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.

Sal is so inconsequential, it barely exists. It seems possible that even Franco has forgotten it, in order to make room in his memory for the 74 similar projects he was pursuing around the same time.

Pompeii just feels like an excuse to rain digital terror on screaming extras. There’s much to see here, but little to feel, and even less to remember.

While discipline and self-control certainly figure into Ladouceur’s teachings, there’s also a passion and drive that’s totally absent from Caviezel’s performance. It’s not that the film needs any more goosing—it’s broad and shameless even by inspirational-sports-movie standards—but its basic lack of plausibility starts with him.

Sabotage’s mystery component is mostly dead on arrival, and poor Olivia Williams has the thankless job of carrying it as the no-nonsense detective searching for the killer. But as Ayer proved with his previous film, End Of Watch, he has a natural eye and ear for the ecosystem of law enforcement.

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.

The tease of 50 gorgeous women fighting to the death has a classic grindhouse appeal, but Raze is strictly a “be careful what you wish for” proposition.

It never winds up with anything particularly interesting or effective to say about life, intelligence, religion, the nature of consciousness, or any of the other big themes it deliberately evokes. It does, however, blow up a lot of stuff.

It’s all tasteful and polished to a fault, but it feels like exactly what it is: an abbreviated version that preserves the high points, zips past the rest, and never approaches the depth of the full text.

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

Better Living Through Chemistry suggests a new cinematic rule: the more impressed a movie is with itself, the less likely it is to impress a discriminating audience liable to have seen all its silly little tricks before.

It began a transition in the series away from horror and toward kid-friendly adventure.

Ribald yet frantically unfunny, it wears out its welcome within the first five minutes, and never comes close to gaining it back. It feels like an alternately flat and flailing television pilot for a bro-comedy no one in their right mind would ever pick up.

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.

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.

At its best, Nightbreed is like a living version of a coffee-table book, with each page filled with tentacled, quilled, or moon-faced monsters.

As routine and undercooked as Beneath’s one-wet-corpse-after-another plot is, the movie is still breathtakingly beautiful at times, with compositions and color tones that resemble a high-class fashion-magazine layout circa 1965.

Sometimes it’s fascinating, but just as often, it’s frustrating: It’s a film without a net, and it tends to land with a thud.

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.

It’s many different films at once—all muddled, all unsatisfying, and all crying out for Liam Neeson’s participation.

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.

Salinger thinks it’s big, important news, but it’s barely a footnote.

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.

Whatever Crowe’s ambitions, Aloha feels like a tropical transplant of past work, and an unfortunate demonstration of the law of diminishing returns.

Though Wan is stepping away from horror, at least for now, to direct the next The Fast And The Furious sequel, the latest Insidious entry suggests he’s a long way from running out of new tricks, or at least finding infinite variations on old ones.

The film doesn’t ask its stars for much, and they deliver.

Overlong and lacking a single believable moment, Make Your Move is nevertheless a sweet reminder that anyone can dance together, so long as they aren’t fighting over who should lead.

Though it strives mightily to compete in every category, it’s not as funny as Guardians, as awe-inspiring as Interstellar, as thrilling as Edge Of Tomorrow, or as provocative as Under The Skin.

At its core, Homefront is thoroughly generic, a grim exercise in formula whose action sequences are edited into a frenetic, incoherent blur, especially the awful opening setpiece.

There’s so much distance between where Blacula started and where Scream Blacula Scream ends up that the sequel quickly exhausts its thin purpose.

The whole movie is encased in air quotes, and its sole purpose, apart from that winking, is to argue that even artsy-fartsy grumps secretly identify with Hollywood wish-fulfillment. Would Guerschuny the film critic have liked The Film Critic? If so, he’s a soft touch.

For all the scary refrigeration on view, this is a concept that’s long since gone stale.

Whenever it features feet flying through the air, Brick Mansions is a pleasure. Asked to do anything else, it’s one stumble after another.

Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.

Rather than having its characters’ circumstances reveal something about societal dynamics or human nature, Aftermath avoids depth; Engert casts his material in strictly suspenseful terms.

Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters continues a tradition of adequacy that could be described as “epic-ish” or “majestic-esque.”

After The Ball commits its most garish faux pas in rooting its plot in the thorny politics of high fashion, despite an apparent lack of any understanding of how the business works.

Need For Speed modifies its outlaw antihero with all sorts of unnecessary pain and backstory, and the film is slow to leave the starting gate because of it. But once it does, Need For Speed becomes a much fleeter vehicle, powered by impressive practical stuntwork, eye-popping cross-country landscapes, and the sparking chemistry between Paul and Poots.

Though Dorff isn’t the only thing wrong with Zaytoun, he is still its biggest liability, and the rare case where one miscast role ruins a film’s essential premise.

Although the film is supposedly about movement, Growing Up And Other Lies frequently stalls out, and whole patches of it grind on without momentum or purpose.

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.

As Above/So Below purposefully generates a certain air of mystery by keeping the exact nature of its protagonists’ experience enigmatic, but for a film that takes place underground in tightly enclosed spaces, it’s surprisingly thin on suspense and palpable physical danger.

The result is a relentlessly dour film livened up only by Bardem’s shameless scenery-chewing and the occasional jolt of action. Otherwise, it’s an endless frown of a movie that does little but confirm that Penn’s talents, while impressive, aren’t limitless.

The bigness of Mann’s performance can’t help but set the film’s tone, which goes manic and high-strung to the point of hysteria before settling down and becoming really stupid and gross.

A crowd-pleasing, proudly working-class celebration of large women, old women, broke women, and women who love women, Tammy isn’t just consistently funny and unexpectedly touching and tender, it’s also genuinely subversive.

The songs are fine; the slaughter is sub-standard.

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.

It’s a pleasant enough expression of a series of familiar story beats, but apart from a few brief action-sequence moments, it could hardly be more rote or vanilla.

Phantom Halo is overstuffed even before Bogdanovich starts layering in the soliloquies and comic book metaphors.

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.

The movie offers more of the same, only more: more T&A, more conspicuous consumption, more cameos, more Jeremy Piven yelling, and significantly more Mark Cuban than anyone outside the city of Dallas needs to see.

The setpieces, in addition to mostly rehashing better scenes from earlier films, feel thrown together to serve the effects, and the effects look far less astonishing than anything in Cameron’s first two films.

While Sleepwalkers fails spectacularly as a horror movie, it triumphs as a loopy camp comedy. Sleepwalkers gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, which is saying something, as it starts out batshit insane.

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.

The most pressing issue with Ouija is that Stiles and Snowden cannot seem to write a single interesting line of dialogue. They volley between conversational banalities and whatever exposition might be needed to get the film to its next scary setpiece.

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.

There are no casual conversations in The Citizen, and no idle moments. It’s pushing its agenda at every moment, first gently, then relentlessly.

Think Like A Man Too isn’t a movie, or even an arbitrary sequel to an arbitrary adaptation of a novelty book, so much as an extended victory lap from filmmakers and actors convinced that all they have to do is show up to equal or top the first film’s success. The sad thing is that they’re probably right.

As contemporary romantic comedies go, it’s by no means an embarrassment, ranging from politely bland at its worst to very nearly inspired at its best. It could have been so much more, though, had its makers been prepared to grapple with the genuinely thorny, surprisingly incisive idea at the movie’s center.

Free Birds feels like Hollywood brining small children for the blockbusters they’ll pay to see when they’re older. It’s littered with quips, but the film puts a premium on loud, effects-driven action that mistakes nonstop intensity for cartoony entertainment.

Wiig’s new comedy sulks limply along with her, unable to bring the kind of energy that might complement her tendency to underplay every scene.

Garrett’s performance lacks any nuance or fire. When he’s playing, he’s a powerhouse. When he’s talking, he’s a half-presence with a vaguely Tommy Wiseau-esque accent, and sleepy eyes to match.

The movie as a whole has an immediacy that’s appealing even in its weaker second half.

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.

It feels like the series has run its course, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history alongside the hardware it so lovingly pays tribute to.

Third Person’s considerable strengths generally come from the actors.

To borrow a phrase from Patton Oswalt’s bit on a particularly monstrous fast-food creation, the film is “a failure pile in a sadness bowl.”

In the absence of narrative urgency or fresh storytelling devices, Grand Départ lives or dies with Marmaï’s performance, but like everything else around him, he’s merely adequate.

There’s absolutely nothing new or innovative to be found here, but sometimes it can be almost comforting to watch a movie do an unironic tour of the classics.

The surrealism that dominates so much of Mr. Jones’ final stretch is admirably unusual, but it’s also confusing, and quickly becomes tedious.

Given the level of sophistication at which the movie operates, they might as well have called it Motherlover, after the Lonely Island video in which Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake sing about the exact same taboo foursome. The only significant difference is that the comedy in “Motherlover” is fully intentional.

With familiar faces like Arquette and Sevigny turning up in nothing roles, the film looks like a cheap, underproduced facsimile of the crime movies it’s trying to emulate. It goes down in a blaze of hoary.

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

Director Darrell Roodt’s by-the-numbers biopic suffers from clunky dialogue and shallow characterization, all while never deciding what to make of its leading lady.

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

Apparently unsure whether to go with the lazy idea of a disastrous beauty pageant or the equally lazy idea of a zany road trip, Raphael and Wilson lazily combine the two.

In the insufferable, secondhand tradition of countless other regrettable genre films, Black Out is so impressed by itself, it doesn’t even need an audience.

Dim, compromised, and dead on arrival.

Though light on drama, Apple’s scenes at the shelter are easily the best part of the film, among the few moments when Gimme Shelter decides to show the effect of faith and charity rather than simply preach it.

There’s little in Burying The Ex to suggest it’s a Dante movie at all, given how far it’s removed from the smart, exciting films he used to make. Maybe it’s best if everyone just pretends he wasn’t involved.

Excerpted from The History Channel’s 10-part 2013 miniseries The Bible, then given extra footage, Son Of God boils the life of Jesus down to feature-length, but it plays less like a movie than a hastily edited attempt to explore a new revenue stream.

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.

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.

Virtually nothing happens in the film that enhances viewers’ understanding of the situation. Winterbottom and company merely survey the scene, kick around a few half-assed moments of atmosphere and suspense, shrug their shoulders, and pack it in for the night.

Through all the ham-fisted lunacy, writer-director John Huddles displays an infectious love of philosophy, coupled with an exhilarating, anything-goes filmmaking style.

The film aspires to educate as well as entertain, rattling off the names and relevant distinctions of various dinosaurs as they appear onscreen for the first time. But the overwhelming impression the film leaves is that dinosaur poop was enormous.

There’s real craftsmanship to the film, but it’s in service of a story that can’t quite support it.

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.

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

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.

A non-movie that seems to wash over audiences without making any kind of impression. Except for those it does impress.

Even at 86 minutes, with plenty of chases and action sequences thrown in, The Nut Job feels overstretched and arbitrary.

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.

The screenplay relies far too heavily on coincidences, misunderstandings, and characters purposefully not saying things for reasons rooted in plot contrivances rather than clear motivation.

Only God Forgives suffers from the disconnect between its stylistic high-art archness and its content’s pulp gratuitousness. Refn gives every sequence a hushed consideration, but there’s rarely a sense that he’s earned it with equivalent profundity in theme.

What’s best about the film is its willingness to go deep, its strange yet effective fluidity between serious scenes and dance numbers, and Duran’s grace with weighty subjects.

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

Last Love hardly presents itself as a challenging picture, tugging as it does at the heartstrings with gentle persistence, but at its best moments, it is a sweetly considered one.