Meh and double meh on this movie. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Writer-director Francesca Gregorini's film just feels tonally off like that most of the time, and the inclusion of magical realism elements — while attractively photographed — only muddle matters further.

Aside from the vividly bleak atmosphere, Eve's performance is the main reason to invest any time in Cold Comes the Night.

Bell's performance is the best reason to see Raze.

While Lutz might possess the beefcake to fill out his chest armor, he lacks the acting chops to make us much care about the fate of his gleaming hero who looks as if he just stepped out of a Beverly Hills salon.

The Bieber fans aren't going anywhere. And Justin Bieber's Believe is best when it shows us why.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Jonah, the rest of the characters aren't much more fleshed-out than the screeching beasties.

Unfortunately, early hints that the the actor-filmmaker's latest will be a brilliant, bloody, sustained workplace satire don't pan out. This is an intelligently composed, crisply edited, sometimes amusing, but otherwise unremarkable cross/double cross gangster picture.

It's all a bit overheated, and while there is certainly nothing wrong with melodrama, the problem arises when the script (also by Tornatore) keeps insisting on explaining its own symbolism and subtext, to make sure we get how deep the thing is.

So what are you looking at, really? Is the movie a bait-and-switch? Probably. The film has fun with the idea that nobody would have gotten involved were it not for the chance to work with James Franco and perhaps perform in a sex scene with James Franco (there are no sex scenes involving James Franco, if you were wondering).

Thankfully, the entertaining chemistry between the two young leads in Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Andrew Jacobs and Jorge Diaz), almost saves it.

If the boozy epic confrontations of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" or "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" are your definition of a good time, then this is the place to be.

Dhoom: 3 has — by far — the best action set pieces of the series.

Lone Survivor burns with the fever of a passion project. Writer-director Peter Berg's gratitude to United States servicemen for all their sacrifice comes through viscerally, from first frame to last.

In spite of its enjoyable, easy-to-exploit aspects, 47 Ronin is a big budget spectacle hamstrung by its need to be at once flippant and respectful of its honor-driven source material.

The film represents a formidable achievement for Fiennes as both actor and director.

Let me be frank: to use the words of the august founder of this website, I hated, hated, hated this movie.

Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is abashed and shameless, exciting and exhausting, disgusting and illuminating; it's one of the most entertaining films ever made about loathsome men.

Grudge Match belongs to a fast-growing genre I'll call "Senior Citizen Action Porn," or SCAP. Proud members of SCAP include "Red" and its sequel, "Red 2," the "Expendables" series, and the best of the 2013 crop, Arnold Schwarzenegger's "The Last Stand."

A film that is not so much bad — although it is quite bad — as it is utterly inexplicable.

More about ambience than narrative progress, so if you don't like these kinds of characters (ie: hippy-dippy aesthetes), the film will drive you up a wall.

Another brilliantly mounted drama concerning fracturing families, hidden motives and the difficulties of attaining stability in a rapidly changing world.

When Melanie falls under the spell of a silver-haired pedophile as tall and trim as a Marine (Joseph Lorenz), the film gets set on its rocky path to a conclusion that fulfills the film's title and rounds out the "Paradise" series quite beautifully — if you're not afraid to look.

The New Rijksmuseum is a four hour procession of minute details, an exhaustive catalogue of art world diplomacy and process, but what sticks is the way Hoigendijk weaves all the strands together, crosscutting here, overlapping there.

Her remains one of the most engaging and genuinely provocative movies you're likely to see this year, and definitely a challenging but not inapt date movie.

Lacks the original's momentum. It only sometimes builds to the peaks of lunacy that you want and need from this sort of picture. It goes here, it goes there, it does this, it does that.

When Madea is onscreen, at least you know what universe you are in, and there is something interesting and insane to watch. Otherwise, you are thrust into an abyss of meaninglessness and plot-heavy maneuvering overlaid with Christian propaganda that wears out its welcome with the first line of exposition.

Unfortunately, Nuclear Nation is slow going, and given the uniqueness of the documentation and the importance of its message, it deserves to be more compelling than it is.

It’s thrilling for even a novice fan to watch Pearce.

Neither erotic nor thrilling, but rather reliant on cheap nudity and multiple mistaken-identity switcheroos in hopes of keeping us on edge.

The problem is that writer-director Adrián García Bogliano can't decide what kind of horror movie he wants it to be.

Is the movie too adulatory? It is not the most subtly layered documentary I've ever seen, but these days it's no longer verboten to take a stance in docs. And there is so much to be admired about Hanna. Plus…if you've never seen some of those songs performed…it's electrifying.

Heisserer doesn't get everything right, but he sure knows how to milk a taut ending, including a miraculous final shot, one that would have drawn tears even if Walker were still around. For those who wish to see the actor at his best, Hours is worth the time.

The absolute ending of Some Velvet Morning is a stunner, one that is sure to irk and awe viewers in equal measure (I’m in the latter camp). LaBute may not be saying anything novel about constricting gender roles and the cynical ways in which we sell ourselves out, but he is saying it in his signature, provocative style.

An intoxicating kiddie cocktail for young-at-heart adults, inspired by a Disney fairy tale based on fact: the making of "Mary Poppins."

David O. Russell out-Scorseses Martin Scorsese with American Hustle, a '70s crime romp that's ridiculously entertaining in all the best ways.

The thematic elements are in place, the emotional tension is highly strung, and the action unfolds in a wave like the fire erupting from the dragon's mouth, overtaking all in its path.

This is quite a good sports documentary, moving and unafraid of making you work for its pleasures.

Through the playing of the game, the real life characters' true personalities emerge, and we can see that this is a pretty heartless bunch.

Yes, it's all as clunky and tasteless as the description suggests, and the awkward casting doesn't improve this overlong drama.

Expecting is a fairly laidback movie that isn't serious and isn't funny and isn't much of anything.

It really isn't even a bad movie, or a bad movie of its sort. It's just not good enough to really distinguish itself.

Khumba is disastrously uninspired. Not even a galaxy of stars, united in their willingness to take a check, can save Khumba from being the boringest plucky outsider of all.

Crave, a creepy and deliberately paced thriller that is effective in its unpleasantness.

Probably a lot of people who see this film will get fed up with Gili's passivity, but some people in life are passive in a way that feels like a defiantly inactive reaction to ill treatment. These boys don't view her as a person with feelings, but Gurfinkel's film does.

The most satisfyingly diabolical cinematic structure that the Coens have ever contrived, and that's just one reason that I suspect it may be their best movie yet.

Unfortunately this film has none of their urgency or sense of control; for long stretches it just doesn't seem to have any idea what, exactly, it wants to say, or be.

This American version of Park Chan-Wook's Korean thriller is Lee's most exciting movie since "Inside Man" — not a masterpiece by any stretch, but a lively commercial genre picture with a hypnotic, obsessive quality, and an utter indifference to being liked, much less approved of.

Sylvester Stallone can write entertaining formula action scripts like a demon, but he often hands them over to hack directors who don't know how to extract the pulp and the juice from them. On that score, Homefront is better than average.

Little girls will absolutely love it, though. That much is undeniable.

A visually opulent, proudly melodramatic entertainer with some great songs and star performances.

Just over the Mexico/U.S. border from Juarez is El Paso, Texas, ranked the safest large city in America three years in a row now. The question that that fact begs is in part why this film is a quietly subversive masterpiece.

The trouble here is a lack of texture and urgency.

She is an engaging guide, humorous and honest, cynical and wise, with that same sense of innocent joy in her own fame that translated into in photos.

Most of its pleasures come from the way it confounds expectations.

With each on-screen chapter, the poor girl from District 12 continues to fulfill her destiny as an inspiration and a rebel fighter. She is but one female, but she's the perfect antidote to the surplus of male superheroes out there.

You may think it unfair that I make comparisons between "Starbuck" and Delivery Man. Truth be told, my rating is higher because I'd seen "Starbuck." Had I not, Delivery Man would have been intolerable.

It wants to put you smack-dab in the middle of a particular place during a particular time, and let you marinate in that place and time through quiet montages and long—sometimes very long—scenes.

Without being explicit, without being overtly angry, Kabakov's installations are a critique of the entire system, a critique leavened with irony, wit, and fantasy. It's powerful stuff. You go into Kabakov's labyrinths of associations and you don't come out.

If Sunlight Jr. does anything, it is to shine a light on the fact that the American dream is a dormant notion for far too many.

Every now and then, one comes across an indie film that's so showily awful, so drenched in bathos and cliché, and yet features such a uniformly sharp cast that you have to wonder: "What is it with actors?" Or, if one already knows what it is with actors, "Did this material actually look good on paper?" The heavy-sigh-inducing Charlie Countryman is just such a motion picture.

As they discuss "how much this strip meant to me," I got the sense that Dear Mr. Watterson was as uninterested in them as I was; they're not even identified.

Indeed, compared to many Sokurov films, this one has an enlivening paradoxicality: it's morbid but upbeat, grim yet rapturous.

This 43-year-old filmmaker is a major talent. Though he may not be the second coming of Fellini, his films all have a funny, refreshingly complex perspective, and his latest work is a perfect example of why he is the next big Italian thing.

The Best Man Holiday has the potential to become a staple of Christmastime movie watching in the 'hood.

Nebraska is full of complicated people marked by flaws and failures, mistakes and regrets; they can be selfish bastards, too. It often feels as though Payne is trying to strip away the cliché that the region is populated exclusively by hardworking, decent hearted types.

The writing-directing team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer now take aim at "The Hunger Games" with their latest effort, The Starving Games, and the fact that the title, as witless and uninspired as it may be, constitutes its humorous high-water mark should indicate just how ineptly they handle things this time around.

It's infectious, and the daffy, breezy way they play off each other makes Ass Backwards way more enjoyable than it ought to be.

The Newell Great Expectations is just a good-looking Classics Illustrated rundown, something to help high schoolers labor through a Dickens English assignment a little faster.

It's strong stuff, and the actors are fully up to it.

Marshall's film does not only aim to document animal rights activism but also to propagate it, and in that it is less successful. This is a film overflowing with passion and compassion but often lacking the intellectual detachment necessary to distill conviction into a rigorous argument.

In the end, there's a distinct air of solipsism to this tale.

The film's plot is articulated cleanly, if a bit too plainly at times, but as is so often the case in Sayles' movies, that's not where the director's interest lies. Go for Sisters lacks the epic quilt qualities of such sprawling Sayles pictures as "Lone Star" or "City of Hope," but this seems more a matter of intent than evidence of any sort of failure of vision.

The directors and the cast, through a miracle of tone, mood, and emotion, have made a film that feels true, that is sweet and sharp and unbearable. Every frame feels right, every choice feels thought-out, considered. All adds up to a heartbreaking whole.

The Armstrong story is fascinating. That someone could get away with such a huge lie in plain sight is terrifying.

A middle-aged bromance tucked inside a French crime thriller, a slick and brutal B-action picture that finds writer-director Edgar Marie channeling Nicolas Winding Refn channeling early Michael Mann.

Best Man Down is billed as a "warm and funny comedy," a subjective description with which I do not agree. I would not consider this a comedy, let alone a warm and funny one. There are no laughs, and most attempts at humor are mean-spirited or embarrassing.

Thor: The Dark World's characters are often very charming, but they're only so much fun when they're stuck going through the motions.

The film ends with footage of his corpse on the sidewalk, and then a scene from "Rebel." From the first footage of the newscast on Mineo's death to this last tasteless film of his body lying in the street, nothing much has been learned about Mineo.

As for why the film is called "the pervert's" guide, this reviewer noted that its end credits do not acknowledge the many movies it draws upon so copiously. That, in terms of standard filmmaking etiquette, truly is perverse.

Man of Tai Chi is hugely entertaining.

This is a glacially paced movie, filled with sickly picture postcard imagery that seems designed to put you to sleep.

What makes La Camioneta so interesting is not so much the story that it tells as it is the way that Kendall has chosen to tell it.

Everything about Free Birds feels perfunctory, from its generic title and holiday setting to its starry voice cast and undistinguished use of 3-D.

This narcissistic quality is the film's true undoing.

The famously left-leaning Costa-Gavras is preaching to the choir in his indignation, but he does so in slick, brisk fashion.

It's a rich, raw, heartache of a film, a beautifully composed, soul-stirring drama about love, family, sex, sorrow, faith, and music.

The picture begins vanishing from the memory the instant that its final credits roll, and its laid back attitude suggest it's fine with that.

That the stars of the show are none other than the esteemed Richard Griffiths and Richard E. Grant in invaluable cameo roles and that they end up provoking some of the biggest laughs of the movie demonstrates why Curtis is a comedy genius.

If Dallas Buyers Club falls somewhat short in the categories of historical chronicle, emotional wallop, and information delivery, its conscientious attempts to portray a group of people in trouble in a troubled time delivers mini-epiphanies in a series of small doses. And that isn't nothing.

The film's biggest problem is a matter of tone and characterization: the characters constantly talk about how mean they can be, but their actions suggest otherwise.

Boss is a film suffering from one fundamental problem, to wit: a lack of commitment to its central purpose.

Big Ass Spider! wants to serve two masters, the ones who unabashedly enjoy this type of movie without shame, and the ones who openly mock it with false senses of superiority.

Molina's story is worth telling. I suspect that, in this form, it will reach some of the at-risk youth who are clearly his target audience. But for myself and most folks expecting a movie, it is too transparent an infomercial for the church to move the mountain.

In the few moments where he's left to prank people on his own, Bad Grandpa doesn't treat him like the clichéd potty mouthed kid out for shock value. Instead, he uses his childlike innocence to make the adults more uncomfortable than his grandpa's raunchier shenanigans ever could.

The result shows the human stakes and often punishing difficulties of challenging entrenched powers and interests.

While there have been plenty of movie romances not unlike this, there's never been one told in such an ambitiously immersive way.

What works for him (McCarthy) in a novel cannot be said to work for him here.