The film advances some harsh truths about the spoils of money-grubbing savagery. But Cheap Thrills doesn’t take a scolding tone: These lessons come in the form of a rowdy, midnight-movie entertainment that keeps its considerable ambition under wraps.

Morse, at least, may get better chances to strut his stuff in future. For Monteith, this mediocre last act will have to do.

Competently shot and edited, and imbued with a gentle sense of affection for its setting, Angels In Stardust doesn’t ultimately insult its audience’s intelligence. But it doesn’t really engage it, either.

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.

It’s many different films at once—all muddled, all unsatisfying, and all crying out for Liam Neeson’s participation.

Given that this is a film about a very specific political situation, with lifetimes of scholarship and signifiers behind it, writer-director Hany Abu-Assad made a bold decision in pulling back and going broad.

Thanks to remarkable access to her subject, and a refusal to turn away during even the most personal moments, Karasawa has made something deeper: a portrait of Stritch just as the aging process is beginning to punch holes in her concrete dam of a personality.

In the insufferable, secondhand tradition of countless other regrettable genre films, Black Out is so impressed by itself, it doesn’t even need an audience.

While the film’s individual moments and images are often fantastically wrought, the story elements often seem as unintegrated as the moral exegesis.

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.

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

Through it all, Gheorghiu finds the perfect pitch between a mother’s love for her child and a kind of pathology.

It’s hardly a masterpiece, but then, it shows no signs it ever wanted to be, and sometimes that’s a relief.

This trio of leads is so wooden, they make Mann’s hysterically over-the-top villainy seem refreshingly energetic by comparison.

Hall and Hart have appeared together in several movies, including 2012’s Think Like A Man, but have never been paired as love interests. Here, they lock into a manic, improvisational groove from minute one.

Haunt winds up being memorable only for its absence of subtlety or surprise.

There’s a sluggishness to The Returned throughout, attributable to generally weak acting and a plot that requires a lot of exposition.

Pettyfer and Wilde look the parts, but any scenes asking them to emote quickly turn disastrous.

Date And Switch is a plucky step in the right direction for diversity in teen comedies, but it lacks the extra oomph to stand on its own merits.

It’s a greeting card of film, full of platitudes and pleasant imagery, and destined to be thrown in a drawer and forgotten in short order.

There’s a sense with Jimmy P. that Desplechin and his co-screenwriters, Julie Peyr and film critic Kent Jones, are doing everything they can to steer away from contrivance and stick as closely to Devereux’s recollection as possible. What they’re left with is a rigorous, keenly intelligent therapy session that’s largely absent of dramatic tension.

The New Black is unabashedly pro-gay marriage, but it treats the other side respectfully. Opponents of gay marriage in the community are given their say.

The movie’s ludicrous narrative continually forces its characters to behave like cretins, and even when Leven’s dialogue is tolerable, it can barely be heard over Craig Richey’s aggressively sprightly score.

Rarely has a life beyond the law seemed less enticing than it does in Babak Najafi’s bleak crime picture. It’s unrelentingly intense and utterly humorless, but there’s no denying the skill and brio with which it unspools.

Lucky Bastard mostly combines the worst of all worlds: the less-clever-than-it-thinks script of old-school porn, the piercing brightness and flatness of video production, an especially lackluster rendering of the played-out found-footage horror concept.

Every scene featuring Amy and Rat together is a giddy marvel of kinetic energy, with Roberts and Cusack seemingly in competition to determine which of them can make their character more unsympathetic.

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.

There’s something deeply depressing about a debut film centered on fading talent, but even more depressing are the downright amateurish insights it musters about youth, the art world, and the burdens of growing up gifted.