Comedies don't get much more unfunny than Father of Invention, a lame and somewhat preachy comic take on a father trying to get back into his daughter's good graces.

Ultimately the movie disappoints, falling between two stools and failing to convince either as spectacle or as a fable about religious obsession.

Neither its depiction of the world of squares nor its embrace of rule-flouting self-affirmation rings true, so the inevitable happy ending offers little joy.

With neither great insight nor any sign of wit, the film is not likely to capture interest outside France.

Moshe, who wrote and directed, creates a boldly Expressionistic alternate reality to background this heavy-on-the-action story, but neglects narrative and character beyond the most basic strokes.

Dennis Lee comes up empty. Kids, parents, siblings, an aunt and an estranged wife all bicker and yell, but the noise cancels itself out. The movie is one long argument, tiresome and repetitive, that produces more heat than light.

The disappointingly generic film, which strands a father and son on Earth a thousand years after a planet-wide evacuation, will leave genre audiences pining for the more Terra-centric conceits of "Oblivion," not to mention countless other future-set films that find novelty in making familiar surroundings threatening.

Abercrombie & Fitch model Guzman looks every bit the metrosexual romantic lead, but also makes a credible partner for So You Think You Can Dance star McCormick. Fortunately, neither is called upon to stretch too far in the acting department and both are able to get by with good looks and flashy moves.

Chan has not injected any of his playful charm or physical virtuosity into Wang Xingdong's and Chen Baoguang's insipid, poorly structured screenplay.

A grindhouse quality that makes Loosies almost fun in flashes. But flashes are all they are -- pleasures even more fleeting than an off-brand smoke bummed from strangers in an alley.

Allen the writer-director has gone tone-deaf this time around, somehow not realizing that the nonstop prattling of the less-than-scintillating characters almost never rings true.

A lame action-comedy that seems ready made for undiscerning late-night cable viewing.

Perfect Sense is dense: It's a very complex and intelligent story hybrid that, must have looked great on paper and sounded impressive in discussion, but as a movie, it splatters all over the screen in unsatisfying genetic mutations.

Silver Tongues isn't a film that ever tries to be especially palatable. Its cynicism is of an unusually bitter, even nihilistic flavor, in the vein of early Neil Labute. This leaves an intriguing, memorable but naggingly unpleasant aftertaste.

At isolated moments a tolerably amusing send-up of alien invasion disaster movies in which the attackers are video arcade-era renegades arrived to gobble up as many famous landmarks as possible, this one-note comedy runs out of gas within an hour (it is based on a short film) and should have been trimmed to a neat 90 minutes.

Fairly mild in tone and riffing -- if not quite ripping -- off a collection of horror classics that includes "The Shining," "Rosemary's Baby" and "Poltergeist," both the franchise's premise and its execution nevertheless remain rudimentary, with the narrative and character backstories representing more of a sketch than a fully realized vision of the supernatural world that Katie inhabits.

As with so many films of this ilk, plot holes and inconsistencies abound, with audiences likely to express in loudly vocal fashion their opinions about what the characters should or shouldn't be doing.

Director David Mackenzie's film about two rival band members handcuffed to each other takes too long to find its footing.

Suspenseless, uninvolving and underdeveloped, it wastes the talents of an almost entirely distaff cast that deserves much stronger material.

Neither the script's conspiracies nor Nicolas Cage's performance is weird enough to trump the film's generic feel.

By this time, cinematographer Fred Kelemen's mostly stationary camera has revealed about all there is to see in a fine array of textures in such things as the wooden table, the rough floors, the walls of stone, the ropes on the horse and the skin on the boiled potatoes. That does not, however, make up for the almost complete lack of information about the two characters, and so it is easy to become indifferent to their fate, whatever it is.

Audiences attuned to Tim & Eric's weird wavelength will find plenty of guffaws in the first half, but a plot this thin can't sustain comedy based on discomfort; the film is so much of a good thing one starts to wonder if the thing is good in the first place.

Presumably intended as an inspiring portrait of a private individual daring to live his dream of traveling in space, Man on a Mission instead comes across as a cautionary tale about having too much time and money on your hands.

You almost feel sorry for Tyler Perry, stepping out of his own universe for the first time to try to expand his range and finding himself in something as thoroughly dismal as Alex Cross.

Despite a talented cast lead by Halle Berry, director John Stockwell fails to take more than a bite out of this lackluster shark thriller.

Aesthetically, it's desultory. Talking-heads rants and ruminations are further stultified by the amateurish aesthetics. Visually, zooms, pans and filler moments enervate the message. Most annoying, the dour music grates throughout; its hollow grinding, we'd guess, is an attempt to impart profundity.

A flat-footed and seriously unsexy romantic dramedy.

A flavorless literary adaptation sunk by a lead actor, screenwriter and co-directors that are all out of their depth.