The lead performers certainly are highly attractive, making this one of the more sensual werewolf pictures in quite a while -- and to their credit, they do manage to keep a straight face throughout. But ultimately, the anemic Blood and Chocolate could have benefited from a little less chocolate and a lot more blood.

While The Only Living Boy in New York looks nice (it was shot on film by veteran DP Stuart Dryburgh), it's an unabashed fake — glib and movie-ish in a grating way, with lots of prefab "soulfulness" and none of the texture or rough edges of life.

There’s plenty of imagination on display in The Blazing World, but it’s buried amidst the narrative and stylistic self-indulgence that assumes we’ll be interested in going on this very strange and ultimately enervating journey.

"Stories" makes a better Christmas movie than those generic comedies manufactured this time of year. The hits-to-misses ratio for its gags is above average, the sentimentality is kept in check and the film plays well to its audience.

David Duchovny delivers a clearly heartfelt but terminally mawkish and awkward directorial debut in House of D.

Compounding the sense of predictability and deja vu is the presence of well-known TV actors portraying the sorts of characters they've perfected on the small screen.

Presumably a glib attack on sanctimonious small-town religious hypocrisy informed by Black's own strict Mormon upbringing, the film is tonally all over the place, eventually settling in a rut that comes a lot closer to resembling bad camp than edgy satire.

The screenplay by Eddie and Chris Borey fails to live up to the juiciness of the original premise, lacking meaningful character development and teasing out its unveiling of its mysterious plot elements in dull, plodding fashion.

The proceedings quickly degenerate into deafening video game-style fiery mayhem featuring endless explosions and depictions of human combatants melted into anguished looking skeletons.

Ultimately, Adam Moreno's screenplay, with its multiple narrators and constantly shifting points of view, makes for mighty confusing viewing.

Featuring endless scenes of multitudes of women baring their breasts in public in various areas of New York City, Free the Nipple is an unfortunately tone-deaf and poorly executed drama that doesn't exactly help its cause championed by the celebrity likes of Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham.

It’s all pleasant and forgettable.

While not the worst in recent 3D films, Gulliver's Travels is more gimmicky than a crackling good yarn.

Christensen delivers a low-key performance that is ultimately quite appealing, and he's well matched by the beautiful Alba. Olin brings unexpected depths to what could have been a stock role, and Terrence Howard uses his easy ability to project innate decency to excellent effect.

Boredom has long since settled in by the time gunplay is involved.

The dark humor feels forced and artificial, especially when tied to the utterly ludicrous plot machinations

Certain to create a gaping divide between generational and aesthetic camps, Sucker Punch is a largely grim and unpleasant display of technical wizardry wrapped around a story that purports to be inspirational.

Even with locked-down consumers scraping the bottom of the Netflix content trough, this new addition to the lineup is pretty dreary.

A barrage of unbelievable stereotypes try to kill each other in Barry Battles's dispiriting exploitation flick.

British writer-director Roland Joffé dips a toe into explosive material - the Spanish Civil War, betrayal, sainthood, Opus Dei - but all these big themes and characters slip from his grasp.

The title is a good indication of this movie's blandness and predictability.

Colonia marks a truly misguided attempt to fabricate a Hollywood-style thriller out of the darkest quarters of Latin American history.

An action romp with heart. If that heart is somewhat misguided, it's hard to deny the family-friendly thrills and spills along the way.

Combining its adventure and romantic plotlines in painfully hokey fashion, The Space Between Us (the title is a pun, get it?) is so ludicrous that only a cinematic stylist might have been able to pull it off.

The biggest disappointment is the rigorously rote nature of the characters and story line in Geoff Rodkey's script

A thoroughly undistinguished addition to a genre that probably reached its peak a quarter-century ago with "An American Werewolf in London."

The movie so deftly mixes sentimentality, romance and bathos in just the right measures that her fans and maybe new ones will enjoy the new Miley.

A grindhouse slasher picture that swings from dull to ridiculous without finding any pulpy pleasure in between.

The Young Messiah is just, like, barely competent enough that the faith-based target audience won't feel entirely cheated.

A home-captivity picture boasting all the implausibility associated with that genre and nearly none of the thrills.

Its run-of-the-mill standoff may appease some hardcore horror buffs, but it offers nothing to the rest of us and will likely be forgotten before the blood on the ground dries.

Putting aside the grating performances, the clumsy direction, the visual ugliness and the haphazard development of story, character and relationships, the movie is hobbled by its intrinsic unsuitability for contemporary retelling.

From its generic title to its familiar child in distress storyline to its hackneyed depiction of things going bump in the night, Out of the Dark is thoroughly forgettable.

Shorter and punchier but nearly as hokey as the original.

By-the-numbers screen parody fails to resurrect an increasingly tired genre.

A perky comedy aimed at young women that gets the job done with crisp efficiency.

Another heartfelt coming-of-age story that plays much more like a television movie than a theatrical feature.

A "non sequel" to Alex Cox's 1984 classic "Repo Man," the crazily plotted and deliberately garish Repo Chick only serves to provide further evidence of the cult director's diminishing talents.

Ultimately, there’s little to distinguish the proceedings other than their brevity. By the time the piece reaches its familiar death-strewn conclusion, with guns taking the place of swords, it has come to seem like little more than an ill-conceived exercise.

Director Renny Harlin's take on Agatha Christie's versatile "Ten Little Indians" is total B-movie swagger in all its unsubtle glory.

With a running time of nearly two hours the overall silliness wears thin rather quickly.

Leonard and Foley offer enough semi-naked sex scenes here to prove that quantity is no substitute for chemistry.

The predicable, overlong romantic farce has enough sass and sex appeal to appease fans of stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston.

Not for the faint of heart or for those who like their films to have beginnings, middles, and ends.

Poorly structured and at times incoherent.

Crosses the line from horror to just plain sick.

What truly hampers Regretting You is its inescapable unoriginality, its plodding, uninventive, unthoughtful attempts at swoon and heartbreak.

This implausible plot full of holes does pave the way for a series of Cedric the Entertainer skits and physical gags. None of these is very funny. A few are painfully unfunny. In either case, the movie comes to a standstill. It's a pity no one thought to screen old Bob Hope movies to see how to integrate comedy into genre filmmaking.

Part parable, part wild west shoot-out, yet totally original, Dear Wendy is a powerful indictment of American gun culture.

The disappointingly generic film, which strands a father and son on Earth a thousand years after a planet-wide evacuation, will leave genre audiences pining for the more Terra-centric conceits of "Oblivion," not to mention countless other future-set films that find novelty in making familiar surroundings threatening.

While the CGI effects are undeniably impressive, the laughable story line, risible dialogue and cheap humor (most of it involving a hapless zoo security guard) seriously detract from the fun.

A light touch keeps the film from being an ordeal, but the story's trajectory is as predictable as the setup is contrived.

Haunting tweaks familiar tropes enough to make them interesting. Just not so interesting as to inspire many nightmares after the credits roll.

The resulting cat-and-mouse game -- occupies most of the film's running time, to gradually diminishing results.

The family drama The Cup revisits this popular win in a workmanlike fashion.

It's hard to imagine a dull film based on the infamous Kitty Genovese murder, but Danish filmmaker Puk Grasten's fictional take on the horrific, real-life crime manages the dubious accomplishment.

Rajiv Shah’s screenplay fails to flesh out its characters and situations in compelling fashion, leaving the actors struggling to bring depth to the sketchy scenario and Mehta’s uninspired direction.

The performances in the 1997 scenes are relatively low-key, relying more on the dramatic development of personal relationships than the shock value of unexpected events. The contemporary storyline offers little of particular interest, however, serving more to contextualize earlier developments.

This treacly and overwrought piece of mishegoss from French novelist turned director Amanda Sthers is pretty much a chore from start to finish.

Excitement is hard to find in Joo-hwan Kim's The Divine Fury, a leaden good-vs-evil tale that takes issues of faith very, very seriously but fails to make K.O.-ing the Devil look the least bit fun.

Despite the overstuffed assortment of vampires, werewolves, warlocks and demons of all shapes and sizes, The Mortal Instruments seldom feels like anything more than a shameless, soulless knockoff.

Who knew Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy would make such a dynamic comic duo?

A bigger-louder-dumber take on that good ol' CBS hillbilly hit, the movie version of "The Dukes of Hazzard" starts off on the wrong foot and keeps heading, appropriately, south.

Respectably crafted but short on invention and serious scares.

Director J Blakeson...might be making franchise bait but he exhibits a relatively restrained reliance on spectacle, and the screenplay by Jeff Pinkner, Susannah Grant and Akiva Goldsman is light on the aphoristic earnestness that bogged down the most recent Hunger Games, or last year’s Goldsman-penned Insurgent.

Starts out as an exuberant romp but soon gets trapped in a holding pattern of dumb sex and toilet jokes.

Essentially sleepwalks its way through a strictly by-the-numbers premise.

Girls ages 6-14 will get a charge from the fashion show, animation effects and, to a lesser degree, the cartoonish antics. But like most adolescent histrionics, the pic's impact on adults will be limited to mild amusement alternating with annoyance.

Cheerfully disconnected from the real world, bearing a great resemblance to screwball comedies of old.

There’s a fine, fierce film somewhere in Jenny’s Wedding, trying to claw its way out from under all the clichés, speechifying and sappy pop music.

This low-rent, R-rated "Rush Hour"-ish comic caper could have been several notches better with more charismatic leads and some dialogue upgrades but still would have felt like a genre hand-me-down.

Just as the basic plot points are hard to swallow, even the most rudimentary aspects of the characters' interactions feel forced, artificial and unspontaneous.

Quite funny for much of its running time, the film feels like it simply runs out of steam in its third act, settling for a lazy, pandering resolution and seeming happy to have made it to the 83-minute finish line.

Of interest to Police fans but hardly a rock-doc for the ages.

While God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness proves less fiery in its preaching than its predecessors, it's also a significantly duller offering. How could it not be, considering that its main plot element involves a courtroom battle over real estate?

An uneven romantic comedy that feels as fresh as a hunk of week-old soda bread.

Just identifying the references is a feast for film buffs, but the comedy here is so specifically film-oriented that the laughs, with rare exception, have no deeper resonance. The gags, both sight and verbal, come fast and furious, and more than a few connect. But the ultimate result is wearying, as if one were forced to sit through an endless succession of "Carol Burnett Show" parodies. Another problem is that the films parodied are often less than stellar; "Sleeping With the Enemy," for instance, was already a tired thriller rehash. [19 Oct 1993]

There is certainly talent on display here, but their work fails to come together into a coherent entertainment.

A tone-deaf muddle that shifts moods more often than its lone wolf vigilante rubs out bad guys, clocking in at a punishingly paced two hours and change.

Features fine performances from the veterans in its cast. But it ultimately comes across as little more than a compendium of cliches.

However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine’s plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else’s spiritual retreat — in real time.

Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of Eternity, although clearly lovingly intended, is too haphazard and unenlightening to fulfill its mission of educating Western audiences about the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Equal parts solemn and sappy, Euphoria marks a well-performed if extremely heavy-handed foray into English-language filmmaking for Swedish director Lisa Langseth.

Familiar but never overly broad, this well-cast, crowd-pleasing comedy benefits from a low-key emphasis on character over high jinks.

The movie doesn't have much visual style or atmosphere, but it does have a kinder, gentler spirit than many gross-out comedies, and that makes it a likable time killer.

Once you realize the film is just going to be a string of encomiums against a backdrop of frantically edited archival material in which few shots are allowed to stay onscreen longer than three seconds, it's clear that no meaningful analysis of the woman's career or political agenda will be forthcoming.

For a comedy, it's not really funny.

The awkwardly titled Every Thing Will Be Fine seems more like a showcase for expressive camerawork pushing the limits of cinematography than anything else. Actors the caliber of James Franco and Charlotte Gainsbourg get the short end of the stick in this angst-ridden drama.

The filmmakers, longtime music video veterans, have delivered a technically polished production that belies the film's low budget. They've also elicited mostly strong performances.

This carefully-crafted tale of collective psychosis, satanic ritual abuse and pseudo-science, starring Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson, is satisfying as a compact, if over-cautious, horror-tinged psychological thriller. But it's most interesting beneath its polished, doomy surface, where complex concerns about the cultural origins of our fears are skillfully explored.

Actual footage of Afghanistan makes it an interesting experiment, but as a dramatic thriller, the story of an American documaker is not as taut or compelling as it could be; instead, it's often confusing and irritating.

Belying its ominous title, Age of Extinction barely skirts the idea that humankind and planet Earth are about to be totally annihilated. What is extinguished is the audience's consciousness after being bombarded for nearly three hours with overwrought emotions...bad one-liners and battles that rarely rise above the banal.

The film has enough entertaining action and sly humor to please its target audience.

It's a reasonable premise for a horror film, but the execution is remarkably lackluster. The pacing is sluggish to such a point that viewers may quickly fear that they too will fall asleep and meet Mara themselves.

This offbeat indie chiller benefits from colorful cinematography and bits of satisfying butchery, even if a less than airtight scenario fails to make it run efficiently.

With a storyline less challenging than that of a typical CBS crime procedural, Ride Along 2 is little more than a repetitive rehash of the original.

High praise to the cast and crew. Jared Leto is mesmeric as the bloated, deranged Chapman. It's a brilliantly measured performance, evincing the tale of a madman through his own awful rhyme and reason.

About as subtle as its all too obvious title would suggest.