Kirkland manages to rise above the soap opera script with its improbable twists, stilted dialogue and internal contradictions to give a believable and often-sympathetic performance.

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.

It's a derivative trove of swashbuckling action, romance, comedy, special effects and revisionist history — the kind of film that would be pitched to studio execs as "Pirates of the Caribbean" meets "Free Willy."

Although director and co-writer Cutter Hodierne tells the story from the pirates' viewpoint, he adds no more dimension to them than the one we saw in "Phillips."

The narrative of Strachwitz as preserver of obscure music just repeats like a broken record with the introduction of each region, genre and musician.

The film seems to have an entire deck of cards up its sleeve, and they're dealt out with more tedium than fun.

Disjointed and unfocused.

Director Brett Harvey has gotten the documentary look and format down pat, complete with generic and gratuitous nature and cityscape shots. Where he shows an amateurish hand is in the term-paper-like voice-over narration and the inclusion of underqualified talking heads.

It's an unsurprisingly ambitious movie from the notoriously, proudly headstrong Crowe, which makes it such a disappointment that it feels so blandly earnest and unexpectedly hesitant, with none of the unnerving conviction the actor often brings even to lightweight promotional appearances.

Eternity: the Movie, a purposely cheesy sendup of mid-1980s pop music, offers committed performances and a few chuckles, but it's a largely one-note rendition.

Acher makes some astute observations about the contemporary dating scene, but this airless vehicle ultimately feels more like a stage piece than a feature proposition.

The new Vacation turns out to be a mostly bumpy, unpleasant trip.

Cage's loop-di-loop performance, the movie's surviving asset, at least hints at the themes of institutional illness and mortal decline that must have fascinated Schrader.

Once tragedy strikes, the clichés in Bram and Toni Hoover's screenplay win out, and Baker never stirs up enough energy to make it feel any different from a thousand other tales of underdog triumph.

The mood is somber, as cued by the contemplative voice-over narration. Sights of rubble, tent cities and an orphanage are devastating. But these seem to be mere backdrop for a very different movie.

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.

Keaton’s performance — sly, affectionately cranky, subtly reverberant — is certainly one of The Flash’s highlights. But it also reveals, with depressing clarity, the imaginative poverty of the movie’s design.

Because it's all shot to look like a South Korean noir, with umpteen slo-mo shots and stylistic noodlings to affect a kind of grimy urban anti-hero chic, Christensen effectively leeches the emotion from the central story.

Between lots of uneven acting, some embarrassingly bad dialogue ("How do you move forward when your soul is torn apart?!") and too many unconvincing, warmed-over moments, the movie, like its charisma-free characters, is a tough one to embrace.

Director Sanjay Rawal also allows the likes of Eva Longoria (an executive producer of the film, as is "Fast Food Nation" author Eric Schlosser) and members of the Kennedy dynasty to hijack the farmworkers' story. It's a reductive strategy that ultimately insults viewers' intelligence.

Ultimately the documentary falls short of explaining why Vreeland not only made his choice but maintained it.

With a 21/2 -hour running time, Work Weather Wife does not lack ambition. But for a film deliberately channeling Bollywood, its scope seems rather Lilliputian.

Although first-time feature writer-director Julius Avery may aspire to become a sort of Aussie Michael Mann — and perhaps lays an apt foundation here to do so — he has a ways to go in developing the kind of characters and world we can solidly invest in.

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.

The basic story's narrative and psychological simplicity — characters stating their beliefs over and over again — becomes an increasing burden.

Although the film has little of the smarts and the sizzle of the best of Goldman, it does have a splash of the writer's sense of irony.

[Minn] runs around with a microphone in hand like an if-it-bleeds-it-leads ambulance chaser, playing out that local news reporter stereotype often spoofed in mockumentaries.

This first feature by Jabbar Raisani is played out with considerable conviction on the part of its director and the tough-guy cast (led by Rick Ravanello), but the alien element is less convincing because of corny costumes and static-y special effects.

The Greatest Showman, for all its celebratory razzle-dazzle, in the end feels curiously lacking in conviction. Its pleasures, namely those Pasek-Paul songs, could be removed and repurposed for another story entirely, with no discernible loss in enjoyment or meaning...Its failures are rooted in something deeper: a dispiriting lack of faith in the audience’s intelligence, and a dawning awareness of its own aesthetic hypocrisy. You’ve rarely seen a more straight-laced musical about the joys of letting your freak flag fly.

The movie isn't fantastical enough to sustain itself outside the bounds of reality, yet every time something real creeps in, the movie stumbles and cowers.

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

Unfortunately, by the end, thanks to a misguided use of a few offensive slurs against gays and African Americans, the whole thing turns needlessly ugly, undermining the goodwill Cross had mustered.

As a sizzle reel, Manny feeds off the hype but leaves this man with fascinatingly renaissance tastes and ambitions still naggingly unexplored by the end.

Despite its true-events pedigree, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is woefully captive to B-movie crime saga tropes.

Although the storytelling technique may feel innovative, the story itself is not.

The film takes a long time to get going because of all the prolonged, glib chit-chat that loses whatever satirical edge it might have initially possessed.

With "Whiplash" setting the new bar for depicting the rigorous discipline and competitiveness in a music academy, the stale, one-note narrative seen in Boychoir sounds even more out of tune.

The results are decidedly more mind-numbing than bone-chilling.

Dope is, in the end, just another unfunny grab bag of stereotypes. Don't believe the hype.

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.

While the corrupt Indiana Jones conceit certainly held promise, the Hesses fail to move it much further beyond that "what if" premise, taking weak, obvious potshots at its fundamentalist target.

The visually stirring format proves unable to lift the story and performances out of a prevailing, airless stupor.

The medieval-tinged adventure Last Knights will test your patience for speeches about honor, grim declarations of loyalty and pre-battle glowering.

The script, co-written by director Georgina Garcia Riedel and Jose Nestor Marquez, plays like a first draft that misses out on comic opportunities.

If you are a cinephile or an aspiring filmmaker looking for some behind-the-scenes edification, there's little.

There’s a deeper emptiness at the core of the movie, a failure of nerve and a fundamental incuriosity about what makes the Snowden affair interesting and relevant, then and now.

If director-co-writer Karim Aïnouz has set out to depict soulless gay lives, he has more than succeeded.

The only aspects of the tale that seem uniquely Maori are the action sequences featuring the martial art of mau rakau. Aside from intermittent dream sequences in which Hongi communicates with his late grandmother (Rena Owen), the storytelling is Westernized.

There are tangible improvements in the techniques of writer-director Terron R. Parsons. But some of the nagging plot holes remain unresolved.

By ambitiously aiming to encompass the full scope and complexity of the social pandemic, Lost and Love winds up being all over the map.

The more recent concert and backstage material, assembled by director Andy Grieve, lacks the energy and immediacy key to dynamic performance films.

On the wildly uneven rollercoaster that is Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, the lows far outweigh the highs.

It might also have been nice to have included some archival footage that would have illustrated how little the Yukon River setting has changed over the last century, but Horvath appears to have no interest in digging any deeper.

Like the floundering filmmaker at its center, The Face of an Angel never seems sure of what story it wants to tell.

Zoolander 2 defines haphazard. You may smile at times, but not as often as you'd like.

Snow is excellent, though, as she attempts to inhabit her murky character. If only we had a better sense of what the movie was trying to say about faith — or the lack thereof.

As over-the-top operatic and inexplicable as Dawn Patrol can be, producer and star Eastwood remains captivating and charismatic, ultimately serving as a grounding element within the swirl of emotional drama and almost saving the film from going overboard.

The film is undermined by choppy editing and a penchant for hoary aphorisms and forced gravitas.

Co-directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy haven't attributed all of their facts and figures, hence the proverbial grain of salt.

Writers Christopher Borrelli and Michael C. Martin commit quite a handful of sins of contrivance that are difficult to absolve.

Dreariness seems to be the filmmaker's shorthand for authenticity here. Without any realism to ground it, the movie's spiritual story line feels aloft — swirling around but never dramatically landing.

It's a testament to the stars that they manage to sell the third act sentimentality after wading through so much screenplay triteness and unimaginative direction.

Writer-director Anders Morgenthaler's conclusion comes far too hastily and haphazardly, with a disregard for plot details or plausible storytelling.

Talky, relentlessly affirming and as predictable as a paint-by-number.

Though Kidman is solid as a wife and mom tormented by her daughter's secret erotic life, Strangerland never successfully welds its central mystery with its psychosexual drapings, leaving neither especially interesting.

The action set-pieces and the comedic character scenes in the film seem to be taking turns and are rarely brought together in a meaningful way.

The premise, that high school is more perilous than a life of espionage, is witty and full of potential. But Newman makes that case by staging his car chases and fight scenes with as much sense of drama as eighth-period trig.

The series seems to have at last entered its frustrating, decadent, spinning-its-wheels phase.

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.

It suffers from a marked lack of narrative energy and a regrettable surfeit of clichéd characterization.

Tumbledown sees its good intentions undermined by cloying sitcom conventions.

The low energy pace and performances strive for naturalism but just don't achieve compelling tension or suspense.

Writer-director-star David Thorpe attempts to probe the whys and wherefores of what he calls the stereotypical "gay male voice," but he ends up crafting a naval-gazing self-portrait that's unflattering, inconclusive and, at times, a bit specious.

The Program pedals fast, but the end result is little more than a psychologically shallow recap reel.

The plodding film goes awfully heavy on script exposition and all too light on character depth, leaving Cage and company — including a smartly cast Peter Fonda as his been-there, done-that alcoholic dad — to come up with their own complexity.

Unfortunately, the human relationships depicted here are less credible than the solid special effects.

Perhaps fearful of venturing into downer territory, I Am Chris Farley sticks to slickly edited, bite-sized anecdotes about an attention-starved Midwestern goofball unprepared for stardom, accompanied by storybook music that accentuates Farley's childlike nature over his darker impulses.

It's hard to tell if director and co-writer Ariel Kleiman is being serious or sarcastic with a story this preposterous.

The film's apparent faithfulness is admirable, but interviews with actual survivors shown during the end credits provide more impact and resonance than the rest of the film can muster.

Being big on improvisation doesn't necessarily mine nuggets of comic brilliance, and there are times you wish Argott and Joyce would have adhered more closely to the Matt Serword-penned script.

Demolition is a well-meaning misfire, terribly earnest but unconvincing for all of that.

Beyond a few nice closing emotional beats, the whole enterprise plays too desperate and slapdash to whip up the goodwill required to sell such thin, far-fetched material.

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

More filmmakers should treat the zombie subgenre as allegorical, the way George A. Romero intended. But Extinction and "Maggie" both arrive at the same conclusion about fatherhood, thereby confirming it as a cliché rather than a coincidence.

The film is most effective when Bauer and Cartwright are battling the surroundings instead of each other.

Despite its serious imperfections, the soapy escapism provided by The Perfect Guy at least arrives at an opportune time.

Hellions is art book horror, something to flip through but never truly eerie or scary.

Money Monster is all over the map, mixing earnest contemporary relevance, black comedy, bogus emotion and tragedy with its nominal thriller plot, all to frankly bewildering effect.

The movie can't do much to address the inherent flaws in the premise.

Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki withholds judgment and resists editorializing, but the result is frustratingly nebulous and devoid of context.

Searching for Home: Coming Back From War touches on wide-ranging veterans' issues, but goes no deeper than that.

Unfortunately, A Reason doesn't have enough story to justify its running time of nearly two hours, and though the performers are skilled, the melodramatic score and deliberate pace result in a piece that is overwrought but underdone.

Director J Blakeson can't quite maintain the film's momentum while squaring its disparate parts, malleable story rules (weren't all power sources destroyed?), hokey dialogue and a crisscross of often one-note emotions.

While the gangsta lyrics and posturing are laden with cliché, there's still some novelty in sustaining a rap narration for nearly two hours. But whenever the music stops, the film can never stay in the game by landing on a figurative chair.

How much filmgoers enjoy it may depend on how much they enjoy the mixture of smugness and naivete in a college sophomore.

Hardcore Henry is a single-gear novelty that never achieves real liftoff.

Although the lead performances, including a turn by Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark on "Game of Thrones") as a no-nonsense police chief, are uniformly solid, the hollow Montana has trouble unloading all those stolen parts.

This is a tonally and visually inconsistent piece whose cracks at "Lethal Weapon"-style humor are needlessly silly or simply flat.