Sheri Linden

Whatever affection the filmmaker might have for her characters, she does her actors no favors, leaving newcomers as well as seasoned talents flailing.

Love of God and dog can be powerful things, but in this uncinematic telling, they fail to inspire.

With its gauzily surreal touches, Woodshock reflects the Mulleavys’ romantic flair for texture and embellishment. But as Theresa’s guilt and self-medication mount, along with the film’s profoundly muddled ideas about assisted suicide, the curated trance grows mind-numbing. It’s a death trip with pretty lingerie.

With its many story strands and flat direction, the movie lacks a pulse, its ambitious hodgepodge of concepts refusing to jell.

Howell’s inept pileup of would-be signifiers — a misty quarry, a family crypt, a philosophical beekeeper — gives way to frisson-free horror and unconvincing romance.

However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine’s plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else’s spiritual retreat — in real time.

A seemingly tourist-bureau-sanctioned travelogue posing as a romantic drama.

The movie struggles to generate the slightest tension around the question of who’s playing whom, but the real question is, Why bother?

Concerned with both physical and psychological hazards of the job, Life on the Line manufactures a pileup of looming disasters to which director David Hackl lends no cadence.

American writer-director Angad Aulakh tries to agitate the pensive set-up with sex and a supposed mystery that never raises the pulse. The Bergman-esque posturing falls so far short of the Swedish master that it wouldn’t even qualify as accidental parody.

The Last Film Festival is stuck in a loop of painfully silly humor, with stars Dennis Hopper and Jacqueline Bisset offering glimmers of the satire that might have been.

Cooper weaves a few well-placed observations about gun culture and male condescension into the heavy-handed mess.

A lazily written and generically directed Fatal Attraction knockoff.

Like a wedding toast gone awry, the movie doesn’t know where to begin or end and is cluttered with factoids and awkward asides.

By the time director Alexandre Aja brings together the pieces with an illuminating pang of emotion, most viewers’ confusion will have given way to indifference.

McAvoy and Radcliffe are actors with charm to burn, but it’s only in brief moments that their characterizations cut through the film’s pandemonium, while the jokes they’re called upon to deliver land with a thud.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest is well cast and strong on setting. But the dull thudding that resounds isn’t part of its effective aural design; it’s the ungainly landing of nearly every shock and joke.

Except for a reliably flavorful turn by John Hawkes, compelling in a few key scenes as Henry's accomplice, The Pardon remains stubbornly uninvolving.

First-time director Daniel Duran, working from a screenplay by Oscar Torres that abounds in the maudlin and risible, isn't able to lift the ham-handed material to a place where it might ring true.

With its faux small-town values, faux countercultural ethos and faux personal struggles, Rita Merson’s debut feature skews closer to delusion than honesty.

Aaron Zigman’s score provides reassuring downhome uplift — perhaps a necessary element in a tale of impossible, perfect love, where everything happens for a reason and is as it should be, even when it’s terrible.

Carmine Gaeta and Luke Davies' screenplay is constructed from plot mechanics, and the emotional stakes grow less convincing with every twist of the screw.

The movie opens with the suggestion that it will address the generational divide, but it has nothing of substance to say.

The comedy unfolds mostly in real time, but its grasp of real human behavior is shaky.

To call Don Peyote a mess would be putting too fine a point on it.

If the ostensible thriller contained a single believable moment, let alone an ounce of suspense, its nonsensical final twist might be grounds for concern.

Over the decades, there’s been no shortage of boneheaded premises for romantic comedies, but the painfully ill-conceived Barefoot takes boneheadedness to regrettable places.

Jeremy Leven's attempt at old-school romantic comedy, set in a postcard-pretty tourist's vision of Paris, is more of a foolish plod than a weightless rollick.

Like many a biopic before it, Winnie Mandela shoehorns an exceptional life into the standard template of a highlights reel, lurching from one Important Moment to the next.

But unless you're a demolition-derby fetishist or a connoisseur of vehicular mayhem, none of that will buy you a thrill in this video game posing as a movie.

Insights are few in this fan letter of a documentary.

The climactic collision of agendas is even more contrived than everything leading to it.

The film’s first half is a slog as Chism sets up the minefield for Wade, with every (fully visible) mine certain to explode.

The conceit grows more strained, its Talmudic potential unrealized, while the comedy never rises above bleh.

The absurdist comedy Oconomowoc is not only named after a place but dedicated to it — “a city we love very much,” the end credits declare of the titular Wisconsin town — so it’s doubly disappointing that there’s not more there there.

A good idea for a ghost story is dead on arrival in The Condemned, a would-be thriller whose intended horror-tinged chills register as ho-hum hokum.

Mistaking arrested development for enlightened innocence, Waiting for Forever is an indigestible hash of whimsy, drama, romance and, for good measure, crime.

An overwrought and undernourished drama.

This thin concoction of domestic drama and thriller suspense won't hold up after the curiosity factor runs its brief course. Neither Robert De Niro nor a phalanx of a dozen producers can deliver Godsend from unintentional comedy.

A collection of feeble jokes in the service of green themes. Sustainability never looked so stupid.

Nick Cannon, playing an L.A. cop who goes undercover as a prep school student, provides the few sparks this wan action-comedy can muster.

This comedy whodunit generates more laughs than its predecessor, which is to say, two or three.

It's no wonder that the film's strongest sequence, visually and dramatically, involves none of these characters. It's a flashback to the construction of St. Peter's that explains the origins of Eden's centuries-long reign on his dark throne.

The sequel retains not only the same gimmicky premise as the original but its preference for cliche-ridden dialogue and flat-footed comedy as well.

Straight out of the slice-and-dice school of filmmaking, Vantage Point fractures chronology and perspective in a vain attempt to disguise its flimsiness.

Having tackled treacherous terrain to film Hayata's story, the filmmakers miss the opportunity to deliver a scorching testament to the dangers and passions that drive the saga.

Bottom line: A soft-hearted gross-out pic. If you're not a male between 17 and 23 and don't find the chance to see R-rated rejects from "America's Funniest Home Videos" a good thing, The Long Weekend will be a long and pointless haul.

The movie is a letdown, stringing together pointless episodes to little effect. It's the kind of thinly conceived, quirk-for-quirk's-sake indie that gives indies a bad name.