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.