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.

The shorts in The ABCs Of Death 2 are wholly forgettable, and leave the limits of the gimmicky conceit completely exposed.

There’s a conspicuous self-serving impulse behind Farewell To Hollywood on Corra’s part that makes viewing it an extremely strange and sometimes queasy experience.

The movie’s ludicrous narrative continually forces its characters to behave like cretins, and even when Leven’s dialogue is tolerable, it can barely be heard over Craig Richey’s aggressively sprightly score.

The cast is too big, the setting too obviously stagey, the issues too diffuse, the personalities too simple.

While Blash intends The Wait to be a study in stasis, depicting emotional paralysis in various forms, the thin, amorphous nature of both this film and Lying suggest that he simply doesn’t have much to offer apart from uncontextualized moodiness.

The profound moral and spiritual emptiness at the core of The Secret Of My Success keeps it from being the dumb fun promised by its premise, title, and extensive use of Yello. The film never bothers to consider why Fox is in such a huge hurry to make it in business, or why the audience should be so invested in his professional success. Instead, it just assumes that everyone is out to make their fortune, get the girl, and come out on top at the end. The film consequently feels like a souped-up Rube Goldberg contraption in a furious hurry to get nowhere in particular.

The stakes of All The Wilderness aren’t high, because Johnson never directs his attentions to the real issue at hand: James is ill, and gallivanting around Portland for a few nights isn’t going to fix that.

Vigalondo is shooting for something densely layered, an expression of the complexity and moral murkiness of the hacker sphere, but he doesn’t have the plot sorted out.

Serena is quite bad, as it happens, but until it goes absolutely haywire in the final act, the biggest problem is that it’s all bones and no flesh, so busy combining all the structural elements that go into an award-winner that it has no personality of its own.

Greg Francis’ writing and directing feature debut plays like a thoroughly mundane mashup of grim David Ayer cop movies like Training Day, neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects, and green-tinted, subterranean torture flicks like Saw for long enough that when Francis turns out to have an ace up his sleeve, it’s a genuine surprise. Not enough to put the movie into the black, but enough to mark him as a talent to watch.

Revolting plays with interesting ideas about how different generations of activists inspire and feed off of one another, but that theme plays out as blindly congratulatory.

A messy, confused, over-the-top mixture of brutality and sick comedy, puckishness and ugliness, self-awareness and tone-deafness.

Instead of committing wholeheartedly to telling the story of a single family, Daniels gets distracted trying to tell the story of our nation’s complicated racial history.

As Laggies piles up one scene after another of Megan’s boyfriend and all her old high-school chums acting exaggeratedly square, the movie’s comic point of view becomes overpoweringly sour and predictable.

For all the good intentions and native hands behind the camera, The World Made Straight never seems particularly credible or convincing as a fresh look at regional history.

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.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken isn’t a comedy of incompetence, or the psychological battle of wills its opening scene suggests. It’s hard to see exactly what the filmmakers were going for, beyond bringing a real-life story to the big screen as dutifully and dully as possible.

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

The tone is delicate and vaporous, more attuned to mood and melancholy than anything resembling a conventional narrative. And despite the ambition on display, the film feels awfully slight, like a dream forgotten immediately upon waking. In its admirable but muddled attempt to fuse pure poetry and pure cinema, it ends up doing justice to neither.

Bright Days Ahead means to be a casual, charming movie about a woman taking charge of her life, but its lightness gets unbearable; the film is so featherweight that it eventually blows away.