Robert Abele

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

Bogliano — who hit it big in indie horror with "Penumbra" and "Room for Tourists" — is a mood man, adept at unease and admirably judicious about shock moments, if not exactly skilled with storytelling or pacing.

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

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.

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

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.

"How to Let Go” says all the right things about an unnerving peril, and the various ways some highly motivated people are trying to combat it.

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.

Wilson asks, can a male middle-aged crank get a sentimental education? If you even care whether that’s possible, Craig Johnson’s film adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ 2010 graphic novel offers a reasonably amusing case study in how that might transpire.

Escape Plan is mostly a gray, thudding metal machine of throwback exploitation, but the goateed, goofy Ah-nold is so happy to be in the thick of an old-school bruiser again that he makes it feel like the dumb-fun flashback party it is.

As a flashy, country-hopping ridealong with a style icon, it will appeal to fashionistas, but you won't learn much about the high-end world of clothing design beyond its ability to stretch someone's schedule to the breaking point, and land that someone a gig outfitting Jamie Foxx and Will Smith.

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

The first half is a cautiously dread-inducing tour de force as the suspicious interlopers parse the shiny, happy members for signs of a darker version of paradise... The second half, however, when all hell breaks loose a little too quickly, is the disappointment.

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.

Although no less fawning and indulgent about its self-centered subject, played by Jean-Marc Barr (who also narrates, run-on style), the muted emptiness of the ill-fated sojourn wills its way toward something like existential meaningfulness.

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.

Occasionally, when you Death Wish upon a star and that star is Banderas, you get a serviceable time-waster like Acts of Vengeance.

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 mix of callous humor and romantic doom doesn't always hold up, but in its best moments, The Wannabe finds real spikiness in the pitfalls of anti-hero worship.

With Cooties, what starts as recess fades all too rapidly into movie detention.

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.

Writer-director Eran Creevy shows himself to be well versed in the mythic sweep of Christopher Nolan's and Michael Mann's crime sagas, if not their intelligence with storytelling.

Jamie Marks Is Dead admirably refuses to hew to conventional horror tropes and is acted with integrity by its young performers, but the film nonetheless has a nagging pulse problem.

Though plenty of road-tested war truths about sacrifice, honor, grit and intimacy get trotted out, "Stalingrad" is deep down a spectacle campaign forged in operatic violence and a siege of the senses, and on those terms it has its moments.

There’s simply no time for the impact of anything that happens to get its reflective due, because the movie is too busy reverting to the up-and-down status of Michael’s and Ana’s increasingly inconsequential relationship while lining up its next large-scale set piece.

Without its lead, whose full-throttle portrait is at least a burning flame, Gold wouldn’t work on any level.

The darkly funny Australian charmer Griff the Invisible introduces its titular hero to us as nighttime caped crusader first, mild-mannered daytime office drone second.

Not that there aren't sporadic pleasures in store for the star's completists — a seasoned gesture here, a well-timed tear there and the steely beauty of her ageless gaze. But it's not enough to save Souvenir from the sense that without her anchoring presence, this movie would float away.

The fights are leaden, so when a movie’s bid for historical verisimilitude has already stopped at backlot-acceptable, and the character development is constrained by dumb dialogue, such meager tending-to of an Asian action flick’s primary draw is nigh unforgivable.

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.

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.

For the show's rabid viewership, these testimonials are probably integral to a celebratory experience like the "Glee" live show. To everyone else, it's all gonna be Gleek to you.

If you meet the fiendishly deadpan Rubber halfway, its assured mix of cinephile artiness and grindhouse spoof will offer some oddball surprises.

Its empty, loud breathlessness is the real bunk to behold: think trailer for a movie more than movie itself. Or more accurately, think teaser to the trailer to the movie. It’s a broken record of ersatz positivity and empowerment, practically shout-singing at you to be all you can be while it mostly just is what it is, plastic flash without any enduring oomph.

In the end, despite the clunky mix of narrative formats, My Father and the Man in Black makes for an illuminating alternate history of sorts to the Hollywoodized version of Cash's ascendancy in "Walk the Line."

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.

Unless you're on this spiritually noodling movie's wavelength — an easier proposition when the great McKee is singing (she wrote the music with Akin) — this is narratively thin, tone-poem stuff

Cathey brings a burnished, bone-deep authority to the question of who music belongs to, and it's handled in a way that doesn't forgive the movie's tonal missteps, but also doesn't dampen its earnest nostalgia for a lost time.

Bullet to the Head is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice.

If anything, the new stuff’s brazenness is truer in tone to what this “Cat Person” clearly wants to be: a slick, snarky, pulverizing horror-comedy rather than the compressed, low-key Mary Gaitskill-meets-Eliza Hittman cringefest that Roupenian’s delicate storytelling conjured with every peek into Margot’s drifting psyche.

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.

Though there's no shortage of mustache-quivering energy and wide-collared strutting, Angel of Evil can't separate itself enough from the pack as a character piece to be memorable as anything other than a blood-spattered timeline.

What aims for Hitchcockian slyness ends up an inconsequential jumble in the comedy thriller The Perfect Host.

The best thing about Klinger’s time/memory/dream aesthetic is how it looks: the visual equivalent of an audiophile’s nostalgia for vinyl. But the time jumping feels precious, and the screenplay — written by Klinger and Larry Gross — falls too easily into clichés.

The leads give it their all — Hopkins’ vinegary parrying is especially lively — but the overall takeaway is of historical puppets playing philosophical gotcha, when we yearn for three-dimensional humans filling up a room with their lives, learnings and flaws.

The FP so desperately wants to be cultishly admired for its bad-taste rollout of wacko characters, ugly costumes and vulgar slang that it forgets to be genuinely offbeat or funny.

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.

No matter how much directors Eric Warin and Eric Summer (who wrote the story with Laurent Zeitoun) try to distract with dumb comedy — usually involving the annoying Victor — or cartoony action...the relationship between Félicie and Odette is a warm, heart-tugging one.

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.

With actors this good, however, there's rarely a pinched expression, heartfelt speech or laugh line that isn't at least partly sold, even if the stunted-male psychologizing at the expense of the under-written women grows tiresome.

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.

Slater has some effective moments and Franco excels at a certain kind of scary/funny psycho, but it doesn’t ultimately add up to much as either pulpy trash or exposé.

When we need the churning dread of an intimate tale of generational trauma, The Marsh King’s Daughter goes formulaic, and when we’re primed for exploitation sweats, it gets flabby.

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

Jaglom is too spiritually and cinematically lazy to do anything but evoke glib, artless solidarity, and let us know he's heard of Twitter and Facebook.

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

There’s a refreshingly contained, deadpan sass to many of the characters’ personalities – and even Marino’s direction of the actors — that makes these people appealing, not abrasive, and which never devolves into the needlessly crude or ham-fistedly improvised, as so often happens in the more raucously engineered R-rated comedies.

What starts as a cheeky lark about bad reputations and snazzy transformations never really gels into something truly funny or even appetizingly weird.

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.

Less a documentary than an acutely positioned marketing tool, Mindless Behavior: All Around the World delivers a chaotically high-energy burst of performance and behind-the-scenes footage for fans of the slickly produced hip-hop boy band.

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.

The Ardennes is an odd mixture of glum-chic style and emotional curiosity, a story of brotherly tensions that primarily comes off like a movie posing as a story of brotherly tensions.

The self-serious POV visual style has none of Brian DePalma's cheeky, unnerving and self-implicating virtuosity — it just reinforces how sick and dumb this whole feel-bad exercise in misogyny and dimestore pathology is.

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.

Ultimately suffers from a late-inning collapse into thematic obviousness and multiple endings.

It’s more of an action gallery, not a blood-pumping story accelerated by its flights of fury.

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.

This visually restless and ultimately ludicrous Chinese horror film from director Yip Wai Man (a.k.a. Raymond Yip) is unlikely to either shorten your breath or curl your toes.

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.

At the Devil's Door goes right up to the threshold of being an interesting possession saga but never truly gets inside.

Suffers from the tired POV gimmickry, the weak characterizations, the numbing sameness of stuck-in-the-woods-with-dolts narratives.

This wildly uneven mix of nasty and nervy...is primarily a time-waster, trotting out clichéd misadventure tropes and predictable zigzags in a manner neither terribly funny nor suspenseful.

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.

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

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.

All that matters with efforts like this is whether the cookie-cutter plotting serves up enough situations for Atkinson to contort himself into and out of jams. After all, are the narratives what you remember from the "Pink Panther" movies? Or the silly things, like that Clouseau could so easily get his finger caught in a spinning globe?

As things play out, however, Loach and Laverty are realistic enough in their tale of invigorating compassion to grasp that, as difficult as it is to find and nurture hope, just as essential is recognizing the danger lurking in festering grievance.

As it sputters toward its curtain-exposing conclusion, “Level 16” stays disappointingly thin, both as a dark-future cautionary saga and a genre exercise.

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.

Rebel in the Rye is the most dispiritingly presentational of biopics, on a tight schedule to hit its marks and compartmentalize its subject’s life.

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.

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.

For the most part "Matru" is neatly energetic, a mix of screwball whimsy and softball seriousness.

There’s an appealingly sentimental destination in store for Ronnie and Myla’s parallel quests that keeps the movie from floating away entirely on its all-too-airy premise.

The only way to describe this movie's trio of party-throwing protagonists is numbingly predictable, as if writers Michael Bacall and Matt Drake had "Superbad" on a loop in the background.

Though it’s millennial angst that drives the Andrea/Tara trajectories, Mendelsohn’s portrait of midlife fragility is a strong coloring in Untogether.

What’s painfully clear is that all the artfully composed shots, hinky situations and extra conceptual surprises can’t make this Detour all that compelling beyond its crisp artifice.

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.

Crushingly listless and at times as off-putting as a needle scratching vinyl, this corkscrew tale of questionable (and questioned) parenting, youthful misjudgments, grudges and disappointments doesn't even have the disciplined domestic-evil allure of a Lifetime movie.

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

There’s an elegant severity to the natural elements that share the frame with the movie’s characters, manifested in silhouettes against vast cloudy skies, delicate snowfalls, shafts of light in dark interiors and crisp air filled with smoke and dust. A testament to lives cut short, Rust is beautifully filmed and all the sadder for it

Whatever Life of the Party needs its star to be, it gives us — frumpy, hot, weird, normal, kind, mean, humiliated, heroic, limber, uncoordinated, sexy, unsexy — in the desperate hope that you’ll latch on to some nugget of McCarthy-patented brazenness and you’ll laugh, as if story and cohesion meant nothing.

The movie — glibly admiring of its hero's awfulness — is tone-deaf about genuine satire, assuming anything ugly (insults, nihilism, bloody violence) qualifies as sharp cultural commentary as long as the unceasingly venal, knowing narration explains it all for us.

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

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.

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.

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

The effect is both visceral and thoughtful, demonstrating a knack for cinematic dread rarely shown by today's manipulative horror meisters.

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.

Hsia has an appealingly slick visual style for the fast-paced if predictable turns in Sam's story, shooting the gleaming, bustling Shanghai as if it had finally earned its big-Hollywood-romantic-comedy stripes as a setting for the usual fish-out-of-water jokes, broad humor, meet-cutes, silly coincidences and happy endings.

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.

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.

Paint may ultimately be just modestly amusing, but at least it understands that a palette of well-blended tones has a better chance of earning our laughs than the one-color-fits-all kind.

Director Spencer Susser, who wrote the film with David Michod, has a kinetic filmmaking style and an impish, crash-and-burn sense of humor that keeps sentiment at bay long enough to let us appreciate the loose, uncomplicated performances from a cast that includes suddenly ubiquitous Oscar winner Natalie Portman.

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

As screenwriter, Billy Ray's adapting the original's Argentina-centric trappings to a tense post-9/11 milieu is smart, but as director his style is hardly atmospheric.

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.

South Korean filmmaker Sngmoo Lee's debut feature is less a genre-spanning romp than a tiresome lab experiment in computer-generated tropes and green-screen oppressiveness.

[It] is it all forced and regrettably laugh-free, despite the considerable energy the actors put into it.

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

With all the finesse of a bullhorn that sprays noise and blood, All Cheerleaders Die shows just how difficult it is to pump life into the shopworn teen horror-comedy genre.

Even with a gripping subject like blues-singing convicts, the documentary Music from the Big House has a disconcerting emotional distance.

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

The best moments showcase Duvall and Franco, formidable stars representing different cultural eras, testing the waters of a father-son relationship bruised by outmoded views of love and sin.

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.

Bloated, inexplicably un-entertaining.

The problem is that for all the ways this story is entertaining as a magazine article or Dateline segment, it’s an awkwardly bloated bore when Love makes the affable, naïve Hyden not just his key interviewee but also his reenactment star.

It's not unfunny in spots, but it huffs and puffs (among other bodily functions) more often than it splits the sides.

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.

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.

The meager tension generated by characters discovering their survival instincts, and why you might not want to be next to them when they do, is quickly dissipated by the realization that, at a certain point, the movie is an assembly line of killing, and not a terribly exciting or entertaining one at that.

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.

The overall flavor profile indicates that Waititi, whose own cartoonish appearance as a priest feels like an afterthought, has become bored with his signature brand of goofy uplift. Going by the unfunny self-referential gags (“The Karate Kid,” “The Matrix,” “Taken”), you’d swear the Oscar-winning filmmaker was struggling with the impulse to go full parody.

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.

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.

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

The characters, the dumb dialogue, and the story mechanics are the biggest problems with “Hot Summer Nights,” which never convinces, while it uses an annoying, legend-building voiceover narration from an unseen local to keep hawking the notion that we’re seeing life-changing, mythic events.

Downloaded is still a vigorous retelling of Fanning's and Parker's wildfire achievement and its ethical pitfalls, even if there's little in the way of journalistic balance.

Until its characters behave illogically in the third act and the direction shows suspense fatigue, Preservation displays a flinty resolve to be better than your average woodsy-nightmare thriller.

First-time feature filmmaker Dave Wilson and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret (“Mile 22”) can manipulate the speed of combat scenes all he wants (the stylistic crutch of a slo-mo point of contact is evergreen) but dull choreography, CGI overuse and Cuisinart editing are still the bane of today’s action sequences.

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.

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

Without a human dimension to ground its construct, The Brass Teapot ultimately feels like an interminably stretched-out skit rather than a storybook lesson stained with blood and hurt.

A structural, chronological mess of information and emotion, so chaotically shot and edited to move from stat to image to sound bite that it suffers from its own concentration issues.

This one's for the conspiracy-minded only.

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.

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.

Every awkwardly declarative, stagy scene in “Bonhoeffer” is just a right-against-wrong equation to be answered by the title character’s virtue.

Despite appealing features, including stars Emma Watson and Tom Hanks (who morphs his patented affability into casually sinister, Jobs-ian salesmanship), The Circle never builds up a head of steam as either dark drama, modern satire or dystopian thriller.

Rarely do you sense that any key performer was ever in the vicinity of a real animal.

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.

A busy but witless and stale comedy that rehashes every raunchy gag we expect from R-rated comedies, it also wears its hackneyed sentimentality and cookie-cutter underdog story beats as proudly as adhesive nametags.

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.

Even when bits go thud, there's a brittle, unsentimental wit about kin's inexplicable tug that's hard to ignore, and the leads — game for some surprisingly sublime bits of physical comedy — eventually wear one's anti-charm defenses down.

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.

As a misfit-centric slap at religious conformity, the story's premise couldn't be more primed for trenchant social comedy, but screenwriter Knight and director Eyad Zahra opt for maintaining a thin veneer of tiresome obnoxiousness over exploring the contours of an emotionally complicated subculture.

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.

If you've seen most any rom-com you know where this one's headed. Unfortunately, under director Sheree Folkson's unsteady hand, getting there is more frustrating than fun.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, to follow these characters around is to experience not great theater, nor rich cinema, nor architectural wonder, but rather the itch of the restless spectator.

A routine home invasion movie more interested in B-horror tropes and bloodletting than a thought-provoking look at "Hunger Games"-ish class warfare.

If only the falling-in-love machinations and character details weren't so wispy, Tonight You're Mine might have had more resonance. That said, the film has its moments.

Movies with no redeeming qualities are rare, but the execrable Found comes pretty close.

The movie achieves its own nervy sensitivity about youthful urban despair.

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.

It’s an off-putting mix of matters whimsical and disturbing, more obvious and ludicrous than chilling.

[Antoine Fuqua] gives in to terrible instincts here, flirting with overwrought patriotism, one too many laugh lines amid numerous characters being shot in the head, and a general chaos-inspired editing technique all too rampant in today's action cinema.

Its modest (if occasionally gross-out) stabs at genre parody rarely insult our intelligence and even allow for the kind of retro deadpan silliness Mel Brooks used to underline his louder punch lines.

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.

A true tale of high school football achievement becomes a strained, by-the-numbers grab bag of uplift in the Christian sports drama When the Game Stands Tall.

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.

Frankly, it's hard to imagine even George Clooney making such ill-used screen minutes interesting. But the movie around those moments is even worse.

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.

The Hollow Point is all hollow, no point.

Stuckmann grabbing aimlessly in the last third for the kind of sickly visual elegance that is Flanagan’s deliberative style. But it only ever feels like homage, not anything organic — Stuckmann doesn’t have his mentor’s storytelling smarts, nor his flair for the underpinnings of normality that ground horror.

Prickly, suspenseful, even coolly humorous, Mojave finds noirish fun in the existential woes of a successful artist and old-fashioned movie pleasure in the parry and thrust of sharp dialogue.

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.

The Most Hated Woman in America is ultimately a simplistic approach to a fascinating figure, more Lifetime than a woman’s life and times.

Its CGI renderings are no better or worse than last month's or next month's animation family outing. Its vocal talent - led by Russell Brand and Hugh Laurie - is suitably star-powered. The only thing missing is any real wonder, imagination or comic verve.

It's a junky, unscary genre piece with a misleading title, because director and co-writer John Pogue jacks up the decibels so often to manufacture frights that you fear a punctured eardrum more than anything else.

Early on, it's tempting to dismiss the noir pastiche The Girl From the Naked Eye as a warmed-over pulp wannabe, what with the overwrought camera work and clichéd dialogue. But in its moments of sometimes comically violent antagonism, the movie shows some flashes of genre pizazz.

At Troma, puke-green is the warmest color.

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

When Table 19 tries to be a goofy humiliation comedy, it’s barely engaging. (The pratfalls are numerous and laugh-free.) But when it settles down into something like an indie ensemble about disappointment and the comfort of strangers, Blitz finds a more effortless tone.

With its flat location visuals, B-movie gore (snakes pulled from mouths) and colorless score, The Carpenter’s Son is the uninspired origin story you never prayed for.

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.

Is 65 a hall-of-fame bad movie? No, and that may be its problem. It’s just pedestrian dumb and dull.

What initially augured a spiky portrait of late-age restlessness recedes into a woefully generic case of shopworn cross-generational uplift, sprinkled with tired wisecracks.

Can't match an ounce of the suspense generated by contestants frantically buying airline tickets on Bruckheimer's own TV money quest, "The Amazing Race." This movie is a fortune wasted.

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

Kai Po Che packs a lot into its two hours, with not a lot of subtlety -- and in some cases, bracing grimness. But its performances are enjoyably boisterous, and director Abhishek Kapoor refuses to linger on clichés for too long...before hurling his trio into their next complication or moment of triumph.

While writer-director Andrew Renzi’s feature narrative debut is problematic whenever Gere isn’t onscreen (and even sometimes when he is), the veteran star exudes a damaged magnetism reminiscent of the character studies that thrilled discerning moviegoers in the ’70s.

In writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner's hands, it's a convoluted, airless procedural that generates practically no suspense and little that's thematically resonant about lost souls and poisoned memories.

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.

Screenwriter Max Enscoe and director Basel Owies — enamored of twists at the expense of logic and character — might as well have made a clip reel of their favorite cat-and-mouse movies, because their fever-pitch story is as tension-free, transparently obvious and ludicrous as they come.

That Les isn't one of LaBute's garden variety sadists is the best thing you can say about Dirty Weekend.

It's just all too breezy to have any real effect.

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

Lopez is a middling ringmaster of doom at best. But there's so little context to the litany of ugliness — some played for laughs, some meant to shock — that it's hard to discern where the entertainment value lies in any of this.

A famously crackpot conspiracy theory, psychedelic humor and arty ultraviolence make for dreary bedfellows in the scattershot British comedy Moonwalkers.

For those already jaded by the onslaught of YA fantasy universes, The Darkest Minds is on the forgettably “safe” end of the genre’s coded spectrum.

An entertainment-free sinkhole of Dramamine-worthy nonsense.

Maybe if you hate movies, LaBute’s attempt to bore us to death with classic noir material is a nifty prank. For anyone else, you’re better off revisiting Garfield and Turner, or Stanwyck and MacMurray, or Hurt and Turner — or even “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.”

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.

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.

A predictable hodgepodge of uninteresting psychological cat-and-mouse, dimly lighted action.

The fifth entry, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, is the most divertingly enjoyable since the first. A professionally crafted brew of action, slapstick and supernatural mumbo-jumbo, it’s less likely to spur timepiece glances than did the last few bloated installments.

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

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.

None of it works, really, as either musical satire or genre Chex mix.

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

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

Peter Berg’s Mile 22 is an angry, hyperviolent downer of an action flick that is the August blowout-sale of its ilk: loud and desperate.

As violent act begets silly exchange begets another violent act, Sweetwater squanders its noteworthy resources — a cast enjoying themselves (especially Isaacs and Harris), and some effectively brooding outdoor cinematography.

The dramatized movie we’ve gotten, All Eyez On Me, is a hagiographic dud that unfolds like a depth-free magazine listicle.

The ghost scenario that this boring, CW-ready, "Scooby-Doo" gang uncovers isn't nearly as shocking as the blasé attitude they have toward friends dying off.

It's called The November Man, but it's really just another forgettable August release.

It all remains remarkably free of memorable comic situations, dramatic tension or emotional insight. Adolescence may be bruising, crazy or normal, but it's rarely this staid.

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

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

Pali Road disappoints with ghost-romance squishiness and deadly dull pacing.

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.

The truest test for unrepentant treacle like this is to imagine how invested one would be if Lewis weren’t headlining his first movie in 20 years.... The answer is, barely invested at all, considering how simplified and pandering is Noah’s approach to issues of grief, aging, and family dynamics.

Moore is primarily known as an actor but this is the third feature he’s directed, and he proves surprisingly unable to get layered performances out of some great actors.

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.

Movies can warp any urgent issue into disposable melodrama, and what’s cringe-worthy about Trafficked, directed by Will Wallace, is how unnecessarily eroticized it is, like something from the made-for-video bin in a ’90s-era Blockbuster.

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.

Gone is the scrappy, brutal wit of the original - nothing more than an unfettered showcase for Jaa's talents - and in its place is more of the overwrought myth making that sunk "Ong Bak 2: The Beginning."

Does Tulip Fever feel like a precious bulb poorly nurtured? Primarily it comes across as something laboriously over-handled, and any flower so treated is bound to lose its luster. After waiting so long, the strongest fragrance on display is one of sweat and mediocrity.

Joyless and repetitive, Extraterrestrial is like getting cornered by a madman. You keep wondering, why is this movie shouting at me?

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

In the end, Trespass steps all over its own genre strengths.

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

The scenarios in Ass Backwards, which director Chris Nelson contributed to by filming in focus, feel arbitrary rather than organic, as if the creators' list of humor targets — lesbian bikers, trailer trash, drug-addicted reality TV stars, pageant world denizens — were picked out of a hat.

When Love works, Noé achieves a lulling, melancholic frenzy about sex and memory, but the foundation isn't strong enough to make his movie ever seem more than a stereoscopic fermata: one envelope-pushing note held way too long.

Burying the Ex is a genre-mashing low for Dante.

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.

Gallo, whose direction has an undeniable paciness but a numbing competency, seems eager to check things off a list and move on.

Annabelle works enough devil figurine juju to make for a modestly hair-raising prequel to the more satisfying scares of its predecessor, "The Conjuring."

Fist Fight is so ineptly assembled, shoddy-looking and devoid of comic tension or creative lunacy — like a movie comprised of outtakes — that you half-expect the filmmakers not even to deliver a fist fight.

Writer-director Abe Sylvia slathers on the cartoonish characterization and neon-colored '80s pop - Benatar! Joan Jett! The Outfield! - for an easy-bake mood-setting, which is tedious enough. But his attempts at situational humor on the road - including a stripping scene for Dozier as coming-out metaphor - fall embarrassingly flat.

Title’s command of the material is haphazard, her direction not artful enough to know when expository clunkiness is undercutting the chance to dig into the meat of personalities in deterioration.

There are occasionally atmospheric shots of depopulated boardwalks and streets, but the strain to give the visuals meaning becomes its own clue in the worst crime committed here: the killing of good storytelling.

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.

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.

Stranded stops at being merely seriously dull and trite, rather than tipping into train-wreck silliness.

Under Mikael Håfström's visually clunky, rhythmless direction, it's a snooze of epic sameness: choppy action scenes, a blankly stern Cusack, and too many allegiance shifts to count or care for.

The movie equivalent of a diverting beach read.

Unformed protagonists don't come more wallowingly irritating and contradictory than George.

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

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

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

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.

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.

If Michael Mann, Luc Besson and Quentin Tarantino all ate the same bad sushi together, the unfortunate end result might just resemble the pre-digested pap that is the French thriller Paris Countdown.

It’s a rom-com both com-less and rom-less.

It’s legitimately difficult, from scene to scene, to determine what exactly about the increasingly lurid and far-fetched “Mute” made it necessary to be told.

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

An action fan could be forgiven for the medicinal taste that this slick but dissipating exercise leaves behind.

As alternatingly silly and serious as its mix of wisdom and wallops, and even with that blond bro gumming up the works, “Birth” is nevertheless zippy, B-movie entertainment.

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.

What you won't feel is genuine horror, because unlike John Carpenter -- whose original 1978 film is a sly game of nerve-racking peekaboo -- Zombie isn't out to engage fans of the genre with a slaughterhouse bonbon like "Halloween II."

Action movies don’t necessarily need logic, but in the absence of entertainment value, tracking what doesn’t make sense is often the only fun.

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.

Feels precision-engineered for a morally torn fanboy who likes the idea of female empowerment but needs it served with a heavy dose of torture porn and glistening flesh.

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.

A crisis scenario striving for issue-driven importance that should have paid more attention to its dull suspense mechanics, slapdash style, and implausibility.

Flawed yet intimate, Diana respects its subject's hopes, strengths, weaknesses and legacy and, in the extraordinary Watts, boasts a formidably empathetic advocate.

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.

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.

If kids can grow out of their pretend pals, so too can horror audiences of cynical snoozes like this.

Strict adherence to the playbook may work in sports, but My All American shows the pitfalls of that approach with movies.

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.

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

Erased is eminently forgettable.

This “Mummy” is rags that produce no riches.

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.

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

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."

Looking Glass ultimately feels trapped between leaning toward Lynchian identity weirdness and suggesting a classically character-driven slice of indie exploitation, despite a suitably retro Tangerine Dream-like score that vibrates suspensefully when needed.

Dagen Merrill’s thriller, made under the Syfy channel’s banner, is strictly cheap-TV genre fare that might have passed muster as an average episode of “The Outer Limits,” but over feature length simply feels slipshod and dull.

With no names given to the characters, you never have to remember them. But it's really best to forget about all of Amnesiac.

A movie lovely to look at but on-the-nose and crushingly dull, a pair of qualities a ghost yarn can't live on.

Too often, Carter sacrifices characterization for one more flickery effect or carefully composed shot of moody elegance, then overdoes unlighted interiors to an almost absurd degree.

Little more than an 88-minute "it has a mind of its own" gag, Bad Johnson should have kept its premise in its pants.

A troop-rallying campaign infomercial as imagined by Michael Bay: hero-worshipping, crescendo-edited at a dizzying pace, thunderously repetitive and its own worst enemy as a two-hour, talking-points briefing.

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

Passion will only rekindle your love affair with De Palma to the extent that his luridly artisan chiller classics are readily available afterward for another viewing.

Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory instead of a poet’s and a composer’s feline (uni)verse, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants.

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.

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.

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

Seeking existential, noirish heft, Amoedo coyly avoids articulating what Martin is. (He calls himself "sick.") But it only comes across like an amateur play at gravitas, one unsupported by dully weighted scenes and clunky dialogue, delivered mostly by English-speaking actors straining to hide Latin accents.

Any movie that leeches the perverse fun out of illicit voyeurism, then tosses in a grim gotcha of an ending to make everyone feel worse, when the kids’ actions are distasteful enough, is worth avoiding.

Beware any movie that talks about what it is before being what it is.

Cheap silliness abounds, including car chases that are more about loud crashes and CGI than the thrill of speed.

A uniquely frenetic hodgepodge of story lures.

An investment in theatrical self-indulgence with diminishing returns.

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.

Pulpy dross of surpassing dumbness, Charlie Countryman takes the blender approach to mixing dark adventure, doofus comedy and pie-eyed romance, but forgets to put the lid on when pulsed.

There's so little urgency, cleverness or romantic comedy zing to this effort from four credited screenwriters (including Oscar winner Ron Bass) that the whole effort seems to run solely on the smiles of its photogenic leads.

Everything about the story, from opening to closing dance party, feels like it was made up on an especially unimaginative playdate by bored kids who’d rather be watching TV.

The model here may be the florid, female-centered movies of Douglas Sirk, but the effect is as poetic and inspiring as a waiting-room pamphlet.

Families with canines are better off staying home and having an old-fashioned backyard frolic than trotting out to see Show Dogs, a panting, poorly trained entry in the live-action/talking animal genre that for once makes viewers long for the candy-colored, half-witted professionalism of third-tier Pixar-knockoff animation.

A lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie.

As soon as Willis deploys his trademark smirk, and the comfortable vengeance of tracking down his wife’s killers while avoiding detection takes over, it just becomes a million other B-movies about lowlifes getting what they deserve.