Nick Pinkerton

Staying squarely with those victims, what Sequestro does crudely do is communicate the only really sensible platform-an abhorrence of cruelty.

Such an abundance of "epiphanies," one after another, amount to a tactical assault on viewer sentiments. The deluge of tears is Daldry's idea of pathos, but to these eyes, it's Oscar-trolling 9/11 kitsch.

Where "The Last Exorcism" was sustained by artfully balanced skepticism and a feel for character, Paranormal 2, putatively directed by Tod Williams, can only hold an audience with the understood promise of big jolts around the corner.

Adventures is an awesome movie mechanism, but awe comes at a cost. The Tintin character is something like a blank spot at the movie's center, most vivid (unfortunately) as a plucky, priggish motivational speaker when he coaches Haddock out of a drinking problem.

Ignoring all but the most obvious tensions in the Uday-Latif symbiosis, Devil's Double is static drama, with Michael Thomas's script establishing relationships as if perfunctorily pressing buttons marked "Father-Son Dynamic" and "Forbidden Love Affair," failing to dignify these themes with individuality.

Though director Jonathan Hensleigh (The Punisher) perks up when filming violence, the atmosphere throughout is past-prime, stymieing any strut.

The grungy setting and unflattering photography are only camouflage for callow, creeping sentimentality.

There's a human tragedy somewhere here-but aggrandized puppy-love romance and stylish revenge fantasy is all that lingers.

It's quibbling to draw up columns denoting what Lanthimos, a difficult but undeniable talent, does right and does wrong. He's seemingly working intuitively here, and whatever missteps he makes while feeling his way forward, he manages to pass quite near to one of the essential conundrums of being human.

Lackluster screenwriting and the absence of actorly communion are breezed past with monotonous banter, as is the fleetingly visible plot.

The least one should hope for from another adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is savory, salacious trash, but nothing in Hur Jin-ho's tony new version approaches the dizzying depths of Sarah Michelle Gellar spelling out the conditions of her sex bet with Ryan Phillippe ("You can put it anywhere . . .") in 1999's "Cruel Intentions."

Those with a higher tolerance for bumptious jestering-from a yipping and mincing Xiao, or Cheng Ye as a bucktoothed jelly-belly-may, however, cry Masterpiece. They are instructed to seek out the longer Chinese cut, which apparently packs in more such interminable shtick, broad as the Yangtze.

Black, looking like an unwashed clothes pile and capering in familiar "Uncle Jack" style, is a good babysitter, his cross-dressing turn in a doll's house a highlight.

She (Kazan) also wrote the screenplay, which begs interpretation as a frustrated actress's commentary on the way that even ostensibly serious writers write women - that is, for maximum convenience. Still, the direction, from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), is never more than workmanlike.

The result is not without beauty, though at a certain point, one begins to notice that each new muse rather resembles the previous, a uniformity that restrains the film from true symphonic swell.

Delpy, of course, finds her father charming because he is her father, misses her mother for the same reason, and treasures her neuroses because they are her own. What viewers miss is anything inviting us to feel the same way.

More than once does To's grandiose imagism miraculously grant this rote thriller a gleam of the sublime, as in a trash-dump face-off staged as an epic field maneuver, or a campground shoot-out timed to the fickle light of the moon.

More often, Mekas's focus on "names" comes off as a cloistered insensitivity to the wider world.

The villains come across as individuals rather more compellingly than do the film's ostensible heroes, mostly mouthpieces for warrior credo recited in voiceover.

The narrative often seems at odds with the director's pictorialism, trudging when it should be striding toward the climax, isolating the performers on their marks when everything depends on taut blood-ties interconnection.

Danhier has made a lifestyle-nostalgia oral history after the popular "Please Kill Me" model, but gets none of the tall tales and internecine grudging that made that tome so entertaining.

To the atheist, the various interpretations might seem as so many angels dancing on the head of a pin, but any admirer of good talk will be impressed by the scholasticism and pulpit-trained oratory here, as well as some choice fighting words: "Evangelicism in America is what the pharisees were to ancient Egypt."

It's exactly what you thought it would be: A plagiarized, campus-set "Single White Female" pitched to teens.

Penn's lachrymosity and hotheaded indignity seem cartooned against Watts's contained conviction-though more incongruous couples have certainly existed-but the film's assertion of Plame and Wilson as real people rather than characters consists mostly of draining them of anything compelling.

Haneke remains, by his rules, infallible. So what? A movie in which incident is as spare as it is in Amour can certainly be great; a movie in which ideas and feelings are so sparse cannot.

Emmerich's movie is sporadically enjoyable trash with better performances than it has any right to: Hogg's verminous villain leaves a trail of cold, oozing hisses.

The idea is to show love in incidentals rather than big scenes, but the fragments selected do not build to any significance - this is a rote story, arbitrarily scattered into abstraction.

Undeniably long, Panavision-wide, but of questionable depth.