Rollins' villain is a deliciously deranged, compelling character, but the problem is that there's not enough of him in this otherwise routine B-movie clearly shot on the cheap, with low-grade CGI effects making the shootouts and gore mostly laughable.

There are plenty of fisticuffs and shootouts to be found in The Duel, but precious little of interest.

Though it's better than its "dump this thing" theatrical release would suggest, Cell is far from excellent.

It arrives not as a lusty tale in full bloom but as a tastefully arranged still life, in search of an animating spark.

Sluggishly paced and featuring lengthy voice-over narration by Strong in which his character ponders his role in the universe like a graduate philosophy student, the film never achieves liftoff.

The plot leans toward conventional horror violence as it progresses, but Cresciman has Hogan and Crampton remain largely affectless, their blank-slate characters doing little to make us respond to the action.

In between bouts of torrid sex, the men engage in the sort of anguished, confessional conversations that Eugene O'Neill would find over-the-top. None of the characters are particularly interesting, even with the dramatic revelations they've been assigned.

Biggs is appealing in the central role, although for him, conveying mortified embarrassment doesn't exactly qualify as an acting stretch. But he does have good chemistry with Montgomery.

This aggravatingly empty would-be suspense piece puts all its trust in its star to save the day, but even this compulsively watchable performer can’t elevate such a vapid, undeveloped screenplay.

Qasim Basir's indie drama Destined proves both uncommonly ambitious and frustratingly derivative.

All the talented women here are stuck playing types rather than characters, in a strained frolic in which both the verbal humor and the physical gags too often fall flat.

Brandishing impressively packed abs and enough upper body strength to pull herself out of countless jams, Alicia Vikander gamely steps into the kick-ass role twice played by Angelina Jolie, but the derivative story and cardboard supporting characters are straight out of 1930s movie serials.

Though blessed with a spectacular true story and character to work from, director and co-screenwriter Lars Kraume...fails to breathe much life into the stuffy, overly complex enumeration of the historical facts.

It’s a frenetic grab bag of strained shtick, however expertly delivered by ace comic performers.

The film — penned by Michael Ricigliano Jr., a lawyer making his screenwriting debut — never really achieves the necessary dramatic tension despite a surprising climactic plot twist. The dialogue rarely rises above the level of cliché.

Described by Werner Herzog as “a daydream that doesn’t follow the rules of cinema,” Salt and Fire may be rule-breaking, but the result is one of the director’s least appealing adventures.

The movie is all tease and no follow-through, letting its story leak out in dribs and drabs that fail to gather any momentum or meaning, let alone mystery.

The fight scenes are indeed the film’s strongest element, even if at times they seem overly choreographed and slightly cheesy.

McCarthy more often seems to apply a generic style to his substance, rather than actually use a stylistic choice to help suggest or demonstrate something about his story and characters.

Unfortunately, Kampai! For the Love of Sake is more cheerleading than informative, concentrating largely on personality profiles of three figures—two of them Westerners--obsessed with the Japanese rice wine.

A predictable, whimsical exercise that only occasionally produces the sort of bittersweet emotion it seeks to elicit.

A muddled psychological horror film about a young man coping with the death of his father, Jack Goes Home is a puzzle few viewers will care to piece together.

A small, sympathetic story of a teenage girl’s rough coming out is smothered by a pile of far-fetched melodrama, a loathsomely obnoxious male lead character and far too much unsteadicam visual randomness in First Girl I Loved.

His screenplay strikes universal chords, but with his preference for constant commentary over dramatic action, Schwartz doesn’t quite translate those feelings into involving cinema. Mainly he oversells them.

The action sequences and gun battles are staged with enough flair to satisfy genre fans who haven't gotten their fill with the recent Magnificent Seven remake.

Whereas Aferim! was a thrilling epic that uncovered a piece of Romanian history heretofore largely ignored, Hearts hardly develops a pulse, hiding the faces of the protagonists in immobile medium and wide shots while any possible emotions get snowed under by non-contextualized intellectual musings and socio-politico-historical details.

The raw vigor and protest of punk get co-opted by the movie’s coming-of-age story; it’s not the heartfelt sweetness that’s the chief problem, but how run-of-the-mill and derivative the plot is.

Buried beneath all the increasingly tired visual gags and well-worn character conventions is a workable message about following one’s muse, but director Ash Brannon, a Pixar veteran, along with at least eight other writers, seem content simply to lay down the same old licks.