Though at times pleasingly quirky, the story is too slackly written and insipidly photographed to entertain.

The best I can say about all of this is that it didn’t bore me.

Based, sometimes loosely, sometimes carelessly, sometimes pointlessly, on “Great Expectations,” the Hindi movie Fitoor is at all times more Bollywood than Dickens.

Relationships unfold with a bright, glossy and antiseptic sentimentality in Park Hyun-gene’s Like for Likes, which brings abundant social media usage to shopworn rom-com contrivances.

Ventura Pons’s stagy drama Virus of Fear tries to walk a thin line about its volatile subject — child sexual abuse — as it weighs a man’s possible innocence against a mob’s rage. But its attempts at ambiguity work against it.

Feels as if it’s arriving late to its discoveries and, given the current political climate, as if it’s only scratching the surface.

The frat house atmosphere eventually gives way to tedious bloodletting. In that regard, The Predator hasn’t evolved at all.

Mr. Landis’s sensibility, which combines sitcom jokiness with mumblecore sentimentality, tends to be more grating than amusing in Me Him Her, though scattered moments will make you laugh.

The script, besides being full of bad-guy clichés, doesn’t give the actors enough opportunities to work up a buddy rapport, though the glimmers of it that they are permitted are promising.

This is a story full of people being miserable, humorless and selfish, despite having been given a lot in life, and they’re pretty much the same at the end of it as they were at the beginning.

The movie is sloppy.

It’s dispiriting to see a movie about interesting real-life characters reduce them to clichés, making them less vivid, less fascinating, less charismatic than they must have been.

The movie’s refusal to abandon commercial formulas and examine its characters’ inner lives suggests that the director’s years inside the Hollywood bubble may have prevented him from recognizing the degree to which independent films and television are already overrun with deeper, more sensitive explorations of addiction and recovery.

The director Susanna White makes a lot of strange choices, including the dark, fussy visuals best described as stained-glass noir. As an Expressionist choice, it doesn’t make much sense. Then again, neither does much of Our Kind of Traitor, which has loads of twists and all the ritualistic pessimism you expect, but none of the political and moral outrage that might have elevated this genre story into a le Carré one.

For a movie that promises an “epic journey” to explore a family’s “long-buried suffering,” it’s strangely unsatisfying, and eventually wearisome, to find that this clan is deeply troubled perhaps only in the eyes of its filmmaker.

To say it feels reasonably authentic doesn’t mean it’s very good. Mr. Kelly, who directed the well-received “I Am Michael,” starring Mr. Franco as a Christian pastor with a gay past, clearly knows the territory, but he barely skims the surface.

The film’s director of photography, Matthew Libatique, makes “Pelé” more than an eye-moistening anthem for a built-in global audience.

We bend over backward to find joy in this movie, but, like eager yogis striving to achieve an impossible asana, we just can’t do it.

The Duel has a few ideas and a glint of politics but is largely characterized by its perplexing shifts in tone and unpersuasive story turns.

Viewers...are unlikely to be more than marginally amused by its fair-to-middling acting, enervated plot and forcibly diverse group of drifting souls gathered on the fictional Greek island of Khronos.

It’s neither a secret masterpiece nor a laughable disaster.

Lucha Mexico often plays less like a character study than like a simple promotional effort, with repetitive platitudes.

The movie is in dire need of character development and a wider social context.

Welcome to Happiness is an airy fantasy of a film, cute but also frustrating. It’s a little too determined to be eccentric.

Dog Eat Dog is a movie that wants everyone off its lawn, but only after they’ve had time to appreciate that said lawn is way more nihilistic than their own.

Our hero’s quest, however — updated to the 1980s, when the country’s corporations enjoyed unprecedented government benefits — never ignites, mostly because of Mr. Lee’s acting deficits.

Because Mr. Hill is still, in most respects, Mr. Hill, a lot of the movie is more watchable than it has a right to be. But ultimately, The Assignment ends up being ridiculous even by its own nonsensical standards.

The director and writer, Noah Buschel, has no fresh insights to add to the well-worn dynamic and doesn’t give the actors or the audience much to work with.

Dipping no more than a toenail in the philosophical waters surrounding personhood, the movie is at once ideologically vague and maddeningly self-serious.

Marauders lays out a scenario in the first 40 minutes or so that, oddly enough, makes you think “this is not an entirely uninteresting premise for a thriller.” But after that, things devolve into “this is extremely far-fetched” and, finally, “this is goofy.”

1941 is less comic than cumbersome, as much fun as a 40-pound wrist-watch.

The film, awkward and amateurish, is by Eric Merola, and at least it’s useful in explaining the differences among the various types of stem cells that are being explored for medical treatments.

Its willful determination to be outré proves its undoing.

The effort is commendable, but the execution is rocky.

It’s all blithely formulaic and would be more irritating if the performers — who include Zoë Kravitz and Illana Glazer — weren’t generally so appealing.

The filmmakers keep the visuals merry and popping bright. Benedict Cumberbatch, voicing the Grinch, opts not to compete with Karloff at all, which is smart, and speaks in an American accent, sounding rather like Bill Hader, which is confusing.

Anna feels more like a device than a person, a collection of eccentric behaviors (her job involves counting molehills) that support an aesthetic of excessive cuteness.

Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but the script, by Sheldon Cohn and Gary Wolfson, is tepid stuff, and Michael Manasseri, the director, doesn’t find a way to enliven it.

The writer and director, Daniel Noah, creates no space for the story’s darker corners, or for his star to delve beneath the surface of Max’s depression and anger. Then again, who cares? It’s Jerry Lewis, so everyone can just shut up.

Sure, the new action workout Kickboxer: Vengeance — a reboot of a foot-fighting franchise from the 1980s and ’90s — follows a tiresome martial-arts movie formula. But amid the hoary conventions are agreeable inklings of an alternate sensibility.

Even the profanity has lost its zing in this cut-rate retread, which mostly prompts admiration for how far Mr. Zwigoff ran with one joke.

A case of excellent actors’ straining to elevate a contrived screenplay.

Mr. Roshan, an appealing dancer, works hard to twinkle his way into our affections and make Sarman something more than a cardboard hero. He can’t, but the effort is appreciated.

To make the premise of a 30-year-old who acts like a 15-year-old work, Mr. Pollak has made everyone else in the film act like a 15-year-old, too. It doesn’t quite click.

The script, by Mr. Dekker, spirals into a muddle of ambiguity, leaving only the imagery and the performances to save the movie. And try as they might, they cannot.

It is too flat-footed and sloppy to explore the obvious parallels between then and now, and the movie is peppered with gratuitous star cameos that distract rather than enlighten. At least it means well.

Mr. Church fully inhabits the character, making the most of Willie’s dented moral sense and his many limitations. But the film constructs some too-perfect solutions to problems and manipulates our emotions.

The depredations of the Nazis are depicted in a way that will make viewers want to declare war on Germany anew. But Come What May is also too pretty of a movie. It is often sentimental and, worse, schematic.

The acting and filmmaking are too crude to make you care about what happens to any of them, even though you know pretty much exactly what that will be.

Weighed down by the worthiness of its intentions, The Promise is a big, barren wartime romance that approaches the Armenian genocide with too much calculation and not nearly enough heat.

The Whole Truth plays like an especially claustrophobic courtroom procedural, drably photographed and generically framed.

Seed: The Untold Story is one of those documentaries that get you riled up about a situation but leave you feeling that nothing significant can be done about it.

The performances are desultory, the musical score bullying and the drama — aside from the game-changing placement of inconvenient shrubbery — as predictable as Tom senior’s steadily sprouting beard.

It is a competent if sometimes heavy-handed affair, a mosaic of fictitious and underexplored characters who hear the assault but are too self-preoccupied to act.

The director, Taylor Hackford, never makes any of this pop, which isn’t a surprise given the material.

Bitter Harvest feels awkward and parochial.

The film, directed by Gregg Bishop and released by the Chiller Films horror factory, has a few good special effects, but it’s too noisy and scattershot to be suspenseful.

The dark, comic poignancy of the book is drowned in garish, self-conscious whimsy, and the work of a talented ensemble is squandered on awkward heartstring snatching.

Mr. Schumacher’s movie is more a failed tone poem than a horror picture, and to its credit, this new version, with a trickier script by Ben Ripley and hyper-competent direction from the Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev improves on it — by making it behave like a horror movie every now and then.

Written and directed by Tim Kirkman (“Dear Jesse,” “Loggerheads”), Lazy Eye has realistic dialogue and believable performances by its stars. But unless you consider subjects like saltwater swimming pools and the movie “Harold and Maude” fascinating topics, “Lazy Eye” has little to say.

This British thriller is a high-concept tease that slogs its way through a morass of barely differentiated characters and visuals before reaching an unsatisfying conclusion.

Before I Fall is tactful rather than maudlin, tasteful rather than lurid, soothing rather than creepy. None of that is good news.

Ms. MacLaine, 82, holds the screen effortlessly. Too bad she has to share it.

The movie makes no attempt to engage any current situation, basking instead in a one-dimensional nostalgia.

The movie is not boring as such, but because it is a chronicle told almost entirely by the people behind the space (Mr. Conboy being one of them), it is relentlessly personal — there’s no genuine cultural critique.

The Wasted Times plays like a movie carved out of a much larger mini-series, whose segments are then shown out of order.

Adapted from Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel (and based on a true story), Alone in Berlin is dour and flavorless.

Despite solid acting (including John Cusack as a plainclothes detective), Arsenal is hobbled mainly by its director’s histrionic tendencies.

The Party is a brittle, unfunny attempt at comedy that features some very fine actors and a lot of empty chatter.

Here, both the director (Denise Di Novi) and the writer (Christina Hodson) are women, yet that doesn’t translate into a reimagining of the tired formula.

It’s a nice opening for a movie that spirals into nonsense.

Unfortunately, the fresh blood has been saddled with a tired story, the family road trip that goes outlandishly awry, and the result is another forgettable film.

It’s not even very good as a genre exercise, and can’t always keep track of which genre muscles it wants to flex. For a while it’s a locked-room mystery. Then it’s a runaway-train thriller.

The scenes of Dracula befuddled by a mobile phone were familiar; those in which the vampire’s garlic “intolerance” preludes a flatulence joke predictable. Returning a third time as director, Genndy Tartakovsky lends his usual graphic savvy, providing a not-quite-saving grace.

The movie’s ambition is the good news. The bad news is that it is a hash, choosing to jumble the historical record and frame a Churchill bout with depression against the D-Day invasion of France by Allied forces.

The sequel is all glitz and no heart.

The movie doesn’t credit any source material, but it plays like a poorly dramatized magazine exposé.

The writer, Joe Johnson, and directors, Damien Macé and Alexis Wajsbrot, have a few surprises, but not enough to make this anything other than a formulaic story of teenagers behaving badly and getting what’s coming to them.

Wonder Wheel, Woody Allen’s latest movie, is one of his more unfortunate contributions to cinema.

The problem, I think, comes back to Mr. Stallone. Throughout the movie we are asked to believe that his Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug.

Mr. Clooney gets some things right in Suburbicon, including visually and with his two appealing child actors, who together give the movie a heartbeat.... But he skimps on the adult characters’ inner lives, and, once the narrative weight shifts to the Lodges, he never finds the tone that balances the movie’s sincerity with its nihilism.

While Mr. Laaksonen devoted his life (1920-91) to challenging conventions, the film is committed to honoring them.

The idea has anarchic possibilities, but the film itself is awfully tame.

Bulletproof, directed by Ernest Dickerson from a screenplay by Joe Gayton and Lewis Colick, is really a screwball love story disguised as a macho action film.

The New Mutants spent three years on ice before being allowed to escape into the slowest summer season in a century. That’s fitting for a film that’s all buildup and no bang.

Working from Peter Bognanni’s 2010 novel, the writer and director, Peter Livolsi, has created a painfully quirky tale that’s so contrived you can almost hear the gears of the plot grinding.

Fortunately, Camera Obscura has decent actors to flesh out its dubious premise.... But their diligent efforts cannot raise the whole enterprise above a mere exercise.

Sometimes it flaunts its clichés...and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.

No commercials are shown during Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait. They would only be redundant. Instead this documentary serves as a feature-length advertisement for the artist, and is about as daring as a billboard for skim milk.

There are parts of The Blues Brothers that would have played infinitely better with a knock-about feeling, a sloppiness like that of "Animal House." As it is, the movie is airless. The stakes needn't have been so suffocatingly high.

For hard-core Godardians, Godard Mon Amour will be an indispensable hate-watch. For the Godard-ambivalent, the critical outrage of the partisans will provide its own kind of amusement. But you don’t need to have strong feelings about Godard to notice the off flavors in this airy, brightly colored macaron.

Fatigue is in the air. This third look at the quintessentially middle-American Griswold family, led by Clark (Mr. Chase) and the very patient Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) is only a weary shadow of the original ''National Lampoon's Vacation,'' which found a lot to laugh at as it followed the dopey paterfamilias Clark and his quarrelsome brood on a hellish cross-country journey in their station wagon. The new film does little more than reintroduce these familiar characters (with new actors playing the children, who would otherwise be college age by now) and let them get on one another's nerves in earnest.

Mr. Oyelowo is without a doubt the best thing in Gringo, supplying the only grace notes in a cacophony of secondhand attitude and facetious overacting.

The cast is surely capable of sharper comedy, but Will Raee, who directed, doesn’t get everyone on the same page. Ms. Cardellini and Ms. Schaal offer cardboard caricatures, while Mr. Ulrich, among others, plays it mostly straight.

Ms. Streep’s near total absence leaves a hole Cher is expected to fill. It’s too little, way too late, of course, and because it’s Cher, it’s also too much.

Signs of life are few. A desaturated palette makes Rodin as monotonous to look at as it is to endure.

Deep inside the vague, unfocused excesses of The Bodyguard, the tale of a buttoned-down security agent hired to protect a glamorous pop star, there lurks the potential for a compelling film noir.

An American Tail looks good but the tale itself, as conceived by David Kirschner for the screenplay by Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss, is witless if well-meaning. It's mostly bland, though every now and then it rises to express its own brand of kiddie-bigotry.