It seems that no matter how many times pop chews up and regurgitates itself, it ain’t dead yet.

The sharp performances and committed cinematography elevate this stock drama to something beyond routine.

The challenge – the one this film proves incapable of overcoming – is how you marry a broad family comedy with the endless complexity of the adoption process.

There’s a distinct Eighties vibe that appeals to the intended demographic, especially in the bumbling school administrator Dean Bronson (Zissis, more stooge than villain), the sexual politics between the characters (they are in college after all), and the delicious bitchiness of mean girl Danielle (Matthews). Yet for all its ambition with loopy timelines and dubious scientific explanations, convenient logic only justified in pushing the plot along, the actual world-building falls flat.

Generally works like a drone but sometimes provides glimpses of the queens at the center

It’s a phantasmagorical chase movie that rarely takes a breather long enough for you to enjoy the sights along the way.

Miss Potter is, in the end, a confection, a trip through the imagination on gossamer wings. Enchanting, perhaps, but a long, long way from meaningful.

Given the rags-to-riches Mafia narrative Piranhas is built upon, it’s no surprise that Giovannesi’s film has received comparisons –  both favorable and unfavorable  – to "Goodfellas."

The whole film is a delicious excuse to gawk – at the magnificent costumes, at the diplomatic dance of museum personnel and party planners, and at the sumptuous squish of so many egos sharing space.

Evil Dead, however, accomplishes what it sets out to do: Scare viewers silly and uphold a tradition.

Unfortunately, the film is as bloodless as its purported crime. In the Name of My Daughter is presented dispassionately, and the performances neither intrigue nor captivate.

What's fundamentally uninteresting about Love and Thunder is Waititi's inability to recognize any character development over the last decade, or to move Thor forward.

Forget life lessons: I much prefer a lemur king doing the robot.

Unfortunately, the digressions into an unformulaic art heist plot can't cure, and often exacerbate, The Burnt Orange Heresy's habit of dragging interminably whenever it focuses on anything other than James, Berenice, and Jerome.

It's got a good creative pedigree and confident execution – as well as nifty design, down to its Hammond-organ Photek soundtrack and desert chic – but this ensemble piece set in a rural mobile-home park steps off the trail into melodrama from time to time.

Anyone can come up with jokes about incestuous rednecks or pubic hair that "looks like Osama bin Laden's beard," but it takes guts to make a comedy in which the Indian-American hero accuses an African-American TSA agent of racial profiling, all so he won't get caught smuggling weed onto a plane.

Coixet’s film begins with the quiet patter of rain on skin and holds that somehow sweetly sorrowful tone throughout.

A spectacularly imaginative piece of Shakespearean cinema.

Too bloodless to satisfy except as a political exercise.

Misfires on so many levels that we have to wonder if there is more than one meaning to this story's wild boars.

The straight dope for speed junkies and fans of the art of flinging one’s well-padded frame through the contortions enabled only by disastrously catapulting oneself off a slippery asphalt track at speeds even Dale Earnhardt would have dismissed as lunacy.

Cyberpunk meets renegade romance, à la Orwell.

Emerges as an artful, courageous, experimental work that is as compelling as it is impaired.

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate isn't as much fun as the director's previous film – the wondrous "Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame."

Even if it doesn’t manage to be quite the "Hunger Games"-level hit its producers would clearly desire, it’s the best of the wannabes we’ve seen so far.

Because of the episodic nature of the material, Klown Forever feels more like a series of events rather than a cohesive whole. That’s fine with me, as I enjoy spending time with these bumbling, emasculated males grappling with their ultimate insignificance in the world.

Sporadically, the deliberately organic, semi-improvised tone doesn't quite gel, and there are momentary longueurs that could derail the story. But Myrick's decision to keep the narrative simple, and instead concentrate on the characters, means there's always a thick strand of sympathy and tragedy at play.

Despite its high tech sheen and overstuffed cast of characters, played by some of the best actors in the land, this mega-mecha melee manages to give short shrift to both the airborne action set-pieces that define Iron Man's zoomy panache and incoming supervillain Whiplash, aka Ivan Vanko (Rourke).