The Happys never manages to find a consistent tone, awkwardly blending broad comedy with serious emotional moments that don’t come off. It also attempts to weave in serious discussions about sexuality and ethnicity in Hollywood, generally via stilted dialogue exchanges in which the themes are explored in boldface fashion.

The Crow is a sluggish, overly self-serious gloomfest that never takes wing.

It’s contrived at every turn and talky like a French film, though 100 percent American indie in its earnest conviction that it’s saying something of substance about the unpredictable roller coaster of life and love.

Vaughn Stein's Terminal blends tropes from several sorts of crime flicks into a soundstagey affair that's more brittle than hard-boiled.

Beyond the obvious complaints about objectification of women, this second feature from the Canadian who calls himself Director X is just a bore.

If there are any dadaist cinephiles out there, perhaps they can reclaim Second Act as a multilayered masterpiece of illogic. Certainly the film seems destined to survive all future nuclear winters, enduring as a time capsule of humanity at its most pitiably pedestrian.

The performers do what they can with the tired material, with Starr mining his doofus character for all it's worth and Perlman making a committed investment that doesn't pay off. Despite their strenuous efforts and the picturesque Catskill Mountains locations, The Escape of Prisoner 614 comes to feel as laborious as its title.

Lacking suspense and at times bordering on unintentional silliness in its characterizations, the film is a misfire that sorely disappoints as it comes from the director of such acclaimed efforts as The Syrian Bride and The Lemon Tree.

Nearly devoid of scares for the casual horror consumer, it will likely elicit a respectful dismissal from genre connoisseurs: "We get what you're trying to do," they might gently say to the filmmakers. "It didn't work."

The doc is so eager to tell you who's visited the hotel and eaten at the restaurant (JFK allegedly trysted here, which didn't keep his widow from enjoying the Cobb salad) that it shares very little about the hotel's origins and operations.

It is full of the signifiers of musical devotion but lacks the hummably acerbic insight of the best music it namechecks.

Director Shackleton stages the ultra-violent mayhem with reasonable proficiency but little flair or imagination. And the less said about the dialogue...the better.

Sadly, Oliver Daly's kid-oriented feature only strains hopelessly for Amblin Entertainment-style magic. The result is that A.X.L. feels in desperate need of repairs.

Grillo uncharacteristically displays no charisma, although considering the material he's working with, it's not surprising that he looks like he simply gave up. Speaking of giving up, Willis, who provides a few sparks to the otherwise lamentable Death Wish remake, here reverts to his by now usual phoning it in.

A nearly one-note comedy.

Stiffly scripted and stoically directed, Siberia shamelessly squanders the particular appeal of its charismatic lead and wastes an inordinate amount of screen time going practically nowhere, except undoubtedly right to VOD.

To the director’s credit, the animated sequences are richly rendered, making the most of the rather stiff and plain-looking originals (though, if you want to get nitpicky, an early gag poking fun at the fact that Playmobil legs are unbendable is soon forgotten) and offering up a plethora of settings that help compensate for the lack of good writing.

D’Souza seems too distracted by pyrotechnics to focus on getting believable performances from his cast. By presenting every lengthy fight scene in ultra-slow motion, he needlinessly draws out the film to an endless, nearly three-hour run time.

It's a derivative bore, all popped collars, douchey bros and hand-me-down psychology, that gets its characters up to their necks in borrowed money just long enough to have it really hurt when the accounts run dry.

A slow-burn psychological thriller all too visibly wearing its cinematic influences on its sleeve, Beach House delivers suitably ominous atmospherics but doesn't seem to know where to go with them, ultimately resorting to familiar genre tropes.

Featuring appearances by a dizzying assemblage of well-known and estimable performers, A Happening of Monumental Proportions is a perfect example of a bad movie happening to good actors. The problem doesn't stem so much from Greer's helming but rather the painfully unfunny script by Gary Lundy.

Every conceivable button is pushed to achieve rote satisfaction in young viewers, while any notion of creating tension and suspense is dutifully ignored. Not for a moment is actual peril considered as something worthy of a dramatic climax.

The only thing missing from God Bless the Broken Road is compelling or believable drama.

The film’s cardinal sin isn’t so much that it’s unoriginal as that it’s so uninvolving it almost assures attention deficit will set in early.

Attempts scares and yucks in equal measure and fails to deliver either.

I Still See You is painful to watch, and having to learn all the new jargon only makes it feel like an academic chore.

Displaying an amateurishness that undercuts even its more promising elements, Hell Mountain is the sort of instantly forgettable cheapie effort that has become all too prevalent in movie theaters and VOD listings. This one is for hard-core horror movie completists only.

It's a reasonable premise for a horror film, but the execution is remarkably lackluster. The pacing is sluggish to such a point that viewers may quickly fear that they too will fall asleep and meet Mara themselves.

There's nothing inherently wrong with agitprop cinema, of which this is a prime example. But passion and righteousness are not enough to make a satisfying film. Cohesion and rational arguments are necessary as well.

It's almost unfathomable that this one made it through all the preliminary production meetings without someone sensibly calling a halt to the process by saying, "Wait a minute, those kitties are damn creepy!"

For all its vividly and realistically rendered graphic violence and gore, The Basement is an example of torture porn at its most ironic. It threatens to bore its audience to death.

Drowns in its own preciousness.

Sutton is aiming to make a grand statement about America's downtrodden, and he never lets you forget it.

Despite a fine cast featuring numerous screen veterans, this is a cliché-ridden effort that quickly runs out of gas.

Depicting the effects of a mysterious, ethereal stranger on the residents of a small town, Change in the Air proves frustrating and dull for most of its running time, displaying unwarranted confidence in its ability to cast a spell.

What spark there is in the movie comes in the scenes when Vivian and Nana are getting to know each other. Both actresses have a sweet chemistry and strong screen presences that you wish were better utilized.

Attempting to be a cautionary tale for the Airbnb era, the pic squanders its potential with ham-fisted execution.

Aiming for charm but instead coming across as hopelessly forced, Swimming With Men barely manages to stay afloat.

Hospitality is the sort of film that looks like a thriller, feels like a thriller and essentially plays out like a thriller. The only thing it forgets to do is provide any actual thrills.

Such an utterly routine, formulaic and forgettable example of its genre that watching it becomes an exercise in endurance. Even the always welcome presence of veteran actor William Fichtner, terrific as usual, isn't enough to save it.

Strictly for the most obsessive fans of the series, The Gilligan Manifesto mainly demonstrates the pitfalls of intellectuals having too much time on their hands.

It’s a film that wants to be visionary but isn’t.

The film has significant problems in the writing and direction, but the first challenge lies in the casting.

This talky, ham-fisted effort proves particularly disappointing because it should have been much better than it is.

There's barely a scene in IO that's performed with pulse or verve. It's Sad-Face Emoji Sci-Fi, with po-faced references to Greek mythology, Chopin and T.S. Eliot, among others, and empirical techno-jargon spoken at a Valley Girl level of credibility.

Writer-director Kelker never establishes a consistent tone, eventually aiming for a tragic conclusion that feels hopelessly unearned.

A by-the-book script and stiff direction fail to milk any suspense from this scenario, and in the absence of thrills, the picture's heavy focus on the long-lasting impact of trauma is suffocating.

Most anthology films give you the comfort of knowing that if you don't like one segment, another one will be following in just a few minutes. Berlin, I Love You perversely does the opposite. It makes you nervous that if you don't like one segment, which you surely won't, another mediocre-to-awful one will follow.

The whole enterprise seems like an advertisement for the breed, the ownership of which will apparently improve your life immeasurably while making a holy mess of it.

An Affair to Die For is an erotic thriller with pretensions to the sort of clever whodunnit theatrics of Agatha Christie. But "Murder on the Orient Express" seems like child's play compared to this film's screenplay by Elliot San that is too clever by half.

There’s no denying that The Tomorrow Man has a knockout ending. But is it worth sitting through the mundane, relatively uneventful film that precedes it? Few will think so.

This misadventure of a project is a blip on the actresses’ résumés.

This Bannon is a snooze, occasionally making a wry aside but nearly never saying anything unusually smart or new. ... It's hard to see what ordinary viewers at any point on the political spectrum will gain from this particular status report.

Veteran comic actors make the most of the not very original (though well-timed) one-liners the script gives them. But the movie's last act drags almost as slowly for viewers as for the gang in the cave, and the story's resolution is no better.

The latest example of the unfortunately fertile trend is a comedy from Josh Huber that features every stereotypical plot element and predictable gag imaginable. Making Babies demonstrates the need for creative contraception.

On some level, Fritz’s story is compulsive viewing, only you wish you weren’t there.

As a supposed snapshot of life in the unaccommodating big city, and of the humane gestures that can soften that harshness, it feels utterly synthetic, not to mention a romantically "European" view of New York that's sheer nonsense.

Poms is equal parts boring and infuriating, especially when you consider the actresses made to perform caricatures of old age.

The animation, consisting of both traditional 2D and CGI, is impressive, and there’s certainly a lot of it. But it never feels as joyful as you’d hope, too often coming across like corporate machination than inspired imagination.

The didactic screenplay sinks the film. Instead of exploring characters, or having them spout witty lines, Ting has them explain everything to each other, out loud, almost all the time. ... It’s great to see more films with Asian and Asian-American actors and stories, especially one written and directed by a woman. But while Ting’s movie may be heartfelt, it offers viewers more fluff than heart.

Eden Marryshow (Jessica Jones) makes an arduous attempt in his feature directorial debut, in which he plays the title role of an unemployed actor who gets by thanks to the good graces of family and friends. But his character ultimately proves far more grating than endearing, making Bruce!!! a slog to endure.

Unfortunately, their strenuous efforts (and Esposito tries very, very hard) aren't enough to lift the material above abject hokeyness. This is a film that makes subway riding seem such a miserable experience, you suspect it's been bankrolled by Uber.

Chauncey Page (Jason Woods) is no Michael Myers, and this Homecoming killing spree is far from "Halloween" in almost every respect. Notable only for a cast consisting solely of people of color (and for the involvement of RZA), the pic fails to deliver what its title promises.

Unfortunately, for all the debuting filmmaker's talent for creepy atmospherics, I Trapped the Devil feels draggy and attenuated even with its brief 82-minute running time including credits. Despite some good performances, the film goes nowhere, and very, very slowly.

Quickly paced and based on a novel, and creepy, idea, the film fritters away its potential by delivering only a modicum of horror and compounding that disappointment with some creaky performances.

A tale as generic, and as dull, as its title.

Clara forgets to have anything resembling a compelling plot. Or an original one. Even science geeks will find little here compelling.

Graham begins Run with a solid premise, but he lacks the dramatic horsepower to move the story out of second gear.

Standup star Jim Gaffigan, who mines domesticity for laughs so successfully onstage, would seem an ideal choice for a man with twice the responsibilities and one big secret to hide. But Bailey and Lakin give him next to nothing to work with, and the result flops where it should crackle.

This is the pure case of a filmmaker doing whatever the hell (sorry, Joan) they want and leaving us to contend with the results. Enthusiasts of the prolific Dumont ... will surely get something out of this latest effort — as perhaps will Joan of Arc movie adaptation completists. But beyond that niche, many will find watching the 137-minute movie akin to being burnt at the stake.

It's as if a bunch of horny grad students decided to loot a costume store and then remake Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom with camera phones, but less fun.

Unfortunately, the themes don't resonate in sufficiently powerful fashion to compensate for the film's sluggish pacing and strained melodramatics.

The thrill is long gone in Anna, a lifeless and instantly forgettable spy flick whose lead, Sasha Luss, shows zero promise as a movie star.

Well-shot (by Luc Besson regular Thierry Arbogast) but otherwise entirely forgettable.

Back to the Fatherland is too shallow to do justice to its psychological quest.

It's never remotely involving, and you can feel the lead performers straining to handle their acting chores. The exception is Haddish, who is so convincingly scary and menacing here that you wish her character were in a better, dramatic movie.

This treacly and overwrought piece of mishegoss from French novelist turned director Amanda Sthers is pretty much a chore from start to finish.

The ensuing melodramatic plot developments, which include Lana's little boy suffering a potentially fatal brain injury and Ryan being asked by the Make-A-Wish Foundation to visit sick kids in a hospital, are the stuff of which truly bad movies are made. By the time Ryan makes a death-defying leap over a drawbridge and then makes a spectacular comeback at a championship soccer match, you'll be unlikely to hear the dialogue over the guffawing of the audience.

Despite its very brief running time, the film feels plodding, never quite managing to land either the intended dark humor or scares to which it aspires. You can admire its ambitions but lament the missed opportunities.

A surfeit of bad-ass mystery-man posturing and dearth of either convincing emotion or visceral kicks makes this pastiche unmoving, an assemblage of tropes few will enjoy wading through.

Excitement is hard to find in Joo-hwan Kim's The Divine Fury, a leaden good-vs-evil tale that takes issues of faith very, very seriously but fails to make K.O.-ing the Devil look the least bit fun.

There almost isn't a single shot in it where every member of the cast isn't Acting ... The result is, at times, insufferably pleased with itself.

The movie aims to make Daphne's journey raw and real, but mostly it's just insipid.

Overlaying the drama with the false cheer of lively music and bouts of humor, the story feels out of touch with the very emotions it desperately tries to evoke. Neither tearjerker nor very affecting drama, it defaults to somewhere in the middle.

As jumbled as all this is, the film never achieves the kind of sweaty intensity of the original.

The story takes place in 1953, and the relentlessly artificial-feeling film feels like it could have been made then as well.

This bloodthirsty comic-book fantasy is let down by its infantile humor and derivative, incoherent plot.

Miller demonstrates even less conviction than his writers, relying on frequent flashbacks to fill in backstory that’s not evident from the main plot and substituting CGI exteriors for actual locations. His workmanlike approach conveys the essentials without delivering many of the thrills or stylistic flourishes that the genre demands, adequately fulfilling a familiar expectation for forgettable entertainment.

Netflix's To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You is a charmless sequel to a charmless YA rom-com. (Extra rom, hold the com.)

It's certainly an imaginative concept for a detective story, but the storyline gets so convoluted and baroque that unintentional humor sets in. By the time we learn the outlandish motivation of the time-traveling serial killer and her true identity, the twists have been coming so fast and furious that we've long stopped caring.

Nearly everything misfires here — bizarrely so, since we can see where the laughs should come, how they would work, and how a more competent movie would get from A to Z. (To be fair, some jokes do land, just not as satisfyingly as you'd hope.)

Neither funny, insightful nor moving, it's mostly objectionable for its failure to exploit the facets of Coogan's screen persona that line up so neatly with the smug blatherers who dominate the AM dial.

The unfortunate result is that you wind up thinking how much more you'd prefer to be rereading that contemporary classic than watching this tedious exercise.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed ... To be fair, while Parker's film lacks finesse and the writing too readily slides into bullet-point didacticism and self-righteous speechifying, it does go to some lengths to give both sides a voice, even if it inevitably stacks the deck.

Although earnest to a fault and certainly fulfilling its goal of being family-friendly entertainment, The Great Alaskan Race ultimately proves less exciting and not nearly as adorable as Balto, the 1995 animated film inspired by the same events.

Its largely Hispanic cast and extensive Puerto Rico locations lend a unique quality to Paul Kampf's prison drama starring Laurence Fishburne as a morally corrupt warden. Unfortunately, those elements are the only original aspects of this turgid exercise in prison movie clichés which doesn't even manage to be convincing as melodrama. Although certainly well-meaning in its condemnation of capital punishment, Imprisoned is too dully executed to achieve its desired impact.

It would, after all, take a sleuth of Hercule Poirot-like talents to discern what attracted these supremely talented (not to mention, in the case of one of them, Oscar-winning) thespians to such lame, cliched material.

Initially a sluggish stalker flick whose undergraduate moral debates are tiresome instead of provocative, it eventually transforms into a patriarchy metaphor as obvious as, well, all those Greek-lettered paddles that decorate both the frat's and the sorority's clubhouses.