It’s a well-worn bad joke that any moron can become a teacher in America. Another one is that women act like sluts and artificially enlarge their breasts in order to snag well-paid, vapid, interchangeably handsome corporate types. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to make a movie based around these stale ideas, provided the movie does something with them. But when culturally codified bad jokes are used as an excuse for a relentless piling-on of the same, you don’t end up with a movie so much as a bitter stand-up’s mean-spirited routine reshaped into film form. Hence, Bad Teacher.

In the film Green Lantern, a reckless, irresponsible, fighter pilot named Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) receives a ring from a dying alien that lets him create any kind of object that he can think up, with the apparent caveat that it has to be green and semi-transparent. In the film’s climax, Hal, who has been fighting in outer space, struggles not to be sucked into the sun’s gravitational field; the best idea he comes up with is two green fighter jets with a rope in between them that he holds onto. It works.

We are in a distinctively egalitarian era, when nearly anyone can make a film and find an audience. Homegrown and indie films can be financed without investors, shot over a weekend, and posted on the internet or submitted to any of the countless festivals that have sprouted up in the past decade. With digital cameras taking over as the preferred medium, many neophytes may never touch a strip of celluloid, while a viral video can turn a couple of kids in the hinterlands into the next sensation.

Most people familiar with Make will be so primarily because of its promotion by Sufjan Stevens, who drew a great deal of inspiration from the artists featured in the film while recording The Age of Adz. Stevens was so deeply touched by the passion, intensity, and obsession of this documentary’s subjects that he felt compelled to distribute the film through his Asthmatic Kitty label.

From Denmark rookies Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm comes R, a brutal prison drama about the moral and physical destruction of two inmates fresh off the street. “When you get imprisoned, you are reduced to a number, a letter, just another inmate,” write Noer and Lindholm in their directors’ statement. “But we did not want to do just another prison film. We wanted to set ourselves free of all clichés.”

The title The Art of Getting By makes it sound like there will be something at stake in this movie, something like the survival of a young artist in the cruel world. But there is no real worry about “getting by” for our protagonist, complainy Manhattan prep schooler George (Freddie Highmore). He’s quite well-off, and his problems don’t amount to much more than a desire to not work. So right off the bat, The Art of Getting By is a letdown. Then it gets worse.

The thing about spin-offs — if there even is such a thing, if they’re even worth thinking about for more than a few seconds before we get on with our lives — is that they are often in no way thematically, chronologically, or canonically linked to their media of origin, so that while, superficially, the sequel or prequel may seem a distant cousin of the spin-off, the latter is even more shamelessly exploitative in nature than you could ever imagine.

A lot of Europeans sought out new ground abroad in the aftermath of World War II; for the Dutch, the search for land was literal. The country, much of it below sea level, faced severe floods and a chronic housing shortage in the 1950s. People who needed to rebuild their lives couldn’t even find the space to build a home.

The first thing I want to do is make it clear that I’m all for the bees. I love bees and think colony collapse disorder (CCD) is messed, and I’m sure Queen of the Sun, the latest documentary by director Taggart Siegel, is right that the recent spate of sudden and massive die-offs is directly attributable to an obvious set of human technological interventions. The second thing I want to do is pan this movie. I’ll start with the small stuff and go from there.