Peter Keough

“You don’t need a man to define you!” Very true, and so much for feminism. The rest of the film takes a long, convoluted, predictable, and mostly unfunny route to prove that the opposite is the case.

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.

The problem with high concepts like this is cooking up a story and characters to go along with it.

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.

If you close your eyes you’d think it was a commercial for a “Great Love Songs” DVD collection.

The concept is derivative of about a dozen other movies and their sequels.

Grown Ups 2 offers a bittersweet paean to childhood and youth and their inevitable loss. Take the case of Adam Sandler. Didn’t he use to be funny?

That’s one of the problems with Brian Ackley’s no budget sci-fi psychological thriller. No horror can compensate for the preceding 75 minutes of tedious, repetitious bickering. It’s about as thrilling as a couple’s therapy session with a married pair who hate each other and for good reason.

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.

Marilyn Monroe’s death in 1962 was ruled a suicide, as was Hemingway’s in 1961. Both spawned conspiracy theories. Maybe someone should make a movie about that. Or a decent one about Hemingway himself.

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.

One thing you have to give Bay credit for: He has a knack for bringing A-list talent down to his level. Like Mark Wahlberg, Oscar nominee for “The Fighter” and “The Departed.”

In his second directorial effort, Mojave, Monahan has no such map to follow, and he wanders in a land of sophomoric pretentiousness and banal profundities.

Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall reduces these events to a backdrop for caricatures that were already passé in William Friedkin’s “The Boys in the Band” (1970).

Despite such attractions as Gabriel Byrne as a vampire with a skin disease and a décor that combines Hogwarts with “Suspiria,” the only lesson learned here is that Hollywood needs fresh blood.

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.

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

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.

The Quiet Ones simply has nothing to say.

Denounce the cynics who pander such pabulum as entertainment for children.

As for the dialogue, although the characters talk really fast, swear a lot, and overlap their lines, what they’re saying isn’t very funny or authentic. It’s as if David Mamet collaborated on writing an episode of “Two and a Half Men.”

It’s like a nightmare in which you are trapped in an endless Kmart aisle of horrible holiday cards.

Just because Rad — who died in 2007 at the age of 70 — wasted 26 years bringing Dangerous Men to the screen doesn’t mean you should waste 80 minutes watching it.

As a five-minute sketch it would have been so-so. But as a 93-minute slog through witless puerility, it seems like an eternity in hell, baby.