Robert Abele

For a movie about so rabble-rousing a figure, it’s an unusually quiet portrait.

What keeps Les Nôtres from being effective, however, is that it rarely makes the transition from coolly observed case study to compellingly messy, resonant human drama.

While this return to indie roots frees up Lee's often gifted image making, his usual pace issues and penchant for jagged flourish over sustained feeling keep it from achieving a rich, strange, sexy and sad whole.

Even as the low-key mockumentary Brian and Charles impressively scales down a sci-fi concept to fable size, it neither does much to maintain its oddness nor finds that right mix of comedy and pathos to have much impact.

When the focus is on how he made Playboy pop on the page — as backed by archival footage, interviews with Paul and those who worked for him, plus plenty of examples from the issues — director Jennifer Hou Kwong’s movie compels as a portrait of unwavering dedication to aesthetics and breakout creativity.

Though the thin mystery at the center becomes a narrative albatross, and Lillard and Gugino seem hamstrung by the schematic nature of their characters, Stewart's melancholic electricity manages to maintain its appeal.

Although Kateb carries a certain arrogant genius’ authenticity with his opaque portrayal, Django will leave fans of the legend merely eager to return to their beloved recordings and let their ears take in the greatness.

The movie ultimately treats us like adrenaline junkies, assuming we lack curiosity.

At a certain point, though, the movie runs out of eccentricity capital and becomes just another contest documentary about determined participants — in this case, mostly obsessive young white men — and the well-worn narrative of defeat or accomplishment.

The movie is choppily constructed, with a preference for jarring region-hopping and touristy positivity over vivid mini-portraits or informative dives into the process/taste details of Georgian wine.

Philippe winds up with a curatorial hodgepodge; the lovingly cited connections about shifting realities, artifice, searching and all those plush Lynchian curtains never coalesce into anything unifying, and sometimes get repeated by different narrators.

At a certain point, it feels as if scenes are missing, and what’s left reads as unconvincing.

Biyi Bandele's adaptation of Adichie's novel of loyalty and betrayal set against the turbulence of the 1960s Biafran war, certainly makes for an honorably propulsive wartime soap. It's just not stirring enough as historical drama.

Outside of its major assets, which include “I, Tonya” scene-stealer Paul Walter Hauser’s unapologetically showy performance as Jewell and Sam Rockwell’s sardonic turn as his underdog lawyer, there’s a mystifying lack of clarity to the dramatic impact this retelling is seeking.

“The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

The overall effect here is of parallel biographies juiced to feel important whenever they intersect, and an undercooked paean to lost masculinity.

The movie equivalent of a diverting beach read.

Though there's plenty of movement and enthusiasm, director Susan Seidelman is content with a metronomic approach to manipulating our feelings - buoyant Latin music never felt so routinely scene-setting - and seems afraid to let anyone on-screen depart from established caricature.

DamNation is certainly a picturesque splash of doc advocacy, as long as you don't dwell on the cracks.

Rourke and Wolff certainly have chemistry, and Sarah Silverman (as Ed's concerned single mom) and Emma Roberts (as Ed's potential girlfriend) provide solid support on the edges. But the humor never feels aimed in any particular direction.

The overall sense is of a rushed, simplistic installment in a well-worn biography franchise.

The tone swerve into body-count humor and the nuts and bolts of violence eventually prove too much for Crano and Craig to effectively mold into a comedy of perception and privilege.

Reptile, a studiously atmospheric, layer-peeling mystery from director and co-writer Grant Singer, foregrounds Del Toro — playing a calloused detective investigating a young woman’s murder — in a way that makes you want more of him. But also, regrettably, less of movies like “Reptile,” which tries to match its star’s unpredictable magnetism with a forced eeriness, only growing more ponderous and unfocused, like a case getting colder.

The two leads are resolute soldiers about it all, but they’re dutifully edgy elements in a stylist’s frame instead of fully realized characters living out what is supposed to be the riskiest time of their lives.

Hunt, whose debut feature was “Frozen River,” has a steadfastly classicist approach to tried-and-true genre storytelling that’s admirable, but instead of building tension, The Whole Truth lets it bleed out.

The provocative noir experience that Talaash promises, with its jazzily scored, moodily lighted opening montage of a Mumbai red-light district at night, is nowhere to be found once this meandering mystery begins.

As respectful as writer-director Jon Watts is toward creating opportunities for wise-ass capering, the movie is curiously both a labored and lax attempt at restoring that luster.

Something tells me a documentary on Hancock simply navigating the rigors of Edie, as well as acting it to the fullest, might have been more readily inspiring.

Wittock’s film is ultimately more of a well-intended melodramatic experiment than a fully realized love story about one of the more curious corners of humanity’s sexual-psychological tapestry.

There’s little doubt prison reform needs to address the severe effects of locking up kids for life, but They Call Us Monsters feels like a well-meaning skim rather than an impassioned, expertly reasoned plea for mercy.

The busy star (Cage) acquits himself well enough in this otherwise rudimentary thriller from deliriously unsubtle director Roger Donaldson.

Janie Jones is ultimately its own uneven tune, a mixture of discordant notes and way-too-familiar chords.

Krzykowski’s pacing and tone is off as he tries to meld his comic book instincts – visually atmospheric if susceptible to arch cheesiness — with the requirements of a small-scale drama.

It's the movie's slow drift toward happiness, though, when Bruce meets a widow (Diane Farr) with a sweetly razzing sense of humor that spurs a more refreshing less patently abrasive comedy from Carolla.

Handsomely mounted if never exactly stirring, Louis van Beethoven honors the struggles that gnawed at brilliance but is itself little more than an elegantly tailored time-filler.

The regrettably titled From Prada to Nada has more in common with a slapped-together TV movie than a timeless comedy of manners.

Citizen Koch is pure advocacy doc: brisk and clear-eyed, to be sure, but not likely to surprise headline-savvy moviegoers or angered progressives.

“Love, Charlie” plays like a whirlwind story, and an often entertaining one, but there’s no breathing room to process anything beyond hitting the highs and lows. We’re left in some unresolved limbo between celebrating what makes a high-end restaurant sing and considering this culinary legend’s life a cautionary tale.

The race to the end is certainly technically proficient, and all the actors gamely play out the ride (including an acid-tangy Marin Ireland making the most of her two scenes). But it’s not horror anymore — more like a medical drama with a race-against-time diagnosis and cure — and ultimately no memorable deepening of King’s ruthlessly efficient, vividly sketched black hole.

For the most part, this is the kind of immersive fanboy experience that doesn't suffer wandering attention spans.

It’s an old-fashioned injustice barn burner with narrative and emotional beats so sturdy you can practically see the rivets. But on the big screen, it’s just not convulsive enough to stir us and instead feels trapped in a limbo of not quite awards-prestigious, but not exactly indie-fired.

The fantasy of a punk icon for a friend is one thing, but the filmmakers undercut the modest liveliness of their enterprise with a save-the-day storyline that seems far removed from the roiling, anti-authoritative ethos of punk.

The blessing is that Buckley, Colman, Spall and Vasan are expert enough that dimensional character work still peeks through the vibe of cookie-cutter idiosyncrasy.

For all the ways Dumplin’ does its best to avoid some clichés (no mean-girl antagonists) while embracing others (drag queens as coaches), it’s still a regrettably undercooked meal, even with those songs and the breezy magnetism of “Patti Cakes” star Macdonald.

The performances are dedicated, but the camaraderie feels perfunctory, outside of a few ruminative exchanges between Hawke and Washington.

By the time the patented Shyamalan Extra-Strength Third Act Twist is revealed, being asked to care about fate, redemption and forgiveness when a satan-in-an-elevator gimmick hasn't delivered is like getting medicinal aftertaste from what should have been a box of delectably fiery Red Hots.

Until it devolves into testosterone-drenched, operatic silliness, the mix of bullets, blood and banter is dumb fun.

Light, frenetic and anecdote-rich, it's the kind of back-patting Hollywood toast to the guy behind the guy that's breezy good fun if you don't examine it too hard.

In too many scenes Freundlich prefers the arch heaviness of pained expressions in posh surroundings when what you’re waiting for is the messiness of humans letting fly after their careful worlds have been upended.

It's all slight stuff with a typically oversold Bollywood score, but there are pleasures here and there.

Often more distracting than diverting with its everything-goes aesthetic - there are strains of steampunk, manga and silent film comedy, with video-game touches.

Arie Posin regrettably sticks to the tastefully designed, artless tear-jerker. The lost opportunity is that he's got the masterful Bening and Harris to play with, great enough actors to turn any interaction — however tritely written — into an intimate, emotionally honest dance of the scarred and delicate.

Love Beats Rhymes lacks its own ambition to be something different.

Fans, go be with your people. Others, approach cautiously.

A new biopic of eccentric British rock legend Ian Dury, Andy Serkis uncoils a performance of spit, grit and wit so ferocious it only serves to starkly clarify how unremarkable and formulaic the rest of the movie is.

Had the movie itself been more focused as a story of messy loss — and not played tonal Twister with its high concept — it might have better served its freshly oddball lead.

Even with three charismatic leads, the talky, convoluted nature of the cat-and-mouse between Zhang and Huang and their respective gangs is impossible to follow or care about, and the mix of identity comedy, cartoonish violence, philosophizing and grief over killed loved ones is hardly smooth.

Killing Bono whips up a frenzied mix of musical jealousy, wishful stardom and farcical lucklessness into a movie too slippery to hold onto.

Well-acted, understanding, and literate ... But when the emotional honesty still doesn’t make for compelling drama, you’re left wondering why, even with all the lights on, there’s a conspicuous lack of galvanizing human detail in the contours of this story.

Director Xiaozhi Rao’s facility with behavioral extremes that disguise the hardships of life in modern China is a scattershot mix of the Tarantino-esque and melodramatic, with bursting pop songs and visual tricks filling in any perceived gaps in logic or attention.

Although Whiteley's unrestricted there-ness effortlessly yields an avuncular striver... it means little when the viewpoint is so hermetic.

Magician may not be its own rich experience, but like Workman's many breathlessly compiled odes to the history of movies, it'll certainly spur a meaty living room film festival.

The whole effort is undermined by an abundance of mob-movie cliches.

If you think of second features as pitfalls of either sameness or overreach, Chon’s Ms. Purple is more curious than most in that it feels like an alluring mixture of the two, a family story with artistic ambitions that’s tone-conscious to a fault, but rarely chord-rich.

The main flaws in “Queen,” however, are a lurching narrative coupled with dialogue awkwardness, and a blasé approach to Bell’s motivations.

You can't blame Hunt for perhaps taking on too much — at least she wrote herself a complicated role in this sorry age for front-and-center movie women — but it doesn't always make for a smooth Ride.

Johnson’s well-rehearsed poise and Penn’s coasting boldness make them seem like the stars of a commercial for a scent called Common Ground rather than flesh-and-blood people. At times, they hardly seem to be sharing the same car interior, leaving Daddio feeling like a safe space, when what it needs is danger.

Mildness reigns and indifference blooms. What calls out to be well seasoned — a dish with bits that are scorched and raw — is instead merely a tepid porridge.

You might not "like" Perry's movie, but it's hard to deny the forensically assured sensibility at work.

The stars certainly aren’t acting like their participation is a mercenary endeavor. Lawrence and Smith seem to enjoy their goofy-meets-gung-ho responsibilities, and that counts for something in these types of movies, as is a tone decidedly less mean-spirited than the last one’s, and a central car/motorcycle/helicopter chase that distracts you with thrills rather than wear you down with overkill.

Rob Reiner’s LBJ is an often pedestrian, sometimes punchy, well-acted biopic that gives the mightily capable Woody Harrelson the reins of the country’s 36th commander in chief.

Unfortunately, the new biopic Hands of Stone...is too often content to play like a lot of other boxing flicks instead of forging its own path.

Though it boasts an agreeably preposterous scenario and a weird mixed bag of physicalities and acting styles — from Foster and Sterling K. Brown to Jenny Slate and Dave Bautista — the movie is itself an eye-rolling performance of cyber-pulp tropes and pop-movie excesses that undercuts its spotty pleasures at nearly every turn.

It’s surprising that this effort from Clooney is as flavorless and unrooted as it is, because his better directorial turns are the ones grounded in character more than style.

What we’ve gotten in Snatched is an uninspired, scattershot disaster romp that mostly serves the talents of one half of the marquee pairing, underuses the other half, and struggles to blend R-rated humor, foreign misadventure, and oil-and-water mother-daughter dynamic into a cohesive diversion.

Crumbling nuclear families are a well-worn movie genre; you could even add “in Manhattan” to that description and the examples would be many. “Landline” is simply another one, not appreciably worse than the average, but not much better, either.

Like a servant to two masters, “Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep” wants both Stephen King and fans of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of his book “The Shining” to be happy. But sadly, it isn’t enough of its own chilling entity to have much impact.

So much of Boundaries coasts on hackneyed complications and characters’ self-defeating actions that one wonders why we should believe anything anybody says.

Unlike “Spy,” which took great pains to make its cloak-and-dagger shenanigans as exciting, and thematically meaningful, as the raucous comedy around it, A Simple Favor is like two different movies, a sophisticated sisterhood lark you want more of, and a ho-hum buried-secrets murder mystery getting in the way of your good time.

Big swings can make for big misses, and that’s the situation writer-director Quinn Shephard’s internet satire-screed “Not Okay” finds itself in, lining up all kinds of juicy targets regarding fame and shame in our social media age, but proving not so discerning about character, humor, and story when it comes to following-through.

What The Outfit doesn’t generate much of is organic suspense. With an air of duplicitousness telegraphed early on, and a handful of scenes coming off like information dumps instead of natural exchanges, many of the story mechanics strain for believability.

Slick and silly, Sword Master rarely reaches the thrilling heights of the many kinetic twirl-and-slice epics directed by its producer, the legendary Tsui Hark.

It's a testament to the stars that they manage to sell the third act sentimentality after wading through so much screenplay triteness and unimaginative direction.

With the indie two-hander I Think We’re Alone Now, starring Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning, this talented director is stuck in neutral with the illogical, unremarkable concerns in Mike Makowsky’s ham-fisted screenplay.

Logan Sandler’s Live Cargo is stuffed with arty close-ups and stunning backdrops, but the emotions to connect them are missing.

Cassadaga tries to scoop up enough tropes to satisfy a wide range of potential fright fans but lacks the cohesion to ever truly be effective.

Song to Song is that most fascinating of busts: it spurs many feelings, but they’re sentiments like real estate envy, Austin yearning (if you’ve ever been), Lubezki admiration, and pity for A-listers who can’t improvise.

Though Kidman is solid as a wife and mom tormented by her daughter's secret erotic life, Strangerland never successfully welds its central mystery with its psychosexual drapings, leaving neither especially interesting.

Because it's all shot to look like a South Korean noir, with umpteen slo-mo shots and stylistic noodlings to affect a kind of grimy urban anti-hero chic, Christensen effectively leeches the emotion from the central story.

The movie's few pleasures, though, do belong to Gere, who makes the most of his preening caginess as a spook thrust back into the cold. Grace, though, comes off more whiny than tantalizingly adversarial.

An investment in theatrical self-indulgence with diminishing returns.

Though its mix of European romanticism, lustrous trappings, and nostalgic movie love can occasionally make Planetarium feel like a galaxy all its own, the effect is more illusory than enveloping.

It's a lovefest in which critics' voices and debate are simply absent, and the only talking space is wonder, nostalgia and excitement for the future.

The "Midnight Run" meets "Bonanza" idea isn't exactly a terrible one, but writer-director Mike Pavone has only one point-and-shoot gear, whether the scene is light comedy, dysfunctional family drama or western-tinged gunplay. (Even television shows these days exhibit more directorial flair and editing variety.)

What's missing is any of the real-life messiness that might have lifted this material from its creatively tic-ridden confines.

Heightened but airless, this “Castle” is like a checklist of the novel’s peculiarities, rather than its singular soul brought to life.

Hardcore Henry is a single-gear novelty that never achieves real liftoff.

This busy-yet-dull sequel feels like Wan robotically flexing his manipulation of fright-film signposts, an exercise more silly than sinister.

The Rooftop is a bullet train to bananasville, its tonal eccentricities sure to wear out even the most dedicated connoisseur of silly cinema.

There's little that feels fresh, freaky or funny about one more batch of eccentric reactions to hungry corpses, one more attempt to creatively splatter, one more metaphor for zombie invasion.

The medieval-tinged adventure Last Knights will test your patience for speeches about honor, grim declarations of loyalty and pre-battle glowering.

No One Lives is a cheap horror prank that's ultimately not clever or accomplished enough to sustain its eccentricities, and they are very bloody eccentricities indeed.

Brotherhood isn't badly acted or without some skillfully tense moments, but it doesn't have much in the way of entertainment value either.

Despite the considerable physicality of the movie, with its impressive cinematography and Radcliffe’s believable, all-in disintegration, it’s more earthbound slog than psychological deep-dive.

So much blandly sweeping, speechifying history and so little personalized dramatic focus turn No God, No Master into a series of issue-driven snapshots instead of something genuinely illuminating.

The directors get some melancholic atmosphere out of their visuals but don’t have the scene sense to build their actors’ committed performances into compelling through-lines of seaside personality disintegration.

Knox Goes Away should be noirishly enjoyable hokum. But instead, screenwriter Gregory Poirier’s tribute to an earlier era’s taciturn machismo is more muddled and ludicrous than fleet and clever.

Though sleekly photogenic in its depiction of cosmopolitan Europeans in permanent romantic neurosis, The Laws of Thermodynamics is better in theory than fact.

The basic story's narrative and psychological simplicity — characters stating their beliefs over and over again — becomes an increasing burden.

Exhausting before its first few minutes of whip-pans, smash cuts, coarsely self-referential jokes and on-screen text visuals is over, the teen horror-spoof Detention is a patience-trying exercise first, energetic genre-jumble comedy second.

The early glimmers of something soulful and sobering — rooted in investigative details and detention center realities — ultimately give way to the tired mechanics of give-it-all uplift.

An attempt to counter noisy, hyper effects-laden alien invasion flicks with something teasing, indie and good for you. Instead, it's like a pendulum swing too far in the other direction.

With loving shots of booming, towering ships so dominant, and decades squeezed into what feels like a week of action, there's barely enough time to develop De Ruyter as a character in his own movie, or even successfully explain his war strategies.

Everything ultimately gives way to the stately, simplistic, inevitable pace of by-the-numbers biopics, from some woefully tinny, hit-and-run screenwriting to the usual difficulties surrounding the dramatization of an author's craft.

For a movie about moonshine, something so imaginatively made, mood-altering and once violently sought-after, it goes down way too blandly.

As it stretches out, it also thins, its Malick-meets-Cassavetes ambitions never rising above clichés of technique and melodrama.

Paradise and its predictable waltz of suffering, choked consciousness and monstrosity adds little to the problematic subset of camp-themed World War II movies, which feel like nostalgia for hell.

Despite the good intentions, structurally it's all over the place with an excess of montages, archival footage, interviews and information practically drowning out any chance to appreciate the richness of the German composer's beloved achievement.

Hellions is art book horror, something to flip through but never truly eerie or scary.

It suffers from a marked lack of narrative energy and a regrettable surfeit of clichéd characterization.

If the goal is to relay what a miasma of suspicion and despair the water crisis created, “Flint” certainly suggests that, if regrettably by being its own well-intentioned if messy, unilluminating chronicle.

When Drift sticks to the likable, gently humorous contours of occasionally fractious brotherly love, broken up by thrillingly shot surfing footage, it has plenty of charm, period flavor and breezy visual breadth... Where the movie routinely disappoints, though, is in pursuit of a perfect storm of conflict story lines.

Allied is ultimately a thin love story, with creaky suspense machinery and star turns from Pitt and Cotillard that feel more like matinee idol dress-up than a meeting of the magnetic.

A Whale of a Tale is an unfortunately directionless, low-gear rebuttal that hardly ever stirs up emotions as effectively as “The Cove” did.

Though an admirable shake-up of the typically overbearing, munch-intensive undead yarn, The Returned is still a far cry from the smarts-and-shocks zombie allegories George Romero mastered.

The clichés are what make White Irish Drinkers a drearily predictable bout, so much so that the decent last-round plot twist that momentarily dazes is immediately undercut by the sappy, life-changing-fuh-EV-uh jab telegraphed from the beginning.

Berry's florid physicality has a certain silent-melodrama pull. The film around her, however, is lamentably by-the-numbers.

Regrettably, the movie itself feels trapped by its airless gallery of carefully crafted images, familiar to the high-toned end of the horror genre: elegantly mood-thick surroundings, deliberately half-seen creatures, actors positioned as if in a still life.

Levesque has rough, in-the-moment charm but paltry characterization skills, Corrigan's natural edge feels out of place as a Disney-esque hoodlum and Winter seems hamstrung playing an adolescent only a fraction as compelling as her hilariously bookish daughter on the ABC sitcom "Modern Family."

The movie relies too much on the same comic tension in each scene: Johnson is the gung-ho one, Wayans says no (a lot).

Though built to divert, Road Games mostly feels untethered to any memorably crafty storytelling.

Zookeeper has the territory-marking scent of a franchise product from the Sandler-produced stable: pratfalls, caricature and aggression, which the likeable-enough James isn't as effective at getting laughs with as he is the more recessive, aw-shucks moments.

The somnambulant slickness of the direction when a truly grown-up tale of late-in-life love is nipping at the edges suggests Reiner is more stubbornly set in his stay-cute approach than his leads, who at least find the occasional pocket of human messiness in this tension-free exercise.

There are times you even wonder if Cage and Dafoe should have switched roles. But the true identity swap tragedy is within Schrader, the filmmaker having substituted his trademarked thoughtful approach to unacceptable men with a cheaper, imitative brand of cartoony bleakness.

A movie with a location named Snake Island should deliver more fun than this.

Artificially jacked up to feel like mean but serious fun, Sabotage mostly flings blood, vengeance, testosterone and clichés to the wall to see what sticks.

Director/co-writer Adam Sherman's Bukowski-lite character study is one of those exercises in masculine self-pity and glib misogyny that frustrates because of its shortsightedness.

Cage's loop-di-loop performance, the movie's surviving asset, at least hints at the themes of institutional illness and mortal decline that must have fascinated Schrader.

Stewart is enough of a force to give Seberg’s darkest moments their due, but it’s too little, too late for the superficial soup that is the movie that bears her name.

A few minutes of nail-biting, recreated heroism isn’t enough to justify the other 90-or-so minutes in Clint Eastwood’s dry salute of a movie, The 15:17 to Paris, which struggles to mix patriotism, friendship, God, and destiny into something meaningful.

The big question here is why any of The Voices, as crisply made and stylish as it is, should matter or entertain. The cold truth is that it doesn't.

With little room to feel for or even understand Anna Maria, Paradise: Faith rarely seems more than high art with low intentions.

This Papillon just lopes from place to place, and indignity to indignity, without any special style or verve.

There's a great story at the heart of Matej Minac's documentary Nicky's Family, if only it were allowed to be told unvarnished.

It comes off as more of a wandering travelogue that only hints at richer insights into the bridging of cultures, preferring the comfort of an established trajectory to what seems, in bits and pieces, to have been an intriguingly uncertain quest.

The hour of mike time isn't as strong as such previous dispatches as "Seriously…Funny."

If The Man Who Knew Infinity had been more concerned with the soul of a raw talent instead of the learn-and-earn ethos of so much accomplishment cinema, it might have produced something soulful rather than something institutional.

Writer-director Kyle Wilamowski smothers his bid for nuanced emotion in the cardboard mechanics of bad-decision drama.

The film is ultimately a stodgy, overblown and repetitive slog.

Unfortunately director Anthony Fabian prefers to dole out emotion in short bursts of superficial montage rather than fully dramatic scene work in which characters deepen through extended interaction. That leaves Louder Than Words feeling diffuse, choppy and cold rather than illuminative about how broken families heal after terrible loss.

Mr. Jones has the bones of something freaky but succumbs to a penchant for alienating chaos over sustained, abiding creep.

It wants to be a high-toned nail-biter, an important history lesson and a roiling friendship drama. But because Schwochow and screenwriter Ben Powers would rather jam the components together than braid them into a cohesive whole, the movie fails at all three, straining logic (especially the poorly handled spycraft) and flattening out the emotion at every turn.

Kingsley is certainly committed to the arc of tough guy stripped bare, but his gifts aren't served well by an artificially studious attempt at applying Understanding 101 logic to a perpetrator of atrocities.

Dope is, in the end, just another unfunny grab bag of stereotypes. Don't believe the hype.

It’s a movie that already seems like a dust-gathered statue, rather than something vividly, imaginatively crafted to reflect the burning intensity of so passionate and forward-minded an artist.

A bewilderingly facile and preposterously plotted misfire that offers few pleasures as either a star-driven thriller or a big-screen indictment of the forces that devastated global bank accounts.

The stars are as imprisoned as their characters’ respective frailties.

Had V/H/S been a nasty jolt of three, it might have been memorable, but at nearly two hours, the gimmick punctures a hole in itself, causing ambience bleed-out. Recommended cure: a tripod

Though a thoughtful reflection is occasionally allowed — sometimes humanity finds its way out — this indulgent, stylized slog is straight out of a well-worn aren’t-people-weird-and-awful playbook.

Gutierrez is ultimately too enamored of his quasi-feminist, visually convulsive upending of damsel myths to let his actors enjoy themselves the way De Palma or Dario Argento would.

Why Stop Now? feels trapped in the limbo between comedy and drama where many indies gamely venture, but from which few emerge with any resonance.

The Żabińskis were as unfailingly heroic as it gets, but memorably rendering a resistance shouldn’t be so resistant itself to the rough-and-tumble humanity of the details, and the unsentimental doom that shrouded it all.

What could have been an empowering and amusing riff on the typically male underdog genre is mostly charmless.

A sweet, sincere, yet ultimately tepid story.

Greer's wallflower is bitter, and their respective families - played by Jean Smart, Malcolm McDowell, Cybill Shepherd and Chloë Sevigny - come off like a second-rate sitcom's castoffs.

More of a recognition reel for a fan convention than a movie, it signals a career that’s traveled far from its first evocation of a raw seriocomic intelligence about small-to-bursting lives. Now, it’s a closed loop only for die-hards.

Perhaps fearful of venturing into downer territory, I Am Chris Farley sticks to slickly edited, bite-sized anecdotes about an attention-starved Midwestern goofball unprepared for stardom, accompanied by storybook music that accentuates Farley's childlike nature over his darker impulses.

Writer-directors Dallas Hallam and Patrick Horvath, picking up the baton from first film creator Nicholas McCarthy, do a serviceable job aping the original's clean, mostly lo-fi atmospherics and nervy framing... The story's a wash, though.

The flatly visualized characters and tinny, stiff English-language voice performances are busts, often creating the paradoxical vibe of a cartoon with an uncanny-valley problem, as if you were watching the rough specs for an animatronic theme-park installation.

There’s zero chemistry or feeling to this sweeping, predictable endeavor, only the scent of what might have been.

It's a strong story of lonely, even futile righteousness, which makes the plodding execution by director Arnaud des Pallierès somewhat mystifying.

With the patiently assembled '90s films "Ruby in Paradise" and "Ulee's Gold," director Victor Nuñez gave independent film a quiet luster of hand-craftsmanship sorely lacking in his dreary new effort, Spoken Word.

A bold-faced name for a lowercase effort, a school wrestling drama so mired in family-film clichés it can never shake loose the suspicion that - not unlike certain high-gloss mat bouts - the emotional fix is in from the get-go.

Rock Dog stays firmly in the realm of the pleasant but unremarkable, an air-guitar effort when a stab at virtuosity might have yielded something more memorable.

Goon feels like a movie starring a gimmick, not a person.

At every turn, the Chinese globe-trotting heist flick The Adventurers, with Andy Lau as international master thief Zhang and Jean Reno as his Javert, calls to mind better, craftier precursors.

It’s almost afraid to invite true messiness or insightful belly laughs, and remains content to cruise on a wispy likability.

A movie about identity that doesn’t know its own identity, Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf starts in the wilderness, and pretty much stays there as it tries to tease sympathetic human drama out of the singularity known as species dysphoria, a condition in which people believe themselves to be not human, usually an animal.

This one's for the conspiracy-minded only.

Unfortunately, Spot the Painting is this wooden movie’s only sustaining thrill, because the investigation plot rarely generates any lasting interest.

As always, Jovovich's game face is admirable - whether giving gunslinger shade or play-acting a protective mother storyline straight-outta-Cameron. But it can't be easy when all around her are line readings that recall the glory days of baroquely dull foreign-movie dubbing.

JeruZalem is just a wobble-a-thon with incessant screaming and a predictable trajectory for its leading ladies, even if the final, arresting image of a malevolently transformed skyline makes one wish a more enticing, original road had led there.

Once tragedy strikes, the clichés in Bram and Toni Hoover's screenplay win out, and Baker never stirs up enough energy to make it feel any different from a thousand other tales of underdog triumph.

Despite its true-events pedigree, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is woefully captive to B-movie crime saga tropes.

With many languid scenes and little narrative momentum, Algrant may have been aiming for a more ethereal father-son heartbreaker. But all that comes across is twee hipster romanticism.

A flavorless feast, with the movie's few mystical leaps clunkily handled.

It’s off-putting the way Velle bombards us with statistics and warnings and ominous music before settling in to his (mostly white) brain trust of researchers and experts expounding on population growth as the survival topic we shouldn’t be afraid to address.

A slapdash tribute too humdrum to ever whip up a truly inspirational froth.

As a sizzle reel, Manny feeds off the hype but leaves this man with fascinatingly renaissance tastes and ambitions still naggingly unexplored by the end.

Brown's argument is hampered, however, by the chaotic rush of information and speculation, overuse of winking archival footage of commercials and old industrial films, and Brown's charmlessness as a "what's going on?" guide.

In all too many ways, it’s a predictable, tiring wade as both a domestic tale and a pandemic yarn.

Instead of a grand lark of fast fists and derring-do, we get a lumbering, choppy voyage of minimal excitement.

There's still a nagging, cartoonish emptiness — and a trilogy-ending installment still to come.

The kind of curiously inconsequential homage that neither stokes your interest in cinema/Godard nor illuminates a turbulent love story between artists.

Where Gunn's last feature "Slither" was an enjoyably icky, funny riff on schlocky horror tropes, the split-personality Super merely repels with half-baked ideas, Wilson's and Page's scorched-earth overacting and atonal bursts of jokey gore.

There’s a glimmer of a better movie in Richardson’s and Cox’s scenes, which suggest a thorny marriage that barely survived its low points, but it’s inevitably undercut by Teplitsky’s fondness for slo-mo memorializing, music overuse, and a simplistic pace that wants to brush away all the negativity with a well-timed come-to-Jesus moment, and a rousing radio speech.

It's terribly long and repetitive for so delicately dreamy a diptych, and at times the modern-day story feels like little more than a drawn-out apologia for the wandering male gaze.

The Ward is bland shock therapy from the guy who reinvented bloody peek-a-boo with the classic "Halloween."

That raw looseness is too often just sloppy filmmaking, and the gangster clichés ultimately win out over even Rezaj’s roiling, ripped-from-the-streets vitality.

Ultimately it all adds up to a hodgepodge of styles and attitudes with hardly any insight into what made this corrosive clique so magnetic to its adherents.

The noir-ish contours of writer-director Ana Piterbarg's story yield a frustratingly dissipated movie, one with few storytelling pleasures and an overabundance of forced mood.

Though the hambone acting quotient is high (and not necessarily unenjoyable), the loud, closely photographed limb-hacking becomes as monotonous as the movie's unrelentingly gray palette.

The movie stalls in a limbo of half-realized characters and superficial weightiness.

Unfinished Song is a movie so geared toward hitting its spots, it amounts to emotional Muzak rather than something truly played live.

The naughty-yet-nurturing tone is certainly unusual, but in working so hard to be the adult who "gets" kids yet lectures them at the same time, he's ended up with a colorful but superficial mess.

The film’s chaotic structure and panting sensibility leaves Veil feeling more like the star of a fast-moving timeline than someone we get to know.

Director Christian Duguay is much more comfortable handling the sledgehammer superficialities of near-miss action and prankish boyhood than the complicated, turbulent emotions surrounding children imperiled during wartime.

Busy, but not exactly invigorating.

Women have been long overdue their “Goodfellas” or “Scarface,” but the not-too-hot The Kitchen is more superficial comic-book posturing than enjoyable blast of exploitation equality.

Though not exactly a punishment, director Michael Dougherty’s tongue-in-cheek monster movie is hardly a celebration, either, despite initial promise that we’d be getting a niftier-than-usual package of subversive comedy and chills to shake up the usual holiday-movie sameness.

A uniquely frenetic hodgepodge of story lures.

Keeping up with the betrayals and shifting allegiances is more tedious than fun, while the simplistic moralizing about callous corporate greed, and the detours into tragedy, fall flat.

Apart from mistaking energy for exhilaration, the movie is a mostly flavorless puree of dark humor, comic-book sentimentality and ultra-bloody combat. But it’s the relentless and banal video-game aesthetic that may get you involuntarily reaching for a controller in hopes of finding a pause button.

Ritchie has always been a performative director, so maybe Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is right in line with his jocular acts of gutter criminality and Hollywood imitations, existing in a kind of touristy netherworld of entertainment – more a handsomely mounted “ruse” of an action comedy than one itself.

Roberts is a compelling figure.... But the movie itself is ragged and routine.

Although Reynolds rises above the rest as a father consumed by sadness and anger, The Captive quickly devolves into scenes that feel like stilted dramatic re-creations demanding a noirish voice-over by "Cold Case Files" host Bill Kurtis.

Though there’s an abiding sensitivity in the often-noirish approach to the story’s many traumas and its characters’ flailing attempts at coping, as a whole it’s something of a tonal mess.

Like something you peer at rather than absorb, Salt and Fire is both awful and a tad fascinating.

Where Dern and Stewart kick-start something worth exploring, the movie around them is pleased spectator instead of engaged participant.

As pop culture narratives go, “Scandalous” wants to be as colorful and fun as a flip through of the rag itself at the supermarket. But in these truth-challenged times, the jovial tone of “Scandalous” all too often outweighs the judgmental.

Paltrow's kitchen-sink visual sense may keep your eyes engaged, but it sucks dry any inherent drama, leaving you with a bunch of characters who feel pegged by a conjurer rather than nurtured from a wretched new Earth.

Though assured in execution and not without a few moments of genuine tension — mainly emanating from Combs' flinty weirdness — Would You Rather is hardly a most dangerous game night at the movies.

Elvis & Nixon meanders its way into the big encounter with a tone too wacky and cutesy to whet our appetite for strangeness.

Though there’s never any real doubt that the rules of rom-com (even the platonic kind) and the sanctity of Catholicism will be given a once-over, what’s annoying in this otherwise well-meaning movie is how the barbs become a kind of armor against real feeling, and the bland direction offers nothing.

Given its overabundance of empty shock humor, the movie seems afraid to be about much of anything except its toy monkey’s prankish body count.

It’s so talky and un-visual that despite it taking place in multiple locations, including the California coastline, it feels like a play barely opened up for the cameras.

Hints of Koy’s stage charm burst through occasionally in Easter Sunday — mostly because he’s also playing a comedian trying to hit the big time, so stand-up-like bits are built in (or crammed in) — but as directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (“Super Troopers”), who also has a small role as an agent, this feature opportunity is a woefully run-of-the-mill, laugh-challenged attempt to translate Koy’s comedy to the big screen.

Director James Kent’s adaptation of Rhidian Brook’s 2014 novel — about a ghost-like Germany, a broken British marriage, and the healing powers of a passionate thaw — has the unfortunate quality of a hot-blooded soap grafted onto rather than merged with a historical-political drama.

This sentimental slog about the relationship between a friendly golden retriever and the growing family of a race car driver is, under director Simon Curtis’ no-nonsense stewardship, about as box-checked and rubber-stamped as mainstream entertainment gets.

If you’re going to see a comedy that isn’t all that funny, you could do a lot worse than the slapdash all-ladies feel-good of A Bad Moms Christmas.

It’s as if Haley viewed his star’s strengths — laconic wit, unforced masculinity, polite romanticism — as the only elements needed for a Sam Elliott showcase, rather than as the building blocks from which to mold an original character.

Visually, Ratchet & Clank has its appeal.... But the story is ultimately too predictable and forgettable to make Ratchet & Clank anything but a kid-targeted holdover between slavishly awaited tentpole behemoths from the comic book world.

The movie’s ambitions are misguided, which makes it all too fuzzy of an experience.

This Flatliners plays like a malpractice case: a cheap horror film grafted on to an episode of “House.”

The clichéd story wouldn’t even be an issue if the movie were enjoyable. But little works as humor or suspense or sentiment once the job is on.

This Ben-Hur may not be an epic fail, but its steady stream of shortcomings are certainly a cautionary journey for anybody with the hubris to try and rebuild the monuments of movies past.

The cars are the stars in Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend, a pamphletized biopic that does the easy thing — beautifying Italy and vintage automobiles — but stalls with everything involving humans.

Forster’s haphazard direction is so checked-out it’s painful – he shows no interest in giving anyone a scene that isn’t wholly about snapping something into place, and his comedy mise-en-scène and timing in even the simplest moments of humor is flat. And the less said about Thomas Newman’s phoned-in score, the better.

While we can perhaps be grateful that the superficiality of Brightburn probably kept it from opting to exploit elements of disturbed-kid narratives that have been all too common in our more tragic news stories, what remains is still never terribly entertaining as either popcorn or a bent take on superhero myths.

It’s an eminently missable, cliché-ridden affair.

The Last Witch Hunter is one of those artlessly restless, exposition-dialogue fantasy-action slogs that, thanks to Breck Eisner's untamed direction, never manages to corral all the potion talk, mythology rationale and leaps back and forth in time into anything remotely entertaining.

It’s confused about whether it wants to be a ticking-bomb tale of heroics or a complex insider account.

Even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this shoulda-been auto-pocalypse from being in any way pleasurable.

We're more than 45 years out from Roman Polanski's director-controlled masterpiece in gestating terror, and yet no gimmick in Devil's Due — no point-of-view shock cut or shaky-cam "realism" — is as dread-inducing as tracking the grim revelations on Mia Farrow's face.

The nonstop adversity lacks any real sense of danger. Or, for that matter, emotional punch. Why these two long-distance runners keep each other alive should be of front-and-center concern. Instead, My Way is mostly an endurance test.

Who knows what Pelé: Birth of a Legend could have been had it tapped more into that mysterious life force and the true messiness in harnessing it and making it glorious. Instead we get what the man himself was canny enough to ignore: a familiar game plan tediously followed.

Consider Twelve its own memory-retarding narcotic.

This film from writer Kenny Golde and director Mark Schmidt slaps a clichéd war-movie dressing over everything so that what should have felt heart-poundingly incredible comes off as heavy-handed, ludicrous and unintentionally queasy.

The overall mood created by the crummy, pinched visuals and logic-strained rhythm is of something scanned and discarded, like a tabloid article or a Lifetime movie.

When Rebecca De Mornay shows up as the criminals' fiercely doting matriarch, the ready crackle of her studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.

Realistically depicting full-scale domestic terrorism is one thing, but directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott seem unaware of how their long-take gimmick — the cuts are easily determined — destroys logic, emboldens the use of stereotypes, and kills suspense.

Lowell, a sitcom actor ("Enlisted") and photographer, lards his "The Big Chill" ripoff with plenty of arty touches... He assumes this will lend the needed heft to paper-thin characters, witless exchanges and emotional recriminations you can see coming a mile away.

Bryon’s real experience is certainly incredible, but Nattiv’s in-your-face approach to every scene — literally so, since the frame is rarely anything but a sloppy, unimaginative close-up — strips this character study of believability, or any nuance or gathering power.

Nothing about Sinister 2 comes close to the feel-bad ode to literally and figuratively dark interiors that distinguished the title-earning original.

Despite some scenic territory, there's just not much to this journey, leaving Lost in the Sun feeling like a short story stretched way too thinly toward feature length.

Writers Skip Woods and Michael Finch have a few tricks up their sleeves as betrayals emerge and allegiances shift. But it's not enough to make us care or to keep the third act from being a head-scratching mess.

Hansel and Gretel are this movie's breakout stars, but it's not enough to make Hoodwinked Too feel like anything but a storybook hurled straight at your head.

Tower to the People means well, and Tesla deserves his own movie, but it's like being cornered by a zealot: an educational slog that morphs into an infomercial.

Well-intended seriousness dismantles Regression, a not-exactly-horror horror movie that's also a mystery with no mystery.

The humor is way more miss than hit, prone to the kind of raunch (analingus debates, homophobia teasing, who’s-hot-who’s-not) that feels available, not thought-out, and pain gags that don’t get funnier the more they’re repeated.

As a big sci-fi entertainment, it hardly feels like a movie about the problems of two emotionally desperate people in a crazy situation, and therein lies the problem.

Besides never knowing where to stick a camera, or how long a given scene should last, Hopkins quickly ditches any potentially subversive joy in her cartoon vigilante by saddling her with a redemptive love story opposite James Badge Dale's kind-eyed sheriff.

By the umpteenth disruptive shock-cut and patiently framed shot of Carter staring us down, Darling has worn out its welcome even as a mood piece.

Erased is eminently forgettable.

The pedestrian filmmaking and community-theater pacing mostly recalls PBS pledge drives hawking Bocelli records.

An undercooked, "Glee"-like hybrid of grating indie pop songs and forest slasher flick.