Noel Murray

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 stars can’t save it.

Primal ends up being more exhausting than awesome.

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.

Reality Bites embodied seemingly every odious post-Nirvana media trend. The title alone was laughably faux-hip, and the movie's portrait of slackerdom—limply enacted by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Janeane Garofalo—was both broad and shallow...No one acknowledges the obvious—that a heinous idea got even worse when Stiller signed on to direct.

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.

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.

She acts amazed by her own work, in hopes that we'll be too. To help the matter along, Lee underscores the action with a Mickey Mouse score, cutesy animation, and a relentlessly chipper tone. Her technique is pretty much everything that's wrong with documentary filmmaking today.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

No movie that opens with the line "Time was never a friend to Bobby Long" could possibly be any good, and sure enough, A Love Song For Bobby Long lives down to its squibbed kickoff.

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.

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

Becomes hard going the longer Baur stretches out the parade of narcissists, all spouting received wisdom, cultural clichés, and bad poetry.

What this Singing Detective really needed was to be reworked top to bottom, preferably by a writer fleeing some demons of his own.

A series of third-act complications provides much-needed narrative surprise, but until then, The Three Marias is a disappointingly flavorless genre exercise.

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

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.

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.

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.

Even the movie's brighter spots are undermined by ineptly staged action sequences, flatly functional dialogue and stock characters. Ultimately, Submerged is all wet.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

The movie's more damnable problem is it irrelevance.

This is a stifling film about solipsistic people.

At one point, David Cross tells Gurwitch to enjoy being unemployed, because "When you're fired, you're interesting." But as Fired! proves, that ain't necessarily so.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Guttenberg adapts James Kirkwood Jr.'s humanist black comedy -- and drains all the recognizable humanity out of it, turning it into a morose, unlikable reflection of its sad-sack lead character.

The aim here seems to be to replace startled gasps with shocked guffaws. The results are contrary to Scout Law — not Kind, Clean or Reverent.

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

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.

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 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.

An oafish bore.

This movie’s about as scary as a jackhammer.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

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

A movie about self-absorbed douchebags that wallows in their douchebaggery.

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

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.

Their attempts at wit seem forced, and the overall point of each installment is too minor to spend nearly 30 minutes exploring.

The movie feels like a thin excuse to show image after image of women being abused. This Martyrs has the bones of its predecessor, but it's been bled dry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[An] uninspired, nonsensical mishmash, which crudely cobbles together second-hand religious imagery, abrasively noisy jump-scares, and — for some reason — techno-phobia.

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.

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.

Even by the shaggy standards of found footage, The Final Project is amateurish.

Some Kind Of Beautiful has a fine cast, but they’re stuck doing shtick.

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.

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

The movie tries to wrap an important social message in comedy, but it’s unpalatable all the way through.

From start to finish, Black Rose is about as pro forma as a motion picture gets.

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.