John DeFore

Oddly, everyone from boat-tour guides to shot-bar patrons find time to ask our hero solicitous personal questions. If only he, or the film, had more interesting answers.

Making her debut as director with a true story from her native Australia, actor Rachel Griffiths gives the pic a workmanlike, generic feel that would play well on family-centric cable channels. Horse lovers will be the moviegoers most vulnerable to its modest charms.

Despite its successful attempts to show how oil has affected everyday citizens in nearby Nigeria, the film remains fairly dry.

Though its tone is amiable and its performances are (mostly) professional, it's hard to care if these four people live happily ever after or never see each other again.

Pretty, occasionally witty and not believable for a moment, Sophie Lellouche's Paris-Manhattan is suffused with fannish love for Woody Allen's films but hardly lives up to their legacy.

The plot leans toward conventional horror violence as it progresses, but Cresciman has Hogan and Crampton remain largely affectless, their blank-slate characters doing little to make us respond to the action.

Like a frumpy version of "Knocked Up" playing out in a sadder, stranger world, Barry Munday offers two icky humans and hopes that, by the tale's end, we'll be happy they're procreating.

As shamelessly corporate popcorn movies go, Snake Eyes is better than most. That’s not high praise, but considering the film’s dopey pedigree, it’s not nothing.

A good-natured ride at first, its limited scope grows more apparent as it goes; still, a feel-good approach is unlikely to hurt it as it begins a road-show release concurrent with the band's 50th-anniversary tour.

Boys State inevitably feels more and more like reality TV programming, which is both appropriate for our times and depressing.

Katz is much more interested in observing Jake's newfound emotional core — and probably a bit too confident that a moist-eyed Kroll can turn this quite likable but slight family reunion into something more touching.

Renzi's uneven script makes this a less sturdy vehicle than 2012's Arbitrage, and a less marketable one given the absence of thriller elements that sustained that film's character study. Still, there's plenty here for Gere's admirers to appreciate.

Especially in light of a short parable Cam tells early on about work and retirement, it's pretty obvious that Abbie's voluntary imprisonment is meant to reflect an American underclass that can't imagine any kind of life beyond our late-capitalist constraints.

A fairy tale about parenting that stays kid-friendly without completely glossing over the darker themes of its premise.

Though the 55 year-old plot's bones are sturdy and its new performers gifted, moviegoers hoping for a mercilessly funny post-Weinstein revenge fantasy (its poster declares: "They're giving dirty rotten men a run for their money") will walk away feeling conned.

Wes Tooke offers stiff dialogue and sometimes oddly structured action, leaving much dramatic potential unexploited. Yes, Emmerich stages plenty of aerial battles in which fighter pilots plunge through hailstorms of sizzling projectiles. But those hoping to get a thrill would be better served by revisiting his Earth-vs-aliens war flick Independence Day.

The Queen of Versailles will prompt loathing not only among the so-called 99 Percent, but among those in the top 1 percent who would like someone more sane to represent them on camera.

Modest but revealing documentary.

It's not just superhero fatigue that makes this feature feel generic and cheap — lively enough to keep young kids occupied, but preferably while parents are doing something more interesting in the next room.

The essence of what made the man inspiring to so many — it's not the winning, but the effort that's important — comes through with gonglike clarity in Dexter Fletcher's film, a straight-down-the-ramp sports tale that plays to the average man's dreams of momentary greatness.

Heartfelt but clumsy.

While Hobson's smarts are evident here, the picture's uniformly dim visuals and sometimes overplayed sound design are static enough to do a disservice to his work with the cast.

Costner and Harrelson both give fine performances, but when it's time for each to have his one allotted dramatic monologue, you can practically hear the movie clearing its throat: Shut up and listen while the man is speaking, folks.

Though those glimpses don't add up to what most people would call a portrait, they do evoke a life of old-fashioned female pampering, and contain just enough of Sellam's quirky personality to make those habits charming.

Though it lacks the specific argumentative point of view that might have carried it into the mainstream, its sympathetic approach to subjects offers a compelling human perspective on questions that get too little attention in debates about health care.

A critique of post-millennial journalism is one of several ideas raised but mostly abandoned in this genre pastiche, which never really coalesces despite some promising elements.

Where it might have been an old-fashioned melodrama with credible historical appeal, instead it suggests an old-school celluloid epic whose print has lost a reel or two.