Haunting almost serves as a reverse image of a successful film, demonstrating by what it lacks exactly what is needed to do things right. [23 July 1999, p.F15]

For the most part, Cats is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious. Every so often it does paws — ahem, pause — to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot.

Director George Gallo, taking a cue from his 1991 film, “29th Street,” romanticizes everything in a nostalgic glow, but without a sturdier script featuring fully dimensional characters at his disposal, the performances prove to be as unconvincing as their ethnic accents and period wigs.

This is a film that’s better off unseen despite its lovely visuals.

Riddled with as many plot holes as those highways and byways have potholes, the heavy-handed writing and direction, with its awkward close-ups and purposeful, sustained takes does its cast few favors.

The script from director Scott Smith and co-writer Kevin Guilfoile thinks the rivalry between the two collectors is enough to sustain the narrative, but it doesn’t devote much of its energies to developing the relationship between Alan and Paul.

A proverbial whimper of a finale, Freddy's Dead, the sixth in the series, feels like the product of people who have no vested interest in keeping their franchise alive...You notice almost immediately how underpopulated the movie feels--by ideas, by special effects, even by phobic young cast members waiting to fall asleep and be slaughtered.

Actress and screenwriter Jessalyn Maguire brings her own challenges with anxiety and depression to both the lead role and the script, but the good intentions don’t create a good film with this psychology-driven drama.

Writer-director Nathaniel Atcheson has found a clever way to tell a lot of story without many resources — although the end result is still more exhausting than enticing.

Taking aim at American society’s seriously broken criminal justice system, Iroc Daniels’ well-intentioned multi-character drama The System compensates in compassion for what it lacks in a more accomplished delivery.

Raising awareness of social injustice is a good goal, but not enough to hold an audience’s attention.

Problem is, filmmaker Martin can’t seem to decide whether he’s making a tribute or a send-up, and the overlong, yet under-plotted, results, with awkward close-ups and prolonged, flatly delivered exchanges, take their toll.

The story veers off track, and Rokesh can’t cleanly execute the wild tonal shifts and haphazard story beats.

The biggest mystery in the serial-killer thriller Night Hunter isn’t the identity of a super-predator, or the location of his abductees. The real question here is how such a preposterous compendium of crime movie clichés could attract a heavyweight cast.

If nothing else, The Church proves something: Better an amusingly terrible, eye-catching horror movie than a slick, nondescript, boring one.

A dialogue polishing by Barker, plus his own direction, might have made a crucial difference. What it got instead was a script inescapably convoluted by the need to justify a third sequel...Like the other sequels, Hellraiser: Bloodline goes in for elaborate special effects and decor, but the film is murky and morbid, laden with a heavy dose of grisly sadomasochism that's more repellent than intriguing.

Strong lead performances by Aaron Paul and Emily Ratajkowski are squandered in Welcome Home, a low-tension suspense picture with pretensions of saying something profound about broken relationships.

Director John Pogue brings some grit and energy to the action sequences, but ultimately Blood Brother is just a compendium of pulp clichés, with nothing to say about these characters or the worlds they inhabit.

At every turn in Speed Kills, director Jodi Scurfield and a team of screenwriters sand the edges off a complicated, multi-decade saga, making a featureless knockoff of seemingly every sweeping true-crime movie of the past three decades.

A sluggish film that incessantly tries but never quite hits its big-as-a-barn emotional targets.

It’s better than a number of indie films in its craft — particularly the thoughtfully composed cinematography from Kieran Murphy — but a flawed script ultimately keeps it from eking out a win.

Write When You Get Work doesn’t work. Not as a romance, not as a Robin Hood-tinged caper flick, not as a social commentary on racial inequity or classism, and not as a male-buddy picture — all elements director Stacy Cochran attempts to wedge into her often muddled, under-focused script.

Clumsy and corny, the film plays like a pat showbiz cautionary tale, half-heartedly reworked into lurid pulp.

Oliver Parker’s Swimming with Men is a lazily formulaic male-bonding comedy.

It’s a potentially warm and delicate story that required a scalpel, but saw the blunt end of a sledgehammer instead.

The characters, the plot, and — unfortunately — the star are all interchangeable with the elements of hundreds of other international thrillers.

Despite a skillful use of color, lighting, framing and music, the movie’s artificiality might have played in a short film but becomes tedious and pretentious when stretched to 90 minutes.

With scares at a minimum, Astral relies heavily on its young cast, who are all likable and charismatic. Dillane and Idris and the others are undoubtedly destined to appear someday in movies and TV shows far more memorable than this one.

Though Krings co-wrote and co-directed the film (the latter alongside Arnaud Bouron), “Tall Tales” lacks his usual gentle kookiness and vivid designs.

Despite scads of stiff exposition and constant proclamations of Salvador’s genius, the brash, eccentric, weirdly mustachioed artist remains an elusive and puzzling force. That he’s played, unconvincingly from teen years to death, by an often annoying Joan Carreras doesn’t help.

It might have made for an inspired college paper thesis, but as a documentary, The Gilligan Manifesto, which attempts to draw a direct link between “Gilligan’s Island” and the Communist Manifesto, is conceptually shipwrecked well before completing its one-and-a-half-hour tour.

8 Remains has a cool premise, but director Juliane Block and screenwriter Laura Sommer (with dialogue assistance from Wolf-Peter Arand) treat it more as a metaphor than as a storytelling opportunity.

There’s clear affection for the ocean and its inhabitants in “Bernie the Dolphin,” but the movie’s script from Terri Emerson and Marty Poole is on the level of educational placards at a second-rate aquarium. It’s informative, but there’s little entertainment in director Kirk Harris’ film.

The story almost feels like an afterthought, whipped up to support the spectacle — and not, as it should always be, the other way around.

A movie that very quickly becomes yet another story about people with guns chasing other people with guns, through featureless forests and abandoned buildings.

Garrison’s McNeely damns the overlong film; he’s neither a good man nor a good character, someone that we can’t care about or care to watch.

Even genre buffs will be disappointed by how minor-league this movie is.

Experimental, yes, but this one wildly overstays its welcome.

It’s a valiant but awkward effort.

This is the same dopey save-the-princess-and-kill-everybody revenge plot we always get. The Return of Swamp Thing is enough to drive you back to the comic book stand. Or even the swamp.

Beyond its theme of the power of God’s love, Run the Race centers on the importance of forgiveness. Viewers who can overlook its flaws will find value in its message, but those outside its target demo will be unable to see beyond its cinematic sins.

The fights are leaden, so when a movie’s bid for historical verisimilitude has already stopped at backlot-acceptable, and the character development is constrained by dumb dialogue, such meager tending-to of an Asian action flick’s primary draw is nigh unforgivable.

The premise is effectively eerie; the presentation depressingly sloppy.

Here is a satire about government and business corruption that's as empty, corrupt and manipulative as everything it attacks: a frantic, jokeless comedy about selling out, that sells out itself constantly. This is another big, dumb, pointless picture, a "high concept" movie that's all concept and no movie.

[Martini's] filmmaking instincts, undercut by the script’s meandering, episodic structure, prove too self-indulgent and heavy-handed to tell the kind of emotionally involving tale about post-traumatic stress disorder among returning soldiers that he clearly had in mind.

Margolin says we should “fight with ideas,” but Jihadists misses an opportunity to make vivid how that method of struggle would look.

It’s an eminently missable, cliché-ridden affair.

There's nothing dopier than the crooks in one-against-a-hundred action movies -- except maybe the people who cook them up. [12 Feb 1990, p.F8]

A committed cast fails to elevate Beneath the Leaves, an otherwise draggy and derivative thriller.

Its timely messages become muted amid a kaleidoscope of settings, characters, brusque action scenes, blunt speechifying and wan romance.

As it sputters toward its curtain-exposing conclusion, “Level 16” stays disappointingly thin, both as a dark-future cautionary saga and a genre exercise.

Remarkably, the new Netflix movie takes the same pathetic approach. It’s as if the film arrived to the streaming service in a bubble, unaware that the culture has moved on and that Netflix is brimming with content written, directed and starring strong women. In this horribly timed release, the debasement of multiple women is supposed to be all in fun — and funny, because The Crüe is having a good time and it’s rock ’n’ roll, baby!

This is a two-sentence movie. In cases like this, you're lucky to get three sentences' worth of dramatic development. Like here.

The new erotic thriller that somehow manages to make voyeurism seem about as exciting as one of Cher's infomercials.

Poor Demi Moore — playing the self-centered CEO of a failing company — comes off as stiff and shrill, setting the tone for a movie that’s stilted from start to finish.

It takes a peculiar kind of ineptitude to cast an actor as good as Michael B. Jordan and wind up with something as decidedly not good as Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse.

Chokehold provides a poorly written and terribly acted framework as a thin context for the action.

Coming 2 America is the rare sequel whose title sounds identical to the original, which may be the cleverest thing about it.

For roughly two-thirds of its running time, the big-screen video game adaptation Monster Hunter feels like an attempt to answer a question no one has asked: What would the “Jurassic Park” movies be like if they were drained of all sense of wonder? The film rallies toward the end with a few genuinely spectacular images, but even its best scenes fail to justify a tedious first hour.

This is a well-intentioned movie; it's just not a well-made one.

2050 has a meaningful subject, but is so dialogue-heavy and incident-light that almost the entire film feels like a pitch for the movie Holt didn’t make.

As bland as its title, Something is a horror film with few scares and a mystery without answers.

There are grief dramas, and there are wacky family comedies, and there are films about charming screw-ups, but the degree of difficulty for one film to pull off all three at once is incredibly high. The disjointed “Pretty Broken,” written by Jill Remesnyder and directed by Brett Eichenberger, doesn’t clear the bar.

Ultimately coming across more like a bloated, corporate infomercial, Beers of Joy will undoubtedly leave only those who know their ABV (Alcohol by Volume) from their IBU (International Bittering Units) thirsty for more.

Bryon’s real experience is certainly incredible, but Nattiv’s in-your-face approach to every scene — literally so, since the frame is rarely anything but a sloppy, unimaginative close-up — strips this character study of believability, or any nuance or gathering power.

One could imagine a context in which some of this belabored mayhem might be funny, maybe a dinner-theater stage with lots of booze and a strong audience-participation element. Seen from the vantage of your living room, however, the spectacle of Aniston and Sandler bumbling their way through one strained, busy set-piece after another becomes a deflating, even depressing experience.

Perfect also shows that striking images alone aren’t always enough. Alcazar and cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser have concocted some fine illustrations. Now all they need is some decent text.

There’s something special here, but it’s surrounded by drudgery.

These kind of indie neo-noirs can be little gems when done well. Here though, directors Kevin and Michael Goetz and screenwriter Michael Arkof have delivered something largely devoid of style or narrative tension.

A dispiritingly familiar story.

Short on cultural specificity or distinctive attributes, “Maria” is utterly universal in the most discouraging manner.

It’s not the clumsiness of the filmmaking that rankles so much as the hypocrisy.

Even with solid supporting performances by Morgan Freeman, Robert Patrick and Peter Stormare, this movie’s just … well, sad. Twenty-five years ago, this exact cast and creative team might have turned this material into something to rival “Harper” or “Body Heat.” Now, they all seem slower and lazier: as committed to making a taut mystery as they are to mastering a Texas drawl.

The cast is talented — and occasionally funny — but they run out of fertile material quickly.

The film is content to sluggishly go through its preordained paces without bothering to take any compelling detours.

This is another memorable Doleac effort, true — but it’s more painfully awkward than daring.

Watching Tank Girl is as disorienting as waking up in someone else's bad dream. You want to get out as fast as possible, but all the exits seem to be blocked.

Not even a winning lead performance by Andrew Lawrence can keep this film from feeling as dreary and programmatic as a PSA.

Often, trying too hard to be edgy sails right past offensive and just hits boring. Sherman, amazingly, manages to nail both.

It approaches everything from suicide to Socrates with a facile touch, dealing with serious issues with an almost startling lack of depth and intelligence.

A frenetically unfunny and charmless movie.

Switch witchcraft for werewolves, and the hackneyed plot of Teen Witch could easily be that of Teen Wolf or a dozen others like it.

As The Fourth Protocol begins at the outside and curls its way into the center of its wildly complex plot, it becomes almost a "Saturday Night Live" spy spoof. We're saturated with detail: Where will the nested Russian folk-art dolls, the visiting violinist's patent-leather shoes and the American Air Force officer's randy wife fit into the Greater Scheme of Things? Gradually, as our eyes glaze over, it becomes very hard to care--and even harder to suppress a giggle.

The whole film is a bizarre exercise in fantasy-building on a budget, from the computer-generated sets to the over-long, predictable story.

The most shamelessly manipulative movie since they shot the dog in "The Biscuit Eater."

Almost any movie with Molly Ringwald at its centerpiece has a built-in plus to it. The wonder about For Keeps is that not even Ringwald's customary glow and bedrock believability make a smidgen of difference. Muddled it is and muddled it remains.

Though Skin in the Game is earnest in its attempts to shed light on human trafficking, the good intentions are buried under a thick layer of grime from its trashy script.

A gutter ball of a sophomoric, white middle-age male sex farce fantasy that quickly wears out an already tenuous welcome.

The Hunt lacks the courage of its presumed convictions, displaying no more than a determination to make as much cash as possible by exploiting national divisions less covetous individuals are despairing of rather than monetizing.

A dull, routine action-adventure in which the suspense is mechanical at best. Although there are a couple of gory moments, those expecting the jolts director Sean Cunningham brought to the original "Friday the 13th" are sure to be disappointed.

The director has been able to do nothing with this wheezing script, one of the subplots of which involves Dempsey's dad believing that his son is gay. And the movie's moments of physical farce are mortifying...What makes "Loverboy"(rated PG-13 for sexual situations) such a pitiful waste is that Dempsey has so much potential charm.

Flay is, at its core, just an OK indie drama about a bickering brother and sister, with some blah supernatural hooey clumsily appended.

Repetitive lyrics, nonsensical camera angles and incomprehensible edits will leave viewers feeling anything but positive.

The movie was inspired by a real person but nearly everything that happens here plays as phony.

Lundgren can play these kinds of driven, tortured loners in his sleep. But he still needs a story worth telling, in eye-catching locations, with action sequences that pop. “The Tracker” has none of those three.

While “Mean Girls Apocalypse” sounds like a winning premise, and an incredible thought experiment, the result is something narratively slack and intensely off-putting, which no amount of excellent acting can save.

For all its loaded potential to evolve into a gripping look at life in a correctional facility plus an atypical spin on gay longing, the film squanders much of its running time with thin, repetitive scenes of young men behaving badly.

While Moop might appeal to the Burning Man die-hard set, or for aficionados of the tales of doomed, Sisyphean film productions, beyond that, it’s not much more than a minor curio.