The danger of trying to do a supernatural comedy-romance is that you’ll wind up being as funny as “Twilight,” with all the raw sexual energy of “Bewitched.” Beautiful Creatures isn’t quite that bad, though it did make me long for the cleverer “Dark Shadows.”

Sillen drags out generic talking heads who say generic things about Bernstein, a generic boho. The film might suffice if you're looking for something to watch on cable TV some early morning. But it isn't worth the hassle and expense of going to a theater.

You may protest that this is just a splattery feature-length sketch, and you’d be absolutely right. Why not have a laugh at this absurdly trite concept? I’ll take the cheesy breeziness of “CVZ” over the frowny somberness of “World War Z” any day.

Amazingly amateurish, the film lands wide of satirical targets that should be impossible to miss.

Even if this film may irritate some people who remember "the movement" differently, it's nevertheless a fascinating and often moving document of recent history.

What is astonishing is that husband-and-wife writers Wally Wolodarsky (who also directed) and Maya Forbes, with combined credits that include "The Simpsons" and "The Larry Sanders Show," could churn out something this nasty and ludicrous.

Has funny moments, but it also has a lot of drag time.

Nancy Meyers is known for her obsession with kitchens — sun-drenched, timelessly chic architectural marvels that provide a safe haven for all the director’s characters. The Intern puts a new spin on this trope: Robert De Niro is the kitchen.

A bland look at professional surfing.

Where else can you get to hear Otto sing "Crazy"?

The film is as tender and endearing as a lamb, a lamb at rest in a fragrant atmosphere. It’s a film that has a determined, unironic respect for things past. It’s as if millennial hipsterism, with its feigned fascination for all things retro, took a surprising further step: actual respect for learning, for experience, for wisdom.

I wanna feel the HEAT … but I don’t. On the contrary, the animatronic new Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” left me shivering from a gust of arctic air as it so clinically and lazily examines the tragic life of the famous singer.

Slicker than most attempts to document Monroe's successes and tragic trajectory, but even her own words don't provide much more of an insight into what made this troubled icon tick.

More wobbly moments of Woman Walks Ahead seem to teeter on the edge of both white-saviorism and becoming a Harlequin romance.

Five minutes before The Golden Compass started, I was wondering when it was going to start. Forty minutes into it, I was wondering exactly the same thing.

Less than compelling as drama -- but boy is this an impressive collection of wildly ugly hairstyles, moustaches, clothing and "earth tone" furniture from 1983.

A Walk in the Woods is broad as a barn door, with two stars who have minimal chemistry — and there’s not much in the way of reflection about mortality.

“Fallen Kingdom” is a more interesting, and less obvious, story than the usual Tyrannosaurus romps, which tend to be death-defying games of hide-and-seek.

an overlong and surprisingly dull documentary.

Endearingly offbeat romantic comedy with a great meet-cute gimmick.

Gets pinned down in a barrage of schmaltz, cliché, stereotype and racial condescension - not to mention a historically dubious premise.

It's in the teenage section where the film goes seriously wrong and veers from an absorbing family story.

Hyperactive.

One of the oddest movies I've seen in a while - and that's a good thing.

Stick around till the end. You don't want to miss an unexpected cameo from a filmmaker I won't name. Hint: He's short, likes younger women and isn't Woody Allen.

This overlong drama is the first (mostly) English-language film from the talented Swedish filmmaker Moodysson (“Lilya 4-Ever”). Any semblance of subtlety was unfortunately lost in translation.

If animal slaughter makes you queasy, this movie isn't for you. Along with several cockfights, there's a long scene in which a pig is butchered. The folks at PETA would be most unhappy. People don't fare much better than the animals, with blood flowing in a seemingly unending barrage of violence.

Could easily have become a schmaltzy variation on “Whiplash.” But it’s not, thanks to astringent direction by François Girard (“The Red Violin’’), an excellent cast and heavenly young voices.

It’s too bad there’s already a movie out this week called “The Shallows”; it would work so perfectly for the new film from Nicholas Winding Refn (“Drive”).

Writer-director Todd Robinson is the victim of his own noble intentions, turning each and every moment into an ice bucket of sentiment.

Contraband aims to be dumb fun but gets only the first half right.

For a movie called Breathe, Andy Serkis’ directorial debut is curiously airless — or maybe just quintessentially British, all stiff upper lip and light on emoting.

Seriously lost in the woods. This aimless epic about a pair of charlatan brothers sinks under the weight of a problematic script, questionable star casting, hamfisted editing -- and penny-pinching by Gilliam’s latest patrons, the Brothers Weinstein.

It’s too busy with feel-good slogans like “Si Se Puede.” The slogan may be nice, but it’s meaningless. So is the movie.

This sequel sorely misses the presence of Tom Wilkinson, whose out-of-the-closet character grounded the first film (but died at the end).

A raunchy, sporadically funny comedy.

You can see better stuff on TV any night of the week.

Gregg, who previously directed the very dark comedy “Choke,” never quite settles on a tone; from the opening scenes, in which Molly Shannon plays a neurotic stage mom and Allison Janney a chilly casting agent, it seems he’s going that way again, but a dramatic twist sends the film into less plausible territory.

not so much a movie as an "act," one that belongs at a club called Shenanigans or maybe Chuckleheads.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that this film, generically directed by Christian Ditter (“Love, Rosie”), was written by the people behind 2009’s “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Seven years later, guess what? He’s still not that into you! And I wouldn’t be, either, not with this lot.

It's an odd mixture of an unsentimental, darkly humorous take on mental illness with the usual Hollywood loony-bin cliches.

A micro-budget black-and-white musical set in outer space, The American Astronaut is obviously not for all tastes -- but it's quite unlike anything else out there at the moment.

A zero-joke romantic comedy.

The characters are too cliched to be funny, and Jensen's script can't stay focused long enough to make an impression. Where is Lars von Trier when we need him?

At 96 minutes it is exactly 93 1/2 minutes too long. If they're going to put this artifact in theaters, they'd better charge 1973 grindhouse prices: a dollar a ticket.

For all of its in-your-face, full-frontal sex scenes and threesomes (one involving a transsexual), this autobiographical story is almost sweet.

This digitally tricked-out fairy tale makes for a reasonably engaging kids’ fantasy, but at best we’re talking about a junior varsity “Lord of the Rings.” It’s March. What did you expect?

It's because of a superior cast that this version of "Death at a Funeral" is the rare comedy remake that's funnier than the original, however slightly. Personally, though, I'm not sure it was worth the effort.

If you’re going to call your sci-fi movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, you’d better be sure Valerian (Dane DeHaan) is a guy your audience can get behind. Director Luc Besson styles him as a cocky space rogue, but Valerian is weak sauce. And so is this movie.

Don’t expect the real dirt on “Saturday Night Live” from the doc Live From New York! The movie is fun, but it’s a cinematic coffee-table book.

McKellen, Csokas, Bonneville and particularly Richardson are so good and convincing in their characterizations that you can almost overlook the increasingly unbelievable twists that Asylum takes. Almost.

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.

If you find hedge funds hard to wrap your head around, the movie Human Capital won’t do much to ease the confusion.

Lilien is an amateur filmmaker, and his movie -- which at times is more about Lilien than Pale Male -- shows it.

Ultimately, Birthday Girl disintegrates into a fairly routine -- and brutal -- caper movie.

An overwrought Taiwanese soaper.

Though not as witty or accomplished as you'd expect from its pedigree, "Le Divorce" provides welcome relief from the lame-brained trash Hollywood has foisted on the public this summer.

There are more misses than hits among the myriad plot strands that make up the sweaty Spanish sex comedy KM.0.

You just know something terrible is going to happen. But when it does, you're entirely unprepared

The director, American-born Paula Fouce, has a passion for the holy ways of the East, and it shines through in Naked in Ashes.

An exuberant if not always brilliantly crafted adaptation of the campy ABBA musical.

Shove people into categories, then into a film like Think Like a Man, and it's a recipe for tedium.

A glorified TV movie.

There is enough detail and psychological nuance in Mattson Tomlin’s clever script to make Project Power more intriguing than most of what Marvel and DC have to offer, even if it could barely match their catering budgets.

It tries to be an update of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" crossed with "Pygmalion," but while it has some funny and even original moments, it's too predictable to be "all that."

There’s no better time than summer for a fun, brainless thriller. All you need is three key ingredients: a charismatic hero, a hateable villain and a snappy screenplay...Skyscraper, regrettably, cuts likable star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson off at the knees by failing to deliver on the other two.

It's high-spirited, innocent fun.

Herzlinger is a flack, not a filmmaker.

It’s the wonderful performances by Bening and Harris that make this flawed, somewhat maudlin film worth seeing.

As for Hoffman, the shambling Everyman naturalism he shows here gives God’s Pocket an added elegiac layer that makes its bitter ironies that much more painful.

Everyone's Hero, a tame CGI cartoon for the simple-minded: the very young, the very old and Yankee fans.

Truthfully, it's all incredibly boring. Noé tosses in some dime-store existentialism ("Time destroys everything"), but this is a movie with not a whole lot on its mind except rank exploitation.

Risen veers so far off the Bible’s path that it might as well be a tale of this 13th apostle, called Marty, who was in charge of snacks and mini-golf reservations.

Transporter 3 is made for airplane viewing, and not just any airplane: an Eastern European one, on the flight from Hrubbishnik to Slutnya.

There are no surprises, but for once there’s a set of artsy millennial characters who feel like real humans, and Berlin looks great.

All of this is punctuated with refreshingly strange wit.

Ends up taking enough detours to keep DreamWorks' latest animated epic from striking cinematic gold.

After a dreadfully clunky start, Left Luggage picks up and becomes quite moving.

For a movie that's trumpeted as providing a probing look beyond the comic's onstage patter, there's an awful lot of onstage patter -- and what nasty, hateful stuff it is.

If you're able to check your brain at the popcorn stand, you'll stand a much better chance of enjoying this crowd pleaser.

None of Dunham's humor comes across, except when someone says, "And when you speak, your words are snakes I swat at with swords," which is hilarious, but not intentionally.

One of the highlights of Casino Jack is Abramoff doing dead-on impressions of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan, among others.

In this new, totally unnecessary version of Dr. Seuss’ holiday favorite, the mean one (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) isn’t all that scary or cruel.

Nuanced work by the great John Slattery ("Mad Men") as an emotionally distant dad isn't enough to sustain more than sporadic interest in Brian Savelson's underwritten, slow-moving indie, which plays distressingly like a photographed off-Broadway drama.

An uninspired gay coming-of-age import from Germany.

Harrelson's charming flamboyance - seen to great effect in "No Country for Old Men" - is a great fit for Carter, who carries no small amount of self-loathing under his carefully coifed toupee.

Much of Finding Amanda doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but at its best the still-boyish Broderick suggests his most famous character, Ferris Bueller, going through a midlife crisis.

Like the lovely indie "Weekend," this small-scale story focuses on a couple of days in a possibly blossoming romance. Unlike that movie, it's full of gender stereotypes and all-around bad behavior. There's no one here to root for.

Those flight sequences — first suspenseful, then euphoric — take you back to the classic “Dumbo” as much as they do to classic Burton.

It’s the first R-rated, woman-directed comedy in years! — here’s the rub: The funniest thing about it is the men.

Set in a bar that echoes the far superior "Big Night," this labored two-hander plays more like an acting exercise than an actual movie.

The plot is neither here nor there, but you have to see this for the luscious cinematography by Chi Xiaoning, who loves shades of blue and amber.

Some of the plot points are confusingly vague, the tone lurches wildly between genres, and the film's epilogue pushes the bounds of believability - but The Hard Word could never be accused of being predictable.

It's a chaste "Austin Powers," a less ridiculous "Casino Royale," a more subtle "Spy Hard" — in other words, yet another James Bond parody.

A 2 1/2-year-old collection of mediocre stand-up routines and dull backstage chatter, Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show demonstrates why comedy clubs require you to have a couple of drinks.

Writer-director John Gray, who created "Ghost Whisperer" on TV, is a son of Brooklyn whose love for the borough is as thick as a pint of Guinness, and he keeps finding fresh ways to present familiar plot points.

As a distinctly not-insider, though, I would have benefited more from a broader portrait of the woman herself, and how she became such a legend.

Linklater, a director who usually earns his sentiment, just can’t get the tone right. “Bernadette” is supposed to skewer the norms of family, suburban life and motherhood. While Bernadette should be a creature out of Wes Anderson, Blanchett and her director opt for “The Addams Family” instead. Nothing about it works.