Melissa Anderson

Though the redemption/coming-of-age narrative is highly predictable-with Glover appearing intermittently only to dispense bromides-Clarkson, at least, remains reliable.

Levine, previously a writer for "Nip/Tuck," sets the bar low, content to work within the shopworn crises, lazy epiphanies, and eye-rolling moments of redemption that have become standard formula in Amerindie family dramedies of the past 20 years.

Watching Balasko, a veteran actor-writer-director in thick-browed, frumped-up drag, sitting at her kitchen table reading Tolstoy and nibbling on dark chocolate with a cat in her lap, is one of The Hedgehog's purest delights. At the very least, it provides relief from the prating of that junior wisenheimer.

Most of the culinary footage is devoted to documenting-in flat, dull DV-the finalists' piece montée, or "sugar showpiece," in which sucrose is manipulated for its chemical properties, and dessert becomes a weird, often tacky sculpture.

A home-invasion movie as instantly forgettable as its title, Trespass is not without disturbing images: namely, Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman as spouses.

As far as teen comedies informed by 10th-grade English syllabi go, Easy A, partly inspired by "The Scarlet Letter," is remedial ed compared with "Clueless" and "10 Things I Hate About You."

Lang's film, the last he made in the U.S., exposed the immorality of the death penalty; Hyams's retread offers only more plot and longer, louder car chases.

More accurately titled "Vidal Sassoon: The Slavering Advertorial," Craig Teper's obsequious documentary on the stylist who popularized geometric haircuts in the '60s is in desperate need of shaping and trimming itself.

In Davis's case, marveling at yet another fine performance doesn't stop you from wishing that her first leading role was in a worthier vehicle

It's about as exciting as watching David Blaine play Stratego and makes you miss the power of the first four films all the more: the uncontainable yearning of the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.

Tellingly, it's not the queers, but a cop--Seymour Pine, the 90-year-old retired NYPD morals inspector who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn--who gets the last word.

More an intriguing premise than a successful film, the Malmö-set Sound of Noise, about a group of "musical terrorists," quickly loses its novelty and becomes about as bold as a Swedish production of "Stomp."

Ben Wheatley's muddled adaptation of the dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise — one of many Ballard books that examine the pathologizing effects of modern technology and convenience — suffers from being both too literal and too obtuse in its alterations.

In its rushed, implausible moment of reckoning, Douchebag ends up validating the frat-boy credo: Bros before hos.

Eva Hesse relies too heavily on ventriloquism to recapitulate the high and low points of the artist

As too often happens in nonfiction movies, their exploration of these concepts is undermined by ill-considered execution.

In all fairness, Swank's unsubtle performance is often an extension of the bluntly dumb lines she and other cast members must deliver.

Obit rarely strays from the anodyne tone of the advertorial.

A typically bombastic lives-of-the-artists production made even more stilted by having all the actors (including the Spanish ones) speak accented English.

Once the second act begins with a title card announcing "The Last 3 Months"-the amount of time John spends cooking up labyrinthine plans to spring Lara-Haggis's film becomes interminably nonsensical.

Occasionally diverting but ultimately forgettable, My One and Only will become unforgivable if it inspires other former competitors from "Dancing With the Stars" to go in search of lost time.

Too cute by half, Beware the Gonzo will appeal to the 20 people left on earth who insist on broadsheets over iPad apps and/or those bewitched by star Ezra Miller's pretty cheekbones.

Constance Marks's documentary on Kevin Clash, the kind, gentle man who created the Muppet beloved by every single child in the world, rushes through the intriguing points its interviewees bring up to devote more time to banalities.

A comedy of manners in need of Ritalin.

Ozon's fractured-working-class-family magical realism, liberally adapted from Rose Tremain's short story, "Moth," works best in specific moments.

Even with her beatific face (the actress looks like one of Parmigianino's Madonnas), Farmiga is never wholly believable as a woman shaken by a crisis of belief.

No matter how many trips to Kung Fu Island our hero makes, nothing in Black Dynamite captures the exhilarating absurdity of Pam Grier hiding razors in her Afro in "Coffy"--or the loony genre experimentation in "Pootie Tang."

Works best when its director tamps down his impulse to enhance the performances with florid narratives, focusing on just the singer and the song.

Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason are unable to commit fully even to this sudsy vision, tacking on a coda that completely undermines their already timid message.

Russell enthusiasts — and I consider myself one — often applaud the director's abiding interest in the messiness of his characters' lives, most vividly on display in American Hustle, a movie animated by flamboyant dissemblers and depressives. But the disorder found in Joy is a reflection not of any quicksilver dynamics among the actors but of the odd tonal shifts in the film itself.

Bell, unlike Katherine Heigl and Sandra Bullock, who executive-produced their big-screen debasements of 2009, brings enough effervescence to the film that she's able to spark believable chemistry with a usual dud like Josh Duhamel.

Keshavarz's earnest, well-intentioned first feature on women's oppression in Iran has trouble resisting its own heavy hand.

The brothers' latest also has a certain buoyancy...The fizziness, though, proves fleeting, and Hail, Caesar! too often goes flat.

Like the first two Millennium movies, this final installment feels thoughtlessly put together, its script unpruned and rushed through, all to capitalize on the staggering worldwide popularity of its dead author.

Unlike "The Company Men," which successfully explored the moral conscience and despair of its corporate titans and middle managers, Margin Call's bids for sympathy for its most conflicted character, Spacey's Sam, fail.

These horrors, and the absorbing performances of Watts and McGregor, will soon be undermined by a surfeit of sentiment.

Despite From Afar's lumbering solemnity, Castro, a Chilean actor best known for his collaborations with compatriot Pablo Larraín, proves ever supple.

A clumsy spoof of Hollywood, EP always roots for its hapless heroine. But where this trifle fascinates most is in its connections to David Lynch's masterpiece.

As in the films that precede it, the mysteries--and terrors--of desire also propel Handsome Harry, which reunites Gordon with Luminous Motion's Jamey Sheridan, here in the title role.

Star Léa Seydoux — in her second collaboration with Jacquot (the first being 2012's Farewell, My Queen, in which she plays an adoring reader to Marie Antoinette) — further demonstrates, with each sly, gap-toothed grin, a keen understanding of power and impotence.

Making a kid "the old-fashioned way" becomes the plot engine for the second time this year - after Jennifer Westfeldt's "Friends With Kids" - in Gayby, a comedy that, much like the perfunctory p-in-the-v it depicts, gives about 30 seconds of pleasure before going limp.

Tsukerman is not interested in disproving or discounting theories, but merely assembling them.

A docudrama with a good heart but a heavy hand.

Despite the clumsy script and a shaky acting partner, Cattani, at least, is fascinating to watch, never demanding audience sympathy.

The sanitized moppets in the new Fame sing the body generic.

Reveals itself to be a project of few interesting ideas.

Sharp and precise as its tableaux might be, though, Sleeping Beauty never burrows into the brain, and its tenuous provocations fizzle out quickly.

Machine Gun Preacher is the umpteenth onscreen iteration of a white savior aiding the most desperate in Africa.

Even KST is left floundering as the misconceived, underwritten totem of today's amoral, power-mad executive, wearing flowing trousers and medallion necklaces not seen since Faye Dunaway demanded a meeting in "Network."

Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer's political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography.

When the separatist compound must accommodate an interloper — Steve Trevor, fished out of the sea by Diana after his plane goes down — any hopes that Wonder Woman will sustain its appealing misandry are soon dashed.

And yet for all of its obtuse choices, there's still something commendable, if daffy, about trying to turn the high holy father of German literature into a rock star.

The forebear's underwritten melodrama has been supplanted by Tyler Perry–like soap operatics and much jawing about the Lord, riots in the Motor City, marriage proposals, and maternal heartbreak and disapproval.

Dori Berinstein's desultory, fawning profile of the nonagenarian performer devotes many of its padded 88 minutes to Channing's greatest success, playing the title yenta in "Hello, Dolly!"

Though calling out the abominable oppression of women, even in a vehicle as didactic as Bliss, serves at least some redeemable purpose.

The film tries--and fails--to swing both ways, nostalgically glorifying its subject only to smugly revel in Levenson's ignominious demise.

Until the potent concluding scene, the humor and shallow profundities of We Have a Pope pivot on the cuteness of geriatrics, especially when they're spiking a volleyball in slo-mo.

“The white Precious,” as one rival calls her, may be trying to master a musical genre known for ingenious metaphors and similes, but Patti Cake$ rarely rises above the literal.

Awkwardly mixes blue material with sob stories.

L!fe Happens is a blonde-brunette buddy comedy with a charmless cast (Rachel Bilson plays the third roomie, a Christian virgin) and banter as flat as Deena's favorite no-strings imperative, "Bone and bolt."

The zippy screwball energy - and fantastic roster of cameos - that mitigated the fratty humor of Broken Lizard's last movie, the restaurant send-up "The Slammin' Salmon," is missing here, resulting in generic, feeble laffs and an ending as sticky as the pilfered substance.

As subtle as a face-punch, La Mission nobly continues a necessary conversation about homophobia, but paves the way to hell with its own good intentions.

Life, Above All suggests that ignorance and stigmatization are a problem only in the village, not in the highest office of government.

There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller's limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials.

This Down Under noir confuses incoherent body pileups with "twists."

Tautou, playing workaholic widow Nathalie in Delicacy, gives off a sexless, cutie-pie charm - not as aggressively as she did in "Amélie," but still gratingly. The actress, therefore, is perfect for this dainty, inconsequential romantic dramedy.

Straining for "teachable moments," the film has one noteworthy, unintentional function: to remind us that though LGBT rights are continually evolving, the laws of kitsch remain immutable.

Crafted not to give the slightest offense, The Art of Getting By makes the great - and even the mediocre - teen movies of 30 years ago, like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Fame," and "Foxes," look even more radical in comparison, with their depiction of obnoxious, horny, property-destroying teens.

The film is endurable owing solely to Johnson, a veteran of bad kids' movies whose sense of when to dial up the charm in such a generic, soulless entertainment remains impeccable.

Dedicated follower of fashion Matt Tyrnauer crafts the slick, superficial portrait that you might expect from a Vanity Fair special correspondent.

An incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results.

Frears and Hampton's missteps begin immediately, with the director providing pinched narration as he recounts, over so many cartes de visite, the histories of other famous ladies who made a handsome living on their backs.