Director Peggy Holmes' glittery romp offers plenty of pretty spectacles, but true flights of fancy... are far too rare.

A stylish, serviceable recounting of Saint Laurent's life from the late 1950s through the '70s. But watchable as it may be, this drama lacks intimacy and urgency.

It's not unfunny in spots, but it huffs and puffs (among other bodily functions) more often than it splits the sides.

Though it boasts great performances and urgent, intimate camera work, "Holy Ghost People" diminishes as it progresses, enervated by its prioritization of scares over cohesion and a voice-over that tells everything it should show.

One Candle, Two Candles proves worthwhile at least as a cultural curio.

On first glance, Monster Trucks looks so-bad-it’s-hilarious, and it’s a bit heartening to report that it’s not quite that. The monsters are cute and charming, the production value is high, and the trio of Lennon, Levy and Lowe bring just enough quirk to brighten up the humorous beats.

Like a typical Hollywood action-thriller, though, the screenplay jeopardizes the film. The twists concocted by writers James Robert Johnston and Bennett Yellin are mostly predictable; and the ones you don't see coming are outlandish.

If ever a film looked exactly the way you hoped and imagined it would, The Shadow is it. But if ever a film made you wince whenever its actors opened their mouths, The Shadow is that as well.

The film has only the sheer charm of its cast to get it by, and it says a lot about the actors that they nearly pull it off.

An alternately creaky and intriguing ride, one of earnest ambition and dashed potential.

Tom at the Farm is strange, idiosyncratic tale that straddles a fine line between homoerotic camp and spider-and-fly thriller.

Biyi Bandele's adaptation of Adichie's novel of loyalty and betrayal set against the turbulence of the 1960s Biafran war, certainly makes for an honorably propulsive wartime soap. It's just not stirring enough as historical drama.

Instead of a cautionary tale, they've looked at Flynn's life through rose-colored glasses.

Though handsomely photographed and featuring a compelling cast, the Ireland-set memory piece — adapted by John Banville from his Man Booker Prize-winning novel — will leave audiences wondering how much more satisfying the muted drama might be on the page.

Richard Ray Perez's documentary concerns the myth more than the man.

The setting abounds in beauty, and the storytelling abounds in obvious cues that mute the intended suspense, if not the horror.

There is so much about its package – the stars, the premise, the talented supporting cast – that would make for a film of warmth, humor and insight on the struggles of leaving the past behind and getting out of your own way on the path to fulfilment. Instead, the movie settles for being a party comedy and little else.

Ngoc and Faunce certainly make fascinating subjects, and the film persuasively argues to give them the benefit of the doubt. But one can't help but think that in the hands of a shrewder filmmaker like Errol Morris, this stranger-than-fiction account would have been absolutely riveting.

DamNation is certainly a picturesque splash of doc advocacy, as long as you don't dwell on the cracks.

Ricki and the Flash is a sour movie masquerading as something more cheerful. In that attempted deception the film is both helped and hindered by an indispensable performance by star Meryl Streep.

By allowing Cameron's first-person account to take command of the narrative, though, the film seems to gloss over meaningful logistics of the expedition.

Garriga aims for depth in the third act, contextualizing religious conservatism as a reaction against the social revolutions of the 1960s. But the reduction of Christianity into just another political group feels like a dilution, a conversion of wine into water.

Dunne creates a full-blooded character. The film around him, unfortunately, takes low-key to the realm of tepid.

Despite this notable cast, the remake never manages to drum up much excitement for its sleepy hamlet rousing or for its characters, finally filled with purpose.

Citizen Koch is pure advocacy doc: brisk and clear-eyed, to be sure, but not likely to surprise headline-savvy moviegoers or angered progressives.

That writer-director Jessica Hausner moves things along at such a glacial pace and fills her velvety frames with the equivalent of museum-quality oil paintings instead of with living, breathing humanity, only adds to the film's turgid quality.

The movie has a few bursts of energy and invention — a cleverly executed jailbreak is one. But the story drifts and the pacing drags, failing to gather much steam until the final moments.

There are, thankfully, a few humorous and imaginative touches here and there, but Alien Nation is hardly inspired.

Miss Lovely does exude an air of authenticity... But much of the film remains underdeveloped.

The film's greatest asset is Kelly LeBrock, who is triumphant. She may represent souped-up womanhood at its most fanciful but she does so with great warmth and a sharp sense of herself.

To penetrate beyond the camaraderie and capture the depth of the experience would require less conventional filmmaking.

The film is not without flashes of charm amid its clichés, and leads Lily Collins and Sam Claflin pine for each other prettily.

Ghaffarian's story plays out within such a generic framework, and with such self-importance, that it's all too easy to remain untouched by the onscreen events.

It's overwhelming and, in a curious way, it's charming, but at the center, even though you see it in the right place, you detect not a heart, or a mind, but something like a hot, roasted marshmallow beating and burbling within a thickened, ursine breast.

In a weird way, what happens to the kids is what happens to the movie. The humans shrivel to crawling piffles or get deformed into caterwauling robots; the super-tall grass and the giant cookies and insects take over.

That anyone manages to care remotely about what's going on despite all this is a tribute to Bullock's appeal. She remains a disarmingly winning performer, though here she's saddled with some clunky, cliched bits of behavior.

Even though this is supposed to be a kindlier Van Damme vehicle, his movies couldn't exist without his trademark ability to deliver the kind of accurate, powerful kicks any World Cup team would envy. All his soulful glances notwithstanding, Timecop still depends too much on violence to make it appealing to the uninitiated or the unwary.

Uncle Buck has a medium-level Hughes script, only about half as good as "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," about 50 times as good as "The Great Outdoors."

It's strange that in this somber inspection of moral fiber and what causes it to fray, De Palma couldn't have made his hero at least as interesting as his villain, and both of them at least as complicated as they were in life.

Under Australian director George Miller ("Mad Max"), The Witches of Eastwick begins so promisingly. It has such smashing separate moments, so succulent a cast and so interesting a premise that watching it crumble into stomach-turning crudeness and "Poltergeist"-scale special effects is deeply painful.

The film is certainly interesting, despite the fact that it's a glorified promotional video for Muniz's installations.

Despite some quite engaging sections, "Joy" is, unlike previous Russell films, dragged down more than it is inspired by its chaotic ambience, a film whose variations in tone can't be overcome.

The film's many violent action scenes are quite well, er, executed. But there's a far more emotional and profound story here to be told, one that becomes largely eclipsed by the mayhem.

The movie presents the best possible version of the event without the massive lines, drugs, drunkenness and hellish traffic.

While this return to indie roots frees up Lee's often gifted image making, his usual pace issues and penchant for jagged flourish over sustained feeling keep it from achieving a rich, strange, sexy and sad whole.

Writer-director Terry Miles' revisionist homage is a thoughtful thesis on the melodrama but a letdown in its attempt to serve as an affecting example of that genre.

This journey into "Martha Marcy May Marlene" territory is never as tense and gripping as it should be, the incidents and most of the performances too tamped-down to spark a much-needed sense of animating friction.

This cautionary tale certainly has a chilling and timely message of how wars make monsters out of innocent people. But using reductive caricatures — complete with phlegmatic performances — to send that message is perhaps not the best way, because it turns something with modern-day implications into distant allegory.

Uncharted is fine, and entertaining enough, but while some moments are inspired, others are completely inert. It’s oddly neutered and bloodless, the stakes negligible. It feels like a project with so much potential that never fully achieves liftoff, stumbling when it should soar.

Unfortunately, each main character serves as an avatar emblematic of a societal symptom instead of a real person in whose shoes we can stand. As a result, their trajectories are didactic and predictable.

The movie's raison d'etre, its many highflying, wildly violent, often digitally enhanced kung fu fighting sequences, are edited with so much sleight of hand they may evoke more eye rolls than gasps. But the hard-working sound design, effectively stark visual palette and propulsive score do manage to impress.

The period details are so lovingly burnished in this uneven, if heartfelt, feature that for a while they threaten to overpower the story, which delves gently into a rarely explored aspect of the war.

By turns sexy and exasperating, hypnotic and confusing, this Mexican import is an art film for the patient, adventurous and, let's be honest, forgiving.

Fredric Dannen's reportage, which appeared in a 1992 issue of the New Yorker and serves as the film's basis, contains lurid details that leap off the page in a cinematic way. The "Dragons" script by Michael Di Jiacomo and co-director Andrew Loo preserves many, but few register on-screen.

Christensen manages his fairly dimensional antihero role with physical and emotional aplomb, but onetime A-lister Cage looks and sounds too silly to take seriously. Worry not, fans of Cage's over-the-top stylings: Scenery is reliably chewed.

The film feels like a sketch rather than a portrait, beautifully rendered but incomplete in the details.

At the Devil's Door goes right up to the threshold of being an interesting possession saga but never truly gets inside.

"Swearnet" builds up enough brazen energy and crass goodwill to propel a watchable first hour before it starts to flounder.

The oddball script by Mitch Glazer ("Scrooged"), as directed by Barry Levinson ("Rain Man," "Good Morning, Vietnam"), takes so long to bring Richie and Salima together, it deprives us of the kind of fully fleshed dynamic the story so desperately needs.

Jamie Marks Is Dead admirably refuses to hew to conventional horror tropes and is acted with integrity by its young performers, but the film nonetheless has a nagging pulse problem.

Cantinflas the movie tries to capture the magic of this much-loved legend, and it does so in fits and starts.

More objectivity would have made this case study a lot more persuasive.

Wyatt, Monahan and Wahlberg never seem quite settled on what they want to say with the character or the story, so the film feels marked not by ambiguity but uncertainty.

Take Me to the River is at its most interesting when zeroing in on the back-and-forth between musicians of different eras who rely on unique jam-session skills.

It's a letdown that the film itself, written by Patrick Tobin and directed by Daniel Barnz, doesn't take half the chances its leading lady does and is content to paddle around the shallows rather than plunge into the deep end.

Though the movie is not without thoughtful observations on gender roles and the effects of war, Hart's characters tend to speak in poetic truths that call attention to their authorial polish. The cast breathes what life it can into the proceedings, with Otaru particularly impressive.

The Last Five Years is not unpleasant to watch — the leads are delightful — but as a movie experience, it's not especially satisfying either.

Pohlad did not lack for ideas about how he wanted to portray Brian Wilson's life, but he is without the wherewithal to effectively put them into practice.

[Barthes'] measured, distanced style brings a certain stiffness to the proceedings and makes us miss even more than usual the Emma Bovary interior monologue that makes the book so memorable.

Although the performances are uniformly on point and the dialogue is tartly British, the film ultimately fails to earn its riotous stripes.

The new installment is, at best, a serviceable creep show, one with far more chills than thrills.

The storytelling has all the dramatic complexity of a paint-by-numbers set, and you know exactly where all this is headed from the get-go.

Although Alien 3 is stylish--and ambitious--the movie doesn't have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom.

There are a few inventive battles on a frozen pond and atop the tiled roof of a temple, but they are so CGI-enhanced as to seem cartoonish, not marvelous.

The Hawkins brothers have an envelopingly moody visual style that strives for offbeat touches, at times easily conjuring the existential threat in desolate areas. But that can't make up for the story deficiencies and character superficiality in the script.

Meester and Jacobs have an easy, authentic chemistry, but there isn't enough structure or storytelling thrust to sustain interest in the plot: Triumphs, calamities and reunions keep happening, but none contains real dramatic heft.

It's not that "Inferno" as it stands doesn't provide hints of better things. The plot has its share of unexpected twists, peripheral characters hold our attention, wide-screen vistas of tourist destinations Florence, Venice and Istanbul are easy to take, and stories involving the end of the world have a certain built-in interest. But as presented on screen, none of this gels as it should.

A film that would have been more potent had it been a 40-minute short rather than a feature-length proposition.

Suicide Squad is a concept in search of a story worth telling. Both energized and betrayed by its “Worst.Heroes.Ever” theme and writer-director David Ayer’s trademark visceral filmmaking, it ends up in a kind of limbo, not as strong as partisans will insist or as worthless as its weakest elements would have you believe.

It's an affectionate and admiring collection of moments, but the director's wobbly choreography never locates a dramatic core for this corps' story.

Unfortunately, Merson clutters her sometimes soulful, sensitive story with too many formulaic contrivances to impede Catherine's personal and professional progress.

In Ashok's reunion with the love of his life (Mary Steenburgen) — the chance to see her after many years is the true reason for his trip — the film taps into a tender wistfulness, Steenburgen making her character's every glance and hesitation resonate with emotion.

There's power and authenticity here. And by the movie's incendiary climax, some tension. If only it were presented in a more magnetic package.

Filmmaker Jesse Quinones challenges certain racial and ethnic stereotypes while reinforcing others. When the script falls short, though, Royo and Haggard act up a storm.

When the sequel’ is really clicking, it becomes action cinema in its purest visual form: just one buff, taciturn dude doing major damage to his enemies. But those scenes constitute only about half of Mechanic: Resurrection.

Although the resulting tonal shifts between funny and serious aren't always executed as seamlessly as they might be, Khoury deserves props for defying rom-com conventions more often than he succumbs to them.

A charming supporting cast fails to invigorate Goodbye to All That, a relentlessly flat seriocomic take on contemporary relationships.

Romance, or the desire to find someone special, isn't a bad thing — if it's not the only thing. But as it stands in DUFF, the denouement at prom has cliché written all over it.

The movie finally feels more manufactured than organic, a travelogue of portent, complete with plangent guitars and peopled by characters from the backwoods playbook.

It's excusable for a sheltered novice filmmaker to be out of touch like this, but not for a veteran.

Though the thin mystery at the center becomes a narrative albatross, and Lillard and Gugino seem hamstrung by the schematic nature of their characters, Stewart's melancholic electricity manages to maintain its appeal.

Magician may not be its own rich experience, but like Workman's many breathlessly compiled odes to the history of movies, it'll certainly spur a meaty living room film festival.

Hong Kong director and co-writer Pang Ho-Cheung sends up gender stereotypes and reinforces them in his contemporary yet not quite fresh confection, zeroing in on certain women's girlie wiles.

The appealing Doleac, who also produced, acquits himself as an actor. But as a director, he shows a wobbly visual sense and an uneven hand with his cast.

The documentary A Small Section of the World is straight-up corporate propaganda. But its uplifting, powerful, well-meaning message might be enough to win over even some skeptics.

The look helps provide a little subtext, but not enough. For such an emotional piece, the dialogue stays too close to the surface. More problematic, the trio's encounters feel contrived; you can see the filmmaker's hand staging each one.

An actors' piece, director Michael Patrick Kelly's first narrative feature registers low on the cinematic-oomph scale, the production's low budget sometimes all too evident. Its aim is true, though, and Kathleen Chalfant infuses the lead role with an elegant ferocity.

Screenwriter Victor Hawks' inclusive, all-God's-children message is above reproach, but his lead character is ultimately too good for the movie's own good.