The performances are perfunctory and the scenario standard-issue even if the execution of this no-budget thriller is top drawer.

"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.

Manipulative, contrived, melodramatic — all labels we slap on that most perfectly titled movie genre, “the weeper.” All fit If I Stay like original packaging.

I just wish there’d been more to this allegory, something more than Radcliffe’s Ig explaining his protrusions to one and all with “They’re horns. It’s a crazy story.”

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

The entire affair feels malnourished, under-rehearsed and starved of energy.

It’s just too much — too much graphic violence, too many plot wrinkles, too much stupidity, too many supporting players to track...For a movie as physically fit as this one wants to be, Pain & Gain is carrying way too much extra weight.

Robert Duvall may be 83, but he’s still up to playing a real Texas hell raiser on the screen. He can hold his own with bad hombres.

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

The best that can be said for “Step V” is that it has some sparkling moments of choreography, clever gimmicks as themes for the dance-offs and lovely costumes.

Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”

The cast, plainly packed with second or third choices, lets it down. Is there anything in James Franco’s past that suggests larger-than-life, a fast-talking, womanizing con-man? And the three witches – Theodora, Evanora and Glinda – are Bland, Blander and Blond Bland.

Seth MacFarlane wants to be a movie star in the worst way. A Million Ways to Die in the West is result of this longing, a long/longer/longest comedy with long waits between jokes and longer waits between those that work. Thus, does his leading man career begin and end with a “worst way” Western.

A graphically violent, sexually explicit teen horror tale, it was close to being ahead of its time, in its time. Now, it plays like a quaint, fairly obvious period piece — from 2006.

An empty-headed nothing of a caper comedy.

Call it a vanity project or bargain basement movie mythos, but no hard-boiled biker picture ever looked or sounded like Road to Paloma.

If you’re going to commit to a blasphemous stoner comedy mocking the New Testament prophesy of the coming Rapture, you’d better go all in. Because halfway isn’t funny.

So it’s no “Starbuck,” which most people won’t mind because Americans don’t read subtitles. But even in this form, Delivery Man and the guy who plays him still deliver where it counts.

After Walking with the Enemy, two hours and four minutes of torture, rape and mass shootings, you’ll feel you’ve been tested, too.

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.

It aims for that “Hangover” blend of the sick and the sentimental. And it doesn’t work.

A historically interesting story is painted in broad, colorless strokes, alternating as it does between soap opera and slapstick.

A big, broad dysfunctional family comedy, sort of a “Parenthood” pushed into R-rated “Adulthood” territory.

It’s superficial, but that plays into the hands of the film’s star, Ashton Kutcher.

If it weren’t for the well-intentioned moments of pathos — a tear or two, hear and there — Tio Papi would be a complete waste of time.

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.

If you liked “Scrubs,” and I did, for a few seasons, anyway, you’ll be happy Braff got to make his movie and happy that you got to see it.

An instant midnight movie, a morbid mishmash of styles and filmmaking formats – 26 films, 26 filmmakers from the four corners of the horror globe, all making short films about death. It’s not for everyone.