Interior. Leather Bar.’s intriguing curiosity provides ample food for thought, in part because it’s the rare film that devotes much of its running time to its own principals discussing what, if anything, the film ultimately means.

Topical as it may be, Drones consistently manages to undermine the points it presumes to be making.

The fundamental predictability of Before I Disappear’s main plot is just one of the missteps that betray Christensen’s inexperience.

At The Devil’s Door is a frustrating display of craft desperately searching for purpose.

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

Though it sounds like a contradiction, the film could be described as both dull and over the top.

A rote, unimaginative entry in the found-footage subgenre of science-fiction/horror. It looks better than a YouTube video, but it’s rarely more engaging.

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.

It could generously be referred to as a character study about a detective haunted by her past, and a case that forces her to confront that past in Biblical terms. It could less generously be referred to as a pseudo-spiritual thriller that tries to literalize scriptural mythos in the same bloody terms David Fincher’s Seven used to literalize the Seven Deadly Sins, only far less artfully.

Ravenous is misbegotten in multiple ways. It isn’t scary enough to be an effective horror movie, or funny enough to be much of a comedy... But say this for Ravenous: It isn’t generic.

It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core.

It’s hard to care about the fate of characters who never seem particularly alive in the first place.

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.

Its attempts to force comedy, tragedy, farce, action, and melodrama into the same story never quite fit.

Amelio’s latest, Intrepido: A Lonely Hero, reveals the same strengths and weaknesses as his work two decades ago—an appealing sincerity and social awareness, dogged by a mile-wide sentimental streak. In this case, when Intrepido tilts from whimsical comedy to metaphysical drama, it falls right off the cliff.

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.

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.

If Foxy Brown falls just short of being peak Grier, though, it’s only because it’s a weaker version of Hill’s Coffy, from the year before.

It’s a monster movie made with energy, but no real enthusiasm, and its setting just makes it feel like a long way to go to get the same old thing.

Unfortunately, this procedural/character study unfolds in a manner that feels more generic than genuinely deep.

Directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (The Fluffer, Quinceañera) do their best to avoid sensationalism, but age difference and statutory rape are the only factors that make the story remotely interesting.

It goes about its idiotic business swiftly and efficiently, which is about all you can ask for from this manner of silliness. It never goes anywhere worthwhile, but at least it doesn’t take too long to get there.

The trouble with Black Or White is that it feels reverse-engineered, as if Binder wanted to deliver one big statement about race, and rigged an entire movie to make that possible.

Sommers’ typically hyperactive touch robs the material of most of its charm, placing way too much emphasis on Koontz’s goofy plot, and making Odd a bland paranormal cousin to Guy Ritchie’s ass-kicking Sherlock Holmes.

Director Emilio Aragón doesn’t want to choose a consistent tone any more than a bucking bronco wants a rider on its back, but he’s prodded along by another fine, scabrous performance from octogenarian Robert Duvall as Red.

The bigger The Protector 2 gets, the further it gets away from Jaa’s basic appeals.

Marsan does his best to convey his character’s essential decency, but he’s hamstrung by Pasolini’s insistence on underscoring the emptiness of John’s existence at every opportunity.

Neither Hank nor Asha ever says or does anything that suggests they’re vital, complex individuals, and even their mutual interest in the arts is utterly generic, devoid of any intellectual exchange or even real curiosity. People this dull are available all over YouTube, for free. It’s unclear, however, why strangers would bother watching.

Ultimately, Digging Up The Marrow is more of an affectionate comedy than a horror movie, despite a third act that features some tense moments and hostile critters.

This isn’t a movie so much as a fetishist’s fever dream—a fantasia of New York crime movies from the 1970s that places the specificity of its time and place at center stage more than any actual New York crime movie from the era.

The film’s monsters are so unconvincing that director Marvin Kren has no choice but to hide them as much as possible via rapid-fire editing and violent shaky-cam, relying on his actors to fill in the gaps with hysterical screaming.

The exuberant dance sequences have long been the series’ saving grace, but even those are starting to feel redundant and interchangeable.

Seeing two idiosyncratic actors like Tipton and Teller wasted on such generic material is dispiriting. Just a little acknowledgement of the real world, especially vis-à-vis online hookups, would have been welcome.

Cross gathers a lot of narrative strands and elegantly knots them during a big, farcical climax. But that’s the one aspect of the film that truly works as it should. Just about every other element of Hits, from its eagerness to snigger at the expense of small-town yokels to its sneering disdain for the common-rabble forum YouTube, leaves a sour taste.

If About Alex were the pilot to a new television series, there’d be reason to stick around for a few episodes, if only to see these actors grow into their roles and develop more chemistry. But About Alex isn’t television, and Zwick never really solves the problem of how to make a houseful of semi-likable characters into cinema.

That’s a lot of concept for a 90-minute horror-comedy, and All Cheerleaders Die handles it with a haphazard, catch-as-catch-can style that matches its tonal schizophrenia.

Each scene in Off Label, viewed in isolation, seems perfectly fine, even fairly interesting. It’s how all of those scenes fit together—or, rather, how they absolutely don’t—that creates the overall sense of grotesque deformity.

Perfect Sisters may stand accused of being rife with tone-deaf stylistic choices, but the more positive spin is to call it a marginal film elevated, however inadvertently, by the strange specificity of its scenes.

There’s a difference between elemental melodrama and superficial clichés, and gorgeous cinematography and period production design can only delay this recognizance for so long—and certainly not for two grueling hours.

It’s ambitious, drug-infused, psychedelic, and fractured in strange and interesting ways.

The performances, particularly from Towne and Tighe, go a long way toward making the story’s improbabilities seem trivial.

MacFarlane’s follow-up feels less like a film than like an extremely long, fairly inspired live-action episode of Family Guy, one that’s only as strong as the latest gag or riff. And this being a Seth MacFarlane production, those gags and riffs are of varying levels of quality.

There’s an overlay of gender politics, but it isn’t so firmly ingrained in the material that it transforms Levine’s throwback ’80s slasher film into a much nobler, more thoughtful endeavor.

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

Momoa does capture some scenes of genuine warmth and beauty that suggest he has the potential to develop a filmmaker’s eye for visual poetry.

The film overflows with inspired comic ideas that fizzle and die in execution like a marathon fireworks display of nothing but duds.

Delivery Man has sentiment and affability embedded in its DNA, but Scott and Vaughn don’t do enough to nurture the film to its full potential.

While Barely Lethal is conscious of the clichés of the genre, it’s also the type of film that won’t let that get in the way of regurgitating them.

This Bizarro-universe Coen brothers mash-up has the decency to be sporadically fun, even when it isn’t especially original or steady.

In the spaces between the hackneyed dialogue, ham-handed score, and poor acting, Walking With The Enemy eventually wins its sole victory: a desire to look the story up on Wikipedia later that day. That may be a small triumph, but it’s hardly the mark of fine cinema.

Unfortunately, the film frequently relies on telling over showing, and Rosie and Alex’s bond is rarely demonstrated through palpable on-screen chemistry.

As clumsy as Quale is with the sequences of people shouting exposition back and forth, or delivering teary Blair Witch-style goodbyes into a camera that would have died long before its operators, he handles the CGI action with breathless intensity.

A decent-enough inroad to one of film history’s most respected parodists.

While the setups are often laughably forced—two words: “weed baby”—the script navigates its way out of them relatively gracefully, and sometimes hilariously.

The movie’s style consists of tossing up a lot of heartbreaking medical stories next to a characterization of the industry as a mysterious monolith, and letting viewers finish the correlation in their heads. When it’s possible to use the same line of reasoning to push both truth and lies, different tactics are in order.

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.

This ultimately isn’t a film about human fallibility, but about high-concept grotesquerie for its own sake.

This Is Where I Leave You struggles in vain to meld broad, farcical comedy with low-key, contemplative drama. It lurches so violently between its twin modes, in fact, that it’s a wonder the actors are able to remain standing upright.

Lockdown is mostly a humorless bore until the obligatory bloopers and outtakes in the end credits—and even those are drawing from a flat vein, since there’s so little play in the movie.

It’s bloated, overwrought, and nakedly sentimental, a sappy and cliched celebration instead of a searching and incisive exploration.

All four of the main performances are so strong that they deserve more space to develop and intertwine. Instead, at times, Blood plays like one long “previously on” montage for the series that inspired it.

Jackpot feels more like Guy Ritchie than the Coen brothers. It revels in moronic violence, unleavened by playfulness or wit.

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.

Le Chef involves a showdown between traditional French cuisine and molecular gastronomy, but the film very much serves as the cinematic equivalent of fast food, offering generic, processed menu items that are practically pre-digested.

Hellbenders mostly feels like a doodle, an amiable lark that will amuse genrephiles and anyone else with their sights set appropriately low.

When the film doesn’t strain for twinkly enlightenment, it stoops to find the easiest possible joke.

Second Opinion doesn’t play like a revelatory exposé, so much as a conspiracy-minded chain email sent from a distant relative.

Against The Sun, like its rudderless seacraft, goes with the path of least resistance: a talkfest where the men reiterate every obstacle they face out loud (all the better to show off period-friendly dialect), engage in some temporary breakdown of friendly bonds, and pray. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but there’s also nothing special about it.

A Good Marriage comes off as curiously flat for a movie about a woman who sleeps next to a murderer every night.

Shatkin is trying hard here, but Whaley’s overwrought script keeps the young actor from utilizing his charm; Reggie is simply difficult to be around, even as Meester’s Eleanor is expected to act charmed by all his quirks and issues.

Holmes’ performance helps Miss Meadows considerably: It’s so relentlessly upbeat and deliberately artificial that it admits no cynicism or judgment, and it makes the film daringly weird.

Dealin’ With Idiots is at its strongest when it forgets about plot and character development altogether (which is most of the time) and gives itself over to the laid-back pleasure of improvisation among veteran professionals finding and exploring a good groove together.

While the film has some clunky exposition, and a couple of predictable moments, it creates a real sense of a group of friends who have known one another since high school, who don’t stand on ceremony, and who all, in various ways, struggle with nostalgia.

Driven by Paul Grabowsky’s deceptively jaunty score, Swerve is ably performed and tightly paced... But it doesn’t stick the landing.

It doesn’t make any sense, but Insurgent demands its audience play along anyway. The problem is, the film doesn’t do enough to earn viewers’ trust, or reward it once it’s given.

Transcendence wants to use this future panic to comment meaningfully on our current interconnectedness and inorganic lifestyle, but it’s screaming too much to have that conversation.

24 Exposures is a transparent auto-critique (or self-justification, depending on how you look at it) in the form of a rather vague thriller, and doesn’t work particularly well in either mode.

The pretense of concern, combined with the cynical manipulation of the plot for cheap thrills, is both transparently hypocritical and broadly repulsive.

Shamelessly exploitative, but never entertainingly so.

Its suspense is so nonexistent, and its supposed concerns—about the reliability of memory and the nature of truth—are handled so facilely, the film sells its own conceit short.

Austenland embraces convention, and the result is a romantic comedy in which the ending seems not just foreordained, but promised via contract from the first moment of the film.

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.

The film is curiously joyless and inert.

Cold Turkey is well-acted, and at times even well-observed, but about 20 minutes of the material actually matters, and the rest is mere putter.

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.

What’s most frustrating about Devil’s Knot—especially for longtime Egoyan fans—is how generic the movie becomes every time it folds another wrinkle into the case.

What transpires in this adequately acted, uninventive film fails to add any fresh twists to the cash-vs.-conscience formula.

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

Most of Echoes Of War amounts to Hints Of Aggression, with the film struggling to find enough incident to reach feature length.

It is much less understandable, and not at all forgivable, that in eschewing the culture-clash comedy of the first film for generic action, the filmmakers forgot they were making a comedy at all.

Mostly, however, Candyman: Farewell To The Flesh is content to rely on easy jolts and an overabundance of fake-out scares, rather than hard-earned suspense. It’s never awful, but it also never feels necessary. Mostly, it proves that even the most innovative horror concepts can find ways to spin their wheels.

Barbarash doesn’t do much to compensate for the misshapen script, either. Fumbling camerawork and incoherent editing rob the film’s generous fight sequences of their oomph, and amateurish green screen hobbles a car-chase sequence.

Perhaps it was deliberate strategy on the part of McCann and his screenwriter, Anthony Di Pietro, to neutralize the politics of a mass killing and focus more on the psychic stress that triggered it. But even if that was the case, it doesn’t make the film any less crushingly banal.

As a focused spoof of exploitation tropes, Machete Kills is, frankly, terrible. But as a surreal stream of subconsciousness from a filmmaker who’s spent a lifetime watching bad movies, it’s an occasionally entertaining diversion.

There’s little sense that these people are friends for any reason besides the script saying so, and the contrasts between the three relationships produce no real insight in this hollow, irritating drama.

Daniel Espinosa’s unwieldy, sometimes unintentionally funny film adaptation nails the gloomy period production design of a perpetually gray empire, but otherwise, it’s a wash, starting with a Europudding assemblage of performers of all nationalities besides Russian.

This is time-worn, overly familiar material, indifferently directed by journeyman Tim Story, but Hart’s manic comic invention and textured persona elevates it somewhere beyond the level of pleasing mediocrity onto the slightly more distinguished realm of the agreeable-enough time waster.

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