Though writer-director Bryan Anthony Ramirez keeps things moving apace, he trots out so many familiar tropes that it's often like watching a highlights reel from a lifetime's worth of urban crime dramas.

Brown's argument is hampered, however, by the chaotic rush of information and speculation, overuse of winking archival footage of commercials and old industrial films, and Brown's charmlessness as a "what's going on?" guide.

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.

While the film does not lack production values and panache, Gordon's direction often seems thoughtless.

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.

Le Week-End is a sour and misanthropic film masquerading as an honest and sensitive romance. A painful and unremittingly bleak look at a difficult marriage, it wants us to sit through a range of domestic horrors without offering much of anything as a reward.

The film is most acceptable when it sticks to its beauty-and-beast dynamic. Even then it’s too dizzying and grandiose and the chemistry between the lead characters is pretty much nil.

May please non-discriminating fans of its co-writer/director/star (and more) Jackie Chan, but will likely leave most other viewers dazed, confused and eagerly watching the clock.

Inconsistencies cause more confusion than the magic Rose is presumably going for.

That Rosa never encounters another character with English fluency — nor grasps her Eurocentric limitations — makes director Threes Anna's film less the intended portrait of cultural isolation than an illustration of how a lack of imagination can lead to despair.

This somber work about the worthiness of living has little life in it.

Cassadaga tries to scoop up enough tropes to satisfy a wide range of potential fright fans but lacks the cohesion to ever truly be effective.

The film's colorblindness does not make up for its latent sexism.

If "The Bible" was CliffsNotes for the Scriptures, Son of God is the cheat sheet. The two-hour film condenses about four hours of what already was hasty television, and it all winds up a little dramatically static.

Busy, but not exactly invigorating.

Every time things between blue-collar David (Pettyfer) and pretty, privileged Jade (Wilde) get sticky — either kissy/gooey or teary/hurt-y — and the film could go deep, "Endless" morphs into music video territory.

It's shame that the first film to come out of Lebanon featuring a gay theme turns out to be such a head-scratching jumble.

Bridging the Gap may mainly aim for audio-visual delight (Stephan Mussil's cinematography undeniably dazzles), but as an authentic look at a more than 500-year-old institution, the film proves less in tune.

Scenes can drag; they at times pay homage to the filmmaker's memories rather than drive the narrative forward.

Despite the good intentions, structurally it's all over the place with an excess of montages, archival footage, interviews and information practically drowning out any chance to appreciate the richness of the German composer's beloved achievement.

Everything ultimately gives way to the stately, simplistic, inevitable pace of by-the-numbers biopics, from some woefully tinny, hit-and-run screenwriting to the usual difficulties surrounding the dramatization of an author's craft.

The film is rescued from its own lumbering self-seriousness by Weber's sensitive portrayal of teen dynamics, but it's never as scary or as creepy as it needs to be.

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.

This brief film often feels like an extended gripe session instead of something more profound or game-changing.

Artificially jacked up to feel like mean but serious fun, Sabotage mostly flings blood, vengeance, testosterone and clichés to the wall to see what sticks.

It's not quite a match made in heaven, but there is considerable comic chemistry between the high-octane Kevin Hart and the energy-conserving Josh Gad. A good thing since theirs is the only relationship worth watching in The Wedding Ringer.

We, unfortunately, learn very little in this Earth Day release (originally completed in 2012) that we haven't seen before in more evolved, better focused documentaries.

Even by the non-Olympian standards of the disaster genre, San Andreas is chock-full of cliché characters, staggering coincidences and wild improbabilities.

Despite Almereyda's invention in approaching this tawdry Shakespearean tale, he misfires badly. All that is left is the semblance of Cymbeline.

Writer-director Joe Eddy's debut is sincere but relies on obvious tropes.

Writer-director M. Blash's sophomore film is ethereal and trippy, told less in scenes than in oblique snatches, not unlike the experience of emotional paralysis. This approach grows wearying.

Instead of a pot-boiling crime noir like the one that exists in the pages of the late French novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette's "The Prone Gunman" (which sounds better in French), the adaptation is a frustrating fiasco that kills the material and squanders its exceedingly fine cast.

The somnambulant slickness of the direction when a truly grown-up tale of late-in-life love is nipping at the edges suggests Reiner is more stubbornly set in his stay-cute approach than his leads, who at least find the occasional pocket of human messiness in this tension-free exercise.

Although Reynolds rises above the rest as a father consumed by sadness and anger, The Captive quickly devolves into scenes that feel like stilted dramatic re-creations demanding a noirish voice-over by "Cold Case Files" host Bill Kurtis.

This brief, loosely-knit film never builds any empathy or tension.

The gimmick is marginally amusing as Max tests it out in ways both naughty and nice. But so many holes, questions and contradictions arise that it's hard to square the rules of the game.

Overall, writer-director Garrett Batty takes such a tempered approach, the film lacks the kind of gritty, visceral tension that life-and-death tales such as this normally demand.

The only thing that keeps Knight of Cups from terminal artistic overreach as it follows Rick around town is the knockout cinematography of three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, who does superb work showing us contemporary Los Angeles in a most magical way.

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

Equals walls itself off from the suspense implicit in its scenario — it’s practically an anti-thriller — and barely flickers to life as a tale of forbidden desire.

The big question here is why any of The Voices, as crisply made and stylish as it is, should matter or entertain. The cold truth is that it doesn't.

Though an admirable shake-up of the typically overbearing, munch-intensive undead yarn, The Returned is still a far cry from the smarts-and-shocks zombie allegories George Romero mastered.

It is the most nonsensical crime caper to make it on screen in a while.

So much blandly sweeping, speechifying history and so little personalized dramatic focus turn No God, No Master into a series of issue-driven snapshots instead of something genuinely illuminating.

An unconvincing, poorly conceived hybrid of end-of-the-world thriller and relationship drama.

Magical swords, evil doppelgangers, a sexy black muscle car, an unremarkable final showdown and lots of first-draft dialogue factor into this thankfully brief (about 80 minutes plus end credits) frightfest.

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

The Attorney is on the side of justice, but it's a ham-fisted dramatization of real-life events that mistakes anger for persuasion.

It's so predictable in its beats and pedestrian in its execution that a viewer can slip in and out of consciousness, confident she won't miss much and will know exactly where in the story she is when she awakes.

As written by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, The Legend of Tarzan alternates between a brazenly contemporary sensibility and quietly time-honored events. Unfortunately, almost all of the former are awkward while the latter still ring true.

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

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

It's an intriguing setting — and set-up. But a lack of subtlety in the writing and much of the acting (particularly Circus-Szalewski and Ron Roggé as a pair of good cop/bad cop jailers) mitigate the power of the caged men's plights as well as the movie's intended tension.

Like many found-footage films before it, The Den never entirely suspends disbelief. It doesn't satisfyingly account for how the characters are producing all the footage.

Salva manages a few inspired scenes... But the lasting image Dark House offers is of the screenwriters hurling everything they can think of at the wall.

Unlike the teeming world living between the lines in Munro's story, there is not nearly enough in Hateship Loveship to keep you invested.

Director Jack Plotnick and his co-screenwriters Sam Pancake, Jennifer Elise Cox, Kali Rocha and Michael Stoyanov fail to nail a satisfying theme, narrative or purpose.

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

The story and characterizations never get much deeper than "We're all special in our own way."

Its core dance styles are a wonderfully frenetic fusion of tap and hip-hop and a truly novel blend of Japanese taiko drumming and K-pop girl-group choreography. Whenever actor Derek Hough and BoA stop leaping and twirling, though, Make Your Move is an underwritten mess.

Director-star Livia De Paolis sets out to reassure everybody that the Internet won't destroy all relationships in her agreeable but unnecessary family drama Emoticon ;).

A repetitive, sluggishly paced nocturnal rumination on why we bother reuniting with old friends we purposefully left behind.

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.

The movie relies too much on the same comic tension in each scene: Johnson is the gung-ho one, Wayans says no (a lot).

Not unlike most of its Hollywood counterparts, though, this Hong Kong import can't resist the urge to dumb down a fascinating premise for the sake of mass consumption.

In blurring the lines between truth and fiction as well as right and wrong, Third Person maddens far more than it intrigues. Indeed, more curious than anything about the movie itself is how such an artistic stumble happened.

The film blurs lines between documentary, reality television and "Candid Camera," with Vargas instigating the proceedings.

Mr. Jones has the bones of something freaky but succumbs to a penchant for alienating chaos over sustained, abiding creep.

Everything unfolds at a glacial place, with so many emotional beats overplayed that the experience is more wearing than moving.

By performing narrative gymnastics, the film sacrifices any possibility for viewers to identify with the characters. Although the film does answer the myriad questions it raises along the way, it would have benefited from more straightforward storytelling.

It's a movie that's almost all style, all technique. It doesn't seem to be inhabited by people, thoughts or feelings, but by great coruscating patterns of light crashing over and over us, repeatedly--almost, but not quite, drowning out a constant buzz of cliches.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but Argentine writer-director Damián Szifron allows it to sit until it congeals in the dreary six-part anthology Wild Tales.

The AIDS scare remains as much window dressing as do other period details such as rotary phones and cassette tapes. Test seems to be about dance above all, with choreographed montages filling the bulk of its running time.

First-time writer-director Jocelyn Towne takes an admirably novel stab at familial dysfunction in her father-daughter drama I Am I, but she proves unable to keep the film's originality from rapidly curdling into preposterousness.

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.

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.

It's a lovefest in which critics' voices and debate are simply absent, and the only talking space is wonder, nostalgia and excitement for the future.

The movie stalls in a limbo of half-realized characters and superficial weightiness.

As well done as much of Selma is, it periodically falls from grace with moments that are either emotionally flat or excessively agitprop in nature. Consistently the most ineffective scenes are those that involve powerful but obstructionist white people, especially the unhelpful trio of Johnson, Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker). The deftness with acting and character that can be this film’s strength simply deserts it here.

Bram, who also narrates (and writes, with co-director Judah Lazarus and Adam Zucker), may be earnest in his desire for enlightenment. But his approach feels overly self-serving; too much "Me," not enough "Kabbalah."

Sjogren's promising set-up, designed to unfold with understatement, ends up feeling remote and repressed when Sjogren miscalculates by burying her characters' emotions too far down.

It's far more invested in elaborate historical reenactments, hypothetical dramatizations and special effects than interviews, research and data.

Hector may indeed learn that narcissism stands in the way of happiness, but he also walks away with his privileges intact and unchallenged.

Paltrow's kitchen-sink visual sense may keep your eyes engaged, but it sucks dry any inherent drama, leaving you with a bunch of characters who feel pegged by a conjurer rather than nurtured from a wretched new Earth.

Unfortunately director Anthony Fabian prefers to dole out emotion in short bursts of superficial montage rather than fully dramatic scene work in which characters deepen through extended interaction. That leaves Louder Than Words feeling diffuse, choppy and cold rather than illuminative about how broken families heal after terrible loss.

All the possibilities of a richly drawn family squabble fade faster than the final days of summer.

In the end, as with too many Gospel-derived dramas, The Young Messiah could’ve used less literalism, and more mystery.

Though Page-Lochard manages to make his passive participation in violence compelling, Around the Block remains more lecture than drama about racism and its tragic consequences.

Awkwardly balanced between comedy and significance, with plotting that gets increasingly schematic and unconvincing, My Old Lady is bound and determined to get more serious than it is capable of sustaining.

It turns out Two Night Stand is a one-act sex comedy badly in need of two more — acts, not nights.

"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.

Amazingly, somehow, an overstuffed Godzilla movie feels scant.

As directed by Timur Bekmambetov, this 21st century Ben-Hur is more phlegmatic than awful, a by and large dull and lethargic piece of work that is not bad enough to get mad at. What it lacks most of all is a convincing reason to exist.

Being a mildly pleasant, passingly amusing light entertainment isn't exactly saving the world, yet the film crosses its wires to blow up even that modest assignment.

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

Visually inspired but thematically derivative.

The script by Richard D'Ovidio is so packed with knuckleheaded moves and ultra-obvious dialogue ("Dad, there's something wrong with this place!") that the whole enterprise proves more risible than frightening.