Fletcher and his players never quite hit on a tone that works. Fantastical dream sequences and side trips to the store to get “more bullets” never quite rise to the level of wry commentary. This just isn’t as cute and funny as Fletcher seems to think it is.

Writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins has lots of fun with this surreal set up, and only really loses the thread when reality intrudes.

Garlin doesn’t discover anything new about this well-documented phenomenon. But rounding up his (under-employed) comic pals and turning them loose on Little League is funny enough by itself.

Still waters may run deep, as the old saying goes. But Beside Still Waters there’s nothing deeper than “The Big Chill.”

This thoughtful but windy and winded sci-fi thriller shortchanges the science – understandably - and the thrills. The directing debut of “Dark Knight” cinematographer Wally Pfister is a mopey affair with indifferent performances, heartless romance and dull action. It transcends nothing.

Interns Wilson and Vaughn swap lines like veteran jazz musicians who still have a sense of play about them — an endless supply of nicknames, high-and-low fives, dated slang and goodwill — theirs for each other, and ours for them.

Despite an epic fight or two, Parker robs us of the revenge, the suspense of the hunt, of Parker's methodical way of tracking down those who betrayed him, one by one.

The line between “cute” and “cutesy” is violated, repeatedly, in the sometimes funny, often cloying comedy The English Teacher.

The younger sister of the formidable Vera Farmiga gives flat, rushed and unconvincing line readings, especially in her paragraph-long, exposition-packed monologues. Is that by design? Is this a clever teen “acting” to manipulate her memory detective? The actress should be better at masking that, if that’s the case. And if it isn’t, she should be just…better.

It’s never more than a theme park that isn’t worth the price of admission.

As exhausted as this series and the genre it comes from is, it still manages a few decent jolts thanks to that new approach and a pretty good cast’s reactions to what they, and we, see through the video camera’s viewfinder.

Besson aims his movie at anyone who’s ever held a grudge at an ill-mannered French waiter or clerk (haughty, and by the way, they’d NEVER condescend to speak to you in English). If that includes you, The Family has serves up a little wish-fulfillment payback, with a baseball bat.

It’s a epic tragedy, and summing it up in under two hours does nobody justice.

Not every cute movie about the mentally ill is Oscar worthy, but this touching and riotous one from Down Under works well enough.

Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz (“Terribly Happy”) can’t hide his cards and rarely even tries to. He’s stuck with a script that has “Promise you won’t kill us,” maybe the silliest line ever uttered to a murderer, but that features some dandy threats, some by the villain who doesn’t drive the Jaguar.

This is more “Something Mild” than “Something Wild.” But Firth and Blunt handle their characters’ many revelations with care and play with layers of hurt and disappointment with great sympathy and pathos.

A mad, laugh-out-loud mashup of “The Little Mermaid,” “Harry Potter,” assorted vampire tales, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the disaster epic “2012” and oh – “Pokemon” – just to impose the cinematic precedents on display here, Sorcerer is a Chinese twist on the reliable sword and sorcery genre which caused Hollywood to impose “Clash of the Titans” and “Immortals” on the undeserving.

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.

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.

Mostly, it’s just a clumsy lecture about who we’re becoming, haves vs have-nots, with the haves armed to the teeth.

The central premise is a half-hearted retread. And the gags come from a score of earlier films and sitcoms.

A little Kevin Hart goes a long way in Ride Along, a dull buddy picture engineered as a vehicle for the mini motor mouth and the perma-sneering Ice Cube.

An odd, unpleasant 2011 thriller from Austria only now earning limited U.S. release. It’s a reminder of why so few filmmakers experiment with visual-only storytelling. It’s hard to pull off.

For all the bursts of blood, the gunplay and execution-style head-shots that punctuate scores of deaths, it’s hard to see Olympus Has Fallen (Secret Service code) as much more than another movie manifestation of a first-person shooter video game.

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.

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.

What Anderson delivers this one time is a genuine spectacle, a gladiator movie with a volcano in the middle of it.

When the Game Stands Tall is a solid if unsurprising and uninspiring melodrama.