The stilted performances are especially unfortunate when one considers what a fine documentary Clark might have gotten out of the same material.

Based on a novel by Jonathan Ames, this drearily quirky mess wants to be "Secretary" for submissive males, but it's just a sitcom in a powdered wig and size 17 pumps.

Ridley Scott directed this 1989 feature, and while there's a lot of his characteristic atmospherics—smoke, fog, neon, yellow light, rain, and squalor—to fill all the dead spaces, he's still a long way from the splendors of Blade Runner. The script by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis doesn't give him or Douglas very much to chew on, apart from a lot of unpleasant xenophobia about Japanese gangsters, and the plot never gets far beyond the formulaic and the forgettable, hammered into place by Hans Zimmer's pounding and numbing score.

Children won't get the references to atomic-age monster movies, but the film offers more than nostalgia: there are slyly funny performances by Seth Rogen as an omnivorous blue blob and Stephen Colbert as the U.S. president, who faces down, and then flees, an alien invasion.

Director Steve Bendelack and writer-producer Simon McBurney aim for the comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, relying heavily on sight gags and their star's pratfalls and facial contortions, but they vititate the comic payoffs by allowing scenes to run too long.

It's most entertaining for its stunt casting of movie stars as the president's family and advisers.

Every scene ends with a gag line, punched up by Jaglom's harried intercutting, and threaded through the story are close-ups of women discussing their obsession with new clothes, an exercise that yields its wisdom in the first 20 minutes and then keeps repeating it.

The mainstream acceptance of porn has also disarmed Smith's formerly outrageous humor, though there's a warm "Boogie Nights"-style vibe to the little family of oddballs Zack and Miri recruit to help them.

This adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stephenie Meyer never rises above the level of a teen soaper on the CW, and its pale, sulky boy toys (Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli, Jackson Rathbone) are more silly than scary.

If you can make any sense of this you've probably been smoking whatever the animators were when they concocted it.

Seriously gruesome docudrama.

A curiosity of the first order.

Guy Hamilton's direction lacks enthusiasm and pace, while even the art direction—long the Bond films' real secret weapon—seems to have fallen to a shrunken budget. Not much fun.

Martin Campbell directed, displaying none of the flair that made his “Casino Royale” such a hoot.

It's rich, stimulating thought in spite of itself. Lots of elegant clothes and settings, weirdly linked to a shock rhythm of tension and release. It's a movie dream turned into a movie nightmare, a wonderful idea the film doesn't know it has.

As for remakes, it stands to reason that if you try to redo a work of art without the original artist, you're bound to damage the artistry as well.

Part of what keeps this from working is that Modine's character is almost as obnoxious as Keaton's—Griffith proves to be the pluckiest member of the trio—and matters are not improved by a lot of gratuitous camera movement and an especially lousy dream sequence.

Pretty enjoyable as a piece of campy sleaze--especially for the first half hour, before the storytelling starts to dawdle.

As the driven competitor who learns to make hubris work for him, Jared Leto gives a complex performance that suggests a deep, intriguing interior to the character even as he maintains a convincing one-dimensional facade.

An offensive premise and a pathetic, almost pleading desire to outrage our sensibilities with it.

There's a trove of movie lore in this absorbing documentary.

An exceptionally glib satire about reality TV, by writer-director Daniel Minahan, that puts most of its effort into looking as much as is possible like a real TV show.

As usual Spielberg is too bored by everyday life to use his premise for anything but a fairy tale, whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation. This grows progressively phonier and eventually devolves into "Mr. Roberts," with Stanley Tucci filling in for James Cagney as an airport bureaucrat.

This is supposed to be a testament to the nation's diversity, but it's so complacent that you'd never imagine said diversity is one of the greatest social challenges of the new century.

In a sense, Caravaggio has less to do with its ostensible subject than with Jarman's own insistence on sensual, and largely homoerotic, expression, though there's a feeling of stifling enclosure to the images Jarman invents, of eros turned inward, toward private fantasy and longing, rather than outward to a world of real possibility.

Unfortunately, Harold Becker's direction seems deliberately designed to pull the material toward the bland and conventional—toward easy payoffs and Rocky-style inspirational melodrama.

Her (Westfedlt) directing debut is a funny and emotionally credible.

Becomes blandly idealistic.