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.