The film simply fails to provide much reason for nonfans to particularly care about the rise to cult stardom of the Rhode Island-birthed group.

That the film works at all is due to the performances of Smollett-Bell, who is natural and appealing, and Pierce, who infuses his low-key portrayal with his usual deep soulfulness. But their fine efforts are not enough to lift the mediocre One Last Thing above its basic cable-level veneer.

As an experiment in collaborative, exploratory docudrama, The Dead and the Others is an admirably committed enterprise. Sadly, as a cinematic experience, it is flat and functional.

Graizer too often seems afraid to potentially offend anyone (but especially straight audiences along for the ride) and too polite to explore the darker recesses of grief, desire and sexuality.

The film becomes more exhausting than tense. In the end, all that manipulation backfires. Unlike the best of its genre, the rote Five Feet Apart isn’t wrenching enough to jerk a single tear.

Where it might have been an old-fashioned melodrama with credible historical appeal, instead it suggests an old-school celluloid epic whose print has lost a reel or two.

Despite the professionalism of the acting talent, Like Father feels distressingly retrograde.

Sadly, Berk’s stale screenplay simply lacks the heft or depth to lift it above third-hand homage to earlier, better, smarter films.

All the well-crafted effort has unfortunately been expended on a tired and overly familiar story that never registers as anything more than a compendium of horror-film clichés.

For the most part, footage of rehearsals and competition is lackluster.

Few mainstream romantic comedies are so brazen or as unconvincing in their third acts. As if the movie were embarrassed about the tidy way it wraps things up, it trots Haddish out for a silly coda that reminds us how little we saw of her during the film's final hour.

Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel emerges as a messy hybrid that has some interesting and amusing moments but ultimately feels as inauthentic as the team it chronicles.

Writer-director Boaz Yakin, who has directed everything from veteran movie stars to canine thesps in his career, has a harder time with child actors, eliciting performances that are uneven enough to attract attention to the script's weaker aspects.

No doubt the film has noble intentions, but its absurdly over-the-top, practically fetishistic approach undermines its very aims.

The main problem is that the storyline becomes so convoluted that it doesn't live up to the intriguing setup. Most of the film's second half is consumed by plodding exposition that is not exactly handled in imaginative fashion.

Colin Minihan's What Keeps You Alive sets itself up promisingly enough before succumbing to a progression of implausibilities and excesses that test even this genre's lenient standards.

The screenplay co-written by Clark and Thomas Moffett attempts to derive much humor from Atticus' relentless debauchery, but it all feels pro forma and repetitive.

Though peppy and bright enough that it might amuse some kids should it show up on a screen in front of them somewhere, it offers no reason for their adult guardians to actually take them someplace to watch it.

So understated in both its dramatic and comedic aspects that it fails to make any real impression whatsoever, Dr. Brinks & Dr. Brinks demonstrates little reason for being.

This navel-gazing epic is maddeningly distancing at almost every turn, lacking the spiritual and existential breadth of even Reygadas’ most impenetrable work. Running a prolix three hours, it feels like being trapped in somebody else’s crisis unfolding in real time.

Wes Tooke offers stiff dialogue and sometimes oddly structured action, leaving much dramatic potential unexploited. Yes, Emmerich stages plenty of aerial battles in which fighter pilots plunge through hailstorms of sizzling projectiles. But those hoping to get a thrill would be better served by revisiting his Earth-vs-aliens war flick Independence Day.

In what does have to be perversely honored as some kind of special accomplishment for Moss as a performer, Becky sustains such an abusive, mad, pathetic and immature display for well over an hour that you just want to bolt. What edification can possibly be gotten from such a grotesque form of exhibitionism?

This making-of-a-star drama is old-fashioned and corny, and not in a good way.

River Runs Red is neither substantive nor thrilling enough to prove satisfying.

Scene by scene you wish 55 Steps made you angrier than it does. Yet August's docile filmmaking acts as an emotional soporific, removing even the potential camp pleasures of Bonham Carter's histrionics.

Lacking the flash of big-budget blockbusters or the originality of a uniquely imagined world, First Light is left trying to make the best of overly familiar sci-fi themes.

A ho-hum horror flick.

This unflinching yet compassionate depiction of marginalized misfits boasts a few pleasingly poetic flourishes, but it suffers from some common first-time director flaws, notably a listless narrative, thinly developed characters and a relentlessly somber mood.