Dead Envy is interesting for the way it plays off of Di Nardo’s backstory, but this lightweight stalker-thriller doesn’t deliver much else.

Roberts, working with a much larger scenic and visual palette this time, seems adrift.

This picture tries to encompass many ideas: about loyalty, the lust for fame and the slippery slope of immoral behavior. All of that is in the film. It just hasn’t been put in any particular order.

Asante usually excels at sharing stories audiences haven’t seen before, so it’s unfortunate that this one feels so dully familiar.

A Whale of a Tale is an unfortunately directionless, low-gear rebuttal that hardly ever stirs up emotions as effectively as “The Cove” did.

There are ultimately kernels of truth buried amid the film’s random yakking, mini-crises and bits of forced bad behavior, but they prove too little, too late.

Summer ’03 bounces between plot lines and themes, shuffling through elements of better films with a lack of focus and little insight into Jamie. It never transcends its teen movie origins to become something more.

Although it’s all bathed in a warmly nostalgic glow courtesy of cinematographer Darin Moran, and the cast, including Peter Stormare as an oddball shaman called the Rock God, is uniformly engaging, too often the familiar proceedings get bogged down by extensive slo-mo surfing sequences and pointless “Wonder Years”-style narration.

Screenwriter Robert Rhine and co-directors Devon Downs and Kenny Gage have made something polished, colorful and energetic but, ultimately, pretty disposable.

Though sleekly photogenic in its depiction of cosmopolitan Europeans in permanent romantic neurosis, The Laws of Thermodynamics is better in theory than fact.

With its incoherent, episodic script, In Like Flynn lacks the worth of even a minor Flynn film.

Lost Fare aims to tell a story that’s at once dark and heartwarming, but it never balances these two contrasting ideas. There is genuine feeling here, but the dialogue and plot make the proceedings plodding and contrived.

Arcan wrote prolifically about beauty and female identity in essays and articles, as well as her books, and Émond uses those words extensively in the film. But what may have been profound and poetic on the page feels redundant and banal on screen. It’s a sad tale that never manifests much more than that singular emotion.

A Land Imagined never congeals into anything intriguing or compelling enough to earn our required patience.

MFKZ is obviously modeled on Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s “Akira” and Taiyô Matsumoto’s “Tekkonkinkreet,” but it lacks the gritty brilliance of the former and the underdog poignancy of the latter.

The movie’s well-meaning, but also tedious and self-indulgent, with only brief flashes of originality — and even those are quickly interrupted by yet another explicit sex scene.

Ultimately, Ride feels a little like a drama class exercise, with the leads digging deep into their characters’ motivations and feelings. All three nail their parts. But their story never gets out of first gear.

The Negotiation unravels from the inside out, lurching from improbable to implausible to just plain ridiculous, and writer-director’s Lee Jong-Suk’s by-the-book filmmaking does little to raise the stakes.

Where Dern and Stewart kick-start something worth exploring, the movie around them is pleased spectator instead of engaged participant.

Mancini's script, here as before, never rises above simple sadistic button-pushing. [30 Aug 1991, p.F13]

The gentle drama Change in the Air is buoyed by its sweet spirit and a strong cast, but it ultimately tries too hard to win our affections.

Well-made but generic, the thriller The Super is noteworthy primarily for featuring one of Val Kilmer’s first substantial roles since recovering from throat cancer. Director Stephan Rick works around the actor’s infirmities, but Kilmer’s offbeat charisma remains unmistakable.

What we want from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is a giddy mix of gruesome horror and campy humor. What we get is less massacre than mess. [29 Aug 1997, p.F16]

An accomplished cast does what it can to bring the material to life, but it’s tough to add fine emotional shading to characters so thick and cartoonish.

Bernstein stages a few good, tense moments in the film’s second half — in particular a skate-chase scene on an iced-over stream — but Look Away mostly fails as a “killer teen” movie. The pace is too slow, and the mood too somber.

The filmmakers’ choice to focus so heavily — and, unfortunately, dully — on the odd-couple friendship between the tightly-wound, workaholic Hughes (Hilary Swank) and the brashly spirited Riese (Helena Bonham Carter) instead of on the bigger-picture legal wranglings and wider effects of the landmark lawsuit against a San Francisco hospital may point to the chapter’s cinematic limitations.

The idea of human memory as a kind of time machine is powerful, and writer-director David Gleeson and his co-writer Ronan Blaney make it pay it off well in their movie’s final 10 minutes. It’s the preceding 80 that are the problem.

Ultimately it all adds up to a hodgepodge of styles and attitudes with hardly any insight into what made this corrosive clique so magnetic to its adherents.

Despite its flaws, The Samuel Project is likely to make an impact on open-hearted audiences, with extra credit due Linden for an authentic performance in line with the actor’s body of work.

While Silencio could be fascinating sci-fi, it’s bogged down in all the family drama.

The result, directed by Mark Dennis and Ben Foster (not the actor) from Dennis’ script, is a handful of intriguing ideas in search of a more cohesive and dimensional narrative.

The movie’s artier components are imbued with enough heart and poetry to hold the picture together — just barely — through the more tedious stretches.

Bissell has needlessly manipulated the real story, completely missing what makes it significant.

It’s understandable that Hardwicke didn’t want to mimic her predecessor’s moves. But in chop-chop-chopping the action into standard Hollywood fragments, she has drained the material of its tension, its meaning and its purpose, to say nothing of its beauty.

The minimalist approach and premise of Solis should work, but the execution in the script keeps the viewer disengaged, wishing the pod would move more quickly toward its final destination.

Unfortunately, in Love Jacked, Anderson brings the heat, while West is barely present, unable to keep the necessary chemistry crackling.

Despite chemistry between its attractive leads, 5 Weddings is a hot mess that deserves to be left at the altar. Inorganic and implausible, this Bollywood-inflected rom-com features little comedy and even less romance.

Factoring in the flat narration by Clarke and some awfully hokey visual effects, Better Angels would have benefited from better angles.

Kendrick’s film eventually finds its legs in the final stretch, with an emotionally effective conclusion that might persuade even the cynics to its cause. Whether it converts them to running or to Christ will depend on the viewer.

The cast of Texas Cotton is good company, and the location’s a nice place to hang out for an hour and a half. But all these nice folks are worthy of more than such a flat, featureless story.

By the time the Tinker fantasy elements kick in, they seem more like an afterthought than the reason this movie was made in the first place.

The characters and story take a backseat to the movie’s message — which is as subtle as a roundhouse punch.

Knight does a good job of establishing the political complexities of a more theocratic age. But then The Appearance pivots straight to the usual assortment of things going bump in the night, which — as it turns out — aren’t suddenly less clichéd when everyone’s wearing robes.

Though there’s an abiding sensitivity in the often-noirish approach to the story’s many traumas and its characters’ flailing attempts at coping, as a whole it’s something of a tonal mess.

The actor’s fierce commitment turns Between Worlds into another solidly strange entry in the ever-expanding “Nicolas Cage movie” sub-genre.

The plotting is so leaden and the fire fights so pro forma that not even the sight of the three Shafts in action can keep this film from sinking under its own weight. Yes, the great Isaac Hayes music makes an appearance, but the old days are gone and they are not coming back.

The characters make such unrealistic, outlandish choices at almost every turn that it’s hard to buy into their journeys. The pace is so measured as to be stultifying, and at the end of the film, you have to wonder where all of this is going, and ultimately, what is it for?

There’s the kernel of an intriguing political thriller buried beneath all the strained exposition and pompous speechifying enveloping An Acceptable Loss, but writer-director Joe Chappelle never manages to find it.

Even during the fun moments — and there are a few, if nowhere near enough — you know you’re in the presence of an impostor, a generic blockbuster wannabe in established franchise drag.

Watts is plenty convincing as someone well past the brink of a psychotic break, but The Wolf Hour takes too long to get properly cranked up. This movie is mostly just mood-setting, with much more going on in the background than the foreground.

In the overstuffed plot of Then Came You, Skye’s terminal illness isn’t even about her. Her life merely serves as a lesson for Calvin to overcome his fears and seize the day. It’s a shame this manic pixie dream sick girl can’t even get her own movie.

Landais has made a version of Aspern that is too often uncertain and unconvincing despite the good work of his female stars. And when the actresses leave the screen and the film ventures into ill-advised flashback territory, things get shakier still.

It's a generic action movie with more guns than brains, more car crashes than coherence and more opportunism than originality. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]

The Doom Generation plays like a low-budget Natural Born Killers -- and that is not intended as a compliment. [27 Oct 1995, p.F6]

While “Worm Valley” is generally diverting, the plotting is remedial — and devoid of whatever personality Zhang brought to his books. There’s just enough story here to support the next big special effects sequence.

A dour drama that lacks depth despite all its good intentions.

The effect is like watching a bar band do a cover version of “The Amityville Horror” — spirited enough, but hardly ready for the big time.

The dialogue is often stiff, the action and plotting unlikely, making the romance hard to swallow. The appealing Uddin and Raymonde do generate enough chemistry in their fleeting time together to keep the proposition afloat.

There’s not much story to tell in The Untold Story, a bland, rather old-hat take on male reinvention and redemption. That it’s as watchable as it is proves a testimony to star Barry Van Dyke’s committed turn.

Brewster's Millions isn't bad so much as flat. And flat comedy has about the appeal of flat champagne.

An obvious abundance of creative passion went into the two-fisted action picture Split Lip — a film that’s generally likable but ultimately too slight and derivative to recommend.

Zuhdi’s story is ambitious; and there’s something poignant about the way these characters’ roundabout schemes keep pushing them further away from what they really want. But the audience rarely gets to see these plans play out.

The film’s biggest issue is its balance between setup and payoff.

Days is loaded with effective visual razzmatazz, but what the eyes giveth, the ears taketh away. For whether it's the plot, the dialogue, the character development or the acting itself, anything that stands apart from camera style is a thudding disappointment.

Flowers in the Attic is a protracted exercise in morbidity, relieved only by moments of ludicrousness. In adapting Andrews' Gothic chiller, writer-director Jeffrey Bloom tries hard to establish an eerie fairy-tale-gone-sour mood, yet fails to work up the credibility necessary to sustain it. The result is a real turnoff. [20 Nov 1987, p.32]

The early glimmers of something soulful and sobering — rooted in investigative details and detention center realities — ultimately give way to the tired mechanics of give-it-all uplift.

Despite how good-natured this movie is, it just doesn’t stand on its own. It has the right kind of soul, but a shapeless body.

For every poignant keeper...there’s a clunker.

The Kirkes are attractive and intriguing actresses, Mendelsohn again proves one of the best screen actors around and Dornan looks great in scrubs. But it’s hard be sure exactly what Forrest is trying to say here and the film isn’t compelling or appealing enough to sufficiently care.

Though the family-friendly comedy has all the good intentions of a motivational puppy poster, it unfortunately also has the same level of intelligence and plot.

Winning lead performances and some uniquely quirky touches keep this dramedy watchable from start to finish, but an over-reliance on indie film clichés — from the plucky folk-pop soundtrack to the generic “dredging up the past” plot — add up to squandered potential.

This is just another buy-the-numbers POV fright-fest — like the B-movie version of walking through a professional Halloween haunted house.

Director Lior Geller brings an aggressive energy and jittery style to this action movie, but his sketch of a script feels like an all-caps reactive tweet to some news story about MS-13, a real problem in the D.C. area.

The problems may lie in Todd’s novel, but regardless, characters act illogically, as though written by someone who napped through most of Intro to Psych and skipped English 101 altogether. Character motivations go either unwritten or left on the cutting room floor.

Darkness Visible is disjointed and drags out for far too long, but it features some effectively creepy visuals.

Otherhood does have a few genuine and genuinely funny moments — thanks largely to its stars — but they’re overshadowed by the bad behavior of both the mothers and their sons.

Hardcore “Hunter” devotees may enjoy “Last Mission,” but the film lacks much of the good cheer and frisky élan of the broadcast series.

For much of this movie you may find yourself hoping that Zemeckis might somehow recapture the entrancingly macabre spirit of “Death Becomes Her,” still one of his greatest pictures and one of the few in which his flair for ever more outlandish visual effects feels perfectly in sync with the story he’s telling. But despite a few flashes of novelty . . . The Witches is pretty thin brew by comparison, concocted from mostly secondhand ingredients.

With its solid production values, Unplanned has all the appearances of being a real film, but viewers in favor of abortion rights will find it to be pure propaganda. Writer-directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon spend more time making their talking points than developing their characters, who exist merely to make their arguments.

Fans of the real-deal Chucky movies, with their cheerfully low-rent effects and bawdy, impish humor, may well regard this slick new offering as a desecration masquerading as an upgrade. Which is not to say that this Child’s Play is entirely without its brutish, haphazard pleasures.

It is hard to blame the audience for a movie that keeps daring us to envision a richer, funnier, more intelligent and imaginative version of it at every turn.

Spencer succeeds much more than the movie itself does; even when the writing and the filmmaking fail her, which is annoyingly often, she’s awfully good at using her beatific smile and tough-talking charm to elicit your nervous chuckles.

Unlike Medem’s best films, The Tree of Blood feels way too haphazard. It hops freely between timelines and characters, such that it becomes more of a compilation of sensual, stimulating scenes than a movie with anything in particular to say.

Due to the movie’s deliberate lack of narrative arc, thematic stance and clear characterizations (the soldiers feel interchangeable and Logaze’s interview style is weak), we’re never always sure what we’re watching — or why.

The story is thin and merely serviceable at best, and it often feels like the film has barely been written.

In order to make the situation more universal and existential, Raschid keeps the issues and stakes so vague that there’s no way for the characters or story to develop. The film, like its title location, becomes just another featureless box, designed to agitate and confound anyone who enters.

Despite Smaller and Smaller Circles being visually proficient, stagy performances fueled by formulaic dialogue do little to steer the film’s narrative.

While the European locations are picturesque, the cast lacks the chops and charisma to make this collection of killers and thieves imposing. Weight-room-sculpted muscles aside, everyone here comes across like too much of a lightweight — as if they’re just playing pretend.

Unfortunately Marryshow, in his various capacities, has neglected to instill his terminally obnoxious character with a vital shred of audience empathy, let alone to provide sufficient comedic beats that would have better engaged his thoughtfully diverse cast.

From the casting of Centineo to the climax at a school dance, The Perfect Date feels engineered by Netflix algorithms. The resulting film, directed by Chris Nelson, feels as inauthentic and unsure of its identity as its hero.

As long as he maintains his focus on the notoriously private Land and the painstaking efforts of Impossible Project’s chief technology officer and Polaroid vet Stephen Herchen to recapture lightning in an SX-70, Baptist delivers something reasonably compelling. Unfortunately the bulk of the overly artsy production is preoccupied with the exploits of others.

Perhaps he was too distracted by wearing so many hats (Dara also performs the self-penned Once-style ditties on the twee soundtrack), but both he and Lancaster didn’t bother to imbue their sketchy characters with sufficient likability.

Thriller falls back on the old horror formula of bland, often mean-spirited young folks, getting slaughtered one by one … and without near enough flair.

While Feldman — a veteran screenwriter making his directorial debut — brings plenty of storytelling craft to the picture, Know Your Enemy falls short of being as eye-opening as he intends. A strong sense of mystery and two searing lead performances can only counteract so much of the contrivance here.

The new Margot Robbie vehicle Dreamland seems to be about legends, the price of escape, maybe unreliable narrators — but ends up not saying much about any of them.

Amanda Crew and Adam Brody give bracingly realistic performances as a grief-stricken couple in “Isabelle,” a supernatural thriller ultimately too sensationalistic to make proper use of the stars’ excellent work.

The film’s well-made, thick with spooky 17th century atmosphere. But it’s also as dreary as its setting, with little original or exciting to add to an already limited horror sub-genre.

The jaunty, neo-noirish crime outing Lying and Stealing has its moments — chiefly the engaging performances of sexy leads Theo James and Emily Ratajkowski — but is too short on depth and logic to prove much more than a glossy, forgettable trifle.