What starts as a flipped survival tale turns into historical tragisploitation that wallows in its slog of endless suffering.

Though the Tavianis’ intent is clear—to comment on the thin line separating part and performer, as well as on the quite literally liberating powers of art—the meanings rarely emerge with any elegance or resonance. Hardly a dish fit for the gods.

Fellini used to get away with such slender crises, but he had Marcello Mastrioanni behind the shades, as well as a more vivid penchant for psychosexual fantasy. Coppola and Swan are stuck in their obsessions with dorky album art and old-man cocktails at Musso & Frank. A precious, arid thing, Glimpse arrives pinned to Styrofoam like a prize arthropod.

No matter how may times Identity Thief switches tracks, nothing works — it fails as a star vehicle, a recession-era satire, a WTF white-collar-grunt revenge tale, a "Midnight Run"–style buddy flick, a gross-out laughfest and a bathetic tale of broken souls. No amount of stolen guises can fix it.

It’s a reasonably diverting piece of work, falling somewhere between the high of "Magic Mike" (2012) and the low of "Haywire" (2011), among his recent efforts.

This surreal, sentimental journey does provide an excellent encapsulation of everything Ruiz did best: oddball takes on highbrow lit and lowbrow genre conventions, guided tours of characters’ mazelike memory banks, and a reveling in film culture that doubles as a cinephile’s wet dream.

It's pure comic-book malarkey, adapted from a graphic novel by French artist Matz. But the skeletal plot affords Hill the opportunity to go atmospherically hog wild.

Warm Bodies wants us to believe in the transformative power of love, but what of Julie's poor, devoured boyfriend? There's Stockholm syndrome, and then there's cozying up to the monster who ate your sweetheart.

There's influential, and then there's this 1953 microbudgeted beauty, one that's made its way into the DNA of everything from cinema vérité to the French New Wave.

The result is neither blind idolatry nor a definitive portrait; just a major missed opportunity content to loiter in the middle of the road.

Writer-director Austin Chick throws in echoes of Abel Ferrara's feminist grindhouse classic "Ms. 45," but the provocation feels hollow and the stylish direction - filled with pensive slo-mo - just slows things down.

The overall fist-pumping rhetoric (lots of earnest reciting of Abu-Jamal's prose) and a failure to address the possibility that he might have, in fact, shot that cop in 1981 make this profile more hagiography than history.

This frenetic horror-comedy from "Bubba Ho Tep's" Don Coscarelli is of the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of storytelling.

For a movie that's essentially about a piece of hardware-the legendary Neve mixing console, an imposing slab of knobs and meters - this geeked-out documentary beats with more heart than could be imagined.

You'll be arguing with your friends about the ethics of secrecy and defense for hours; that's what makes these exit interviews so essential. They come late to the spy game, but are welcome regardless.

Im could care less about these people as characters, presenting them as either obscenely hot or repellently decaying bundles of flesh.

No stranger to one-joke premises, writer-director Tommy Wirkola (of 2009's Nazi-zombie "classic" "Dead Snow") populates this frenzied horror-satire with tons of incoherently staged bloodletting and f-bomb–accentuated kiss-off lines. It's a grim fairy tale, all right.

The smidgen of dramatic color offered by Jennifer Lopez, as a divorced real-estate broker drawn into Parker's payback scheme, is offset by her character's shocking naïveté, shedding her clothes on command (as if she still couldn't hide a wire somewhere) and falling unconvincingly for Statham's featureless cipher.

As sick-making sketch comedies go, this stupefyingly bad one-somehow rife with A-list talent-must rank near the very bottom.

The perfectly sculpted, entirely sure-of-himself Tom ultimately seems more of a construct than a character, his carefree nature shaped almost entirely by the very wish-fulfillment clichés that the movie otherwise sidesteps.

Barely over an hour, the sketch feels lovely, unhurried and a bit insignificant. That may be your definition of cinema, but if you've hired a babysitter, this isn't the film for your date night.

The result is less an ode to late-'60s California dreamin' than an NYC-hip riff on SoCal somnambulism, one that occasionally Pops with Warhol's mondo minimalism yet never snaps nor crackles. "Lonesome Cowboys" this is not, despite the fact that Surf uses virtually the same cast.

Thanks to his pitch-perfect portrayal of Parks and Recreation's Type A–personality-run-amuck boss, we're willing to forgive Rob Lowe for virtually anything. This pitiful excuse for a political satire, however, seriously tests that theory.

The fictional filmmaker's rejection of "quirkiness" ends up, ironically, being embraced by the movie itself, but even at its most sitcomish, Karpovsky and Lowe's banter has a contentious authenticity that recognizes these industry grunts as vital and three-dimensional-no matter their nominal supporting status.

There's enough filmmaking talent evident throughout that you wish the journey were more satisfying overall.

This Siberian jaunt, free from cultural weirdness and ethical barbed wire, is even more of a vacation for Werner Herzog than it first appears: The German codirector never left L.A.

This exceedingly lazy comedy is just the first of two "Paranormal Activity" parodies being crammed down our throats this year. The horror!

Broken City never asks its gumshoe to repent for the blood on his own hands, and the anticorruption - but pro-vigilantism - ethics here are especially murky.

There's savvy in Schwarzenegger's understanding of his appeal. Always foreign yet weirdly Americanized in our dreams, the big guy is a craggy monument in need of a countryside. He's back in the place that deserves him.

An admirably balanced, wide-ranging look at the phenomenon of Somali high-seas piracy.

The promise Dumont once showed has ossified into unholy shtick.

The feverish intensity of enthusiastic birdwatchers may seem better suited for a Christopher Guest movie, but director Jeffrey Kimball's lush cinematography makes Central Park's beauty no laughing matter.

With its rock-skimming male bonding alternating between grisly homicides and a florid Mexican standoff that begets a tidy take-the-money-and-run finale, this tale seems less timely than merely tall.

Expertly conjured atmosphere only gets Muschietti so far, but there's enough genuine promise here that you're willing to cut this talented newcomer some slack.

Though its insights are slight-the movie feels as delicate and ephemeral as its sleepy winter surroundings - you can't help but admire the overall generousness O'Brien shows to his characters and performers.

It's unclear what drew the likes of Billy Bob Thornton, Eva Longoria and Andre Braugher to this tepid grindhouse retread, but at least they liven up the proceedings whenever they're onscreen.

An engaging study of the disparate characters who are drawn to speak out when the authorities crack the whip.

Then observe as all but the hard-core Colferphiles slink out embarrassed, feeling as confused and discombobulated as if they too just took an electric bolt to the brain.

If such outré flourishes don't fully lift the story past the limitations of innocence-lost storytelling, they do suggest Ávila is an artist worth keeping an eye on.

Ceaselessly upbeat and just short of zany, Let My People Go! will bring smiles of recognition to anyone who hasn't seen early Woody Allen in a while.

My Best Enemy bleeds suspense like a pin-pricked tire. It wants to be clever, but survivor tales bring with them too much muck.

The curtain can't come down fast enough.

Though based partly on actual events, Ruben Fleischer's ludicrous shoot-'em-up plays fast and loose with the facts, and plenty else besides.

Time to fire up the critical Black & Decker: Somebody-there are six credited screenwriters-really wasn't clear on the concept.

The film's notion that a little understanding and a lot of e-mailing would basically solve the Middle East crisis, however, is as reductive as it is utopian.

Apted once wanted to give us "glimpses into Britain's future," per the archival-footage announcer. With this installment, he's delivered an intimate portrait of settling down and finally making peace with one's well-publicized past.

What, exactly, is the payoff for suffering through such painfully bad filmmaking for 93 minutes? Forget about getting "A Few Good Men"–style military melodramatics; this movie quickly proves that even a few good performances, lines of dialogue or music cues are a pipe dream. Your loyalty will not be rewarded.

Yet worst of all is the way the film ultimately reveals its humanistic setup as a lazy pretext to redeem Damon's big-business apologist through the healing power of nature. He's not the only one who should be put out to pasture.

The whole second half suggests a new way of storytelling-like one of those Wes Anderson montages done by an obsessive fan of Hatari! To judge from Tabu's first hour, pacing is not Gomes's strong suit, yet the filmmaker who emerges might win you over.

Whether blithely comparing American prisons to retirement homes or gleefully recalling the time he chewed off his own fingers in Siberia, the moonlighting German New Wave auteur injects some much-needed black humor into what is otherwise a soporific star vehicle.

Berlinger and Sinofksy merely suggested Hobbs might be responsible for the crime; Berg goes in for the kill, inconclusive evidence and docu-ethics be damned. The queasy certainty with which the filmmaker jumps to her conclusions, however, is all too reminiscent of the original prosecutors' zeal. It's hard to imagine how someone could study this case for so long and yet miss its most critical lesson.

Best is Viggo Mortensen's William S. Burroughs proxy Old Bull Lee, holed up in a perspiration-saturated Louisiana mansion with a shell-shocked Amy Adams and a gas-huffing chamber at the ready.

When it comes to human emotions, however, the filmmaker is all thumbs, crassly fumbling for audience response via clichéd uses of dropped-out sound and the occasional twinkling piano.

Despite being the subject of nearly every shot in the film, Hoss maintains an air of mystery, simultaneously projecting severity, sensitivity and sensuousness throughout.

It isn't until the story reaches its fancifully abstract final passages, where cinema displaces music as Douglas's weapon of choice, that Chase's reverie reveals itself as a particularly exceptional exploration of how art ceases being an idle hobby and becomes an obsessive vocation.

What's surprising is that Rogen and Streisand have a genuinely complementary chemistry, feeding off each other in a way that suggests that, given a halfway decent script, the two would make a better-than-decent screen duo.

Vibrating with the geekery of a filmmaker off the chain, the movie plays like no other this year. Tarantino, steeped in even the smallest Leonean gesture (what's with the weird terrain shifts?), knows how to satisfy fans of scuzzy Italian horse operas and badass superviolence in equal measure.

A genuine labor of love and fictional self-loathing, Sullivan's animation style is undeniably compelling, whether he's channeling Grant Wood's paintings or Robert Crumb's monochromatic sketches. But the interweaving stories of commercialized religion, rancid Americana and alcoholic wretches start wearing thin around the movie's midpoint; by the end, the whole morose endeavor risks becoming downright threadbare.

Whether it's Caplan and Webber trading goofy dance moves or Brie being perkily OCD-ridden, Date works best as a collection of winsome, unconnected vignettes; its ideal distribution model would be piece by piece on YouTube.

More of a massive back-patting for bleeding hearts than a comprehensive-or even semi-comprehensive-survey of DIY protest art, the film unintentionally makes the perfect valentine for the OWS version of radicalism: It's righteous, full of rage and cripplingly unfocused.

It's one thing to call a film about homophobia and human rights Any Day Now; it's another to actually have your character sing "I Shall Be Released" in full at the end. The intent is righteous. The dramatic overkill is deadly.

This moronically unfunny gangster comedy fluctuates wildly between the lowest-of-low humor and pity-the-aged-man pathos, and offers further evidence that the best days are behind its iconic cast members.

It all comes down to the Big Birthday Party and a furious bike ride, which he's clearly done before, in "The 40 Year Old Virgin."

Inspiring heartbreaker of a documentary.

It's not an easy sit; we're never let off the hook with golden-hued memories or belated bits of wisdom. Maybe this is love after all.

A mesmerizing study in excess, Peter Jackson and company's long-awaited prequel to the Lord of the Rings saga is bursting with surplus characters, wall-to-wall special effects, unapologetically drawn-out story tangents and double the frame rate (48 over 24) of the average movie.

The details are gripping, presented with respect for an audience's intelligence.

Russell Crowe's pained vocal stylings (they sound more like barks) as relentless Inspector Javert can be forgiven after hearing Hugh Jackman's old-pro fluidity in the central role of Jean Valjean, hiding a criminal past.

Husbands and fathers, do not try this sh-- at home. Such "lovable" misbehavior is best left to the professional cads.

While the documentary offers some insights into the pervertion of art for ideological purposes, too much of it simply finds Fry standing in dumbfounded awe of the holy sites that populate his journey.

Director Maya Kenig's film never decides whether it wants to be a social satire, a familial drama or a parable about Israeli life during perpetual wartime; that it neither picks a route nor cohesively combines any of those strands doesn't make a fairly generic father-daughter story any more colorful.

From its flash-forward framing sequence to its glossy black and white images, the film emulates "Raging Bull" in nearly every particular, while failing to capture even a sliver of that tortured-soul sports-movie's insight or visceral power.

Rice's style is pitched somewhere between Merchant Ivory and Wes Anderson, favoring shots of sad, pretty people looking bereft in elaborately elegant rooms. But it's Jones and Treadaway, both seething volcanoes trapped behind artfully pallid faces, who turn what could've been a candy-coated comedy of manners into a complex, melancholic farce.

Director Jacob Rosenberg's approach is heavy with archival footage and interviews, yet oddly features almost nothing from Way himself; his puzzling absence for most of the film turns the project into less of a biography than a one-note hagiography.

Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters) may be an occasionally interesting visual stylist, but storytelling-wise, his second English-language effort couldn't be more stillborn.

In the wake of the spunkier "Your Sister's Sister," writer-director Brian Savelson can't seem to mount a head of steam, and his chamber piece feels underdeveloped. Even Slattery's sourness doesn't redeem the banality of impending heart-to-hearts.

Lay the Favorite is frenzied without being funny. Like Judy Holliday on a particularly manic day, Hall tears from scene to scene with a bubbly effervescence that is technically impressive yet increasingly exhausting.

There are a few nicely turned moments... but they're scattered plums in a starchy, flavorless pudding.

At times, the film's lyrical drift shades into incoherence, spackled with globs of free-floating voiceover and Larry Clark-like indolent moments. It's both lovely and frustrating, at least until hard times lay bare the gulf between Skye's fractured family and the boys' more stable lives.

Even at this short running time, there's a looseness to the kaleidoscopic adventure that becomes slightly wearying.

Hyde Park could have been fawningly ponderous; that it's merely an airy trifle puts it a cut above the usual Oscar bait.

The young actors' vacant-eyed brazenness may be true to life, but there's a whiff of exploitation, matched by the script's disinterest in exploring any friction that isn't skin on skin.

Director Andrew Neel has hit upon a compelling reason for the found-footage gimmick: to indict a narcissistic generation who think their phones make them royalty.

There's not much to dislike in My Brothers' sweet inconsequence, but even less to quicken the pulse or stir the heart.

The badly miscalculated meat of the film is an endless parade of to-camera addresses by performers such as Lindsay Lohan, Viola Davis and Uma Thurman, all reading clumsily from Monroe's recently discovered letters and journal entries as if it were final-exam time at the Actors Studio.

The fact that director Darragh Byrne has laden things with a Celtic Whimsy 101 score and a sketched outline of a script makes it even tougher for Meaney to lift this film out of its social-drama rut.

The characters are flat; the voiceover is awkward.

Marshall Lewy's film functions largely as a delivery system for Carlyle's performance. Luckily, Carlyle's tough, tender turn is strong enough to carry the load.

Fortunately, there are a good number of Yen-choreographed action scenes to break up the monotony.

The way forward, both in Caouette's real-life situation and his development as an artist, remains unclear, yet that frustration makes it to the screen, in spiky waves that signal a vital personal quest.

It's almost worth wading through the wearisome setup to get to the fun stuff. But there is a reason fast-forward buttons were invented.

An aggressively unpleasant man somehow lands a perfect series of gigs in this rudely funny documentary: first as a pounding rock drummer who revolutionized the field; then as a fearless, rage-filled polo player; and finally as an impatient interviewee.

Only Gandolfini comes off as a character as opposed to an effigy, his sad-sack posture and f-it-all unprofessionalism truly capturing the tragedy of a working man with a one-way ticket to 99-percenter hell.

Helnwein's elaborate vision bumps up against practical concerns and meets with resistance - a conflict that this superficial portrait glosses over almost as much as it reduces Helnwein to simply being a determined, intransigent creative type.

A new Red Dawn could have been so much more fun had it thrown a properly out-of-bounds tea party. (It lacks the signature brawn of original director John Milius, a guns-first libertarian.)

The voice work sounds more quick-paycheck than impassioned, and the animation rarely rises above video-game cut-scene quality. As revisionist holiday fables go, you're better off watching Aardman's delightful "Arthur Christmas" than this lump of coal.

Too-cutesy conceits such as Hitch's imagined conversations with serial killer Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) feebly attempt to ground the story in psychological terra firma, while horribly on-the-nose dialogue flatters those viewers who prefer to keep their sense of cinema history on fan-mag frivolous levels.

Lyrical touches and the most moving use ever of Katy Perry's "Firework" almost cancel out a cheap-shot third-act tragedy, yet it's the actors that save the film from soaping itself into Euro-miserablist irrelevance.