Turn them loose, and this cast has nearly endless potential to be outrageous, and yet, the script...keeps interrupting the festivities with unnecessary details about whether the company will even be around tomorrow.

Scene after scene (or, if you prefer, round after round) of “The Fight Within” is clunky and didactic, and the movie as a whole has appreciably less mainstream appeal than several other recent, and much better, faith-based dramas.

A classic case of a literary adaptation capturing the high-gloss trappings of its source without getting a handle on its story or themes, The Secret Scripture is like a nicely decorated Craftsman home built on a foundation of Jell-O, with a toilet where the kitchen sink should be. It looks nice on first glance, but spend any time there, and things start to get messy.

There’s no free-at-last rain dance for Darcy, but just about every other lyrical cliche appears on cue.

Director McCarthy does little visually that would generate a sense of fear in any viewer, and there’s nothing that will generate so much as a startled jump.

The script has some familiar, vaguely disapproving things to say about latchkey kids (both the teen leads are under-supervised by workaholic or absent parents), depersonalizing technology, and the pursuit of fatuous social-media fame. But there’s not much real suspense stirred here by a premise that straddles recent found-footage thrillers and “Rear Window.”

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea feels like a first draft, the one that needed to be written before the second draft added flesh and blood.

The events being considered deserve better than a sloggy melodrama in which the tragedy of a people is forced to take a back seat to a not especially compelling love triangle.

Looking back to “Frozen River,” Hunt’s long-awaited second feature shares the weaknesses of her debut — namely, a single-minded focus on a somewhat trashy predicament, with little to no room for subplots or other enriching details — while lacking in the earlier film’s strengths.

Sleepless is a propulsive thin exercise, “energetic” but tedious, the kind of January movie that Jamie Foxx should have permanently graduated from. Foxx is too good an actor — taut and committed — to phone in his performance, yet that hardly matters, since the whole movie is phoned in. It’s far from incompetent, but it’s a who-cares? thriller.

It’s simply not about very much aside from lampooning the ease with which a canny storyteller (for such Virc undoubtedly is) can fabricate “truthiness” by co-opting the tropes and mechanisms that we all long ago accepted as the documentary norm.

Michael Moore In TrumpLand turns out to be a tossed hand grenade that doesn’t fully detonate.

Everything leads to a third-act twist that is absurdly shameless, even by Bollywood standards. Unfortunately, Johar doesn’t appear to have intended it as another joke.

The performers are mostly out to sea without a paddle trying to make sense of hateful characters, but Trimbur at least shows some comic spark and strikes a few sympathetic notes.

While Bitter Harvest will undoubtedly serve to raise awareness, there can be no doubt that the events deserve a more compelling and responsible treatment than this.

O’Brien could grow into the role. He has an earnest, high voice — perhaps the reason he’s barely allowed to speak — and shines in the rare scenes where he gets to show personality, as do Keaton and Kitsch when they put down their guns.... It’d be more fun to watch the three actors swap war stories over beers than batter each other — especially when their worst enemy is the script’s coma-inducing machismo.

As dull as it gets, Flatliners never sinks all the way into outright fiasco, and there’s enough talent both behind and in front of the camera to keep things on the right side of basic competence. The actors do what they can with the material, and Oplev happens upon a few decent visual ideas.

Lautner’s earnest turn, as well as those of familiar TV faces Johnson (“Bates Motel,” “The Shield”) and Zimmer (“Entourage,” “UnReal”), are hamstrung by writing that demands a certain emotional urgency while providing the performers little opportunity for surprise or nuance.

For the first hour or so, it is unabashedly sappy yet modestly engaging, buoyed by the low-key charm of its two leads. But then an implausible third-act reveal spoils the fun, and the movie never recovers.

Noble intentions alone do not a great movie make, as evidenced by Po, whose heart is in the right place but whose drama is woefully lacking in momentum.

There’s hardly a moment in Dangal that doesn’t go according to the numbers, but after 160 minutes’ worth of formula, the movie certainly hits a note of touching tribute to the way girl power is sweeping the world.

The climax quickens the film’s pulse but doesn’t exactly grow organically from what’s proceeded it.

The result is a watchable, albeit unsatisfying, vehicle for two stars who’ve now made a pair of movies together in which their skills constitute the main attraction, yet who aren’t particularly well-served by either film.

“Paws of Fury” is an efficient yet underimagined animated fable that barely musters the flavor of a cliché Western comedy.

The part may be tailor-made for Simmons’ no-nonsense persona, and his performance reliably rock solid, but the bland execution of director Gavin Wiesen and the uninspired scripting of Seth Owen have no comic zing.

By the time we see them playing “truth or dare” anew over dinner, Strike a Pose begins to feel like a rather flimsy, gimmicky exploitation rather than a thoughtful exploration of a shared, shining-moment-in-the-spotlight past.

Tartakovsky’s instincts are to keep the action moving quickly and let one piece of kid-friendly slapstick tumble into the next, but when the jokes are this consistently uninspired, it doesn’t matter how fast they’re dispensed.

Aftermath is one of those mopey coping-with-grief movies in which the characters grapple with intense emotions, while audiences feel nothing.

The Fabios appear to have some talent, but not a lot of common sense. They’ve made a land-mine suspense thriller with a few heart-in-the-throat, hair-trigger moments, but Mine is so eager to be a “metaphor” (it’s a little Beckett, a little Tarantino, a little Lifetime channel) that it’s the film’s pretension that winds up exploding in your face.

While the humor mostly misfires, there’s a certain pleasure to be had simply from spotting the celebrity cameos in Sandy Wexler.

Crucially missing are credible human motivations or skilled balance of physical with verbal humor.

Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl! aims for poetry yet, like its ridiculously clumsy title, manages only an odd mix of magical realism with over-heated Lynchian touches.

The film keeps acting like it has something big to tell us; it plods and broods with self-importance. Yet in almost every crucial way, The Yellow Birds is a flat and listless piece of moviemaking, a monotonous indie dirge.

This glossy doc uncovers very little conflict or depth in a personality more colorful than it is interesting, at least as presented here.

What 13 Minutes fails to understand is that it’s a moral imperative to remember, but it’s an ethical minefield to remember in a simplified manner.

Marking a distinct change of pace for both director Don Siegel and star Clint Eastwood, The Beguiled doesn’t come off, and cues laughter in all the wrong places.

Nearly two decades after the original “Blair Witch,” it’s a mystery why any filmmaker feels the need to be “purist” about the found-footage format when it’s been done to death.

After 40 or so minutes of teasing hints that its makers may have hit upon a fresh approach to found-footage thrillers, “Phoenix Forgotten” indicates the genre may be having its last gasp on life support as the movie devolves into yet another threadbare patchwork of mounting hysteria, faux cinéma vérité, and shaky-cam visual clichés.

In this particular cocktail, Carax is boiling lead to Sparks’ soda-pop fizz, sucking all the fun from the root-beer float. What does go well with the French auteur’s honesty-insisting earnestness is Adam Driver’s over-committed lead turn.

Venom is a textbook case of a comic-book film that’s unexciting in its ho-hum competence, and even its visual-effects bravura.

By any normal standards, teen horror flick Wish Upon is a pretty bad movie. But its badness is of such a distinct and kooky character that it can’t help but exert an inadvertent charm.

Peyton delivers a unified-looking whole, in which the visual effects integrate well with stage and location work.

As icky a comedy as you’re likely to see this year, Flower comes from an angry place — one that is clearly more concerned about sounding provocative and clever than having anything meaningful to say.

What you see a movie like Noelle, what the experience comes down to is: It’s something you’re not watching in a theater because most of us wouldn’t watch it in a theater. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. Whatever your idea of a sentimental connect-the-dots Christmas comedy is, this is sub that.

Had Smit developed his themes as scrupulously as his visual effects, Kill Switch might have been the next “Primer” or “District 9,” but instead it feels like a demo reel for a game that nobody can play.

Whatever suspense it musters feels artificial, manufactured in the first half by withholding information all the characters already possess from the audience, and in the second by adding more curlicues and flourishes to the elaborate plot at the expense of nourishing the milquetoast characters.

With the film’s human element so glassy and its storytelling so thin, however, all this elegant formal trickery soon turns more aggravating than intoxicating — by its extremely splintered, impressionistic finale, the film skates perilously close to misery chic.

Although the screenplay contains all the beats needed to generate tension, Assayas’ gift for conveying information between the lines is almost entirely lost on Polanski, who doesn’t give his actresses the opportunity to flesh out the subtext of their most awkward interactions.

In its own weird way, Ismael’s Ghosts has something profound to say about the lingering pain of past relationships and the threat they still pose to the present, but it does so in such a needlessly complicated fashion, we can’t help but be overwhelmed. [Cannes Version]

If only the music and lyrics were more memorable, then “Jeannette” might have delivered on its potential. But Dumont has a stiff, fixed-camera style that deprives the story of its transcendence.

Simultaneously shaggy and hyper-stylized, The Beach Bum plays like a less-coked-out “Scarface,” the collected works of Charles Bukowski, and a Cheech & Chong movie all rolled up in one — an epic goof in which the cast (not just McConaughey but Snoop Dogg, Martin Lawrence, Jonah Hill, and Jimmy Buffett) play elaborate, semi-improvised caricatures of outlandish tropical fruits.

The humans are little more than dress-extras for the mechanics.

Rodin is a meticulously reverential, handsomely lit and very dull biopic.

No wonder this Lawrence Kasdan script has been on the shelf for more than a decade: In the custody of director Mick Jackson, it proves a jumbled mess, with a few enjoyable moments but little continuity or flow.

Every character and every situation presented herein have been seen a thousand times before.

The camera barely leaves Trinca’s side. She delivers an over-sized, nervy performance but the material is so flawed that it’s hard to truly say whether it’s exceptional acting.

The problem is that this watchable indie isn’t all that funny, clever or surprising despite its outré premise.

Willow is medieval mishmash from George Lucas, a sort of 10th-century "Star Wars" tossed together with a plethora of elements taken from numerous classic fables. Even if Lucas has bastardized his own story with derivative and unoriginal elements, kids probably will love it. For MGM Pictures, b.o. should mean recoupment of its large investment.

If it’s the most vividly gruesome monster ever to stalk the screen that audiences crave, then The Thing is the thing. On all other levels, however, John Carpenter’s remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 sci-fi classic comes as a letdown.

Frankly, if forced to bet between John McClane and Anakin Skywalker, I’d take the “Die Hard” tough guy every time, but that’s just the underdog factor Miller is going for, staging a reasonably entertaining series of off-road chases and backwoods shootouts en route to that final confrontation.

All the new Death Wish is truly committed to is getting a rise out of the audience. It’s a first-person-shooter fantasy. The film’s only real view of justice is that it’s a blast.

Crowley’s thinly conceived debut feature only has one big joke, and everything around it is either long-winded setup or deflating letdown.

Format works only on a pure action level, with some exciting, but overly repetitious, roller-coaster style sequences of runners hurtling into the game through tunnels on futuristic sleds. Schwarzenegger sadistically dispatches the baddies, enunciating typical wisecrack remarks (many repeated from his previous films), but it’s all too easy, despite the casting of such powerful presences as Jim Brown and former wrestlers Jesse Ventura and Prof. Toru Tanaka.

Dark Star is a limp parody of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that warrants attention only for some remarkably believable special effects achieved with very little money. The dim comedy consists of sophomoric notations and mistimed one-liners.

Main problem with this mildly entertaining special effects showcase proves as transparent as its title character -- namely that Chevy Chase, who can only play Chevy Chase, lacks leading-man qualities necessary to make this sort of Hitchcockian man-in-peril scenario work.

Pet Sematary Two is about 50% better than its predecessor, which is to say it's not very good at all. The latest incarnation relies more on gore than genuine chills and is sorely lacking in subtlety.

Savage Dog is a good deal less than watertight in terms of logic and credibility, but Adkins’ blunt-force physicality is sufficiently impressive to make it entirely believable that Tillman could emerge victorious when battling bigger and/or bulkier opponents.

Moviegoers aren’t likely to be similarly spellbound, as Heston employs a too-slow buildup to an explosion of mayhem that incorporates gruesome violence with awkward attempts at dark humor.

Tug-of-war for dominance among the trio provides the interest in an otherwise ordinary crime story, as Harmon and Connery end up working to piece together clues in a convoluted smuggling caper.

Nocturnal setting, uneven tone, abrasive score and only fitfully successful attempts at humor create a generally grim atmosphere, occasionally leavened by goofy ideas and flashes of explosive action.

For the most part, pic is about as engaging as what's found on Saturday morning TV.

Despite inspired casting and nifty visual trappings, the eagerly awaited Addams Family figures as a major disappointment. First-time director Barry Sonnenfeld never really gets past the skeletal plot, which plays like a collection of sitcom one-liners augmented by feature-film special effects.

A hot subject, cool style and overly contrived plotting don’t all mesh in American Gigolo. Paul Schrader’s third outing as a director is betrayed by a curious, uncharacteristic evasiveness at its core.

This pileup of frustrations is variably funny, often just mildly so, but rooting value is slight since floppy-haired Jamie is such a passive figure, one defined by little more than his constant cell-phone rambling and general brospeak.

The Reagan Show, unfortunately, isn’t the movie that it pretends to be. It’s a glib and scattered exposé.

Central premise of a secret romance between Michael Caine and the love-smitten daughter of his best friend (Joe Bologna) while the trio vacations together in torrid Rio may be adventurous comedy. Zany comedic conflict, however, is offputting, even at times nasty, in this essentially dead-ahead comedy that sacrifices charm and a light touch for too much realism.

Rising Sun waters down the more contentious aspects of Michael Crichton's controversial bestseller about Japanese influence in the United States, while remaining faithful to its mechanical plotting and superficial characterizations.

This Michael Crichton robotic nightmare is so trite that the story seems lifted from Marvel Comics, with heat-seeking bullets and a villain so bad he would be fun if the film wasn’t telling us to take this near-futuristic adventure with a straight face.

Is it an awful movie? Objectively speaking, no (although it does feature one of the worst endings ever inflicted on an audience). But as a Bond movie, it’s an abomination.

This sequel to the 1968 smash, Planet of the Apes, is hokey and slapdash. The story [by Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams] and Ted Post’s direction fall far short of the original.

Japanese helmer Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ongoing interest in love, loss and souls in limbo is stretched way too thin in Air Doll, a beautifully lensed (by Taiwanese ace Mark Lee) and charmingly played (by South Korean icon Bae Du-na) modern fairy tale about an inflatable doll who takes on a life of her own. Recut to a trim 90 minutes, this fragile yarn would work perfectly and have a chance of an afterlife as a specialty item. In its present form, pic may not get much farther than the fest netherworld.

Misfortune is what it is, a small-budget neo-noir so generic that one half-expects to see a bar code rather than closing credits at the end.

Scripters have provided very little context or societal texture for their unmodulated tale, which disagreeably seeks to find humor in characters’ humiliation, embarrassment and even death. Nonetheless Robert Zemeckis directs with undeniable vigor, if insufficient control and discipline.

Monkey Shines is a befuddled story about a man constrained from the neck down told by a director confused from the neck up.

Reds bites off more than an audience can comfortably chew. Constant conflicts between politics and art, love and social conscience, individuals versus masses, pragmatism against idealism, take the form of intense and eventually exhausting arguments that dominate the script by Beatty and British playwright Trevor Griffiths.

Cross-country race of the title comes off as almost entirely incidental to the star turns. Overall effect is akin to watching the troupe take a vacation.

So much care has gone into each of the departments, from Guy Hendrix Dyas’ exquisite production design to Jenny Beavan’s micro-detailed costumes to composer James Newton Howard’s loving update of the Tchaikovsky score, and while any one of these elements might be tasteful in and of itself, it’s all too much to take in at once — the kind of overkill for which Liberace was known.

Yes, it’s impressive from a visual effects standpoint.... However, had Potter lived to see what Hollywood has cooked up for her mischievous hero (who was sent to bed without supper in her own didactic tale), she almost certainly would have preferred for Peter (charmingly voiced by James Corden) and his three more cautious sisters...to have wound up in one of Mrs. McGregor’s infamous rabbit pies.

Scrub away a needlessly fussy visual style, trendy narrative tweaks and a climax both morally repugnant and logically absurd, and there’s a tough little noir about buried transgressions coming out of the past in Renny Harlin’s lackluster thriller “Cleaner.” Too mainstream to attract genre interest, and too tangled in its character motivations to sit well with the multiplex crowd, this is a minor stain that should fade quickly and leave only faint traces in ancillary.

What’s lacking in Up in Smoke is a cohesiveness in both humor and characterization. Once the more obvious drug jokes are exhausted, director Lou Adler lets the film degenerate into a mixture of fitful slapstick and toilet humor.

Pic lapses into formulaic predictability with nearly an hour of frenetic chase scenes and technically perfect explosions from Industrial Light & Magic. Action comes sporadically alive in scenes with scientist Jones, who becomes possessed by the spirit of an evil Dark Warlord that entered his body during the same fateful mishap that brought Howard to Earth. There is an abundant amount of special effects wizardry that emanates mostly from Jones as he transforms into a monster, but it is not spectacularly unique enough to distinguish this film from other, more entertaining, sci-fi thrillers.

Overboard is an uninspiring, unsophisticated attempt at an updated screwball comedy that is brought down by plodding script and a handful of too broadly drawn characters. Only element that occasionally lifts pic is the work of the redoubtable Goldie Hawn, who gives a gem of a performance.

With a script that signals every progression as obviously as the large-lettered signs used in homes for people with dementia, viewers can guess after 10 minutes exactly how this predictable story is going to end.

England Is Mine is fussy and prudish — about erotic longing, and about the rock ‘n’ roll that gives form to it.

Any Which Way You Can is a benign continuation of Every Which Way But Loose. Original ape from Loose was not available to Eastwood here, but substitute performs heroically.

Wirkola’s film is set apart by its almost heroic lack of self-awareness: Not only does it not realize how dumb it is, there’s a real sense that it thinks it’s smart. In fact it’s a whirlygig of inanely convoluted plotting, deeply dubious philosophy and shots of Noomi Rapace sliding glasses across tables to herself. You should probably watch it.

A strange hybrid of Far Eastern mysticism, treacly sentimentality, diluted reworkings of Eddie Murphy’s patented confrontation scenes across racial and cultural boundaries, and dragged-in ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) special effects monsters, film makes no sense on any level.

Poisonous incitement to do-it-yourself law enforcement is the vulgar exploitation hook on which Death Wish is awkwardly hung.