The occasional sudden zoom or quick comedic cutaway make for brief moments of respite, and it’s hard to truly hate a film aiming for such kindly emotional resonance. But whatever slight wisdoms or truths are to be found here are squandered in a big nothing of a story trying to render them meaningful.

The ensuing adventure has a few giggles and a warm, sweet ending, but The Rugrats Movie is more like a pleasant Sunday drive in a big smooth sedan than the TV show's riotous joyrides in a fast, shiny convertible.

Raging Grace is too gleefully ridiculous to live up to its didactic ambitions, and too on-the-nose to let its wings of crushed velvet madness truly spread.

Tykwer's camera can assault the audience with the rankest of imagery, but not even once does it come close to distilling the actual aroma of the abattoir that was 18th-century France. And for that, I suppose, we should all be thankful.

It's a soggy drama said to be inspired by actual events – too serious to be trashy, too trashy to be serious.

There’s none of the visceral artfulness that Scott managed in the original. Quite simply, if you can’t make man-on-baboon hand-to-hand combat interesting, why do you think you can make a sword fight fun?

By the end, however, the movie’s predictable wind-down and ho-hum twist at the end make this Life hardly worth living. In space, no one can hear you yawn.

Ultimately, it's 79 minutes of footage of a pair of petty, pretty people freaking out over having to go to the bathroom in their wetsuits, and in the end you find yourself rooting for the sharks.

There's nary a hint of suspense in West's film, though, mainly because he loudly trumpets the upcoming disasters so early in the film.

One can't help but wonder how much better this film would have played straight, without its characters in seemingly constant song. God help us if there's a film version of "Cats" in the works.

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

It fails to rise above the inherent limitations of the traditional Hollywood biopic and it's about as insanely great as a Mac "low cost" LC model – which was, to be fair, pretty cool.

A nifty idea that goes everywhere (and nowhere).

It’s too didactic to be a spaghetti Western but lacks the moral compass required of a more evolved philosophical statement.

Sweet enough while it lasts.

The entire film wants to be the retort to an idle comment uttered by a prep school lacrosse mom in the stands: "When did the Indians starts playing lacrosse anyway?"

The last thing Peppermint could afford to be was a mediocre action movie, and yet, here we are, and here it is.

Remove the horror aspects, and Overlord is ham-fisted and oddly unimpressive.

Neither all that scary nor all that hilarious, Vampire in Brooklyn falls directly between the two, into the valley of mediocrity.

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.

This time the acclaimed filmmaker tackles an entire “ism” and, much like its ambiguous title, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore’s film is an unmethodical survey of a gargantuan topic, one that has only grown more so in the year since he began work on the project.

Honestly, both Sex and the City and Seinfeld tackled the romantic pitfalls of youngish single life in NYC more adeptly in their relatively truncated formats than this 91-minute movie, and with a helluva lot more verve and wit.

Those expecting a charming bonbon à la Midnight in Paris may wish to lower their expectations. Magic in the Moonlight’s story is exceedingly threadbare, a first draft that never got fleshed out or tightened up.

There are so many underdeveloped themes that it’s not hard to see what Singer was trying to achieve, and how short he falls.

It's neither utterly real nor utterly romantic (heroin, like alcohol, manages to be awfully and unremittingly both).

Even in the budget-laden slickness of this Amazon production, I can’t lose myself in a fantasy that these issues can be solved by a mere costume change, a pep talk, or a snappy comeback.

In George’s odyssey, McQueen attempts to emulate and skewer the classic British boys’ own adventures by juxtaposing it with social realism, but it ends up divided between the two instincts. Blitz is also burdened by a surprisingly leaden script filled with paper-thin Cockney stereotypes.

Though the movie’s raison d’être is unmistakable from the outset, the most compelling moments come not when God’s name is being invoked out loud and with great frequency, but rather when the loving symbiosis between two young people facing adversity and caring for each other is tenderly communicated without uttering any words, conveyed in something as simple as the direct gaze between two pairs of locked eyes. Now that’s the notion of a higher power in which we can all believe.