Farran Smith Nehme

The movie’s strength is, surprisingly, the narration, spoken with gentle gravity by Moni Moshonov.

Frank’s work is phenomenal, but his longtime editor and collaborator Laura Israel seems determined during the course of her documentary never to give you a moment long enough to contemplate it.

Labyrinth of Lies hits every genre cliché, from the mawkish score to the no-dialogue-montage-of-tragedy. Perhaps inevitably, it’s Germany’s submission for the best foreign film Oscar.

Hossein Amini’s script leaves good actors like John Cusack, Ken Watanabe and Chow Yun-Fat flailing.

The real thrills consist of one monologue brilliantly delivered by Manuel Tadros as a bar owner, and most of Gabriel Yared’s old-school orchestral score.

Sex comedies work best with light touch, and as the ponderous title (a literal translation of the French term for orgasm) indicates, Australian writer-director Josh Lawson mostly doesn’t have it.

Despite the blazing guns, this script is not so tough.

The film is full of baffling choices, like the EKG machine that beeps for the first 40 minutes, so loud and so maddening that the great words barely register. Mumblecore is not a good look for Ibsen.

Full of appealing actors mugging like crazy, it’s got amusing moments, but the overstuffed visuals suffocate real emotion.

The real unflinching truth is that an average newspaper reporter can do a more artful, compassionate job with a drug-war story than this movie does.

Colin Firth plays a real-life investigator whom the script renders as noble as Atticus Finch. Reese Witherspoon does haunting work as a victim’s mom. But the stately pace and the faultless art direction add to the impression that truth was not only stranger, but more dramatic.

Consistently stale but not altogether unpleasant.

Carl Kranz, as a possibly autistic boy enamored of Natalia, offers his scenes some heart. But Soft in the Head is drab, ramshackle stuff — up in everyone’s face, and finding very little there.

It’s all terribly talky and low-energy; that wonderful noirish title, it turns out, was just a front for a history lecture.

Juliette Binoche, as Claudel, is occasionally touching, but as soon as interest flares, the movie suffocates it via endless takes of her suffering through daily chores.

The most distressing bad choice in CBGB, a movie entirely composed from them, is that those brilliant songs are repurposed studio recordings.

There are some bright one-liners in the beginning, but the comedy/drama mix is an uneasy one, especially considering the shabby way the film treats McKenna, as a tart who’s just there to improve some yuppie sex lives.

Now, here’s the trilogy’s second installment, in which the jolly Austrian makes it clear that women of a certain age do not have his permission to overdo it with religion, either.

Director Annette Haywood-Carter films the proceedings with a sepia-tinged prettiness, but this is a Southern “Downton Abbey,” minus the loopy plot turns and wisecracks that make that series so addictive.

A movie about bisexuals sounds fresh and fun on paper, but a sensitive acoustic song under the opening credits shows exactly where The Happy Sad is going. Deadly earnestness and sex don’t mix well at the movies.

This morbid, cruel movie seems leached of all things that might inadvertently give viewers pleasure.

It’s a scrappy, unpretentious movie, with nicely calibrated pacing, but there’s no logic, little motivation and above all, no personalities.

First Comes Love seems punishingly long. It’s no more visually arresting than anybody else’s home movies, and the film’s creator fails to connect her subset of Manhattan privilege to anyone or anything other than herself.

Copperhead has a more accurate period look, but dramatically it’s inert.

Big Star’s fans are so passionate that this film may well please some of them, but as for myself, I already knew their music was genius. By the end, I was muttering at every critic and musician and record producer, “Guys, tell me something I don’t know.”

Set in the drab suburbs of Paris, The Stroller Strategy doesn’t even offer pretty backdrops.

Here’s a movie that will test the limits of your ability to watch other people having a good time.

The best compensation for sitting through this silliness is Alice Taglioni as the primary cop.

Sirius requires a religious faith in the notion that the same government that can barely get it together to raise the debt ceiling can suppress all evidence of aliens, via means such as engineering 9/11 as a distraction when Greer got too close to proving his case.

It is a remarkably unattractive-looking movie. I don’t know when people voted that the seasick look of an iPhone video is now a desirable style.

Eckhart’s another matter. He’s adequate, but there is something about his raspy voice and WASPy body language that’s more in tune with being the bad guy at the board meeting than the hero racing through the train station.

So unspeakably dull that it can’t even offend, save when the filmmakers have the almighty nerve to quote Alfred Hitchcock and Jonathan Demme. It would be far better to rip off a William Castle movie, and aim for a level they have a prayer of actually hitting.

Give director Paul Borghese credit for daring in giving his movie a title that evokes Sergio Leone’s two most famous epics. The trouble with doing that, of course, is that you better be prepared to deliver a movie on the same level.

Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it’s an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.

The last topic is the hook for audience members not related to Gregory or Kleine, but just as insight appears, back we go to Kleine's tediously selfreferential narration.

It’s not a documentary, it isn’t entertainment, and aside from Chung’s intelligent, dignified performance, this sure as heck isn’t art.

Clip hurts your eyes, but if it’s supposed to hurt your heart, it misses the mark.

The result is like an hour and a half listening to someone bellyache about her landlord.

Part of the limp-rag ambience is due to Talt, who seems to be channeling Sarah Jessica Parker — which, unsurprisingly, does not work. Mostly it’s due to the script, which fails to meet the major romantic-comedy requirement of being clever about keeping lovers apart. All by itself, “The hero is kind of a drip” doesn’t cut it.

Molly’s Theory of Relativity is anti-cinema. All hope for any plot atrophies as Molly and her husband discuss their possible move to Norway with the wit and passion of a representative reading a tribute to Calvin Coolidge into the Congressional Record.

The director has cited "Inglourious Basterds" as paving the way for his own movie; but for all his boldness, Quentin Tarantino avoided the camps altogether. My Best Enemy shows the camps only briefly, but once it does, it becomes both too much, and not enough. Once you see even a long shot of such a place, the impulse to find humor in much of anything is gone.

Allegiance works better as a way of reminding us who does the fighting in this age of outsourcing than it does as a human drama.

What you get instead of soccer is almost two hours of late-stage syphilis.

The plot is predictable, as complications line up like jets awaiting takeoff. Even the camera work is predictable: The attractive-girl's-scary-boyfriend-suddenly-pops-up shot; the morning-after, face-in-the-pillow shot.

The plot, however, comes with twists you can spot as far off as a Himalayan peak. The dialogue is heavily expository, and the actors are not up to the task of breathing life into characters meant to symbolize the Spirit of the Afghan People or the Nature of Evil.

It's deeply frustrating to discover that this 2012 movie has precisely the same concerns as the ["The Women"] - appearance and men - with raunchy frankness about sex added and every trace of real wit siphoned out.