Noel Murray

Confidential Informant feels cribbed from dozens of other dirty cop stories, restaged with as little original detail as possible. It has the shape of a movie, but none of the stuff to make it move.

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.

There are talented people up and down the One True Loves cast and crew list, so it really makes no sense that director Andy Fickman’s film is so off-key. Nearly every creative choice goes awry.

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

This is a stifling film about solipsistic people.

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

The stars can’t save it.

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.

It’s as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide on one complication to set the action in motion, so they picked six. That much narrative congestion keeps the story from really moving.

By the end, Maneater has walked right up to the edge of being a fun, silly, “so bad it’s good” time-killer. But after taking way too long, it never really arrives there.

Me Time is less of a movie than it is a bulletin board filled with half-thought-out premises for dirty jokes.

This movie is mostly just another brisk recounting of a much-scrutinized actor’s tragic life, coupled with some unconvincing and often confusing coverage of the conspiracy theories surrounding Monroe’s death. The results feel tawdry and shallow.

Frankly, this is the kind of soft-core smut where it’s the character development and dialogue that feel gratuitous.

It’s clichéd, falling back on the old pulp premise of the culturally diverse “ragtag team” of tough guys and gals, barking out clumsily expositive dialogue in between unimaginative fights.

The best thing The Devil Below has going for it is its stark, remote location, which evokes the feeling of a world unto itself, hidden away in rural America. But what happens in front of this striking backdrop is too blandly familiar — and not nearly hellish enough.

This is a pretty rote slasher premise, the Utah setting aside. And Devane doesn’t do himself any favors by making his potential murder victims — a techie nerd, a social media influencer, a boorish jock, a pot-head and a prickly lesbian — so gratingly cartoonish.

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.

For roughly two-thirds of its running time, the big-screen video game adaptation Monster Hunter feels like an attempt to answer a question no one has asked: What would the “Jurassic Park” movies be like if they were drained of all sense of wonder? The film rallies toward the end with a few genuinely spectacular images, but even its best scenes fail to justify a tedious first hour.

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

Despite Tanović’s efforts to depict these crimes and their aftermath as aestheticized abstractions, there’s something depressingly mundane about the way the murders and the investigation play out.

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

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

The limited location here appears to have been strictly a cost-saving measure, not an opportunity to get creative.

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

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.

Primal ends up being more exhausting than awesome.

Even the weakest horror anthology films can be redeemed by one good segment; but alas, the semi-comic compendium Holiday Hell is pretty dire from start to finish.

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.

There’s something admirably bravura about Beloved Beast, which just keeps going, hour after hour, grinding through dry, tedious scenes of lousy people misbehaving, with no end in sight. This is a movie about misery, which makes viewers feel every bit of the characters’ ennui.

Madison’s work aside, this picture isn’t all that exciting. It’s 80 tedious minutes of shouting, swearing, nudity and gore, cut together with the deftness of a chainsaw.

10 Minutes Gone is clumsy and cliché-ridden, and populated by two accomplished action stars who look like they just want to get through this job as quickly as possible.

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.

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.

The biggest mystery in the serial-killer thriller Night Hunter isn’t the identity of a super-predator, or the location of his abductees. The real question here is how such a preposterous compendium of crime movie clichés could attract a heavyweight cast.

Boy Genius remains frustratingly bland and disjointed throughout — like it was assembled from discarded pieces of family-friendly television pilots.

It’s probably for the best that The Fanatic is so terrible. If it were made with any actual care, it’d be offensive instead of just dumb.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Schadt’s dialogue lacks punch, and his cast isn’t charismatic enough to compensate. But the bigger problem is that nothing especially tense or exciting happens after the corpse is found.

A few minutes of this kind of moody existentialism here and there can add flavor to a stylish genre picture. But it’s much less satisfying when the seasoning becomes the main dish.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A dispiritingly familiar story.

This movie’s a shoddy copy of something that was pretty tawdry to begin with.

Made Me Do It shuffles among different visual styles, as it bounces between its villain’s backstory and one desperate night in the lives of the brother and sister he’s targeted. The movie looks ugly and feels uglier, without much sense of a larger intent to mitigate the meanness. Koppin's right that his movie is different from a typical slasher. It’s far, far worse.

2050 has a meaningful subject, but is so dialogue-heavy and incident-light that almost the entire film feels like a pitch for the movie Holt didn’t make.

This is a well-intentioned movie; it's just not a well-made one.

The premise is effectively eerie; the presentation depressingly sloppy.

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

Quale and his crew clearly want this to be a good old-fashioned two-fisted caper, but the pacing is leaden and the plot lacks imagination. Worst of all, nobody really bothered to give the picture an angle. It’s all straight, flat and dull.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.”

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.

Maximum Impact is a dopey international thriller that’s fully aware of how dumb it is, This doesn’t make it a good movie, but it does make it easier to sit through.

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.

A tedious exploitation picture not even sleazy enough to find offensive.

No matter how spare and arty The Night Eats the World is, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before.

Devotees of Sunset Strip rock decadence may enjoy the general seediness. Horror hounds will likely feel bored, confused and more than a little ripped-off.

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.

Cage gets exactly one meme-able meltdown scene, about two-thirds of the way through the picture. The rest is a waste of time, even for trash cinema connoisseurs.

The Assassin's Code features a few plot twists, but none surprising. The situation and the characters are just too stock.

"Gehenna" features impressive gore effects, but the plot's an uninspired hodgepodge of dozens of other "haunted structure" pictures, set at a plodding pace, in a gray, dim location. It peaks in its first five minutes. The remaining 100 go nowhere, slowly.

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

Writer-director-star Brian Gianci keeps a snappy pace, and his cast is admirably willing to take chances, but when the humor doesn't land — which is most of the time — the movie's tough to take.

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

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.

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.

Writer-director Brian A. Metcalf avoids the usual found-footage looseness, instead relying on scripted dialogue and professional actors (including former child star Thomas Ian Nicholas, who also produced). The cast is strong but their lines are painfully stilted.

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

The Midnight Man would feel like a hodgepodge of other fright flicks even without England and Shaye’s familiar faces.

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

There are limits to how much of an edge a movie gets from incompetence — as writer/director/producer Susannah O’Brien’s The Doll proves definitively.

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.

The lack of any real imagination makes Attack of the Killer Donuts a chore.

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.

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.

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.

A lifeless demonic possession drama.

It’s the same dreary hooey, made more tedious and witless through repetition.

Even with a solid cast at his disposal, Bieber can’t make Don’t Sleep anything more than a disconnected compendium of time-tested shock tactics.

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.