Because the tone is so erratic, it’s hard to know whether its anticlimactic quality is a botch on Araki’s part, or a purposeful bit of genre subversion.

Loves Her Gun goes nowhere at a slothful pace.

As a stand-alone documentary, it begs for more conflict and a broader canvas from which to explore the contemporary theater scene.

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.

There are weeds here, thorny stuff to slash through, but when A Little Chaos stays on course, there’s plenty of beautiful work to admire.

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.

The film struggles in vain to balance petty infidelities and other personal crises with displacement, famine, and death.

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.

Grant specializes in bastards, but he makes them so charming that viewers can nearly forget, and even forgive, their consistently bad manners. It’s a good skill, and it’s put to heavy use in Marc Lawrence’s otherwise charmless, vaguely offensive The Rewrite.

Lovelace finds a fresh take on familiar material, but the film is also distinguished by its focus and intensity.

Parkland finds a new angle on an exhaustively chronicled and debated subject by focussing on the grim practicalities of the situation.

More than anything, Misery Loves Comedy does not need to exist. The niche it aims to fill has already been occupied by people willing to go much deeper than Pollak.

Ultimately, the lackluster fight scenes are what make 14 Blades a disposable addition to the wu xia world.

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

“My Life Directed” is mostly disposable, just the sort of home-movie project a restless artist might sketch while stuck in a hotel room for a few months. It’s not a movie so much as a cry for help.

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.

The default middle ground between true-to-life and wacky in I Give It A Year turns out to be a place of dreary artificiality.

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

Sorting through the shards of the Ottoman Empire requires a historical complexity that eludes Crowe, who flattens the landscape into bromides on family and country, and the hard-won glories of being Russell Crowe. His on-screen persona could stand to be as modest as his filmmaking abilities.

It’s a slickly packaged, proficient thriller first, political statement a distant, speck-on-the-horizon second.

It’s neither consistently funny nor poignant enough to make the most of its impressive cast, all of whom are capable of delivering better than what A.C.O.D. asks of them.

The film refreshingly portrays its kids as part of a diverse group trying to succeed in a country in which they can never find secure footing. That’s the big-picture story here, and one even the occasional underdog cliché can’t obscure.

A lot of the story’s emotional shifts seem designed expressly to prolong the narrative, which is pretty darn skimpy.

Swamp Thing has many dubious qualities, but it clearly isn’t a piece of product tested and polished to a blinding gleam, and the world is duller for not letting oddball efforts like this slip into theaters once in a while.

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.

Bogliano provides a steady series of jolts, all the way to an ending that’s twisty but ultimately unsatisfying.

Afternoon Delight is one of those bad films that seem to drift further and further away from a recognizable reality the more we get to know it.

Sincerity and good intentions are all it has going for it, alas, and the result is the cinematic equivalent of a plate full of spinach.