By the time the film reaches a faith-based, third-act crescendo, Bean, Walsh and company, despite their best efforts, look like they know they've been beaten, while the score's mournful strings wring out whatever pathos remains untapped.

Miles Away comes off like some low-budget take on "Trapped in the Closet" or a Tyler Perry movie, except it treats kitsch with all sincerity and seriousness.

United Passions, with its clashing, production partner-mandated Europudding of accents, fails to find a unifying voice.

The trailer for Pitch Perfect 3 makes it look and sound like a comedy, which puts me in the unfortunate position of announcing that it is nothing of the kind. It's a tragedy in four-part harmony.

Tension is low, pacing uneven and the acting — LaSardo's eerie work aside — proves subpar.

Laughter can break down barriers, but don't count on director Matthew Ladensack to help bridge differences.

Although Beef and Conan are far from stereotypical, the quirkiness and eccentricities ascribed to them by writer-director Kenny Riches harp on their otherness all the same.

Mad Women is punishingly dull and apparently aimless, without any real conflict driving the story, just confounding and ridiculous interactions among the characters.

Rather than sticking with that entirely workable setup, writer-director Martin keeps distractedly flip-flopping back and forth in time leading up to the big heist, preventing the plotting from building any tangible tension.

Although this well-meaning film may appeal to its intended audience on a spiritual level, the result is a sluggish, clinical, largely dreary portrait that tends to mistake trauma for drama.

There's so little urgency, cleverness or romantic comedy zing to this effort from four credited screenwriters (including Oscar winner Ron Bass) that the whole effort seems to run solely on the smiles of its photogenic leads.

With no names given to the characters, you never have to remember them. But it's really best to forget about all of Amnesiac.

The film fails to generate even a shred of suspense or humor as the characters stumble from one forgettable song to the next.

Breaking Through is curiously low-energy, riddled with hackneyed plot devices and weighed down by choreography that doesn't come close to what you'd see on network reality shows.

There isn't a whole lot to the script, and the exasperating direction by Natalie Bible only makes the film look like an extended trailer that teases but never delivers.

To call it amateurish would be kind.

This strained, often crass comedy traffics in broadness and inconsistency far more than anything smart, clever or dimensional. That might be more forgivable if the film was at least funny. It's not.

The aggressively awful London Fields is, once again, proof that not every successful novel should become a movie.

Momentum is a spectacularly generic action-thriller that, despite its sleekly shot and edited mayhem, lands with a giant thud.

The film slowly, painfully declines from merely oddball to awful, with vapid dialogue and muddy character motivations, particularly where Woll's unsympathetic Alice is concerned.

The supernatural thriller The Forest begins with an intriguing premise and fun, ghost story-type potential but quickly devolves into convoluted hokum that produces more laughs than scares.

There's such mechanical artifice at work that it's hard to do more than squirm and groan at the couple's ultimate travails.

Leachman's facility with the wackadoodle senior is ever-admirable, but even she can't save the low-energy, charm-free thud that is This Is Happening.

Shark Lake lacks bite. Its audience doesn't even get to revel in blood and guts; the whole thing seems like it was edited for broadcast.

A leaden-paced film that only followers of Okawa could enjoy.

At no point do the filmmakers seem to evince any real interest in the emotional misery they inflict on their characters; trauma here is just the quickest means to an uplifting end, or in this case, a montage’s worth of wretched epiphanies.

Even if the world had been clamoring for yet another "Step Up"-type hip hop dance movie, it wouldn't be Dancin' It's On!, an inept knockoff that proves every bit as clunky as its punctuation-challenged title.

The pacing of the individual scenes and the direction of the actors feel so clunky and amateurish, you may wonder after a while if “The Space Between Us” is meant to indicate the yawning emotional chasm between the actors, struggling to connect across a galaxy’s worth of wretched dialogue.

It's tough to stomach in more ways than one.... A capricious, counterintuitive narrative also renders the film nearly unwatchable.

Since his due-diligence efforts were rebuffed by the American Dental Assn. and the Food and Drug Administration in their declining of interview requests, director Randall Moore doubles down on the already ex parte narrative with heavy-handed editorializing.

Director Steven C. Miller, working off a script by Max Adams and Umair Aleem, keeps things moving at a breakneck pace in an attempt, it seems, to help mask the film's convoluted plotting, one-note performances and bad dialogue.

This is grim and witless storytelling, and what makes it so depressing is that it hasn't improved by so much as a chemical trace since the days of the first "Rocky."

It feels like a bad parody, a shadow of what a film is, not an actual film itself. The color palette is a dreary mud puddle of grays and browns, and there’s no sense of space or geography. It has no weight, no heft, no texture, no color, no sense of magic or wonder in the least. The story itself has no sense of stakes or resonance, and the actors vary in affect from lifeless to dutiful to pained.

It doesn't help that what passes for acting here seems more like a table read.

The most disappointing thing is that Nine Lives doesn’t even dare to be an audacious mess. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of Hollywood’s worst instincts, a movie made with a math formula where its vision should have been.

Agron's screenplay and Harvey Lowry's direction seem more concerned with scattering bread crumbs than fashioning credible characters and an engaging story.

Despite its connotation of sun-drenched sensuality, Rio, I Love You is a dispiritingly dull affair.

Gray and listless, the Anthony Hopkins/Ray Liotta-starrer Blackway is a vengeance tale set in a cold, foggy Pacific Northwest logging town where clichés are as prevalent as trees.

[An] uninspired, nonsensical mishmash, which crudely cobbles together second-hand religious imagery, abrasively noisy jump-scares, and — for some reason — techno-phobia.

Sundown is a distressingly sexist and tone-deaf spring break sex comedy cobbled together from references to other classic party films and sounds as though it was written by aliens approximating teen speak.

The biggest problem with Most Likely to Die, though — beyond it being unimaginative, unfunny and frightless — is that it has no sense of place or time.

Cursed with obnoxiously broad characters and nonsensical plotting, A Bit of Bad Luck is an intended backwoods satire that runs hopelessly off-course from the outset.

It’s a color-by-numbers thriller that’s flat.

Italian writer-director Francesco Cinquemani, in his feature debut, has essentially done a cut-and-paste job, assembling a thoroughly uninvolving, tension-free futuristic sci-fi thriller.

This tedious picture botches both the setup and the punchline.

The film’s prevailing theme may be that nothing is black and white, but the execution, with its strident lobbyists, salt-of-the-earth farmers and onscreen admonition to “investigate before you donate,” proves spottier than a kennel full of caged Dalmatians.

While your brain tries to wrap around that element of the fantasy, Basir flubs his big point about fate, choices and paths — that no matter our lives, we face the chance to change for good or bad — by embracing all the clichés he can find, then filming them without nuance or style.

Noah’s awkward, unconvincing script aside, Lewis is the true weak link here as he struggles to sell Max’s wobbly lines and emotions. This is a thoroughly painful experience.

That the World War II-era drama Ithaca was directed by actress Meg Ryan may prove the most notable yet least successful thing about this oppressively sentimental journey.

Any movie that leeches the perverse fun out of illicit voyeurism, then tosses in a grim gotcha of an ending to make everyone feel worse, when the kids’ actions are distasteful enough, is worth avoiding.

The jokes aren’t especially clever, and the story’s too cluttered, adding characters that range from an aloof poodle (with a French accent, naturally) to a blustery American monkey (no comment) to a cute alien.

Dull and drab, the film squanders an attractive young cast and a killer title.

The Hollow Point is all hollow, no point.

The script from Billy Morrissette — featuring disappearing narration, awful characters and no humor — is largely to blame, but director Anthony Edwards makes uninspired choices throughout, such as inserting random animated characters and allowing Gina Gershon to do a cartoonish French accent in a supporting role.

It’s the same dreary hooey, made more tedious and witless through repetition.

Animated comic book panels hint at an attempt at style, but bad camerawork captures bad performances of bad dialogue.

Enjoy a marathon of Bravo’s real estate reality shows for more nuanced characters and compelling story lines instead.

Martin and Coffa may bear a strong physical resemblance to their real-life counterparts, but their contemporary-sounding line delivery has all the dramatic heft of a Foster’s beer commercial.

Blind stumbles with unlikable characters and a lack of depth, leaving audiences simply wishing for its ending, happy or not.

A staged kidnapping isn’t the only thing that goes from botched to worse where the tone-deaf black comedy-thriller Get the Girl is concerned.

The main achievement of The Institute is that its cast kept straight faces long enough to shoot this risible gothic chiller. A

It’s crisply shot but suffers from poor, amateurish editing, an overwrought dramatic score and the storytelling fails to compel. The acting, writing and directing of American Violence indicate this flick is strictly a B-movie, but its tone is far too self-serious to have any fun with at all.

Ghost of New Orleans, by Serbian director Peter (Predrag) Atonijevic, is a laughably pretentious crime caper-supernatural thriller hybrid that comes up woefully lacking on both fronts.

This lifeless serving of soggy pulp packs all the gritty authenticity of a gummy vitamin.

Patagonian landscapes in 16 mm and Hollywood real estate shot in 35 mm provide a visually sleek backdrop for mighty uninteresting relationships in the pretentious indie Somewhere Beautiful.

What makes Ed such a dreary experience is that literally no one here seems to be trying--someone came up with the hey-let's-put-a-monkey-in-funny-outfits idea and no more creative meetings were called.

Do little? They could not have done less. The only appropriate adjective for this Dolittle is “hasty.” Everything feels slapdash and half-rendered; the plot proceeds in a fashion that could be described only as perfunctory. Everyone on screen seems to be in a stumbling daze, especially Downey as the frazzle-dazzled doctor.

The Eyes is a talky, set-bound drama masquerading as a suspense picture, and nearly the entire movie consists of overwritten, overacted, visually inert confrontations and monologues.

From start to finish, Black Rose is about as pro forma as a motion picture gets.

While a lot of gunfire ensues, Jesse Gustafson’s mechanical direction and Guy Stevenson’s cut-and-paste script shoot laughably hollow blanks.

The flaws of Nola Circus aren’t limited to its outrageous and offensive approach. It’s that it never succeeds in bringing viewers onto its wavelength, which is probably a good thing for humanity’s sake.

This mess never knows whether it’s a mob movie or a raunchy comedy.

A wincingly unfunny comedy caper.

First-time feature-director Jonathan Baker keeps the pace too slack and the tone too earnest — and sometimes fails to convey basic visual information about what’s happening.

The time-travel stoner comedy Ripped blows a potentially funny idea on slapdash filmmaking and lazy storytelling. If much of this overly broad eye-roller wasn’t made up on the fly, it sure looks that way.

Unfortunately, the worst fault in this horror movie isn’t the amateur performances, beginner-level editing or the special effects; it’s the dreadfully dumb script.

The Upside was probably never going to be a good movie, but it needn’t have been such an unfortunate, spectacularly ill-timed one, the victim of circumstances it ultimately has neither the wit nor the imagination to transcend.

Love of God and dog can be powerful things, but in this uncinematic telling, they fail to inspire.

Grimly unfunny comedy needs all the help that it can get. It's so bad it doesn't deserve the boost a Hanks nomination for Big may give it.

By the time one of the gun-toting members of Team Snipes growls “Let’s finish this!” viewers would be hard-pressed to disagree.

Somehow worse than its ridiculous title, Awaken the Shadowman is sillier than it is scary.

Although the reliable Cooper (taking over the role from Henry Cavill) and the rest of the cast...valiantly do battle against the thunderous score, they’re ultimately unable to pump up a dreary mission that fails to adhere to the most basic rules of audience engagement.

Eddie Murphy's latest is a flabby disappointment. The jokes die, the action curdles. Much of it falls as flat as smashed tinsel.

There’s barely a convincing — or amusing — situation or interaction, including the film’s climactic nuptials, which also turn fatally contrived.

Have I changed so much that I can't find this funny anymore? Nah. Broken Lizard hasn't changed enough to keep up with the times, turning in a badly degraded copy of the original. Stale, unfunny and offensive is quite the hat trick.

While there are some cool creature effects and committed, physical performances by the actors playing the monsters, the movie’s worst sin isn’t the found-footage rules it ignores. Instead it breaks the cardinal rule of the larger horror genre, running 95 minutes without a single scare or moment of dread.

In a wicked mess of unmatched water shots and dreadful interior airplane sequences, the characters outlined in little blue halos, the performances range from the mortifying to the merely immemorable. Against all odds, Lance Guest and Karen Young manage to be warm and credible. Podgy but game, Michael Caine, bravely attempts mouth-to-mouth resusitation on a role which is little more than anecdotes strung together. It is not his finest hour.

There are occasionally atmospheric shots of depopulated boardwalks and streets, but the strain to give the visuals meaning becomes its own clue in the worst crime committed here: the killing of good storytelling.

The director gives the audience a story that takes off in as many directions as the prison corridors, leaving us lost and dazed. But unlike the characters, the viewers never feel a moment of fear.

Richard Gabai’s film is too preoccupied corralling all the genre clichés to come up with anything original or compelling.

Faith comes naturally, but complexity does not for Ty Manns’ script, which plays like a first draft, one written from a manual and riddled with two-dimensional characters and on-the-nose dialogue.

The overstuffed production feels as tediously incessant as its endless winter.

Based on the dubious, and occasionally eye-rolling responses from the majority of those being pitched, the plan would appear to be as ill-conceived as Surviving Peace itself.

The end result comes across less as a bona fide, issue-oriented documentary than a package of company profiles.

On the movie's feeble plus side are Richard Gant's acting (as the coroner), Manfredini's music and one funny joke in the last half-minute. On the minus side: ludicrous characters. Garbled nonstop gore. Persistent loud, clanging noises that give you the impression of being trapped inside a malfunctioning radiator. Shadowy lighting that makes you feel as if you're staggering around in the dark. [16 Aug 1993, p.F3]

The self-seriousness of this loony swing-and-a-miss shares a tone with Tommy Wiseau’s outrageously amateurish cult classic “The Room” but isn’t nearly as entertaining.

For all of the mini-melodramas that populate this tale, and the repellent ickiness in the central relationship, the worst part about Almost Friends is how incredibly dull and dramatically inert it is.

The lack of any real imagination makes Attack of the Killer Donuts a chore.