There's likely an audience for the cloying and dizzying hip-hop dance flick Battlefield America, but even the most forgiving viewers may feel like they've been underestimated - and underserved.

Unbalanced storytelling aside, Ozeki wisely works to keep the film focused on his actors.

There is an interesting kernel of a story about beauty, betrayal and brutality inside each of the film's scenarios and a cast that could handle anything thrown at it. But the kernel never pops, and all we're really left with is a whole lot of neo-noir corn.

The film feels overstuffed and overcooked, as if the filmmaker were trying to get too much out all in one go.

Writer-director John Chuldenko stretches a sitcom episode premise to feature-length breaking point in Nesting.

Director/co-writer Adam Sherman's Bukowski-lite character study is one of those exercises in masculine self-pity and glib misogyny that frustrates because of its shortsightedness.

The film is ultimately a stodgy, overblown and repetitive slog.

Long on atmosphere and short on sense, The Tall Man becomes less gripping as it grows more ridiculous.

Starts out as an agreeable, playfully off-color comedy of contemporary domestic manners and loses course to become a slack, tacky slapstick.

It is a disappointment coming from writer-director David Cronenberg, who has proved such a master at mind games. Cronenberg is perhaps too faithful to the book. The topic is provocative and certainly timely, but the film never achieves the incisive power of his best work, "A History of Violence" for one. Even an A-list ensemble that includes Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti can't save it.

Some of the language is smart, sinister and ironic in just the right ways, particularly when Addison, Eric Bana's serial-killing mastermind, delivers it. In other cases, the dialogue is so ludicrously off - either unnecessary, or unnecessarily misogynistic if a cop is doing the talking - that it's hard to believe the same person wrote it.

Had V/H/S been a nasty jolt of three, it might have been memorable, but at nearly two hours, the gimmick punctures a hole in itself, causing ambience bleed-out. Recommended cure: a tripod

A movie with a location named Snake Island should deliver more fun than this.

Unfortunately, attempts to be original are not enough, they have to succeed, and this film's solutions tend to present themselves as alternately gimmicky and banal.

The film is only slightly more boorish than the racy cult hit was on telly and would probably not be worth the celluloid expended were it not for the bookish, brainy Will McKenzie (Simon Bird).

Why Stop Now? feels trapped in the limbo between comedy and drama where many indies gamely venture, but from which few emerge with any resonance.

Though one enjoys and appreciates Rush for what it is, it does not thrill the blood the way we have the right to expect a film like this to do.

Though individual set pieces are well done, the film inevitably leaves an empty taste behind it once it's done.

It is billed as a comedy, but it's really a lipstick-smeared drunken tragedy. The humor is so caustic you won't know whether to laugh or cry.

It's terribly long and repetitive for so delicately dreamy a diptych, and at times the modern-day story feels like little more than a drawn-out apologia for the wandering male gaze.

Melton and Dunstan have created little more than a hollow shell for an empty box.

Romance and capers exist in Lay the Favorite, they just aren't played well.

Amiable and upbeat though it is, the documentary Hollywood to Dollywood lacks a compelling reason to see it. Unless you are a Dolly Parton zealot, which its two protagonists definitely are.

All the talking would be fine, but the dialogue is preachy, the drama too earnest and the action kind of sluggish, though it's hard not to get a jolt when Johnson jumps behind the wheel.

Really the biggest problem with Dark Skies is that Stewart can never quite decide just what story he is telling — a slow-burn horror parable or paranoid invasion flick — or whether to focus on this character or that, instead struggling to string together scares regardless of how they fit together overall.

Though it's nice to see Smurfette get her due, the whole endeavor feels tired and tiring.

An investment in theatrical self-indulgence with diminishing returns.

We're the Millers is full of moments that feel as forced as the marriage of convenience — and contrivance — in the movie.

The story becomes more ridiculous as it escalates, the film's over-determined ecological focus undermining any real horror movie tension. Levinson's casting choices are off-the-mark as well - star Kether Donohue is just plain bad.

Director Feng Xiaogang captures the epic scale of the exodus as well as the often-harrowing details, yet emotional connection proves more elusive.

It can't decide what kind of a film it wants to be and so ends up failing across a fairly wide spectrum.

"Rubber" felt inventive and complex, but here Dupieux's absurdism is simply muddled, masking the fact he doesn't really have much to say.

Efficiently told and features solid performances, but without the juicy character detail, vise-grip suspense or black comic intensity of its memorable forerunners, it unwinds as a boilerplate genre item.

It's really just an overstuffed story that comes off not as layered but rather as an unfocused jumble.

There are no new treasures to be found in this installment, which is dragged down by the anchor of a prescribed franchise blueprint.

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.

The war crimes and romance stories theoretically run on parallel tracks, but the overall pacing is ragged and the dialogue frequently out of step with the characters we've met.

The great failing of The Iceman is not in giving us a monster, but in not making us care.

Mumia Abu-Jamal would be the perfect subject for an investigative documentary that explored his life and thought with a calm and even hand. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary is not that film.

Baggage Claim promotes painfully outdated social mores.

It starts out like a house afire, but by the time it's over we're the ones feeling burned. A slick heist tale with more twists than sense, this is one movie that ends up outsmarting itself.

Though assured in execution and not without a few moments of genuine tension — mainly emanating from Combs' flinty weirdness — Would You Rather is hardly a most dangerous game night at the movies.

It's big, cartoonish and empty, with an interesting premise that is underdeveloped and overproduced. [3 July 1985, p.Calendar 6]

By our quote-unquote standards of contemporary comedy, it plays as uneven at best and often just flattens out for long jokeless stretches.

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.

The film, though nicely performed, rarely builds into the kind of gripping emotional journey it clearly intended.

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.

If Flatliners is anything at all, it's watchable: aflame with Jan de Bont cinematography, deep-focus decor, an attractive cast. The movie's problem, like many others recently, is that it isn't any deeper, dramatically or psychologically, than its own trailer. It is the trailer: the long version.

Despite the story's melodramatic contrivances the creation of characters we actually care about is beyond this film's capabilities.

The film, directed by first-timer Rocky Powell, has a different happy ending in mind, one that adheres to rom-com formulas in a manner that should give it a second life on basic cable. Just don't expect to fall hard for it.

Unfinished Song is a movie so geared toward hitting its spots, it amounts to emotional Muzak rather than something truly played live.

This busy-yet-dull sequel feels like Wan robotically flexing his manipulation of fright-film signposts, an exercise more silly than sinister.

The hour of mike time isn't as strong as such previous dispatches as "Seriously…Funny."

Many of the transitions between narrative and music are rough. The temptations of the street, all too real in the real world, feel forced. Confrontations become clichés. The substance of human motivation is missing. And thus the heart never beats as it should.

The noir-ish contours of writer-director Ana Piterbarg's story yield a frustratingly dissipated movie, one with few storytelling pleasures and an overabundance of forced mood.

Brad Leong's comedy has some nicely miserable character beats.

While the plot is a non-starter, the margins of Gold and co-director Tammy Caplan's debut feature are scattered with other real-life magicians who make quarters vanish every time our attention does the same.

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

With good intentions and a warm heart but undone by uneven performances and shaky storytelling, Bob's New Suit never quite finds the right fit.

There's a great story at the heart of Matej Minac's documentary Nicky's Family, if only it were allowed to be told unvarnished.

A flavorless feast, with the movie's few mystical leaps clunkily handled.

There's still a nagging, cartoonish emptiness — and a trilogy-ending installment still to come.

With many languid scenes and little narrative momentum, Algrant may have been aiming for a more ethereal father-son heartbreaker. But all that comes across is twee hipster romanticism.

No One Lives is a cheap horror prank that's ultimately not clever or accomplished enough to sustain its eccentricities, and they are very bloody eccentricities indeed.

Violet & Daisy comes out of the gate guns blazing. Too bad it ends as a misfire.

Pawn's cops and robbers game could have been far better played.

Almost from the beginning the message overwhelms the medium.

The promise it begins with doesn't pay off. And while Arthur Newman is not a complete disaster, it does leave you wishing the romance and the ride had been a whole lot smoother.

A tonal jumble, veering between forced farce and tired, rom-com beats, with little feeling real or true.

What could have been an empowering and amusing riff on the typically male underdog genre is mostly charmless.

There's little that feels fresh, freaky or funny about one more batch of eccentric reactions to hungry corpses, one more attempt to creatively splatter, one more metaphor for zombie invasion.

When Drift sticks to the likable, gently humorous contours of occasionally fractious brotherly love, broken up by thrillingly shot surfing footage, it has plenty of charm, period flavor and breezy visual breadth... Where the movie routinely disappoints, though, is in pursuit of a perfect storm of conflict story lines.

Since it's a comedy, much could be forgiven if the film was consistent in generating laughs, but the comedy is as erratic as the couple's sex life.

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

There are some laughs and, at least on screen, more than a few tears. But it doesn't come together with the kind of satisfying punch a comedy should deliver.

With "Looper" and the fantastic recent release "Predestination" using the same plot device to explore existentialism, the potboiler Project Almanac feels like a leap backward.

Slyness, slapstick and sex can often be mixed to amusing effect whatever the specifics — the original "Hangover," for example, did a credible job of it — but The Other Woman is ultimately undone by its indecision.

It's a strong story of lonely, even futile righteousness, which makes the plodding execution by director Arnaud des Pallierès somewhat mystifying.

A sweet, sincere, yet ultimately tepid story.

Free Samples is a film about wasting time, and it feels like it. Despite clocking in at 79 minutes, Jay Gammill's comedy drags by no fault of its delightfully sour lead.

It's a handsome nothing, at least until you get sick of the screaming.

Expendables 3 is a kind of ho-hum experience, wherein a lot of bullets are expended and a lot of structures exploded to minimal dramatic effect.

The Book of Life juxtaposes overwrought visual imagery with an undernourished, familiar story.

The elder Makhmalbaf, who wrote and directed, puts many spins on this ethereal mood piece — it is by turns poetic, impressionistic, metaphorical and even a bit trippy — without satisfying such genre basics as structure, depth and resolution.

What makes this film particularly bedeviling is that you get the sense there is a nice guy behind this mess, one not so callous about matters of the heart. If anything, the raunch seems forced. The closer the film gets to real emotions, the more authentic it feels.

Although children may enjoy the animal action (there's also a fun pelican and a yellow sea turtle) and parents might appreciate the movie's genuinely sweet moments, this is exceedingly mild entertainment.

The Nut Job features decent CG animation, especially of animals, but the writing isn't particularly clever, relying on obvious puns and slapstick humor.

Kramer, 10 years removed from his lone critical success, "The Cooler," and writer Adam Minarovich aren't exactly aping Tarantino, if only because they don't have the talent or inclination to aim that high.

Aiming to discomfort, the film ends up retreating.

Yes, some of the individual stunts and action set pieces temporarily hold our interest...but the story itself is not convincing on its own terms, playing like a series of boxes (Bond asking for a martini shaken not stirred) that need to be checked off and forgotten.

The Rooftop is a bullet train to bananasville, its tonal eccentricities sure to wear out even the most dedicated connoisseur of silly cinema.

It's hard to remember when actors have stepped into such a no-win situation and mustered up such panache: Turturro may be on a sinking ship, but he manages to drown brilliantly.

Unfortunately, there's a lack of structure, context and point of view to the largely gray, grim, hardscrabble world presented here.

[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.

A flimsy episodic feature.

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.

With little room to feel for or even understand Anna Maria, Paradise: Faith rarely seems more than high art with low intentions.

This "Theorem" is all sizzle, zero steak.