Beyond its mere unfunniness and stupidity, Septic Man is criminally unimaginative.

It’s a film that feels like it’s simply going through the motions—not to mention one whose ultimate critique of trying to relive the past is, in light of its mass of clichés, more than a tad disingenuous.

It’s only fitting that a series that began with the concept of linking the digestive tracts of three people would end by feasting on its own shit.

United Passions leaves no historical-drama cliché unexploited: the voiceover narration, the jumbled Europudding accents, the expository dialogue, the hasty compression of major world events, the thickly applied old-age makeup, the not remotely seamless mix of re-creations and archival footage. It’s all there, in support of FIFA’s lies.

Plush fails to be a turn-on: It’s all surface and zero substance, with limp attempts at shock value.

What’s truly strange about Two is how halfheartedly director Heather Winters acknowledges anything that might have provided some nuance in the Childs’ lives.

The latest—and perhaps dreariest—horror film to employ a found-footage conceit.

Underdogs isn’t painful to sit through—the silver lining to well-worn clichés is their comforting coziness—but its antipathy to risk, even if that only meant straying momentarily from the path of least resistance, is more dispiriting than outright awfulness would be.

A cinematic doodle whose lack of ambition is both its most charming characteristic and its most limiting one, Pictures Of Superheroes operates in an absurdist universe where everything is abstracted in the silliest ways possible.

What makes Baby Peggy: The Elephant In The Room so valuable, though, is that it isn’t just a 58-minute wallow in the misery of one long-forgotten, largely misunderstood American celebrity.

Murnau’s approach to Nosferatu was to treat the material as real, not laughable. Much of the movie was shot on location in Old World villages and towns, and though Murnau can’t avoid the odd theatrical flourish—in keeping with both his personal style and the era’s expressionistic bent—Nosferatu has the ring of truth.

Shadow makes an urgent, compelling case for the importance of bright, clear, fluid battles. This movie has everything modern blockbuster spectacles lack: precision, grace, intimacy, stakes, and genuine, gritty excitement.

There’s something deeply depressing about a debut film centered on fading talent, but even more depressing are the downright amateurish insights it musters about youth, the art world, and the burdens of growing up gifted.

This trio of leads is so wooden, they make Mann’s hysterically over-the-top villainy seem refreshingly energetic by comparison.

Repentance lurches unsteadily to a foregone conclusion that isn’t the riveting twist the filmmakers imagined: It’s the final, predictable disappointment in a film full of them.

The film isn’t so much a vision as a conversation, and it isn’t revelatory, but it’s engaging.

This kind of dully formulaic filmmaking accomplishes little more than congratulating viewers for caring enough about historical atrocities to watch.

Rose’s film is just another formulaic found-footage throwaway, notable only for its wannabe-porno sensationalism, replete with a climactic money shot that’s simultaneously graphic and underwhelming.

The filmmakers behind Our Vinyl Weighs A Ton benefit and suffer from an excess of fascinating subject material.

Cannon is a big believer in the power of repetition. He apparently nurses a strong belief that if a gag isn’t funny the first time around, it will somehow become hilarious the eighth or ninth time it’s repeated.

This is an accessible, briskly paced documentary about a phenomenon that warrants exactly the level of investigation Hodges has given it here.

There’s a good horror movie to be made about how the insularity of the Amish could stoke paranoia and fear—and obscure the truth and forbid outside perspective—under these circumstances, but The Devil’s Hand doesn’t have more than a casual interest in Amish rituals and traditions.

There’s no shortage of the recognizable actors in minor roles that populate this sort of thing: Luis Guzmán as a loan shark, Gina Gershon as a detective. But there’s a real shortage of recognizable human behavior.

The film’s unexpected nastiness has a way of livening up its otherwise tired story beats.

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

Writer-director Jefferson Moneo, tackling his first feature, has a good handle on storytelling economy, and gives his unique setting—the badlands of Saskatchewan, where the movie was filmed and where Moneo calls home—ample time to shine.

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.

At its best, Losing Ground suggests a wobbly filmmaker who was robbed of the chance to steady herself. At its worst, it’s still a fascinating time capsule.

The trouble is in Williams’ execution: His characters convincingly strive and struggle with love, but then go ahead and express their angst in the most typical, banal ways imaginable.

Apartment Troubles consistently finds opportunities to subvert expectations and tropes in an appealing fashion.

As illuminating as that article may have been, though, Emptying The Skies, a documentary based on Franzen’s story that borrows its headline as its title, ultimately makes a more searing imprint on the psyche.

Planetary’s message is repetitive without being enlightening, and the film and its assorted participants insist on hitting the same beats without pause, until the concept loses all meaning.