No, which has been nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988. That means light flaring up to spoil the image, bumpy camerawork, a nearly square picture and all-around grubbiness.

Odd and not entirely uninteresting little docudrama.

At its best, Shanghai Calling is mildly diverting.

If Like Someone in Love frustrates, it also has ineffable grace in the framing of Kiarostami’s long, languid shots, the changes he captures in the light, and the way the actors’ smallest movements become fascinating. This enigmatic study of identities built on social deceit offers more than easy answers ever could.

Adapting the author’s cornball formula for a second time around is once-ambitious director Lasse Hallström (“Dear John”), who delivers a cinematic valentine you’ll be reasonably content to watch on a flight in a year or so.

Actually, Bruce, what stinks is the script — which is woefully lacking the kind of one-liners and memorable bad guys that helped make working-class hero McClane so iconic he’s still around after 25 years. Even the action sequences are pretty much by the numbers this time.

The tone of The Playroom is one of soppy moroseness. This imitation “Ice Storm” is as refreshing as a step into a puddle of slush.

Lore is the sort of movie you’d already expect to rip your heart out, but that doesn’t diminish the tragedy when it does arrive.

Such is literature’s power that the cast is more at ease portraying ancient Romans than speaking as versions of themselves.

‘A brave man and a brave poet.” That’s Bob Dylan talking about Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, publisher, anarchist, civil libertarian — in this lively documentary by Christopher Felver.

So feeble it fails even as train-wreck exploitation. I’d be unkind, but not entirely inaccurate, to label Coppola’s sophomoric, er, sophomore effort as a director an offer you can refuse.

Would you rather . . . watch this movie, or spend an hour and a half having your arm hairs plucked out with a rusty pair of tweezers? I’d have chosen the latter if it’d been on offer.

Funny and promising as the first act is, the entire second act is pretty awful, as the script chucks in one tiresome, unlikely gag after another.

I walked out of Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects thinking to myself, “Finally, a mainstream 2013 movie I can whole-heartedly recommend’’ — then quickly added, “well, except that it will probably piss off a sizeable portion of the target audience.’’

An entertaining if nonsensical variation on Hill's greatest hit from that bygone era, "48 Hrs.''

Koch ends with the former mayor showing off a typically flamboyant gesture that embodies his contradictions - choosing to be buried in a Christian cemetery in his beloved Manhattan, complete with an already erected tombstone proclaiming his Jewish identity.

When The Last Gladiators treats brawls like greatest-hits clips for more than half the movie, then suggests fighting is behind Nilan's decline, it feels like trying to have it both ways.

A supernatural horror-comedy that's frighteningly lacking in wit, John Dies at the End thinks it's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for dudes. But in its randomness, its vulgarity and its level of humor, it's more like the collected writings on the walls of a roadside men's room.

The documentary is unapologetically one-sided, and spends more time canonizing Abu-Jamal than exploring the murder and trial themselves. Still it raises issues of racism in America (flashback to George Wallace) that are worthy of discussion.

This female revenge thriller starts out promisingly, but squanders its girl-power capital quicker than you can say "Rihanna."

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.

If you mashed-up the worst parts of the infamous "Howard the Duck,'' "Gigli,'' "Ishtar'' and every other awful movie I've seen since I started reviewing professionally in 1981, it wouldn't begin to approach the sheer soul-sucking badness of the cringe-inducing Movie 43.

An exceedingly dull and stillborn attempt to update the Brothers Grimm.

The film keeps its focus small, but the trouble is, the characters' emotions stay that way, too.

In the poignant, symmetrical end, Touré leaves the idea that the real yearning of these people is for a fair shake in their own home.

Dan Schechter's no-budget comedy about the romantic and professional travails of a pair of financially struggling film editors offers a few laughs, all served up on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

You'd hope a political-insider indie reuniting "West Wing" stars Rob Lowe and Richard Schiff, and informed by the experiences of an actual former spin doctor, would be a small delight. You would be wrong.

The film is both elegiac and amazingly retro, like the nature specials that baby boomers were weaned on - although it's not for animal lovers, unless you have a specific grudge against sables. "Happy People" is the title, but it's virtually all men.