In Lau and Loo’s telling, the off-the-boat indoctrination of young, undocumented Chinese families into vicious gangsterism is overstated and cartoonish, like The Warriors trying to pass itself off as a docudrama.

While it’s nothing new and lacks individualistic touches, it’s still solid trashy fun as an overwrought superhero origin story.

While the film is often playful, it never attempts to be particularly funny, perhaps out of a fear that too much levity in a World War II-themed movie would be in poor taste. Instead, it loads on great quantities of tacky crowd-pleasing moments and clichés.

Even with all the SFX overlays, it’s questionable whether any of this is entertaining enough to sustain even a svelte 92-minute runtime, but Spurlock and the boys can’t be faulted for holding back.

Once Amoedo lays all the cards out on the table, The Stranger feels like a piece of genre revisionism only in its deliberate, grinding pace, not in any refreshing turns of the plot.

The film is curiously joyless and inert.

It’s neither consistently funny nor poignant enough to make the most of its impressive cast, all of whom are capable of delivering better than what A.C.O.D. asks of them.

There’s a difference between elemental melodrama and superficial clichés, and gorgeous cinematography and period production design can only delay this recognizance for so long—and certainly not for two grueling hours.

In the spaces between the hackneyed dialogue, ham-handed score, and poor acting, Walking With The Enemy eventually wins its sole victory: a desire to look the story up on Wikipedia later that day. That may be a small triumph, but it’s hardly the mark of fine cinema.

As a focused spoof of exploitation tropes, Machete Kills is, frankly, terrible. But as a surreal stream of subconsciousness from a filmmaker who’s spent a lifetime watching bad movies, it’s an occasionally entertaining diversion.

Marsan does his best to convey his character’s essential decency, but he’s hamstrung by Pasolini’s insistence on underscoring the emptiness of John’s existence at every opportunity.

Freely adapted from Goethe’s two-part play, Sokurov’s Faust is a work of crushing tedium, relieved only by the spare moments of beauty that pop out like dandelions in a washed-out landscape of oppression and grotesquerie.

The Book Thief crams story after story into such a small space that it can’t realize any of them in depth.

The film’s sketchy conception is a telling sign that Martin, Godere, and director Adam Rapp have nothing particularly funny or insightful to say about the creative process.

The film’s unexpected nastiness has a way of livening up its otherwise tired story beats.

Pacino never goes too big, as he’s had the tendency to do for a while, but he also never goes deep. Manglehorn wanders and rambles, and the movie follows along dutifully, even though there isn’t much to see along the way.

Putting Faulkner’s dialogue in actors’ mouths only underlines the fact that it was never meant to be read aloud, and simply cutting between one perspective and the next does nothing to evoke the rushing stream of collective consciousness that runs through Faulkner’s South.

A pallid romantic comedy possessed of neither imagination nor heart, it stumbles, like its star, from one familiar setpiece to another with a kind of dutiful, joyless resignation.

This is a very confused movie, designed for an audience that doesn’t exist.

Neither Hank nor Asha ever says or does anything that suggests they’re vital, complex individuals, and even their mutual interest in the arts is utterly generic, devoid of any intellectual exchange or even real curiosity. People this dull are available all over YouTube, for free. It’s unclear, however, why strangers would bother watching.

Earth To Echo is yet another found-footage film, and not a particularly inventive one at that.

The screenplay relies far too heavily on coincidences, misunderstandings, and characters purposefully not saying things for reasons rooted in plot contrivances rather than clear motivation.

What Penguins Of Madagascar needs is a roomful of ruthless editors to take jokes out of the script, particularly the ones aimed at pleasing the grown-ups in the audience.

It’s a monster movie made with energy, but no real enthusiasm, and its setting just makes it feel like a long way to go to get the same old thing.

By trying to have it both ways—goosing up black-market trafficking for cheap thrills, while posing as being sincere about a real global scourge—the film winds up stuck in the middle.

As a lesson in how not to make a historical biopic, Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom proves remarkably complete: It’s a dull, glossy, uncomplicated portrait of a man whose personal and political legacy is marked by serene idealism and shrewd calculation.

The script has a refreshing take on the expectation that sick people should be good sports, and fit a pat, inspirational narrative about the blessings of illness. But the way the story is told, with symbols, dream sequences, flashbacks, and coy withholding, makes that setup manipulative and overdetermined. It tries too hard, without being as deep as it thinks.

The film is a true two-hander—and Astin and Mulkey are mostly up for the task—but inept storytelling sinks the picture faster than anyone can bail it out.

Given that the camera always seems to fall or get knocked into the perfect position to capture the craziness at hand, any vérité pretenses soon prove ridiculous. But it’s no more ridiculous than the plot, which incessantly wastes time trying to flesh out its characters, but barely bothers with building suspense.

Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters continues a tradition of adequacy that could be described as “epic-ish” or “majestic-esque.”

Unfortunately, this procedural/character study unfolds in a manner that feels more generic than genuinely deep.

Paris Countdown has style to burn, where “style” means “uses lots of lighting gels and some camera flourishes,” but it doesn’t have a coherent point of view or a solid take on the genre.

There’s no shortage of the recognizable actors in minor roles that populate this sort of thing: Luis Guzmán as a loan shark, Gina Gershon as a detective. But there’s a real shortage of recognizable human behavior.

It’s a case study on how the quality of screen partners is only as good as the quality of the romantic obstacles separating them.

There’s something icky about a life-threatening coma that serves no function except to engineer a meet-cute.

Though it sounds like a contradiction, the film could be described as both dull and over the top.

The film feels epic in scope, visually at least, but the depth of its deep-focus composition is bitterly at odds with the flimsiness of its characterization and plotting.

It’s a passable knock-off of less-godly but more inspired secular fare, which may not sound like high praise, but is clearly all the filmmakers were aiming for. They set the bar low enough to clear it.

If there’s a real person beneath Danny’s over-the-top showbiz-lifer persona, Pacino never finds him. Pacino probably still has it in him to do measured, subtle performances, but this isn’t one of them. He’s more mannerism than man, even in some otherwise-relaxed scenes with Bening.

Le Chef involves a showdown between traditional French cuisine and molecular gastronomy, but the film very much serves as the cinematic equivalent of fast food, offering generic, processed menu items that are practically pre-digested.

Though Decker pumped up the salaciousness for the ultimately icky Mild, its connections run shallow, and most of its action—particularly in the over-the-top third act—feels spectacularly unearned.

Amid all the excess busyness, there are formulas within formulas.

A Good Marriage comes off as curiously flat for a movie about a woman who sleeps next to a murderer every night.

Though the story’s directness and simplicity are admirable, the ending’s moral ambiguity is frustrating.

Director Darrell Roodt’s by-the-numbers biopic suffers from clunky dialogue and shallow characterization, all while never deciding what to make of its leading lady.

Ultimately, the filmmakers are more interested in congratulating Occupy for taking a stand than in shedding light on its fascinating infrastructure and backstory, as though a protest’s existence automatically spells victory for its cause.

What keeps 21 Years from feeling roughly that long, in addition to the clips (fun fact: Before Sunset’s ending can inspire tears even when shown out of context, with talking heads chattering over the dialogue), is the occasional offbeat moment during interviews.

A ponderous, self-important character study swimming with red herrings.

Cuban Fury feels overpadded and distracted, with no time to establish its leads, let alone the bare connection between them that might give viewers a rooting interest in their future.

Mistakenly convinced that cuteness can compensate for a lack of basic believability, The Right Kind Of Wrong squanders its engaging leads and cheerful joviality with a plot of stupefying senselessness.

At the most basic level—and this is as basic as movies get—Everly delivers exactly what it promises, though as with most American films with sex and violence, the emphasis is heavily weighted toward the latter.

Fatally, for a film about damaged people methodically working through their problems—with themselves and each other—it gets less interesting the more it reveals about its characters.

The simplicity of the film’s East Coast/West Coast assumptions bear out in the rest of the script, which rides such tidy little symmetries all the way to shore, as mom learns to relax and her son grows up a bit. Meeting somewhere in the middle is what mediocrities do.

There’s so much distance between where Blacula started and where Scream Blacula Scream ends up that the sequel quickly exhausts its thin purpose.

Nothing is surprising about The Hundred-Foot Journey. It’s a film that telegraphs all its beats and character arcs, executes them adequately but without passion or personality, then congratulates itself on a job done.

The film’s lack of seriousness isn’t the problem; rather, it’s that its jokey carnage is all caricatured poses devoid of original verve or legitimate wit.

Though co-directed by Leon Gast, who made the exceptional “Rumble In The Jungle” documentary When We Were Kings, Manny stays entirely on the surface of Pacquiao’s life and of a sport that’s rife with dirty dealing and chicanery.

One’s uptight. The other’s flamboyant. Put them together and… Well, not much happens, except the desperation Hot Pursuit brings to its attempts to wring laughs out of the contrast.

Harlan’s film—written by Vikram Weet—is a routine low-budget genre picture, with blandly attractive young actors overmatched by the freakiness lurking in the wilderness.

Given the level of sophistication at which the movie operates, they might as well have called it Motherlover, after the Lonely Island video in which Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake sing about the exact same taboo foursome. The only significant difference is that the comedy in “Motherlover” is fully intentional.

More of a fawning love letter than a nuanced profile of a woman who surely must be more fascinating than she comes off here.

Save for the vague aura of danger surrounding Guzmán—which palpably engulfs the filmmakers as they get deeper into the cartel’s “Golden Triangle”—Drug Lord has trouble forming a coherent point of view.

The film wavers between the drippy and the glib from start to finish, sometimes within the course of a single scene.

Shelton seems so preoccupied with making Touchy Feely feel natural and real that she’s forgotten to add any incident.

In The Name Of… might have worked moderately well as a character study, if not for the film’s insistence on treating other priests as mustache-twirling villains.

Spelling everything out is never recommended, but for a horror movie, in particular, it’s death.

Against The Sun, like its rudderless seacraft, goes with the path of least resistance: a talkfest where the men reiterate every obstacle they face out loud (all the better to show off period-friendly dialect), engage in some temporary breakdown of friendly bonds, and pray. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but there’s also nothing special about it.

The setpieces, in addition to mostly rehashing better scenes from earlier films, feel thrown together to serve the effects, and the effects look far less astonishing than anything in Cameron’s first two films.

Sal is so inconsequential, it barely exists. It seems possible that even Franco has forgotten it, in order to make room in his memory for the 74 similar projects he was pursuing around the same time.

What’s truly strange about Two is how halfheartedly director Heather Winters acknowledges anything that might have provided some nuance in the Childs’ lives.

This ultimately isn’t a film about human fallibility, but about high-concept grotesquerie for its own sake.

It has a good heart and a good cast, mixing Hollywood veterans with some of today’s better young TV stars. But the movie is strenuously, exhaustingly unfunny, in a way that makes its phoniness harder to bear.

Whatever Crowe’s ambitions, Aloha feels like a tropical transplant of past work, and an unfortunate demonstration of the law of diminishing returns.

Ford and Oldman’s scenes together are Paranoia’s sole redeeming facet.

Co-writer/director Douglas Aarniokoski has a nasty little neo-noir thriller tucked into Nurse 3D, but he buries it in his all-chocolate-all-the-time conceptual sloppiness.

It never winds up with anything particularly interesting or effective to say about life, intelligence, religion, the nature of consciousness, or any of the other big themes it deliberately evokes. It does, however, blow up a lot of stuff.

Fans of the books might enjoy seeing their world brought to life, but most everyone else will likely leave feeling as if they’ve just completed a seminar on vampire lore, and they’re likely to fail any pop quiz that follows.

Sex Tape is a case study in how little interest American movies—and especially American sex comedies—have in dealing with sex as anything other than a source of cheap giggles and nonstop humiliation.

This movie is so colorless, odorless, and (especially) tasteless, so devoid of mass or substance, that it’s easy to forget even while it’s still playing.

If About Alex were the pilot to a new television series, there’d be reason to stick around for a few episodes, if only to see these actors grow into their roles and develop more chemistry. But About Alex isn’t television, and Zwick never really solves the problem of how to make a houseful of semi-likable characters into cinema.

At best, The Liberator is a commendably old-fashioned affair that goes light on CGI backgrounds and heavy on dazzling scenery. At worst, it’s a reminder of all the extras-heavy would-be epics that got tossed on film history’s slag heap.

Silver threatens to tease out some compelling emotional dimensions from Robbie and Nina, but stops just short of profundity. Uncertain Terms has no problem amounting to the sum total of its markedly basic component parts.

The only splash of cold water comes from Lake Bell as J.B.’s bohemian tenant, who pops his bubble of self-importance (and the film’s) whenever she gets the opportunity... her chemistry with Hamm, who gives his slickster all the dimension he can, offers a nice relief from the broad culture comedy and sentimental button-pushing.

Garrett’s performance lacks any nuance or fire. When he’s playing, he’s a powerhouse. When he’s talking, he’s a half-presence with a vaguely Tommy Wiseau-esque accent, and sleepy eyes to match.

The film doesn’t ask its stars for much, and they deliver.

The doc proves more concerned with promotion than analysis or inquiry, thereby making it a disingenuous non-fiction portrait: an inhibited look at an uninhibited event.

The specifics of the journey get all the attention, while the fundamental conflicts remain not just unoriginal, but alarmingly nonexistent.

Reitman has placed a not-unreasonable bet that sensual creatures like Winslet and Brolin can convey the passion necessary for their relationship to make sense, but the film carries itself too stiffly, like it’s so afraid of making the wrong choices that it doesn’t make any good ones.

Whatever fun there might be in the guesswork is wiped away by the realization that Van Looy has made a puzzle for a puzzle’s sake, to no discernible thematic end.

Transcendence wants to use this future panic to comment meaningfully on our current interconnectedness and inorganic lifestyle, but it’s screaming too much to have that conversation.

The chief problem is that no matter what the nameless dude is up to, it hardly seems to matter.

Pompeii just feels like an excuse to rain digital terror on screaming extras. There’s much to see here, but little to feel, and even less to remember.

It’s never fully clear whether Daisy is a severely damaged woman with the mental development and social skills of a 10-year-old, or just a wide-eyed, unconventional waif in need of some tender loving care. Barefoot vacillates between the two almost at random, depending upon the needs of its hackneyed screenplay at any given moment.

The most pressing issue with Ouija is that Stiles and Snowden cannot seem to write a single interesting line of dialogue. They volley between conversational banalities and whatever exposition might be needed to get the film to its next scary setpiece.

In the absence of narrative urgency or fresh storytelling devices, Grand Départ lives or dies with Marmaï’s performance, but like everything else around him, he’s merely adequate.

Any straight-to-video horror hack could’ve made The Guardian, which has almost no energy until its last 15 minutes, and never exhibits the command of visual storytelling that should be expected from the director of The French Connection and Sorcerer.

Bondarchuk mingles the you-are-there grittiness of close-quarters combat and constant assaults from above and below with war-movie clichés that haven’t been updated since before the real Battle Of Stalingrad. It’s history written with airbrush.

The majority of the cast are non-actors, and act it, judging by their stilted, wooden performances and robotic attempts at simple human interactions. This seems to be the point, since they’re playing non-characters, but such indifference in a film is only tolerable for so long.