The awkwardly titled gay rugby romance In from the Side is so padded out at 134 minutes with both rugby games and sex scenes that the final effect is numbing, and writer-director Matt Carter doesn’t bother much with either plot or character to fill out his narrative.

What grates about director Yuval Adler and his co-writer Ryan Covington pilfering so obviously from Dorfman’s work is that they haven’t done anything particularly interesting with it.

Marshall-Green’s directorial debut is an intriguing story centered on a flawed protagonist, and with more polishing in the second half of the film it could have really sailed.

A waxen falseness suffuses the stilted, stubbornly generic picture, from the casting to the humor to the lesbian-friendly milieu. Like the fast-food mozzarella sticks one of the characters devours in moments of existential woe, it feels like a calculated imitation rather than the real thing.

The Circle takes a valid concern about lack of privacy in the Internet age and turns it into a hyperbolic and finally laughable melodrama.

For his part, Castillo makes the best of the clunky dialogue and cliché lines, but the story never lets his acting chops shine through.

The structure here is haphazard, to say the least, and there is a serious lack of concentration and follow-through. Too much ground is covered too quickly, and often confusingly.

We watch The Parenting in blasé curiosity, as we engage in the purely intellectual exercise of sussing out what’s gone wrong.

Rock Dog stays firmly in the realm of the pleasant but unremarkable, an air-guitar effort when a stab at virtuosity might have yielded something more memorable.

It comes across less like an actual documentary you would show to a curious audience than a good-job-everyone piece of internal documentation you’d screen at a company party or to potential outside investors.

The drama is muddled, the action is murky, and the storyline can’t help but get goofier and goofier until, by the end, every attempt this movie makes to ground the “G.I. Joe” series gets blown up. It’s hardly the worst film the “G.I. Joe” series has delivered, but it’s certainly the least interesting.

Delivering boredom when it promises mayhem, Wild Card is a bad bet that doesn’t pay off for either the film’s makers or its audience.

The new characters are all one-dimensional, and we learn nothing new about the old characters from the series.

Instead of focusing on the strength of some of her material here, Utt strikes out in far too many directions.

Piven’s Ari is so over-the-top in his narcissism and megalomania that he’s fun to watch, but the other lead characters are the kind of bros who should be having drinks thrown in their faces on a regular basis.

A movie about identity that doesn’t know its own identity, Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf starts in the wilderness, and pretty much stays there as it tries to tease sympathetic human drama out of the singularity known as species dysphoria, a condition in which people believe themselves to be not human, usually an animal.

Seventh Son tells a story of dragons, witches, ghosts and ogres, but the most fantastic thing about it is the idea that someone thought this lumpy, bumpy and swollen sack of tired tropes and cluttered CGI would attract audiences.

The bothersome and irritating thing about the way The Midwife is written is that we keep hearing detail after detail and story after story about the shared history between Claire and Béatrice, but we never get a solid idea of what that history was.

Unfortunately, Spot the Painting is this wooden movie’s only sustaining thrill, because the investigation plot rarely generates any lasting interest.

There is a scene in 'The Exorcist' where the soul of Regan MacNeil writes 'Help me' in her own flesh, begging someone to save her from an exploitative entity. I suspect if you look closely enough at Green’s film you can see the soul of 'The Exorcist' crying out the same way.

The film may be unbridled, unfettered and bold, but sometimes those adjectives aren’t complimentary.

Overall, there’s just nothing about this interpretation of the character that makes him stand out as Count…Dracula versus just another standard vampire, a fact that only becomes more troubling since it’s doubtful most people will equate the Demeter with Stoker’s novel at all.

See How They Run lies as dead on the screen as the corpse of its murdered movie director.

When it comes down to it, you can’t have a strong horror movie without a strong villain. Given that Chucky is currently working overtime to torment an entire community, surely Annabelle can do more than offer up a couple of creepy grins before calling it a day.

The Turning is not a total loss. There are some stylish, nearly giallo-like sequences and sensitive performances from both Wolfhard and Prince, both of whom look like they could go further with their roles if the script didn’t eventually limit them to reactions in the second half.

In Cretton’s hands, this fact-based tale of an oddball, destitute upbringing rings false. It’s based on a woman’s complicated personal recollections of her traumatic childhood, and yet it feels like a cloying, one-note Hollywood tale, the beastly trauma all tied up with a pretty bow and de-fanged.

Love and Fury itself feels like a commercial that can’t figure out what it is ultimately trying to sell.

Hillbilly Elegy isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well.