The sad truth is that TV series like "Dawson's Creek" do a better job with precocious teen dialogue.

The leads are likeable enough, but the script reanimates "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" tactics - a monster story supposedly made hilarious by being told by a savvy high schooler. These lines aren't even jokes, though, they're just collisions of the brutal and the banal.

An atmospheric but sluggish and needlessly confusing British contemporary film noir that may indeed leave some audience members struggling to stay awake.

It’s all headed for a showdown, of course, and duly delivers, though Crudup and Taylor are the only ones who really seem to have a handle on the New Yawk accent.

Regina Hall is always extraordinary — even in projects that are mediocre.

Its intriguing subject matter is diluted by too many bland performances.

A beautifully acted if fairly poky coming-of-age story.

This essentially good-natured movie, a massive hit in France, is more likely to strike American audiences as trite than offensive.

Accomplishes a near miracle -- this British import makes you yearn for Burt Reynolds, who appeared in a vastly more entertaining version of the same story.

If you have two X chromosomes, or know and like someone who does, Blade Runner 2049 may not be the movie for you.

Even on that happy 2005 election day, which was so successful that it led to a December round of elections in which the Sunnis did participate, Poitras takes a break to show us a close-up of someone slitting the neck of a rooster.

While the off-kilter film is a fine showcase for the personalities of two of our best emerging comedic stars, Rachel Sennott (“Shiva Baby”) and Ayo Edebiri (“The Bear”), the humor falls short of being very funny.

The acting is OK, but none of the leads has the kind of sizzle that might have turned this into something as special as another film set roughly in the same era, "Diner.''

Bland and timid.

A so-so heist movie whose dirty-cop character’s personality must have been described in the screenplay as “Nicolas Cage-esque.” Fortunately, Cage was available.

Sometimes dull and mostly uninspired, it's much less a satisfying reboot like "Batman Begins'' than a pointless rehash in the mode of "Superman Returns.''

More impressive than the sight of these acts on an eight-story screen is the excellent six-channel IMAX sound system.

The main reason to see it is for the hilariously nasty uses it devises for a bear trap, nail gun, etc.

Coming Up Roses swerves into a third-act twist that's both an indie cliché and dramatically unnecessary.

There's not a moment of true wildness in It's Kind of a Funny Story, which never gets any more outrageous than projective vomiting.

Gets off to a worthy start, but falls apart about halfway through.

Mawkish and manipulative, the film isn't worthy of its widely praised German director.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders looks great and has a promising opening, but this atmospheric Spanish psychological thriller is otherwise pretty underwhelming.

Unpretentious, TV-style documentary.

There isn't a surprising moment, and it's an affirmation for hard-core fans and pretty much everyone else of William Shatner's immortal exhortation to Trekkies: "Get a life!"

The Amazing Spider-Man is more like an old Xerox copy: Greasy, paper-thin, slightly faded, and probably made unnecessarily, but in any case destined to get lost in a pile of things exactly like it.

May be predictable and silly, but it's never dull.

Berry wears two hats effortlessly. Her direction is gritty and assured, and her leading performance hasn’t lost an ounce of that star quality — to simultaneously be so weak and so strong — that won her an Oscar for Monster’s Ball.

The script falls victim to the stereotypes and clichés so often found in movies about Asian-American families. Still, Lee shows talent, although it might take a feature or two before she finds her own voice.

They should sell antidepressants along with the popcorn at theaters showing Cecilia Miniucchi's Expired, one of those Sundance "comedies" that make you contemplate slitting your wrists.

It's perhaps unsurprising that Love - and her late husband, Kurt Cobain - even manage to steal the show in a documentary about Schemel's life.

Nunez gets nice performances from his cast, but his narrative is cluttered.

The action-adventure aspects of “Christmas Chronicles,” with sleigh chases and a reindeer fights, are cluttered. More appealing are the real-world storylines, such as the siblings dealing with their mom getting serious with a new beau.

It's basically a series of music videos - a few quite good - strung together over two long hours and loosely connected by a weak story line loaded with anachronisms.

Some may find it titillating; more will find it offensive and deeply disturbing.

The adequate Netflix film, which was supposed to have been released two years ago, is funny in spots, but it flatlines early and gets way too gross.

A kind name for this attitude is false moral equivalence, or perhaps post-imperial cringe. A less kind one is Western self-hatred, or an urgent plea to tolerate the intolerant.

Strictly generic, it does little more than regurgitate the J-horror hits "Ringu" and "Ju-on."

So why isn’t They Came Together more uniformly hilarious? Perhaps it’s that elusive problem of trying to explain why a thing is funny in the first place: Spelling it out deflates the joke.

Crippled by lame storytelling.

This absurdist patchwork of a film, already a hit in the Czech Republic, features a number of amusing set pieces.

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

You don't have to be gay or Italian or live in Canada to enjoy Mambo Italiano, but a tolerance for ethnic mugging helps.

Aside from a nifty new way to avoid surveillance in the middle of the desert, there's nothing here we haven't seen in many other movies - including "Spy Game," directed by Scott's brother Tony before 9/11.

Really belongs on Lifetime rather than in theaters.

Never rises above the level of a soap opera, although the steamy sex and Lo's abundant nudity might make it worthwhile for some viewers.

Draggy and contrived.

The 3-D effects are among the most effective ever shot.

Flat dialogue and stiff performances (especially by the street kids, like Ballesteros, turned into actors by Schroeder) don't help.

A sizzling soundtrack and Jennifer Lopez's best performance since "Out of Sight" go only so far in El Cantante, a downer of a musical biopic that leaves no cliché unturned.

When I go to a Mummy movie, I don't want ninjas and yetis and men turned to stone. I want embalmed corpses and hieroglyphics. I want pharaoh. I want pyramids and sphinxes and Ace bandages. Did "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" take place on the Nile?

The premise has potential, but there's no follow- through. And there's no actual zombie mayhem; we learn everything secondhand -- from phone calls to the station.

“Let’s show ’em some good old-fashioned American swagger,’’ MacArthur says on his arrival in Tokyo. It’s too bad director Webber and the screenwriters, David Klass and Vera Blasi, didn’t take his advice to heart instead of largely wasting Jones and some very nice period details.

Despite the title, there is no nudity in the Chinese rom-com Love in the Buff, although there is a lot of risqué language.

This is Ebiri's first feature after directing four shorts. He shows talent, but shouldn't give up his day job just yet.

Steve Taylor's direction is unexciting but solid, relying on the beauty of Portland and his spirited young cast for most of the visual interest.

Szumowska provides lurid scenes of perverted sex, but she offers no new insight into the sordid world of prostitution and the dangers sex workers face. Nor does she flesh out Charlotte and Alicja. The result is a superficial and voyeuristic film.

Of course, nobody watches a Jackie Chan movie for the sophisticated plots or deep characters. They come for the martial arts. But those, too, settle for being not much more than a kick in the park.

Strictly remainder-bin material.

The movies of prolific and popular Japanese director Takashi Miike evoke many emotions -- nausea, excitement, awe, amazement, shock. One emotion they don't often evoke is boredom. Sad to say,Dead or Alive: Final is boring.

When an 80-year-old director turns his attention to death, you hope for some insight, or gravitas, or even whimsy or anger. Hereafter has none of that.

May be the first movie that effectively erases virtually its entire story line by the very last scene.

Has its share of laughs.

Limitless may please a few looking for a shallow fantasy thriller, but won't fire up the synapses of the intellectually demanding.

Beautifully photographed and fitfully amusing, Gaudi Afternoon would be an impressive film from a first-timer, but Seidelman is experienced enough to know she should have told the actors not to camp things up so excessively.

A soufflé of a romantic and family comedy that stubbornly refuses to rise.

Not surprisingly in this tale of desperate men, the only women are top-heavy cartoon characters — literally, animated sequences illustrate Frank’s stories — or live-action betrayers, like Dakota Fanning’s Annie, Frank’s ex-girlfriend. I found the cartoons more interesting.

Dreamgirls director Bill Condon’s off-putting movie is a visual and narrative mess: polished where it should be gritty and ugly where it must be glamorous. Bland, almost always.

Harmless, fish-out-of-water fluff.

A campy guilty pleasure that serves up a “Gladiator’’ knockoff as an appetizer to the impressively flame-filled main course.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic works best when this equal-opportunity offender is on the stage.

Director Baran bo Odar puts all this in the service of ghastly clichés. The rape of children has long since grown nauseatingly familiar, in books, in films, in each season of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Ticket to Paradise would be a better time if it was as campy as its lead actress’ frozen hair.

Sometimes beautiful to look at but ultimately too poetic for its own good.

Courageous, convincing performance by Dunst.

It’s a mildly interesting thriller — Paris through the eyes of a director who doesn’t know how to make its beauty menacing.

About two-thirds of the way through, a stupid, hyperbolic sensibility takes control of the project, running it screaming off the rails.

I understood two words of Youth Without Youth: "The End."

Drag Me to Hell is pure cheese. Goat cheese.

All are subjects worthy of discussion, but tackling them in one film disrupts the movie's momentum and shortchanges viewers. Baichwal could have devoted a single film to just BP's disgraceful behavior.

The opening credits of Gangster's Paradise note that it was "inspired by real events." It would be more accurate to say that the film was inspired by Brian De Palma's "Scarface" and similar fare.

Schmaltzy and endless.

Price of Glory isn't an embarrassment on the order of the last major boxing movie, "Play It to the Bone," but it's not especially worth intercepting on its way to the video racks.

But for all its 21st-century special effects, the characters, dialogue and values of Fury are straight out of the ’50s. The 1650s, maybe.

Big Hero 6 even has a title that sounds like a product ordered off the takeout menu of the type of restaurant that recombines a few elements in many ways. That could work fine, if any of the ingredients were particularly flavorful.

The overlong and too-steady movie tries to say so much — about the struggles of being gay in the ‘80s, gender identity, nontraditional relationship structures — that it all comes off as white noise. Albeit white noise that has a borderline oppressive desire to make us cry.

At 132 minutes, the film is at least half an hour too long. Nobody asked me, but the best solution would be to keep the action sequences (such as the robbery of a horse-drawn steam train, an homage to Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West''), and scrap the allegedly "witty'' dialogue and difficult-to-follow plot twists.

The movie quickly sinks into a terminal case of the cutes and extreme predictability - amid the usual surfeit of wacky supporting characters.

Tremblay is charming as an eccentric kid marching to his own tune, but the film’s attention wanders like a goat separated from its herd.

Witherspoon’s charge, Sofía Vergara as a recalcitrant witness in need of police protection, is an adept slapstick comic likewise hamstrung by director Anne Fletcher’s sluggish pacing, which reliably stays with a scene for three beats beyond the punch line.

It's terribly predictable and often risible stuff.

Fairly shapeless story.

The film's strong point is its stylish, arty look, carefully chosen composition and shadowy lighting.

The psychobabble makes for dry filmmaking until Schreber starts going fem. From that point on, it's every man for himself.

The Club offers plenty of stifling, agonized atmosphere, but it’s all penitence and no redemption.

I love musicals, but I'd be hard-pressed to recommend this curiosity, sort of a shoestring version of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Cotton Club."

Too bad it lacks a substantial story to go along with the kick-ass combat scenes.

Holds your attention for a while, but fails to build much suspense as it races toward a predictable climax. It probably would have worked better as a series of Webisodes, which reportedly was the original plan.