Robert Abele

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

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

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.

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.

The movie exists in a space beyond arguments about immigration policy and border security, and while sometimes a little too willfully pokey, it speaks to something indelibly human about dreams and their costs.

Though the careful mood is invariably dissipated when it comes time to kill, kill, kill, Arnby's ace in the hole remains Suhl, a young actress of Streep-ian intensity.

By turns opaque, harsh, self-aware, indulgent and wickedly funny. It's never dull, pummeling you with its prickly smarts.

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

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

The details are mesmerizing as is the rule-breaking psychology behind it.

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.

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

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

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

Giving flair to the inevitable and imbuing those stakes with emotional heft are key to this type of patiently nasty, slow-boil noir. That Johnson understands this makes his feature debut a particularly confident and enjoyable one.

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.

There's no denying Watts' skill at a certain kind of desolate cat and mouse, but it's in the service of what is ultimately a somewhat heartless exercise.

In giving historical context to the poisonous nature of our oft-bemoaned political discourse, "Best of Enemies" showcases brainy bloodsport with humor, nostalgia and, appropriately, a lacing of melancholy.

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

With so much conversation these days about the effects of rape culture, Felt, with its atmospheric DIY aesthetics, enters the discussion as a corrective chiller that can best be described as compassionately perverse about one type of pushback.

Director and co-writer Thomas Lilti's mistake, though, is thinking the bland Benjamin's coming of age concerns are worth so much screen time. The sturdier character study in Hippocrates is of soulful, beleaguered Algerian-born Abdel (Reda Kateb).

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.

Its oddball colors and willful wanderings betray a sweet, savory, uncompromising air that showcases Russell's uniquely fused brand of American harmony with rascally ebullience.

Whatever your feelings on capital punishment, A Murder in the Park has a gripping story to tell about, oddly enough, the corrosive effects of storytelling on the justice system when it gets the best of reasoned minds.

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

A documentary that shouldn't have to be made, about a law that needn't exist, explored via a crime that could have been avoided: 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets is a thought-provoking, mournful experience, perhaps more so in the wake of the killings in Charleston, S.C.

Culkin's performance is never exploitative. His eyes often say everything, appearing simultaneously laser-focused and distant — he can't reconcile his brain with the world.

Slaboshpytskiy has made one of the most unusual and disturbing films about criminality of the new century.

Gleefully dumb but eager to entertain, this is cheeseball stuff baked with deliciously outsized performances and low comedy and photographed across mighty beautiful landscapes.

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

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

As a first film, it is incredibly accomplished, its influences (French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai) apparent but integrated.

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.

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.

Once We Are Still Here unsticks itself from hommage mode, it finds something cathartically funny inside the fearsome.

Ascher is too content to let repetition of experience take over his film.

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.

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.

Gout undermines his own spiky, ambitious narrative with all the visual interference, as dazzling as it often is.

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.

Despite the pedestrian screenplay (by Jimenez and Audrey Diwan), Dujardin and Lellouche are magnetic performers who slip easily into their antagonistic roles.

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.

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

Where the story falters, though, the performers admirably hold one's attention.

There's good cause to shake the biopic form out of its exhaustively linear, birth-to-death rut, and Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent — starring Gaspard Ulliel as the storied French designer — valiantly tries.

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.

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 young man is inspiring all on his own, never more so than when he's being social or making music with others. It's only the movie around him that is so artless in its uplift.

McNaughton shows some signs of directing rust in pacing and tone, but in much the way "Henry" played out, he keeps sensationalism at bay and twisted character drama in his sights, which makes for a more pleasurably icky suspense.

The plot is predictable, but the inevitable showdown is, appropriately, the movie's highlight, a ferocious hands-on battle — save for the balletic bamboo pole interlude — on a busy, night-lit expressway, with semis and cars roaring past. It's a climax worthy of the tribute thread running through Kung Fu Killer.

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.

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

Unfortunately this "Story" never finds its footing as either a creepy morality play or a performance-driven two-hander.

As a harangue about cyberbullying, it's purely exploitative, but when Unfriended zeros in on the whiplash mixture of freedom and torment we get from multitasking our online lives? It's srsly fun, imo.

Byrne does a fine job fragmenting William's innocent, scary and guilt-ridden sides, and Amy Seimetz makes his wife a compelling, grief-stricken figure. But The Reconstruction of William Zero has its own identity problem, essentially, being a solid sci-fi story with a welcome emotional component, yet never fully effective at either.

Though the plot turns aren't necessarily surprising and characterizations a bit facile, Wladyka manages tense moments.

By turns Dickensian, Marxist and dystopian, it's a movie as deliriously unclassifiable as it is expertly focused in its desire to provoke and entertain.

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

Jauja makes one cryptic leap too many at the end, but until then it evocatively confounds.

Backcountry inevitably brings on the bloody, but it finds atmospheric ways to depict how the bucolic hush of a nature getaway can morph into a survival nightmare for the unprepared.

Like any good purveyor of noir, Boyle, who wrote the film with Joel Clark and Michael Lerman, understands that identifying someone is only one endgame while the mystery of identity is naggingly, tragically endless.

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.

Champs is all over the place and at times too polished for its own good — too many celebrity fan testimonials when more insider insights would have helped. But it comes from a place of caring for an oft-maligned sport.

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

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

The Roache-Turners prove to have the right mix of micro-budget filmmaking ingenuity, action sass and undead splatter to make "Wyrmwood" a tastier than usual exploitation nosh.

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

Queen & Country — though often charming — has a tendency to wander and strain.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

In its garishness, Mommy is a weirdly compelling overreach for this young filmmaker. It's the work of someone clearly passionate, if not disciplined yet, about his cinematic interests.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The Hawkins brothers have an envelopingly moody visual style that strives for offbeat touches, at times easily conjuring the existential threat in desolate areas. But that can't make up for the story deficiencies and character superficiality in the script.

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.

"Next Chapter" may not exhibit the scrappy charm that characterized the first film's glimpse into a marginalized but colorful world, but for devotees, Dana Brown has assembled a love letter to a now-global culture.

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

The 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 a B movie made with A-student love for the relentless thrill of bodies in brutal motion.

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.

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.

Private Violence makes painfully clear the emotional and legal hurdles battered women endure just to feel safe again in or outside the home.

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.

At its most effective, though, The Decent One reveals a psychological portrait of a man devoted to his family yet consumed by a soul-blackening and horrifically destructive cause.

I Am Ali may never truly wow as the umpteenth portrait of a living legend, but it has its charms in reminding us of one fighter's singular ability to knock us all out with his talent, personality and convictions.

As bad-taste splatter comedies go, "Dead Snow 2" is one of the more charitably nutty ones, less about gorging on gore than reveling in how silly the whole genre can be.

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.

There's the unfettered access to Harmon's brilliant comic mind, of course, yet also a warts-and-all portraiture of a difficult personality, by turns boyish, self-involved, abusive and exhilaratingly self-analytical.

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

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.

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

Ferran's eccentricity is an acquired taste, but the light, emotional artfulness of Bird People — a cry for the senses in a world that so often dulls — is welcome.

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

It's Stevens, as the all-American cover-model mercenary both friendly and fatal, who gives The Guest its literally killer personality.

The gory final act can't help but be an explanatory letdown after so much enigmatic fizz, but that's little bother when the rest of "Honeymoon" delivers a steady dose of newlywed nightmare.

Take Me to the River is at its most interesting when zeroing in on the back-and-forth between musicians of different eras who rely on unique jam-session skills.

Director and co-writer David Wnendt is after serious comedy here, a character study of psychic pain, wounds hereditary and self-inflicted, and body-conscious absurdity that treats the human condition with wry intelligence, not empty prurience.

This one's for the conspiracy-minded only.

[An] engaging portrait of a complicated but vivid sports figure.

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

Composed of breathtaking images and cheeky bits of humor, Dencik's travelogue reveals a journey with curious traces of the past, eye-popping encounters with a wild present and — in discovering an oil company's ship in the group's midst — a weighted reminder of our future as stewards of the Earth.

An entertainment-free sinkhole of Dramamine-worthy nonsense.

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.

In conjuring a fantastical slippery slope in which technology, pharmaceuticals and the entertainment industry co-star in a takeover of our lives, The Congress boasts a propulsive image-making pull.

There's goodwill to go around in Dabis' modestly engaging yarn, from its appealing performances to the times it zeroes in on the ways culture, tradition and individuality cause headaches and heartaches as much as comfort.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It humanely, intelligently questions the very nature of our desire to make sense of the past with the tools of the present, when the human mind remains the most aggressively obliterating battlefield of all.

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

By its bittersweet end, Fifi Howls From Happiness has stayed almost entirely in one apartment and yet somehow unveiled both a life in full and a blank canvas.

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 film is a real "whew"-factor yarn, a hearty soup of thick accents, bold personalities and complicated motives, with an unmistakable taste of charismatic, ornery American hedonism.

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

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.

[A] slack, dumb prequel.

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.

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.

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.

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

A feature-length lampoon needs more than rubbery performances, so-so silliness and the constant thrum of meta humor to make it a consistently amusing variation on a theme.

If La Bare had snarky voice-over narration, it could be a segment on "The Colbert Report."

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

One just wishes the scaffolding of indie tropes around Paul and the better parts of Hellion weren't so shaky.

The performances... are solid, and the conceit is alluringly mind-bending without ever seeming off-puttingly brainy.

A stirring ode to cultural bridge-building.

Eubank's fizzy mix of self-conscious, set-piece image-making and small-scale human detail is admirable.

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.

Korengal is a bracing reminder of the inexplicable will to endure hell and come out the other side alive.

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.

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

Ever mindful of the line he straddled between thinker and flamethrower, this "Gore Vidal" is nevertheless a lovingly packaged greatest hits from a legendary rebel of letters.

There's storytelling vigor here and fine performances, plus some pointed exchanges about the burdens of cultural identity and emotional preservation in the aftermath of immense upheaval.

The clichés alone doom the movie.

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

The best you can say about the over-the-top Filth is that it's a brisk wallow, with enough elbow room to marvel at McAvoy's sinkhole aria of a performance.

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

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

At times exquisitely attuned to the commingling of the bitterly funny and tragic, and at other times an eye-roll-worthy collection of ready-made fetish videos (Flores is one brave avatar of outré sexuality), The Dance of Reality is nonetheless proof that the legendary provocateur is still a font of out-there invention.

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

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

Even for the most techno-wary at the Toronto assisted living centers where the movie was primarily filmed, the lure of virtual visitation seems to go a good way toward bridging what's been a large and digitally contoured generation gap.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Even with a cut-and-dried approach to characterization and the issue of man-made consciousness, The Machine percolates with an elegantly palpable sense of wonder and danger.

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.

[An] amateurish, terribly acted piffle, which devolves from dull conversations behind store counters into witless farce on a movie set.

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.

Less concerned with fake shocks and show-me violence than the grimly calibrated rotting of personalities, Oculus is one of the more intelligently nasty horror films in recent memory.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Enemy may be built more on questions than answers, but in the probing it generates a satisfyingly arch hum of weirdness.

The brusque teen humor, underpinning turmoil and sentiment all seem to be pulled and massaged from the same organic whole, and that's refreshing in a genre so often built on gimmicks and stereotypes.

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.

Not all the right notes are hit in Grand Piano, but for an elegantly schizoid B movie, it's more B-sharp than B-flat.

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

The scrappy superhero-noir indie Sparks busks its 1940s saga of dark redemption with considerable visual energy, if not always coherence or competence.

The actors give it punch, but in the grand scheme of caper comedies, The Art of the Steal is more breathlessly imitative than authentic.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The 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.

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.

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 thuddingly unfunny vigilante satire.

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

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

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

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.

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.

At Troma, puke-green is the warmest color.

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.

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

Writer-director Clark's commitment to a deadpan vibe of crisp comic kink amid eccentric, left-turn sorrow can sometimes feel condescending. But within this not-so-jolly trip into the detailed recesses of simmering suburban emptiness, Hollyman takes this woman's barely controlled dignity on a quietly brave, revealing ride.

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

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.

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

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

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

Busy, but not exactly invigorating.

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.

Director Wendy J.N. Lee, who made the grueling trek with a solar-powered camera operated by a monk, provides plenty of breathtaking footage and a strong sense of both the journey's illuminative highs and treacherous (as in altitude and terrain) lows.

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.

As a showcase for accomplished performers tugging heart strings in a holiday awards season, it's perfectly serviceable.

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.

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.

There's plenty of pacing verve in Costa-Gavras' technique, and the residue from that first thrilling peek inside the hermetic world of big-time money-moving never goes away. What's lacking is most surprising from this dissident filmmaker: the emotional outrage.

The brutally efficient shooting style Reeves employs to film master choreographer Yuen Woo Ping's breathtaking fights...is refreshingly grounded and old-school kinetic.

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.

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

Bastards is a thriller truly etched in darkness, pools of black broken mostly by the stricken yet soldiering faces of her main characters, like ships in a sea of stormy nights.

The atmospheric heft of Il Futuro is invariably more bracing than oppressive, and in the complexly stoic Martelli and masterfully craggy, haunted Hauer, an alluringly opaque pas de deux of loss and uncertainty is wonderfully realized.

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.

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.

Has a necessary charge to it, but also a distractingly goofy side.

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.

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

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.

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

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

For Sedaris fans, C.O.G. is a regrettably patronizing washout.

The sights, sounds and sociological quirks of Lyle's and Nina's particular circle of existence are what give Newlyweeds its indie resonance, less a city symphony than an urban alt-fugue.

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

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

Swanberg achieves an occasionally heady aura of improvisational flirtatiousness mixed with a churning will-they-or-won't-they suspense.

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.

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

The surprisingly adept mixture of tones — naturalism, dysfunctional family satire, winking slasher nostalgia, twisty vengeance thriller — is offbeat enough to keep even hardened connoisseurs of body-count entertainment on their toes.

For such a hippie-ish wingding originally designed to discourage the buying and selling of anything, "Spark" has decidedly bought into its subject and has no qualms hawking it to moviegoers.

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

Kinkle's debut refreshingly sacrifices gore showpieces (though it is bloody at times) for a steadily increasing dread tied to a young woman's desperation.

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.

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.

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

The frustrating thing about the British heist flick Wasteland is how it creates two admirably entertaining storytelling strands — one a friendship saga, the other a robbery caper — yet can't merge the two successfully.

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

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

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

The movie is itself rough around the edges, notably in some chintzy attempts at animating pulp graphics. But it's briskly pieced together from interviews and archival footage.

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

Often an engrossing example of the sweeping, stirring biography.

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

The Crash Reel asks pointed questions about hazard, reward and consequence, forcing us to look anew at the rush attached to so many high-stakes sports.

A skillfully rendered narrative that should satisfy fans and pique the interest of the uninitiated.

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

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.

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.

Joy and redemption aren't exactly punk mantras, but A Band Called Death might just give your heart a thrashing.

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.