Eric Hynes

Boy needn't be pop-culturally fluent to be relatable; believable human characterizations would have sufficed.

The culture wars may be simmering throughout writer-director Ben Hickernell's script-the Save the Whales and pro-choice bumper stickers on Will's VW invite a brutal barfly beatdown-but the real casualties are momentum and narrative cohesion.

A miniseries, which the BBC once planned, might have worked. In this form, Midnight’s Children has the paradoxical misfortune of being both too rushed and too wearingly long.

Jaglom can craft a scene and stage organic conversations, but if his saps and suckers never wander beyond a hermetic view of the real world, then so what?

Characters seem less entrapped by their desires than by plot necessities — a fact that’s not redeemed by Ozon’s winking self-awareness.

Convention plays like 11 cameras in search of drama.

First-time director J. Clay Tweel oversells the importance of both the Vegas event and of magic in general-you'd think he were filming a spiritual movement rather than hidden-ball tricks. His wide-eyed subjects do make magic happen-but that has less to do with illusion than innocence.

The Freebie grimly reaffirms the status quo, concluding it's better to have no sex at all than to forsake the Ikea-furnished domestic dream.

Bunraku aspires to be "Kill Bill: Vol 3"; it's more like an ornate pitch for a "Dick Tracy" reboot.

Vamps is commendable, even moving, as a raw-nerve confession of anachronism - but it's also what keeps this strained satire from drawing any real blood.

Despite a few moments of surprising insight, Twelve Thirty comes off as more mechanistic than organic; it's composed rather than truly lived.

This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini’s "La Dolce Vita," but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale.

This boppy biopic pushes a wealth of outrageous incidents while never making anything resembling a point.

Lilien certainly captures Pale Male's wild animal beauty in loving close-up. What his film needs, however, is distance.

Bergès-Frisbey and Duvauchelle make for a deliciously ripe pair - their cheekbones defy both gravity and sound facial architecture - but Auteuil is less interested in young lust than old world values.

The girls are worth rooting for, but their pursuit is secondary to one sorry-ass dude's redemption. That's a win?

It's another episodic, shaggy-dog parade of L.A. denizens caught in moderately compromised positions.

Even by low standards, Grudge Match is astonishingly undercooked.

It's entertainment designed to resemble a good time without aspiring to provide one.

Schwimmer is so committed to telling grim truths about modern living (whither goes humanity in the age of Twitter and sexting?!?) that he abandons the film's tantalizing slide into B-movie exploitation.

Neither Janney nor Keener can rise above the rote hatefulness of their madwoman caricatures, whereas Laurie and Meester fare better at playing liberated dreamers who go against the dreaded grain. But shooting fish in a barrel tends to unintentionally conjure sympathy for the fish - or, in this case, for perfectly unhappy suburbanites.

A mess of arrhythmic editing, mopey first-person inserts and distractingly choppy narration, all making a heady topic that much more difficult to follow. To focus or not to focus should have been the first question.

Outside of a few spirited celebrity cameos - Favreau seems convincingly affronted by Dax's ineptitude, Bradley Cooper gamely tussles with him on a suburban lawn - this meta-vanity project isn't funny so much as counterproductive. It's no less a work of wankery for winking at us.

No one expects a Samuel L. Jackson thriller to be Shakespeare, but David Weaver's wanna-be '70s-grindhouse cheapie doesn't even achieve serviceability.

It's less a film than one long advertisement for itself-and for the fact that mindless entertainment truly knows no borders.

It's hardly worth slogging through a full hour of unexplained bondage and a so-bombastic-it-seems-sarcastic score, only to be rewarded with a plea for tolerance that's both insincere and inept.

Radnor tries to pin a tail of significance on this donkey, but he seems content with light comedy and mere proficiency. To which we can only reply: Nothankyounomoremilquetoast-please.

A movie sorely bereft of ideas, laughs and justification for the comic duo’s undifferentiating self-regard.

Cloyingly crude and dispiritingly typical ensemble Hollywood farce.

Only old pros James Brolin and Jane Seymour, as Eva's colorfully squabbling parents, occasionally rouse the film beyond its fate as fodder for a Snuggie-wrapped slumber.

The film strives to cinematically reanimate that shabby underground lair; instead, it proves to be the most bastardized souvenir bauble of all.

Inane dialogue, extraneous scenes and wooden performances make for an experience that's less edge-of-your-seat than one very long, amateur hour and a half.

This drama is as listless and self-regarding as its protagonist, flitting among underdeveloped characters and subplots and indulging in rote emo shots by the pool, yet never figuring out how to dive into the deep end.