There’s real ugliness here, with the creative torture visited on the victims being enough to unsettle all but the most hardened of horror fans. Unfortunately, the ugliness isn’t solely in the on-screen violence. Transphobia and misogyny flow through the film as much as blood, staining what might have been a solid genre effort.

The modestly watchable, at times intriguing romantic mystery Intersection is never quite skillful or convincing enough to forget for even a moment how many far better haunted hunk-meets-femme fatale thrillers have come before it.

Sam Firstenberg--a decent enough action director who's shepherded along three previous ninja movies--here has a story so preposterous that nothing short of a mutiny could make the movie work.

There’s some well-crafted dialogue and decent acting, including from Joseph R. Sicari as a besieged producer. But this overly talky and stagey film, which takes place mostly in Colt’s hotel room and trailer — and frustratingly off-set — lacks the requisite catharsis and charisma to sufficiently engage.

Christian Audigier the Vif lacks the strong narrative structure that would make it a better documentary, and it often skips details about Audigier’s life and experience that might have offered deeper insight into the designer.

Gutierrez is ultimately too enamored of his quasi-feminist, visually convulsive upending of damsel myths to let his actors enjoy themselves the way De Palma or Dario Argento would.

Given the script’s basic dialogue and narrow characterizations, it’s fortunate that there’s such an evocative locale to help us further imagine the lives of the film’s idiosyncratic folks.

In most ways, a sequel-as-usual: a little warmer, with slightly less zip and flurry.

Actor-turned-director Peter Facinelli makes his behind-the-camera debut, and beyond the film’s many script issues, it’s not entirely without its charms. Peter and Daisy might not make sense, but Gibson and Hinson almost sell it with strong chemistry.

Judy Greer, the wonderful film and TV actress, makes an inauspicious directing debut with this unevenly paced, tonally awkward comedy.

Jungle Cruise, despite its more-than-capable leads and its much-vaunted attention to detail and verisimilitude, never feels transporting in the way that even mediocre blockbusters were once able to muster. It’s less an expedition than a simulation, a dispatch from a wild yet oddly pristine world where seeing is never close to believing.

Hope Springs Eternal is fine as a leading role for Frampton, who has had small supporting roles in bigger projects such as “Bridesmaids,” but her star power far exceeds the boundaries of this limited project.

Other than Shaw's turn, which gets dampened in the determinedly frolicsome finale, there's little to like in Three Men and a Little Lady. Selleck is charming. Danson, aided by latex and a Carmen Miranda outfit, has two funny scenes. Travis has a lovely smile, which she overuses.

Writer Dennis Marks and producer/directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera can't seem to decide whether they're making a with-it musical for teen-agers or re-creating the ingenuous humor of a '60s TV show, and don't do either very well.

There's something sordid about the way the filmmakers offer up this -- shall we say questionable -- entertainment as a refreshment. [4 Feb 1994, p.C-15]

Barney looks both more real and more magical on video; on film, he's clearly a doofus in a felt outfit.

A heavyweight cast and superb location-shooting carries The Padre, an otherwise meandering crime thriller.

Flipper is push-button family filmmaking that could have used a stronger sense of porpoise. Plotwise, it ain't much.

Although it comes under the increasingly crowded category of Why Did They Bother, McHale's Navy does offer an example of a movie that tries to be all things to all people. As long as they're 13 and male.

Alfonso Arau's romantic fable A Walk in the Clouds is so confounding a miscalculation that its every development causes your jaw to drop in sheer amazement.

The film is loud and labored--its sense of adventure kicking in so late that it scarcely matters. [12 Feb 1999, p.F15]

As the film’s sole director, writer and subject, Wang could have used some distance from the material.

Screenwriter Robert Siegel’s second directorial outing is better as an exercise in nostalgia than as a film, but it deserves some praise for its faithful recreation of a time and a place.

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.