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.