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.

Ultimately, the Tickells cram so much into their 90-minute cause machine that nothing really sticks, and seemingly crucial interviews soon become distant memories.

Verbinski orchestrates complex action sequences, including two spectacular bits of derring-do on a moving train, with a precision few in Hollywood are capable of pulling off. Yet The Lone Ranger, like his last two Pirates movies, seems conceived to deliver spectacle by the bulk, which means carrying the baggage of multiple subplots for the purpose of multiple climactic sequences.

Kitano’s surreal autobiographical phase was maddening, but it’s depressing to see him stoop to giving audiences what he thinks they really want.

Director Kevin Greutert, who cut his teeth on the Saw series (editing the first five and directing Saw VI and Saw 3D), whips up some generic Louisiana atmosphere, but his PG-13 shock effects are ineffectual, and he’s eventually given over entirely to a story that twists into melodramatic knots. The takeaway from all this: Sometimes less is more.

Despite an intriguing opening and an overqualified cast, The Lazarus Effect can’t shake a been-there/resurrected-that vibe left over from Flatliners, Pet Sematary, and countless other films stretching back to Frankenstein.

Radford’s pacing, which alternates between “stately” and “deathly,” keeps robbing the film of any momentum, and for every charming moment between the two leads, the film offers annoying bits of overstatement.

There’s little analysis, in-depth history, anecdotal humor, or even well-selected gameplay clips. Ironically, Video Games: The Movie is almost no fun whatsoever.

Once the Heavies arrive back on the scene, Raisani uses their presence—and the way the military dispatches them—to dodge complexity in favor of shooting stuff for freedom’s last stand. It’s Starship Troopers without the irony. But it looks nice.

As Walter White, Cranston proved he possesses more menacing charisma than anyone would have previously imagined, but that doesn’t mean he can fill a complete vacuum with his penetrating stare.

Say this for The Equalizer: It gets the job done, and that job, to quote A Clockwork Orange, is delivering a little of the old ultra-violence.

Coogler isn’t exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we’re supposed to feel.

Condon seems to hope energetic staging and furrowed brows will compensate for a script that’s essentially an exchange of halfhearted arguments.

In a movie like this, where plot points are practically an aside, the characters’ depth and the dialogue quality are what give it potentially memorable zing. Cavemen is not only zingless, it practically pulls a muscle attempting to generate some.

Nearly every superficial element of the movie is badly misconceived; it was doomed before the first scene was shot.

Carano deserves better: She’s a formidable physical performer, and the current state of the MMA film on the DTV circuit is strong enough to shame this wan, drama-clogged effort.

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

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.

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

V/H/S/2 is content to recycle the conventions and stylistic restrictions of the original while pursuing the default vision of just about every horror sequel: more of the same, with less inspiration, a bigger budget, and more gore.

Even with a strong first half lampooning the vapidity of American news media, The Interview is the worst thing Rogen has ever done.

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

The film actually has some solid elements—a couple of appealing supporting performances, a good villain, effective comic relief, and even some awkward but sincere attempts at subtext about its aging cast. But the fact remains: An Expendables movie should be fun, and for long stretches, this one isn’t.

The film leans heavily on well-trod “most dangerous game” territory, but the insistence on inscrutable characters and cheap twists never lets it feel actually dangerous. It just feels vacuous.

There’s a potentially compelling story here about children of divorce and the tentative ways they set about forging their own relationships, but the filmmaking is too rudimentary to draw it out subtly.

Apart from its shallow analysis, Terms And Conditions is, if anything, not alarmist enough: Its worst-case scenario has already come true.

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

Weiner might have a great movie in him yet, but Are You Here suggests his true talent lies elsewhere.

It’s a backhanded sort of praise to say Stretch is a movie that goes nowhere fast.

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.

At least Outcast’s rustic sets and costumes look lived-in and real.

The connection that these two are allegedly making must be taken on faith. Little is shown or spoken to sell it.

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.

The Possession Of Michael King has its share of jolts, but it becomes exhausting down the stretch, and disappointing for its squandered potential.

Like a stale Big Mac served in gold leaf, Taihuttu’s film offers up some central meat that never matches the aspiration of its textured flourishes.

Romantically uninspiring and comedically unstable, And So It Goes is a poor excuse for a rom-com, even one that continually plays by the rules of the genre and has two major stars to keep it bouncing along.

The Riot Club was clearly made by people who understand that a film that revels in conspicuous consumption doesn’t magically become anti-greed by hastily grafting on a moral. But instead, they’ve made a polemic that suddenly, unconvincingly insists it’s a character study.

Panning across still photos and scouring island maps like Ken Burns hunting for treasure, Geller and Goldfine (Ballets Russes) whittle a truly insane murder mystery into a competent artifact for Weird History buffs.

Suspense can be riveting, but 3 Hearts really needed to deploy its bomb much earlier. When it does goes off, it’s a dud.

This film can’t decide whether it’s a Noah Baumbach-ian character study or an episode of NBC’s Revolution.

Schepisi does nothing inventive visually, and the stars can’t find the humanity beneath Di Pego’s dialogue, generate much romantic chemistry, or make their personal struggles feel like burdens instead of scripted complications they’re destined to overcome before the credits roll.

The Judge ultimately plays less like a film than a series of big moments, some of which work well. Downey, Duvall, Farmiga, D’Onofrio, and Thornton aren’t known for making dull choices, and they often dig out nuance where others wouldn’t find it.

The D Train hangs some inspired ideas and winning comic moments on material that’s not strong enough to support them.

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.

The Princess Of France ambles from one low-key encounter to another, rarely engaging directly with the Bard, and never elevating its heart rate beyond the resting level.

Unfortunately, the film’s sense of place is much more lucid than its sense of purpose.

Perhaps fittingly, part of the problem with Everyday is that it’s too short, both in micro and macro terms. Ninety-odd minutes isn’t long enough to make the full weight of the elapsed time register.

The Machine is small science fiction. In a genre that openly invites invention, it barely bothers.

it’s hard to not see the puppet strings above everyone’s heads as Alaimo tugs them into big statements about suburban emptiness, economic flim-flammery, family dysfunction, and other hallmarks of America’s foundational rot.

Despite its shortcomings as a narrative, Man Of Tai Chi nevertheless feels like Reeves made exactly the movie he set out to make, assuming he didn’t set out to create a movie that was “good” by any stretch of the imagination so much as intermittently entertaining, albeit probably not for the reasons intended.

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.

Twist cinema at its most brainless, Rowan Jaffé’s blunt-force thriller Before I Go To Sleep appears to have forgotten that films about amnesia don’t render the audience incapable of recalling what’s happened from one scene to the next.

It’s a greeting card of film, full of platitudes and pleasant imagery, and destined to be thrown in a drawer and forgotten in short order.

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.

Director Simon Curtis and first-time screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell constantly push too hard and too forcefully, laying on schmaltz where none is needed.

The November Man doesn’t pause for a moment’s breath, which tightens up the action at the expense of clarity, character development, wit, politics, themes, subtext, and all the other things that can go into a thriller besides bang-bang and crash-crash.

It feels like 100 minutes of arch nudges, a highlight reel from Politicians Say The Darndest Things. Political junkies may find that appealing, but for more general viewers, the film—like Rick Santorum’s campaign—feels largely irrelevant.

There’s a sluggishness to The Returned throughout, attributable to generally weak acting and a plot that requires a lot of exposition.

Clarkson has great emotional authority onscreen, but even she can’t save Last Weekend. It’s beautifully filmed, with a great feel for location and atmosphere, but it feels petty. The vacation home is huge, but the emotions are exceedingly small.

With the prospect of more films like it in his future, Rourke’s decision to walk away from Hollywood while his star was still on the ascendant makes a lot more sense.

A legendary director’s unsullied cut of Dying Of The Light would almost certainly be more interesting than the version the studio is dumping into theaters, but it might have been a lot sadder, too.

Yves Saint Laurent is the kind of heavy-handed, substance-light, spectacle-driven period film where the set decorator and the costume designer don’t just have the most important jobs on the film, they have the only important jobs.

With no compelling characters in sight, and a director whose formal acumen begins and ends with forbidding locations (in this case, underwater), Pioneer has to lean on its drab story.

Despite its slim 79-minute runtime, Emoticon ;) is crammed with a startling number of subplots, which mostly struggle to address some of the large issues they present and subsequently abandon.

Nothing is revealing or surprising in this horse-beating tale of spiritual poverty among the extremely wealthy. It’s uninvolving enough to make Ayn Rand herself beg for a bailout.

The Short Game is like a tape-delayed Olympics: old footage, slick bios, no substance.

The script for Murder Of A Cat is undeniably funny at times, a potential cross between Ace Ventura and The Big Sleep. But Greene misses multiple opportunities to make that humor palpable, proving that film comedy is as much a tone as it is a performance, requiring a strong directorial vision to make it pitch-purrfect.

McCormack admirably tries to squeeze a lot of real-world messiness into Expecting, but her film’s essential phoniness refuses to make room for it.

The filmmakers don’t bother to dig into the psychology of their subjects, or even get to know them as anything more than symbols.

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

All the pieces are in place for a gripping indie horror flick, but this pointless, motivation-free film just goes around in circles.

Like so many documentaries made in a pop style, Generation Iron is a squandered opportunity, sacrificing depth and insight for superficial portraiture and drama.

It’s a slow-motion horror movie founded on utter nonsense.

In the end, there just isn’t much of a movie here; Almost Human clocks in at a mere 76 minutes, and that includes what may well be the slowest end-credits crawl in cinema history.

Angels Sing is a heartfelt but less-than-polished piece of work that isn’t for everyone, particularly those who can’t suspend the disbelief required to accept preposterous plot developments, or the sight of Lyle Lovett wearing a variety of snowman sweatshirts. But graded on a Christmas-movie curve, it actually isn’t bad.

Clark is either doing way too little or way too much here; he rarely hits the right tone.

It’s the geriatric equivalent of a ramshackle teen sex comedy, only intermittently elevated by the caliber of the talent involved.

Derrickson gives it everything he’s got, but when a film offers “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” as a spiritual pathway, it’s hard to take seriously.

In the end, the film isn’t scary and it isn’t all that brainy, either. It’s just a juicy metaphor in search of worthy action to support it.

Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus is the best kind of failure, impassioned and singular, but it’s a failure all the same— glacially paced, stiffly acted, shapeless, and for the most part tremendously boring. It’s an intriguing idea ruined by the execution. There’s a fine line between hypnotic and somnolent.

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.

There’s no harmony at all to the elements tossed into the new remake of RoboCop, but credit screenwriter Joshua Zetumer and director José Padilha for at least having some elements in play.

Though Kenner’s slick graphics and attractively photographed talking heads call Errol Morris to mind, his methods are significantly less subtle.

Sparks has to rely on exterior plot machinations because his characters lack any inner life.

There’s just not enough innovation or insight here to stretch a footnote to feature-length.

There’s a touching story here about a boy getting over his grief and narcissism by nursing a dog through its own set of traumas, but Max is far too gung-ho about playing up the pup’s heroism and self-sacrifice to give it much time to develop.

The small company of actors make convincing pilots, flight attendants, and air-traffic controllers, but their activities, tragic and brave though they may be, quickly grow monotonous.

There’s a worthy sequel to a better-than-average horror film in here somewhere, but it’s buried underneath a wild goose chase that ultimately goes nowhere.

The Shadow was one of the original pulp heroes, but his movie is more copycat than pioneer.

Automata approximates the look and feel of idea-driven science fiction, but it doesn’t have any actual ideas. That future looks bleak.

Morse, at least, may get better chances to strut his stuff in future. For Monteith, this mediocre last act will have to do.

This feature directing debut from X-Men, X2, and Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter is basically a bloodier, drastically more hirsute remake of Footloose set in the sleepy Canadian tax haven of Lupine Ridge, where most of the residents are actually… well, if you guessed “vampires,” you’re close.

Unfortunately, Penance is an example of a TV movie that definitely belongs on the small screen, to be watched piecemeal over the course of several days. Consumed in one gigantic, four-and-a-half-hour gulp, it becomes painfully repetitive and monotonous.

The amusements here are mostly of the unintentional kind.

Too frequently, Monk With A Camera feels like a character study with no interest in studying its character.

In the end, despite its quirky twists on the genre, Wyrmwood is just another zombie flick, riffing on its predecessors and hoping that’ll suffice. It needed more creativity. Or more passion. Both, maybe?

Chavez was a man of intense, overriding passions, his biopic feels strangely academic and detached, an unimaginative, straightforward catalog of his greatest hits and most historic campaigns that provides precious little insight into his inner life.

Kill Me Three Times is reasonably absorbing while it’s in progress, if only because it succeeds in inspiring curiosity about where it’s headed, but the finale is such a blood-soaked shrugfest that it retroactively makes everything that preceded it feel like a waste of time.