Director Andrew Shankman has built a career out of making extremely mediocre movies, and one of the worst in that lot was the painfully unfunny Bringing Down the House that saw Steve Martin paired with Queen Latifah. Riddled with clichés and a story that makes no sense despite all the band-aids applied to string the story together, Bringing Down the House came about long after Steve Martin’s filmography landed on the skids, making it the perfect example of the kind of garbage he’s been signing on for since the mid-90s.

After divorcing his wife (Jean Smart) and spending many nights alone when not the custodian of his two kids (Kimberly J. Brown, Angus T. Jones), successful but aging attorney Peter Sanderson (Martin) finds solace in a legal chat room where he connects with Charlene, a woman he believes to be a young, attractive lawyer.

A visual theme that falls in with a film’s plot or pace can help to further immerse the audience in the story, like Paul Greengrass’s choice of “shakey cam” giving the sense of body movement in intense action sequences, but sometimes it can work against the Director. Michael A. Nickles’s Playback is a perfect example of a style that sabotages its story; constant artificial static and film distortions might seem like an appropriate flourish for a film about a demon using a video tech to do his evil bidding through cameras and possessions, but it ultimately detracts from the viewing experience. Even without that failed visual gimmick Playback doesn’t have what it takes to get off the ground as the characters are basic teenaged victims with no real personalities to speak of and the plot succeeds in neither thrills nor chills.

Chronicle is exactly the shot in the arm the found footage style needed needed, after years of second-rate horror films and redeeming entries few and far between. As in every film in this style, the difficulty of explaining away a character carrying a camera about everywhere they go still remains, but at the same time Chronicle actually found a way to make the experience more cinematic and less irritating. That success goes a long way towards making the film easier to enjoy, and it doesn’t hurt that it features a relatively strong but distracted script played out by a trio of surprisingly talented young actors. At the heart of it all, it’s perhaps the closest visualization of that Superman brand of epic slugfests, combatants pounding their adversaries through buildings, that’s ever made it to the screen.

A pivotal point in the film Havoc involved Eric (Matt O'Leary) interviewing Alison (Anne Hathaway), as the latter lounges on a couch in her affluent house and flirts shamelessly with the outcast documentarian. While Havoc may have largely gone down as the film that heralded Hathaway's transition into more adult fare (evidenced in part by nudity on the actresses part), that scene featured more compelling characterization than the majority of the sunny but largely unnecessary Geek Charming. Here, the geek in question is Josh Rosen (it's reassuring that Disney is keeping budding filmmakers saddled with Jewish last names - good on you, Hollywood!), a film student who decided to keep his camera trained on social bee Dylan Schoenfield (Sarah Hyland). While Josh hopes to uncover Dylan's truly vapid popularity practices, what he uncovers...should I go on? Ok...what he finds is that Dylan is plagued by similar insecurities and the two have more in common than the young filmmaker anticipated.

The union of Ken Burns and the second World War feels like such a natural, it's almost surprising that it took so long to happen. Burns has made a career out of producing respectfully inoffensive documentaries about topics so broad they would seem to defy cohesion (The Civil War, baseball), while World War Two is so steeped in iconography that only the bravest souls would attempt to condense it to any length (even this series' ultimate 15 hours). The man here has done no worse than anyone would have expected him to, and The War is nothing if not an impressive achievement in synthesizing information, but by producing something that so carefully evokes a portrait of America so long since accepted, he manages to push the actions even further into the past than they already were. In a world where discussion is defined more or less by Godwin's Law, World War Two needs to be remembered more than ever, but it might not need Ken Burns.

The lasting mental and emotional effects of war on soldiers as they return home has long been a major field of psychological study, and it’s received quite a bit of coverage in film over the last decade in the form of features like Stop-Loss and Brothers. Those films took the side effects of post-traumatic stress disorder to their more harrowing extremes, whereas Liza Johnson’s Return, with Linda Cardellini as a mother-turned-veteran returning home after a tour of duty, takes aim at the psychological toll from more of an emotional point of view.

Kelli (Cardellini) returns home from service in the Middle East to find the world has kept on spinning in her absence. While she was experiencing the atrocities of war, her two daughters grew older and lost their emotional connection to the woman who birthed them.

After Soul Surfer, 2011’s heavy-handed Christian drama about a surfer whose faith carries her from the hospital bed after a shark attack and back into the water proved watchable, a less overbearing film like Beautiful Wave, about a girl coming of age while immersing herself in surf culture, seemed like it might have struck upon the proper mix of saccharine and lighthearted drama. Instead, ironically enough, it lacks soul. David Mueller’s film has nothing to it whatsoever. It’s a bland, flavorless film where everything is so understated as to be ineffectual. The budding romance, the predictable happenstances, and the clumsy “heartfelt” reunion tying it off with a neat little bow arrive on the screen as if according to a checklist of coming of age drama clichés.

Tom Mattera and David Mazzoni’s film about dark things happening to a young boy and his older relatives living on a farm never really manages to spook its audience beyond its creation of an eerie atmosphere, but it does succeed tremendously on one front. Much like television’s comedy Raising Hope, The Fields reminds us exactly why Cloris Leachman has won an Oscar, numerous Emmy Awards, and many others: she gets lost in her characters so effortlessly that she can make everyone else in a production look like chumps. Along with child star Joshua Ormond, Leachman does her best to fill out the moody dramatic horror, and they do well enough to keep things interesting, but the plot retreads horror elements that have been overused as of late without adding anything new.

To say the least, NBC’s stand-up comedy experiment Last Comic Standing had interesting results, but what it proved best is that comedians shouldn’t be chosen by a committee as large as an entire country. Comedy, for the large part, is subjective and each person is going to find some comics funny that others simply can’t stand. When you attempt to distill the “best” comedian according to a huge poll of people, you won’t necessarily get the best comedian, the one with the most insightful observations, but you will get the one with the broadest appeal. To his credit, that’s what comedian Ralphie May has going for him with his brand of comedy that takes those markedly middle class or trailer trash experiences and turns them into potential laughter.