Tirdad Derakhshani

Masterminds is filled with the sort of idiotic bathroom humor that has become standard in big-screen comedies, but it is enlivened by the surreal slapstick touches that made Napoleon Dynamite so good. Even though it isn't the sharpest comedy, it had me in stitches.

It's nothing more than a sophisticated clone of the original, and it really overdoes the shaky-camera thing - even more than in some of the worst found-footage movies The Blair Witch Project spawned.

A schmaltzy, deeply sentimentalized drama about American slavery and the rise of the Underground Railroad.

An extremely delicate, quiet, and stunningly understated chamber piece.

The Possession has none of the suspense that made Bornedal's morgue thriller "Deathwatch" such shuddering good fun. And despite the absurdly overwrought Bernard Herrmann-esque score, it has very few genuine shocks.

Two Night Stand, is a clever, if uneven, romcom about Generation Y's conflicted, paradoxical views of sex and love. Featuring strong dialogue and terrific performances, the film has moments of near-brilliance, but falls apart with a lame, conventional ending.

Well-intentioned if cloying, Miracles from Heaven has an appealing cast and an accessible take on spirituality.

Hollywood's latest entry in that tried-and-true genre, the disaster movie, is . . . well, it's like . . . a totally gnarly roller-coaster ride!

Don't get me wrong. Angry Birds doesn't depict any on-camera violence against person, bird, or pig. But there's a darkness at the heart of this movie that's hard to reconcile.

Despite its terrific performances and its great use of locations, Shelter doesn't have enough substance to hold your attention or linger in the mind for long.

The more movie magic Howard piles on, the less we care. And, boy, does he pull out all the stops, stocking the pic with a tub of red herrings, half a dozen plot twists, and more complex set pieces than a comic-book flick. I felt relieved when it was finally over.

Love conquers all. Sadly, Yoo's film does not.

I should put in for worker’s comp for the extensive injuries I sustained watching the insulting, abysmal 3-D action thriller xXx: Return of Xander Cage, which left me deeply traumatized and suffering from injuries to my eardrums, my eyes, my mind, my soul, my aesthetic sensibility, and my sense of decency.

The writer-director has the talent to dig deep and lay bare the assumptions behind our idea of justice and our notions of right and wrong. In The Devil's Knot, he settles for an encyclopedic, if skin-deep, presentation.

Unsullied was made by a director with real promise. It's a shame Rice picked this turkey to shoot as his first

A deeply disturbing, intimate, and not unsuccessful look at 10 years in the life of a young boy, Harlon, who grows up to become a Columbine-style killer.

With its clever structure and pacing, its range of emotional notes, and its remarkable use of magic realism, The 9th Life of Louis Drax makes for an absorbing and memorable mystery.

Some viewers will dismiss Autumn Blood as a pretentious Euro-art iteration of Straw Dogs. For those willing to be open to its experimentation and more charitable about its many faults, the film can provide a powerful experience and serve as an fascinating testament to the tenuous nature of the social contract.

It's a small, intimate chamber piece with beautiful camerawork and gorgeous art direction ... until it loses its way in a wrongheaded bid for sci-fi greatness.

Firth is brilliant as a preternaturally patient man - every day he has to tell her the same exact story. But he has a creepy way about him. Is it love that drives him, or something darker?

It would better to call it Two Actors in Search of a Story.

Suicide Squad does have quite a few tremendously entertaining sequences of high action and low comedy. It's a shame it never rises beyond that.

Like other entries of its pulpish ilk, the picture packs lots of violence, a fair bit of gore, and plenty of cheap scares.

A mildly charming, if singularly unoriginal, comedy.

A subpar 3D action comedy featuring four giant motion-capture animated turtles and a raft of human costars, including the dreamy-eyed Fox, wide-shouldered Perry, a remarkably slender Will Arnett, and Laura Linney, who looks tired and uncomfortable throughout the proceedings.

It seems another member of Clint Eastwood's brood is ready for stardom. Francesca Eastwood, 22, his daughter with actor Frances Fisher, is one of the bright lights in writer-director JT Mollner's otherwise uneven feature debut.

An enjoyable (but long) romcom that's like "Meet the Parents" on LSD, laced with rat poison.

An ambitious, if wildly uneven, character study that relies on a taut script, snappy dialogue, and a few well-placed plot twists, The Barber boasts a fine turn by Scott Glenn as an aging serial killer.

Messy and confused, the film is a mishmash of tropes from Shakespeare, heist movies, family melodrama, and romance novels hastily thrown together.

The new Ben-Hur isn't much of an improvement. Dominated by CGI effects, it's a soap opera better fit for basic cable.

Despite its formulaic structure, The Abandoned has a lot going for it. It eschews cheap scares, bloodletting, and gore. Instead, it works the audience with good, old-fashioned suspense. And it has heart.

It's refreshing to see a film set amid the daily life of an impoverished, rural immigrant community. It's a shame the only aspect of the social world that is explored is the sexual exploits of a few teens.

Predictable, tired, formulaic, it makes up for its lack of originality with a bigger budget, louder jokes, louder costumes, and louder music.

A happy-smiley Christian fairy tale disguised as a hard-hitting shard of social realism.

Sadly, Annabelle, a cheap, sleazy, low-budget prequel meant to explain the origins of that particular doll, is as undistinguished, uninteresting, and unscary as the worst of the Chucky films.

An ineffective, derivative, and awkwardly executed mash-up of ghost flicks and voodoo movies.

It also has great momentum, good set pieces, and so much frothy nihilism it’s just plain fun.

Phase II has some nice comic touches, but it's a forgettable B-movie.

A dull, formulaic theme-park ride whose only purpose is to make more pots of money.

Not one of Sparks' best flicks (The Notebook is quite good) Safe Haven is marred by film cliches. It has an alarming number of throwaway montage sequences.

Four film sequels and 14 years later, the best I can say of Ice Age: Collision Course is that it has nice coloring and good picture contrast.

A weak "Toy Story"-esque animated film for preschool kids made with little imagination, little art, and even less soul.

Just because you can come up with names such as Azeroth, Durotan, Orgrim, and Grommash Hellscream doesn't mean you're J.R.R. Tolkien, people.

Identity theft and credit-card fraud never looked as exciting or sexy as in Plastic, a frothy little heist movie from Britain that starts off with great promise, only to devolve midway into an empty derivative shell of a film.

Mildly enjoyable despite its basic mediocrity.

Not a great film. Or particularly good. In fact, it's fairly bad as B-movies go.

Overall, the effect is closer to a Monty Python skit or a Village People music vid than a serious film about civil rights.

This story truly is inspirational and a lesson about civic responsibility. However, it makes for little more than a TV movie or a straight-to-video snack.

Filled with embarrassing gosh-golly moments about non-Western cultures, it's a staggering, and insulting, example of cultural myopia.

The Best of Me is neither worse than his other films nor particularly better. At 118 minutes, it is, however, one of the longest. Interminably long, dragging out its molasses heart through what seem like three different endings.

There are a few nice scares in The Colony, and the female lead, Rookie Blue's Charlotte Sullivan, looks really, really cute in blond dreadlocks. But she can't save the movie, nor can her impressive costars, Bill Paxton, Kevin Zegers, and Laurence Fishburne.

Slapdash, with dialogue and plot points that were cliches in Dickens' era, the pic sends up, then reaffirms, all the values the media sell us each holiday: compassion, forgiveness, tolerance.

Aloupis is not untalented as writer or helmer. But his first outing is an unsurprising, paint-by-the-numbers picture.

While it misses the mark most of the time, director Hilary Brougher's film has a promising story, an impressive cast, and occasional moments of grace.

The Man on Her Mind, a mirthless, stagy romantic comedy about a pair of New York loners, isn't so much a story as a threadbare concept - a one-liner, really. An old, used-up one at that.