Overwritten and overcooked, Remember Me still manages a few explosive sequences between Pattinson and Pierce Brosnan.

What we get are themes and variations on previous good work, to lessening effect.

One of those movies with a terrific premise left unfulfilled.

Lawrence is terrific at playing tough, as she also demonstrated in her previous outings with Russell, “Silver Linings Playbook” and, especially, “American Hustle." But maybe it’s time for her to take a rest from him for a while. There’s a lot more to this actress than bold and brassy.

Promised Land is more effective as an anti-fracking screed than as a drama. Damon has his low-key charisma and Van Sant captures the enraged anomie of the community, but, except for one big plot twist, everything in this film is telegraphed from the first frame.

Low point would be Knightley's hysterical opening sequences in which she appears to be trying to trying to contort herself into a Moebius strip. Overacting this gross can only have been enabled by a director. Didn't Cronenberg look at the rushes? Or did he think he was back in "Dead Ringers" territory?

If we are being asked to regard BlacKkKlansman as more than a movie, this may be another way of admitting that, on some fundamental level, it falls down as anything but revue sketch agitprop.

Despite the all-too-harrowing familiarity of these scenes, they seem more like illustrations than dramatizations of trauma.

If Hollywood must have franchises, we could do worse than one highlighting people who have lived a long life and are not on altogether friendly terms with technology. But imagine what this cast could do with something less tutti-frutti!

The film's predictability dampens its best parts. Having decided to make a movie about a dreaded subject, the filmmakers too often retreat into the comfort zone of easy assurances and flip quips.

Travolta gives a hangdog performance as the world-weary cop obsessed with rooting out the killers. Hayek and Leto share a few tart black comic moments as the film spirals into a bloodbath.

Some of the sequences are undeniably thrilling but, at about 2-1/2 hours, overkill sets in early.

O'Neill and Curry, both heretofore nonactors, can't put across much more than a single emotion at a time, but their amateurishness isn't as annoying as it might have been in a movie with higher aspirations and artistry.

Not quite funny enough, or serious enough, falls into the muddle middle.

Stallone's writing and direction pull off a considerable level of pathos and suspense as Rocky mourns his wife's passing and tries to develop a closer relationship with his resentful son.

What you get in Trouble with the Curve is standard-issue late-career Eastwoodiana. The growl, the snarl, the crotchetiness are already familiar to us from "Million Dollar Baby" (2004) and "Gran Torino" (2009), his last appearance as an actor.

The movie is more striking to watch than to hear, more interesting as a tone poem than as a drama. In the end, it's a half-successful film on a subject that could have been all fascinating.

The foundation of this sympathy is Hoover's complicated sexuality. Eastwood and Black have attempted to provide Hoover with the balm he denied himself in his own lifetime. It doesn't work.

Michael Caine gives the most ferocious comic performance of his career, while Elizabeth McGovern is deliciously understated as the ''sorceror's apprentice'' who unwittingly helps him. [23 Mar 1990]

All of this has its value, but Plummer, in rollicking good form, without a shred of sentimentality, is primed for greatness, and Mills keeps cutting away from him just when things are getting interesting.

Like Jim Carrey, Ferrell seems to think that the way to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor is to drain himself of everything that audiences love about him.

As Sam, the wayward stepsister of Charlie's sardonic friend Patrick (Ezra Miller), Watson doesn't lose her cool, or her warmth, in a role that might easily have devolved into terminal sappiness.

As the hero, Christopher Reeve oozes with sincerity in the world-peace scenes - he helped write the story of the film, and this may be why he overdoes it. But he's also funny when he gets back to being klutzy Clark Kent, so the movie doesn't completely drown in its own good intentions.

It's also a mistake, I think, to have Oliver and Jordana be so emotionally flat. No doubt Ayoade was reaching for a hipper-than-thou vibe here, but their inexpressiveness is more annoying than cool.

Blethyn, as Frank's wife, is less high-strung than usual, which is a boon.

As director, Harris takes this classical sense of the western too far, though, until it seems that the movie is carefully trying to keep the genre alive.

A privileged sanctimony clings to this movie that is not fully recognized by its filmmakers: After all, not every distraught new mother can afford a self-help guru.

It wants to be a movie about the intersection between criminality and the class system but, for that, it could have used a bit more class.