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.