The characters never sound like they're actually talking to one another, but rather delivering Jeff Lipsky's echo-chamber monologues.

The film seldom pushes beyond the bare-minimum dictates of the thriller, only rarely offering up a memorable action sequence.

Even as Deb comes to embrace the vibrancy of urban life, she's still prey to a blinkered suburban viewpoint which becomes inscribed in the film itself.

Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.

Sarah's Key becomes a musing ("meditation" would be too generous) on the importance of uncovering the past that fails to honestly contemplate why such an act is significant.

For a film that had once made some pretense toward exposing such dangerously submissive attitudes toward Hollywood romance, Friends with Benefits's conclusion can't help but seem more than a wee bit disingenuous.

Of all the vaguely philosophical, calculatedly left-of-center dialogue that peppers Miranda July's The Future, no line is more telling than the writer/director/star's late-film declaration, in the guise of her character Sophie, that "I'm saying okay to nothing."

Francesca Gregorini and Tatiana von Furstenberg's film is episodic, but the episodes don't achieve any kind of cumulative effect.

Played as broadly and as crudely as you please (in terms of acting, direction, "edgy" dialogue), Prince of Swine paints a grimly ugly portrait of male sexual violence and female submission.

Naturally, given the film's somewhat precious air of spiritualism, the parroted phrase that speaks most clearly to Lyman is a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes that gives the film its title and gives Fiona a chance to offer a blithely optimistic interpretation of that most dour of Biblical books.

The film is so careful to avoid the luridness that would seem inevitably to accompany an excavation of child kidnapping, forced labor, and rape, that the result is a plodding, overly tasteful procedural that holds up its hero as an incorruptible embodiment of goodness.

What unfolds is a predictably anguished story of true love thwarted by material circumstances, or in the terms dictated by the film, rationality triumphing over romance.

Like most of the film's performances, Sisley's comes off as flat and impenetrable, the result both of a certain stoical conception of character and the dissipation of focus that arises from the movie's perceived need to encompass so much.

When does intensity and commitment supersede historical understanding?

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has to be the least kinetic of working filmmakers - and not simply in the sense of static camerawork or lack of narrative momentum.

The first half of the film is a virtual compendium of high-culture references, topical concerns addressed almost in passing, and narrative fracturing devices.

A (relatively) tasteful and restrained approach to potentially lurid subject matter isn't necessarily any better than one that gives in freely to what might be seen as a filmmaker's baser impulses.

Gentler and less aesthetically assaultive than offerings like 0s & 1s and Catfish, but it's not necessarily any subtler or more enlightening.

Debbie Goodstein-Rosenfeld's film seems oddly anemic when it deals with anyone but Chazz Palminteri's Joe.

Far more concerned with indulging a slightly less glossy Slumdog Millionaire-like aesthetic than dealing with the frayed relationships of its characters.

A predictable, drawn-out romantic comedy that happens to be set in the shadow of impending apocalypse.

What's perhaps most off-putting about the movie isn't its increasingly stale humor, but the way it ultimately validates its characters' worst impulses.

Shifting between wacky situation comedy and somber familial drama, Why Stop Now? isn't invested enough in either mode to convincingly pull off its genre-hopping ambitions.

While the heart of the movie is the at-times strained relationship between the two leads, it all unfolds rather by the numbers, dictated more by the expected arc of such things than the demands of the characters.

Director Erik Canuel fails to deliver us from the inevitable hermeticism of the material.

With Danny Way almost never weighing in directly, the film's attempts to portray his story as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity scarcely registers.

Cassavetes puts over this simple, poorly acted story with moody lighting, self-consciously "beautiful" gore, and an annoying penchant for impressionistic quick-cut flashbacks, all of which get in the way of rather than enhance the supposed fun.

High school creative-writing-class ironies of all kinds abound in The Help.