’s not quite enough new or exciting about the picture’s demon-haunting tropes to recommend it. But the connection between family dysfunction and supernatural evil at least gives the routine jump-scares and vaguely spooky atmosphere a firmer context.

The premise is effectively eerie; the presentation depressingly sloppy.

The Fight Within is too generic as a sports flick, and too pro forma as a tract. There’s more vitality and humanity in the closing-credits blooper reel than in anything in the actual picture.

It tests the theory that a creepy clown lurking in the dark is always terrifying. It turns out that with repetition, some nightmares become boring.

Reilly's appearance in Piggie amounts to little more than a cameo, but he's lively and real in ways that the rest of Bagnall's cast is not. It's the material's fault.

Hell Fest has exactly one genuinely nail-biting scene.... Otherwise, the movie does little to update, subvert, or comment on the trappings of classic thrillers like “The Funhouse” and “Halloween.”

The cast is game and the pace blessedly zippy, but everything about this film feels too fake to generate any real suspense.

The acting’s either overly muted or awkwardly broad (with terrible Southern accents throughout, for no real reason). The slack pacing drains the movie of its urgency. This is a neo-noir that never generates any spark.

Clumsy and corny, the film plays like a pat showbiz cautionary tale, half-heartedly reworked into lurid pulp.

Aggressively ugly and gross, the movie boasts a certain low-rent authenticity, but the auteur never figures out how to fill his grubby little rooms.

The Gracefield Incident sports some impressive special effects in key scenes, but remains yet another found-footage thriller where the dialogue feels phony, the nonscary action is tedious and the images are artless. The angle may be different, but we’ve seen this before.

While Moussi has ample skills as a fighter — and is plenty handsome to boot — he lacks Van Damme’s charisma. It turns out that just slapping the title “Kickboxer” onto a movie isn’t enough to revive a B-movie favorite. The actual kickboxer matters.

Landon struggles to generate much tension from her plot, which frequently feels contrived. The story jerks its protagonist (and its audience) through several dark and heartbreaking moments, before inevitably landing on a final confrontation with an outcome that’s not too hard to predict … and thus not all that nerve-wracking.

With Eloise, Legato and company take a prime location, rich in history, and make it look like a soundstage.

At both its highest and its lowest, Inherit the Viper lacks excitement. The action sequences are sparse, and the plot is underdeveloped.

This is a picture that could do with a little bit of scenery-chewing and a whole lot of sensationalism — anything that would make its middling mystery plot more exciting.

The movie isn’t trying to understand Chicago in the Capone era. It just uses those names and stories as a backdrop for a lot of shooting, swearing and bad accents.

A series of non-answers isn't enough to build a documentary on, especially when they're strung together by insufferably self-congratulatory voiceover narration (de Ponfilly plays up his agony over whether documentary filmmaking helps or hurts its subjects) and corny stylistic effects.

With scares at a minimum, Astral relies heavily on its young cast, who are all likable and charismatic. Dillane and Idris and the others are undoubtedly destined to appear someday in movies and TV shows far more memorable than this one.

Director John Pogue brings some grit and energy to the action sequences, but ultimately Blood Brother is just a compendium of pulp clichés, with nothing to say about these characters or the worlds they inhabit.

Ultimately, there’s just nothing here that’s snappy or relevant. In tech-speak, this film is bricked.

From the overwritten, pop-culture-reference-laden dialogue to the incessant attempts to be shocking, Happy Birthday tries way too hard. For a movie that doesn’t have much to say, it sure never stops jabbering.

More often than not, it feels like Dutoit uses shock and surrealism as a way to cover up for the movie’s plodding pace, crude blocking and nonsensical story. It’s admirable that she’s trying to defy convention here, but the result is something ultimately too befuddling to disturb.

The woodenness of China Salesman, coupled with the general oddness of a two-fisted adventure yarn about hyper-aggressive telecom companies, gives this movie some “weird cinema” appeal. But if you can’t tolerate stinky cheese, leave this one on the shelf.

Acceleration is like a quest story with all the cool complications and nifty narrow escapes removed.

The People Garden is so slow and spare that it barely registers. It just floats through the forest, silent and bloodless.

8 Remains has a cool premise, but director Juliane Block and screenwriter Laura Sommer (with dialogue assistance from Wolf-Peter Arand) treat it more as a metaphor than as a storytelling opportunity.

The stars can’t save it.

The story almost feels like an afterthought, whipped up to support the spectacle — and not, as it should always be, the other way around.

A movie that very quickly becomes yet another story about people with guns chasing other people with guns, through featureless forests and abandoned buildings.

This “Close Encounters” is overlong and rambling — more concerned with disconnected anecdotes than making a compelling case or telling an interesting story.

While its DIY spirit is admirable, this tedious shocker feels like it was cobbled together from a kit.

While The Escape of Prisoner 614 has the right cast for a good old-fashioned romp, this movie barely moves.

If nothing else, The Church proves something: Better an amusingly terrible, eye-catching horror movie than a slick, nondescript, boring one.

Even genre buffs will be disappointed by how minor-league this movie is.

Director Matthew Currie Holmes (who also cowrote the script) has a hard time controlling this movie’s tone, which ranges from tongue-in-cheek to deadly serious, with some well-meaning but poorly executed attempts to examine the racial component of the old Buckout Road tales.

Writer-director C.A. Cooper’s The Snare is admirably artful and oblique in putting its own twist on the haunted-house story, but it’s derivative of much better psychological suspense films and is obnoxiously unpleasant to boot.

There’s nothing notably new — or especially scary — about any of it.

The movie doesn't do justice to a promising premise. A scarcity of laughs and scares limits this property's curb appeal.

Movies like these — so well-intentioned, so unexciting — give the very notion of “a brainy thriller” a bad rep.

A dispiritingly familiar story.

These kind of indie neo-noirs can be little gems when done well. Here though, directors Kevin and Michael Goetz and screenwriter Michael Arkof have delivered something largely devoid of style or narrative tension.

Even with solid supporting performances by Morgan Freeman, Robert Patrick and Peter Stormare, this movie’s just … well, sad. Twenty-five years ago, this exact cast and creative team might have turned this material into something to rival “Harper” or “Body Heat.” Now, they all seem slower and lazier: as committed to making a taut mystery as they are to mastering a Texas drawl.

Perfect also shows that striking images alone aren’t always enough. Alcazar and cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser have concocted some fine illustrations. Now all they need is some decent text.

After an hour or so of bad noir dialogue and convoluted plotting, viewers may wish they could jump back in time and watch something else.

González maintains a glacial pace and a hushed tone, while withholding so much information that the film is confusing and only comes together in retrospect. It's a grueling experience, with a modest payoff. By the time it finally ends, every word in its title feels apt.

Director and co-writer Jason DeVan assembled a good cast, and has solidly constructed scare sequences strewn throughout Along Came the Devil. But even at its best, the movie feels stitched together from incomplete, ill-fitting pieces.

The surrealism that dominates so much of Mr. Jones’ final stretch is admirably unusual, but it’s also confusing, and quickly becomes tedious.

This flavorless home-invasion thriller hasn’t ripened with age.

An oafish bore.

A compendium of genre clichés — or, more charitably, “homages” — Queen of Spades offers little that fright fans haven’t seen before.

While writer-director Tudley James has a disarmingly light touch and some stylistic flair, this “Granny” ultimately isn’t clever or funny enough.

A lifeless demonic possession drama.

Flay is, at its core, just an OK indie drama about a bickering brother and sister, with some blah supernatural hooey clumsily appended.

Doleac’s forging a niche. His name on a picture is now an indication that genre fans will see something different … though it’s not yet a mark of quality.

Though Krings co-wrote and co-directed the film (the latter alongside Arnaud Bouron), “Tall Tales” lacks his usual gentle kookiness and vivid designs.

Michael Madsen brings a much-needed jolt of bad boy energy to this dreary psychodrama that squanders good performances and a sharp midfilm twist.

The cast is talented — and occasionally funny — but they run out of fertile material quickly.

Raising awareness of social injustice is a good goal, but not enough to hold an audience’s attention.

The apparitions are cool. The schmoes they’re haunting hardly seem worth the effort.

This is another memorable Doleac effort, true — but it’s more painfully awkward than daring.

The newly released Point Break remake is tedious and overblown — as though the filmmakers were so preoccupied with "updating" the material that they forgot what made it so popular in the first place.