An aimlessly wandering DIY-indie that will send viewers retreating to popcorn movies at their local multiplex.

Feste, who has one previous effort as a writer-director, last year's "The Greatest," fails here to do the most basic thing -- give an audience a rooting interest, or any interest at all, in these four troubled people.

Speed-Dating seems designed to exploit the black indie theatrical circuit but hardly merits even a DVD release.

Extremely crude in its technical elements, the low-budget film does reveal stylistic ambitions through devices like frequently reverting from color to black-and-white film stock. But the shaky narrative style and broad characterizations undo its effectiveness.

This lame comedy about a big doofus who enters the fight game manages to take every cliche in the book and render them even more cliched.

Features sitcom-style stock characters and situations, not to mention the sort of ethnic stereotypes to be found in TV ads for fast-food Mexican restaurant chains.

The most banal and indulgent of Gus Van Sant's periodic studies of troubled kids, this agonizingly treacly tale comes off like an indie version of "Love Story" except with worse music.

Dead Awake, now receiving a limited theatrical release, is the sort of B-movie effort that so screams "direct to video" that it's a wonder they don't hand you DVDs as you enter the theater.

A "non sequel" to Alex Cox's 1984 classic "Repo Man," the crazily plotted and deliberately garish Repo Chick only serves to provide further evidence of the cult director's diminishing talents.

Not only is this film's form clichéd, so is its content.

Mistaking arrested development for enlightened innocence, Waiting for Forever is an indigestible hash of whimsy, drama, romance and, for good measure, crime.

As it thuds along from one wolf attack to the next, Catherine Hardwicke's first film since taking leave of Bella and her toothy friends adamantly refuses to provide any wit, humor or fun.

Starring a painfully awkward Katherine Heigl, One for the Money mostly resembles a failed television pilot.

An alien invasion flick that evidently expects dramatic shots of a depopulated Red Square to make up for a flatlining screenplay and the absence of even a single compelling character.

There is no purpose to the film other than random blood splattering amid scenes of bondage, primitive savagery and S&M eroticism. The film is numbing and dumb with its hero indistinguishable from its villains.

Arriving eight years after the lame third installment in Dimension's profitable series, this seems like far too little way too late.

Lincoln's script has no knack for the pacing of cinematic exorcisms, and the truncated climax he does offer is short on action and scares.

Whatever gothic originality the first Human Centipede possessed is altogether lacking in this sorry follow-up.

As sequels go, Piranha 3DD has barely enough heft to squeeze out 83 minutes of ho-hum entertainment, although it faithfully delivers plenty of menacing fish and bouncing boobs, as amply advertised.

The lameness of the gags and dialogue and the film's frequent deep dives for the bottom at the expense of real comedy speak to desperation in Hollywood to figure out the audience for contemporary naughty comedy.

The result proves to be as appealing and effervescent as a flute of flat champagne.

Despite a couple of unconvincingly upbeat tacked-on moments at the end, Project X basically reads as nihilistic, as not believing in or standing for anything. Not even fun.

The PG-13 film is heavy on scenes of cloudy blood in the water but almost entirely lacking shock shots of flesh torn asunder. (And while marketing relies heavily on bikinis, the movie's light on that kind of flesh as well.)

This low-rent, R-rated "Rush Hour"-ish comic caper could have been several notches better with more charismatic leads and some dialogue upgrades but still would have felt like a genre hand-me-down.

It falls short on character definition, emotional involvement, narrative drive and originality.

In the absence of anything truly original in the screenplay he co-wrote with Juliet Snowden, director Stiles White vainly attempts to ratchet up the tension with a series of cheap jump scares fueled by loud noises that are the cinematic equivalent of shaking hands with someone wearing a joy buzzer.

This is a movie drowning in flamboyant design elements and in need of a stiff shot of enchantment.

This dour, uninspired, Hispanic-themed variation on the profitable "Step Up" dance movies is unlikely to similarly rouse teens.

Nothing is bleaker than failed black comedy, which this is.

The action that follows is as broad and unconvincing as the characters involved: director George Ratliff manages to turn even dignified Ciaran Hinds into a ham.

Never gets off the ground, trotting out the same predictable twisting heads and psycho-babble without a whiff of originality or discernible visual flair. As a result, the would-be thriller proves as scary and unsettling as a slab of devil's food cake - only considerably less satisfying.

Most of the major events in Reagan’s life are covered, but few of them are recounted in an incisive fashion.

A thriller so fixated on red herrings that viewers may stop caring if anyone's really in danger, Gone is diverting but unlikely to linger long in theaters.

She's (Milla Jovovich) constantly being besieged by a seemingly never-ending series of monsters, and we -- at least every couple of years or so -- are forced to sit through yet another installment of the mind-numbing series.

This latest installment of the horror movie spoof franchise is mainly notable for its Charlie Sheen/Lindsay Lohan cameos.

A gore fest aimed at indiscriminate action fans. Those interested in learning more about goings on in medieval history will probably find the splatter tedious and off-putting.

This Mexican action flick from director-writer Beto Gómez has all the makings of a great comedy only no one told the filmmakers.

Fails both as historical re-enactment and as action-flick thrill ride.

Embalming the simple and simplistic yarn in an amber glow that is all but suffocating and banishing from it any traces of humor and spontaneity, director Scott Hicks serves up this treacly tale with absolutely no trace of self-consciousness about the material's cliches or simple-mindedness.

Not so much blasphemous as just outrageous for the hell of it.

Director/screenwriter Stuart Beattie, adapting the graphic novel by Kevin Grevioux, employs a strictly humorless, gothic approach to the material that makes one long for the satirical touches of James Whale, let alone Mel Brooks.

As leaden as the bullets whose random behavior it revolves around, Géla Babluani's 13 fails to recapture the sweaty tension of his original 13 Tzameti, a French import that reeked of style and first-timer ambition.

A teens-in-trouble thriller with barely enough momentum to make it to the end credits. Performances and script are made-for-cable grade.

It's something you'd think only the crassest of Hollywood producers would come up with - injecting sex appeal into an event as ghastly at the Nanjing massacre - but it's an element central to The Flowers of War, a contrived and unpersuasive look at an oft-dramatized historical moment.

Onscreen, it somehow manages to be at once wildly overblown and terminally boring.

A creaky haunted house that, once the big twist is revealed, makes very little sense at all.

The good news is that it will be a good 15 years before we're forced to encounter the character again in Spring. Maybe by then he'll be less of a downer.

Unfortunately, John Moore has directed these sequences in a way that makes the incidents look so far-fetched and essentially unsurvivable that you can only laugh.

The film’s first half is a slog as Chism sets up the minefield for Wade, with every (fully visible) mine certain to explode.

They just don't make 'em like this anymore, and it's a good thing, too.

Belying its ominous title, Age of Extinction barely skirts the idea that humankind and planet Earth are about to be totally annihilated. What is extinguished is the audience's consciousness after being bombarded for nearly three hours with overwrought emotions...bad one-liners and battles that rarely rise above the banal.

The "Dexter" star gives it his all in this indie comedy about a 35-year-old unemployed man coping with various romantic and life crises, but by the end of this terminally cute effort you'll wish that he just stop moping and kill somebody already.

It's a good thing that forgiveness is a predominant theme of Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day, because viewers will have to look deep into their hearts to forgive this kidnapping drama for its heavy-handed melodrama and tawdry plot elements.

Lee's latest rambles through almost two hours of unfocused drama, burdened with endless didactic editorializing, before lurching out of nowhere into ugly revelations and violence.

Presumably a glib attack on sanctimonious small-town religious hypocrisy informed by Black's own strict Mormon upbringing, the film is tonally all over the place, eventually settling in a rut that comes a lot closer to resembling bad camp than edgy satire.

Silent Hill is not a place you want to go, and that applies for moviegoers as well as this videogame adaptation's characters.

Thematically diffuse, tonally inconsistent and blighted by an inauthentic feel for its story’s time and place, it sits awkwardly between sober human drama and lighter dysfunctional-family turf, constantly striving for unearned emotions.

A grindhouse slasher picture that swings from dull to ridiculous without finding any pulpy pleasure in between.

What's actually up onscreen in this vaguely ambitious but tawdry melodrama falls into an in-between no-man's-land that endows it with no distinction whatsoever, a work lacking both style and insight into the netherworld it seeks to reveal.

If the target audience for this film were any younger, they'd be embryos.

No one doubts that the country faces major challenges in the next four years, but there is one safe bet: The future is unlikely to be affected by this simplistic documentary.

Self-destructs in its quest for comic outrageousness.

The bottom line: Mirthless and unmoving drama about a depressed stand-up comedian finding a new life as a kindergarten teacher.

Elba, who recruited his former Luther director Miller into the project, gives the film more dignity than it deserves, and Henson delivers a performance of complex emotional shadings. But their fine work is utterly wasted in this B-movie exploitation thriller that would barely make for passable viewing on late night cable television.

Smiley, is unfortunately less scary than, say, the prospect of your significant other accidentally discovering your search engine history.

It ultimately devolves into yet another rote horror film that in this case lives up to its name by also being seriously underlit.

Too often settles for raunchiness instead of wit.

If the dreary Mystical Laws was designed by its creating organization as some sort of recruitment tool, then they clearly have a lot to learn from the Scientologists.

With such an in-house cast of extended Coppola family sparklers, one would think things couldn’t go too wrong in the comedy department, but they have little chance to oil the wheels of a creaky script written around Sheen.

Making her feature directorial debut at the tender age of 70, veteran actress Connie Stevens delivers an obviously heartfelt but sadly unfocused melodrama in the form of Saving Grace B. Jones.

A film that seems drained of life and ideas rather than sustained by them.

A barrage of unbelievable stereotypes try to kill each other in Barry Battles's dispiriting exploitation flick.

The cinematic axiom of diminishing returns appears to be catching up with Robert Rodriguez’s Machete franchise in only the second installment, as the series’ engagingly lowbrow concept gets overwhelmed by episodic plotting and uninspired, rote performances.

Despite its scaldingly hot cast and formidable writer/director combination, The Counselor is simply not a very likable or gratifying film. In fact, it's a bummer.

The movie only wakes up when Hart and/or Arkin are on screen (preferably together).

Overlong and aimless documentary.

Despite relocating across the pond to the esteemed British Museum, the creaky Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb fails to capitalize on the comic potential provided by that change of venue.

Despite the world-changing ramifications inherent to the plot, the results are more tedious than thrilling.

Although Rulin displays a compelling neurotic edge as the driven Emily, Chenoweth and Modine are unable to breathe much life into their schematic roles, while the supporting players are basically saddled with conveying a compendium of quirks.

Where Attenborough's script lent an air of dignity to the shorter film, Allen's reading of Philip LaZebnik's cutesy narration has a canned feel, and is unlikely to connect with viewers too young to appreciate cliched humor about the joys of bachelorhood versus the duties of parenting.

The real problem here is not the shameless blurring of fact and fiction, but how unforgivably dull it all seems.

A modern cinematic equivalent of the sort of tired sex farces that used to populate Broadway with regularity, If I Were You simultaneously exploits and squanders the talents of its star, Marcia Gay Harden.

Full of overwrought campery and vicious drag queens, K-11 feels in places like a deranged John Waters remake of "The Shawshank Redemption."

This endlessly derivative, nearly unwatchable effort from debuting Italian director Christian Filipella is amateurish on every level.

You know a movie’s in trouble when it’s most dramatic element is the breaking of a piñata.

Even at this late stage in the evolution of the franchise, logical lapses in filmmaking technique undercut the integrity of the found-footage format.... What may be less acceptable, however, is the film’s unaccountably weak effort to sort out the mythology concerning the series of demonic hauntings.

Superficially provocative but ultimately pointless, this is one punishing vacation.

Playing the emotionally shut-down driver for an escort service, the actor provides what little interest there is to be found in this otherwise aimless depiction of urban alienation.

The absurdist comedy Oconomowoc is not only named after a place but dedicated to it — “a city we love very much,” the end credits declare of the titular Wisconsin town — so it’s doubly disappointing that there’s not more there there.

While Anderson excels in the film’s many moments of digital doom-and-gloom, he can’t deliver a single authentic emotion between the two star-crossed leads, leaving us with a sooty aftertaste of having sat through one very loud rendition of Titanic in togas.

Crude, repetitive and rigorously single-minded, the popular actor’s writing and directing debut lays it all on a bit thick, as the few points the film has to make are underscored time and time again.

Pretty pictures alone do not in themselves great cinema make - not for the first time, Reygadas' waywardly wilful approach to screenwriting and structure severely outweighs whatever fleeting pleasures his movies may impart.

A wrong place/wrong time actioner stupid enough to damage the art-house credibility of actor Paul Walker.

Basically the film consists of a bunch of techies in white shirts and glasses laboriously discussing their views, exchanges you get the feeling the filmmaker thought would come off as humorous.

Now that the filmmaker has reached a certain age, she no longer seems to have her finger on her generation’s pulse. Case in point: The Hot Flashes, a ribald comedy whose menopause-referencing title is all too indicative of its pandering humor.

Whatever suspense that might have been generated by the violently gory goings-on is dissipated by the sheer visual incomprehensibility.

A no-budget "Alien" ripoff with little reason to exist beyond the few creature-effects shots its design team now can add to its reel, Roger Christian's Stranded might leave viewers yearning for the director's "Battlefield Earth" -- a film that, terrible though it was, at least couldn't be accused of a lack of ambition.

Much like the recent, widely reviled I, Frankenstein, this misconceived project mainly signals a need to go back to the drawing board.