Noel Murray

This is a B-movie with the pretensions of a prestige drama; and frankly, the less ambitious version would’ve likely been better.

It's all a tad too serious for a movie that's essentially a tawdry pulp thriller. Still, anyone who comes to Acts of Violence looking for colorfully sleazy characters and shootouts — as opposed to nuanced public policy briefs — should find enough reasons to stick around.

The film has the eerie atmosphere and outstanding makeup effects of a good fantasy thriller. But it’s way too choppy to build any tension.

Compared to other, similar offbeat monster movies, Grabbers is under-realized. It isn’t as smartly plotted or funny as Tremors, nor as politically charged as The Host.

At its most basic level, the Paranormal Activity formula still has some kick, with its combination of creepy lo-fi video and tasteful suburbia creating some strong, unsettling dissonance.

Schweighöfer does have a memorable screen presence, and this film is well made, as formulaic pictures so often are. But this one never fully justifies its existence, or its expense. It’s a big movie with skimpy ideas.

Throughout, Gaffigan is great, eschewing sentimentality as he taps into his frustration and rage — with no jokes in sight.

Gass-Donnelly has a great eye and brings some genuine beauty to his movie’s rural setting. The preoccupation with aesthetics though means that “Lavender” is sometimes quieter, slower and artier than the material warrants.

Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell have often been the lone bright spot in otherwise dismal movies, and it takes their combined charm to redeem Mr. Right.

Even with the short running time, writer-director Matt Kane and cowriter Marc Underhill exhaust most of their ideas early. But Kind is touching throughout, as a man who just needs to feel wanted.

The less oblique and more direct the movie gets, the worse it is.

Still, after an hour and a half of exquisite photography and mushy action, audiences may well ask the unspoken question that plays across the faces of the Rolling Family clan right before the closing credits. Was it worth it?

At its best, Running From Crazy is a powerful portrait of a woman who’s wrested control of her life by understanding the patterns her relatives fell into, and consciously breaking them.

Despite the handsome Craig Wrobleski cinematography, and despite a typically fine performance by Patrick Wilson as the lost kid’s dad — slowly going mad in the bush — “In the Tall Grass” runs too long and repeats itself too much to be as gripping as its source material.

It’s impossible to overstate what Fraser brings to this movie, with his imposing frame, manic energy and slangy dialogue. The other leads are strong too — including Abhay Deol as an undercover cop. But Batra doesn’t do enough fresh or surprising with the plot or action scenes, both of which are merely functional.

Both Kong and Mechani-Kong look unimpressive, with none of the weird grandeur of the classic Japanese kaiju.

While Saints And Sinners will strike some as a refreshingly even-toned social study, it's also a documentary heavy on talking heads and low on real drama. It's beautifully shot and deeply felt, but, for the most part, hearing a description of the film is as good as watching it.

The Tony Scott version of Tarantino comes out vulgar; the graphic violence and profanity-laced posturing represent everything that the wannabes soon used to exhaust audiences. Nevertheless, True Romance contains so many unforgettable moments.

While trying to make the original’s free-flowing, frequently surprising plot fit into a more conventional screenplay arc, Barris and Hall have sapped a lot of its vitality. The new version may be more current, but the old one rings more true.

Wagner and company fail to follow Langella's primary rule of storytelling: "Follow the characters around until they do something interesting."

A lot about this Chainsaw is under-realized and messy — perhaps because of the project’s convoluted shoot, which saw the original directors axed one week into production in Bulgaria. The final version of the film, directed by Garcia, packs a lot of characters, subplots, and backstory into its 83 minutes, and very few are essential.

This is an inspiring and important story, but worthiness doesn't automatically equal quality. Had Besson looked for unexpected ways into Suu Kyi's life, or even had he indulged his old impulses and made a slick, surface-y Luc Besson movie, then The Lady might've been more memorable.

All the nudity in Zerophilia is either prosthetic or body-doubled. Which means the sex scenes--and the feeling and meaning behind them--are just as phony.

Roughly 99 percent of the time, if a movie that seems like it should be a big deal appears almost out of the blue, it's because it's lousy. The Double doesn't exactly buck that trend.

In basketball terms, it’s not just that Boogie’s a star player who never passes the ball. He also rarely shoots. He mostly just stands in one place, listlessly dribbling.

Only a filmmaker as talented as Alex Ross Perry could make a movie as misbegotten as Golden Exits.

It's tough to keep track of everything Jeff Warrick's subliminal-advertising documentary Programming The Nation? does wrong.

It's a lousy movie, but it has spunk.

The Secret Scripture is a film with a lot to say, which struggles with the best way to say it.

Undoubtedly, everything documentarian Darius Marder shows in his debut film Loot actually happened, but Marder’s approach to this “truth is stranger than fiction” story is so forced that the movie FEELS phony.

The sketchily symbolic characters and flat plot just frame an atmosphere of sticky heat and Biblical reckoning.

There's a solid framework in place here for a fun, original twist on a conventional science-fiction premise, but aside from the occasional quirky touch - Vigalondo fails to fill that frame with a picture worthy of it.

Cox’s character is a living, hissing embodiment of the idea that no good deed goes unpunished. As an actor stuck in a movie that wastes his talents, Cox can surely relate.

More than anything, The Playroom feels like an excuse to explore this retro house from a child’s point of view—which is perfectly okay, provided no one breaks the spell by talking.

Branch also adds some welcome visual pizzazz when needed, and admirably tries to keep the movie from becoming the story of a heroic creative adventurer and the people who try to drag him down. The characters in Multiple Sarcasms are more nuanced, and don’t reduce to a generic good or bad.

At the start of Gerrymandering, Reichert quotes Thomas Pynchon, writing, "Nothing will produce bad history more directly nor brutally than drawing a line." The same could be said of documentaries.

Director Tom DiCillo does his damnedest to make his documentary about The Doors unwatchable, but the subject matter is too compelling--and the vintage footage too electrifying--to be completely worthless.

Red Lights' setup is silly but fun, with a fair degree of self-awareness that the film's entire "super-scientists vs. celebrity spiritualists" premise is a hoot.

At times plays like a case study more than a drama.

The bloodiest of the Apes films, and one of the most despairing.

The film looks amazing, but the cranked-up acting (complete with the most rapid-fire dialogue Bogdanovich had yet attempted) is tough to bear, especially as it becomes apparent that James' subtle character study is beyond the story-driven Bogdanovich's capabilities.

The flat, pat talk is symptomatic of Amu's overriding problem: It has no sense of personal style.

The Letters feels dutiful, not artful.

Nothing in How About You is the least bit surprising; the film hits its marks with dreary precision.

All the performers are fine--even the miscast Romijn--but they're still too much like actors playing dress-up.

The Sutherland segments are the most bothersome, because they never really reach a resolution, and because they're betrayed by Avelino's uni-faceted approach.

Bercot moves the characters up and down like lines on a chart, never granting full access to what any of them are thinking. And access is what Backstage promised.

Would the movie be as (barely) entertaining as it is without De Niro? He only has about 15 minutes’ worth of scenes in Heist, but whenever he’s on-screen the film almost feels legitimate.

The best parts of Deadfall are absorbed into a scenario that frequently ditches the cat-and-mouse routine and tries instead to be about three dysfunctional families working toward reconciliation.

In the words of his own character, this young filmmaker hasn't found his "inner fat girl."

Manda Bala is exciting and stylish, and Kohn knows exactly what he wants the movie to say. But he makes most of his points in the first 10 minutes, with disgusting slow-motion frog footage and sound bites from social scientists pointing out how "corruption is what links all other crimes." The rest is just so much show.

Has its moments of wonder and beauty, but the film is obscure by design, and meant to appeal to those who favor the alternative canon of directing greats: the one that includes the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, Crispin Glover, John Cassavetes, Claire Denis, Abel Ferrara, and Vincent Gallo.

Oskar Roehler's serio-comedy Agnes And His Brothers tries to make some incisive points about the damage wrought by society's sexual hang-ups, but though Roehler throws three different characters at the subject, only one halfway sticks.

It's hard to overlook how much of Elsa & Fred is rote and pre-chewed.

Forever Strong is generic faith-and-redemption fare, devoid of nuance.

When a documentary feels obliged to spend a few minutes explaining what “300 years” means, it crosses the line from simple and straightforward to condescending.

Fairhaven's location is lovely. Its actors are terrific. All of them beg for something better.

What's missing from this movie is any of that sense of what made Chapman so important, or why he was so often at the center of Monty Python's best skits and movies, up until his death from cancer at 48.

The one bit of artsy business that McGee pulls off well is the recurring image of snapshots, serving as a kind of map to who these people were and who they're becoming.

This movie is all talk and no action. It’s a two-hour pregame show, with no game.

Give Don't Go In The Woods credit for not being a wholly conventional horror movie. Debit it for not caring about horror in the first place.

It isn't exactly a waste of time, but anyone who's seen a mob movie or TV show in the past 30 years has pretty much seen 10th & Wolf.

Christopher delivers cutesy jabber and one-note characters, as oily and devoid of substance as... well, you know.

Rites Of Spring does have a real "no idea what's going to happen next" quality, which is rare. Then again, that's because the movie feels haphazard and unfinished: more weed than plant.

This is a movie displaced in time. And it’s barely a movie. It’s more like a dusty, faded old pamphlet: “So your daughter’s decided to get gay-married…”

Friedrich’s snide tone gets in the way, turning a study of capitalism run amok into one artist who just can’t stand all these rich squares and their “fancy dogs.”

This time out, Bahrani’s push to make a point wins out over the strong sense of character he’s cultivated in his earlier films.

It’s too broad in both its humor and its melodrama, and there are so many narrative threads that none of them aside from Driver’s really get their due.

Nothing about The Ward's script or direction has much snap. The dialogue is never witty, the characters are indistinct, the story is set in 1966 for no relevant reason, and the scares are strictly of the "thing jumps loudly out of the shadows" variety.

Skills Like This is never great. But for its first half-hour, it's more fitfully amusing than a movie about a bank-robbing playwright ought to be.

The drama feels factory-cut and shrink-wrapped, with each of three kids' stories following predictably twisty paths to ironically hopeful conclusions.

Aside from a smattering of irony and a resolution for one of the storylines, the security cameras aren't really threaded into Look's essential purpose. If the idea is that we're always being watched, why does it seem that in this movie, no one's really paying attention?

There's a difference between "funny" and "comedy," and the movie adaptation of Killing Bono tries way too hard to be nutty, at the expense of just getting across what McCormick knows.

The problem with Desert Wind is that Kohler takes everything at face value. Wouldn't it have been more useful to make this trip the centerpiece of a longer documentary that follows the men before Tunisia and, more importantly, after?

Burns has continued to cram one-dimensional characters into thinly plotted comedy-dramas, hoping to re-impress moviegoers with his aloof leading-man charm and faux-natural, trying-too-hard-to-be-funny dialogue.

Peter Nicks’ documentary Anthem is a broad-strokes film about a nuanced topic: the promises and failures of the American experiment.

The result is a movie that feels both fussed-over and meaninglessly cruel.

Even with an old pro like Shaye behind the camera, Ambition is too slight.

James Cullen Bressack’s Bethany is polished, well-acted and filled with memorably disgusting images, but its portrait of a frazzled adult survivor of child abuse is ultimately formulaic and a little sleazy.

Reconstruction doesn't evoke much emotion beyond cool ennui. At that, the film excels.

It’s hard to recommend Blood Brothers, which is mostly unpleasant and shrill. But it is unusual enough to suggest that Prendes’ next film might be better.

Looking for bathroom humor, beer jokes, heavy metal, unapologetic smut and a dude in a furry monster suit? These movies are a one-stop shop for just that kind of good-natured vulgarity.

There’s not enough story here but every time David pops up on the soundtrack to spout dime-novel clichés like, “Fear the hanged man, because he’s dead already,” this movie takes on the quality of classic storybook, not straight-to-video schlock.

More often, the weirdness and affectations seem gratuitous. Even for a movie meant to be offbeat, the rhythm is jarringly askew.

In the process of becoming characters, the writer-stars have diminished themselves.

What's most surprising about Never Been Thawed is that it's not completely awful. It's just a little awful.

With its cast of veteran child actors and its baked-in holiday warmth, Let It Snow has some baseline appeal. But like the formulaic Christmas movies that fill the Hallmark Channel this time of year, this film isn’t exactly a timeless classic. It’s more like something to put on in the background, while making cookies or wrapping presents.

What the movie does have going for it is Ricci, who in the past few years has become a master at playing offbeat heroines in violent stories. Ricci is convincingly terrified in a film that’s never scary enough to justify her performance.

Knight does a good job of establishing the political complexities of a more theocratic age. But then The Appearance pivots straight to the usual assortment of things going bump in the night, which — as it turns out — aren’t suddenly less clichéd when everyone’s wearing robes.

Like its predecessor, “The Boy II” is a fairly corny and stodgy spook-show, with a few good jolts and one genuinely creepy killer toy.

The movie’s well-meaning, but also tedious and self-indulgent, with only brief flashes of originality — and even those are quickly interrupted by yet another explicit sex scene.

Meet Cute falls into a rut fairly quickly, because it lacks the breadth of imagination that makes the best time-loop stories work.

Doke's cast of unknowns has trouble bringing a convoluted plot to life. As it unfolds, Goodland stacks up more preposterous B-movie notions than Doke's thin script can support.

Wicked Witches is almost like a segment from an old British horror anthology. It’s simple, direct, rich in local color and dripping with irony. But it’s been stretched to about triple its ideal length.

The disappointing western-mystery hybrid Murder at Yellowstone City strands an excellent cast in a slow-paced story with a muted tone, too far removed from its pulpy inspirations.

Ultimately, Ride feels a little like a drama class exercise, with the leads digging deep into their characters’ motivations and feelings. All three nail their parts. But their story never gets out of first gear.

Given how visually inventive and unusual the film’s first five minutes are, it’s disappointing that, by its last half hour, it essentially turns into one undistinguished chase scene after another. A heroine as strong as Reese deserves a more consistently exciting plot.

The mystery plot isn’t surprising enough — and it takes at least a few good jolts to create the cinematic equivalent of a page-turner.

For all the smart visual design, though, She's One Of Us is frustratingly clinical.

While the story’s nothing special, the world of Desolate is memorable, with its tribal rivalries and sleazy black markets. It’s a vision of the end-times that disturbingly resembles the dying small towns of America in 2019.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Bright is that it squeezes nudity, profanity and blood into the kind of dopey adventure that should be aimed more at adolescents — right down to its simplistic lessons about tolerance.

In the end, the most disturbing thing about The 16th Episode is how good it might’ve been if Cohen-Olivar had figured out how to fill the whole picture with the personality at its center.

The idea of this boat as a last-ditch play to save a marriage is fine as an inciting incident, but it ends up steering the story way too much. Oldman and Mortimer play the drama in “Mary” well. Too bad they don’t get much chance to play the horror.

Alicia Vikander, Eva Green and Charlotte Rampling pump some energy into writer-director Lisa Langseth’s overly static, chatty drama, but are let down by a movie that keeps promising — and failing — to blossom into something more.

A Good Marriage comes off as curiously flat for a movie about a woman who sleeps next to a murderer every night.

An obvious abundance of creative passion went into the two-fisted action picture Split Lip — a film that’s generally likable but ultimately too slight and derivative to recommend.

The Outsider is a slick copy of multiple, much-better films and TV series. It's so well-polished it's practically featureless.

An accomplished cast does what it can to bring the material to life, but it’s tough to add fine emotional shading to characters so thick and cartoonish.

The film as a whole, though, never hits as hard as it should. The characters are too stock — generic enough that their personalities won’t distract from the looming apocalyptic trouble.

Well-made but generic, the thriller The Super is noteworthy primarily for featuring one of Val Kilmer’s first substantial roles since recovering from throat cancer. Director Stephan Rick works around the actor’s infirmities, but Kilmer’s offbeat charisma remains unmistakable.

While the European locations are picturesque, the cast lacks the chops and charisma to make this collection of killers and thieves imposing. Weight-room-sculpted muscles aside, everyone here comes across like too much of a lightweight — as if they’re just playing pretend.

The film mostly feels perfunctory and awkward — like calling home at Christmas.

As the true purpose of the quest becomes clearer, Huang raises the film’s stakes, aiming for a profundity that he can’t quite hit — though he takes a solid shot.

While the tone of One Last Night is appropriately breezy — and while newcomer Schank makes a wonderful first impression — in a “strangers spend a long evening talking” story, the characters should be more witty and wise, and not as vaguely defined as this pair.

The effects look cheap, the Louisiana accents are broad and the characters are one-dimensional, but veteran B-picture stars Nicky Whelan (as a tough sheriff), Casper Van Dien (as a notorious criminal) and Louis Mandylor (as the raiders’ leader) all throw themselves into the film’s cheesy spirit.

Hoge, who scripted and directed The United States Of Leland, caters to his cast too much. He gives almost every character a way-too-involved subplot, which distracts from the heart of his story.

Bernstein stages a few good, tense moments in the film’s second half — in particular a skate-chase scene on an iced-over stream — but Look Away mostly fails as a “killer teen” movie. The pace is too slow, and the mood too somber.

Honestly, The Funhouse Massacre isn't quite enough of either.

Although Shattered is a relatively short movie, it takes too long for Prieto and Loughery to put all these pieces into play — at which point the story belatedly does develop some tension.

The idea behind this film is to celebrate James’ first and best teammates. In the real world, what they achieved as a basketball team was remarkable. But dramatized? On the screen? It’s stubbornly undramatic.

King worked on the script for Cell, which isn’t that surprising given that many of the worst adaptations of his work have his name on them. It only proves how hard a job it is to adapt King. Even the author himself can’t ace it.

There are really two movies happening here: one, a cat-and-mouse game between two manipulative schemers; and another that skewers self-involved, “anything for a click” influencers. Both have their merits; but they don’t mesh well.

Harlan’s film—written by Vikram Weet—is a routine low-budget genre picture, with blandly attractive young actors overmatched by the freakiness lurking in the wilderness.

Despite all the familiar faces, Simulant still feels too bare-bones. It asks some pretty remedial questions about freedom and humanity; and it is ultimately too tasteful and earnest to get pulses pounding and minds racing.

Shelton seems so preoccupied with making Touchy Feely feel natural and real that she’s forgotten to add any incident.

The movie’s artier components are imbued with enough heart and poetry to hold the picture together — just barely — through the more tedious stretches.

The film has a nutty premise and a game star, but it too quickly runs out of fresh ideas.

If nothing else, this movie is an effective demonstration of the directors’ ability to lull the audience into a relaxed state before knocking them around.

None of this amounts to much. The original had some squirmy points to make about femininity and motherhood that this Inside lacks. But the movie works on a gut level … as in, "Sharp blades are scary when they're pointed at a pregnant belly."

Melody Makers never becomes more than a set of disconnected sound bites and archival photos, loosely assembled. At times the film feels like outtakes from another, more cohesive documentary about Melody Maker’s legacy.

This picture tries to encompass many ideas: about loyalty, the lust for fame and the slippery slope of immoral behavior. All of that is in the film. It just hasn’t been put in any particular order.

It has a good heart and a good cast, mixing Hollywood veterans with some of today’s better young TV stars. But the movie is strenuously, exhaustingly unfunny, in a way that makes its phoniness harder to bear.

The movie surely isn’t meant to be mean. But there’s an underlying sourness that makes Sextuplets much less fun than the pictures it’s imitating.

Despite how good-natured this movie is, it just doesn’t stand on its own. It has the right kind of soul, but a shapeless body.

The movie’s handful of action sequences are good, but they’re too sparsely deployed and overwhelmed by lots of slow-paced scenes of characters stewing in self-pity.

Last Sentinel is more geared toward delivering a message about humanity’s bent toward paranoia and self-destruction than in producing any tension or thrills. It’s a very heavy film — really too heavy to move.

If About Alex were the pilot to a new television series, there’d be reason to stick around for a few episodes, if only to see these actors grow into their roles and develop more chemistry. But About Alex isn’t television, and Zwick never really solves the problem of how to make a houseful of semi-likable characters into cinema.

The Axe Murders of Villisca never really comes to much, perhaps because its focus is too diffuse. The scares are low, and the plot under-baked.

This movie ultimately lacks the characters and imagination to make it anything more than a passable entertainment.

Hopkins and company don’t bring much special or personal to the material. The plot’s predictable and the shocks are routine in Slumber.

Writer-director Akash Sherman gives the film a handsome look, and gets two strong lead performances, but his picture still comes out too static and somber.

The idea of human memory as a kind of time machine is powerful, and writer-director David Gleeson and his co-writer Ronan Blaney make it pay it off well in their movie’s final 10 minutes. It’s the preceding 80 that are the problem.

The film’s well-made, thick with spooky 17th century atmosphere. But it’s also as dreary as its setting, with little original or exciting to add to an already limited horror sub-genre.

By the time the Tinker fantasy elements kick in, they seem more like an afterthought than the reason this movie was made in the first place.

The cast of Texas Cotton is good company, and the location’s a nice place to hang out for an hour and a half. But all these nice folks are worthy of more than such a flat, featureless story.

Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill! is just dumb enough to be a potentially fun candidate for someone’s “bad movie night.”

Term Life is cleanly plotted and tautly paced, but it’s never as fun as it should be.

The characters and story take a backseat to the movie’s message — which is as subtle as a roundhouse punch.

Camera Obscura lurches between gory thriller sequences and dreary character development, and never develops any momentum. The movie gets in its own way — burdened with meaning.

While writer-director Megan Freels Johnston makes some unusual choices that set her film apart from run-of-the-mill low-budget horror, too much of her movie feels warmed-over.

While Feldman — a veteran screenwriter making his directorial debut — brings plenty of storytelling craft to the picture, Know Your Enemy falls short of being as eye-opening as he intends. A strong sense of mystery and two searing lead performances can only counteract so much of the contrivance here.

In order to make the situation more universal and existential, Raschid keeps the issues and stakes so vague that there’s no way for the characters or story to develop. The film, like its title location, becomes just another featureless box, designed to agitate and confound anyone who enters.

While Beauty doesn’t really work, it does fail in interesting ways.

Pelosi should be roughed up some, though, for what little she does with her access to the then-president-to-be and the political circus surrounding him.

God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, directed by Michael Mason, is less strident than the two surprise hits that preceded it, but it still tells a programmatic story, rooted in presumptions.

Any straight-to-video horror hack could’ve made The Guardian, which has almost no energy until its last 15 minutes, and never exhibits the command of visual storytelling that should be expected from the director of The French Connection and Sorcerer.

It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It’s really not anything.

When it’s a cautionary tale about an unusual family who’ll never know a moment’s peace because of their past choices, Firestarter is worthy of its source material. When in its last half-hour it turns into chapter one of a potential new superhero franchise, it joins the long list of Stephen King movies that are all gimmick, no guts.

As the heroine of the chase thriller The Courier, Olga Kurylenko brings a lot of personal magnetism and awesome athleticism — and she needs to, because her director, Zackary Adler, has stuck her in an action movie that rarely moves.

The film is a case study in why critics say “show, don’t tell.” It’s 90 minutes of people talking about routine gangster stuff, peppered with occasional gunfire.

As the name suggests, Modern Life Is Rubbish romanticizes analog relationships — and is meant for anyone who does the same.

Begos gets the texture and atmosphere right, but there’s nothing beneath his cool ’80s fog.

Granted, it’s all pretty stimulating. But when the jolts subside, there’s not much for viewers to cling to, to steady themselves.

Despite some nice mood-setting, too much of Wolf Garden is spent talking around the story rather than just telling it.

The energy of Workman's editing and the innate value of seeing the creative process play out makes House watchable.

While McLean and company admirably aim for some relevance by tying the Taylors’ haunting to their personal demons, ultimately The Darkness is just the same old show: things that go bump in the night, and the tasteful decor they defile.

It's just mediocrity, further soured by bad intentions.

The movie too often plays like a regional theater production of “Goodfellas,” marred by some hammy dark comedy and off-the-rack tough-guy dialogue. The passion of the people behind this project is evident, and appreciated.

The Black Room is unabashedly trashy — with scene after scene of nudity and gore — but doesn’t offer much beyond sensation.

Welcome to Willits has a loopy energy that in short spurts can be pretty amusing. More often than not though, the film is clever to a fault, packing in too many characters and gimmicks.

There’s nothing particularly awful about the film (title aside), but it never develops into the “Shaun of the Dead”-like social satire it strains to be.

Daughter of the Wolf could’ve used a jaw-dropping set-piece or two (or three or four), but Hackl does at least embrace the challenge of shooting outside in the cold, and the movie’s moderately better for it.

As documentary drama, 39 Pounds Of Love is as ungainly, blunt, and icky as its title.

Most of the first half of director Ellie Callahan’s supernatural thriller Head Count feel like a waste of time, made all the more frustrating once the movie starts to improve.

Despite a few meta moments in which the characters comment on how their plight is like “a bad horror movie,” Bedeviled ultimately embraces clichés rather the subverting them. The evil technology’s up to date, but the storytelling’s too old-fashioned.

Director Andy Newbery — working from a script credited to four writers — makes the story look classy but can’t find its beating heart.

Johnson tries too hard to make all his mayhem meaningful, to minimal effect. Still, this picture should entertain Adkins’ growing base of fans, who ought to appreciate that the star gets more freedom than usual to be delightful as well as dangerous.

Watts is plenty convincing as someone well past the brink of a psychotic break, but The Wolf Hour takes too long to get properly cranked up. This movie is mostly just mood-setting, with much more going on in the background than the foreground.

The strong sensibility and the unabashed sensationalism overcome some (but not all) the movie’s amateurism. The raggedness is part of the charm, making “Killer Unicorn” feel like the filmmakers’ deeply personal craft project.

Because of the talent involved, every now and then Holmes & Watson hits on something bizarrely inspired.

There are good lessons to be learned from the Market Basket saga. "We the People" doesn't trust the audience to figure them out for themselves.

There’s nothing especially original about “Assimilate.” But director John Murlowski and a talented young cast — including Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy and Andi Matichak as the plucky high schoolers trying to save their town — do at least keep the action lively and unpretentious.

In the end, as with too many Gospel-derived dramas, The Young Messiah could’ve used less literalism, and more mystery.

Amanda Crew and Adam Brody give bracingly realistic performances as a grief-stricken couple in “Isabelle,” a supernatural thriller ultimately too sensationalistic to make proper use of the stars’ excellent work.

Although this film never really makes sense, Sesma’s years of experience means that it’s at least competently shot, with locations around the world. Plus, it’s admirably gonzo. And when it comes to cheap genre fare, bizarre always beats boring.

A paint-by-numbers indie that barely uses its most vivid hues.

While Pearce is typically superb as the hero — a self-doubting U.S. marshal named Jim Dillon — the film itself is otherwise utterly unremarkable. The combination of stiff, overwritten dialogue and flatly functional action sequences wastes a good lead performance.

Too much of this project feels like it’s been coldly calculated for maximum international box office.

The cast is fine, but there’s a dispiriting dourness to the film. Nevertheless, after a slow start, Kitamura does offer up some impressive splatter scenes — peaking at the end, with a wild climax that partly justifies the movie’s existence.

The elements of a good, “Winter’s Bone”-like depiction of the rural social order are here. But they only really coalesce — and combust — when Thornton’s on the screen.

Ghosts of the Ozarks is an often fascinating puzzle, but once the explanations for what’s really plaguing Norfork start rolling in, any remaining narrative tension dissipates quickly. Even before then, the lack of scares and action proves detrimental.

Nothing in the story really sticks, or stings. The ace cast makes the movie better. But they deserved a better movie.

Even with the Gen Z-friendly touches — and Dever delivering a winning performance — Rosaline still feels frustratingly stale.

Ambush has the structure of an old-fashioned two-fisted combat picture, but with too little actual combat.

The film’s biggest issue is its balance between setup and payoff.

Zuhdi’s story is ambitious; and there’s something poignant about the way these characters’ roundabout schemes keep pushing them further away from what they really want. But the audience rarely gets to see these plans play out.

While Mollner elicits some strong performances — especially from Francesca Eastwood as a vengeful farmer’s daughter — Outlaws and Angels can’t overcome its distractingly showy camera moves or its tendency toward scenes that drag on interminably.

The Possession Of Michael King has its share of jolts, but it becomes exhausting down the stretch, and disappointing for its squandered potential.

Life on the Line traffics in piled-on, predictable melodrama, with only intermittent sparks.

Bounce Ko Gals ultimately devolves into a litany of social ills, with not enough of a proper story, and Harada loses the thread of the film whenever he slips into slapstick comedy, or has his female leads play the role of giggly best friends.

The two leads help create an atmosphere of quiet surety, but they can't elevate the film beyond its self-imposed smallness.

It’s too facile to connect deeply. Everything in Natalie’s life is depicted on a surface level: motherhood, work, romance, friendship and even her passion for drawing. The differences between her two selves never seem too wide because both are barely rooted in reality.

Everyone in Bee Season is chasing spiritual peace and falling behind, and McGehee and Siegel catch them at their most worn-out and static.

The setting and the characters are fairly unique. But they’re put to fairly mundane use, in service of a blah coming-of-age tale.

Cold Blood is well-made but hard to warm to — although it might satisfy nostalgic Reno fans, eager to see him playing a silent, hulking assassin yet again.

Winning lead performances and some uniquely quirky touches keep this dramedy watchable from start to finish, but an over-reliance on indie film clichés — from the plucky folk-pop soundtrack to the generic “dredging up the past” plot — add up to squandered potential.

Just like the first Iron Sky, the sequel is frustratingly unfocused as a commentary on the modern world — and even more so as a story. It has the seeds of several nifty ideas, scattered loosely, left untended.

The actors all look like they had a wonderful time making Supervized, but the material they were given to play is pretty dopey, and way too basic. It’s an insult to superhero fans and senior citizens alike.

The three principal actors are all pros, with plenty of TV and movie credits; and they’re charismatic enough to be good company. But the story around them keeps changing every 20 minutes and lacks payoffs. It’s like a series of uncompleted writing prompts.

The situation and the performances are strong, but without a good story to hold everything together, it all falls apart in the end.

A few memorable shots don’t offer enough justification to watch a film that’s not scary, rarely exciting and never as engrossing a puzzle as it means to be.

Canvas has some aesthetic appeal, but beneath its surface there’s not much of a narrative foundation.

The cat-and-mouse action is uninspired and slackly paced; and any pizazz that Wilson, Lundgren and Fehr bring gets lost once they stop talking and start shooting.

This is just another buy-the-numbers POV fright-fest — like the B-movie version of walking through a professional Halloween haunted house.

Cold Turkey is well-acted, and at times even well-observed, but about 20 minutes of the material actually matters, and the rest is mere putter.

The movie is too ponderous and dry — neither endearingly trashy nor effectively scary.

There’s a sluggishness to The Returned throughout, attributable to generally weak acting and a plot that requires a lot of exposition.

Robbie is fascinating to watch, as always. But in this case she's providing 100-watt star power to a tacky little table lamp.

Like the original experiment, this film fails when it tries to impose a conclusion, rather than letting its meaning reveal itself naturally.

The action sequences are strong, with spectacular crashes and explosions, dynamic camera moves and tight cuts that at times give the film an appealing breathlessness. But the cast takes a too-lax approach to this material.

It's hard for Rick to maintain this jangled tone, which aims to be simultaneously heartbreaking and broadly satirical. The latter tack pushes Rick too far, and too soon.

It’s unusual to see a film like this make its nominal hero into a jerk, who learns something essential from his nemesis. True or not, the complex characterization does make for a better story.

There's enough mystery and agony here for an engaging documentary, but Rossier fails to produce one, largely because he doesn't approach the material in the spirit of true inquiry.

The actor’s fierce commitment turns Between Worlds into another solidly strange entry in the ever-expanding “Nicolas Cage movie” sub-genre.

Unlike Medem’s best films, The Tree of Blood feels way too haphazard. It hops freely between timelines and characters, such that it becomes more of a compilation of sensual, stimulating scenes than a movie with anything in particular to say.

A heavyweight cast and superb location-shooting carries The Padre, an otherwise meandering crime thriller.

Nods at objectivity but announces its activist intentions throughout.

While the film is well-acted and appealingly slick, the end result lacks novelty.

Evergreen suffers from creeping indie-itis, epitomized by the low-light digital video and droning electric-guitar soundtrack, but its biggest weakness lies in Zentelis' apparent fear of surprise.

There’s just not enough innovation or insight here to stretch a footnote to feature-length.

Thriller falls back on the old horror formula of bland, often mean-spirited young folks, getting slaughtered one by one … and without near enough flair.

This picture is just one upsetting scene after another, which then only belatedly coalesce into a story — too late really to pay off any investment in those remarkable early moments.

The storytelling’s smart, but the style’s tediously reverential and somber.

The effect is like watching a bar band do a cover version of “The Amityville Horror” — spirited enough, but hardly ready for the big time.

Mason does a lot to make the characters’ distanced interactions — mostly via video chat — seem natural and not like a gimmick. But the real-world resonances are actually fairly dull. Though not especially objectionable, Songbird may suffer a worse fate: being forgettable.

Director Mario Van Peebles brings real tension and excitement to the scenes where these men are surrounded by predators, but the tone of the film is awkwardly split between the grit of modern cinema and the boisterous adventure of old Hollywood.

The outsider road picture Gypsy 83 means well, but writer-director Todd Stephens can't keep his aesthetic out of the way.

Ultimately, this film has a memorable villain and a stunning location, and not much else.

Weaver's overacting and Dorfman's bold-faced dialogue oversell the scenario. Only Kingsley's sly turn gives Death And The Maiden any real feeling of disquiet.

Psychopaths is too random, too kitschy — too immature.

No situation or character really gets a chance to breathe or grow here. Even the best casts can flail when the vibe is more antic than comic.

While “Worm Valley” is generally diverting, the plotting is remedial — and devoid of whatever personality Zhang brought to his books. There’s just enough story here to support the next big special effects sequence.

The actors all ham it up to a degree suited to a project so flat, cheap and derivative, which helps keep Mindcage at least watchable, if never exceptional.

It lacks the cleverness or the panache to give its schtick the proper zing.

Screenwriter Robert Rhine and co-directors Devon Downs and Kenny Gage have made something polished, colorful and energetic but, ultimately, pretty disposable.

There’s something wrong with the children, all right. The filmmakers can’t figure out what to do with them.

As Laggies piles up one scene after another of Megan’s boyfriend and all her old high-school chums acting exaggeratedly square, the movie’s comic point of view becomes overpoweringly sour and predictable.

This is a rare case when a cheap B-movie isn’t improved by Cage-style clowning.

Palminteri and screenwriter David Hubbard desperately want the crazy misfits in their movie to move the audience, but they're all too cracked to inspire empathy. There's no holiday magic, just famous faces playing people who don't exist.

At its best, “Max Steel” shares elements with “Smallville” and “Teen Wolf,” using the supernatural as a metaphor for awkward adolescence. At its worst, it’s more like “Transformers” — an extended toy commercial, noisy and forgettable.

Garcia holds back too much, perhaps trying to avoid any phony epiphanies. As a result, his two main characters are too preoccupied with re-litigating old grudges to do or say anything notable.

While it has a sharp hook — and is reasonably diverting — it never rises above the routine.

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.

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.