Ronnie Scheib

Complex story twists unfold to confusing effect, while characters angrily toss cliches at one another and revelations multiply rather than resolve murky plot developments.

Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan's script relentlessly piles on goopy conversation-stoppers like "Do you believe in destiny?" and "I didn't know that true love had an expiration date."

Though it follows the reductive paradigms of men-on-the-make laffers, the low-budget, flatly shot picture rarely turns nastily shrill or swaggeringly stupid in tone; redemption and/or sanity is usually waiting in the wings.

This black comedy on the making of a documentary about mail-order wives finally breaks down under the weight of its twists and turns, but mostly maintains a creepy fascination with its scuzzy characters.

This cinematic anomaly falls flat as a stand-alone.

Star Chiyaan Vikram delivers a knockout three-pronged performance, but this cinematic bravura is offset by underdeveloped scripting, flatly one-dimensional villains and overdone lone-hero-vs.-swarms-of-murderous-attackers setpieces.

Unfortunately, the unconvincing fictional storyline Rosenbaum weaves around this solid musical base hits every meller cliche in the "self-destructive rock star" playbook.

Uncomfortably confessional or wildly melodramatic plot twists work interestingly in the moment, but wobble in retrospect. Pic's overarching structure is further weakened by Schaeffer's half-hearted attempt to tie together loose ends.

Though conceived in whimsy, Minoes generally lacks imagination; once the premise is established, familiar plot conventions reign.

Once Mulholland has established that both men hark back to a bygone, Teddy Roosevelt-fostered image of laconic masculinity, his peculiar vantage point generates little insight into the psychology and accomplishments of either man, as “The True Gen” abandons biographical logic in favor of a catalogue of arbitrary differences and similarities.

The result is Sam (Mark Duplass, "The Puffy Chair" and "Humpday"), a 34-year-old unemployed rocker whose mediocre musicianship is matched only by his abysmal people skills; he's like Jack Black without any energy or confidence.

Partly produced by Lifetime, the pic attempts to elevate the disease-of-the-week movie into a moral dialectic between conformity and imagination.

Lacks focus, stumbling from one emotionally fraught stopping place to another but arousing less and less curiosity along the way.

The jazz-scored picture relies heavily on quirkiness to round out shaky characterizations and inject interest into otherwise forgettable pairings.

Some six or seven men (women conspicuously absent), including a mayor, an immigration lawyer, a congressman and a "coyote," offer views on immigration. Unfortunately, they all say the same thing -- and it's nothing new, affecting or articulate.

Unfortunately, the documentary's impact is mitigated the benefactor's constant presence and paternalistic, infomercial-like exposition.

Documentary's insistent inflation of buried gold jewelry and watches into symbols of heroic defiance and transcendental tragedy rings hollow in the wake of weightier Holocaust testimonials.

Even a magnificently inspired Maria Bello proves insufficiently daring to save Richard Alfieri and Arthur Allan Seidelman's Chekhov-based chamber piece Sisters from pretentious psychodrama.

Unable to establish a consistent tone, picture goes derivatively screwball one minute and stickily sentimental the next.

Even Sandler diehards may pass on this mostly derivative paean to compulsive computer geekdom and male sexual dysfunction.

While its questions of affirmative action and charter schools could theoretically resonate with American audiences, the picture's corny theatrics, talky, preachy approach and taxing 164-minute running time will not translate.

Competent but unimaginative horror entry.

More scenes of Richner’s admirable efforts in the hospital and fewer expressions of admiration by the doctors and nurses he trains would also have helped to anchor the film’s sincere but repetitive hosannas.

Shetty’s need to maintain his characters’ romantic heroism constantly grates against his depictions of their ridiculousness.

A behind-the-scenes comedy about the making of a reality TV show, My Uncle Rafael looks suspiciously like an outright sitcom itself, with the same careful dosage of sententiousness and one-liners.

But atmospherics notwithstanding, the narrative unfolds unconvincingly in jerky fits and starts.

This scattershot documentary — an undiluted advertisement for this temple of high-end consumerism — jumps skittishly from subject to subject, disjointed and repetitive for all but dyed-in-the-wool fashionistas.

Trite, sententious and generally unfunny.

It's all so overdetermined -- each encounter of the present-day lovers mirrors some moment from the long-ago day when they parted -- that it reduces their whole affair to a matter of last-minute revisionism.

Watching TV feels fundamentally old-fashioned in its storytelling. Thesping is solid, particularly by O'Nan, Nam and Jacobs. But the conversations feel artificial, overly concerned with re-creating period detail or interjecting relevant philosophical life concepts.

With Cross jump-starting others on a liquid road to health, this glorified infomercial could saturate latenight TV after its April 1 bow.

Lacks the delicate tonal control and subtle smarts required for such an intended half-surreal exercise.

The film replaces choreography with metronomic editing, while one-note overstatement drowns out character development.

Strictly for fans of free-form, DIY hit-or-miss humor (and those who prefer a miss to a hit), pic complacently parades its alienated amateurism in the mistaken belief that half a gag is better than none.

For every engrossing rank-and-file story, there are endless self-congratulatory explanations and podium highlights.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, big studio Hollywood hitmakers should consider themselves lauded to the max in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Selzer's Epic Movie, the latest (and epically unfunny) entry in the movie parody franchise.

Despite the presence of Glen Matlock, Steve Dior and a handful of other punk rockers, plus a slew of oblique eyewitness who lurked around before and after the fact, the documentary soon bogs down in tiresome minutiae.

Unfortunately, with its unconvincing action, preachy script and flat performances, the picture winds up less moving than most typical journeyman documentaries on the subject.

A comic routine that quickly grows stale as the film devolves into a soppy romance sustained solely by the actors' chemistry.

Garden of Eden sends sleek, half-nude bodies glumly cavorting through lush Riviera landscapes in a paradigm of unintentional camp.

In this shoestring outing, Susan Streitfeld ("Female Perversions") opts for an unsettling mix of low-tech cinematic tricks and temporal reshufflings to simulate the process of enlightenment to sometimes laudable, usually ludicrous effect.

Stellar thesps gamely strive to elevate the one-note material, but gravity ultimately defeats them in this relentless downer.

Hampered by pedestrian, underpopulated mise-en-scene, a sketchy script and uneven thesping, “Destiny” definitely underwhelms.

Grotesquely straining to ridicule and validate its hero simultaneously, A Novel Romance will disappoint even Guttenberg diehards.

Woefully amateurish psychological thriller.

In “The Greatest” (2009) and “Country Strong” (2010), Feste proved herself quite skilled, if not especially innovative, at limning her characters’ emotional travails. But subtlety, complexity and even the slightest modicum of realism elude her here.

Satirist and "Daily Show" ex-contributor Mo Rocca's faux-disingenuous tone and nonstop jocularity dominate the documentary to quickly grating effect, significantly diminishing its impact.

Dustin Guy Defa's Bad Fever takes mumblecore to its reductio ad absurdum, featuring a hero whose utterances border on the unintelligible.

This transparent piece of propaganda blatantly overplays its hand.

One long tease -- not in a voyeuristic sense, since its heroine, as nakedly incarnated by pouty Polish sexpot Natalia Avelon, hides none of her obvious talents under a bushel.

Amateurish, half-hearted romantic comedy-cum-heist film twists itself into unconvincing knots to pull off a guilt-free bank robbery.

A terminally lame puberty comedy.

Pappas' scattershot musings on the social, political and metaphysical implications of extended healthy seniority come off as positively crystalline compared with the random natterings of the director's friends and neighbors, who are invited to chime in.

Culturally falling somewhere between "Sideways" and "Dumb and Dumber," this low-rent road movie similarly rides on principles of audience identification, largely minus competent helming, thesping or scripting.

Rain strives for a "Magnolia"-type tapestry of quiet desperation. But after 90 unremitting minutes of badly acted, atrociously written histrionic misery, pic leaves one praying for frogs.

Moore and Hill's script plunges Spacek in a mawkish stew of banality and improbability composed of bits and pieces of earlier roles.

Tedious enough to serve as a cautionary example of the pitfalls of DIY filmmaking.

French actress-writer-director Josiane Balasko plunges in with all the finesse of a hopped-up Pollyanna, her simplistic interpretation of an impaired sexagenarian coming close to outright parody.

Reveling in its provocative absurdity, Impolex is a madly uncommercial head-scratcher that will strike a dream-logic chord in some viewers and leave others in a "My kid could do better than that" mood.

The problem is not the stretched improbability of the film’s premise, or even the political incorrectness of its caricatured stereotypes (this is slapstick, after all), but rather that the actors fail to come off as funny in any of their incarnations.

A muddled script, spatially confounding direction and four thesps seemingly acting in four different movies are only a few of the problems with the misbegotten political thriller As Good as Dead.

In the absence of actors with the tremendous presence of Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, picture loses its raison d'etre. Yet, directed by video helmer Dave Meyers with a certain fastidious distance from its plentiful gore, picture is also insufficiently over-the-top or corny to incite gleeful audience feedback.

Incompetent on every level, from its haphazard staging to its amateurish sound mix.

A flabby, unfunny action-comedy produced, directed and written by former WWE exec VP Mike Pavone, The Reunion boasts one of the most poorly assembled scripts to emerge from the wrestling franchise.

The characters are wearisomely one-dimensional and their situations and motives almost indecipherable due to poor exposition, weirdly pretentious dialogue and amateurish thesping.

The connective tissue between its separate segments is so tenuous and unconvincing that "Cries" almost suggests a failed anthology.