The true mistreatment is directed toward the moviegoer, who has to endure enough stale pseudo-shocks, empty atmospherics, explanatory mumbo-jumbo and personality-free acting that it's hard not to think of viewing Dark Summer as running-time served.

Tiu finds absolutely nothing redeemable in Cissy's upbringing. Her wholesale rejection of her parents' values isn't the enlightenment filmmakers would have you believe; it's internalized racism — conditioned by a lifetime of exposure to stereotypical depictions and cultural colonialism — to think that Asians' heritage and culture necessarily deprive them of happiness and fulfillment.

As written, directed and played by Swartzwelder, Clay is such a self-absorbed, judgmental jerk that anyone who would willingly subject themselves to his endless pontificating could rival Anastasia Steele in the masochism department.

Treehouse is a lackluster backwoods thriller that takes far too long to get — well, not very far. There's more tension in a round of Final Jeopardy.

With Snyder-Starr producing the film, My Way impresses as an exercise in narcissism.

Even if you do manage to make sense of the plot, it still doesn't make the film any more watchable.

Between plot and character, there are definitely 18 holes in The Squeeze.

Quale and his crew clearly want this to be a good old-fashioned two-fisted caper, but the pacing is leaden and the plot lacks imagination. Worst of all, nobody really bothered to give the picture an angle. It’s all straight, flat and dull.

Screenwriter Max Enscoe and director Basel Owies — enamored of twists at the expense of logic and character — might as well have made a clip reel of their favorite cat-and-mouse movies, because their fever-pitch story is as tension-free, transparently obvious and ludicrous as they come.

With the excruciating gal-pal comedy Apartment Troubles, writer-director-stars Jess Weixler and Jennifer Prediger have created such blurry, unappealing characters that their film is hamstrung from the get-go.

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.