Filmmakers never seem to run out of footnotes to history during World War II. This one is better served in the pages of a novel. It doesn’t work on film.

Ho-hum. Running with the Devil is yet another generic drug trade thriller that defies coherence, embraces clichés, and wastes the time and talent of Nicolas Cage.

She (Watts) produced it to show off the range of her obvious talent, and deserves an A for effort in a vehicle that rates a D for dreary, desolate and depressing. The rest of The Wolf Hour deserves an F for forget it.

For an old-fashioned crime thriller, you need real pros. Mr. Statham is to acting what Taco Bell is to nutrition.

Papi Chulo eventually turns effectively…poignant.

Talky, labored and lost in mediocrity, Maybe I Do is another sad example of what happens to seasoned pros when they hang around long enough to end up in material that is regrettably beneath them.

Under Craig Zisk’s frisky direction, the entire cast is superb and wrinkle-free. The screenplay, by husband-wife team Dan and Stacy Chariton, is thin as a poker chip but as clever as it is contrived.

Opus isn’t as superficial as the world it’s commenting on, but it’s not cleverer, either.

We all know how rotten today’s movies can be, but even at the bottom of the slag pit, you won’t find a load of garbage any smellier than From Paris With Love.

The case is revisited with painstaking detail, and a riveting picture emerges once again about misunderstood outsiders.

The best thing here is the muted cinematography, which caresses the wet leaves and cloudy purple Tuscan skies like an old Italian master oil painting that comes to life. In the desultory Voice From the Stone, it’s the only thing that does.

James Franco again, more subdued and less hokey than usual, this time in something called Good People, the kind of routine thriller they used to show on Thursday and Friday nights before the big Saturday double features, back in the good old studio years when the marquees changed every two days.

Persuasion is a wistful novel, full of longing and regret; those feelings are onscreen here, even if they’re delivered in a more modern style.

After an hour of this tedium, you stop worrying about where this disaster is going — or if it’s going anywhere at all. In the end credits, 28 producers are listed for an 85-minute film that doesn’t appear to have even had one.

Rarely will you see a more soul-numbingly empty product of this tragic operation than Halloween Kills, a film that so completely sucks the vitality out of John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original vision that one would be tempted to call it a desecration if that didn’t make it sound like more fun than it actually is.

Two lost souls on the highway of life — that’s what a well-acted but benign little trifle called Arthur Newman is about.

Part social melodrama, part violent crime drama and part send-up of family values gone haywire, it’s a curiosity that stubbornly fails to come alive until it’s almost over, and then it’s too late.

Despite the cast and the director’s best efforts, this is a movie that so desperately wants to be edgy that it somehow becomes completely dull.

Congenial is the word for Larry Crowne, but it's as flat as an ironing board.

It is an absurd premise, one made even more so by its execution, which at the hands of veteran Hollywood thriller director Martin Campbell (the one-time director of Bond films who has been in movie jail since 2011’s Green Lantern) is often lackluster and, on occasion, shockingly inept.

There are individual scenes, individual moments of action and even characters that actually work, but as a whole, Black Adam is a tangled, cluttered mess.

Battleship is dopey, preposterous and unintentionally hilarious in all the wrong places, but as directed by Peter Berg, it is also energetic, fast-moving and bracing.

The screenplay, from Hailey DeDominicis, lacks the vibrancy you expect from a light-hearted holiday movie. Sure, there are a few genuine emotional moments and Lohan aptly gives Avery as much dimension as possible, but there’s only so much she and Chenoweth can do to liven things up.

True to form for this trilogy—which supposedly concludes here—the brainless and disjointed Last Dance skates by on star Tom Hardy’s charm and a few good gags.

Liam Neeson is the dullest denizen of this particularly unctuous Hollywood After Dark. As Marlowe, he uncovers the usual blackmail, grand larceny, homicide and other crimes corrupting the klieg light rays of Southern California, without much energy or wit.

As a nauseating variation on the home-invasion theme, The Purge is as sickening as it is dreary.

All I know is it’s excruciatingly dull. It pains me to see industrious people wasting time, chasing their tails and turning into butter when they could be taking a nap — which is what I did at regular intervals during The Female Brain.

Without the grounding of richly drawn characters and burdened by ideas that reflect Pentagon policy papers of the late 1980s rather than our current world, Without Remorse has the feeling of product rather than cinema — just another polished, consumer-facing, slightly stale gizmo scooting down the virtual Amazon assembly line.