Rigor Mortis’ strongest suit lies with its cast. The film comes with lavish (and sometimes distractingly so) digital effects, but it’s the old-timers who are instrumental in injecting humanity and life into the film.

Even by the slight standards of high concept -- put sexpot in next-to-nothing costume and have her shoot people -- "Point of No Return" is thin. Screenwriters Robert Getchell and Alexandra Seros make attempts at humor, primarily such high frivolities as sadism or food-gorging, and there is a perfunctory attempt to round out Ms. Killer herself, largely socio-drivel about her abusive upbringing. [19 March 1993]

An absorbing character study, even if it's ultimately not one that justifies its much-vaunted technological advances.

This picture sometimes rivals "Avatar" in its spectacular landscapes and thrilling flying sequences, but of course it won't come anywhere near those megagrosses, and it's too scary to be wholeheartedly embraced by children.

Spends an inordinate amount of time ogling the tight, lithe bodies of its young female characters. Thus, what might have appealed only to teen girls might well have crossover appeal to leering young boys as well.

Offers proof that the Korean animation industry is poised for the big leagues.

A too-rare instance in which a gifted young actor signs on for a fright flick without coming away tainted, The Awakening places Rebecca Hall in a convincing historical setting and gives her more to do than widen her eyes in fear.

Sluggishly paced and featuring lengthy voice-over narration by Strong in which his character ponders his role in the universe like a graduate philosophy student, the film never achieves liftoff.

Through it all, Bailey’s star power shines. She holds the camera’s attention, pops off the screen and gives Anna an innocent energy that makes her ruses seem mischievous and harmless.

It definitely delivers the goods, making it fairly obvious that DCI John Luther isn’t going away anytime soon.

Bautista has the low-key charisma, natural appeal and formidable physicality necessary for an action star, and he makes Final Score worth watching (at home while eating pizza and drinking beer, preferably) despite its endlessly derivative elements.

A warm and fuzzy family movie, but you do wish that at least once someone would upstage the dog.

That exciting crash sequence — from initial turbulence through to catastrophic Pacific Ocean landing — is where high-stakes action specialist Harlin is most firmly in his sweet spot.

This one is straight out of the old-school Sundance manual. Still, there's enough warmth, humor and heart in the very slick package, not to mention a gaggle of accomplished and well-cast actors.

A pervy premise and top-flight cast yield a mixed-bag spy flick.

If De Palma’s version was one part adolescent dream, three parts nightmare, with a sly streak of satire running through it, Peirce’s is a more earnest yet still engrossing take on the story that should connect with contemporary teens. At the very least it might send fledgling horror buffs scurrying to their Netflix queues to watch a vintage masterpiece of the genre.

Katie Says Goodbye is a plaintive story of hard luck and fringe dwellers, one that might have felt clichéd in lesser hands. But first-time filmmaker Wayne Roberts conjures new, resonant chords in his taut, tender drama.

But the synthesis is underwhelming on screen where it might have resonated in Lipsyte's book. Here, Measure becomes a mildly nostalgic, mildly romantic entry in a genre that, more than most, requires that the viewer feels a personal connection to the misfit protagonist on screen.

Closeness, the original title of which, Tesnota, also apparently implies being walled-in or suffocated, is dramatically erratic, with tense and compelling sequences alternating with diffuse and/or flat interludes that don't advance the narrative or pay off in other ways.

Silly, overstuffed and as sweet as anything Adam Sandler has done.

Veteran television director Greg Berlanti (Riverdale, Everwood), who demonstrated real cinematic talent with Love, Simon, is unable to make any of this remotely convincing or, more problematically, entertaining. The wild tonal shifts leave the viewer in the dust, and not even the two stars are able to make any of it work.

That the film doesn't rise above the formulaic is a particular disappointment as these stunningly brave Rescue Swimmers deserve a film as daring as they are.

As novel and absorbing as In Time is in several respects, however, Andrew Niccol's latest conception of an altered but still recognizable future feels undernourished in other ways that are not as salutary, preventing the film from fulfilling its strong inherent promise.

Director David Gordon Green’s latest unpredictable addition to his resume is offbeat and appealing on some levels but is neither as funny nor as trenchant as it might have been.

De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast.

Whimpers a bit like "Rosemary's Baby" and gurgles occasionally like "The Exorcist," but the video look and bare-bones craftsmanship all scream B movie.

Much like the recent, similarly themed "Life in a Day," the results are more admirable than enlightening or even entertaining.

It's a nice little human interest story, but hardly seems worthy of this full-length treatment.

Six Million and One suggests the need for both a more ruthless editor and a well-trained family therapist.

While Disney’s Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast might not ever be accused of risk-taking, the new adventure does feel a shade or two darker than previous installments.

Sumptuous and romantic in an attractively old-fashioned way despite a hitch designed to give some contemporary American idealists pause -- the writer's lover is married, with no interest in divorce -- the film satisfies in a wholly commercial way.

Lee's eye for everyday Chinese life - whether in isolated rural villages or among aggrieved laborers on fish farms - compensates for the film's minimal commentary on the larger social trauma brought about by human traffickers, and the stigma faced by their victims.

Though the story’s midsection, with its shifting alliances and reversals, feels distended, the movie offers well-defined characters and an inventive sense of earthbound fun, as well as poignant moments.

The trouble with Chongqing Hot Pot is that despite its brief running time, it takes too long to bring its various threads together.

Director/screenwriter Jones displays an ability to sustain simmering tension that's impressive for someone directing only his second feature film.

Even if Werewolf lacks bite as an allegorical horror thriller, it works pretty well as a psychological study of tender young minds struggling to relearn their humanity after years of brutal mistreatment by inhuman adults. The unschooled cast are unusually natural and convincing for child actors, and technical credits are generally superior.

Predictable but sweet.

Nobu is a straightforward and admiring portrait of its subject.

Despite many script problems, Levine has kept the film tightly coiled and engrossing throughout.

An action thriller that doesn’t know when to quit. For the most part, though, it remains preposterously entertaining.

While weighed down by digressions and contraptions, Man of Tai Chi is an adequate and ambitious effort from a first-time director, who could have enhanced his on-screen philosophical arguments with a bit more depth and done with a touch less of the admittedly riveting man-to-man melee.

Though it’s not without cinematic touches and affecting, sometimes harrowing moments, and even with a convincingly fragile and unmoored Amanda Seyfried at its center, the drama is often hampered by an instructive sensibility that gives it the air of a feature-length PSA.

Unfolds in a scrupulously accurate historical adventure story that depicts the world of Jesus' birth with an exciting you-are-there verisimilitude.

Stern's melancholy on election night in 2016 is genuinely affecting, but despite some incisive footage en route to the depressing conclusion, the film ultimately leaves us feeling that the director has become a little too close to his subjects to probe as deeply as our national chaos requires

It contains terrific sequences, and Nicholson and Sandler team up better than one might expect. But the film plays like two characters in search of a story and runs a good 15 minutes too long.

Despite the professionalism of the acting talent, Like Father feels distressingly retrograde.

Brad Anderson has basically thrown everything into the film's furnace so as to keep its wobbly narrative running — to no avail, sadly: as the leaps between genre tropes and divergent threads exposes ever wider plot holes, this incoherent adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe attempts endless twists and turns culminating in a supposedly cathartic denouement drenched in sap.

The leads all take this as seriously as possible, and Lennon goes the extra mile by investing scenes with Edgar's parents with believable emotional baggage.

At its plainspoken best, the U.S.-and Thailand-shot film is an eye-opening history lesson more than an atmospheric thriller. It's nonetheless chilling as it exposes the machinations between countries with no official relationship.

Giacomo Durzi's aptly titled documentary Ferrante Fever delivers a fan-friendly examination of the novelist and her works, and what it lacks in depth it more than makes up for with enthusiasm.

A relentless focus on action over character and story will leave more mainstream viewers cold.

Whatever nuance can be found in Front Cover, the story of an openly gay fashion stylist and a seemingly homophobic Chinese movie star, belongs chiefly to the performances of Jake Choi and James Chen.

Despite the stylistic glitches, Radium Girls proves engrossing, thanks to its powerful real-life tale and the excellent performances by leads King and Quinn, who make us fully care about their characters' fates.

Those who might be able to put aside despair and absorb this strictly as a work of persuasive rhetoric will be impressed with its intellectual scope, the economy of the storytelling in its fictional narrative, the bravura editing and visual panache as it builds a world full of dust, detritus and debased morals.

By the time it reaches its final act, the film rivals its American counterparts in intensity if not quite in explicit violence.

Even if some of them are playing hackneyed gangster-film types, the strength of the actors makes it almost possible to forgive the formulaic plotting and artificially movie-ish developments. Candis and Justin Wilson's screenplay stretches credibility thinner and thinner as the story advances.

Kline remains a pleasure to watch, surviving the character's deepening self-pity and making his suspiciously unwriterly carelessness with words (he refers to the trophy head of a wild boar as a "cow") almost charming.

There’s no doubt, from the way Reptile creeps in the first half, that Singer is a skilled director. But there’s something to be said for restraint, which the helmer, who wrote his screenplay with Benjamin Brewer and the film’s star Benicio Del Toro, doesn’t exercise enough of here. In an effort to prove its cleverness, Reptile clanks, rattles and stumbles in its second half.

It’s quite a story, which Berlinger moves along with unrelenting energy.

Powerfully moving but laced with incisive wit, Don't Tell has terrific performances with a wise tone and polished look.

It all feels quite silly, but Outlaw Posse manages to be fun anyway, thanks largely to the terrific ensemble of veteran character actors (including Neal McDonough and M. Emmet Walsh, making brief appearances) who fully embrace the film’s daffier qualities.

Vivid if scattershot documentary examines today's sexualized culture by focusing on three subjects.

It's formulaic but with a big heart.

Like the first film, the sequel (directed by Kyle Newacheck) proves moronic, witless and relentlessly vulgar. Which is to say, Happy Gilmore fans will love it.

The episodic screenplay lacks narrative momentum, and the use of faux-documentary commentary by older versions of Sawchuk's colleagues (played by actors) doesn't come across convincingly.

There’s much to appreciate in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino’s second consecutive bittersweet paean to his home city of Naples. At least for a while, before the too-muchness of it takes hold and the character at the center stops being intriguing and just becomes a siren with an air of mystery but too little evidence of all that’s supposedly going on behind it.

The blues music in "Moan" is superfine, but my oh my, what to make of the ripe Southern cliches and this absurd story. The film is so jaw-dropping awful that it just might become a boxoffice hit.

Genial documentary combines extravagance of Mardi Gras drag with an underexposed story of early gay-rights achievements.

With its echoes of the Nicole Kidman vehicle "To Die For" -- the blonde in question is a television weather-reporter with big ambitions -- the film will appeal to movie-goers who appreciate story, character and crisp dialogue.

A crowd-pleaser despite its missteps and occasionally because of them, the pic enlivens some stale conceits about killers-for-hire and the women who love them.

It is an unsatisfying film because we know no more about the people at the end than we did at the beginning, in fact, very little at all.

Strong performances and outstanding cinematography aren't enough to rescue an unfocused and episodic screenplay, which will leave many stranded in a purgatorial cinematic-halfway house between bliss and despair.

Taking two of the most magnetic actors on the planet, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and transforming them into emotionally stunted virtual avatars for more than half the running time is the least of the miscalculations.

At its best, the movie achieves a broody dazzle, even as the narrative proves less memorable than one would have hoped. But the fluency of Mann’s direction and the slow-burn chemistry between Chris Hemsworth and Tang Wei counterbalance the more ordinary, and not always involving, procedural elements.

Although there’s talent on display in all aspects of this time-jumping, visually distinctive independent that rests its commercial hopes on the names of leads Justin Long and Emmy Rossum, Esmail strenuously overplays his hand with the torrent of obnoxious dialogue he asks his male lead to deliver, which is enough to make one want to run out several times for a breather.

Meredith has woven together a half-dozen portraits of contemporary lives-on-the-edge in this quietly searing drama.

Likely to inspire heated arguments about the ethics of nonfiction film, the diverting but not really satisfying pic makes weak lemonade from lemons that might have yielded something tastier.

Inconsequential but intermittently charming.

Its appeal naturally will be to book-reading audiences who appreciate films with well-written dialogue, a tony cast, lush visuals and the triumph of civilized values.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

Hartley's kooky cosmopolitan caper can never be accused of slumming, but the shift from dry, offbeat wit to politically charged drama is a little jarring, to say the least; it's a bit like taking in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" and having it morph mid-way through into "Shadows and Fog."

This well-made epic boasts carefully researched production values and the talents of classically trained actors, but by literally playing it by the book, the picture loses something dramatic in the translation.

Like "Dogville," Neil Young's Greendale uses the deceptively simple "Our Town" foundation on which to build a platform for some highly personal sociopolitical criticisms, but unlike the contentious von Trier picture, the Young variation gets the job done in roughly half the time with a notable absence of histrionics, plus you can tap your toes to it.

With Made-Up, the sisters Adams and Shalhoub (who is married to Brooke) have taken a playfully irreverent approach to middle-age rites of passage that comes with many opportunities for the performers to self-consciously "act."

The Cow is depressingly slack and indecisive, neither leaning hard enough into its B-movie preposterousness nor taking the time to build any real, sustained suspense.

Meyer aims to emulate the jagged freeform jazz that permeates his soundtrack, but this wan indie is strictly middle-of-the-road background music.

Less a sequel than a remake featuring a younger actor going through the same narrative paces as Murphy in the original, Coming 2 America includes so many nods to its predecessor that it feels like a feature-length Easter Egg in search of a movie.

While the juvenile performances are bright and engaging, and there's no shortage of genuinely humorous observations about love and life in the Big Apple, there's an inescapable small-screen dynamic to the scope and rhythm of the production.

Tigers shares a penchant for rigorous self-analysis with such relatively recent films as "Chumscrubber," "Mysterious Skin" and "Tarnation."

Insidious co-creator Leigh Whannell’s economical script vividly reimagines Elise’s motivations for using her “gift” to aid the demon-afflicted while providing a clearer plotline that avoids many of the convoluted indulgences of the first and second episodes.

Who Do You Love, directed by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks, pays attention to the music but to its credit pays even more attention to the actors and story.

Despite a virtually unplayable premise, The Switch overcomes this handicap to turn itself into a friendly, offbeat romantic comedy.

While one might agree or disagree with their theme, aesthetically Citizen Koch is feisty.

Frost is a likable lead and an easy rooting interest. But his affability isn’t enough to give this silly-sweet feature the edge and dimension that would make it a memorable contribution to the subgenre epitomized by The Full Monty — comedies in which middle-aged, unassuming Brits discover their inner showman.

Mad as Hell is far too subjective to take seriously.

For a piece of speculative fiction about a subject as sensitive as the grieving process, Another End becomes distancing, a near-future sci-fi drama too muted to deliver significant rewards.

Great material, but the film never catches fire.

Pusher struggles to rise above standard drug dealer/gangster fare and succeeds, but only in part, thanks to its strong cast lead by Richard Coyle.