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.