This go-round, everything’s louder and more banal.

He’s made a mystery with no curiosity, a cautionary tale with no good advice. It’s unclear if Guadagnino’s elites believe their moral arguments don’t apply to themselves or if they’re just stupid — or if the script makes them do stupid things to keep the audience off guard. Regardless, raise a glass of Pinot anytime someone says “This was a mistake.”

Oddly, it’s the bawdy silliness of “Dangerous Beauty,” and its jaw-dropping presumptions of Veronica’s liberated lifestyle, that makes the film occasionally entertaining. But it’s a movie without a consistent tone or creative vision.

Like Kogonada, I believe that artifice is a useful tool to dig up honesty. But a script with this much contrivance only works if it’s delivered with snap and confidence. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is sticky sweet and sludgy and so cloyingly aesthetic that the roadkill bleeds ropes of twee entrails.

There’s little urgency or outrage. Instead of a funhouse mirror of what could be, it’s merely a smudged reflection of what is.

Despite that juicy setup, Dangerous Animals is a disappointingly straightforward and ultimately underwhelming horror movie, offering little of the grim poetry of Byrne’s previous work and far too much of the narrative predictability that in the past he astutely sidestepped.

Having stripped away most of the documentary’s narration and sit-down interviews with Kerr’s family and friends, the film barely explores anyone’s psychology — and Blunt’s railroaded Dawn loses her chance to speak for herself.

The Death of Robin Hood feels like a director thinking only of his ambitions and not whether he’s making a movie anyone wants to bother to see. The lesson is right there in the film: Audiences decide what gets remembered.

Jack Conway's direction is slow and ponderous, which is characteristic of so many of MGM's painstakingly crafted melodramas of the 1940s. [02 Sep 1991, p.F14]

Per usual with movies like this, spelling out the terror (the roots are in hobo codes and religious legend) becomes, regrettably, a shock absorber, not a facilitator. But the scares were middling to begin with because Øvredal — a game but overeager trickster — telegraphs his set pieces as if he were equipped with a flare gun and detour cones. Then again, it might be an attempt to distract us from thinking too hard about all the illogic in Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess’ screenplay

I’m no sadist. They’ve suffered plenty for our amusement. Still, it’s a shame that for the first time in two and a half decades of cringe comedy, the guffaws feel forced.

If One Spoon of Chocolate ultimately fails as a grindhouse banger, you still might understand why RZA developed this project for more than a decade. His rage at this inequitable country has only grown more acute as America’s racial divides widen and codify. But like Unique, RZA doesn’t know how to fight his way out of the hell that surrounds him.

Legion may traffic in signposts of the apocalypse, but the whole affair mostly indicates that we're in the movie wasteland that is January.

Any higher intentions are brought crashing down by predictability, wooden characters, giggle-inducing attempts at scares (shrieking bats, anyone?) and cinematography so gloomy it should be checked for serotonin deficiency.

Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not. So what does that leave Nine with? Well not much.

Grant has never been less charming and Parker never less fashionable or more grating than they are as Paul and Meryl Morgan.

Duffy tamps down his best instincts -- occasional wry humor and the appealingly oddball supporting character (Willem Dafoe last time, a bug-eyed Clifton Collins Jr. here as the MacManus' admiring Latino cohort) -- and doubles up on his worst: homophobic gags, tedious '90s-era slo-mo shootouts and overwrought gangster tropes.

Keeps its audience in the dark -- literally and figuratively -- far too long to be of much use besides as a patience-trying exercise in reference spotting.

Rarely have the words "game over" come as such sweet relief.

What the plot doesn't decimate, the film's slower-than-a-clogged-drain pacing does. Sadly, this is one box that's just not worth picking up off the porch, much less opening, not even for a million dollars.

They try to get 'real' about strange occurrences. Instead they get ludicrous.

This is a film with a mission: Get to the grand-gesture climax without disturbing any clichés in its path.

You could go see P.S. I Love You, or you could hit yourself on the head with a meat mallet -- it depends on the amount of time and money you want to devote to what amounts to roughly the same experience.

Turns out to be a thudding dud, crammed with clunky dialogue, bad acting and gruesome but unpersuasive gore. Mindhunters will pass muster with only the most undemanding horror fans.

The movie straitjackets Keaton into a humorless, table-pounding role.

Gets nowhere. Its star Ice Cube remains characteristically amiable, but this thuddingly miscalculated comedy is way beneath him.

Unless you're a connoisseur of movies that are so bad they're good, Hide and Seek is one game you're not going to want to play.

Winds up an oddly depressing, lost, little movie that eventually caves in on itself.

This heartfelt valentine to the stage leaves no cliché unturned. If it has anything to recommend, it is the loving portrayal of the camaraderie of those who participate in art for art's sake who, to quote Cyrano, "work without one thought of gain or fame."

An unsuccessful concoction of sincerity, camp and crassness that is more interested in its parade of D-level celebrities than developing its characters.

Although Travolta is as smooth as ever, the picture is a bust, a grimly unfunny comedy with no connection to reality, and worst of all, running on and on for two dismal hours.

The bleak absurdity of its predicaments cries out for a tone of pitch-dark comedy to stave off the unintended laughter that it is virtually certain to elicit.

As awful as the original was inspired.

Eating Out might just make it as an amusing trifle, but on the big screen it's merely tedious and silly.

Related to the 1953 Vincent Price film in name, embalming technique and Warner Bros. pedigree only, the new House of Wax is a dreary, predictable tale.

The anesthetized, deadpan performances -- except for Meat Loaf as Anna's gangster boyfriend, who's so over-the-top it appears he stumbled in from another movie -- and dull storytelling result in an unsuccessful mix of screwball comedy, melodrama and noir.

Andreas is way too low-energy to hold the screen as the film's lead, but he was wise to surround himself with a talented cast. Unfortunately, the wooden dialogue and overall shallowness of the writing keep the film from being even an amiable diversion.

The movie is a tortured marshmallow.

However visually striking, this Australian film is ultimately as tedious as it is derivative.

Yet for all its ballyhooed candor about sexual matters, it's a surprisingly baffling and opaque film, too artistic to be standard pornography and too zealously focused on being graphic to the exclusion of all else to succeed as drama.

An unconscionably dreary and amateurish-looking thing, and the rote plot and annoyingly predictable script -- a compendium of bird puns, mostly -- don't work nearly hard enough to make up for the hammy awfulness of the images.

In some ways, The Man plays like a sequel to some terrible movie that was mercifully destroyed before it was ever released.

In the parlance of "The Player," Katrina Holden Bronson's Daltry Calhoun would be pitched as "Because of Winn-Dixie" meets "Napoleon Dynamite," and that is definitely not a good thing.

Shows less human dimension than the new Wallace and Gromit movie.

A comedy so inane and tedious that it buries its premise and its various worthy points under too many arch and improbable shenanigans and endless dialogue, much of it seriously under-inspired.

A jumble of genres including mob melodrama, bodyguard romance and interracial love story, none of which is handled in a remotely satisfying manner by director Ron Underwood. The film's tone shifts with all the grace of a car with a balky transmission.

Rent is commodified faux bohemia on a platter, eliciting the same kind of numbing soul-sadness as children's beauty pageants, tiny dogs in expensive boots, Mahatma Gandhi in Apple ads.

A trying experience. As we watch Rochester fall apart in spectacular fashion, it's clear that a major lure for the venturesome Depp was the chance to play a grotesque, to become a pestilent physical wreck with an artificial silver nose. There's more in that role for the actor, however, than there is for us.

A big fast bust.

The movie suffers from a malady common to tiny indies of the let's-put-on-a-show variety -- it strains for irrepressibly nutty, but lands squarely in annoying.

Droopy remake.

The performances by all three children are scarily convincing. Still, it's a taxing bit of exploitation, which, although you're glad to know it's a work of fiction, doesn't exactly make a case for itself as art.

Director Mikael Hafström's dramatic sense is so pedestrian and snail's-pace obvious -- since this 2003 feature, he's made the leap to Hollywood with the plodding thriller "Derailed" -- one starts biding time for the inevitable retributive smackdown that will save our hero from the gantlet of draggy high-mindedness about counteracting fascism with stony resolve.

Unfortunately, the film lacks the suspense and drama to carry the psychological burden placed on it by its makers. Plot strands are dropped like so much lint, and it ends so abruptly that you wonder whether the filmmakers ran out of money, ideas or both.

You have to be a bit of an arrested adolescent to think "Larry" is funny.

What we may very well be looking at here is another "Showgirls," a drag camp-fest for the "Baby Jane" crowd, fabulous fodder for future cabaret acts, and a pleasure probably best enjoyed in a crowd -- preferably a vocal one. Dead serious and stone idiotic, the only basic instinct in evidence here is desperation.

Farnsworth's frenetic, often hysterical first feature tries desperately to find a style, or styles, to call its own, but there's never a moment that doesn't feel as if it's been chewed up and spit out a dozen times before.

Isn't it amazing to see just how low some people will stoop if you pay them enough?

Schifrin wisely holds off showing the monster -- because once the creature is revealed, the already shaky film takes a turn for the worse. The costume for the monster looks like a cross between a drugstore Halloween mask and leftover molds from the horror chestnut "Leprechaun."

The movie is flatly acted and extremely ill-paced, lacking any sense of urgency, momentum or fun. "Romancing the Stone" it is not.

The bedraggled movie limps along to its phony hogwash of an ending, adding the ignominy of sentimentality to its previous sin of being so derivative.

A flavorless snack, time filler until "Saw III" and "Hostel 2" are served up.

Devoid of verbal wit, instead relying on a relentless stream of Looney Tunes-inspired violence.

There is something bizarrely compelling about the movie. It's slower than watching a train wreck but invokes that same level of disbelief.

It's always dispiriting to see children's movies succumb to desperate pandering to the coolness imperative, especially since, given the marketing muscle they tend to have behind them, the bigger trick seems to be in getting people not to see them.

There are no laughs to be found in writer-director Michael Traeger's would-be comedy The Amateurs, but there is one big mystery: how actors of this caliber could have been convinced to take part.

It never quite settles on whether it's a "Mean Girls" burlesque of teen life, an "American Beauty"-style bad-things-in-the-suburbs drama, or a wayward horror film. And it certainly never reconciles itself to successfully pulling off a hybrid of the three.

As boredom sets in, the viewer realizes that "The Covenant" does possess one magical power: It afflicts its audience with restless leg syndrome.

The movie's disinterest in character might be forgivable were its plot not riddled with holes.

Good-natured and exuberantly politically - socially is more like it - incorrect, but it is woefully under-inspired and amateurish.

Even for ultra-low-budget, grade-Z horror movies, this is a truly incompetent film.

This is a bitter, occasionally farcical drama with the most hostile cinematic view of Los Angeles since "Crash."

Like an ugly tie or a pair of slipper socks, Black Christmas is destined to be forgotten the instant it's unwrapped, gathering dust until the season rolls around again.

It's more like "That Girl" on speed than anything else.

Yes, stepping is an age-old tradition at historically African American schools, but this smells of desperation; one more misstep for a film with two left feet.

Cease Fire is no art film but, rather, mainstream fare that's likely to appeal primarily to Farsi-speaking audiences. It is talky, too long at 1 hour, 44 minutes and tends to be preachy and tedious.

The original film was intellectually engaging as well as tangibly creepy, while the new remake is just plain bad, and boring to boot.

It's a relentlessly silly horror/fantasy/romance that is merely the latest twist on a tired premise.

Bad as Harris' Hannibal Rising screenplay (his first) is, at least it's an improvement on his dreadful book, streamlining its convoluted action and discarding large chunks of unspeakable dialogue.

By the time it sputters across the finish line, Wild Hogs feels as if it's gone on forever -- like a trip in a hot car with the windows rolled up. The air is stale and hard to breathe, and it sure feels good when it's over.

Detailing the sexual and romantic misadventures of the employees and patrons at a London cafe, Caffeine is about as appetizing as a pot of dishwater coffee.

The movie is all surface, loudly clamoring for attention and then losing its voice.

You'd like to think such bankruptcy of imagination means we've seen the last of these subterranean creeps. But you know they'll be back soon to collect their royalties from the gore hounds who apparently don't care how dull or warmed over the accompanying package.

One of the funniest films of the year. That's not good news for this attempted action-adventure, which clearly lost its way in its own copious fog.

Redline isn't exactly a car wreck, mainly because it's far less exciting, and you can, in fact, look away. Perhaps at your shoes.

Beach's storytelling tactics, much like the film as a whole, would simply be annoying if they weren't also borderline insulting.

Condemned is, if nothing else, an object lesson in how to punish women for fun and profit. But it's all for a point, the filmmakers would have us believe. One suspects that's a point of sale.

Little more than an extended excuse for a soundtrack.

Georgia Rule oscillates clumsily from shock to slapstick to schmaltz. The result of these big tonal swings is a cinematic strikeout.

The movie is a pastiche of tortured slapstick, groan-inducing dialogue and a lethal dose of treacle, apparently awaiting one of Williams' trademark sprees of riffing and vamping to save the day. That moment never comes, however.

It's a movie on the wrong side side of the so-bad-it's-good line.

Director Frederik Du Chau's big-screen Underdog has all of the cartoons' crudeness and none of their charm. It's the celluloid equivalent of sugar cereal: cheap, empty and headache-inducing.

Depending on your revenge story preferences, the brutally pretentious Descent is either a payback flick with an agonizingly formless middle, or a soul-darkening head trip bracketed by a crude vengeance tale. Mostly, though, it's indie provocation trapped between shock and blah.

War ties itself in knots trying to bring something new to a stale formula. It's never painful to watch, but that's only because it provokes no feeling at all.

Fluent in the laughable dialogue of a million bad fantasy flicks:

Martian Child would like to be "About a Boy (Who Thinks He's a Martian)", but, disappointingly, it doesn't even come close.

The result is a film that's main crime is inducing stupefying boredom with little payoff in the end.

Its convictionless competence is merely dull, denying the pleasures of an outright howler without providing much else.