Muddy, confused, and worst of all boring, Sleepers grinds to the preordained halt shared by any over-budgeted epic that lacks the simple necessity of good story.

What's missing from Kidnapped is a grander context - or richer subtext - to all the terror.

The trouble is that The Life List too often struggles to reconfigure its well-known tropes into something that feels alive and human, which is what one comes to romantic melodramas for.

The film works best as a passionate tale of obsessive love, with two people brought together under harrowing circumstances.

Russell’s penchant for aesthetic excess is thoroughly indulged, as the director stages grotesque human tableaus straight out of Hieronymus Bosch over Derek Jarman’s intricately detailed sets. The result gives the story a sort of wanton, overripe feel, with such ostensibly austere environments as a cloistered convent about to explode with repressed sensuality.

The only benefit the soul is likely to get from watching this is the comforting knowledge that you, the viewer, are not any of the people onscreen. Which doesn’t mean you can’t have fun watching them be bad, of course. But it’s a detached kind of fun.

An implausible, wildly protracted setup that drags on forever before reaching a payoff that barely registers.

Sex Drive offers a limp variation on a hoary old teen-film trope.

While its look at interclass romance among African-Americans and the struggles of a working-class single father is fresh and vital, the heavy-handed execution isn't.

The best scenes play like "Frankenstein" revisited, with a comically bedraggled Pacino cast as the mad scientist trying to protect his runaway creation from a rabid public.

French drama Special Treatment draws a brazenly provocative parallel between the professions of psychiatry and prostitution.

By showing up and not embarrassing itself too much, the film far exceeds the standards established by the likes of the Shelley Long/Corbin Bernsen team-up "Frozen Assets" and 2012’s dire sperm-heist comedy "The Babymakers."

The characters are stubborn as ever, but in lieu of the characteristic spectacular downfall, The Legacy Of A Whitetail Deer Hunter offers only the pokiest and most rote of plots.

Timeless message: Kids: They’re the worst.

Many of its fiercest detractors may be surprised to find that it's a far more sobering piece of speculative fiction than they might have imagined.

Curiously lifeless, Lucky You feels like poker without stakes; it goes through the motions with nothing to play for.

Enemies Closer finds Hyams senior and his screenwriters, Eric and James Bromberg, channeling Lynch and Mark Frost’s TV series "Twin Peaks," mixing bizarro characterizations and woodland intrigue with wholesome national imagery.

With a few self-conscious exceptions, Soderbergh makes an earnest attempt to return to that place and time in both history and American filmmaking, and his risk-taking pays fascinating dividends.

A grating muddle.

Despite a few electric moments, the movie never makes anything of its stylized displays of frustration, ending in a whiff of narrative and emotional cop-outs. Say what you will about "American Beauty," but at least it had a climax.

It's just too bad that Legend Of The Fist breaks up that action with long scenes of well-dressed men and women sitting around in nightclubs, talking politics.

2012 is ultimately only about finding new ways to topple monoliths. Only they don’t feel that new.

Trouble is, even a finely tailored suit needs a body to fill it, and A Man's Story never gets its man.

In between the many high-gloss production numbers and a couple commendable bits of physical comedy putting the previous installment to shame, there’s a lot of treacle delivered with minimal conviction.

Maddeningly dull. It works on the cerebrum while the rest of the body drifts off to sleep, and the dullness only intensifies as the film goes on.

It’s hard to be persuasive, though, when your protagonist comes across as a collection of quirky tics rather than a credible human being.

A respectable enough little ghost story, but it loses a lot of sparkle by being similar to such other guy-talks-to-the-dead thrillers as "The Sixth Sense" and "Ghost Town."

A manipulative attempt to swindle money out of the generation that came of age during the Harding Administration, Out To Sea has the wit and sophistication of your average Fox TV pilot.

Because the film is meant to resemble documentary footage, West is forced to effectively “play dumb,” disguising his craftsmanship behind a lot of intentionally cruddy handheld camerawork. Still, that’d be less of a problem if the material he was gracelessly filming weren’t such run-of-the-mill claptrap.

Don’t Look Up is both types of blunt: It makes no bones about exactly what the filmmakers think of climate-change deniers and social-media distractions, and it repeatedly blunts the impact of its satire by calling its shots early, often, and loudly.

The film is well-acted, slickly made on a shoestring budget, and blessedly efficient, with a runtime that inches just past the one-hour mark, credits included. It’s also nearly devoid of surprises, sending its characters through some Hitchcockian paces en route to an ending that’s more depressing for its predictability than its bleakness.

The film ends with Franken contemplating a run for U.S. Senate, but it's clear that his political campaign began long ago.

It's more in the so bad it's almost good mode.

The key mistake was Ahmed's choice to direct it himself; it's promotional when it might be revealing of impasses (and commonalities) between cultures and the complex tactics comedians use to address it.

While Raymond And Ray registers nicely as a relaxed, compassionate character study, there’s no denying that one of the two central characters being studied hugely outshines the other.

Mostly, however, This Is Us counts on the musicians to supply the personality—a strategy that makes it feel more like an anonymous mash note than a warts-and-all glimpse behind the curtain. Then again, what warts?

As is probably inevitable for a film with two corrupt, murderous, drug-dealing cops for protagonists, Gang Related is a nasty, vicious little movie. It's also an excellent genre film. Like a good pulp novel, it tells a lurid story cleanly and effectively, without calling undue attention to itself. The cast is uniformly excellent, with James Earl Jones, David Paymer and Gary Cole making good turns in supporting roles. Belushi turns in a surprisingly restrained performance as the nastier of the two corrupt cops, but the real surprise here is Shakur's work as an essentially moral officer who is gradually sickened by the murky moral swamp in which he finds himself. Shakur's growth as an actor since his unheralded debut performance in Nothing But Trouble is nothing short of remarkable

An exercise in tasteful pointlessness, shot in flat black and white and scored (by Gruff Rhys, of all people) with tinkling piano and sawing strings that evoke nothing so much as an aura of cut-rate class.

It tries to replicate the earlier film’s redemption arc, all the while proving that it is more than willing to adhere to the same double standards it ostensibly pokes fun at.

Disney has once again constructed a digital environment out of cutting-edge special effects, only this time, it isn't merely silly; it's as dry and talky as a PBS panel show.

While the players are circling and silently sizing each other up, the audience may find itself straining to look around them, to see the history they're blocking.

Nicotina's lack of originality ultimately proves forgivable. Its glib, heartless nihilism doesn't.

For a film that takes place in such a cold locale, it all feels awfully warmed-over.

Beyond The Black Rainbow is more surface than substance, but those surfaces are gleamingly polished enough to make for a hypnotic experiment that goes beyond genre pastiche or art-school wankery to seem formally daring.

Giving the kind of mannered performance that seems predicated on careful mimicry of 60 Minutes, Cumberbatch impresses without ever coming across as more than an abstraction.

It’s derivative and drowning in stagnant machismo, but stark enough to work.

The execution is decidedly wobbly, with too many telegraphed, poorly paced jokes, too much Grumpy Old Men-style insult humor, and too many schmaltzy scenes. But Garner and Jack Lemmon have enough charisma, and there are enough solid laughs, to mostly overcome My Fellow Americans' embarrassing moments and improbable ending.

The film alternates sloppily executed sex gags with sentiment, as did its predecessors. And it's all just slightly more endearing and amusing than it has any right to be.

Neither particularly frightening nor especially funny, the Yuletide horror-comedy Krampus scrapes by on the novelty of its setup.

The whole thing resembles nothing more than the kind of video a well-meaning high-school teacher would put on to occupy their class while they catch up on some paperwork. It will almost certainly be used for this purpose in the future.

Rush has a lot of fun with Oldman’s gradual thaw, and the questions the movie raises about authenticity and deception, while not remotely in the same heady league as those in "Certified Copy," nonetheless allow it to conclude on a satisfyingly ambiguous note.

It’s not high art or sophisticated humor, but there are just enough clever turns in its physical comedy and insight into relationships to give it a bit of cult status.

Your Place Or Mine isn’t that invested in crafting a world that looks anything like ours; it’s arguably more interested in giving its supporting cast’s ace one-liners (which, I’ll admit, is where the film sporadically got me chuckling).

Gosling’s one of those actors for whom a recurring action hero role somehow feels long overdue, and the Russos have taken advantage of more than just his good looks and smoldering gazes.

The segments don’t form anything like a coherent whole, but they aren’t distinctive enough to clash meaningfully with each other, either.

Nobody’s given the opportunity to do much more than brood prettily and occasionally shout carpe diembromides into the pounding surf.

Musings on motherhood, performance, and power are never fully articulated, leaving a flurry of concepts up in the air without resolve.

Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.

Without "The Wire" and its like as a point of comparison, Texas Killing Fields might seem the natural heir to a gritty '70s cop drama. But with great contemporary TV around, it seems strangely incomplete.

At the start of Gerrymandering, Reichert quotes Thomas Pynchon, writing, "Nothing will produce bad history more directly nor brutally than drawing a line." The same could be said of documentaries.

For a movie about the unpredictability of life, Pippa Lee plays it awfully safe.

Even when the movie focuses on its imagery rather than its plot mechanics, it seems intent on covering its bases rather than committing to a particular look or mood.

It's all meant as gory good fun, but once the novelty wears off half an hour in, the rest of the film is only meant for people who absolutely agree with Giamatti's character about that violence thing.

In spite of some punchy scenes, crackling dialogue, and fine performances, Broken City is hopelessly overmatched. It has Academy Award dreams, but a detective-show heart.

The junk-shop surrealism ultimately gets the better of everyone's good intentions.

Includes a few half-hearted ironies about how people are really serving dogs, not the other way around, but even those gags are cribbed from a retired Seinfeld routine.

Less a film than a terror delivery system, The Grudge repeatedly shows off Shimizu's technical chops, but never gives viewers a reason to care about or identify with the victims.

It's clumsy, but also strangely refreshing. To children raised on "Spy Kids" and "SpongeBob SquarePants," it may look as primitive as a daguerreotype, but never underestimate the persuasive powers of a cute animal.

The way-too-familiar climax feels less like a comment on destiny than like watching a finely crafted but soulless product roll off an assembly line.

Tries for that series' breezy matinee atmosphere but the results turn out far too forced.

As it is, it’s another jarring mismatch in a film full of them. The core issue seems to be indecision over whether this is all supposed to be camp or not.

In the best scenes, the filmmakers make the case that Queen’s musical decisions grew out of the musicians’ restless inability to fit in with either pop conventional wisdom or, sometimes, each other. The rest of the movie fits in all too well.

Continental Drift feels less like an extension of a theatrical franchise than an episode of a middling TV cartoon, lolling around on territory that's already been settled. Jokes are recycled so frequently, it's as if comedy writing was eating a hole in the ozone layer.

It's a daring, even mildly challenging mixture for a superhero film, and while the pieces don't entirely add up, the puzzle is at least original.

Art is actually as complicated as the lives that inspire it, which is probably why Mary Shelley builds its specious and underwhelming climax around the question of ownership. Perhaps that’s the most contemporary thing about it: intellectual property passed off as modern myth.

Don't let the film's highbrow cast, portentous tone, and leisurely pace fool you: Cleaner is just as empty and formulaic as his previous films, just much, much duller.

Visually, fusing the story with a warm, contemporary aesthetic makes it a pleasant enough affair. But ultimately, Mack & Rita is a passable work at best for Aselton (Black Rock and The Freebie serve as better showcases for her creative voice), and consequently, it’s unlikely to lead to her soon swapping chairs with the director of the next big-budget blockbuster.

A hysterically over-the-top backstage melodrama whose temperature seldom falls below overheated.

Antichrist is a boldly personal film, tossing all von Trier’s ideas about faith, fear, and human nature into an unfettered phantasmagoria, full of repulsive visions and fierce scorn. It’s also the most lush-looking movie von Trier has made in about 20 years.

Leitch’s talky, violent hit man movie, with Brad Pitt at the center of an over-cranked ensemble cast, reminds us why Hollywood has all but abandoned attempts to copy the successes of Tarantino and Ritchie. This film is not just bloated, tedious, dim-witted, and glib, it’s also redundant.

Four Brothers regresses into gallows comedy, rampant misogyny, and one preposterous Hollywood action setpiece after another.

Y2K should mark the beginning of Kyle Mooney’s film auteurism, but his funnier instincts and command of human vulnerability have been replaced by weak jokes, weak characters, and a weak storyline.

No doubt the list of talent involved in this remake sounded great, but the project hasn't been thought through as anything more than an arch exercise in style. And even in that trifling end, it fails utterly.

As this somewhat overlong film continues on, it becomes increasingly shapeless, finally succumbing to the sort of soupy sentimentality it’s trying to critique.

Amsterdam is not a great movie by any shakes, although it looks terrific and all of the performances . . . are energetic, entertaining, and enjoyable.

The members of its young cast (Jennifer Connelly, Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler) have all shown promise elsewhere, but don't really get to do much but look attractive and troubled here. They may be stars, but as long as they keep treading water in bland stuff like this, the world may never know.

Any satirical points about contemporary gender roles get lost in a mad rush through the matriarchy's beautifully realized, Death Star-like gray fortress. It's a fun rush, though, and an intense one, too.

Opaque acting, excruciating dialogue, and flat, affectless direction certainly don't help, but even in brilliant hands, Flannel Pajamas would still be a movie about two horrible, unsympathetic people doing dreadful things to each other, and learning nothing in the process. Why should anyone else have to endure it too?

Frankenstein’s Army is a ludicrous World War II horror flick bogged down by its found-footage gimmick, which is compromised and contradicted so often that it becomes a distraction.

If there’s a real draw to this bastardized variation, it’s Louis-Dreyfus.

There's at least one good movie in The Man Who Copied's 124 minutes, but Furtado never settles on it.

Moves forward on the conviction of its performances. Brody, in particular, shows uncommon sensitivity as a politically committed and temperamental photographer who responds to MacDowell's half-crazed resolution with heartbreaking zeal.

Channels Toback in his purest form, which will probably be a treat for auteurists and a headache for just about everyone else.

Words And Pictures is supposed to be divided, as equally as its title, between these two characters. But Owen’s performance as a man who values his own faux-sophistication even as he goes to seed overpowers Binoche, leaving the movie lopsided.

Like Cuthbert, The Cellar oozes with potential but isn’t given enough—or doesn’t do enough—with what’s there, creating a subdued experience for viewers.

Flavorless and unexciting, thanks to an execution as formulaic as a well-worn copy of "The Joy Of Cooking."

Little moves quickly and can feel a little scattered, with subplots about Jordan befriending a group of middle-school misfits, April’s idea for a new app, and multiple love interests. But the film is grounded by its actors, the key to any body-swapping material.

Chapter 2 delivers the same type of creaky but not uncharming Western melodrama as the first installment, but talks and walks like a film that doesn’t understand what’s at stake.