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.