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.

The film fictionalizes his life story so aggressively that it’s no less (or more) entertaining than the average rom-com.

Even with a strong first half lampooning the vapidity of American news media, The Interview is the worst thing Rogen has ever done.

There’s no harmony at all to the elements tossed into the new remake of RoboCop, but credit screenwriter Joshua Zetumer and director José Padilha for at least having some elements in play.

Superficiality reigns here. Arguably, that should dominate a movie about a fashion designer. But fashion shows run 10-20 minutes, not two and a half hours.

While it’s a shame Leong couldn’t find a fresher approach to Lin’s story—and that he left out any postscript about his struggles the following season in Houston—he does well in setting the stakes.

The way the film hews to tiresome conventions is itself a buzzkill, but worse is its sheer lack of energy, as Pearlstein stages serious and/or heartfelt conversations that go on twice as long as necessary and treat the characters as more than the two-dimensional caricatures they actually are.

As bluntly unimaginative as its title.

Writer-director Katrin Gebbe rubs viewers’ faces in this dog dish of a film, with the promise that some sliver of transcendence will redeem it. But it’s all dog dish.

Like its main character, Age Of Adaline is a movie out of time, mannered and unconcerned with current trends, and hopelessly unhip. But it’s also beautiful and refreshing in its own earnest, straightforward way. For as ridiculous as Age Of Adaline appears on the surface, it’s surprisingly refined and poised in its execution.

The Short Game is like a tape-delayed Olympics: old footage, slick bios, no substance.

Next Year Jerusalem offers little insight into its putative protagonists, and even less into Israel.

With his thin-lipped, narrow-eyed, disquietingly symmetrical face, Mikkelsen is nearly as good a prop as he is an actor. That impassive but selectively expressive mug is what makes Age Of Uprising’s climax shocking and memorable, but not at all in the way viewers will be conditioned to expect.

Theory’s premise dares to interrogate what, if anything, the apparent randomness of life means. Brown and screenwriter Michael J. Kospiah haven’t the foggiest, but they’re willing to unload as many harebrained plot twists as it takes to obfuscate the question.

Eddie And The Cruisers is a hodgepodge of seemingly unmarketable ingredients: a complicated flashback structure, oblique nods to Elvis Presley conspiracy theories and The Beach Boys’ unreleased opus Smile, and anachronistic Bruce Springsteen-style frat-rock.

Chavez was a man of intense, overriding passions, his biopic feels strangely academic and detached, an unimaginative, straightforward catalog of his greatest hits and most historic campaigns that provides precious little insight into his inner life.

Where the first film kept insisting that drama and liveliness need not disappear in the golden years, its sequel feels almost like a rebuttal. Hopefully everyone involved will find something better to do before this unexpected franchise opens up a third location.

[An] occasionally awkward but finally light-footed movie.

Though the sequels to The Slumber Party Massacre venture into outright sex comedy, Jones tries the more effective tack of playing the slasher stuff straight and inserting clever visual jokes when she has the opportunity.

A smart, sardonic, unpredictable morality play that gets the little things right.

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.

Given the wealth of possibilities, this doc’s superficial, exceedingly polite approach is a big disappointment.

Whether it’s worth seeing a film solely for one amazing performance is a personal judgment call; for those who take that particular leap once in a while, though, here’s a worthy candidate.

Because the actors are uniformly strong, though, and because the neighborhood itself provides such a credible context, Slattery manages to create the impression of an immense backstory that informs every interaction, making any sketchiness seem like naturalism rather than a failure of imagination.

Holdridge and Saasen should get credit for making sure the obstacles to their happiness aren’t romance-movie contrivances, but rather the sorts of things that—to paraphrase another famous writer—happen to people while they’re busy making other plans.

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.

A Five Star Life steers away from pat answers and stereotypically Hollywood conclusions, a narrative direction that’s all the more refreshing with a woman in the lead role. But in its second half, Tognazzi’s movie derails as it starts trying to hammer home its points with too much force.

As the onscreen moon goes through its inexorable cycle, Late Phases transforms from laughably non-frightening horror film to self-serious family drama and back again, all the while remaining ferociously, ravenously boring. Silver bullets would be a mercy.