The screenplay, written by French arthouse writer-director Antoine Barraud (Les gouffres) with an assist from U.S. scribe Edwards, too often seems to be under the mistaken impression that making a movie for kids means everything needs to be overly spelled out, especially by using as many short-hand clichés as possible.

It should be a sturdy player upon its release in home video formats, assuming that its target audience knows how to operate their DVD players.

Stefan Haupt's (The Circle) documentary Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation explores the building's tortured history and the current efforts to bring it to fruition, but in a disappointingly dull style that fails to do justice to its outsized inspiration.

It provides only scant background information and no deep insights about the musicians, other than that they seem like very nice people who apparently perform more for the love of church than money.

While Helen Mirren elevates the material with her usual aplomb and the events being depicted inevitably are stirring, this is a stodgy crusade-for-justice drama, directed and written with minimal flair.

For a film that takes great pride in its heroine's nonconformism, pretty much everything in Allegiant feels conventional.

The characters are ciphers, the narrative is dull and even the sights and sounds become numbingly bombastic after a while.

This derivative smoothie appears to have been made by putting Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and the Coen Brothers into a blender along with Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths. The brash result squanders a talented cast, sharp visuals and spectacular locations on a grisly trail of mayhem that rarely yields much mirth.

Technological updating and a few clever narrative twists are the sole saving graces of the otherwise pedestrian Preservation.

Its paper-thin characterizations, hackneyed plotting and overdependence on viciously profane humor put this effort more in the minor league of Tammy, McCarthy's previous collaboration with her director/co-screenwriter husband Ben Falcone, than her truly inspired work with Paul Feig on Bridesmaids and Spy.

Russell pulled off some outrageous moments in I Heart Huckabees, the feature he made before this film, but the evidence here suggests Nailed had issues even before the money ran out.

The longer the proceedings go on the more wearisome they get, with Perry's character quickly wearing out his satirical welcome. By the time it's over, you'll almost wish that La Ultima Pelicula would live up to its title.

Effie Gray is an exquisitely dreary slice of middlebrow armchair theater which adds little new to a much-filmed story.

The fragile film’s bid for poignancy is so aggressive and its sensitivity so studied that it eventually drowns in syrupy banality.

Haphazard plotting and seriously undernourished character development aside, none of the emotional stakes have been planted deeply enough to elicit audience involvement in young Pete’s plight.

By the time the relatively brief but seemingly interminable proceedings reach their conclusion, viewers may feel like they've been held hostage themselves.

Director Stephen Kijak, who previously explored far more compelling musical territory with Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, has delivered a behind-the-scenes portrait that should please the band's diehard fans but offers little of substance to the uninitiated.

It's all busy-ness, noise and chaos, with zero thrills and very little sustainable comic buoyancy.

Rings finds a couple of nice, if inconsequential, little chills.

Despite its apparently sincere identification with its protagonist, Entertainment feels like a sick joke.

Despite the director's frequently stated mission to liberate the poetry in his material by excavating what he has described as "ecstatic truth," this is a literal, rather flat epic that keeps telling us in voiceovers of its spiritual dimension, without actually generating much evidence of it.

In their awkward attempt to shoehorn these kids into the first pic's formula, Stoller and his writing collaborators care far less about creating believable characters than getting to the next laugh.

Clever enough to provoke a few abrupt laughs along the way, this big screen debut for two television stalwarts, director Matt Shakman (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and writer Robert Patino (Sons of Anarchy, Prime Suspect), is sabotaged by some frightfully on-the-nose expository dialogue and an adamantly prosaic visual style.

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

When in doubt, the director cranks up the assaultively reverberant score from po-faced '80s rockers The The (aka Matt Johnson, the director's brother), which at least provides intermittent pep to this increasingly torpid wallow in the moral mud.

Unfortunately, despite displaying an admirable stylistic ambitiousness and excellent use of its NYC Lower East Side locations The Girl is in Trouble never manages to feel like more than a strained, modern-day pastiche.

Sure, it's a kick to see Stiller and Wilson back in the shoes of these camera-ready cretins, but for every joke that sparks there are several that just lay there.

Lumbering, lifeless, and—strange thing to say about a cadaver—almost entirely charmless. Almost entirely because both Lily James, as headstrong heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Sam Riley, as her brooding suitor Mr. Darcy, make for a delightful onscreen pair.