Robert Abele

It’s an illogical, simple-minded mess in which Stevens is primarily a disembodied voice in a first-person-shooter-style video game movie.

The celebrity soup that is Love the Coopers is, indeed, a mess, the kind in which the screenplay by Steven Rogers...is made more chaotic by Jessie Nelson's tonally smeary direction.

Weaver's last ditch attempt to upend rom-com convention and rewrite the movie as a skeevy lout's comeuppance hardly makes up for the clichéd slog that comes before.

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.

Named as if it knew its destiny, The Disappointments Room brings together those horror movie standbys that just can’t quit each other — a creepy old home and a troubled family — for some truly convoluted, non-scary, and execrable psychological mishegoss surrounding a hidden chamber and the noxious historical shame it holds.

The true mistreatment is directed toward the moviegoer, who has to endure enough stale pseudo-shocks, empty atmospherics, explanatory mumbo-jumbo and personality-free acting that it's hard not to think of viewing Dark Summer as running-time served.

The dreary, loud, amateurish horror-comedy A Fantastic Fear of Everything...isn’t terribly interested in logic. Or continuity. Or filmmaking acumen. Or, most glaringly, laughs.

Brings vampires, werewolves, zombies, detective noir and spoofy comedy together for a murky genre gumbo with barely any flavor.

Despite the high body count, consider this a murder of The Crow.

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.

In its stylistically flailing stab at authenticity, CBGB ends up merely a mess of caricatures.

It's all simplistic sermonizing in director and co-writer Alejandro Monteverde's hands, devoid of any thoughtful messiness about wartime mind-sets or family despair, and quick to sand any edges with postcard-pretty coastal town vistas and cutesy music cues.

Breathless, uninspired January junk that feels like the iffiest bits of a Lifetime movie and late-night cable schlock slapped together. (And not erotically.)

When the movie isn't forcing its cuteness or R-rated humor, there's a frisson of genuine screwball to The Right Kind of Wrong.

There's certainly no moviegoing reanimation in director Stuart Beattie's adaptation of Kevin Grevioux's graphic novel.

The movie has too much on its plate in selling its paint-by-numbers uplift.

One of the more plastic molds of troubled heartthrob storytelling in recent memory...is the kind of dispiriting effort that thinks it’s scratching an itch for masochistic young girls, but primarily suggests that romance, desire and sexuality aren’t worth genuinely exploring.

[A] slack, dumb prequel.

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

The clichés alone doom the movie.

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.

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

Co-writer and director David Aarniokoski's clunky, crude blotch of prurience and bloodletting is too self-satisfied with its wink-wink naughtiness to be either fun-dumb or scary-sexy.

It won’t slam the door on Tesfaye’s movie ambitions, but as a bid to conquer the big screen, it’s an off-putting, see-what-sticks wallow that treats the power of cinema like a midconcert costume change.

Ultimately, "2" is hit-and-run humor as hit or miss as any comedy of its ilk. If one has to sit in front of a jet spray of degradation gags, better it feel like the occasional seltzer spritz than a fire hose blast to the crotch.

The stars' banter is insipid and unfunny, the wacky shocks short out and, most unforgivably, the car chases are a snooze, filmed as a series of stationary close-ups and diced in the editing room until they suggest anything but movement.

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.

An abject filmmaking lesson in the many ways to irk moviegoers: cardboard characters, dippy plotting, sentimental overkill and tortuous logic.

What’s left is a visually unappetizing Animal Farm that plays as if someone sloppily traced over a masterpiece. And Serkis (who also voices a rooster) doesn’t so much direct it as twist some grand knob with settings like “Louder,” “Faster,” “Jokier,” “Bigger.”

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.

No image or moment is grounded – every shot is augmented with restless animation, smart-ass narration or video game sounds. The artificiality of it all is smothering.

This is Nancy Meyers territory, but leaden with passé observations about lovelorn women...and hardly ebullient as either oddball-pair comedy or housewife-revenge fantasy.

As long as there are enemies in Islamic lands, we'll probably have to endure risible time-wasters like London Has Fallen, designed to justify blinkered foreign policy attitudes and stoke jokey hatred.

6 Souls is regrettably sick with that familiar disease afflicting movies of this ilk: ostentatious, hollow moodiness that spreads like an unwelcome rash.

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.

This hollow downer about deep wells of male anger, wallowing regret and mental disintegration is ultimately a thematic cop-out.

A stroll along the Venice boardwalk is likely to elicit more laughs, and probably even thrills, than Once Upon a Time in Venice.

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.

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

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

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

The kind of low-wattage, paint-by-numbers thriller that usually signifies a perilous turn toward the action purgatory that is cheap, direct-to-nowhere fare.

The movie's early promise fades, however, as an Apatowian crassness descends upon the comic situations, churlishness gets mistaken for rawness, and sweetness starts to feel manipulative instead of natural.

As dramatized, “The Warrior Queen” takes all the biopic shortcuts (narration, sped-up timeline, ham-fisted exposition) only to get to a depiction of the drumbeat to conflict that traffics in platitudes and clichés.

If only 11-11-11 had arrived a little closer to Thanksgiving - the turkey connection would have been entirely appropriate.

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.)

Between plot and character, there are definitely 18 holes in The Squeeze.

It's rare to find a movie protagonist who singularly fails on every count to be a compelling, sympathetic or even understandable figure.

I Melt With You assuredly marks itself as one of 2011's most ludicrous releases.

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.

What’s especially pitiful about this installment, which has been given a perfunctory dark-action look by cinematographer Brendan Galvin (“Self/less”), is how often Stallone tries to give psychic heft to the wounded-warrior part of his creation, as if he were Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers” and not just a monosyllabic killing machine easily triggered.

One can't help experiencing the same dread about the exhausting flood of lackluster horror films that swamp our screens and, as Case 39 unfolds, realizing we're enduring one more.

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

The Identical is ultimately too schematically sentimental, even with Liotta playing against type, to have much of an impact.

The pretentious, preposterous, dueling-dialect flameout called Killing Season has to stand as one of the biggest missed opportunities in iconic matchups.

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

Horror films that backstory the audience to death lose all hope of mining what’s eerie and unsettling about the unknown, and Rings is a perfect example: it doesn’t so much spread its familiar myth as dilute it.

This meandering lark about a corrupt, spiteful and hopelessly distracted police force in a decriminalized, sun-scorched city never quite finds the funny bone.

Plodding, predictable, amateurishly staged and with wild swings in acting quality - sometimes within the same person (Roberts) - this is the kind of well-meaning, homemade concoction hopelessly enamored of the kind of clichéd potboilers that don't get made anymore. And with good reason.

If ever a movie signaled that the Quentin Tarantino copycat age of empty-headed wink-wink genre rehashing is still with us, Rushlights is that movie.

Even without the queasy racial stereotypes, Walk of Shame feels perfunctorily assembled, its obstacles straining even screwball logic.

To say everyone plays like they're in separate movies is an understatement.

Silent River feels intensely personal, but also impossibly closed off. But is that so bad? Ultimately, for all its awkwardness and attentiveness, its grab-bag of tones and problematic pacing, there’s a lot about “Silent River” that gives one faith in off-the-beaten-path cinema, from how much Lee cares about what his images and sounds convey, to how little he cares whether your narrative questions are satisfactorily answered.

Revenge is a dish served lumpy and tasteless in the tonally muddled Return to Sender.

In the wake of "Bridesmaids," Sandler's lipsticked tomfoolery - and inability to share the screen with genuinely funny women - feels particularly regressive and stale. Both movies have diarrhea gags, but only one feels defined by such humor.

Fairbrass has a certain rugged sincerity and appealing sense of barely coiled rage, but it's mostly wasted in a screenplay (by director Brian A. Miller) of gaping plot holes, wan excitement and dumb action cliches.

A sweet, sincere, yet ultimately tepid story.

Dark Tide, directed with hopelessly flagging energy by John Stockwell, barely musters up enough interest to be thuddingly bad.

What galls is that for all the perspiration in jazzing up an old yarn, there's not a whiff of originality in how Wirkola engages with the perverse pleasures enshrined by the Grimm brothers, two of their era's shrewdest storytellers.

A childish slog of hero worship.

Watching Father Figures is like finding a piece of food in the back of your fridge that you barely recognize, but know right away it’s not worth eating.

The dull, hectoring financial melodrama Supercapitalist has all the spark of a high school assembly skit about not letting friends drive drunk.

Consider Twelve its own memory-retarding narcotic.

Depending on what you need from horror like this – shock followed by relief, or a brutalization fix – Martyrs is bait-and-switch, or it’s a drawn-out tease that makes good. Either way, it’s a sop to vile tastes.

Inexplicably filmed in a handful of styles - including, bizarrely, obviously processed shots - by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Passion Play would be midnight-movie fodder if it weren't so drearily wrapped up in its wounded-male aesthetic and a clumsy approach to art-movie moodiness that was abandoned in the '80s.

Stay past the credits, though, and you'll find a tongue-in-cheek rap video recap with the cast - and directed by star Dustin Milligan - that carries the kind of spoofy insouciance missing from the main attraction.

It's dispiriting enough that we're still getting movies about the cute side of mental illness, but to turn someone rendered childlike by abusive trauma into desirable girlfriend material — and sporting cast-off stripper attire to boot — is more than a little creepy.

Though the title hints at a tale of infatuation, Levy sheds little light on interpersonal conflict or why we're such an addictively self-documenting modern society.

Like so many movie stars, Bigfoot has been sold out by movie opportunists, in this case as ho-hum fright bait in the aggressively unimaginative Exists.

The title's promise of violence is dutifully met in gory, sonically squishy close-quarter melees shot in Confuse-o-vision, as if the camera had been strapped to a whirring blender before the footage was edited with the puree button.

A kitchen-sink mess with no discernible narrative drive or thematic resonance beyond uninspired batches of bad behavior, gunplay, eccentricity and weak uplift.

The movie doesn't even need five minutes to signal that it's already a goner.

Occasionally Norm and everyone around him will break out into a dance, and you have to wonder if these numbers were scheduled as bathroom breaks.

The inconvenient truth about Geostorm is that it’s dumber than a box of asteroid-sized hail. But to take it seriously for just a second, it misses an opportunity to turn idealism about the world coming together to solve its biggest problem and instead turns it into more of cinema’s biggest problem: empty-headed spectacle.

If all you need from a love story are two people smiling at each other and a narrator saying they’re in love, then Life Itself is for you. If all you require to show the passage of years is a CG montage or some cheap makeup, then Life Itself is for you. If the only way you’ll know things are tough is if everyone dies, then Life Itself is for you.

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.

To borrow a hamburger chain's refrain, not lovin' it.

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.

A near complete exercise in mirthlessness and atonal satire, Cellmates is a sentence, all right.

Assassin's Bullet is strictly '90s-era pay-cable genre-rip-off nostalgia, ripe for ridicule.

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

So unless you're a fan of yawn-worthy shootouts and showdowns, The Prince is a "Taken" retread hardly indicative of any special set of skills.

Too bad the only thrill you get from all the bloodletting is that you know each cartoony death brings you that much closer to the end credits.

The many ridiculous tragedies are just there to slather showy woundedness on a weak, annoying character, leaving The Vanishing of Sidney Hall a mystery-free mystery with an inexhaustible supply of eye-rolling postures.

A brainless, exploitative folly which gives John Travolta free rein to mine the history of cringe-worthy autism portrayals for an offensively garish Frankenstein pantomime of unhinged obsession.

Perhaps aware of how little its audience might pay attention to anything not running, fired off or blown up, the movie's characters explain themselves regularly. Willis, meanwhile, mutters his executive-suite-villain lines as if he's afraid of waking you.

Vaguely misogynistic and defiantly paternalistic, the movie fails at nearly everything.

While there's regrettably nothing terribly witty or surprising about any of this as either love story or laugh machine, director Scott Marshall does manage a breezy, good-natured tone toward this oft-mocked cultural phenomenon that allows for eye-rolling and smiling in equal measure.

It’s a winning cast, but don’t be surprised if you think about how many commercials for good times with friends or wellness products could be excerpted from the buoyant cinematography and editing style of Rise.

The trouble is, director Wayne Blair’s perfunctorily handled adaptation of Dalia Sofer’s 2008 novel is long on cardboard characterizations and short on genuine tension.

There's no ignoring the aggressive stupidity and crassness behind the whole enterprise.

The patriot-packaged Last Ounce of Courage has been made with the conviction of true zealots, but also the competence of amateurs.

A treadmill sex comedy, huffing and puffing in place until its time is up.

Enthusiasm isn't exactly a replacement for good sense or basic skills, and the film's truest mystery is why no one pulled Metcalf aside and suggested he keep all this to himself.

The scenario makes for an inept, lazy R-rated movie whose sole purpose is as a glossary of euphemisms for genitalia and sexual acts.

There's simply nobody to care about in Among Ravens, even as a case study in unhappiness and delusion.

Cloying and smug when it's not being unfunny and crass, the high school reunion comedy Back in the Day hits lows with a frequency that suggests a world-class sharp shooter or free-throw king.

A thuddingly unfunny vigilante satire.

As horror, it's frightless and boring. As comedy, it's desperate and laughless. As exploitation, it's exceedingly dull. Even excrement was once something of substance. The Human Centipede III: Final Sequence is just rancid air. It too shall pass.

Not Cool is the Internet culture of artlessness, excess, empty popularity, whining and sex-fueled hatred writ large.

One's diminishing interest in the nuts and bolts of cheating a cheat can be forgiven when the sheer star wattage of the peppy cast is in close-up overdrive.

What unfolds instead is a deadly dull trial and boatloads of speechifying about religious dignity, hate crimes and prejudice.

All cartoon and no charm.

Whether meeting a malevolent spirit wearing expensive sunglasses, seductively controlling her (Bazu) prey, or bringing her scheme to an operatically violent close, she gives"Raaz 3" its defiantly retro flamboyance.

As predictable as these stories invariably are, Lee's wonderful turn reignites the potent fantasy of peasant wisdom - if given the power - melting politically cynical hearts and legislating through decency rather than fear.

A snapshot of Los Angeles artists during a cultural pivot point, the documentary Young Turks sparks fascination and frustration in equal measure.

Writer-director Leone Marucci has a scratch-worthy itch for plump visuals and flashy camera moves, but a limp way with dialogue and story, and — despite his cast — no grip on directing actors.

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

This one's all about the next jaunty, jangly guitar riff on the soundtrack that signals a new day, the next bit of inspiration or opportunity, and sometimes that's just fine.

Like getting a half-dozen undercooked after-school specials at once, Quentin Lee's White Frog serves up a medley of messages and themes while generating no discernible dramatic heft.

After the quiet, dread-filled punch of the first half-hour — when it seems vampire culture is going to get turned on its head — Iwai's character study mostly descends into a pretentious slog.

Six-year-olds at recess could come up with a wittier script and more charming performances, since they probably wouldn't be hampered by lame pop culture references, laziness disguised as parody, and gore disguised as slapstick.

Often an engrossing example of the sweeping, stirring biography.

In the regrettably amateurish hands of writer-director Thomas Verrette, Ethan's journey toward the truth feels more like watching someone wandering through one of those pharmaceutical commercials with a laundry list of side effects.

Abandoned Mine is all that its title promises: something generic and empty, with the sense that much has been left behind.

We Came Home has its amateurish side, but it's effortlessly affecting when showing how music acts as an extended hand across generations and cultures.

Apart from Farmer's effectively stricken portrayal of a singularly conflicted man, The Falls: Testament of Love is too earnest a slog to have any impact.

The mix of computer-generated imagery, hand-drawn simplicity in the humans and depth-conscious, textured backgrounds makes for a potent visual intelligence.

The more generalized confessionals on friendship and love are a lot simpler to grasp. But the real star is the riot collage of twisty, breakneck visuals underscoring these conversations and battles.

The movie isn't exactly scary, and it has a tendency to meander. But the crumbling, ornate sets are an atmospheric marvel.

The ludicrous and bloody New Orleans melodrama Repentance offers the despairing sight of talented actors in full flounder.

The script (by director Gary Lundgren with James Twyman) is modestly feel-good to a fault and the scenery expectedly beautiful, but it's the unforced acting providing the most nourishment.

If the material isn't always smooth or funny or well-thought-out, the tone and spirit are agreeably light, with a visual sophistication for a meager budget that's admirable.

[A] thoroughly routine, straight-to-video-reminiscent action thriller set in Louisiana.

NightLights achieves something admirably genuine about the queasy mixture of anguish and joy attached to caretaking for the most needy of loved ones.

Though the breathless tale and full-throttle tunes give "Filmage" plenty of rollicking energy, it's the through-line of genuine soulfulness and tireless artistic commitment that sets it apart.

Emilio Mauro's screenplay is all rancid machismo, tedious yelling and turgid plotting, while director James Mottern exhibits a pathological love for repetitive close-ups and terrible acting that instantly brings each endlessly talky scene to a dead stop within seconds.

Two-Bit Waltz is watchably imitative, arch nonsense. It has committed performances — including a deadpan turn on the edges by William H. Macy as the dad who's only seen reading books — and the occasional, provocatively funny line of dialogue.

Sjöberg is so enamored with the dancing and overall positivity that moves and platitudes fairly dominate, when the movie could have used more narrative cohesion and engagement with his subjects.

There are occasionally interesting peeks into the hard work of keeping a flame alive that burned briefly 30 years ago. But mostly this is a video tour book for fans, no more, no less.

Writer Eddie Guzelian's grindhouse-meets-"Groundhog Day" scenario is not without its clever plot turns, but his terrible faux-noir dialogue is mostly crass, witless snark, and the fresh-faced, hollow actors don't have the scuzzy charm or fatalistic comic rhythms needed to make this material disreputably fun.

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.

Leachman's facility with the wackadoodle senior is ever-admirable, but even she can't save the low-energy, charm-free thud that is This Is Happening.

It's like a cozy, informational visit with a beloved professor who assumes you come with a cineaste's built-in appreciation, but enjoys connecting the dots for you in a way that makes the movement's creative signposts — nonprofessional actors, street vitality, stories about poverty and desperation — feel freshly indelible.

Whenever the larkishness thins, though, Sheil — who could easily have modeled her face for Modigliani — grounds it all as a young woman torn between dissecting a mistake and accepting a responsible future.

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

Aram, Aram is almost too lightweight to have real power, but its snapshot of a vibrant local community and a hollowed-out transplant's very real identity crisis feels genuine.

The repetitively fetishistic camera work and lunatic-asylum sound cues are meant to signify a nod to something psychological and pointed, but all it is is bilious, empty-calorie extremism, and it only ever drags you where you expect.

A rich, occasionally stirring and ultimately plaintive ode to the craft of velvet gloves, iron fists and how to point with either or both.

Tonally, the film is a mess, unable to decide if it's a damning downer or...the inspiring story of conquering injustice.

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.

Gray and listless, the Anthony Hopkins/Ray Liotta-starrer Blackway is a vengeance tale set in a cold, foggy Pacific Northwest logging town where clichés are as prevalent as trees.

The shared love of the movie's featured racers for their long-rebellious sport makes for a unifying energy, but their individual experiences — and different attitudes toward the future — provide an underlying complexity.

Even if its trajectory hews to a well-worn format, Keepers of the Game is as strong an argument that can be made for the rich emotional rewards of schoolgirls hitting the field to show everyone and themselves what they can achieve.

In the laughably awful Code of Honor, Steven Seagal continues his campaign to make minimal onscreen movement, alarming chunkiness, and slurred, whispered threats in a weird Southern drawl, into the greatest assault on disbelief suspension in action filmmaking.

Bourek is well-meaning but woefully lacking in dimension or urgency, the movie equivalent of a scenic tourist trap.

It isn’t terribly exciting as a movie — director/co-writer Steven Chester Prince mistakes drab pacing as a stylistic match for the laconic charm of his lead actor — but the serious-minded humor has a probing sincerity that carries you along.

While your brain tries to wrap around that element of the fantasy, Basir flubs his big point about fate, choices and paths — that no matter our lives, we face the chance to change for good or bad — by embracing all the clichés he can find, then filming them without nuance or style.

Downriver is the kind of graceful provocation that slips around a corner before you can pinpoint its intentions, and that keeps it arresting as both an inquiry and a character study.

One wishes Bernstein had more cleanly presented the arc of Purcell’s life and career and how her representative eye evolved. Nevertheless, the sheer number of images shown gives this brisk foray into Purcell’s work an admirable guided-tour feel.

Though its focus is the two years the Sharps spent in Europe, it rushes through elements of their lives that would seem to warrant more examination

A scrappy war flick with a fair amount of combat suspense but a whole lot of clichéd dialogue.

A thoroughly amateurish un-comedy about show business.

Often exhibiting the best of DIY cinema sensibilities — a mixture of focus, mood, and lived-in characterizations — Green is Gold augurs good things for the multi-hyphenate Baxter.

Though there’s never a smooth path toward narrative or emotional enlightenment as you watch CRD, Kanadé’s willingness to explore the creative impulse through impish experimentation is amusing and infectious.

The brutally serene documentary Iron Moon from Qin Xiaoyu and Wu Feiyue spotlights a handful of bottom-rung workers who write achingly clear-eyed poetry that spotlights the contours of their lives.

Like others in this series (“The Black List,” “The Out List”), it’s a mix of to-the-camera testimonials and archival photos, elegantly packaged, less a movie than a companionable hour spent with a diverse collection of people wonderfully articulate about the road they’ve traveled.

Cinematic life...is in short supply in this ambitious but leaden cautionary tale, which tries to pep things up with energetic fight scenes in the avatar worlds, but can’t escape the wooden acting and zipless storytelling.

Like a fog that corrupts your ability to be entertained, Top Coat Cash is genre amateurishness that neither thrills nor makes sense.

Though not the most sure-footed of superhero entries, as an offbeat perspective on the genre, They Call Me Jeeg merits an enthusiast’s look.

Patagonian landscapes in 16 mm and Hollywood real estate shot in 35 mm provide a visually sleek backdrop for mighty uninteresting relationships in the pretentious indie Somewhere Beautiful.

Choked with clichés, joyless, and with a suspense meter on empty, this France-set caper about classic-car-thieving half brothers (Scott Eastwood and Freddie Thorp) mixed up with a pair of violent, automobile-collecting crime lords (Simon Abkarian and Clemens Schick) is only for those who think the “Fast and the Furious” movies aren’t white and charmless enough.

It won’t replace your favorite girl-meets-boy classics, but it yo-yos between the heart and the loins with admirable verve, and it boasts a few richly comic turns.

Had a minimal effort been made to address policing controversies in the context of an honest argument that the job is grueling and perilous, Fallen might have been more powerful.

Though overlong, and pitched a little too heavily toward cable-TV sensationalism...Killing for Love is still a gripping murder mystery about the fated coupling of a pair of calculating romantics too smart for their own good, and the limits of the American justice system

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

As a wry commentary on religious tourism, and the limited avenues of prosperity for occupied, idealistic Arabs, “Holy Air” is tartly effective. And Srour’s deadpan way with storytelling, satire and elegantly fixed camera framing is a biting pleasure throughout.

You may tire of the onion-peeling by the time it’s all laid bare, but for fans of the buffet-style of crime capers it’s a slick diversion, engagingly assembled and acted.

"Bloodline” director Hèctor Hernández Vicens and screenwriters Mark Tonderai and Lars Jacobson, on the other hand, are less stewards of it than schlockmeisters, treating any possible resonance as stale oil in which to fry the usual junk food of gory, hyperkinetic kills. Their side orders are thin characters with dumb dialogue and even dumber behavior.

Along With the Gods strains to whimsically entertain, but routinely fails its smaller human-sized moments due to convoluted plot twists.

Probably no one movie could capture the scope of citizens forcing regime change in a dictatorial country, but the South Korean feature 1987: When the Day Comes valiantly tries in its own thriller-ish way.

The actors gamely strive for conversational naturalism, but what they say matters little because you never sense anything other than an environment rigged to explode, rather than nurtured into emotional relevance.

This is a visually inept, nonexciting slog, from the dialogue scenes in which the image shakes because one assumes the camera operators were laughing, to the action shots that you would have re-staged if you were just filming your pets at home.

What ultimately stands is a portrait of a woman for whom the term "cultural ambassador" was meant, whose dynamic range and earth-wide smile made the words and sounds pouring from her like a hand extended, a heart exposed, a story of the world made achingly real.

Shot in the Dark is a sobering reminder that places like Chicago are more than sensationalistic national headlines about crime and sports: they're where kids struggle every day to balance their dreams with the obstacle course of their surroundings.

No easy path to forgiveness and communication, this one, but as a tour-de-force howl of primal, damaged rage, it contributes in its own strange way to the current era of public reckoning and testy healing.

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.

Gould's admiration for the genre is affecting and sincere. The problem is that his and screenwriter Greg Tucker's love of horse operas both boilerplate and ruminative a la Peckinpah doesn't mesh well enough into a smooth ride.

The dissipating focus and the turgidly explanatory dialogue ultimately affects the legitimately surprising twist at the end, one in keeping with espionage's great theme — the intertwining of loyalty and betrayal — but that lacks oomph after so awkwardly uninvolving a buildup.

It's a prodigiously researched buzz saw of archival material, facts, feelings, testimonials, and nostalgia.

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

As long as the world worshiped fame, Hunt realized, that light could be redirected where it was most needed, and in our toxically fused celebrity-political climate, that focused, principled, humane simplicity of purpose feels as resonant as ever.

Though made by different directors, there’s a visual language of urban detail, intimate gesture and expressively animated lighting that connects all three — they’re like sweet, sad pop songs from a supergroup with many lead performers.

If your taste for athletic snapshots has tired of tales of the troubled, Khan’s at least smoothly offers someone as comfortable being a Muslim hero and family man as he is a fast-jabbing contender.

Although Vaya is plenty watchable as a commercial melodrama energized by its performers (especially the magnetic, star-in-the-making Nyoka), Omotoso’s fleet pacing and Kabelo Thathe’s marvelously textured cinematography, it also shrewdly avoids convenient, well-trod moralizing about small towns versus urban centers.

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.

It leaves one with the sense that Khaled wishes to reclaim a headline-tainted religious status from the acts of violent men and bestow that mournful grace to people in an everyday struggle with sensitivity and hopelessness.

Filmmaker Anahí Berneri, through her tough single-mother protagonist, mesmerizingly realized by Sofía Gala Castiglione, offers a no-apologies look at a member of a risk-taking underclass dinged on all sides.

Side effects from watching the anti-Pharma documentary Drug$ start with rage, and pretty much stay there through the call-your-congressperson coda.

While this story is more likely to have impact for those who lived through the horrors of this period and Mujica’s eventual emergence as a political leader, A Twelve Year Night avoids the easy trappings of triumph-of-the-human-spirit narratives. Sometimes a human simply withstands what it’s subjected to, and that’s enough to rivet us.

Margolin says we should “fight with ideas,” but Jihadists misses an opportunity to make vivid how that method of struggle would look.

Sure, there are the kinds of contrivances and roadblocks one expects from a comic drama of this nature, but Lionheart is built more around the abiding sweetness of its message of hope-filled struggle and hard-won enlightenment than the rudiments of a business farce.

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

Though we’re introduced to an assortment of prisoners, for much of the running time, Khabensky struggles to individuate them as anything other than archetypes, save his own brooding hero figure.

At its intimate best, Merata is an embrace and an education, a son’s love letter and for cineastes, a celebration of inclusion and voice.

Deadpan and over-the-top, these scenes make for a view of turbulent reality that is episodic and nonsensical — and wholly Ruizian.

Private and odd, archly dreamy and intimate, A Bigger Splash remains one of the more uniquely hypnotic movies about the connection between presented life and pulsating art.

A sincere, sensitive entry in that niche genre of family drama scenarios involving culinary legacy.

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.

As metaphors for America go, it might just put a hopeful smile on your face after another stomach-churning political news day.

It makes for one of the more alive portraits of artists in the moment you’re likely to see, a thumping gallery show forged from survival, and assembled out of passion and need.

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.

Justine recalls the golden era of the conscientious, well-acted movie of the week: a slice of life built around hardships, but without exploiting them.

Like a fan excitedly showing off their record collection, the documentary Streetlight Harmonies flips through its history of doo-wop telling a tale both tuneful and essential in the development of rhythm & blues, rock and roll and civil rights.

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 veneer of historical reality is thin on the baldly nativist and manipulative Serbian World War II movie Dara of Jasenovac, a slickly made extermination camp drama about child peril that will test the patience of even the most rigorous students of cultural representations of genocide.

The People vs. Agent Orange has a gripping urgency, especially as a reminder that the history of chemicals’ effects on our bodies is still being written and fought over, and that what a secretive industry is allowed to cover up, it will.

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.

When rock star wattage is the focus, “Like a Rolling Stone” doesn’t distinguish itself, but when Kai finds those ties in Fong-Torres’ life between the son who dreamed and the man who accomplished, the movie is like airplay for an album deep cut: what was always there getting some well-deserved attention.

The intimacy, warmth and humor of the memories give the footage of him teaching the feeling of watching home movies from the adoring offspring of a cherished father.

It’s Klein at his most conservatively verité and least pointedly judgmental — he was a fan of the game and setting, after all — but he still offers up a tapestry of personalities, playing and performing that captures what is ineffably beautiful and edgy about tennis, at a time when it was as popular as it had ever been.

Jacquot pays tribute to his mentor and friend, by adapting Suzanna Andler less as the movie you want than as an intimate walk along that precipice of desire or nothingness.

Low-key and likable, the Nassers’ Gaza Mon Amour is a movie with no use for sentimentality but in which the timing of a simple kindness, a nervous smile or a cathartic laugh means everything. Which it often can.

Though its seriousness of purpose and visuals of trees whole and hewn keep Peepal Tree intermittently compelling, one wishes the more pointed audaciousness of Kanadé’s last film, the stylish acting-school melodrama “CRD,” were in effect here to rev the urgency of what is clearly a deeply personal crusade for the filmmaker.

Though modestly assembled, Beijing Spring benefits from its historical richness as a portrait of artistic dissent.

With specificity, sweep and urgency, occasionally terrifying and bloody when capturing violent police tactics, Chow’s movie is a true epic of meaningful resistance.

It’s a nice story of master and protégé, and in many scenes the bond between the irrepressible, humorous Guy and the quiet, observant Sullivan seems genuine.

Should your New Year’s watching require the occasional break from grim awards fare and grimmer real-world news, you could do a lot worse than this well-intentioned tale of mirthful mouthfuls and other appetites.

While The Conductor isn’t redrawing the documentary form, it’s nevertheless pleasurably illuminating as admiration cinema about a feminist hero who bucked tradition and broke rules to make herself — and the significant music she’s curated — heard on her terms.

Though often roughly assembled in its sweep of archival footage, witnessing and performance, as a celebration of a monumental figure in politics and culture, A Song for Cesar doesn’t need to be slick to reveal its beating heart.

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.

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 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.

Thankfully, in the stretches when Monk is playing, he gets to be exactly who he is, his exhilarating music doing the talking, his exquisite dissonance suddenly more revelatory than perhaps intended.

Some films benefit from tying their persuasive abilities to sustained righteousness more than careful slickness, and this collaboration between Cheyenne filmmaker West and veteran documentarian Kempner (“The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg”) is one of them.

Whether you see Lévy, a spritely 74, as a hot spot gadfly or a dedicated war reporter, there’s no denying his dedication to the cause.

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.

A well-meaning but slapdash travelogue, Fioretta does find gratifying closure in the company that the Schoenbergs find: curators of a collective memory that won’t fade on their watch.

Thanks to its actors, there’s a credibly heavy sense of the personal prisons within literal ones that only a wretched war can foster.

The world is full of ego-massaging celebrity documentaries, in which legends we know star in glorified tribute reels. But the zesty, illuminating The World According to Allee Willis feels like what the showbiz biodoc was meant for, to give voice to someone who was so much more than a ubiquitous album-sleeve credit.

For anyone who needs a gut-punch primer in what the lack of reproductive freedom looks like now, the propulsive documentary Zurawski v Texas from co-directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault is here to put your voting decisions into sharply delineated, heart-rending focus.