Farran Smith Nehme

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 movie sneers at the journalists covering the trial, but for those of us who followed it at the time, the newspaper accounts were a lot more engrossing than this film.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.