Melissa Anderson

Sentimental and pandering.

We’re fortunate to witness such impassioned consideration of Houston’s art, career, and life from the people who actually knew her. Still, it’s notable that Crawford isn’t interviewed here.

Dalle, with a mouth that could devour the world, unravels inexorably but with decadent dignity, and Chiha's singular film never relies on cliché in its examination of illness, disappointment, and abandonment.

Crucially, all four men, plus the ancillary characters who appear throughout the film, prove to be excellent company, holding forth on literature, Europe's future, inner-ear ailments, and side triceps.

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.

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.

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

Likably stoopid, the latest from comedy troupe Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest) mines plenty of jokes from eating out and being served.

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."

The most coherent moments of the simultaneously byzantine and dumb Atomic Blonde are its nimbly choreographed fight scenes, episodes that best show off the aloof appeal of Theron.

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.

What's most crushing is witnessing what should have been the dream pairing of Kunis and Timberlake - both foxy, loose, confident performers - here generating zero chemistry.

Polytechnique smartly exposes the spectrum of misogyny without overplaying the connection between the two incidents. Which makes the concluding flash-forward scene all the more disappointing: Designed to give hope, it comes off as an emotional sop instead.

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.

The Hunter is too many films in one.

"I think their marriage was a mystery to everyone," an Eames worker notes - an observation true of every couple that you'll wish the filmmakers had explored more deeply.

10 minutes early to the Free Fire press screening, I grew restless as “Annie’s Song” played on a continuous loop in the theater; the gimmick filled up my senses with the quickly confirmed fear that Wheatley’s film would rarely rise above the dopey and obvious.

The played-out scenarios in Olnek's first feature, such as Jane's sessions with her therapist, are soon outnumbered by inspired silliness, like tears shed over a revolving dessert tray in a diner.

Never a banal depiction of dysfunctional group dynamics, Stinking Heaven, which was shaped, as in Silver's previous work, largely through improvisation, remains consistently absorbing.

The greatest frustration-not just in For Colored Girls, but in Perry's entire oeuvre-is witnessing talented (and often criminally underemployed) actresses struggle with the material they've been given.

The beloved Kiwi duo, who frequently perform as a rotating cast of corny alter egos, can charm even the crankiest viewers, thanks to their soaring, clarion harmonies and cuddly-butch personas.

Aided by an excellent ensemble cast, director Xavier Durringer and his co-scripter, Patrick Rotman, don't refrain from showing this truly repellent side of Sarko during his rise from minister of justice in 2002 to the highest elected office.

10 Years is an uncommonly magnanimous project, kind not only to its stumbling characters but also to audiences tired of films pruned of unruly emotions.

It's dispiriting enough to witness Kunis still waiting for a comic lead role worthy of her. But the usually nimble Wahlberg - who at least has one great moment rattling off "white-trash girls' names" - suffers the most, playing second fiddle to a knee-high Gund knockoff.

If director James Watkins's second film is about as scary as the haunted house your big cousins made in the basement, Radcliffe, as widowed lawyer Arthur Kipps, at least gives a moving portrayal of grief.

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.

A film that puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous, aimless leads.

The pathetic attempts at outré, taboo-busting humor as sociopolitical commentary can't disguise what this film really is: a mawkish, MOR comedy of manners that even its straw man Nicolas Sarkozy would find suitable for date night.

The six surviving members of the original seven are always excellent company, though Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan's film at times seems frustratingly under-researched.

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

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

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.

There is an easy camaraderie and chemistry among the central quartet, a harmony that continues when Chris Hemsworth, charmingly stupid, enters as the phantom-vanquishing squad's receptionist. Yet the main performers rarely get to display their individual idiosyncratic strengths.

When isn't it a good time to show a movie tracing the development of a kind, charismatic yellow Labrador retriever from frolicsome puppy to devoted seeing-eye companion to weary senior?

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.

Beyond fans of Mélanie Laurent--who furiously fingers a fiddle and wears flashback wigs--The Concert may appeal to those who delight in stereotypes.

Dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality.

That so many of the colossal yokel's mental states are literalized, as when the screen fills with thousands of rats while Margueritte reads Camus's "The Plague" aloud to her new pal, typifies the movie's antipathy to nuance.

HGBP too often relies on caricature.... Yet Cone, who is bighearted toward but not uncritical of his Bible-thumping characters, has a keen sense of seemingly incongruous details.

A comedy of manners in need of Ritalin.

There's trouble in Paradis-and in a script that prizes frenzy over any actual feeling.

Isabelle and Gérard's regrets and laments about their parenting skills betray no bone-deep rue or shame but are delivered with all the conviction of two luminaries merely running their lines.

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.

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

Shameless Eisenhower-era corn.

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.

Though its structure may be whittled down in comparison with the earlier works, Biutiful is even more morbidly obese than "Babel" in terms of soggy ideas, elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber.

Binoche's hushed histrionics, though, are of a piece with the fruity portentousness of L'Attesa.

This toothless, silken-looking satire takes aim at easy targets: white Williamsburg ennui, technology, yoga.

A film only Hilton Kramer could love, (Untitled) aims wide and misses.

Sheridan, repeatedly drawn to family sagas, including his own (2002's In America), aims for Greek tragedy but ends up with a PTSD melodrama, with Maguire able to produce slobber almost as effortlessly as Portman can summon up tears--essentially all her role calls for.

A misguided tale of sentimental education.

Reteaming with Silverstone, the alpha matchmaker of "Clueless," for Vamps, Heckerling uses the actress as the mouthpiece for her complaints about how dumb everyone is today. The writer-director's nostalgia feeds the laziest type of cultural critique: never piercing, just grumpy.

The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting abbreviations, namely AYFKMWTS and GTFOOH. In the end, though, it's an armed-forces acronym dating back to World War II that best describes this dismal project: FUBAR.

Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.

Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest.

In any language, the actress (Kristin Scott Thomas) does what she can to best serve her scripts, even when they're hopelessly beneath her.

Glatze's blog entries are read aloud by Franco, an infamous graduate-degree collector not so long ago, in a voice that suggests poetry-MFA earnestness, horrible acting, or both.

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.

Its characters are all too easily determined but never specific—or memorable.

A warm and heartfelt but too often desultory and disorganized tribute to the down-to-earth intellectual.

A docudrama with a good heart but a heavy hand.

A late-act crisis precipitated by scandalous maternity news is straight out of the Tyler Perry Academy of Plotting, and all the beseeching of the Lord sounds like little more than product placement.

Real, dramatic tension erupts as the strains placed on the women's relationship surface, offering a candid look at what the stresses of parenthood can do to any couple.

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

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.

Just as Friends With Kids compares unfavorably to Westfeldt's earlier effort, her cast members' previous projects further highlight this film's shortcomings.

Writer-director Talbert similarly follows formula for the overcrowded and overplotted Noel-season movie, ladling out too-generous portions of churchiness, multigenerational dance-off, and Mars vs. Venus sermonizing.

Little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks.

As generic and impersonal as a new credit card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality.

The principals, especially Ejiofor, rise above the starchiness that often hampers portrayals of recent, monumental history.

More willing suspension of disbelief - or suppression of giggles - is required.

A sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which all the angles are obtuse.

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.

For a film about the perils of too much talk, there's quite a lot of babbling presented as profundity. The political statements in Pontypool, much like those in another recent Canadian offering, Atom Egoyan's trite terrorism hand-wringer "Adoration," seem all the less provocative for appearing several years too late--McDonald's film might have had more punch if it were released when Bluetooth first rolled out.

Unremarkable, thinly sketched characters, many adorned with creative careers or hobbies, populate the romantic dramedy Save the Date, yet another unfocused movie about generic relationship quandaries.