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.

Parker is watchable chiefly for Statham, who exudes effortless cool and excels in hand-to-hand combat, as well as demonstrating his skill at wielding some very unlikely weapons.

Sure, violence in movies isn't violence in real life. And when you combine it with intelligent dialogue and pointed social commentary (a la "Django Unchained"), it can be cathartic. But The Last Stand, absent either of these things, just seems to want to gin up a lot of high-fiving for a lot of shooting, and right now is the least palatable time I can think of for that.

First-time writer-director Andy Muschietti, an Argentine discovered by Guillermo del Toro, relies too much, especially in the early going, on horror clichés (sudden loud noises and jagged blasts of music), but he does make the tension hum.

Beautifully photographed over the four seasons - including Christmas, for the park's century-old bird census - Birders: The Central Park Effect is full of grace notes.

Perhaps the most fascinating vintage footage...depicts what happened in 1961 when the city sent police into Washington Square Park to stop the longtime Sunday practice of singing without a required permit.

Candis gets some wonderful performances from his impressive cast.

The stalker-enabling menace of Facebook is largely abandoned by midpoint, and Brief Reunion won't even prompt most people to change their privacy settings.

To put it as positively as possible, there's never a dull moment in this flick - and that's not something you can take for granted at this time of the year. At the same time, though, there's rarely a believable moment in the script.

A cartoonish 1940s shoot-'em-up that's impossible to take seriously.

McAleer is an expert practitioner of cinematic jujitsu.

When Uprising shows masses of Arabs marching for freedom, and using Muslim prayer as a form of peaceful protest, that in itself is a bit revolutionary.

Among gay Jewish French postman movies, Let My People Go! may be a Hall of Fame entry, but alas, by any other standard this would-be sex comedy is a dismal failure.

The director has cited "Inglourious Basterds" as paving the way for his own movie; but for all his boldness, Quentin Tarantino avoided the camps altogether. My Best Enemy shows the camps only briefly, but once it does, it becomes both too much, and not enough. Once you see even a long shot of such a place, the impulse to find humor in much of anything is gone.

O'Brien also provided the lethargic direction and collaborated with Messina on the cliché-infested script, which is long on booze-filled confessions.

Clandestine Childhood is the impressive first feature by Argentine director Benjamín Avila.

The line between honey and syrup is a fine one, I'll grant you, but "Best Exotic Marigold" was on the wrong side of it. Quartet carries a noble glow, as serene and beautiful as sunset.

The tin-earned dialogue and haphazard plotting are more reminiscent of Tarantino's frequent collaborator Robert Rodriguez.

There's also a refreshing lack of wrapping everything up in a neat, happy bow at the end.

Directed and co-written by Thierry Binisti, a TV veteran, the film boasts solid acting (especially from red-haired Bonitzer) and handsome cinematography.