Melissa Anderson

The Hunter is too many films in one.

As with most fam-cam documentaries, dysfunction pushes the story along, tipping over into exploitation.

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.

Engaging ideas bubble up every so often in Colossal, a film that carries out magical thinking to its extreme. But the audacity of its conceit is inexorably tamed, becoming an all-too-familiar lesson on saying no.

Americano, which Demy also wrote and stars in, is an ambivalent, occasionally touching work of homage to his parents, yet one whose clumsiness only underscores the superiority of their directly quoted films.

I can’t recall ever squirming as much as I did during Ronnie and Will’s first kiss; shiny, buff Hemsworth looks like he’s locking lips with an Andy Hardy–era Mickey Rooney in a wig.

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.

The growing disgust of both his family and business associates, all hazily drawn, may knock the magnate down, but it's a limp substitute for the public fury that still burns after the fall of 2008.

Watching Nénette watch those who gape at her is an intriguing, multi-layered exercise of voyeurism, but one that wanes after our gaze is demanded for too long.

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.

Sentimental and pandering.

In Luc Bondy’s largely inert False Confessions, the tedium is broken by the [Isabelle Huppert's] outfits, and by the way she moves in them.

Guggenheim's insistence on not engaging with the injustices that children of certain races and classes face outside of school makes his reiteration of the obvious-that "past all the noise and the debate, nothing will change without great teachers"-seem all the more willfully naïve.

The Coco of Fontaine's project--which she co-wrote with her sister, Camille, freely adapting Edmonde Charles-Roux's book L'Irrégulière: ou, Mon itinéraire Chanel--can be described as courtesan before couturiere.

Like its title, Turn Me On, Dammit! is a jokey pseudo-provocation.

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

"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.

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

The sentiment, just like the repeated shots of Jacky lying in the fetal position in a tub, shadowboxing, and erupting into a bestial 'roid rage, typifies the film's habit of flattening an idea rather than developing it.

Aiming to be a seriocomic movie of ideas but desperate not to offend or challenge, Let It Rain soon settles for being another smug comedy of bourgeois manners.

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.