As always, Jovovich's game face is admirable - whether giving gunslinger shade or play-acting a protective mother storyline straight-outta-Cameron. But it can't be easy when all around her are line readings that recall the glory days of baroquely dull foreign-movie dubbing.

A bold-faced name for a lowercase effort, a school wrestling drama so mired in family-film clichés it can never shake loose the suspicion that - not unlike certain high-gloss mat bouts - the emotional fix is in from the get-go.

Without a human dimension to ground its construct, The Brass Teapot ultimately feels like an interminably stretched-out skit rather than a storybook lesson stained with blood and hurt.

A predictable hodgepodge of uninteresting psychological cat-and-mouse, dimly lighted action.

What's missing is any of the real-life messiness that might have lifted this material from its creatively tic-ridden confines.

The regrettably titled From Prada to Nada has more in common with a slapped-together TV movie than a timeless comedy of manners.

There's still a nagging, cartoonish emptiness — and a trilogy-ending installment still to come.

It all remains remarkably free of memorable comic situations, dramatic tension or emotional insight. Adolescence may be bruising, crazy or normal, but it's rarely this staid.

The busy star (Cage) acquits himself well enough in this otherwise rudimentary thriller from deliriously unsubtle director Roger Donaldson.

The Ward is bland shock therapy from the guy who reinvented bloody peek-a-boo with the classic "Halloween."

In the end, Trespass steps all over its own genre strengths.

Writer-director Abe Sylvia slathers on the cartoonish characterization and neon-colored '80s pop - Benatar! Joan Jett! The Outfield! - for an easy-bake mood-setting, which is tedious enough. But his attempts at situational humor on the road - including a stripping scene for Dozier as coming-out metaphor - fall embarrassingly flat.

The movie's few pleasures, though, do belong to Gere, who makes the most of his preening caginess as a spook thrust back into the cold. Grace, though, comes off more whiny than tantalizingly adversarial.

Unformed protagonists don't come more wallowingly irritating and contradictory than George.

Why Stop Now? feels trapped in the limbo between comedy and drama where many indies gamely venture, but from which few emerge with any resonance.

The film is ultimately a stodgy, overblown and repetitive slog.

When Rebecca De Mornay shows up as the criminals' fiercely doting matriarch, the ready crackle of her studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.

Erased is eminently forgettable.

Levesque has rough, in-the-moment charm but paltry characterization skills, Corrigan's natural edge feels out of place as a Disney-esque hoodlum and Winter seems hamstrung playing an adolescent only a fraction as compelling as her hilariously bookish daughter on the ABC sitcom "Modern Family."

A troop-rallying campaign infomercial as imagined by Michael Bay: hero-worshipping, crescendo-edited at a dizzying pace, thunderously repetitive and its own worst enemy as a two-hour, talking-points briefing.

A uniquely frenetic hodgepodge of story lures.

An investment in theatrical self-indulgence with diminishing returns.

The trouble is that it's hard to care about poor Wayne when he seems so empty-headed and naïve - civic unrest in Peru on the eve of its first democratic elections in 1980 is the setting - and when the movie itself seems so unfocused.

Weaver's last ditch attempt to upend rom-com convention and rewrite the movie as a skeevy lout's comeuppance hardly makes up for the clichéd slog that comes before.

Director/co-writer Adam Sherman's Bukowski-lite character study is one of those exercises in masculine self-pity and glib misogyny that frustrates because of its shortsightedness.

Brings vampires, werewolves, zombies, detective noir and spoofy comedy together for a murky genre gumbo with barely any flavor.

The nonstop adversity lacks any real sense of danger. Or, for that matter, emotional punch. Why these two long-distance runners keep each other alive should be of front-and-center concern. Instead, My Way is mostly an endurance test.

Zookeeper has the territory-marking scent of a franchise product from the Sandler-produced stable: pratfalls, caricature and aggression, which the likeable-enough James isn't as effective at getting laughs with as he is the more recessive, aw-shucks moments.