It's pleasant enough, as a view of small-town Americana, but played very straight.

The trouble is that all of these characters are more interesting when things are going badly for them than when the tide has turned, and Carroll's determination to make the final reel an extended bout of audience tummy tickling is disappointingly conventional.

Cool, it's a rom-com featuring the man who'd influence Romanticism.

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.

Like so many Doors chroniclers, DiCillo can’t help but fall under the singer’s spell; it’s understandable, but frustrating.

The lunacy on view is strangely dreamlike, and no bad thing. It's only a pity the film actually tries to make sense. More abandon all round, and the result could have been a Z-grade cult classic.

There are splendid economies, too: Rogers' mirrored dressing-room registers first as a social humiliation for the cop, who can't find the exit, but later his intimacy with her surroundings gives him an edge over a killer. There's little waste, though the thriller element could have been tuned up a bit.

It’s all a lot of effort for very little output, sadly. The Current War has lots of flashy lights and whizzy features, but it remains fatally underpowered.

Sprightly dialogue, nice performances.

There's no Deep Throat this time, but Tom Wilkinson does his best Ben Bradlee as a hawkish legal mentor, while Kevin Kline coos menacingly as Lincoln's Nixonian war secretary, Edwin Stanton, a man seeking to hang prisoners out of political expediency. It all seems a little forced.

The film’s best scenes are a series of hilarious father-son encounters where the son wants to be loved and the dad just doesn’t get it.

Hicks is undoubtedly missed, but this attempt to commune with this social critic's spirit falls frustratingly short of his brilliance.

Let your mind wander during this painfully generic teen-sex dramedy (trust us, it will), and there might be emotions worse than frustration in store.

Always effortful and desperate to impress, The Lion King may serve as a virtual substitute for going to the zoo (don’t slide down the Black Mirror cynicism of that idea), but let’s hope it never replaces such outings, nor its 1994 forebear, a passport to something far more sublime.

Both overindulgent and the writer-director's most fascinatingly strange movie to date.

We like our secondhand vengeance as sleazy and bloody as the next grindhouse fiend, but even an intentional throwback shouldn’t feel content to coast on so much déjà vu.

Every bit as unshakable as "An Inconvenient Truth," Werner Boote's documentary isolates the mysteries (and possible dangers) of that ubiquitous titular substance.

Apart from the devastating material itself, some of Lapa’s aesthetic choices are extremely off-putting.

A blasé Hanks redeems this string of sexist, racist, comic clichés with winning charm. It's funny.

Live action cartoonery had been underworked since Tashlin mapped its possibilities with Jerry Lewis, but the novelty value of Sellers' disaster-prone Inspector Clouseau, funny French accent and all, wore off quicker than its commercial value.

The exceptional cast helps to while away the platitudes and pieties, provided you can accept the likes of Mitchum, Sinatra and Marvin as somewhat wrinkly students.

Three of the episodes are rough-and-ready but vigorous Grand Guignol fun. The fourth is something else again, a marvellous mood piece of chilling intensity.

Fine photography, but the script is a typically numbing affair, and the cast, aside from Peck and Meillon (whose part was considerably cut), seem totally out of their depth.

Seneca is worth watching, Ry Cooder's score is among his best work, and this certainly isn't sequel fodder.

The occasional elegiac tone lamenting the passing of the West seems entirely out of place. Only Michael Parks, still aping James Dean at nearly 40, provides some welcome distraction.

There's too much going on here - of a winning, thoughtful nature - to dismiss Josh Radnor's back-to-college romance as the nostalgia bath it mainly is.

Director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) can do this stuff with his eyes closed, and sometimes it feels like he might be doing that as the plot chugs from London to Berlin and secrets are duly uncovered. But there’s enough visual flair to elevate things above standard genre fare.

Though Walker, in his most demanding part, does his best to transcend his characteristically bro-ish demeanor, he’s ultimately failed by this film, whose script and questionable taste hardly add up to a eulogy-worthy goodbye.

Even with the actors’ laudable work—especially Simm, who finally shakes off the notion that he’s a poor man’s Simon Pegg—there’s not enough going on past the temporal trick to make the humanistic elements pop. Gimmick aside, the title is regrettably apropos.

A swirly-girly sameness has taken over Malick’s flow; his movies aren’t supposed to feel like fashion spreads but they do, even as hushed narrators speak about their aching souls and lost loves.

Not so much a comedy about American values as a 2,500 mile skid on a banana skin. The visual gags come thick and fast, and are about as subtly signposted as the exit markers on a freeway. An exercise in the comedy of humiliation which is the stuff of shamefaced giggles.

As a vehicle for their considerable comic talents, the enterprise is wheelclamped by type casting.

The D Train ultimately generates so few laughs from its thin “be yourself” message that a commendable refusal to gawk at the gay stuff is all that keeps it on track.

The spot-on cast almost holds the movie together, but whatever potential this timely premise has is wasted on reworking the same gag about overconsumption.

The black-and-white visuals disturb for only so long, and while themes of indoctrination and conspiracy prove initially intriguing, the film quickly descends into fistfights and gunfire. Still, there's little about the comic strip action to suggest that we should be taking this too seriously.

A smart concept is thoroughly wasted in this cute but grating DreamWorks animated comedy.

Yet even with the rich, inherently cinematic texture of the urban setting and two excellent native outer-borough actors in Morales and Reyes, Gun Hill Road falters thanks to its paint-by-numbers storytelling.

Once this cultural exploration devolves into just a forum for grating geek griping and Jar-Jar Binks hatred, however, you'll wish you could escape to a galaxy far, far away.

The 33 makes shameless lunges at religious imagery via ghostly auras and this-is-my-flesh apportioning of daily rations. It feels tacky, and only late in the game does Riggen find the script’s most interesting idea, about unwanted celebrity. Miner story, major fail.

Shorn of its quintessentially American roots, a biting tale of adult extravagance becomes insubstantially tween-aged.

The plot is reasonably entertaining, and Davis handles the action sequences well, but where the film transcends a lingering sense of déjà vu is in its intelligent performances: Hackman and Cassidy make a strong, unsentimental couple, hints of romance and reconciliation lurking beneath their businesslike exchanges.

Ultimately, this feels like a hagiographic official portrait that takes the sting out of the proverbial bee.

There’s a lot going on here: you never quite know what Maggie Gyllenhaal is going to throw into the pot next, but it’s always visually exciting and often funny.

Made for cable with many has-beens from hell.

An unfocused comedy about weird Army pseudoscience, ends up blinking before we laugh.

Lotz's grudging fortitude provides enough engagement to let you overlook the cracks in the film's facade, but when she cedes the screen to Casper Van Dien's thick-witted police detective, all you can see are the gaps.

An adaptation of Mike Batistick's Off Broadway play, this stagy character study about immigrants living off the crumbs of the American Dream revels in cut-rate street smartness. Then comes the third act, at which point the film moves from obvious message-mongering to the beating of a post–9/11 dead horse.

This is truly De Palma–ville, and the filmmaker’s remake of Alain Corneau’s tale of corporate bloodletting, "Love Crime" (2010), is a welcome return to the carnal shockers that he does so well.

While this has its pleasures, it feels more like a doc you’d watch on terrestrial TV rather than seek out in the cinema.

The director’s latest—a lighthearted romance set in 1920s Germany and France—won’t do much to sway proponents or detractors from their own perspectives, though taken at face value, it’s one of Allen’s most charmingly conceived and performed efforts.

Ticking-time-bomb suspense is not Nair’s forte, so she relies on Michael Andrews’s Middle East–inflected score to do most of the heavy lifting in the present-day scenes, which feel shapeless and perfunctory.

Harmless piece of Neil Simon fluff, rather flattened by Hiller's steamroller direction.

It's almost cruel to criticize something so essentially lighthearted and disposable, but it must be said that a lot of these jokes feel distinctly recycled, mainly from "Broadway Danny Rose."

Griffith's directorial debut - after 20 years of scripting for Corman - does deliver the expected race/chase/demolition derby mayhem, but every time the focus switches to Ron Howard's adolescent romantic worries, it stalls.

It's too bad V/H/S starts off on such a high note. Mainly, the omnibus film feels undercooked, even on the grounds of its forced technological setup.

It's Weiss's sheer gonzo energy and his determination to keep it together (barely) in the name of justice that initially fuel this underdog tale, giving it a far more manic, unpredictable edge than your usual courtroom handwringer.

You’re going to find it all either enormously empowering or deeply calculated: an Arcade Fire–scored TV commercial for instant spirituality.

The results make your head spin more than they make your spirits soar.

This is a superhero movie that feels like it might have been made by anyone and no one at the same time, simply space-filler before the next big team-up movie.

Kormákur creates some effective jump scares and considerable suspense as the lion stalks its prey with blood-chilling growls one minute and deadly silence the next. The CGI budget can’t always quite match his ambition, however, and perhaps as a result, his timing sometimes seems off.

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.

What makes things different is the way Blumberg strikes an assured balance between dour downward spirals and “work the program” uplift, gifting these flawed people with both a sense of hope and the knowledge that it will never be enough.

It’s not a perfect movie. Sometimes it moves very slowly. Other times the acting is so big it becomes pantomime. But what Piper is incredible at (in both this and I Hate Suzie) is taking the raw, intense, angry energy, that builds when you’re forced to spend too much of your life tackling the toxicity of masculinity around you, and pouring it out like a long line of acid shots for viewers to chug.

If you’re not a #ReleasetheSnyderCut signee, you’re still better off watching the original, patchy as it is. At least it’s short.

Why Stone also chooses to characterize those on his side as feeble-brained hippie protestors is a mystery, but in its attempts to debunk the feasibility of massive energy reduction, Pandora’s Promise at least brings some measure of rhetorical skill to its arguments.

The movie indulges a few too many whims, but it's never less than alive.

Cracks simply doesn't make the grade.

The lack of suspense amid the Technicolor carnage disappoints. Subtle it ain't, but the title alone should keep art lovers away.

Imagine "Goodfellas" without much in the way of stakes, and you’ll get Clint Eastwood’s pleasingly square and forgettable adaptation of the Tony-feted 2006 jukebox musical.

So while the film clearly wants to be an affirmation of female agency, it plays instead like nothing more than the story of a girl who marries an ogre and waits to be freed by true love’s kiss.

Let's not make 4:44 Last Day on Earth sound cooler than it is. Compared with Lars von Trier's histrionically doomed "Melancholia," the film lacks any serious attempt to grapple with mortality.

Even if the music leaves you cold, there’s plenty of captivating awkwardness here, like Paul McCartney listlessly watching the monitors in his dressing room, or producer Harvey Weinstein solving a tech issue by calling Google exec Eric Schmidt in the audience.

There are tears, there is laughter, there are ups, there are downs, there is hugging and there is learning, but none of it will leave an impression. Instead, it leaves you only with a faint yearning for a proper, scary-Simmons chair-hurling freak-out.

Stallone's performance is a superb blend of stubborn-jawed gravity and ironic hamming as he heads, Godfather-like, for a confrontation with the Senate.

Despite some ingenious effects, a generally trivial exercise that never matches the punch of the original.

The film aspires to hommage, it's true, but its references are altogether too obvious. That said, there's a Psycho bathroom pastiche that's almost worth the price of a ticket all by itself; and no collector of movie mush will want to miss it for its good bits, which are more than a few.

Most of the blame must rest with McLeod, whose incredibly cackhanded direction piles on the whimsy by the bucket-load and can't come to grips with the absurdity at all.

Director Thomas (once Sgt Lucy Bates of Hill Street Blues) has recreated '70s sitcom-land with the kind of unerring attention to detail Merchant-Ivory lavish on a society ball, and she's drawn hilariously synthetic performances from a shrewdly cloned cast.

Awkward banter, a lack of narrative thrust and concentrated character deep-digging, and a performance by Sally Hawkins as a Russian maid that seems beamed in from another movie all contribute to the cinematic equivalent of a half-baked fruitcake.

For the undemanding, it may seem a fair stand-off; but compared to Hill's best work, it's merely a jerk-off.

A movie that gives Streep her most emotionally blocked character in years, without caricature.

The grim, black humour of yore sporadically breaks through the glossy sheen, providing moments of vintage vitriol.

The crass Scots jokes are irresistible; Alan Arkin's cameo as a mild-mannered police chief is sheer perfection; and the cultish references to Beat poetry should please slumming hipsters. Like an exploding haggis, funny but extremely messy.

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.

Sister is the one you remember; like the film, she's mesmerizing because of her flaws as well as her charms.

There are a handful of brilliant set pieces, including a scorched-earth attack on child beauty pageants. But this exercise in wink-nudge bad taste simply leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

A boxing movie in desperate need of Martin Scorsese (aren’t they all?).

Macdonald, playing an outsider with wisdom, is by far the most sympathetic character; the movie has plenty to say about the parenting traditions of the wealthy, not much of it favorable.

This is shameless stuff: happy, barefoot peasants sing that traditional Latin cancion, 'Crush the grapes, crush the grapes,' the moonlight is so strong you could get burned, and the metaphors are writ large as tabloid headlines.

If you want to feel good about a war with no end, this one’s for you.

Richard Pearce's thriller suffers from near-total predictability, with a script that careers headlong through clichéd situations, calculatedly coarse dialogue, and cardboard characters. That said, Pearce reveals a strong feel for lurid locations and spectacular set pieces, and makes the film look stylish, too much so in the case of the three leads. Indeed, taken straight it's all a little risible; but as fast-paced hokum pitted with plot-holes, it's polished fun - no more, no less.

It's about as deep as an afternoon of people-watching.

Brando-wheezing Gandolfini never slums it, but there’s still no shaking the sense that a pro has shown up for amateur hour.

This rather mushy combination of animation and live-action remains one of Disney's most controversial efforts.

Viewers enduring early adolescence or those grappling with its psychic scars will recognize the honesty in the comic humiliation.

Mildly diverting comedy in overexposed terrain.

Coppola's meticulous direction, and some exceptional acting (especially from Caan) never fail to rivet the attention, there's a pervasive and worrying sense of the central issues being gently but undeniably fudged.

The film is at its most entertaining when it’s a showcase for Smith and Lawrence’s easy chemistry, whether improvising a Reba McEntire country song to appease some rednecks or bantering about Burnett’s bad eating habits during a convenience store hold-up. They’re eminently watchable. Then again, when the highlight of an action movie fourthquel comes with the two stars watching a younger man do his stuff, it might be time to call it a day.