Originality is what made Alvarez famous. If only he showed more of it here when it comes to storytelling, not just innovative jump scares.

Despite successfully creating the illusion of forbidden glimpses, The Good Shepherd slogs through most of its lengthy running time.

The filmmakers no doubt had a hell of a time whittling the material down; unfortunately, what they came up with was something long on the mundaneness of GovWorks.com and short on the personalities behind it.

Ultimately feels like a movie whose heart is in the right place, even though someone neglected to flip the 'On' switch.

An excellently cast biopic about yet another self-destructive genius who burnt out but will never fade away – at least not in France, or wherever cigarettes, alcohol, and sex are still allowed.

Instead of a radical call to action, it's a long slog of wigs and oration.

On the whole, the film feels detached and morose, just like its characters.

It starts off with a slick split-screen bang, but this high tech heist thriller is like a For Dummies guide to the genre.

No chaperones are necessary to watch this genteel movie. Although the terrific cast manages to deliver some small, lovely moments, The Chaperone keeps its corset fully laced and its narrative intentions in check.

Product placement aside, there’s an admirable, even sweet, message about fellowship and misfit pride shot through the whole script, and Vaughn is rather touching as a kind of cuddly uncle figure to his fellow interns.

On the plus side, Costanzo is an appealing and likable young actor who carries the film easily; he gives the impression that he is thinking deeply and mildly amused.

Ultimately, it's undone by the overfamiliar nature of Doon and Lina's quest, the outcome of which, while breathlessly paced, is never really in question.

What ultimately disappoints here, however, is the conventionality of the movie’s narrative arc, its mushy characterizations (as the cosmetic company heiress who befriends Renee, a squeaky-voiced Williams is utterly dispensable), and a rushed conclusion that ties up the loose ends with a sloppy bow that diminishes the movie’s message.

It's a 24-hour-party-people travelogue, entertaining enough to grab your eyes... but less memorable than it may at first appear.

Breathtakingly gorgeous but ultimately thematically unsatisfying.

Frankenheimer resorts to gunfire and explosions to bring the film to its predictable end. It's when things get mundane that you find yourself wishing that Brando would reappear on the screen to make things interesting again.

After establishing this interesting premise, writer/director James DeMonaco only scratches the surface of its implications before devolving into a creepy roundelay of murders and deaths averted.

This is really Reygadas' show all the way. And what he's delivered is a sad, tawdry picture in which all hope for salvation lies with God.

This children's sci-fi movie should be palatable to the young and old alike, yet it's ultimately more a mild diversion than a magical adventure.

Smashed may be better at preaching to the choir and is likely to find its largest audience among struggling 12-steppers.

It's a loud, obnoxious, and pleasant-enough entertainment, but hardly the soaring tale of one man's struggle that it was so clearly envisioned to be.

If you shy away from that sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that comes when watching good people make bad decisions, then best to steer clear of Manito, a low-budget indie that reaches near-Greek proportions of tragedy brought on by lousy decision-making.

A startling beauty who radiates both intelligence and a teenager-like surliness, Mackey is Hot Milk’s main point of interest and its stable anchor. She makes a meal of the scraps meted out about Sofia’s backstory, her inner thoughts, and motivations – which is what makes the film’s final moments so rankling.

Arguably better than the last five Eddie Murphy films taken together, The Nutty Professor still seems to be playing down to its audience much of the time, though you'd never know it to hear the gales of laughter erupting at the screening I attended.

Glory Road really isn't a bad show – it's just an obvious one – and one wishes material of this historical import had received a more refined rendering.

The elliptical narrative also recalls Fernando Meirelles' somewhat similarly themed "The Constant Gardener," a film ultimately more heartfelt and accessible to mainstream audiences because its maker is unafraid of grief and explores it more deeply.

The screenplay by Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox, and Katie Silberman nails the mechanics of a rom-com, even if it takes Wilson’s delivery to drive the lessons home. Scenes are succinct and the movie comes in at 88 minutes even with a tacked-on song-and-dance video at the end (as a nod to the film’s wildly successful karaoke-bar sequence earlier in the film).

Perhaps the fault lies not in our stars, but in our shameless need for a sappy ending.

This is a film strictly for hardcore sentimentalists, despite its straight-ahead depiction of the harsh urban landscape in contemporary China.

A drab, anemic machine, Spectre, may bring the spectacle, but it lacks a soul. Someone get Idris Elba on the phone.

Suffice to realize that Reeves’ opening salvo is an ambitious and heady mix of the glorious (if overtold) past, the tense present, and the imperfectly perfect realm of Chen’s fighter, his conscience, and blow upon blow upon blow. The concoction works, despite – or maybe because of – its unjaded, fantastical familiarity

Fernandez is excellent as the maladjusted daughter, but the film's heart and soul is embodied in Galina's noble, understated performance.

Screenwriters Nina Fiore and John Herrera have modernized Keene’s decades-old storyline without completely chucking the quaint qualities of the original.

Most important is that there's no caricatured, mustache-twirling villain, or low-grade local bullies, driving the action.

Hotel for Dogs is a decent family film, sure to please animal-loving kids and their parents alike. Well-acted, the movie also looks good and is stocked with lots of goofy gadgetry.

Clunky horror in-jokes, like a heavy-handed Scream nod in the name of Winnie's aunt (Isabelle), feel labored, and it's all plagued by the same unevenness that afflicted director Tyler MacIntyre's Tragedy Girls: The gore and the comedy are well-executed, but the timing is off.

Pass the popcorn, dude; this shit rocks.

Certainly it's not for everyone, but fans of Euro-sleaze will groove on Argento's obvious charms and the film's dystopian thrill ride, while the rest will probably doze off dreaming Fassbinder dreams.

The film is vast and epic, featuring sprawling rivers, awe-inspiring landscapes, serious military campaigns, and the rich political and ideological history of the period. Still, without sufficient context, the films swirls grandly but without making much meaning.

In essence, the artistic failure of She's So Lovely is traceable to a single, supremely ironic fact: For a story by a writer with so much professed faith in the power of truth to bubble up out of apparent chaos, there's hardly anything here that feels recognizably true.

Scooby's just so dang cute, what's the point in grousing?

The seductive scenery in this French film will sink its hooks into any hungering soul, and the window into the winemaking process it offers will stimulate the juices of any armchair oenophile. But the dramatic core of Cédric Klapisch’s Back to Burgundy is pure boilerplate.

Despite the vividness of the movement and the philosophical underpinnings of the cause and its tactical shifts, Suffragette unfolds in a sequentially predictable manner.

Maybe it's indicative of my end-of-the-year brain-fry, but this dopey comedy about two of the dumbest guys in the universe on a road trip to misadventure is a hoot.

At its best, 32 Short Films manages to convey something of Gould’s state of mind, often using the musician’s own words.

As a vehicle for Gina Gershon to strut her provocative stuff, Prey for Rock & Roll is a rock & roll fantasy come to life.

Like most dreams revisited with eyes wide open, this one's content dissolves into a transparent puddle of inchoate thoughts and predictable iconography.

This biography, to our surprise, is extremely respectful and earnest and lacking Morris' usual transformational touch.

The movie's main weakness is the premise that sun, flowers, Mediterranean air and, certainly, castle living, are magical restoratives strong enough to salve all social ills. But these actresses and their mates are all pleasurable to watch as they go through their paces and interact.

As a document of an extraordinary event, Anthropoid does the disservice of rendering this bit of World War II history dull and colorless. I’m sure there’s a History Channel show that tells the tale better.

The problem here, and what makes it so inferior to Evans’ films, is the editing. It is a page that Berg perhaps lost, but the action is the very definition of discontinuous.

Cape of Good Hope is a hopeful piece of humanism that is difficult to begrudge too much.

What we witness onscreen is horrifying and deeply disturbing (as it should be), but a little more context might help us to not feel so marooned.

Director Reiner (All of Me, Sibling Rivalry) takes -- ahem -- a stab at parodying those wacky ice-pick thrillers of the Nineties and barely breaks the skin.

The splendid performance by Sobieski, who ends her long run as industry-mag buzz princess and arrives as a full-fledged star.

The heart is in the right place for Your Lucky Day, but the execution is a little loose. Brown puts a lot of tenderness in his film, particularly with the film’s central couple, but there’s not enough friction and surprise to create a tight holiday-set thriller.

It works best as a spank-it movie you don’t have to feel guilty about and that you can dance to. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

It IS consistently funny. Its trash-can humor is tasteless, no doubt, but hey, that doesn't make it unpalatable.

You’ll be the richer for spending time in Crimmins’ company, but the material seems better suited to the small screen.

As kids' comedies go, this one's fairly topical and, better yet, amusing.

The movie treats all its characters kindly -– especially in moments where it would be easy to go for the cheap shot -– but there’s either not enough froth or meat on its bones to sate the appetite.

Talk to Me is hardly a bad horror film, but the disconnect between what was and what could be looms large over the final act.

Ozon's take on this marriage in particular is notable – apart from Freiss and Bruni-Tedeschi's bracing performances – for his unwillingness to let things spiral out of complete control.

You get the feeling the filmmakers didn't want to make anyone think too hard about what's going on here behind the scenes of the main storyline, and that's more than a little insulting.

Although the film starts off a bit slowly, things pick up as the two heroes venture into the mysterious forest in search of Excalibur. There the images start twisting themselves into wacky animated fun. But still, events are interrupted by way too much singing, a prospect not helped much by the caliber of the instantly forgettable tunes composed by David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager.

These fun-loving mutants meet life on their own terms, they are heroes despite themselves. Their appeal is apparently strong enough to overcome any potential disturbance regarding plot disjointedness, pseudo-scientific reasoning and historical inaccuracy.

They're admirable attempts to update the old cartoon's broad social satire and add some depth to these characters, but they're played too gravely (gravelly?) to work in this wild world, and they don't prompt the same silly satisfaction that the show did.

The film's biggest shortcoming is that its caricatured strokes aren't broad enough; it lacks the slam-bang energy of the comically grotesque.

Hard truths: Popstar’s jokes land pillow-soft.

The storyline goes from bad to worse as one-dimensional characters gradually flatten out into pure stick figures, and the crime plot goes from hokey to implausible.

Paul is offensive solely for being so underachieving.

Rather than providing a foil for Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation" or embodying the mostly silent model for the painter Vermeer in "The Girl With One Pearl Earring," Johansson actually has to emote prodigiously here, and she is just not up to the task.

There is no cumulative emotional resonance to be had here, just a succession of incidents to navigate. Pinocchio’s ultimate transformation from puppet to human boy lacks much of the transcendence inherent in the parable, and thus the film never moves beyond its wooden machinations.

Yet as wonderful as it is to see a breezy, earnest romantic comedy that is so matter-of-factly gay-themed, Big Eden suffers somewhat, unsurprisingly, from some of the usual perils of a breezy, earnest romantic comedy.

Problem is, the movie shifts gears abruptly in mid-story and what had previously been merely melodramatic extremism turns into hyperbolic horror.

An additional change in the film's adaptation from Scott Phillips' novel substitutes the author's original ending for a redemptive conclusion that seems indicative of The Ice Harvest's unwillingness to really plumb the real depths of the darkness it has set in motion.

To my mind, movies about watching nomads walk rank alongside movies about writers writing: The action is dull and endlessly repetitive, and most of the interesting stuff occurs in the mind’s interior.

It's hit-or-miss comedy of the very broadest sort, but those who groove on deciphering obscure film-geek in-jokes will find their work more than cut out for them.

Bassett as Voletta is her usual captivating self.

The film is at its best when painting the atmosphere and detail of 1953 Dublin.

Huang's understatement often seems flat. There's nothing visually distinctive about his depiction of diverse working class NYC, and major events bubble up with surprisingly little impact. With so much on the line, Boogie just sort of dribbles to nothingness.

Anyone who watched (and probably wept his or her way through) the swoony 2004 melodrama "The Notebook" knows Cassavetes is not a man to leave a spot of sap untapped, and in My Sister's Keeper, he pulls out a very big drill indeed.

Counselors and campers' moms tend to tear up when they talk about the lessons these girls are learning, lessons that go way beyond how to tune a bass, but this isn't exactly a "rah-rah" film.

Borrows from other movies almost shamelessly.

Pratt delightfully plays against type here as a fierce bully, and Hawke looks as though he were born to wear spurs and a badge.

There's a lot of wasted effort here trying to distract us from what we know good and well is going to happen. Nevertheless, it's time pleasantly spent.

The how-it-was-made demonstration may have been the most captivating part of Mars Needs Moms.

A standard-issue family reunion dramedy, The Hollars has several genuine moments of human interaction that are near-magical to observe because they feel so plucked from real life.

More thought seems to have gone into the future foodstuff and eating utensil design than in the narrative. It’s a lazy film, one whose future will most likely live on in mediocre undergraduate term papers.

Consistently entertaining, athletically brutal, and, more often than not, well-acted.

It’s Hauser who keeps the movie from tilting over, even though Eastwood and Ray initially seem to patronize the character. The knuckleheaded scene-stealer from "I, Tonya" and "BlacKkKlansman" has the chance here to play a fuller, more rounded character for a change, and he’s unexpectedly up to the task. The performance is an eye-opener. With a little refinement and polish, we may have found our long-awaited Ignatius J. Reilly.

The performances are all terrific, but Together never jells as a compelling narrative.

It's not that there isn't a solid narrative tradition of rebellion against patriarchal cults behind this, one that has been told before in seminal retellings like Danny Boyle's adaptation of Mr. Wroe's Virgins, and it is one that gains different meaning through each contemporary lens. It's that The Other Lamb takes it for granted that the audience understands charismatic sex cults, and then just plays through the tropes. There's a lack of freshness.

It’s not frustrating, but then, it’s not quite that engaging. It may spark a little light self-recognition among filmmakers, and that’s all Hansen-Løve seems to aim for.

The Land isn’t a perfect film, but it is a hell of a good start, and director Caple Jr. – and his young cast – are artists to keep an eye on, for sure.

A delight when its comic elements are in high gear.

The direction and performance do the heavy lifting, but we have seen so many versions of this movie in recent years – films about mourning characters in a spiral of death and demons – that it is admittedly hard to engage honestly with a film that falls into the same traps.

It’s a fascinating world to explore; I just wish Honk for Jesus had done a better job in doing it.