Farran Smith Nehme

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 Franco’s laudable desire to shake up a stodgy genre, his film could have done with more life, and less art.

It’s a truly interesting slasher fest; in this one, the heroine gets to be both beauty and beast.

Directors Matthew Pond and Kirk Marcolina wisely keep this unrepentant charmer, in her 80s during filming, on-camera, save for when they’re interviewing fascinated writers and fed-up prosecutors.

The sex is the main thing that makes Kiss of the Damned worthwhile.

At its best, Shanghai Calling is mildly diverting.

These characters, especially the uninteresting primary couple, can't sustain almost two hours of movie. Overall, BearCity 2 deals in mild amusement, not wit.

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

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

Winter hits his stride detailing how the music bigwigs hung Napster out to dry, but couldn’t do a thing about their industry’s permanently altered business model. This exercise in recent nostalgia (the original Napster went bust in 2002) might have been better if the tart cynicism of that section had shown up earlier.

There’s a simplicity and directness in Chaplin of the Mountains that keeps it aloft; its wholehearted sincerity feels much fresher than any number of slicker, more cynical films.

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.

Things go awry in the last act, as the movie stops dead for more songs and a tragic coda that seems forced and trite, rather than the three-hankie finale we've all earned. Still, Cumming is wonderful.

The movie was largely improvised, which lends itself more to scenes than a feature-length film.

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.

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.

Coming Up Roses swerves into a third-act twist that's both an indie cliché and dramatically unnecessary.

The surreal images, offbeat jokes and pointed human-rights allegory make this an altogether different experience from most American animation. It’s dreamy, poetic and not to be missed.

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.

It’s a wispy movie that does not end so much as peter out, and it could have benefited from a little more humor and a little less heinous male behavior. Miller and Farahani, though — both sometimes used previously as decoration — give strong performances as women bonding over their delight in both movement and their own beauty.

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.

The stalker-enabling menace of Facebook is largely abandoned by midpoint, and Brief Reunion won't even prompt most people to change their privacy settings.

Its sentiment is appealing, though, and its sincerity doesn’t cloy.

It’s endearing how this glorified haunted-house movie tries to reclaim all the old tools, and do so with a straight face and a PG-13 level of violence.

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.

The next time Siddig plays a man of intrigue, let’s hope he’s chasing something more interesting than a clueless kid.

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.

There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

The cast, so packed with talent that Jean Reno and Cherry Jones barely register, is stuck with stagey dialogue. Juliet Rylance, in the Nina part, has a particularly hard time. But there are good points, including Janney’s obvious pleasure in her part.

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

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

Lifetime movies have their pleasures, and so does this film. Chief among them is the cast, a group of over-45 actresses who really are better than ever; in the cases of Brooke Shields and Daryl Hannah, remarkably better.

It’s a mildly interesting thriller — Paris through the eyes of a director who doesn’t know how to make its beauty menacing.

Gould’s lugubrious presence is always welcome, and Rue plays her lovelorn part with verve.

For a long while, director Benjamin Epps goes for breakneck farce; at its best, this is a batty mixture of family-values editorial and teen spoof.

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

The two leads spend a lot of their time doing static interviews, in a format familiar from TV shows like “The Office.” This glorified narration gets old, fast.

Technically, the film isn’t terribly exciting: talking heads interspersed with shots of young people making their symbolic “leap of faith” from the walls. But the directors have chosen eloquent interviewees, and the passionate attachment they feel for their city gives the film heart.

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.

The main problem is the criminal subplot, full of Aussie villains snarling “mate” at one another and landing bloodless punches on Dean. 33 Postcards is what happens when someone grafts a prison angle onto “Pollyanna” — the tough guys just get in the way.

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.

The results are too predictable.

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

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

Aside from an additional 30 minutes or so of plot, Trade of Innocents offers no more than a middling episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

Pretty and pleasing, but no more. A bon-bon, not a meal.

Beat by beat, it’s exactly what you’d expect, right down to the camera’s prurient interest in the dewy flesh of Stefanie Scott as the 17-year-old daughter.

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.

Consistently stale but not altogether unpleasant.

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.

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.

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

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.