Peter Keough

Joe is one more in the line of Southern Gothic miserabilism that includes “Winter’s Bone” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” films that many have praised but some find condescending.

Starting with a premise that a smart-aleck high school sophomore might take pride in, the film rallies late to make some points about patriarchy and female empowerment, but not before a barrage of clichés, tweeness, and inanity.

Unfortunately, though, Rossato-Bennett and Cohen seem to think that the technique is a panacea. In fact, it is not even original, as music therapy in nursing homes has been around for some time.

If nothing else, Beloved Sisters is one of the most visually striking biopics around. Too bad you have to wade through so much verbiage in order to enjoy it.

Puzzle is neither puzzling nor much fun. It reminds you how much better Julie Delpy told the same story in “2 Days in New York.”

The film is stuck in the inconsequential rut of the series. The characters are static, and the comedy is situational rather than dramatic.

Neither dense, distracting makeup nor confused, convoluted chronology can disguise the fact that Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer, scripted by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, is a mediocre mash-up of genre clichés.

Misogynistic, homophobic, scatological — none of these words come up in any of the spelling bees that take place in Jason Bateman’s directorial debut, but they apply to the film.

More disappointing than the film’s inertia and amorphousness is its sacrifice of the real-world themes of class, money, corruption, and power. Unable to decide what story he wanted to tell, Téchiné hedges his bets and loses everything.

For the most part, Fluffy’s material is just that — fluff, with a touch now and then of bile and bad taste.

It’s just like the Kenny Rogers song says: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” It’s time for this Gambler to walk away.

Godard Mon Amour is very much like a Woody Allen film, with Godard embodying Allen’s negative traits of pretentiousness, neurosis, and misogyny without the redeeming virtue of humor.

It’s a big deal for the NFL and ESPN, no doubt, and Draft Day serves as 110 minutes of product placement for both.

The young cast comes through with appealing, naturalistic performances. But Weber’s programmatic, preachy story and emotional manipulation is so blatant that it verges on the fatuous.

It is a contrived, bombastic, well-intended failure.

The fundamental value put forth in Brown’s “Sunday” sequel is not fearlessness but “family.”

There’s no end in sight, and that’s what’s really insidious.

This movie doesn’t make the case. In fact, had they upped the absurdity a notch, it would rival the comedy of Christopher Guest’s let’s-put-on-a-show mockumentary, “Waiting for Guffman” (1996). As it stands, it plays like an infomercial.

Aside from the clever punning of the title, Spare Parts ends up as jury-rigged and programmatic as Stinky, the robot in the movie. And, unlike Stinky, it is dead in the water.

Perhaps that is Roskam’s ultimate point: volition and individuality are illusory; only love and death matter. That truth comes through with somber clarity in the film’s eloquent coda, which almost makes up for the silliness that precedes it.

Here Aniston suffers every manipulative cliché and contrivance in the tearjerker playbook. She works hard, and it’s painful to watch.

Somewhere between John Cassavetes’s “Husbands” (1970) and “The Hangover” (2009) you will find Last Vegas. Not necessarily a bad place to be, except the film unfortunately has the madcap hilarity of the former and the emotional intensity of the latter.

Thunder falls into the common mistake of many children’s films — it underestimates its audience.

A mawkish, preposterous melodrama riddled with clichés, stereotypes, bad dialogue, and inept emotional manipulation.

It sounds like the movie itself: contrived, implausible, derivative, and — even though both the first-time director Denise Di Novi and screenwriter Christina Hodson are women — misogynistic.

Power Rangers might be the only movie that directly pays homage to “Transformers.” Sadly, it suffers by the comparison.

The few winning, not-so-secret ingredients in Dough are the performances of Pryce and newcomer Holder, who brings zest and freshness to a stale role.

Maybe if the filmmakers suggested that these villains were once children with mothers themselves, it might have made their crime, and the chase that ensues, less one-dimensional.