There's likely an audience for the cloying and dizzying hip-hop dance flick Battlefield America, but even the most forgiving viewers may feel like they've been underestimated - and underserved.

Unbalanced storytelling aside, Ozeki wisely works to keep the film focused on his actors.

There is an interesting kernel of a story about beauty, betrayal and brutality inside each of the film's scenarios and a cast that could handle anything thrown at it. But the kernel never pops, and all we're really left with is a whole lot of neo-noir corn.

The film feels overstuffed and overcooked, as if the filmmaker were trying to get too much out all in one go.

Writer-director John Chuldenko stretches a sitcom episode premise to feature-length breaking point in Nesting.

Director/co-writer Adam Sherman's Bukowski-lite character study is one of those exercises in masculine self-pity and glib misogyny that frustrates because of its shortsightedness.

The film is ultimately a stodgy, overblown and repetitive slog.

Long on atmosphere and short on sense, The Tall Man becomes less gripping as it grows more ridiculous.

Starts out as an agreeable, playfully off-color comedy of contemporary domestic manners and loses course to become a slack, tacky slapstick.

It is a disappointment coming from writer-director David Cronenberg, who has proved such a master at mind games. Cronenberg is perhaps too faithful to the book. The topic is provocative and certainly timely, but the film never achieves the incisive power of his best work, "A History of Violence" for one. Even an A-list ensemble that includes Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti can't save it.

Some of the language is smart, sinister and ironic in just the right ways, particularly when Addison, Eric Bana's serial-killing mastermind, delivers it. In other cases, the dialogue is so ludicrously off - either unnecessary, or unnecessarily misogynistic if a cop is doing the talking - that it's hard to believe the same person wrote it.

Had V/H/S been a nasty jolt of three, it might have been memorable, but at nearly two hours, the gimmick punctures a hole in itself, causing ambience bleed-out. Recommended cure: a tripod

A movie with a location named Snake Island should deliver more fun than this.

Unfortunately, attempts to be original are not enough, they have to succeed, and this film's solutions tend to present themselves as alternately gimmicky and banal.

The film is only slightly more boorish than the racy cult hit was on telly and would probably not be worth the celluloid expended were it not for the bookish, brainy Will McKenzie (Simon Bird).

Why Stop Now? feels trapped in the limbo between comedy and drama where many indies gamely venture, but from which few emerge with any resonance.

Though one enjoys and appreciates Rush for what it is, it does not thrill the blood the way we have the right to expect a film like this to do.

Though individual set pieces are well done, the film inevitably leaves an empty taste behind it once it's done.

It is billed as a comedy, but it's really a lipstick-smeared drunken tragedy. The humor is so caustic you won't know whether to laugh or cry.

It's terribly long and repetitive for so delicately dreamy a diptych, and at times the modern-day story feels like little more than a drawn-out apologia for the wandering male gaze.

Melton and Dunstan have created little more than a hollow shell for an empty box.

Romance and capers exist in Lay the Favorite, they just aren't played well.

Amiable and upbeat though it is, the documentary Hollywood to Dollywood lacks a compelling reason to see it. Unless you are a Dolly Parton zealot, which its two protagonists definitely are.

All the talking would be fine, but the dialogue is preachy, the drama too earnest and the action kind of sluggish, though it's hard not to get a jolt when Johnson jumps behind the wheel.

Really the biggest problem with Dark Skies is that Stewart can never quite decide just what story he is telling — a slow-burn horror parable or paranoid invasion flick — or whether to focus on this character or that, instead struggling to string together scares regardless of how they fit together overall.

Though it's nice to see Smurfette get her due, the whole endeavor feels tired and tiring.

An investment in theatrical self-indulgence with diminishing returns.

We're the Millers is full of moments that feel as forced as the marriage of convenience — and contrivance — in the movie.