It’s a painfully minor movie that doubles as an accidental study in how pros handle themselves when given less-than-challenging material.

Thompson and Brosnan really are fine romantic foils. They deserve a better movie to trade barbs in. They deserve better barbs to trade.

The misused cast is just one of many examples of the unrealized potential of Life After Beth, a film that has good bones, but not enough meat, guts, or—most damningly for a zombie movie—brains.

Everyone’s there to get the job done, Dolph Lundgren style, meaning Skin Trade is a throwback to the one-man-army actioners of the ’80s, sprinkled with updated stats on human trafficking. If the film happens to raise awareness, then that’s more bonus than objective.

St. Vincent is even sappier and more committed to yanking heartstrings and manipulating emotions than Hyde Park On Hudson or The Monuments Men, and ultimately even more precious and treacly.

Despite the talent involved and the notoriety of the source material, Carrie feels strangely small, even television-sized.

Superficiality reigns here. Arguably, that should dominate a movie about a fashion designer. But fashion shows run 10-20 minutes, not two and a half hours.

For No Good Reason is an absolute mess from start to finish, a portrait of an artist that’s almost rendered redundant by his art. And yet, for all its failings, the film is engagingly in tune with the man who inspired it.

Will Bakke’s Believe Me is a textbook lesson in how glossy cinematography and an appealing cast can compensate for an undercooked script.

Church’s indelible character study can only carry this wan, skeletal picture so far.

Generally speaking, the more obscure the fetish, the worse the subplot gets, though they all wear out their one-joke welcome before Lawson inevitably turns up the sentiment and makes the film about love and kids and happy unions.

The Green Prince relates gripping events in a doggedly subdued manner, via direct-to-camera interviews and dramatic re-creations.

Within the limitation of their roles, all the actors do solid work... but the movie’s tone is doggedly, almost noxiously sincere, verging on downright moist.

Accidental Love isn’t very good—and might never have been very good, judging from the general air of desperation—but much of it is identifiably Russell’s work, and its scattered best moments recall Huckabees’ inspired loopiness.

There’s just not much of real import in this quasi-historical semi-thriller.

Despite a handsome production and two genuinely brilliant lead performances, The Theory Of Everything stumbles into virtually every pitfall that afflicts biopics about geniuses.

Though the pacing is lumpy, to say the least, Blackhat occasionally bursts to life when Mann breaks out one of his signature action setpieces, which have the distinct pop of heavy artillery and the immediacy of video.

Life Of A King manages to sustain a hilariously over-the-top tone of naked sincerity from start to finish.

While her film abjectly fails in reconciling its modest ambitions with its ungainly story, Bercot was certainly right to trust that Deneuve’s compulsive watchability—and her palpable connection to the part—would be enough to anchor this otherwise weightless coming-of-old-age saga.

The grafting of Greek tragedy to Malickian detail isn’t naturalistic or authentic, it’s absurd, and repeated to tiresome effect throughout the film.

It’s a handsome disappointment, fast food masquerading as fine dining.

It deserves credit for avoiding the conventions of romantic comedies and defying audience expectations, but only to a degree. Instead of hitting the expected notes and beats, Drinking Buddies instead ambles sideways. It’s headed nowhere in particular, but at least the voyage is pleasant.

The film feels more thrown-together than thought-through, but the best moments transcend such problems.

Date And Switch is a plucky step in the right direction for diversity in teen comedies, but it lacks the extra oomph to stand on its own merits.

Gandolfini delivers a funny, poignant performance befitting a great actor. It’s heartbreaking that the film doesn’t measure up to his exemplary turn.

Set and shot in a small coal-mining town in West Virginia, this earnest, well-intentioned melodrama creates a number of potentially compelling figures, only to shove them into contrived corners that undermine the film’s sense of authenticity. It’s as if The Sweet Hereafter had been infected by Babel.

Whether it’s worth seeing a film solely for one amazing performance is a personal judgment call; for those who take that particular leap once in a while, though, here’s a worthy candidate.

If The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears were Cattet and Forzani’s debut film, this might all feel fresher, and more revelatory. But as visually stunning as any given five minutes of this movie is, it doesn’t add up to much cumulatively.

Too much of Dear Mr. Watterson is taken up by Schroeder and an array of non-professional C&H-lovers offering vague praise, with little to no real analysis—aesthetic, historical, or cultural.

At first, the movie is offbeat enough to be entertaining anyway; but like the title character, it quickly outstays its welcome.

Yeh’s charm and compelling story keep things moving along, even as the documentary struggles to find the kind of evocative creativity that she conjures up with her own work.

Give the Israeli drama Policeman some credit: It keeps finding new ways to be unsatisfying.

Its skillful execution of a bad idea doesn’t make the bad idea any better; in fact, the scrupulousness with which West and his crew evoke the past make the film that much more unsavory.

Rage actually has something to say about the futility of vengeance, though that doesn’t become apparent until a climactic revelation re-contextualizes everything. Unfortunately, getting to that sorrowful ending is a real slog.

Rasoulof’s dissident return to filmmaking is ultimately little more than a sporadically searing, though more often unfocused and listless treatise on the pervasive censorship enforced by the autocratic Iranian government.

Just as the documentary doesn’t really have the goods when it comes to solving the photograph’s mysteries, it only skims across the surface of what the picture represents.

With a radically different tone and less naturalistic performances, The Truth About Emanuel might conceivably have worked. Gregorini didn’t commit to the synthetic; paradoxically, that’s what makes the film feel false.

Competently shot and edited, and imbued with a gentle sense of affection for its setting, Angels In Stardust doesn’t ultimately insult its audience’s intelligence. But it doesn’t really engage it, either.

Fogel and Lefkowitz go for a loose, funny vibe that allows them the freedom to serve a range of different characters and subplots, but the center of their movie doesn’t hold.

Perhaps Gurfinkel means to suggest a society off-course, but the game feels rigged, his conception of male and female roles so limited that the characters have little choice but to fall in line.

It’s a brutal story and a heady high-concept idea, but it plays out through characters with no identity other than their symbolic ones, and through shouted, simplistic arguments that repeat the same points over and over.

Rare is the Western that’s too low-rent to be satisfyingly lurid, but with hardly any tension or personality to its name, Sweetwater just misses the mark.

If a middle-American teenager in the late 1980s wanted to see good-looking young folks build a giant ramp in their backyard and do spectacular mid-air twists, then the local video store could satisfy that fantasy, too.

Goold, a highly regarded British theater director making his debut feature, lacks the panache to realize this twisted relationship onscreen. Instead he’s made a stolid, well-acted, intelligent drama that respects the complications of Finkel and Longo’s storytelling agendas without bringing them to life.

San Andreas doesn’t have much interest in the lives lost during its sequence of catastrophes, but it does dole out plenty of the large-scale spectacle that matters in disaster films of this type.

Harris’ wondrous arrogance as Coupland nearly justifies The Quiet Ones, because he’s so absolutely certain of a methodology that’s so absolutely incoherent.

As Christian knock-offs of secular films go, The Remaining is surprisingly respectable. At the risk of crazily overrating the film, The Remaining has to qualify as one of the most stirringly adequate, totally acceptable explicitly Christian horror movies ever made.

It does not seem like too much of a stretch to call Kroll a comic genius, but this kind of low-key sincerity does not suit his particular gifts.

What almost rescues the film is Arterton’s performance.

Where the first film kept insisting that drama and liveliness need not disappear in the golden years, its sequel feels almost like a rebuttal. Hopefully everyone involved will find something better to do before this unexpected franchise opens up a third location.

[Graf's] handsomely mounted, beautifully acted epic biopic (running just shy of three hours) succeeds in reducing the lives of three important figures in German literary history to a rather banal love triangle.

Choosing to ignore any conventional sense of drama, progression, or resolution is, in its way, a memorable choice. But while Fifty Shades Of Grey is a memorable and society-shifting cultural event, it’s in no way a memorable movie.

The film fictionalizes his life story so aggressively that it’s no less (or more) entertaining than the average rom-com.

Despite its wealth of urgent footage, including clips of raids on pimps’ homes and arrests of johns that expose the seedy masculine desire and domination driving the sex trade, Tricked doesn’t have anything new or particularly eye-opening to say about its subject.

From the evidence here, Walker’s forte may have been not action but stillness—a knack for embodying ordinary Joes without any fussiness. That we’ll never find out is truly a shame.

The film creates a kind of romantic view of the minutiae of running a museum, yet it’s barely concerned with the actual artwork housed within. Maybe this won’t matter to the audience, if they find the mere idea of a museum fascinating on its own.

The main problem with Him is that it takes the form of a generic indie dramedy about a hard-luck dude, desperate for a turnaround in his personal and professional life... Him does have a few scattered moments of Her-like insight and vitality, though.

Most of Cinderella’s costuming and production design takes a “glitter first, taste second” approach that embodies the film’s cotton-candy style of filmmaking: a heady sugar-rush in the moment, but empty and a little nauseating over the long haul.

Even for a fairly low-budget movie, Tusk doesn’t feel thought-through, or focused enough.

Almereyda’s sweeping cuts take material that was already problematic (though this technically isn’t one of Shakespeare's “problem plays”) and render it almost nonsensical.

This is the rare martial-arts film where the martial arts are tedious and the conversations more compelling.

Champs dances around the ring when it should be punching.

The makeup is really all there is to look at—visually speaking, the film is aggressively uninteresting. But beyond all Dead Snow 2’s flaws, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that it has undead soldiers in Soviet and Nazi uniforms straight-up swinging pickaxes at each other.

Eventually, the film’s old-fashioned, shtick-friendly tone stops seeming charming and becomes exhausting because DeLuise exerts so much effort where none is necessary.

Despite some genuinely arresting imagery—urban decay abstracted as poetic horror—the true narrative of Lost River is its bizarre, haphazard search for its own identity.

Scott loses the humanity amid all the gods and kings. The setpieces, however, elevate the film around them.

Bauckman and Belliveau don’t connect their observation of Scott to a larger idea, and their interest never seems rooted in anything more empathetic than morbid curiosity.

The triumphs feel engineered, and the realizations overheated. Seldom has a globe-spanning, soul-plumbing search for what really matters looked so inconsequential.

The simplicity of Lone Survivor eventually becomes a handicap, because after a certain point, the film becomes just one long battle sequence, lacking narrative ebb and flow.

Where before, Porterfield seemed to be recording life as it’s lived, here, he’s mostly recording plot. The difference is glaring.

The major failing of Ana Maria In Novela Land is its unevenness. The comedy is never all that funny, and some scenes fall noticeably flat, either because the cast isn’t strong enough, or because the production as a whole lacks polish.

The plucky DIY spirit that pervades small-scale organizations might work when it comes to launching movements in real-time—and Free The Nipple ideals have already bled over into the non-cinematic world—but it makes for a slapdash and slippery movie experience that never comes together.

Wolf Creek 2 does all it can to paper over the fact that it shouldn’t exist, but the film severely diminishes the integrity of the first Wolf Creek by turning Mick into a cartoon icon, more Outback legend than man.

Drunktown’s Finest oscillates between servicing banal plot machinations and the beautiful, symbolic simplicity of the culture it’s representing.

There’s a promotional bent to Mad As Hell that whiffs more of branding than rigorous documentary filmmaking.

Smith and Kravitz, both tremendously likable, simply don’t have enough to do together.

Cohen and McAuliffe fail to distinguish their characters from the umpteen previous iterations of “sensible guy and his hotheaded best friend,” and the film winds up less interested in their relationship than in the compelling details of the smuggling operation, with which they’re only tangentially associated.

If Project Almanac didn’t bungle it all with a shrug of an ending, it would be easier to recommend. Maybe someone with a time machine should go back and give the movie a do-over.

It’s rich territory, and Etziony and Hanuka manage to make both the film’s action sequences and its interviews compelling and interesting. But Call For Help drags in its second half, particularly in an interlude back in the States that makes the same point over and over again.

The Bachelor Weekend plays as expected: Characters must start close, bond during their trip, have their friendship momentarily threatened, then cathartically make up right on schedule.

Populaire’s initial appeal comes largely from its airiness, and it simply doesn’t have the heft or gravity to tackle weightier emotions.

The True Cost’s aim is to make it impossible to ignore fashion’s impact on the world, and it takes an admirably thorough approach to its unwieldy subject. It’s not a particularly cinematic approach, however.

It’s fun to watch the decades go by and the fashions change, but though Fresh Dressed takes its subject seriously, it ends up feeling superficial.

There’s a context to Struzan—not just biographically, but culturally—and while Sharkey seems to understand that, his movie, ironically, doesn’t illustrate it particularly well.

Hausner’s previous feature, Lourdes, was sometimes frustratingly opaque, but at least it had a discernible pulse. Here, she seems more interested in period décor and symmetrical compositions than in Kleist, Vogel, or any of the ideas they espouse and/or embody. Her impressive formalism is hollow.

The shocks are no less effective than the ones in the other Paranormal Activity movies, but no more original, either, with only the whipping of a handheld camera to set it apart from the offscreen gamesmanship that’s long been the series’ stock in trade.

Visually striking, meticulously rendered, a tiny bit pretentious, and emotionally inscrutable.

Compared to other, similar offbeat monster movies, Grabbers is under-realized. It isn’t as smartly plotted or funny as Tremors, nor as politically charged as The Host.

After performing many narrative backflips in an attempt to lucidly resolve things, Haunter eventually settles for half-baked uplift that renders much of what came before ridiculous and nonsensical.

Pasikowski isn’t interested in actual characters or narrative nuance; rather, the prime concern here is censuring Polish anti-Semitism, which, no matter how righteous an aim, eventually comes at the expense of engaging storytelling.

The less oblique and more direct the movie gets, the worse it is.

The best parts of Runner Runner feel like a Rounders facsimile—right down to the metaphor-heavy narration—and the worst seem like a case of mission drift, as if the filmmakers set out to make a behind-the-curtain thriller about online gambling, but got hung up in paying off the plot.

At its best, Running From Crazy is a powerful portrait of a woman who’s wrested control of her life by understanding the patterns her relatives fell into, and consciously breaking them.

Both Kong and Mechani-Kong look unimpressive, with none of the weird grandeur of the classic Japanese kaiju.

Of all the possible ways Diablo Cody’s directorial debut might fail, perhaps the least likely was that it would be innocuous enough to potentially bore the audience into a stupor.

One of the problems with We Are The Giant is that not all the stories carry equal weight, both in terms of effectiveness and in the sheer amount of time Barker spends on them.

There’s a germ of something interesting and different within the film’s narrative tangle, but it’s unfortunately been subsumed by Hollywood’s dedication to replicating previous successes.

Its pleasures are all glib and surface-level, although Luke and Patton have enough chemistry to make their painfully clichéd relationship go down smoothly.