Costner and Garner are good and Langella properly menacing, but Leary has lost his fastball and seems to be holding something back in his quarrel scenes with Costner. Costner has to carry the film, which he does.

"A Dame to Kill For” isn’t the shock to the system “Sin City” was. But whatever its plot repetition and warmed-over tough talk cost it, this is still a movie like few others you’ve ever seen, a 3D slice of Nihilistic noir that will have you narrating your own guts and guns story on the drive home, chewing on a toothpick as you do.

“Eleven” turns out to be an overreach, with too many voices to be anything but superficial, too few (she skipped sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America) to be thorough.

Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as The Call does at almost precisely the one hour mark. Which is a crying shame, because for an hour, this is a riveting, by the book kidnapping.

That makes Kick Ass 2 more sour than sweet, a movie that jokes about comic book fanboys but stops short of mocking them the way the first film did.

It’s a live-action version of on an ’80s cartoon that was designed to sell toys. This is “Transformers” without the Bumblebee Camaro, a lot of action, a few one-liners, and a lot of gunplay.

Jake Gyllenhaal does tour de force double duty in the intimate thriller Enemy, a cryptic essay on identity. He is terrific in both guises, but he is trapped in a frustrating puzzle without a solution.

Robinson manages some suspense, but the thriller’s ticking clock is a weak one.

As impressive as the effects can be, as effective as the blend of TV news helicopter POV shots, security camera footage, cell-phone video and storm chaser images mimicked here turn out, the human stories are given short shrift in this “spend our budget on effects” action picture.

They waste this cast and these characters on a story so conventional, so neatly wrapped up in the finale, that the real mystery is how Gregorini and co-writer Sarah Thorpe didn’t see that.

Manages a tear or two, and enough laughs to get by, even if from first scene to last the strain to stop just short of cloying shows.

Among the cast, the Oscar winner Cotillard acquits herself the best, bleary-eyed and bitter.

Scribbler is just daring and interesting enough that you can see why a fairly accomplished cast — from Cassidy to Dushku, Gershon to Campbell — was drawn to it, even if the execution underwhelms.

It’s the sort of movie whose finale leaves you wondering, “Why do they always leave out what happens next?”

The more correct title would have been “Retribution,” which could work for any number of Statham vehicles over the years. But Redemption is just different enough to make us remember “The Bank Job” or “Killer Elite” or that he’s about to give those fun-but-silly “Fast & Furious” movies a proper villain.

The payoff isn’t nearly as interesting as the cryptic set-up and disquieting performances and scenes that precede it in The Wait.

Your enjoyment of Horrible Bosses 2 is almost wholly dependent on your tolerance for clusters of funny actors, babbling, riffing — and in the case of Charlie Day, screeching — all at once.

There are a TV season’s worth of soap opera betrayals, melodramatic traumas and blundering efforts to learn from and escape this media miasma.

This dark comedy has a lot of promise for about half its length. Then, unfortunately, it settles into the mundane genre picture that it seems doomed to be.

There’s nothing surprising about this late ’60s tale, including its connection to the modern ghost stories told in “The Amityville Horror” and “The Conjuring.” But what it lacks in originality it makes up with in hair-raising execution. You will scream like a teenage girl.

Blame it on the weak chemistry of the stars, blame it on the way the script refuses to let them develop chemistry and the perfunctory way the story is dispensed with, but the sparks aren’t there.

Sex Tape is not quite the train wreck its TV ads make it out to be.

Robert Rodriguez is like that friend who loves to tell jokes, but always goes on and on, well past the punch line. Remember how he beat the living daylights out of his “Spy Kids” franchise? That’s what he’s working toward with Machete.

Antonio Banderas pretty much steals The Expendables 3. But at this stage in that winded franchise, that amounts to petty theft.

It’s disappointing that Spurlock didn’t have the access, the footage or the spine to depict any of the cynicism behind such creations.

Here’s the sort of scruffy action comedy that suits the post-box office-draw careers of one-time hipster John Cusack and fading action star Thomas Jane. It covers the costs of a fun few weeks of working vacation in Australia and provides a few on-screen laughs along the way.

So as much as every generation deserves it’s own Romeo & Juliet, this latest one does nothing to make anyone older than Hailee Steinfeld forget the heat of Baz Lurhmann’s far sexier, noisier and passionate modern dress version of 1996, where Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio completely convinced us that they knew how to “play Satan’s game.” And how.

As colorful as it and its people are, Cooper lets the brawling and the bigger-than-big performances get the better of him, and his story. Out of the Furnace feels undercooked, as a result.