Jordan Mintzer

Going way, way back, at least to The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the western remains one of cinema’s oldest genres — and certainly the one where it feels like everything’s already been done. It’s therefore all-the-more disappointing when a brand new western, like Richard Gray’s gunslinging geezer flick The Unholy Trinity, brings nothing original to the table, rehashing movies we’ve seen before and doing it in a way that feels altogether generic.

Neither funny enough as an outright comedy nor solid enough as a drama, and certainly not believable as an affaire de coeur.

Overlong and overdramatic, the two-hour-plus biopic does feature some exquisite filmmaking, in scenes where the romanticism of Tchaikovsky’s music is met with flowing camera movements that capture the action in artfully staged tableaux.

There’s no real voice in the storytelling, nothing distinctive about the imagery, if it’s not a doubling up on the violence and gore, and the result doesn’t remotely resonate in the same way.

For a film that takes great pride in its heroine's nonconformism, pretty much everything in Allegiant feels conventional.

While the portrait of domestic malaise is occasionally intriguing (and owes much to the original comics), things wind up all-too easily working themselves out in the long run.

French splatterfest Martyrs offers a few genuine scares early on, but they're quickly washed away by all the blood tossed around by writer-director Pascal Laugier.

In some ways, Marcello Mio is the ultimate arthouse nepo baby flick, in which the child of cinema royalty embodies her legendary patriarch in order both to get closer to him and to purge herself of some of the demons that have haunted her own life and career — mainly, the fact that people have a tendency to compare her to her famous parents.

Generic and too self-indulgent, if energetic and occasionally funny, the film’s greatest attribute is by far co-star Crispin Glover, who steals the show as a deranged French-speaking assassin named Luc Chaltier.

Thompson’s heavy-handed storytelling, along with a nonstop score of pure mush, brings this closer to telenovela territory than to the Louvre.

Jacquot has a hard time turning all of this into palpable drama, and Eva slides off the rails during a denouement that goes full on B-movie without much credibility.

By the end, Black Flies leaves the viewer battered, bruised and bleeding out on the sidewalk, but never fully captivated

There’s a good story at the heart of The Out-Laws about Parker coming to terms with her family’s long criminal history. But that’s more or less tossed aside in favor of all the nonstop gags, in a film that starts off like Meet the Parents and ends like a goofier The Expendables, some excessive violence included.

If anything, the movie offers up the guilty pleasure of seeing Bridges and Moore duel it out in front of countless green screens and a few stunning Canadian backdrops – two great actors clawing at each other with magic staffs and fake fire, trying to survive in the netherworld of heroic kitsch.

A handful of plot twists are not enough to compensate for an overtly heavy, often dreary affair that rides straight into the final standoff with little elegance and a wagon train of pathos.

This treacly and overwrought piece of mishegoss from French novelist turned director Amanda Sthers is pretty much a chore from start to finish.

To their credit, the directors aren’t afraid to take things way too far — which could be considered a quality in and of itself, but not one that’s sustainable for nearly 90 minutes of action.

This ludicrous outing from helmer Christian Alvart ("Pandorum") and scribe Ray Wright ("The Crazies") takes its psycho-satanic babble much too seriously, and should elicit more laughs than frights.

Travolta is a lively presence in some scenes, talking in a rowdy New Yawka accent and tossing off a few good lines early on. (The highlight being: "If I robbed a church and had the steeple sticking out of my ass, I would deny it.") But he can do little to bring this tedious and episodic chronicle to life.

For a film meant to champion the powers of three-dimensional art, Rodin winds up being awfully flat.

Like a beltway surrounding its hero’s bloviating ego trips and massive libido, the film keeps turning in circles around a subject that’s only truly interesting if you’re Philip himself.

This low budget effort from director John Erick Dowdle and writer-producer-brother Drew Dowdle provides a few late scares after plenty of eye-rolling setup, with said scares due more to the heavy sound design than the action itself.

To the director’s credit, the animated sequences are richly rendered, making the most of the rather stiff and plain-looking originals (though, if you want to get nitpicky, an early gag poking fun at the fact that Playmobil legs are unbendable is soon forgotten) and offering up a plethora of settings that help compensate for the lack of good writing.

A run-of-the-mill crime drama that toes the risibility line on several occasions, even if it’s better made than your typical straight-to-video movie.

Well-shot (by Luc Besson regular Thierry Arbogast) but otherwise entirely forgettable.

Whenever the camera settles down to record a simple conversation between two characters, things suddenly feel stilted, as if the filmmakers cannot build the drama without flinging a hundred different things in front of the lens at the same time.

A hodgepodge of movie clichés and overwrought scenes, directed with zero tact and plenty of pounding needle drops, actor-turned-director Lellouche’s third stab at the helm after his rather likeable ensemble comedy, Sink or Swim, is less a disappointment than a serious assault on the viewer’s intelligence.

While Anderson excels in the film’s many moments of digital doom-and-gloom, he can’t deliver a single authentic emotion between the two star-crossed leads, leaving us with a sooty aftertaste of having sat through one very loud rendition of Titanic in togas.