Even if the movie takes you to some dark places you would rather not visit, at least you will remember the actors who navigate the tortured journey.

Since the movie lacks a vision of what Alexander was really about as a man and a figure in history, it falls back all too frequently on movie spectacle.

More casual fans are advised to wait a movie or two and see if Begos can do anything new with the idiom he knows so well.

The humor emphasizes quantity over quality, but the batting average isn't too bad. And where else can you witness Leslie Nielsen do a nude scene?

While Bousman's climax is a not terribly original effects-laden haunted house, the house's builder, and his motives, have enough of their own flavor to please a hardened horror fan.

If you're going to tell a wildly implausible tale of fortune hunting and unlikely heroes, you could do worse than National Treasure.

You do wish Pate and writer Thomas Moffett had gone for more wit given the outlandishness of the melodrama since it would be more fun to laugh at this than take it seriously.

A feel-good flick about a serial killer who just wants what's best for her daughter. Broad and not too spicy, the London-set Indian rom-com is a crowd-pleaser.

Director Suri Krishnamma has taken it upon himself to create one of the most depressing films of the year.

Opening action sequences project a cartoony comic flavor that has promise, but that peters out as the battles grow increasingly cosmic.

Smurfs: The Lost Village is a mediocre effort that nonetheless succeeds in its main goal of keeping its blue characters alive for future merchandising purposes.

Lifeless and irredeemably sour. It is difficult to imagine much of an audience embracing it, despite a cast of well-knowns and up-and-comers.

He (De Palma) has rarely been guilty of dullness, as he is with Domino, a counterterrorism thriller offering just slightly more excitement than the average TV police procedural.

With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand.

Setting aside the movie’s tediously lame dialogue, self-conscious performances and frequently predicable scares, the narrative’s compulsively shifting chronology intermittently manages to engage, although it does little to obscure the distracting shortcomings of both plot and character development.

The film fares best when it slows down a bit and allows the Turtles' personalities, which are quite engaging, to shine through via their amusing comic banter.

Whatever charms the first two movies possessed (and they were considerable thanks to the talented and appealing cast) have been thoroughly lost in this soulless installment.

The lack of a meaningful story would be easier to take if the dialogue was wittier or the characterizations were deeper, but the proceedings are instead surprisingly bland considering the outrageousness of many of the situations.

Unconvincing melodrama.

Terrific performances by Anthony LaPaglia, Eric Stoltz and Caroleen Feeney infuse this well-written comic drama with a realistic ease.

By doubling down on a movie that yearns to be both introspective and bone-crunchingly cool, Wild Card overplays its hand.

Cotillard’s performance is luminous throughout, enriching the willful heroine with the depth of a single obsession.

Despite the iffy script, two of the film’s performances pack a punch.

Unfortunately, the updating does the venerable story few favors, and the lack of star wattage makes this Little Women a dull affair.

Director Sheldon Lettich, who also worked on the story and screenplay, gives Van Damme plenty of space for his performance, but his direction, like his star, only really comes alive during the action scenes, particularly the climax, set around the freight containers and towering cranes of the Hong Kong waterfront.

Sandler's drool-accompanied ogling of the female form is now near Woody Allen levels of ick.

Features a top-notch cast, a few beautifully observed moments, and some amusingly bitchy dialogue. But its rambling, episodic structure and gallery of troubled characters will ultimately prove too off-putting to attract theatrical audiences.

Ali has a deft hand in creating a fantasy world based on the classical Sita-Ravana model, and gives Bhatt free rein to project herself with unabashed teenage appeal.

Hough’s dancing is far more impressive than his acting, and BoA, despite her perky sexiness, is an even less compelling screen presence. But they certainly move well together, and that’s pretty much all that matters here.

Initially a caustic and somewhat programmatic checklist of alt-right obsessions, Cuck becomes more tonally and dramatically interesting after it shifts gear midway through, when Ronnie's story becomes a lurid psychosexual nightmare reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream."

Even with all its familiar action tropes, less-than-fresh special effects and loopy plotting, the most depressing element in the Wachowski siblings' latest sci-fi mash is that, as they conceive it, human society has been around for more than a billion years but is still presided over by a rivalrous British-style royal family that treacherously behaves as if it were the 1550s.

Homefront is sufficiently silly and low-down to be entertaining on a certain marginal level, but it wouldn't appear that those involved, with the possible exception of Franco, approached this with the idea that they might be making good trash; it looks too elaborate and costly for that and the script exhibits no self-aware humor.

It’s all quite watchable and not without suspense, but the characters reveal too little emotional depth or complexity to make us care much about either their losses or their hard-fought victories.

The killer himself takes a far more prominent role in this edition, and as played by the superb Tobin Bell he's quite a memorable creation.

Fourth of July turns out to be something we would have never expected from its director/co-writer — bland.

Renzi's uneven script makes this a less sturdy vehicle than 2012's Arbitrage, and a less marketable one given the absence of thriller elements that sustained that film's character study. Still, there's plenty here for Gere's admirers to appreciate.

A dramatic thriller with a large cast playing the hell out of some very juicy roles. Nieman's script shuffles nimbly among an array of colorful characters and offers unexpected twists that keep you off-balance.

Sufficient cheap thrills and enough of the prevailing camp quality.

To his credit, director Asger Leth (Ghosts of Cite Soleil) gets right to the business at hand where the set-up is concerned, but it's in the execution that this would-be thriller falls flat.

The film is a misfire, which you feel more acutely given the talents of those involved, including director Rodrigo Garcia ("Nine Lives," "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her") and rising star Anne Hathaway.

Unfortunately, despite its uncomfortable resonance, Beneath Us barely scratches the surface of its provocative ideas, sacrificing nuance in favor of cheap shocks.

Harlow makes a surprisingly strong impression in his film acting debut, signaling that more big screen roles are in his future, while Walls provides the requisite simmering intensity and formidable physicality as the anger-prone Kamal.

Borrowing liberally from the likes of "RoboCop," "Mad Max" and, of course, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Double Dragon" struggles and ultimately fails to find a satisfying tone (and pace) of its own. [03 Nov 1994]

Despite the best efforts of stars Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly, this new "Day" is tired and corny.

Spiral delivers when it comes to gore, if that’s your thing, and appropriately dour aesthetics — but not much else. That’s a shame, because the story’s themes, from the unreformable nature of the police department to the cost of integrity in a space that values power above all else, could not be more relevant.

Will primarily strike a chord with Latina-skewing audiences with minimal crossover potential.

The film is an elegiac journey to a sweeter, more civilized place in the heart. Predictable and decidedly old-fashioned in its sensibility, the film is likely to win over audiences if not critics.

Strong performances by Scott Mechlowicz as Millman and Nick Nolte as the mysterious mechanic who changes his life ground the film in effective drama.

Filmmaker Alan Govenar misses the mark in his attempt to document the historical French dwelling of once famous beatniks.

Few genre fans will fail to guess the direction in which this is heading. All viewers, though, will scratch their heads at a final plot point, an unnecessary gesture at odds with any conceivable motivation.

With director Jerome Enrico mining the material for only the most obvious gags, the social commentary of the central joke never rises to the level of hard-hitting satire, instead settling on a broadly observed collection of types.

The film just seems to lack the courage of its convictions. Hartnett doesn’t bring much depth to his troubled character, making it hard for the viewer to care about his fate.

Rarely do films from Hollywood emerge in such an inane manner. Its rote characters are inevitably in predictable situations with no subtext or subtlety to any of their predicaments.

Viewers will likely be as confused as the protagonist as to what is going on, and the vague, episodic proceedings ultimately prove repetitive.

The coming-of-age theme doesn't mesh entirely well with the more lurid elements, and Coyote Lake doesn't quite achieve the narrative tension sufficient to lift it above the story's slow spots. The film is carried along by the strength of Mendes' emotionally complex, restrained performance that makes clear that Ester is as much victim as accomplice.

For all the surface wildness of Lawrence’s Slumberland, it’s about as rule-following a family pic as you can find.

The movie contributes nothing new to the genre, but disbelief is suspended willingly enough once the action gets up to speed.

The gory carnage is sparingly but vividly staged, the suspense-driven plot twisty enough to tax the brain.

Much like the recent, widely reviled I, Frankenstein, this misconceived project mainly signals a need to go back to the drawing board.

Thomason delivers a strong performance as the stalwart hero, and Furlong... makes for a highly convincing jerk. But their efforts aren’t enough to prevent the end of the world, at least as depicted here, from seeming awfully dull.

While the main characters appear to have been given a bit of Powerpuff Girl sass by screenwriters Meghan McCarthy, Rita Hsiao and Michael Vogel, it ultimately does little to goose the limited hand-drawn 2D animation.

Serves up all the requisite elements with enough self-deprecating humor to suggest it doesn't take itself too seriously.

The final act hits like a gut-punch. Worst fears are confirmed, and the protagonist faces a moral dilemma no father should have to confront. Kormakur and his writers give their protagonist no easy way out.

The Change-Up bravely attempts to revive the dormant subgenre but it's a lame effort that grows increasingly frantic and foul-mouthed as the realization sets in that the gimmick isn't working.

While the idea of a German romantic comedy may seem like an oxymoron, What a Man proves an amiable diversion that at least has the distinction of not starring Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson.

The Thor Freudenthal-helmed sequel lacks the energetic zip of its predecessor.

Considering the long amount of time since the last installment, you'd think that more effort would have been put into creatively reviving the franchise. But Jigsaw just seems rote and mechanical, with long stretches of its running time feeling like a police procedural or CSI spinoff.

This plot-heavy suspense flick loses some of the book’s originality in translation while failing to channel its sense of Midwestern malaise. But it keeps the guessing game going long enough to compensate for some otherwise shallow characterizations, while Theron offers up an earnest and downbeat turn that says a lot with little dialogue

It's almost laughably bland and watered-down in its desire to appeal to the widest possible audience. It won't succeed in that goal, but it has enough pizzazz to captivate undemanding tweeners.

Even more egregious than the film's concept is its execution, as it somehow manages to make scenes of drug addiction, hustling and even brotherly incest quite tedious.

It's disappointing the film is so sketchy and underdeveloped. The filmmakers may have sold their story short.

Perry doesn't even try to successfully integrate the story's comedic and dramatic elements, merely toggling back and forth between them as if in need of mood stabilizers.

More of a character-etched mood piece than a tautly calibrated caper, Dead Man Down benefits from potent visuals and a compelling international cast that also includes lead Colin Farrell, Terrence Howard and Isabelle Huppert.

Almost without fail, Larney's dramatic beats dispense with any build-up before arriving at their intended level of intensity, and the movie overall projects grandiosity without taking the time to make us care about the world being saved.

The film’s genuine sweetness and affection for its characters go a long way toward compensating for its numbing overfamiliarity.

Good direction takes on a bad script and the script wins. [16 Oct 1992]

A popcorn movie that reaches back to the fantasy epics of old and forward into the digital future, where the word "unimaginable" no longer exists.

Unfortunately, whatever father/daughter, time/memory, music/therapy issues Jaglom is striving to invoke here come across as mostly psychobabble and immaturity.

Tediously one-note comedy.

For a film meant to champion the powers of three-dimensional art, Rodin winds up being awfully flat.

Almost nothing anyone does registers as recognizably human; it’s all just a pretext for yet another round of envelope-pushing outrageousness.

Nearly everything misfires here — bizarrely so, since we can see where the laughs should come, how they would work, and how a more competent movie would get from A to Z. (To be fair, some jokes do land, just not as satisfyingly as you'd hope.)

Never achieves sufficient traction to go the blockbuster distance.

Few mainstream romantic comedies are so brazen or as unconvincing in their third acts. As if the movie were embarrassed about the tidy way it wraps things up, it trots Haddish out for a silly coda that reminds us how little we saw of her during the film's final hour.

Lacks any of the socio-economic or political concerns of "The Big Chill." Indeed its shallowness is reflected in one character's abiding concern with his receding hairline.

Bisset is powerful as a mother who has virtually devoured her young. With her Medusa-like tresses aswirl, she is truly ferocious.

Remaking eccentric English comedies is seldom a good idea, especially the ones from Ealing Studios with all those wonderful character actors. But against all odds, the new version of St. Trinian's almost pulls it off.

The film’s reluctance to fully explore its provocative moral conflict renders it terminally bland.

In the end, the film is so guilelessly unabashed about its hokum that it becomes sort of endearing in a way, and one can’t but admire the likes of Cox, McElhone and Toby Stephens as the boo-hiss bad guy for fully committing to the corn.

Featuring enough stereotypical characterizations and situations to fuel a dozen artificial rom-coms, After the Ball pretty much drops the ball in every aspect.

A determined focus on tight plotting and engaging character development not only helps keep the budget in check, but also necessitates an economy of style that heightens the impact of the film’s numerous plot twists.

There's neither topicality nor bite in this bland pseudo-thriller, which lathers on composer H. Scott Salinas' high-suspense score like shower gel after sweaty sex, yet rarely musters an ounce of genuine tension.

The second half groans under too many dumb contrivances, even if the dumbest — a sword fight at a publicity event — leads to a credit-sequence gag that earns more laughs than anything in the film.

The technical aspects of Mohenjo Daro prove to be a major disappointment.

It’s all pretty tedious, with Miller failing to infuse the proceedings with the stylistic flair necessary to compensate for the cliché-ridden plotline, whose twists can be seen a mile away.

Stretching its high concept but thin results to the breaking point, The Family Plan feels like a movie whose best moments were during the pitch meeting.

Need For Speed is a flat, sexless movie that seems not to understand why people like to sit in the driver’s seat and rev that big engine: Because of the transgressive rumble in your nethers.