Despite the effective performances by its young lead performers, California Scheming mainly comes across as half-baked.

If it was still the 1980s, then Dumbbells might actually be a hit.

The film's generosity toward Christina's decision-making is, however true to life, dramatically unsatisfying.

Directors Patrick Alexander Stewart, Gina M. Angelone and Mouna B. Stewart have failed to construct the often emotional personal accounts into a compelling film.

While a composited scene, in which has-been Lenny lectures his younger self about work ethic and wisdom, has an undeniable poignancy, actual tragedy remains far beyond the film's grasp -- as does any illumination beyond the unsurprising suggestion that Cooke just didn't want success as much as peers like LeBron James.

Personal Tailor is, indeed, a sad example of an once eagle-eyed director losing touch with his audience.

Depp is convincingly vulnerable and forlorn, all while maintaining the Hatter’s otherworldly eccentricity, and Wasikowska has the requisite grit. But Alice’s mission feels as manufactured as the story’s whatsits and doodads, as Bobin struggles to infuse make-believe with emotion.

A handful of plot twists are not enough to compensate for an overtly heavy, often dreary affair that rides straight into the final standoff with little elegance and a wagon train of pathos.

The story unfolds in large part through awkward contrivance.

While the actor lends his formidable presence to the proceedings, this rote thriller mainly succeeds in squandering his talents.

Weirdly out of place here, Cruise brings little daring and less charm to the film, though to be fair to the actor, his character's a stiff.

It offers January moviegoers some guilty-pleasure thrills and laughs, while falling way short of its potential on both the dramatic and the camp fronts.

Lucy plays more like a big dumb superhero flick than sci-fi.

Almereyda puts together a slick-looking, well-paced package. But the central conceit simply doesn’t hang together well enough to create credible dramatic stakes, yielding an underpowered mashup of Sons of Anarchy with Game of Thrones.

It’s as if co-directors Michael Thurmeier and Galen Tan Chu, both veterans of the Ice Age franchise, sensed that there was essentially nowhere left to go with the concept and opted to instead overstuff the production with too many characters breathlessly doing tired, pop culture-heavy “bits” like it was open mic night at the Paleolithic Punch Line.

While Leather Bar will surely make some viewers itchy, its most compelling subject isn't whether straight guys can stand to watch one man pleasuring another. More interesting is the question of what would make this project art as opposed to porn.

Frustratingly devoid of any background information about the director’s storied career, the film is ultimately repetitive and tedious.

The visuals are undeniably dreamy, but they mostly seem borrowed from other filmmakers’ dreams.

Ripe, borderline hammy turns from Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone, Idris Elba and Mark Rylance add some spice.

Magic in the Moonlight does have a not-disagreeable expensive-vacation vibe to it. But the one-dimensional characters are mostly ones you’d want to avoid rather than spend a holiday with.

The wistful pleasures are stretched awfully thin at almost two hours in a film that blurs the line separating self-irony from tiresome self-consciousness.

It relies too heavily on shock value rather than solid facts.

Concerned more with inspirational messages than dramatic subtlety, it remains an item best suited to believers.

Ersatz local color aside, suffice to say that Song to Song is not designed to win back onetime admirers who felt Malick's To the Wonder and Knight of Cups drowned in their own navels. Though offering the occasional radiant moment (usually involving scenery), it is of a piece with those films.

The mix of limpid naturalism with lyricism that has often distinguished David Gordon Green's indie films slides into sentimentality, or worse yet, whimsy in Manglehorn.

It is difficult to believe a single word of it, still less to care about these relentlessly selfish and short-sighted characters.

With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand.

More casual fans are advised to wait a movie or two and see if Begos can do anything new with the idiom he knows so well.

Few genre fans will fail to guess the direction in which this is heading. All viewers, though, will scratch their heads at a final plot point, an unnecessary gesture at odds with any conceivable motivation.

The mash-up of elements combine with a singularly unpleasant roster of characters to create a work of genuinely off-putting quirkiness.

As detrimental as anything to the film’s effectiveness are the visuals, which are murky, lack compositional interest and do the actors no favors.

Unfortunately, the film never begins to reveal what's really going on inside Joe Albany.

Fastvold and co-writer Corbet subscribe to the less-is-more branch of screenwriting, assuming that audiences will be drawn in by the air of mystery surrounding the sisters, when in fact the lack of narrative detail is consistently off-putting.

The villain here, Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor, is so intensely annoying that, very early on, you wish Batman and Superman would just patch up their differences and join forces to put the squirrely rascal out of his, and our, misery.

Cavemen has absolutely nothing fresh to say about its subject, and its tired genre conventions wouldn’t pass muster on a Fox sitcom.

The film has entertaining moments, but these are clearly secondary to its proselytizing intentions.

Respectably crafted but short on invention and serious scares.

While One Candle, Two Candles… sheds much needed light on the archaic, barbaric custom that is its subject, its jocular tone threatens to undermine the importance of its message.

Ali has a deft hand in creating a fantasy world based on the classical Sita-Ravana model, and gives Bhatt free rein to project herself with unabashed teenage appeal.

While Wedge’s animation background comes in handy during some inventive chase sequences (shot in rural British Columbia), Monster Trucks is otherwise a clunky nonstarter.

Replaying many of the visual gags that worked so amusingly before, the latest edition proves every bit as repetitive and uninspired as its glib title, bringing little that’s fresh or funny to the interlocking brick table despite boasting a script penned by originators Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.

The story keeps everyone in motion all night long, and frantically so, to the point that it could easily have been titled Non-Stop 2.

While this low-budget effort seems to have its heart in the right place and features a sensitive, moving performance by Oscar winner Melissa Leo, it ultimately feels like a compendium of bizarre character quirks adding up to a barely coherent whole.

Features fine performances from the veterans in its cast. But it ultimately comes across as little more than a compendium of cliches.

Overlong, willfully obscure and scatologically extreme, the film will elicit a variety of negative responses despite offering some individual elements that, on their own, would surely impress any of Barney's admirers. The work simultaneously is more fully realized and less creatively inspired than the Cremaster cycle.

Another deep disappointment for fans of the raw, exciting "Ong Bak."

It’s a loud Oz hodgepodge that never adheres to a prevailing tone long enough to allow viewers to emotionally engage with those characters in spite of some admittedly inspired CG flourishes.

Awkwardly condensing more than 20 years into a running-time well under two hours, director/co-writer Cao Hamburger needs a bigger canvas for his well-intentioned but underpowered saga.

With a storyline less challenging than that of a typical CBS crime procedural, Ride Along 2 is little more than a repetitive rehash of the original.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a sluggish also-ran compared to its predecessor.

This effort offers some mild amusement but lacks the anarchic wit to make it anything more than a slight diversion.

The script by John Swetnam is rudimentary, with only the most minimal and pallid stabs at characterization... Nevertheless, once the funnel clouds begin swirling, Quale and his special effects team achieve some remarkably authentic and frightening moments.

It’s all pleasant and forgettable.

Hough’s dancing is far more impressive than his acting, and BoA, despite her perky sexiness, is an even less compelling screen presence. But they certainly move well together, and that’s pretty much all that matters here.

Debuting directors Damon Maulucci and Keir Politz have a better sense of storycraft than the filmmaking on display.

The too-infrequent scare techniques, however, are mostly by the book, rarely developing sufficient dread to heighten the film’s rather unremarkable climax.

Despite the undeniable presence of a huge amount of action, X-Men: Apocalypse is decidedly a case of more is less, especially when compared with the surprising action and more interesting personal interactions (including the temporary subtraction of some characters) in other big Marvel franchises.

This feature debut deals mainly in clichés, never transforming the tough question at its center into compelling cinema.

Despite the plethora of melodramatic plot elements, the film remains curiously uninvolving due to its compendium of clichés and sluggish pacing.

As usual, there are only fragments of thoughts, nothing is developed, and it will be left only to the tiny band of die-hard Godardians to try to make any meaningful sense of the disparate fragments stitched together here.

Striking nary an unfamiliar note, The Song sluggishly lurches towards its predictable conclusion — spoiler alert, Jed sees the error of his ways — but it does offer some pleasures along the way.

Getting four mediocre horror efforts for the price of one doesn't exactly represent a significant bargain.

Coming Home sinks into a conventional tragic romance rut that not even engaging performances by Gong and Chen can save.

Techine's last screen retelling of a sensational tabloid case, The Girl on the Train, was sly, illusive and seductive. This one is just inert.

Generic B-level horror marked by numerous dull patches, long stretches of expository dialogue and, save for Astin’s admirably intense turn, uninspired performances.

The screenplay muddles its emotional core with a clunky cross between old-fashioned Hardy Boys mystery and a far-fetched weapons-trafficking subplot.

Ultimately feels as shallow as the lives of most of its principal characters.

There’s certainly an interesting documentary to be made about soccer, the world’s most popular sport by far, but This Is Not a Ball isn’t it.

Though clumsily enacted, the eventual revelation at least avoids the sick-punchline feel afflicting some dramas sharing this theme.

The film’s scattershot approach proves more enervating than enlightening, with the barrage of information presented in such a haphazard manner that continuity and coherence become lost.

There’s no shortage of eye candy on display, with acrobats, dancers, fireworks and carnival rides providing a colorful backdrop to the fairly formulaic story arc. The lack of specific background on the event's origins and history is somewhat frustrating, however, since the 85-minute runtime could certainly accommodate further exploration.

A lot of banality gets passed off here as profound thought. That and the somewhat self-conscious actors make it difficult to engage much with either character.

The picture's first-person focus makes it surprisingly uninformative and occasionally annoying.

As allegory, the picture requires viewers to connect most of the dots without assistance, offering a preachy bit of dialogue once or twice but failing to use action or the camera to say much about non-sanguinary addictions.

Postman Pat: The Movie is a mostly charmless and dark affair.

Wit is in short supply, but director Miller at least keeps things moving briskly throughout the relatively brief running time.

Commercial director Bruce Macdonald’s first feature film feels curiously inert.

Paltrow shows a capable hand with the actors... However, the characters only intermittently engage our interest.

There’s a terrific central idea at the core of the film, but it’s lost amid the endlessly repeated nightmare episodes, the banal subplot concerning the couple’s domestic problems and the clunky exposition and visuals.

Suffering from its forced attempts at pseudo-religious profundity and its familiar depiction of a spiritually lost central character eventually finding salvation, The Calling is ultimately all too resistible.

The Young Messiah is just, like, barely competent enough that the faith-based target audience won't feel entirely cheated.

Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of Eternity, although clearly lovingly intended, is too haphazard and unenlightening to fulfill its mission of educating Western audiences about the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Aiming for Hitchcockian suspense but coming closer to daytime drama, the film offers only occasional tension.

ABCs of Death 2 mainly serves to demonstrate that even talented filmmakers need a lengthier running time to craft even a moderately successful short.

Director Camille Delamarre (Brick Mansions) and his collaborators have devised a few nifty sequences.

Andy Serkis' decidedly non-Disney Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle may have intended to offer a darker, grittier take on the classic Kipling stories, but the end result proves to be more of a murky muddle.

It’s a pretty trying movie to watch, though it does have some striking images.

In the end the taste of H.K. filmmaking dominates in the film's deliberately chaotic visual style, a circular narrative that heads nowhere, and lyrical song interludes that abruptly interrupt the non-stop action and camera movement.

In an era where there's no shortage of clever animated features that appeal to kids while still tickling the grownups, the laughs here are about as fresh as the short-lived 1960s sci-fi comedy, It's About Time.

Director-screenwriter Hopkins is unsuccessful in navigating the absurd storyline’s jarring tonal shifts, with the result that this kinder, gentler variation on Ms. 45 mainly emerges as off-puttingly bizarre.

It's pretty silly stuff, leaving the film to rely on more conventional car chases, woman-in-peril scenarios and mistaken identity to keep things interesting -- all seen on that laptop via security cameras and the like.

This passably palatable film never hits any real high notes.

John Wellington Ennis’ scattershot documentary has many relevant points to make, but the problem is that they’re not made very well and almost all of them have been made before.

Lacks the potent scares and exploitative elements to truly please genre fans. But its thematic ambition and well-crafted elements mark the filmmaker as a talent to watch.

The foursome (most of whom will be in their 30s by the middle of 2015) have long since settled comfortably into their roles, and there's pleasure to be gleaned from the simple physical and verbal rough-housing of their interactions.

Cantinflas hops from cliche to cliche with lazy thoughtlessness.

Its resolutely low-key approach doesn’t make for particularly compelling drama.

Unfortunately, Barthes brings nothing new to the familiar story.