Civil Brand

It's impossible to ignore the strain of misogyny that taints the movie.

It's guilty of gross B-movie meltdown, but mitigating circumstances include honest anger and a scattering of vivid scenes.

Barnette, a veteran TV director, means this as an exposé of prison abuse and exploitation, but the film is too simplistic and derivative to succeed.

Artistically, its heavy-handed clumsiness undercuts its goals.

It presents a heated-up, awkward blend of earnest outrage and down-and-dirty exploitation.

Plagued by continuity problems, ham-fisted storytelling and a problematic voiceover by Da Brat, Civil Brand feels less like a prison movie than a prison sentence.

Wildly uneven, rife with a virtual checklist of human tragedies that build to easy emotional crescendos but fail to engage the audience well enough to evoke any meaning.

This is a film about the abuses of privatization and presents a negative view of what might happen if corporate America gets control of the business of corrections.

There's way too much of the usual bonding, beatings, petty humiliation by guards, cat fights in the yard and trips to the hole.

If Civil Brand hopes to raise awareness or instigate reform, what it really needs is a greater focus on character over convention.

Hollywood still doesn?t seem to understand that just because someone can sing doesn't mean they can act. If this film doesn't prove that point, nothing will.

Women behind bars! While that's the perfect set-up for a late-night, soft-core cable movie, this flick is guilty of being nothing more than a jailhouse crock.