As a movie, Veronica Mars looks and feels, well, like a glorified TV movie, with just decent production values, mostly unexceptional performances and ridiculous plot developments no more innovative than you’d see on a dozen network TV detective shows.

It’s The Maltese Falcon meets Inception somewhere in the Vanilla Sky on the way to Chinatown in the inventive and ambitious but wildly convoluted and ultimately disappointing sci-fi noir Reminiscence, which careens this way and that, and this way and that, before running off the rails.

Assembled from the debris of countless worn-out images of the Deep South and is indeed beautifully photographed. But the writer-director, Deborah Kampmeier, has become inflamed by the imagery and trusts it as the material for a story, which seems grotesque and lurid.

[Harris and Franco] bring out the finest in each other as they punch and counter-punch vastly different memories of horrific incidents from the past. It’s great stuff. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the The Adderall Diaries is overwrought, convoluted and irritating.

She’s Having a Baby begins with the simplest and most moving of stories and interrupts it with an amazing assortment of gimmicks. It is some kind of tribute to the strength of the story, and the warmth of the performances by Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern, that the movie somehow manages almost to work, in spite of the adornments.

Despite the fine performances, A Good Person starts off on the wrong foot and never finds a solid stride.

True Colors requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief; it demands a willful abandonment of incredulity.

It proceeds so deliberately from one plot point to the next that we want to stand next to the camera, holding up cards upon which we have lettered clues and suggestions.

In the end, I'm conflicted about the film. As an accessible family film, it delivers the goods. But it lives in the shadow of "March of the Penguins." Despite its sad scenes, it sentimentalizes.

It's one of those off-balance movies that seems searching for the right tone.

The movie is all the more artificial because it has been made with great, almost painful, earnestness.

Amusing enough to watch and passes the time, but it's the kind of movie you're content to wait for on your friendly indie cable channel.

Here, the charm doesn't happen because the movie doesn't care about them as people. They have little human dimension; they are the tools of the plot, and it's unfair to ask actors to supply qualities that the screenplay doesn't account for.

Curran’s script never digs deep enough.

The sex in the movie is so mild that I assumed the R rating was generated primarily by the gay theme, until I learned the R is in fact because of too many f-words.

If there’s anything worse than a long, slow, boring buildup to a payoff, it’s the buildup without the payoff. This movie doesn’t feel finished.

There’s an admirable commitment to absurdity, yet it belies the thoughtful coming-of-age journey for the five teens up until they hit “morphin time.”

Of the two co-stars, what I can say is that I’m looking forward to their next films.

The result is a tiresome exercise that circles at great length through various prefabricated stories defined by the advice each couple needs (or doesn't need).

It's a muddled, sometimes-atmospheric effort.

Chop off the last two or three minutes, fade to black, and you have a decent film.

By the end of the movie, I frankly didn't give a damn. There's an ironic twist, but the movie hadn't paid for it and didn't deserve it. And I was struck by the complete lack of morality in Demonlover.

So the screenplay is a soap operatic mess, involving distractions, loose ends, and sheer carelessness.

What's lacking is a little more depth. This is a movie that covers a lot of distance in only 87 minutes.

A brave and ambitious but chaotic attempt at political satire.

Here are the two most obvious problems that sentient audiences will have with the plot. (1) Modern encryption cannot be intuitively deciphered, by rainmen or anyone else, without a key. And, (2) If a 9-year-old kid can break your code, don't kill the kid, kill the programmers.

Give the Sony Pictures-backed Affirm Films and Risen director and co-writer Kevin Reynolds credit for making a different kind of Biblical semi-epic.

While Mirren and McKellen are as wonderful as you’d expect, especially in the early going when their respective characters are just getting to know one another, even these two legendary talents can’t overcome a convoluted, unfocused and increasingly implausible storyline.