Even an 11th-hour cameo from the late Dick Gregory as Ella’s long-ago boyfriend can’t keep The Leisure Seeker from being, well, forgettable.

That The Big Bounce works at all is a testament to Wilson, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter ("The Royal Tenenbaums") who probably could have come up with something better in his sleep.

A series of beautifully bleak black-and-white images of the sexy actress Islid Le Besco staring gravely out of windows.

The movie includes a recurring motif of immigrant taxi drivers - like them, the movie is constantly going around in circles.

Despite all its problems, The Last Days on Mars serves up a deliciously shivery hypothetical: Wouldn’t we all secretly love it if the Mars rover sent back footage of a “walker” or two?

Beyond Outrage fails to live up to its title as Japanese superstar Takeshi Kitano can’t find much in the way of fresh ideas for the genre.

A glossy gay soap opera that graphically illustrates new meanings for the term "missionary position."

The film gets one star from me for the admirable brevity of its running time and another for the definite article in its title, seemingly an implicit promise that there will be no sequel.

As directed by Ole Christian Madsen, the thriller features well-choreographed shootouts and assassinations. But the script is too melodramatic and complicated for its own good.

Presence is a brisk 85 minutes, which is nice if you have dinner plans, but it also exposes limited storytelling ambitions. It’s a mid-season episode of TV. We don’t get to know much about the characters, and don’t care either way about their fate.

An ultra-predictable if essentially painless romantic comedy.

The biblically themed Seraphim Falls moseys along very slowly, climaxing with a lengthy series of flashbacks and an appearance by Anjelica Huston as a medicine woman who may or not be the devil.

The intriguing story behind Seberg and the always-interesting Kristen Stewart promised greatness. But this biopic squanders both; it’s a bland period piece with an irritating lack of focus.

The film strains credulity as it hurtles toward its conclusion.

Salma Hayek, as their vengeful ex-boss Eva Torres, is fun to watch as she plots to outwit them time and again, but ultimately, there’s no one here to really care about.

Mostly We Are Wizards is a loving, if flawed, tribute to creativity and artistic freedom.

The acting is super -- these guys know how to be sweet and disgusting -- and the story provides its share of laughs. But after a while, the one-note movie, directed by Felix van Groeningen, grows tiresome.

A brave but ultimately futile attempt at adapting a piece that is so quintessentially theatrical that it defies translation to another medium.

Ends in a cascade of sentimentality straight out of Hollywood. Not even Chweneyagae's excellent acting or Lance Gewer's dark photography can save the film.

There aren’t really game-changing shocks here so much as detours. Shyamalan takes what your non-serial-killer father might call the scenic route. The destination? Meh.

Mildly diverting, but lacks humor and pathos.

Complaining about the gooey and generic The Holiday is as useless as railing against fruitcake - this is a slick, throwaway chick flick designed to provide nothing more than mindless diversion between bouts of shopping.

Making a true story of social injustice into a gripping narrative requires more imagination than is contained in this well-intentioned but uninspired effort.

The teary-eyed sincerity of the music-industry drama Beyond the Lights is at times too much, but despite its cliche elements, the film at least has the feel of a passion project.

If Wonder Park were a carnival attraction, it would be the merry-go-round. The animated movie has animals, relentless positivity and the most predictable journey ever. You must be no more than 4 feet tall to ride this one.

A rather unremarkable, if endearing, entry in the quirky rom-com genre.

A genuinely clever plot.

Though Binoche does very solid work, she can't sell the idea of her and Law as a couple; the chemistry isn't there. Not much else rings true in Minghella's screenplay, which is full of coincidences and speeches about race and class.

Too crude for serious audiences and too serious to be good exploitation, Coming Soon is a teen sex comedy that's predictably getting a token theatrical release prior to its imminent debut on home video.

All it takes is the majestic E-flat that opens "Das Rheingold" to make you realize that, despite what Wagner's Dream insists on showing, "the machine" really isn't the point.

A chilly, pretentious and talky drama.

There hasn’t been this bizarre mixture of hooah and death since John Wayne hung up his combat boots.

In The Kid With a Bike, Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne offer a sly but finally banal update of the Italian neorealist classic "The Bicycle Thief."

Not a bad idea — and one that already worked out pretty well for John Hughes’ “Weird Science” in 1985. But here it’s a single-joke skit that’s too self-aware to be distinctively funny, freaky or thrilling.

The tone and focus of David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn careens around so much it’s hard not to end up as irritable as its title character.

Truly every line of this gussied-up pile of trash is worthy of a yelled-out crowd response. It’s one schlocky horror picture show.

Everything plays out exactly as you'd expect in a cheerful, well-meaning movie in the style of something made for the Disney channel.

Either a ludicrously bad movie or a parody of same. Either way, it's pretty funny.

Yet another teen comedy that tries to have it both ways -- basically, "Mean Girls" with crucifixes instead of designer jewelry.

The talented quartet saves the movie, but making it great would take a rewrite.

The swooping shots and the way the lack of dialogue amplifies ambient sounds are stunning. Story-wise, The Tribe is yet another art-film wallow in cruelty, not nearly as unique as its looks and its world.

The romance between Winslet and Schoenaerts — billed as the film’s centerpiece — is, regrettably, never really allowed to bloom.

Slow and predictable, and the characters are so poorly written that its hard to react to them in any way.

So s-l-o-w-l-y paced it seems twice as long as its two-hour running time.

Crowe — knowingly, I think — clowns around from start to finish. Even if the horror doesn’t have you screaming, his Italian accent will.

This stuff is strictly run of DeMille.

The movie is a pleasant way to spend time in the dark, especially for Francophiles, but it won't leave any lasting impression.

A soggy love story doesn't help this instance of style over substance.

Fox can't decide if Walk on Water is a terrorist thriller or a gay buddy story, and neither can the viewer.

It's perfectly entertaining (and well-executed) in its cute, undemanding way.

Ends up a nightmare of a star vehicle.

Hutcherson isn’t particularly adept at playing moral anguish, but the film maintains an electrifying tension for its first half as we wonder just how far his character will go. In the second half, though, the film degenerates into a desultory action movie as everybody starts creeping around trying to shoot one another.

The Artist’s Wife can, at times, come off as a collage of other, better movies.

Dynamite actually — sometimes cheesily — is a lot like 1990s and aughts disaster flicks, except there is not much suspense as to whether or not the nuclear bomb will land, even though Bigelow casually tries to create some.

Thanks to (Douglas), Diamonds is quite affecting -- even if it's not a particularly good movie.

More frustratingly, Brooks jumps back and forth in time between the couple’s past relationship and the current day, with nary a physical or emotive change evident in either party. It becomes a task just to figure out which timeline you’re in, and then convince yourself why you should care.

A determinedly raunchy holiday comedy about a libidinous, larcenous and perpetually soused St. Nick with a nonstop potty mouth.

A horror movie with an anti-globalist bent that’s more interesting than its halfhearted scares.

If the plot of the Argentine soaper Puzzle seems familiar, that's because it's nearly identical to the story in the French movie "Queen To Play."

As a comedy, the film isn’t especially funny, and as a screwball drug caper a la “Go,” it’s raggedly plotted, with ridiculous coincidences popping up everywhere.

Whether you dig this aggressively campy horror-comedy is, to some extent, dependent on your squeamishness.

Johnny English Reborn sounds like a reboot, but it's actually a tired recycling of something that wasn't exactly fresh to begin with.

This is a by-the-numbers rehash that will leave anyone much over 5 enormously grateful that, if you duck out before the lengthy end credits, it lasts just over an hour.

The best thing about Equilibrium is its impressive look. Along with its generally fine cast and some well-choreographed fights, that goes a long way to making the movie watchable -- despite its underlying stupidity.

A glorified TV movie.

Medina has taken a series of vignettes and fashioned them into a feature film as aimless as Luciano’s life. There’s no buildup or payoff; still, Hendler’s laid-back performance makes Medina’s film worth seeking out.

Two possible ways of regarding Please Give: It's shallow. Or maybe it's deeply shallow.

Trying to understand the story can make you feel like you’re sitting on a stool in a dunce cap.

Movie adaptations shouldn’t require that you know their source material. But in the case of The Glass Castle, it’s impossible not to just say it: You’re better off reading the book.

[JK Simmons] provides a little comic relief, and sums up my feelings on this whole outing: “Goddamn time-travelin’ robots!”

A worthy addition to the cinematic canon, which, at last count, numbered 52 different versions.

For a company that purports to be all about sparking creativity, asking a kid to follow Ikea-evocative directions to assemble an X-wing fighter seems at odds with the mission.

Can't overcome the familiar, soapy script.

Mostly, though, it’s the same old story: Bad mutants versus good mutants, with the fate of us humans — mostly off-screen, disturbingly expendable — hanging in the balance.

Only mildly diverting and way too long for a movie aimed at kids.

Making mixed martial arts — described in the film as “the bloodiest and the goriest sport you’ve ever seen” — tame and lackluster is a challenge. But director Benny Safdie is up to the task.

The film is well-constructed, as one would expect from Gondry, but it offers little reason for anyone outside the family circle to care about dear old Tante Suzette.

The movie can be mildly amusing. But I couldn’t figure out which of the three principals I least wanted to know.

Gabizon has a great idea. But he ruins it by devoting too much time to colorful but unnecessary characters.

There are far, far worse ways to spend two hours than watching Jessica Alba in a skimpy bikini - as well as other natural wonders photographed in the Bahamas - in the airheaded underwater adventure Into the Blue.

Overall, this sci-fi/martial arts hybrid has the stale aura of a product assembled out of bits of other action movies.

With a formulaic plot and adequate supporting players, Smith phoning it in presents a major roadblock for a series as reliant on two leads’ chemistry as this one.

Israeli director Nadav Lapid uses a well-worn concept — a lonely little boy is taken under a teacher’s wing — to create a slow, creepy movie.

Everybody involved in 39 Pounds of Love probably had the best of intentions. But watching the filmmakers scurry about to record every last tear, I couldn't help but feel that this twisted little man was being exploited.

These were people willing to take chances. Would that Trank had taken chances in telling their stories.

A flawed black comedy about two buddies who open a butcher's shop in a small Danish town.

The film is impeccably shot and paced, but the radical real-world implications of Wise’s agenda are never fully explored.

You can see director Jon Watts and the filmmakers struggling to replicate the magic of their first film. But its charm came not from an overabundance of jokes, but from turning Spidey into a school hallway hero whose biggest challenge was girls. Jetting off to Venice, Prague and London and busting up landmarks brings it more in line with the rest of the overly dense Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Neither bad enough to be a complete waste of time nor good enough to remember past next Tuesday, the film co-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie staples together one routine action piece after another with cutesy dialogue and lots of merciless pounding away at iPad screens.

Shallow and blatantly manipulative variation on "Awakenings" in which every plot development is telegraphed.

Uninspired in style, and Joan Allen's narration is dry.

Heavy on quirk and light on wit, first-time director Gillian Greene’s comedy leans too heavily on the badly wigged Kranz.

Safe House may strike you as a brilliant movie, provided you've seen fewer than, say, 10 spy thrillers.

Overlong, overblown and utterly forgettable.

Despite reams of maudlin narration, McKidd's powerful performance as a conflicted man makes this beautifully shot low-budget feature worth checking out.

The birth of the titular infant — what the whole movie’s leading up to — is just an anticlimactic mess.

Makes its biggest misstep in failing to persuade the viewer the five family members are charming eccentrics rather than irritating weirdos.

It must have sounded great on paper.