Sheri Linden

With its flat punch lines, formulaic action and undercooked mélange of messages — touching on everything from factory farming to genocide — the film waddles awkwardly.

Amid the would-be and actual laughs, the screenplay tries to drum up drama, but every disagreement and tension is treated superficially and summarily resolved.

A challenge to eco-orthodoxy, Pandora's Promise subscribes to its own dogma. The lack of opposing voices diminishes the film, even as Stone raises issues that shouldn't be discounted out of hand.

Elegy . . . embraces the emotional messiness of a heart-wringing country song, but lacks a haunting refrain to get under your skin.

The cast's evident delight might be enough for some moviegoers, but with so much talent and so little modulation on offer, audiences subjected to the onslaught could reasonably expect a higher laughs-to-torture ratio.

Very much a lesson, and a repetitive and uneven one at that, GhettoPhysics succeeds at least as a conversation starter.

Even though the movie poses questions worth pondering, it's self-inoculated against doing the pondering. With all the long, loving glances at the orderly pastel interiors of Jean's home, and the constant nudging reassurance of the score, the narrative has been too padded against sharp angles to register a seismic jolt.

Everyone is clearly hiding something. But more pressing than the mystery of Mike’s silence and his parents’ toxic relationship is the sense of a missed opportunity that permeates the movie, sapping its final twist of the solar-plexus wallop it should have delivered.

Where the movie hits flat notes is in the way it spells out its points rather than letting friction percolate through the action.

The culture-clash procedural, which brings the small-town teen to big bad Hollywood, feels more perfunctory than inspired.

The action unwinds with the mechanical artifice of a creaky play, though Nadda creates a few strikingly cinematic moments.

The setting is striking, the cast impressive. But Two Men in Town, a drama that's built on dread and circles the question of redemption for a newly released prisoner, falls short of the mythic territory it aspires to.

Ghaffarian's story plays out within such a generic framework, and with such self-importance, that it's all too easy to remain untouched by the onscreen events.

Although the film loses its way in the late going with a preponderance of melodramatic elements that dilute the more compelling social message, for much of its running time it packs a visceral punch, thanks in large part to a strong cast headed by LisaRaye, N'Bushe Wright and Mos Def.

Does offer a few deeply felt moments.

As a bored baker with an overactive imagination, the wonderful French actor Fabrice Luchini is the only reason to see Gemma Bovery, a mildly amusing riff on Flaubert. H

Like many a stage mother, Thom Fitzgerald's comic drama is pushy. It tries too hard, in all too obvious ways, to win over the audience.

There’s so much potential heart and heartbreak in Firebird’s tale of forbidden passion that the screenplay and the cautious pacing become frustrating; with every ache measured and spelled out, the film’s dogged striving for poetry too often leaves it feeling disappointingly prosaic.

At its most provocative, it suggests a tension between spirit and flesh in the nun's maternal feelings. Rather than examine that friction, Améris pushes the narrative in predictable directions.

The film brings a spectacular but little-known chapter of World War II to the big screen with meticulous attention to period detail -- and almost none to compelling narrative.

Ball tends to slice and dice action sequences in a way that drains them of energy, and his attempts to churn up emotion fall disconcertingly flat. But he does stage a couple of effective adrenaline-pumping chases through the maze's industrial wasteland.

In this well-intentioned celebration of nature and traditional ways of life, giant-screen images feel generic when they should inspire wonder.

Newcomer Myles Truitt inhabits the role with an earthbound soulfulness — what you might call the opposite of heroic flash — and even when the film’s progress feels more mechanical than organic, he’s easy to root for.

A worthy title for cable nets scheduling hard-hitting documentary fare

The overwrought plot mechanics are exasperating, but the lead actresses' exquisitely modulated performances get under the skin.

Whether they’re filing ridiculous complaints about each other to the unflappable mayor (Michel Blanc), arguing over the proper presentation of ingredients or sharing a cafe table, Mirren and Puri bring an effortless command to their roles.

Though the screenplay ... ultimately conforms quite plainly to formula and grows less interesting as it proceeds, there’s a gutsiness to Larson’s headlong leap into material that walks a fine line between risky fantasy and feel-good reassurance.

Furiously crossing and double-crossing, the two main story lines never quite fuse or comment on each other.

Though the intended hilarity is forced and flat, there's a sweetness to the silliness.

Moll's restraint gives way to a tastefully overwrought checklist of Gothic imagery. In the cloistered shadows and the harsh Castilian sun, the visuals are handsome, even as the movie threatens to tip into parody.

Olin could not be more commanding. It's a powerful performance in the service of a movie that's by turns off-putting, bracingly incisive and insufferable.

With its uneven performances and purposeful touches of theatrical artifice, Alligator Girl is finally more distancing than involving.

At various moments throughout the movie, Turner and McDermott suggest something far more complicated and messy than the noir-tinged exercise that unfolds.

The period details are so lovingly burnished in this uneven, if heartfelt, feature that for a while they threaten to overpower the story, which delves gently into a rarely explored aspect of the war.

The movie both embraces and questions the romance of heroism, a provocative paradox that would have had more dramatic oomph if the screenplay were less staid, the characters more fully fleshed.

Zeroes in on retail mania with a flimsy wire hanger of a premise.

The film clicks briefly when capturing the silliness of XXX concerns, especially in script-development scenes. But whatever hilarity might have prevailed on the set doesn't translate to the screen. Intrusive music and last-act contrivances do nothing to lift the flat tone or allow the film to earn its intended emotional payoff.

Hong Kong director and co-writer Pang Ho-Cheung sends up gender stereotypes and reinforces them in his contemporary yet not quite fresh confection, zeroing in on certain women's girlie wiles.

Repetitive and ultimately a victim of its own hysteria, the U.K. indie is nonetheless an impressive exercise in high-tech gothic style, with a convincingly deranged Lee Evans.

Propelled by enthusiastic reviews, the entertaining but ultimately disappointing documentary will entice the fashion-forward and fashion-curious.

In Ashok's reunion with the love of his life (Mary Steenburgen) — the chance to see her after many years is the true reason for his trip — the film taps into a tender wistfulness, Steenburgen making her character's every glance and hesitation resonate with emotion.

What's missing in this Kitchen is heat. A B-movie summer diversion at best, it's more a collection of genre tropes than an involving crime drama.

In an awkward split-personality way, it works some of the time.

Even when Gormican’s material tries too hard to be wackily crude, and not hard enough to make dramatic sense, the actors suggest layers of experience that help to fill in the gaps.

Flawed but imaginative film.

Mildly engaging but never entirely convincing.

Feels jammed into a sitcom-shaped bid for laughs.

The ace cast provides delicious moments, to be sure, but mainly they're playing caricatures in search of a compelling plot.

There's some nice low-key work amid the uneven performances, but the Montana-shot film's key strength is its sense of place.

Richard Ray Perez's documentary concerns the myth more than the man.

Hart has fashioned a tale of matriarchal inheritance, but one whose fierce message is undercut rather than deepened by its child's-book clarity. The intriguing setup receives underpowered execution, the intended jolts landing all too softly.

A film rich in atmosphere but emotionally as blunt as its title.

The movie delivers a modicum of magic without getting pious or gushy. It never soars, though, or burns especially bright.

The promise of a stylish psychological thriller is squandered in Camera Obscura, which lapses into an ordinary, wearying tale of a nice guy in over his head with ruthless criminals.

Directed by Ido Fluk from a screenplay he wrote with Sharon Mashihi, the film is sensitively observed, its performances convincingly understated. But it rapidly devolves into a standard, and increasingly unfocused, story of materialism and greed.

More succinct writing and tighter editing could have yielded a solid B picture.

"Them" is spun from callow romantic notions, the sort that make for heady moments. What's conspicuously missing is any grasp of the lovers themselves.

If state-of-the-art cross-gender fat suits and drunken Chihuahuas were the stuff of comic genius, Big Momma's House 2 still wouldn't be very funny.

The by-the-numbers story never achieves its aimed-for grandeur or intensity, and the striking Turkish locations prove far more interesting than the characters.

[Guo's] film, which at first hints at a wry critique of materialism but ends up reveling in it, is a timely snapshot of aspirational glitz in the big city.

More than a gimmick, that self-conscious visual strategy suits the self-impressed creative-class characters, even as it is, finally, more interesting than they are.

Sour, joyless affair.

The finely observed moments in Stateside accumulate little emotional power. The promise of something startling and compelling goes unfulfilled, and the arc of the central love story isn't interesting enough to sustain the drama.

His screenplay strikes universal chords, but with his preference for constant commentary over dramatic action, Schwartz doesn’t quite translate those feelings into involving cinema. Mainly he oversells them.

Though the leads lend charm and comic timing to the unpersuasive material, it would take a ground-up rewrite to make the fate of their characters matter.

The story's final, intended aha moment falls woefully flat, but capping this flawed valentine to artistic independence is a closing-credits nod to Easy Rider, especially poignant so soon after Peter Fonda's death.

Franco seems torn, on the one hand presenting his subject as a likably ordinary, self-involved actor and on the other sanctifying him as a would-be gay icon in a conformist industry.

A drama that plays out as an overdetermined thesis, with Genovese herself (Christina Brucato) a footnote to the darkly stylized plunge into lives of quiet desperation.

The actors can't turn the strained stabs at poetry into the affecting meditation that was clearly intended.

Though the actor ably creates two distinct people, neither part is entirely convincing in this stuck-in-neutral feature, which combines a vague commentary on Italian politics with a vague portrayal of middle-aged awakening.

What begins as an intriguing psychological thriller devolves into an addiction drama, growing less interesting as it proceeds and giving costars Dakota Fanning and Theo James little to do.

Director Roger Gual presents little in the way of tantalizing culinary visuals, and that leaves the paper-thin characters as the main course.

Concerned more with inspirational messages than dramatic subtlety, it remains an item best suited to believers.

Whatever emotional depths filmmaker Jessica Goldberg hopes to suggest, there's nothing stirring beneath the movie's static surface.

Generally succeeds -- in hit-and-miss fashion -- at bridging the gap between unlikable jerk and misunderstood good guy, though it's still something of a leap to leading-man territory.

Every triumph registers low on the emotion meter, and most of the supporting characters are two-dimensional at best.

With their unforced magnetism, Brosnan and Thompson are persuasive as exes who still have chemistry... They have the verve and comic chops to ignite sparks, à la Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, but this Punch never truly connects.

Heavy-handedness prevails, with the schmaltzy original score as unconvincing as the script. An over-reliance on song, from pop to Puccini to Ellington to hip-hop, doesn't compensate for what's lacking in the storytelling.

Gael Garcia Bernal’s effortless magnetism is the complicating factor — and the only compelling one — in You’re Killing Me Susana.

Breaking News in Yuba County features a pitch-perfect Janney at the center of a game cast of well-knowns. Yet as it fumbles through its unwieldy mix of crime-caper farce, social commentary and black comedy, the genre it most solidly nails is the one that poses the burning question "Why did so many accomplished actors sign on to this?"

The movie is an album-sleeve-thin romance steeped in a self-congratulatory Williamsburg, Brooklyn, vibe.

With its bland positivity (regular people can be superheroes!), flimsy-bordering-on-indifferent plotting and Post-it-note-deep characters, that leaves the bits and shtick to buoy Falcone's screenplay. They're hit-and-miss, but it's definitely the off-track digressions where the film sparks to life.

With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand.

This feature debut deals mainly in clichés, never transforming the tough question at its center into compelling cinema.

As it zigs and zags, its plot unravels rather than tightens, and its curveball of an ending is bound to leave audiences feeling as double-crossed as some of the characters.

The drama is undone by hyperventilating poetics and a busy time-hopping structure.

Assembling this vehicle for his young clients, music producer/manager/video director Christopher B. Stokes has attached an anemic plot to a series of dynamic hip-hop dance sequences.

Had Mader focused on fewer plot strands, he might have found a more effective balance. Whatever metaphysical poetry Displacement could have held is lost amid its over-explained and underwhelming search for the “negation point.”

As the movie drifts from generalities about technique to vibrant scenery — evocatively photographed by Esteban Malpica — to the occasional, much-needed anecdote, the vagueness of his enterprise becomes increasingly apparent.

As the film veers between cartoonish and earnest, it doesn't so much find bliss as try very hard to manufacture it.

Compounding the sense of predictability and deja vu is the presence of well-known TV actors portraying the sorts of characters they've perfected on the small screen.

Given the scope of the early-1930s atrocity, the most shocking thing about director George Mendeluk’s new dramatization is how utterly devoid of emotional impact it is.

Had Brown (Race You to the Bottom, The Blue Tooth Virgin) found a way to ingrain his ideas in the various relationships rather than spelling them out, the movie might have found a compelling groove.

Though the actors' chemistry sets off no fireworks and the story is never truly involving, the movie does manage to avoid being outright painful.

Depp is convincingly vulnerable and forlorn, all while maintaining the Hatter’s otherworldly eccentricity, and Wasikowska has the requisite grit. But Alice’s mission feels as manufactured as the story’s whatsits and doodads, as Bobin struggles to infuse make-believe with emotion.

It offers January moviegoers some guilty-pleasure thrills and laughs, while falling way short of its potential on both the dramatic and the camp fronts.

A flimsy episodic feature.

It buzzes along for a while, the promising plot innovations inviting suspension of disbelief, before by-the-numbers implausibility, over-the-top valor and unsavory contrivances take over and the line goes dead.

Matching the screenplay’s lack of nuance, Campbell (Casino Royale, The Protégé) orchestrates the proceedings with a flat efficacy, stringing together familiar action beats and churning up little that rings true.

Despite a finely wrought lead performance by Dakota Fanning, the drama feels more like the stuff of a mild — and dated — YA novel than an involving exploration of female experience.

The raw vigor and protest of punk get co-opted by the movie’s coming-of-age story; it’s not the heartfelt sweetness that’s the chief problem, but how run-of-the-mill and derivative the plot is.

A few smart laughs hint at what might have been, but thanks to sitcom-y mugging and a tepidness beneath the intended hilarity, David E. Talbert’s romantic comedy is stuck in a holding pattern for much of its running time.

Conventional dramatic hooks have no place in Garrel's filmography, so it's not surprising that his new movie is more atmospheric than involving, or that the two beautiful bed heads at its center hardly invite emotional connection.

As a portrait of female strength and a celebration of the artistic spirit, Leonie too seldom comes fully alive.

With director Jerome Enrico mining the material for only the most obvious gags, the social commentary of the central joke never rises to the level of hard-hitting satire, instead settling on a broadly observed collection of types.

Simon Pegg is likably smart and obnoxious as the fish-out-of-water Brit in high-gloss Manhattan, but he's swimming upstream in a feature that substitutes slapstick for scathing wit.

An art-versus-commerce drama that consists of one beautifully aching performance surrounded by a whole lotta twee.

By turns earnest and profane, the story of three twentysomethings' Sin City sortie contains flashes of wit.... But this road is lined with clichés and blunt dialogue, the emotional shifts all too neatly underlined by Death Cab for Cutie tracks.

A few zany and well-deployed turns of phrase generate some laughs, and the cast is game. But the pieces don’t all fit in this loose assemblage of showbiz spoof, family comedy and on-and-off love story.

It’s a frenetic grab bag of strained shtick, however expertly delivered by ace comic performers.

The high concept outshines the execution; it’s easy to see how a significantly slimmed-down and sharpened version of the overlong feature might have been a small-time contender.

Starts out as an exuberant romp but soon gets trapped in a holding pattern of dumb sex and toilet jokes.

At the expense of emotional depth, Augusto emphasizes the story's sensory aspects. Sometimes this works, sometimes it's overkill.

The starry chemistry of leads Ansel Elgort and Chloë Grace Moretz injects a modicum of energy into the coming-of-age drama, whose elements of romance, crime and smart-kid angst never coalesce.

Aims for whimsy and poignancy and mostly comes up empty.

Embodying the same wholesomeness that has informed most of his screen work, gross-out comedies included, it feels like a tentative next step in Sandler’s evolving screen persona, one that has gone from good-hearted dolt to bumbling man-child to middle-aged father.

The director’s approach tamps down the story’s dramatic potential, while the screenplay she wrote with Jim Beggarly repeatedly defuses the emotional power of messy family affairs.

The sense of place is as strong as the narrative is wobbly. The strongest character is the Louisiana.

The unconsummated attraction between best friends played by Carice van Houten and Hanna Alström clearly is meant to be its emotional pulse. Yet however sensitive the two leads' performances, The Affair rarely gathers the necessary intensity.

McGuinness has a commendable grasp of visual textures and rhythms. It will be interesting to see what she does with a stronger story to tell. Here, reaching for dramatic effect, she comes up empty.

With no unifying sensibility, the magic thuds more often than it soars.

Thanks to Jon Cryer’s likable-schlemiel shtick, a lost-cause rom-com is more watchable than it has any right to be. But that’s not enough to make Hit by Lightning remotely involving.

A drama that struggles to breathe life into its death-themed narrative.

The story unfolds in large part through awkward contrivance.

Actual footage of Afghanistan makes it an interesting experiment, but as a dramatic thriller, the story of an American documaker is not as taut or compelling as it could be; instead, it's often confusing and irritating.

Veering between strained slapstick and thoughtful tête-à-têtes, this boomer-focused reunion comedy strands a game cast of accomplished septuagenarians in a mostly laugh-free zone of zip lines and predictable beats.

Ostensibly exploring a monumental what-if in a musician's life — a late-career reckoning that aims to make up for lost time — the movie is itself a missed opportunity, especially given that it stars Al Pacino.

Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn play the guys they always play in this sci-fi comedy misfire.

With its softball insights about midlife reinvention and its quasi-illuminating glances across the cultural and class divide, the movie takes its place, a la the similarly contrived The Visitor, on the spectrum of It’s Never Too Late character studies.

Augurs well for dazzling visual work but struggles mightily on the storytelling front.

The impulse to profile "the world's most sexualized women" is a worthy one. But little sense of individuality emerges in Aroused.

Director Neil Burger struggles to fuse philosophy, awkward romance and brutal action. Even with star Shailene Woodley delivering the requisite toughness and magnetism, the clunky result is almost unrelentingly grim.

Contributions of the accomplished cast notwithstanding, this period drama takes a few too many spins around the downward spiral, making it hard to believe as well as unpleasant.

A meandering journey, too tepid to stir up the feelings of yearning and rebellion that it aims to evoke.

The screenplay muddles its emotional core with a clunky cross between old-fashioned Hardy Boys mystery and a far-fetched weapons-trafficking subplot.

Even as agile a performer as Sandra Bullock seems to be straining here amid the repetitive jokes and muddled girl-power message.

Aiming to discomfort, the film ends up retreating.

Too squeaky-clean to convey the turbulence of the period.

In terms of character and plot, not one element of the intended wild ride escapes self-consciousness or becomes the least bit involving.

Well-meaning but woefully unconvincing.

Doesn't serve up enough laughs to build a theatrical following but could find life on video as a takeout item.

Egoyan, who has never shied away from the lurid aspects of lost innocence, takes a measured approach that successfully avoids sensationalism. But the film's restraint verges on blankness.

It arrives not as a lusty tale in full bloom but as a tastefully arranged still life, in search of an animating spark.

Rudd is an underappreciated comic actor, and his line readings are the best thing in the film, but the bland role barely taps his talent. Amid the rest of the cast's one-note posing, his scenes with a parrot have a spontaneity and wit otherwise in short supply.

This tale of the theater could have used more time on the road.

Tries to be too many things, none very convincingly: plea for tolerance, docu-style character study, old-fashioned weepie.

Solid performances aside, closing-credits comments from the movie's crew members on marriage and divorce offer fresher insights than any of the story's run-of-the-mill shenanigans.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Characters say precisely what they mean in the film, its flat dialogue a shortcoming not countered by the bland central performances of Juan Riedinger (Narcos) and Julie Lynn Mortensen, in her feature debut.

Insights are few in this fan letter of a documentary.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

An oddity as awkward as its title, Angels With Angles is writer-director-star Scott Edmund Lane's would-be valentine to old-school showbiz comics, wrapped in a silly adventure-romance involving Cuban cigars and, yes, Fidel Castro.

An overwrought and undernourished drama.

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.

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.

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

A lazily written and generically directed Fatal Attraction knockoff.

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

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.

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