Far from the renegade, boundary-pushing, sexually explicit sensation that its makers have been suggesting, The Canyons is a lame, one-dimensional and ultimately dreary look at peripheral Hollywood types not worth anyone's time either onscreen or in real life.

Surprisingly for a writer turned director, the most evident shortcomings with Garcia’s feature originate with the script. With barely any backstory to support them, the characters consistently appear to lack the motivations necessary for their actions.

Both the director and writer show such patchy story sense that a lot of the buildup to the final bloodshed and malevolence registers as suspense-free clutter.

Perhaps keenly aware of the short attention spans and the reluctance in the ordinary viewer to countenance long-lingering malice on screen – especially among good-looking, self-proclaimed friends – everything gets neatly resolved sharply and swiftly, so that shouting matches will quickly give way to yet another round of gags and all-round tomfoolery.

This second feature based on a best-selling book by Jim Stovall is mainly repetitive in its themes and suffers from a melodramatic plotline and hamfisted execution.

A film as soul-sucking as any of the fang-baring bores who populate it.

Aspiring transcendent love stories don't come much more claptrappy and unconvincing than Winter's Tale.

With unappealing one-note characters, retread concepts and implausible motivations, Chappie is a further downward step for director Neill Blomkamp.

Director Suri Krishnamma has taken it upon himself to create one of the most depressing films of the year.

The comedy here feels secondhand and becomes grating when no cliche is left unused, whether about nationality, race, gays or the female gender.

Ill-advised and amateurishly executed, Ass Backwards begins with a passably funny concept and runs it into the ground within 20 minutes.

Cory Monteith in one of his last screen roles may be the best thing going for McCanick, a tired cop drama that recycles predictable narrative elements almost to the point of meaninglessness and then substitutes wildly improbable developments in place of actual originality.

The film’s reluctance to fully explore its provocative moral conflict renders it terminally bland.

Jewtopia feels like a failed sitcom pilot that might have been created by Jackie Mason.

Brad Anderson has basically thrown everything into the film's furnace so as to keep its wobbly narrative running — to no avail, sadly: as the leaps between genre tropes and divergent threads exposes ever wider plot holes, this incoherent adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe attempts endless twists and turns culminating in a supposedly cathartic denouement drenched in sap.

A Strange Brand of Happy is being billed as a “faith-friendly romantic comedy,” but its overall ineptness has the inadvertent impact of making you lose faith in romantic comedies altogether.

This tonal mess rarely puts a foot right as comedy and makes only marginal improvements when it turns poignant toward the end.

Unfortunately, the power of the message is diluted by the pedestrian filmmaking, with the overall effect resembling a compendium of public service announcements.

This overly convoluted and contrived farce features a typically scenic setting and an engaging performance by Helena Noguerra in the central role but otherwise has little to recommend it.

It offers scant insight to go along with its simplistic homilies about the power of faith and the reassuring presence of God.

Wedding Palace is being billed as the first Asian-American romantic comedy and the first U.S.-Korea independent co-production. Too bad, then, that this shrill, unfunny effort from director/co-writer Christine Yoo features such broad clichés and stereotypical characters that it doesn’t exactly reflect well on the Korean-American community.

Whenever the camera settles down to record a simple conversation between two characters, things suddenly feel stilted, as if the filmmakers cannot build the drama without flinging a hundred different things in front of the lens at the same time.

There certainly are moving moments in this inspiring if necessarily somewhat morbid travelogue... but they’re buried in the sloppiness and self-indulgence that too often marks this vanity project.

A rom-com whose agreeable individual elements aren't enough to sell the witless contrivance around which they revolve.

What starts out as a reasonably effective ghost story devolves into familiar torture porn in Cassadaga, Anthony DiBlasi’s muddled horror film ineffectively blending two genre styles.

McAvoy and Radcliffe are actors with charm to burn, but it’s only in brief moments that their characterizations cut through the film’s pandemonium, while the jokes they’re called upon to deliver land with a thud.

The screenplay by Eddie and Chris Borey fails to live up to the juiciness of the original premise, lacking meaningful character development and teasing out its unveiling of its mysterious plot elements in dull, plodding fashion.

An admirable idea in theory proves to be a real slog to sit through in Everyday.