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.