A blatant commodity designed to illustrate what a splendid influence the hit television show has been on the world at large, if the series' creators don't mind saying so themselves.

While Saw III provides a decent number of new twists, psychological as well as torture-wise, it necessarily lacks the originality of its predecessors.

Although not wholly successful in its sociological aspirations, the film does provide both considerable laughs and food for thought.

Ted's Boston-accented zingers are expertly delivered by the director/star, whose voice talent is undeniable, and Wahlberg again demonstrates that he's skilled at comedy.

Despite its frustratingly wandering narrative, All We Had does manage to pull you in, thanks largely to its moving depiction of the mother-daughter bond at its center.

Director Neil Burger struggles to fuse philosophy, awkward romance and brutal action. Even with star Shailene Woodley delivering the requisite toughness and magnetism, the clunky result is almost unrelentingly grim.

The result feels like a dry and endless lecture more than an involving human story about serious issues. It’s a movie that’s all subtext and no text — and even the subtext struggles to make a point that’s more complex than a blunt truth.

This ersatz portrait of American big-top tent impresario P.T. Barnum is all smoke and mirrors, no substance. It hammers pedestrian themes of family, friendship and inclusivity while neglecting the fundaments of character and story.

Phantasm: Ravager should please longtime fans while leaving newcomers unimpressed and confused.

Ultimately, the characters’ motivations, like their titular instinct, are weakly delineated, but viewers are well-advised not to worry their pretty little heads about any of that and just concentrate on the pantsuits.

Although formulaic in design and programmed to meet its quota of laughs, the film makes a point of going beyond basic expectations into some legitimate aspects of mature friendships without getting soggy about it.

Luck’s sweetness comes from the details of Sam’s story and subsequent adventure.

Feels padded in some places, truncated in others. It also feels too respectful, especially when its subject is such a deep thinker and questioner of authority.

A likeable if familiar underdog tale.

The director does an excellent job of setting a properly ominous mood, effectively delivering a procession of jump scares that succeed in keeping viewers on edge. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Tarryn-Tanille Prinsloo proves less effective, failing to deepen the characterizations or situations in sufficiently interesting fashion.

Characters come and go quickly, leaving a feeling that there is too much compression of the multi-episode story.

When all is said and done, their Pulitzer-winning photographs prove more potent than this well-intended but frustratingly generic picture.

Brooks is solidly in charge of this feel-good fairy tale as he gets terrific performances from everyone including two super-talented child actors.

Despite Anna Schafer’s gripping performance in the lead role, this deeply personal effort is too narratively sluggish to sustain attention.

It’s all utterly silly and derivative but also undeniably entertaining.

The hundreds of animation artists on this three-year project made enormous contributions to the final film. There is not an off-kilter moment nor awkward effect in the entire movie.

Although its goofy high-concept premise won't bear much scrutiny, it offers a less predictable ride than their first pairing, and lush Hawaiian locations to boot.

An unfortunately muddled portrait of a teenage girl going through a moral and spiritual crisis.

The director finds himself stymied by weak source material — Jean-Luc Lagarce's 1990 play about a young man who returns home to tell his family he's dying — and only intermittently well served by his starry French cast.

The doc circles its subject with a mix of fascination, reverence and minor disgust.

Director Takashi Shimizu chooses cruel psychological suspense over gore and succeeds in spinning a minimal plot into a panorama of malice.

Despite its scaldingly hot cast and formidable writer/director combination, The Counselor is simply not a very likable or gratifying film. In fact, it's a bummer.

The delicate drama is sweet and sincere but a tad thin to resonate.

Loaded with obtuse symbolism, the film is not only hard to understand, it isn't much fun trying to figure it out.

Lee's latest rambles through almost two hours of unfocused drama, burdened with endless didactic editorializing, before lurching out of nowhere into ugly revelations and violence.

As it is for the two characters for two days, it’s an escape from real life, from anything consequential, a chance to delight in the pleasures that humans can take from what grows in the earth and from an amiable companion’s company.

With all the recent controversy surrounding Depp, not to mention Maïwenn herself, the result of their collaboration is a handsome period piece that feels both flat and shallow, and certainly far from any scandale.

Like the lead characters, who struggle to get "almost there" and fail, the movie provides a good time but isn't wholly satisfying in the end.

This is a creature feature, whose gory jump-scares and icktastic critter design are the reason you're here. An ensemble led by Kristen Stewart brings credible camaraderie to the scenario without quite matching the vivid chemistry of Alien and its best descendants; with such a tightly packed survival tale ahead of them, though, few viewers will be calling out for more character development.

A wacky comedy involving a suicidal marketing executive and his highly irreverent shrink, Martin & Orloff ultimately doesn't fully succeed in its comedic aspirations, but it does offer some genuine laughs along the way.

While the story line often comes uncomfortably close to melodrama, Prey for Rock and Roll"... is an entertaining and sometimes even moving portrait of a veteran band that never quite hits the big time.

It ends up playing like a shoddy blend of V for Vendetta and Mr. Robot but without the budget bandwidth or style of either.

To attempt a critical evaluation of Orion's new Caddyshack is a little like describing the esthetic qualities of an outhouse.

The most thrilling aspect of director Per Fly's drama is watching the interactions between co-stars Theo James and Ben Kingsley. Even as James sucks all the energy out of the room with his inert performance, Kingsley creates oxygen with his dynamic, wildly entertaining turn.

Arnold makes the most of this endlessly wisecracking character, garnering most of the pic's laughs and giving no impression that he thinks this shlocky, low-budget B-movie is in any way a comedown from the likes of "True Lies."

Favoring psychological chills over blood-soaked mayhem, Callahan’s impressively crafted debut nods to recent horror classics while displaying an eminently distinctive vision of its own.

While it zips along with pleasingly brisk economy in the expository establishing scenes, newcomer Evan Parter’s Black List screenplay indulges in too many movie-ish contrivances to offer a genuinely provocative spin on Beltway shenanigans.

What Ralphie goes through over the course of this absorbing enough but bludgeoning portrait of corrosive masculinity makes him both victim and monster.

The Gallerist is not without its occasional charms. There’s a chuckle to be had here and there, bits of zinging dialogue that actually find the right notes. Enough so that one roots for the movie despite its many missteps. The problem, ultimately, is that Yan chose a poor subject for her film, an environment that is an incredibly hard target to nail.

As bloody, dumb shark thrillers go, it stays afloat, gaining some credibility from the natural disaster element.

Beautiful to look at, this is nothing more than a Little Engine That Could story refitted to accommodate aerial action and therefore unlikely to engage the active interest of anyone above the age of about 8, or 10 at the most.

A cutthroat little thriller that's surely more fun than most of the riddle-solving lock-ins currently springing up around the country.

Brandishing impressively packed abs and enough upper body strength to pull herself out of countless jams, Alicia Vikander gamely steps into the kick-ass role twice played by Angelina Jolie, but the derivative story and cardboard supporting characters are straight out of 1930s movie serials.

A consistently amusing, often inspired family romp.

Stem to stern, this 88-minute slasher runs like the clockwork bit of machinery it is, and that baseline competence effectively leeches it of personality.

Marc Lawrence's story about Santa's daughter, despite its solid cast, aims squarely at not-too-picky kids and mostly ignores parents' desire to be entertained as well.

Escapist moviegoers happy to live out a flashy fantasy get a brief comeuppance and still walk away from the table with a little something in their pockets.

Despite its shadowy visuals and insidious soundscape, it’s neither frightening enough to play like full-fledged horror, nor complex or curious enough to pack much weight as psychological drama.

In this case, it’s the thrills that sell, and Gran Turismo has plenty of those.

While the film doesn't fully succeed in its striving for a Hitchcock-style ambiguity in its storytelling, it is consistently engrossing in its exploration of the fine line between civic duty and vigilantism.

A well-intentioned but unconvincing fable about a young boy struggling to overcome his fear of mortality.

George Clooney is the best reason to submit yourself to From Dusk Till Dawn, an exceedingly grotesque thriller-horror-comedy that fails to live up to the promise of its opening reels.

Director Daisy von Scherler Mayer and a strong cast do right by Neil LaBute's script (based on his play), but the soullessness of the story is a turnoff overpowering the intriguing moments scattered within these one-on-one encounters.

Other than for the pleasure of watching Green try to conquer ancient Greece dressed as a distant forebearer of Catwoman, more is less and a little late in this long-aborning sequel.

Though this clearly isn't meant to be a lighthearted story, a glimmer of wit here and there would've helped keep viewers engaged in the action and endeared us to a cast that is competent but hardly charismatic.

Once the outlandish premise is established, there's little to enjoy in the increasing body count, leading you to wish that Mr. Peterson had simply murdered his victims in their sleep. That at least would have made for a blessedly shorter movie.

Danluck's unfocused direction makes Katherine less a grief-struck enigma than a dull somnambulist; and the film's copious flashbacks, instead of drawing us into the character's confused emotions, mostly suggest that the film can't decide how to tell its story.

Directors Stephen St. Leger and James Mather fill the film's obvious narrative gaps with enough witty banter and tongue-in-cheek humor for audiences to overlook the subpar special effects used throughout.

Features a profusion of provocative ideas and a wealth of vintage film clips but is unable to avoid having the inevitable feel of a college thesis.

Crazy Wisdom offers a perceptive, if one-sided, perspective on Trungpa's impact on American spirituality and the arts.

Less successful as a drama, the out-all-night period piece is overshadowed by many similar coming-of-age tales (the best of which are often made by artists with first-hand knowledge of the period they're depicting). But like its twenty-ish hero, it is well-meaning enough that some viewers will be forgiving.

The film simply fails to provide much reason for nonfans to particularly care about the rise to cult stardom of the Rhode Island-birthed group.

Like the amped up comeback tour of two rockers who had their heyday sometime in the mid-'80s, Sylvester Stallone and director Walter Hill (48 HRS., The Warriors) join forces for a hard-hitting exercise in beefy, brainless fun with the New Orleans-set actioner Bullet to the Head.

Going way, way back, at least to The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the western remains one of cinema’s oldest genres — and certainly the one where it feels like everything’s already been done. It’s therefore all-the-more disappointing when a brand new western, like Richard Gray’s gunslinging geezer flick The Unholy Trinity, brings nothing original to the table, rehashing movies we’ve seen before and doing it in a way that feels altogether generic.

This is the rare film that would actually seem even creepier watched from home on your computer, preferably alone to enhance its voyeuristic effect.

Neither conveying the flavor of the swampy South nor juicing the story's murky undercurrents with compositional correlatives, Glimcher's framings and pacings are disappointingly flat, coagulating finally in a batch of cliched action gumbo. [13 Feb 1995]

The cast sparkles especially Simon Baker, a sturdy leading-man type, who is primed to break through any day now, and Paz Vega, already a star in Latin market.

Most of the performances range from adequate to uninspired. Leary's talents are largely misused, while Doug E. Doug (Cool Runnings) as a superstitious short-timer rises above the pack. [28 Jul 1995]

An informative if uninvigorating look at the violinist Itzhak Perlman calls "the first true modern virtuoso player," Peter Rosen's God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz will draw only the most ardent classical fans to its niche theatrical run but should please a wider audience after making its way to educational TV.

Paying slavish homage to culty genre predecessors from the sixties, seventies and eighties, this steamy tale of a hunky screenwriter, his ethereal blood-sucking paramour and her bad-girl sister can't quite decide whether to be seductively stylish or knowingly cheesy.

This sporadically engrossing mockumentary, which gets better as it rolls along, must have been planned way back before Phoenix bombed on "Late Show With David Letterman."

A hair-raising third act adds an unusual coda — one that I, after only one viewing, am still processing. The relief, however, is in the filmmakers’ approach to these tense scenes: Fogel and Ashford loosen their grip, at last trusting us to sit in our discomfort, draw our own conclusions and sharpen our tools for the discourse.

Red Right Hand doesn’t add anything particularly new to the well-worn genre. But it features enough bloody action sequences and shootouts to satisfy fans, who will be more likely to catch it on VOD than at drive-ins.

The puzzle of how the various personal and narrative pieces will eventually fit together exerts a smidgen of interest, but the characters are so dour and un-dimensional as to invite no curiosity about them.

Plucking the same violent, occult strings as "Da Vinci" while avoiding its leadenness, Angels keeps the action coming for the best part of 139 minutes.

The charismatic performers — who include Angelababy as a woman at the center of a past love triangle with the two male leads — are engaging from start to finish.

Audiences will likely feel that they're being intestinated while sitting through Fortress, a soporific and perfectly fatuous exercise that should lure modest audiences for a weekend or two before receiving a life sentence on video. [7 Sept 1993]

This agreeable remake still manages to go the distance.

Although it's refreshing that Alien Trespass doesn't indulge in the sort of mindless, gross-out humor that afflicts so many current cinematic spoofs, it errs too much on the other side, offering mere pastiche instead of witty satire.

Danish director Lone Scherfig skillfully adapts David Nicholls' best-selling romantic novel to the screen.

Despite some amusing moments, it never really takes off, burdened by a tiresome romantic subplot that periodically stops the movie dead in its tracks.

A dry compendium of talking-head interviews.

Wavering between wry humor and frank tenderness without fully committing to either, the film ends up stranded in an innocuously sweet middle ground. That’s a disappointment, especially since the movie gets off to an amusing start.

The idea is original enough to pique curiosity, and the small cast, led by Alba Rohrwacher and the up-and-coming Adam Driver of HBO’s Girls fame, digs gamely into the material, but something is missing.

A dramatic thriller tackling serious themes — the aftermath of war, the cost of retribution and the possibility of redemption — the movie can't always get out of its own way, as reliably effective as Rapace is.

Handsomely made in the customarily fastidious style of most period biographical dramas, Tolkien is strongly served by Hoult, who, after four X-Men outings (and a supporting role in last year's The Favourite), demonstrates that it's high time he moved on from that sort of thing to more interesting and challenging dramatic characterizations.

A painfully earnest but dramatically inert film.

Tales of cynical curmudgeons rediscovering their humanity have long been a cinematic staple, but Wonderful World brings a refreshing lack of sentimentality to its take.

For all its playful touches and neat-o nostalgia for nondigital entertainment, the whimsy feels forced.

Tomnay skillfully shifts the film's initial tone from suspense to dark comedy so that the transition never feels forced.

While its sexy young lead performers and enjoyable dance sequences should provide some boxoffice enticement, this directorial debut from choreographer Anne Fletcher likely will score bigger on video.

A comedy-drama with alarming similarities to a relic from 1976, "Norman, Is That You?" In that film, Redd Foxx and Pearl Bailey were parents shocked to discover that their son was gay and living with a white lover. That's basically the same gimmick in this new film from writer-director Maurice Jamal.

The creativity doesn't match up to the ideals here, even if Abe & Phil does offer one of the better final scenes (a grace note, really) seen in recent indies.