Writer-director Nicholas Stoller and co-writer/star Jason Segel located plenty of comedy in masculine doubt and the difficulty in climbing back up on the romantic saddle in their winning 2008 collaboration, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. A through line of thematic follow-up can be traced to their new work, The Five-Year Engagement, a comedy that attempts to chart the turbulent, churned-up period of personal development and possibly divergent professional paths between a young bethrothed couple’s pledge for marriage and eventual trip down the aisle. Alas, plenty of recognizable and game supporting players can’t save this bloated, hit-and-miss affair, which possesses the same basic nougaty center of ribaldry and sentimentality in which producer Judd Apatow specializes, but falls victim to a sagging hour-plus in its middle, as well as an ending which feels more the product of test-marketing approval than genuine romantic rallying. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, please click here. (Universal, R, 124 minutes)

Strikingly photographed but dramatically inert, Restless City chronicles the story of a young African immigrant trying to make it on the mean streets of New York City. In a bit of a case of the emperor’s new clothes, praise for this art-minded cinematic import recalls Andrew Sarris’ “Russian Tea Room Syndrome,” which posits that sophisticated cineastes will willingly accept in a foreign (or foreign-contextualized) film the sorts of lapses in character and story that in an American film they would utterly reject, basically just for the sake of appearing cultured.

Less explicitly a crime tale than many of the other fringes-of-society/underclass pictures which it glancingly recalls (Tsotsi, Shottas or, say, Viva Riva!), Restless City is kind of like a grimy lost verse of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” — a movie concerned with locating the maybe quiet nobility in hand-to-mouth existence, and celebrating the struggle for self-betterment and, of course, dollar bills. This is perhaps an admirable pursuit in theory, but it makes for a grinding and ponderous experience as rendered here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (AFFRM, unrated, 80 minutes)

The new film from the same creative team behind the New Age-y, $16 million-grossing 2004 box office surprise What the Bleep Do We Know?, documentary People v. The State of Illusion is a deadly dull treatise on stress and other modern psychological hindrances to health and happiness. Mildly and fitfully informative and stimulating, but also more than a little creepy, director Scott Cervine’s film — narrated in artificial tones by executive producer and motivational speaker Austin Vickers, to whom the phrase “uncanny valley” could be applied — comes across as a Scientology recruitment video awkwardly cross-pollinated with a late-night infomercial.

So what is People v. The State of Illusion selling? Well, the movie peddles the notion that stress is a consequence of perception, and that it’s physically impossible to have an objective view of reality; we fill in gaps with our memory, one interviewee explains, and “the only reality is what we’ve chosen to participate in.” Interview subjects include authors like Debbie Ford, Dr. Joe Pispenza, Dr. Robert Jahn, Dr. Candance Pert, Dr. Michael Vandermark, Peter Senge and Dr. Thomas Moore, who get meta on the aforementioned and related topics, while Vickers intermittently pops up to dole out complementary factoids like the detail that more people die from suicide each year than in all of the world’s armed conflicts combined.

A recurring string of narrative re-enactments, though, is woefully misguided, and just puts the brakes on any philosophical insights or awakening the movie might be aiming to trigger. Cervine and Vickers’ other ideas are just as hamfisted. They opt for easy metaphor, hammering home the notion of emotional programs being prison walls via visual overlays of jail cells and what not. The movie itself then just becomes lost in the weeds. When folks start talking about how emotions “literally guide our eyeballs where to look — our superior colliculus moves our eyes, and where our eyes gaze is subconsciously an indicator of the emotional state that we’re in,” well… what does it say about my emotional state that I found myself aggressively wanting to gaze away, and get instead just get lost in a daydream about Marisa Tomei or Diora Baird, or maybe Marisa Tomei and Diora Baird?

There’s an intriguing and potentially beneficial message here — about the idea of making life changes in states of joy rather than waiting until pain or loss — but People v. The State of Illusion is a yawning patchwork of brain science and psychology, and even more of a mess as a self-help film. For more information, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, unrated, 86 minutes)