Inkoo Kang

Unfortunately, Broken lives up to its mawkish title, and the slice-of-life tragedies of the film's first half devolve into manipulative melodrama in the latter part. When society breaks, the spell does, too.

Ritchie’s film still feels shackled by its dutiful allegiance to the source material. But when it gets to be its own thing, it’s a spirited romp that — setting aside the uncanny, off-putting look of Smith’s Genie — has no shortage of charms.

The commitment of its all-star cast — which includes Oscar Isaac, Annette Bening, Mandy Patinkin, Antonio Banderas, Olivia Wilde, Olivia Cooke, and Samuel L. Jackson — can’t divert from the fact that its quills droop and sag, where they haven’t fallen off altogether. Behold the other North American flightless turkey.

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

Director Gurinder Chadha (“It’s a Wonderful Afterlife,” “Bend It Like Beckham”) attempts to explore the cataclysmic human costs of the Partition without humanizing any of the Indian characters. And so we’re offered, on the 70th anniversary of the Partition (give or take a couple of weeks), another film about how brown suffering makes nice white people sad.

Where Charlie’s Angels really falters, though, is in the jokes, as Banks is the only actress on screen with any real comic chops. One can’t help wondering what might’ve been if she’d concerned herself more with being her weird self and less with trying to make every woman in the audience feel validated.

Sure, young star Trevor Jackson (“Grown-ish,” “American Crime”) can’t fill O’Neal’s effortlessly dapper, achingly world-weary shoes, and few movie soundtracks can rival Curtis Mayfield’s legendary album for the first “Super Fly.” But this is a remake worthy of its original.

Lines that should be funny are sacrificed to the breathless exigencies of the plot. The movie starts to feel like a slow suffocation.

Ultimately, the overstuffed, under-dramatized film fails to fully develop the stakes at hand, but it features more thoughtful world-building than most faith-based films, as well as a bracing honesty about the difficulty of reconciling idealistic credos with a harsh and unforgiving world.

Ironically, then, a designer renowned for his brilliantly precise lines and proportions — enough to make a dress out of a Mondrian painting — is paid tribute by a work with disappointingly sloppy structure. Saint Laurent might glitter like the real thing, but a careful look at the construction shows it’s really just a knockoff.

Director Peggy Holmes' glittery romp offers plenty of pretty spectacles, but true flights of fancy... are far too rare.

A repetitive, sluggishly paced nocturnal rumination on why we bother reuniting with old friends we purposefully left behind.

The careless diminishment of every other character that isn't Chávez — including wife Helen, played by an utterly wasted America Ferrera in a grape-sized role — might be worth overlooking if the film provided any insights into its subject.

Love feels deeply, but not complexly. Both Murphy and Noé’s sustained sex scenes understand want and need, but there’s little to invest in emotionally.

Unlike the first half, which felt like a fresh look at Biblical events from an unfamiliar POV, the latter section simply recreates the end of the Gospel of Matthew with little of the urgency or humanity that fueled it before.

Bolivar is eye-rollingly romanticized as a wonderful lover and an even better fighter in Alberto Arvelo's lushly produced, dully reverential The Liberator.

The self-serious meditations on fate and responsibility — as well as the uneven but ever-charged flare-ups between Izzy and whoever she’s talking to — recall exercises in an acting class. By the end, we understand her motivations and recent biography, but precious little about who she is as a person.

The film largely squanders Woodley's considerable talents by having her talking about (but never showing us) the numb but open wound that is Kat's relationship with her mother. More disappointingly, the film never figures out how to translate Kat's lack of emotion into something that makes us feel anything other than distant pity.

It contains more praise than insights, and, chopped into several sections, the documentary could easily become a series of featurettes in the "Extras" section of an American Idiot DVD. Yet Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong still commands the screen.

Ambo's argument is frayed by her arbitrary recommendations of meditation as a panacea for unrelated psychological difficulties. Even more baffling, the director neglects to define this culturally and geographically variable practice with any exactitude.

This switching-places comedy warmly and trenchantly sends up the telenovela genre’s swooning melodrama and oversexed-but-prudish contradictions.

Crowe’s beauty-seeking, but exoticizing camera is slightly outmatched by his performance, which anchors the film with regret tinged with hope. But what continues to haunt after the credits finish rolling are the film’s explorations of the trauma of life after war: The brutally quick political shifts, the lingering shame of committing vicious and dishonorable acts, and the bitter knowledge that there’s no such thing as lasting peace.

Those who believe weddings to be exorbitant, empty spectacles have a fair-weather friend in writer-director Victor Quinaz, whose inventive debut, Breakup at a Wedding, attempts an aloof, smirking pose but surrenders to sentimentality in the end.

Ultimately, “Anarchy” is too cartoonish in its politics to gain the allegorical resonance it clearly strives for — and worse yet, it's just no fun.

A high-concept comedy about the domestication of a work-obsessed woman that nonetheless managed to win me over.

The key, according to the film, is dialogue and altruism — namely, black overtures to white hate. The onus is as misplaced as the movie’s sympathies.

Silicon Valley is built on various inequalities, and, frustratingly, CodeGirl isn’t interested enough in delving into those issues — or the girls determined to overcome them.

A thoughtful and frequently moving drama that insightfully illuminates what it’s like to live with illness and agony at least as well as last year’s other Best Actress vehicles like “Wild,” “Still Alice,” and “Two Days, One Night” do.