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.