Before a foot of film was ever shot on Live by Night, Affleck had already made a decision that would be the film’s undoing. He cast himself as the lead.

Enough already.

From Lee’s point of view, I can understand the enticing challenge of taking on a revered cult film Oldboy. But a pair of ill-conceived casting choices can jolt you out of the film, or worse, elicit the rolling of eyes and barely stifled giggle.

Despite the lame narrative, Kid 'N Play also manage to prove that they are a smooth team who can roll with the flow of intermutual comedic energy.

Inkheart was shot in and around Liguria on the Italian Riviera, and it looks absolutely ravishing.

It's neither the fulfillment of our worst fears nor the surprise of the week.

Not uninteresting, and it is very nicely performed, although you'll strain to learn from the movie the history on which it is based and struggle futilely to get inside the motivations of its characters.

Sex may, indeed, be all in the mind, but Romance fails to score in the mind's eye.

Say what you will about the story, but Pitch Black at least looks and sounds stunning.

At the end of the day, Cake at least stands better as a showcase for the potential dramatic chops of the once and future Rachel Green than it does as the latest life-affirming indie. Hopefully, the next time Aniston goes fishing for awards, she uses a more convincing breed of bait to do so.

Lackluster and slow even in its supposedly hi-octane chase sequences, much of the blame lies with director Doug Liman.

A gorgeous-looking but ill-conceived mash note to the city of Paris that riffs on its better, wiser, glaringly obvious cinematic predecessors.

This British rom-com is all soft and plodgy, a by-the-numbers redemption tale that careens uncomfortably from sentimentality to stomach-turning sight gags.

Years ago, when Allen's inimitable comedy style still seemed fresh, Scoop may have joined the ranks of "Sleeper" and "Take the Money and Run" as a comedy classic. Today it provides a pleasant diversion.

A weird mix of pseudo-jingoism and Bay’s usual bombastic firepower, 13 Hours ends up being a straight-up war film without an actual war in it.

The Judge gives the sense of resting on its casting laurels.

Ultimately, Tournament of Champions remains a welcome balance of YA and horror, featuring inventive puzzle sequences with enough talent on both sides of the camera to consistently entertain.

Robinson keeps Jennifer 8 moving right along, alternately dropping clues right in our laps and tossing in a red herring or two, but it's the dark town running like a black thread throughout the whole film that keeps your nerves jangling.

The whole production is simply as mediocre and half-baked as Hollywood gets.

Ready to Wear is to filmmaking what paper dresses were to fashion -- thin, trendy, and disposable.

Golda isn’t a failure of skill, but one of vision. Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin deliver a biopic that feels like a complete misfire. Stale and without any sense of self, Golda unfortunately does nothing for Israel’s only female prime minister.

What is most egregious, and seems completely lost on the filmmakers, is that the film is the very thing it attempts to expose: a pandering cash-in on faith-based films disguising itself as an honest examination of belief. And that, true believers, is unforgivable.

Zips along at an urgent pace, both tantalizing and repulsing as it goes.

Feels like a been-here-done-that dud.

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 resultant film is all surface and plush, with nary a hard edge or demanding note. Despite the movie's well-intentioned heart, its head is out to lunch, neglecting its responsibility to provide these powerhouse actresses with a script half as smart or compelling as they.

Undone by Blanchett's dull, wooden delivery. She's the pap that kills the pulp the rest of the film is bellowing out to be.

A succession of shrill overacting jobs.

A less cohesive action-comedy than its predecessor, Full Throttle is instead a freewheeling collection of random action sequences strung together with little or no discernible rhyme or reason.

Falls short of both the social history lesson it so pointedly strives to impart and the sport it so roughly embraces.

For a time, The Predator offers some popcorn thrills, grisly deaths, and funny one-liners. But the film tries entirely too hard to capture the magic of those Eighties action/comedy films that Black cut his teeth on that anything resembling a cohesive plot gets set aside for another endless round of bad jokes and running gags, which I’m quite sure is by design.

The final 30 odd minutes of this revisionist Holmes explodathon are downright thrilling, and it should go without saying but we'll restate it for the record: Downey Jr. inhabits the role of Sherlock Holmes to a near-molecular level.

The only redeeming thing in Switch is Barkin's vulgar and adept physical performance of a man literally trapped in a woman's body. She's in a constant state of discomfort, whether it's trying to walk in high heels (a sight gag that quickly gets old), scratching her breasts, or sitting with her legs apart in a tight miniskirt. Her presence, however, is a small consolation in a movie that takes the battle of the sexes and turns it into a pointless skirmish.

The Protégé suffers from its predictability and lack of nuance. Despite a somewhat promising if well-worn plot, the characters and performances can’t seem to catch up.

Whether or not Murakami intended this rambling, erotic nightmare as a metaphor for modern-day Japan is a question I'm not going to get into here, but the fact remains, Tokyo Decadence is a powerful, disturbing film, teeming with episodes of rampant passion, abuse, and beauty.

It's dumb, to be sure, but then again, so were most of the old movie cliffhangers, from which Timecop is obviously derived.

DiCillo has always had the laconic, funkified, vaguely surreal air of a Woody Allen on cough medicine (or a Jim Jarmusch on Jolt, for that matter), but The Real Blonde is just so much ado about nada.

When Liz is good, she's very, very good, but when she's bad, she gives it all she's got. Director Daniel Mann definitely had a way with leading ladies.

Rønning doesn’t seem confident in his storytelling acumen, relying instead on running narration provided by real-life TV anchors cold-reading the least convincing announcements this side of a Fox News host talking about Portland.

Comes across as stiff and uneven.

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

The characters are mechanisms who move along the plot arc from Point A to Point B. They’re not particularly memorable individuals.

Clearly the film is archly trying to connect the dots between Rove and the supreme mishandling of Iraq – and a compelling case might be made – but it isn't made here.

The film restages the greatest hits of the show's many musical numbers, to greatly diminished effect, with lackluster choreography and all the narrative appeal stripped away.

Pop psychology has never been as visceral as it is in Saw III.

The outcome is no great surprise, and plenty of the gags feel as though they were meant to be throwaways, but Ted 2, exactly like its predecessor, has plenty of heart, which makes all the rest of the black-dick jokes marginally more tolerable.

Spacey makes interesting work out of an otherwise overdone situation.

It's not quite as relentless as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but Bride of Chucky is still sick and wrong in all the right ways.

The bestselling first book in yet another dystopic Young Adult series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent is engrossing enough to devour overnight, and flimsy enough to forget by morning light. Neil Burger’s film adaptation faithfully reproduces the same effect.

Those satisfied with a few solid jump scares - of the Things-In-a-Mirror or Hands-on-the-Shoulder variety - will likely find just enough in Mercy Black to pass muster. It’s just a shame that a horror movie smart enough to ask all the right questions cannot seem to provide us with many answers.

As the bombastic musical numbers vie to outdo each other (in one scene, lovebirds Efron and Zendaya appear to be auditioning for Cirque du Soleil), the song-and-dance man gets lost in the scenery, his charisma overwhelmed by director Gracey’s misguided preoccupation with razzle dazzle at full throttle.

It’s delightful to see these acting pros hamming it up in this movie. They look as though they’re having a blast. The same can’t be said for the audience.

Luck feels overthought and overwritten. There's a lithe, fun, bright, and much shorter movie in here somewhere.

The man whom the FBI described as "extremely eloquent, therefore extremely dangerous" here seems about as threatening as Mother Teresa.

Annie is a lot to handle, even for the truncated 77-minute run time, and maybe it would work better as a V/H/S 20-minute slot – but then you wouldn't get quite so amazingly infuriated by her. Dashcam, like few films, relies on your annoyance.

It's unclear what Brooks is trying to say about our melting-pot culture, if anything.

Suffers from Frey’s diluted multitasking. The director, writer, and star are not equally talented.

Feels like the little animated adventure nobody loved.

What do you get when you mix Adam Sandler with SPAM gags, a trained vomiting walrus, a wall-to-wall soundtrack of calypso covers of 1980s pop hits, and Rob Schneider in native-Islander brownface? You get a pretty crappy movie, but for one major mitigating factor: Drew Barrymore.

It’s as deadly dull as the blunt end of a rifle.

Dull and meandering documentary.

Shimuzu sees darkened staircases and hears the rustle of dead autumn leaves and reacts as if from the devil’s own haiku. And his dread is catching.

Fassbender, though, gets the kudos (again) as the man who has everything but loses it all – thanks partly to a slyly cast Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) and, more important, to the character’s moral compass that points wherever he feels it should, until, of course, it points due south of heaven.

There's little drama or sense of progression in the movie until the bombshell hits, and then it just whimpers along for another half-hour until the end.

Paris Can Wait may be a film à clef of sorts – there’s a hint of the autobiographical in it, the suggestion of something experienced – but even that angle doesn’t make the movie terribly appetizing. What it needs is a little salt.

While the impressive cast inspires a sense of hope, The Oh in Ohio's childish storytelling, paper-thin character development, and general unfunniness combine to make one bad movie.

William Eubank’s Underwater is as incomprehensible an action movie as I’ve ever seen in theaters.

For every zinger, there are two flat jokes around the corner.

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

Summertime popcorn pictures don't get much goofier than this silly sequel, which is everything you'd expect and nothing you wouldn't.

I'd rather have a testicular nail-gun mishap than sit through this migraine-inducing train wreck of a film one more time.

Cue ultraviolence, gang stereotypes, and a bucketload of plots that never really go anywhere.

Bright and cluttered and engaging, The Baby-Sitters Club has a youthful buoyancy and whimsical rhythm that catches even the most jaundiced (i.e., 16-year-old) viewers up in its play of light and energy.

Rifkin has fashioned a crawly little movie that underscores the Faustian price of fame in a way that few recent films have managed.

It's Eisenberg who finds Ralphie in those narrative spaces, creating a whole and crushingly convincing portrait of a profoundly lost man, and the damage left in his wake.

Overall, Planes: Fire & Rescue, though featuring lovely graphics and stunning animation, is just too mundane.

From a purely visual point of view, Escape Room is worth the price of admission.

The film bites off much more than it can chew, raising far more issues and personalities than it can successfully weave into one overall narrative.

This new iteration of Ms. Croft, played in a far more realistic fashion by Vikander (of Ex Machina fame), is somewhat more serious in tone, but altogether more fun to watch.

It is funny at times – the teams for dodgeball break down into "popular" and "unpopular" – but Chicken Little is painful to watch for all ages.

Worst of all, its mix of horror and comedy never walks the tightrope of shrieking absurdism that the originals did at their peak (and it's easy to forget that they started as a straight horror franchise). Instead, it ends up with the off-putting meanspiritedness of late-era Charles Band, the king of 2000s straight-to-video exploitation.

Spacey, whose Trigger Street Productions is one of the film's producers, digs into his role as the story's snarky mastermind and lure, yet it's all the kind of stuff we've seen him deliver in so many movies before.

The cramped environs and the paranoiac thrum that runs throughout the film like a main circuit cable straight to hell are almost outmatched by a third-act explosion of horrifyingly excellent practical gore effects.

Gran Turismo is perhaps a more basic film for Blomkamp, but a welcome reminder that his breakthrough first feature District 9 wasn’t a fluke. He manages to give a film that is more or less an ad for a video game a little bit of heart.

Civic Duty stands out amid the new wave of terrorism-paranoia thrillers. It's a taut drama set primarily within the confines of two apartments in the same urban building complex and keeps the viewer guessing until the end regarding the reliability of its two central protagonists.

The fictionalization of their journey is simply not that engrossing, nor are their alter egos, with their tightly scripted character arcs.

It's a huge, bloated, hulking movie.

It’s just not quite bad enough to be considered good, although Stanley Tucci’s hairpiece comes awfully close.

Sweet enough while it lasts.

The exceedingly silly Super Troopers is an earnest, mostly funny spoof.

This is horror with a wink and a nod to drive-in theatres and sweaty back seats. This is how it's done.

This sophomore effort (his first feature after Night of the Living Dead) is difficult and often exasperating, but worth watching nonetheless. It's kind of a quasi-existentialist counterculture love story, rife with bad rock music and hipster dialogue.

While very much a “hard R” movie, Rise of an Empire is, nevertheless, the perfect sort of film for rainy weekend afternoons. It’s a spectacle right down to its shattered ships and duplicitous warcraft, and this time out the story’s been leavened and enlivened with plenty of old-school girl power.

The space prison set-pieces get the job done; only in the film's terrestrial bookends does this nuts-and-bolts action film show its rust.

The special effects feature the most up-to-the-minute flash and dazzle that the Industrial Light and Magic gang has to offer -- but it plays like someone forgot to plug in the power cord; in other words, no sparks or electricity.

The film is a hoot and goes by quickly, but there's nothing here you haven't seen before.

It's a rich, humid mix of race, murder, and mystery that works well, even if it doesn't work perfectly.

The film moves swiftly and vividly, but in retrospect, numerous plot holes come to mind. Not Forgotten presents a fascinating microcosm but ultimately loses believability when placed in a larger context.