Essentially a feature-length advertisement for the Mormon Church which makes AT&T's "Reach Out and Touch Someone" TV commercials seem edgy by comparison, Meet the Mormons is strictly for the converted.

The endless parade of parodistic gags displays no semblance of wit, with the filmmakers content to perfectly ape the silliness of the era's music videos and such fashion statements as wearing a single cross earring.

Reduced to a teen girl empowerment vehicle that trots out every show business cliche about sacrificing your values for stardom, the film is a non-starter.

Viktor would be campy fun if it wasn't so relentlessly tedious.

Garishly unattractive to look at and lacking the spirit that made Wonder Woman, which came out five months ago, the most engaging of Warner Bros.' DC Comics-derived extravaganzas to date, this hodgepodge throws a bunch of superheroes into a mix that neither congeals nor particularly makes you want to see more of them in future. Plainly put, it's simply not fun.

Derivative and otherwise lacking in originality, the film which features enough gratuitous nudity and violence to satisfy the genre crowd is a strictly by-the-numbers affair that probably won't be filling the multiplexes in Salt Lake City.

Misses nary a single cliché in its visually disorienting and narratively confusing proceedings.

With its faux small-town values, faux countercultural ethos and faux personal struggles, Rita Merson’s debut feature skews closer to delusion than honesty.

Unfinished Business is the cinematic equivalent of sub-par fast food (think Carl’s Jr. or Jack in the Box); it’s cheap, easy and maybe even tasty for a second or two, but leaves you feeling queasy and undernourished.

In the end one would rather be back at one's own computer, tending to the tedious details of digital life, than watching this clique get pinged to death.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest is well cast and strong on setting. But the dull thudding that resounds isn’t part of its effective aural design; it’s the ungainly landing of nearly every shock and joke.

Despite its laudable intentions and important social message, Black November is far too ineffective to have the desired impact.

No less noisy, obnoxious or just plain groan-inducing than the previous installments.

Alien Outpost doesn't even manage to do justice to its thematic conceits, failing to weave in its current day parallels in sufficiently thoughtful fashion.

Proceeding at a glacial pace, the film bearing no small resemblance to the far superior "Girl, Interrupted."

Making the most of its low budget with its necessarily claustrophobic setting, the film displays a technical competence at least. But the rote performances and uninspired screenplay by Mike Le will inevitably consign Dark Summer to VOD viewing by undiscriminating consumers.

This ersatz portrait of American big-top tent impresario P.T. Barnum is all smoke and mirrors, no substance. It hammers pedestrian themes of family, friendship and inclusivity while neglecting the fundaments of character and story.

Ponderously paced and mostly flat in its dramatic effect, this wooden period piece is slow going indeed.

Screenwriter Adam Chanzit and director Gabriel Cowan don’t have the same flair for eloquent dialogue or vivid character creation. Instead they offer a lot of turgid exchanges filled with regret and recrimination.

Starts out as a potentially interesting psychological thriller before devolving into familiar horror movie tropes.

The film contains numerous stylistic flourishes... But none of these elements advance the story, prompt a deeper emotional response or suggest something new about the characters, reducing them to meaningless window-dressing for what little story their is.

From its generic title to its familiar child in distress storyline to its hackneyed depiction of things going bump in the night, Out of the Dark is thoroughly forgettable.

Not even Douglas can redeem The Reach, the terminally silly and thoroughly disposable new thriller he stars in and produced.

Unfortunately, A Convenient Truth doesn’t manage to sustain its comic premise over the course of even its admittedly brief feature-length running time. The thin joke would seem more appropriate fodder for a brief sketch towards the end of a Saturday Night Live episode when time needs to be filled.

The film is essentially nothing but little and ineffectual bits of recycled shtick with no sense of freshness of invention. And the women never bond in even the most rote or superficial way that's expected in this sort of claptrap.

Despite its effort to double as a sincerely impassioned message about female empowerment, My Way mainly comes across as a relentlessly self-serving promotional vehicle.

Director Jonathan M. Gunn and screenwriters Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon are hard-pressed to provide the superfluous characters and situations sufficient depth, with the proceedings featuring enough melodramatic plot developments and homilies to fuel a religious soap opera.

Notable Bollywood producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra makes a highly uneasy transition to American films with this weirdly baroque modern-day Western that, while it boasts undeniably imaginative visual and plot flourishes, is far too absurd to take seriously.

While director Martin keeps the film moving, its implausibilities turn from holes into canyons.

Featuring enough stereotypical characterizations and situations to fuel a dozen artificial rom-coms, After the Ball pretty much drops the ball in every aspect.

As low-budget horror filmmaking goes however, this is derivative, uninspired material.

While it might have made for a mildly diverting stage thriller — the hugely successful Deathtrap, for instance, was built on similarly absurd contrivances — the endlessly talky 3 Holes and a Smoking Gun founders onscreen.

Stale as week-old bread and every bit as bland, the movie saddles a strong cast with a groaningly ineffectual script (courtesy of Michael LeSieur, who wrote 2006’s You, Me and Dupree) and wastes the director’s gift for bringing lived-in charm and feeling to broad comic premises.

The lurid and unconvincing Shut In should have lived up to its title.

Playing like a white-trash Greek tragedy, Dawn Patrol squanders the good will that budding screen heartthrob Scott Eastwood earned for his recent starring turn in "The Longest Ride."

Loosely inspired by real events, the plot is time-scrambled and non-linear, hinting at Quentin Tarantino levels of post-modern playfulness that sadly never materialize.

Leonard and Foley offer enough semi-naked sex scenes here to prove that quantity is no substitute for chemistry.

Lacking the stylistic flair provided by del Toro in the original, this sequel directed by Steven S. DeKnight (TV's Daredevil and Spartacus) becomes increasingly tiresome in its cliched plotting and characterizations, hackneyed dialogue and numbingly repetitive, visually incoherent action sequences.

Absolutely Anything is a flabby misfire full of labored slapstick, broad caricatures and groaningly absurd plot twists.

Sometimes, deadpan observation of the mundane isn't Jarmuschian. Sometimes it's just dull.

A run-of-the-mill crime drama that toes the risibility line on several occasions, even if it’s better made than your typical straight-to-video movie.

Gus Van Sant’s sticky, gooey side — previously on display in the likes of Finding Forrester and especially in the 2011 Restless — oozes out once more in the woefully sentimental and maudlin The Sea of Trees.

For all its manic energy, there aren't enough recreational drugs in the world to make Yakuza Apocalypse anything but a bloody silly bore.

The dark fantasy manages to be grindingly dull despite its many quirks.

Its rhythms are sluggish, its jokes predictable and the gags are set up with such thudding deliberateness that even the sight of Ferrell losing control of a motorcycle, careening through the air and crashing straight through his house barely raises an eyebrow.

Whatever charms the first two movies possessed (and they were considerable thanks to the talented and appealing cast) have been thoroughly lost in this soulless installment.

Faith of Our Fathers is undone by its wobbly tone, hokey script and amateurish execution.

Art fans might reasonably expect one of the world's most successful painters to display a distinctive or at least appealing visual sense here, but they will be disappointed by Yasutaka Nagano's pedestrian photography; the film fares even worse in terms of storytelling and pacing.

From laughs to smarts to a credible interest in rehabilitation, lovers of love would do better to go see "Trainwreck" again.

It's certainly a moving tale.... Unfortunately, the film tells the story in the most prosaic fashion imaginable, missing nary a single faith-based film cliché with its one-dimensional noble characters, banal dialogue and requisite sermonizing.

Fouad Mikati's tawdry psychological thriller features the talented actress in a film that bears no small resemblance in theme, if not quality, to the hit movie version of Gillian Flynn's best-seller.

Small-screen comic talent is all over Fresno, with key players from series including Parks & Rec, Arrested Development and Portlandia teaming up for a tale of two sisters stuck with a hard-to-dispose-of dead body. The feature, sadly, exhibits none of the smarts or agility that fuel those series.

If you’re going to make an ultra-naturalistic, two-character, walking-and-talking romance that tips its hat to Before Sunrise, the film that began Richard Linklater’s exquisite trilogy, then it’s best to avoid a script loaded with contrived situations and overwritten dialogue.

Co-scripted by a slumming Bret Easton Ellis, The Curse of Downers Grove is all over the place in tone, never managing to decide what kind of film it wants to be.

There's neither topicality nor bite in this bland pseudo-thriller, which lathers on composer H. Scott Salinas' high-suspense score like shower gel after sweaty sex, yet rarely musters an ounce of genuine tension.

Boredom has long since settled in by the time gunplay is involved.

Rather than engage in slow-build horror, Pascal Trottier's screenplay flips the switch into Poultergeisty chaos.

It lacks the wit and charm necessary to interest any but the most undemanding preteen viewers.

A Christmas comedy of numbing tedium and tackiness.

Whatever you have to pay, it's too much.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

With one senseless set piece after another, the film's eponymous forward movement should carry it out of theaters quickly, notwithstanding the brief presence of a slumming Morgan Freeman in a role that might well have been shot in half a day.

The general air of slipshod incompetence thus torpedoes the intriguing concepts underlying Lewis's screenplay.

Although he can’t quite get a grip on guiding the lightweight narrative, Zada demonstrates a fluid visual style, particularly in the complex sequences filmed in the forest settings.

Boasting the canny use of suitably atmospheric, futuristic-looking locations, Narcopolis is far more impressive visually than narratively, with its tangled film noir plot making Raymond Chandler seem straightforward by comparison.

Lack of originality and self-awareness prove to be a fatal combination. There is something way too familiar about Hoffman's rites-of-passage portrait of wasted youth, with its inevitable soundtrack of fashionable angst-rock and predictably retro-cool cult-movie influences.

Infusing its generic horror tropes with vaguely satirical aspects, the film doesn't really work on either level. Unintentionally campy (or purposely, it's hard to tell) and marred by ridiculous plotting and dialogue, #Horror is mostly just a horror.

This example of the rape-revenge film genre (who knew?) serves up its raw meat for its target audience with reasonable efficiency, although the surplus of ultraviolent fantasy sequences quickly proves wearisome.

Expend4bles — the number is in the middle of the word, get it? — represents a nadir for a series that began as an entertainingly nostalgic throwback to old-school action movies and the square-jawed muscle men who starred in them.

Instant fodder for drinking games, Dangerous Men is a grand testament to its filmmaker's undeniable passion, tenacity and complete lack of talent.

Combining its adventure and romantic plotlines in painfully hokey fashion, The Space Between Us (the title is a pun, get it?) is so ludicrous that only a cinematic stylist might have been able to pull it off.

Unfortunately, Sex, Death and Bowling is as ungainly and overstuffed as its title, filled with enough dysfunctional family drama and quirky indie comedy tropes to fuel an entire film festival.

No one emerges especially worse for wear because the entire production is wholly apathetic to everything from a compelling story to sharp comic timing.

If a film's opening credit reads "Presented by Larry King," run screaming for the hills. The venerable talk show host and his wife, Shawn King, are among the producers of this cinematic trifle that proves yet again that Christmas is responsible for more bad movies than any other holiday on the planet.

It may be Hot Sugar's Cold World, but that doesn't mean we have to live in it.

Dolan has labored hard to yoke together these tricksy, time-jumping, intertwined plots, reportedly editing down a mountain of material over two years. In the process, a whole character played by Jessica Chastain was surgically removed. But however long he tinkered, Dolan has not quite salvaged a story whose default setting seems to be mirthless, ponderous navel-gazing.

It has all the flaws of the recent Bradley Cooper vehicle Burnt, only without the sex and the charm.

The film is the product of the same production company responsible for such previous Willis duds as "Vice," "The Prince," and "Fire With Fire." Either the Die Hard star enjoys working with them, or he's being blackmailed.

Other than undeniably looking good, Harding is unable to bring much depth to his role that, if the film had been shot closer to the period in which it was set, could have been knocked out of the park by a young Pacino or De Niro.

You need more than a little faith to endure Carl Lauten's stylistically ambitious but hackneyed faith-based film that infuses its treacly love story with heavy doses of CGI animation and even heavier doses of Christian moralizing.

While the main characters appear to have been given a bit of Powerpuff Girl sass by screenwriters Meghan McCarthy, Rita Hsiao and Michael Vogel, it ultimately does little to goose the limited hand-drawn 2D animation.

Exposed mainly serves to expose the often torturous process of moviemaking and distribution.

This lame effort represents international collaboration of the most mediocre kind.

Even fans who've stuck with Smith for two decades may draw the line at this outing, which offers ingredients just as inexplicable as those in Tusk (it's a sort of spinoff of that film) without the captivating weirdness that sometimes brought that midnighter to life.

If not always imaginative or digestible, the look of the settings and characters should keep kids awake for 86 minutes; and if the trick that eventually saves the day makes very little sense to critical moviegoers, at least it's cutely frantic eye candy.

A few bright moments aside, these annoying characters don't grow on us anywhere near as much as the filmmakers expect them to, and the shoestring-budget FX work, which would be more than good enough in a film buoyed by some wit, just underlines the movie's pedestrian qualities.

A gay auto mechanic comes out to his straight buddies in Fourth Man Out, but the shortage of dramatic texture, psychological insight or credible sexual tension in this toothless brom-com means he might as well be telling them he has a cold.

Wearing its multiple influences heavily on its sleeve, Monday at 11:01 A.M. is too déjà vu for its own good.

Mother’s Day is bad from the start, and it doesn't get better.

This posturing, airless exercise is wearing rather than exciting.

A film about ordinary people doing nothing is a tricky thing, quickly numbing the audience to sleep unless the screenplay is electrifying and the actors greatly appealing. Unfortunately, neither of these is true of Rafael Nadjari’s A Strange Course of Events, which is anything but strange and eventful.

Despite its promising set-up, Hostile Border lacks narrative tension, with the screenplay by co-director Kaitlin McLaughlin never quite coming into dramatic focus. The characterizations feel sketchy, and the paucity of dialogue proves more frustrating than atmospheric.

The only people sure to love this concoction are those working for Rio's tourism bureau.

Alternately both repetitive and repulsive, this home-invasion thriller never quite hits its stride.

It's never fun watching a comedian's shrewdness ossify into shtick. Yet whatever incisiveness Ricky Gervais once had (and he had plenty, if The Office and Extras are any indication) is barely evident in the new Netflix-released satire Special Correspondents

Director/co-screenwriter Pearry Teo succeeds in investing the silly proceedings with spooky visual stylishness, providing enough scary demons and possessed mannequins to deliver the requisite jump scares. Unfortunately, the film also features sound, which results in the audience being able to hear the inane dialogue accompanying the familiar horror tropes.

Originality or insight aren’t very high on the priority list of this drama.

For a film that's presumably intended to convey the rich emotional rewards of motherhood, it's not terribly convincing.