Everyone’s got at least a few friends who aren’t the least bit excited by the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens this weekend. If they’re going to see a movie this weekend, it’ll probably be Sisters, and they’ll probably be left underwhelmed and bored to tears as they try to ignore the dispiriting sounds of laughter, cheers, and lightsabers clashing in the theater next door.

This endlessly dull house-party comedy stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Kate and Maura (get it?), respectively, siblings who return to their childhood home when they’re informed that their parents have sold it to a snooty young couple. As a loving sendoff for the house, they throw a gigantic party, inviting all of their high school friends and dancing their adult cares away to cheesy ’80s and ’90s radio jams. Predictably, the party gets out of hand, laying bare the sisters’ deepest insecurities and frustrations with each other. Laughs, laughs, laughs, dramatic climax, sweet reconciliation, laughs. We’re all familiar with this studio-comedy formula by now, and I for one am beyond sick of it.

Poehler and Fey have a schtick, and it’s a good one. They’ve set several live television shows on fire together over the years. They’re a phenomenal package. It’s only logical that you’d give them a movie platform to do what they do best, but as a star vehicle, Sisters is a jalopy. The story’s barely there (it’s about their characters learning to let go of their childish ways or something), so all the pressure’s on the dynamic duo to be funny all the time and keep things entertaining. There are a handful of solid laughs here and there, but in a movie with literally hundreds of one-liners and slapstick gags being thrown at us in rapid succession, a handful ain’t gonna cut it.

The problem is that there’s no discipline to the storytelling, so the movie plays out like an improv fest where the jokes feel too standalone and random to support the story or the characters. Maura’s a divorced nurse who’s always trying to fix everyone else’s problems and Kate is a mom who needs to grow up herself if she ever expects her teenage daughter (Madison Davenport) to respect her. Clichéd as they are, these characters could have worked, but once the actors start flying off the cuff and doing their typical “crazy girl” thing, the notion of Maura and Kate quickly melts away and we’re left with Amy Poehler and Tina Fey and their run-of-the-mill Saturday Night Live yucks. Things get so scattered and feel so unscripted that it almost feels irrelevant to mention the movie’s director, Jason Moore—this is the Amy and Tina show, through and through.

Speaking of SNL, the only highlight of the film is current cast member Bobby Moynihan, who plays a wannabe life-of-the-party guy who incessantly spouts bad jokes and goes ape-shit when he accidentally snorts a pile of cocaine. Perhaps the movie’s biggest surprise is that Mya Rudolph, who’s almost always excellent and hilarious, is woefully unremarkable in her role as party-pooping mean girl. Rachel Dratch is here too, doing a watered-down, unfunny version of Debbie Downer. I expect more out of all of these people, and the fact that the youngest, least experienced SNL player of the bunch is the only one to register real laughs is frankly unbelievable.

The real bummer here is that we’ve all seen Poehler and Fey be great elsewhere. Hell, even their previous movie team-up, 2008’s Baby Mama, was pretty fun. But Sisters just feels like they jumped in front of a camera without a plan and rehashed that terrible brand of humor where they rely on the shock value of four-letter words and general crudeness instead of crafting real, clever punch lines. I weep for those who forego The Force Awakens for this forgettable failure.

Two female-centric features took center stage for day 3 of MVFF, further bolstering the festival’s women-in-film initiative with female talent both in front of and behind the camera. Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke was in attendance to present her new film Miss You Already, starring Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette. Also, making its world premiere at the festival was Valerie Weiss’ A Light Beneath Their Feet, starring Orange is the New Black‘s Taryn Manning. It feels like much of the excitement surrounding the festival can be attributed to this year’s strong female presence.

Best Friends For Real

Platonic love stories (particularly female ones) are seldom explored on the big screen for whatever reason, which makes Miss You Already feel fresh from the outset. Jess (Drew Barrymore) and Milly (Toni Collette) are longtime best friends living in the UK, the latter a posh, viciously self-centered socialite with a family, the former a soft-spoken housewife looking to start a family of her own. They’ve always done everything together, but when Milly is diagnosed with late-stage cancer, she falls violently out of sync not just with Jess, but with everyone around her. It’s a sweet friend-love story that never feels petty or sophomoric (like many male buddy movies tend to be) though the cutesy in-joke humor never clicked with me. Collette is ravishing, quick-witted, and tortured all at once, and Barrymore’s best moments are when she says nothing at all as she stares at her best friend with compassion and grace. It’s a solid, solid movie that should silence a few of Hardwicke’s critics.

Not Yet A Woman

In A Light Beneath Their Feet, Beth (Madison Davenport) is at the great crossroads of her life: She dreams of going to college thousands of miles away, but her bipolar mother (Taryn Manning) insists she stay and take care of her. Beth’s father, unable to cope with the difficulties of living with a mentally ill person, has been driven away and encourages her to follow her dream and leave her mother behind. There are some very good performances to be found here (Manning is in the prime of her career), but the story, while edgy by mainstream standards, never seems to push the boundaries or explore new territory we haven’t seen in similar pictures. A thread involving Beth pining for an outcast bad boy at school doesn’t take off either. With tempered expectations, however, A Light Beneath Their Feet is a well-told coming-of-age story that isn’t afraid to explore the darker side of teenage angst.