It’s not one of this summer’s strongest entries, but it’s fun to spend 90 minutes in this dog-eat-dick world.

It’s hampered by a pedestrian script and an improbable ending, but always catches fire when the supercharged Law is on screen.

Still, if any modern strip is worthy of an extended, Hobbes-style tongue bath, it’s this one.

An uneasy blend of neurotic comedy and mawkish sentimentality.

The predictable fish-out-of-water comedy gradually gives way to something deeper, as conflicting world views are exchanged, homespun wisdom dispensed and minds broadened.

Adapted from Dimitri Verhulst’s semi-autobiographical novel with a flair that recalls the squalor-and-dazzle visuals of “Trainspotting,” Felix Van Groeningen’s highly entertaining tale is full of hilarity, horror and heartbreak (sometimes within the same scene).

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.

Eddie the Eagle may suffice for a brainless Friday night, but an honest account would have been a lot more memorable.

The excessive blood-spurting gruesomeness and cartoonish stop-motion effects trivialise the horror and undercut the would-be black humour in this travestied sequel to Stuart Gordon's hugely enjoyable film.

M3GAN 2.0 continues to offer up a goofy brand of cautionary tale, too: against AI, tech dependence, and Silicon Valley types who want to stick a chip in their brains. You can take that seriously as you want to, just don’t be surprised to find yourself watching it again on your cellphone one day.

For the most part, The Forgotten Space treats its subjects and settings as exploitable commodities in service to a lot of facile rise-working-man! muckraking. The ism trumps all.

A film that can narrow choices down to making a million as a car salesman, or drifting with alternate complacency and anxiety into middle-age as a superannuated beach bum, has something going for it in the way of cumulative obsessiveness.

So self-consciously elegiac that its too-good-to-be-true heroes are imprisoned in a slim storyline of implausible fantasy, the movie would have been more effective had Burt and Kirk simply been allowed to be themselves. Of course, it's fun to watch old pros, and Wallach, as a mad, myopic hit-man, is genuinely funny; but one can't help feeling that a rare gathering of Golden Age talent has been criminally wasted.

The movie’s admirable fleetness, however, doesn’t mitigate some of its narrative errors — Alexander’s opening voiceover suggests his family is totally oblivious to his role in their misery, which is disproved by a later scene — nor does it counteract an overall sense of slightness that prevents this from being a family-film classic.

A flimsily plotted but visually impressive addition to the endless Freddy Krueger saga, with an unsavoury gynaecological flavour.

There’s one bright spot amid all the awkward groping and abundant onscreen texting, and his name is Zach Gilford.

All this, along with the tremulous romanticism, might seem unbearably portentous were it not for some lovely comic moments - notably, Busey in the draft-dodging scenes - and the sheer exhilaration of the surfing footage.

More earnest than agile, the whole thing smacks of heavy-handed authorial jiggering-never mind that it's based on a true story.

In all aspects, The Girl can’t help it — this is headline-torn cinema du tearjerking at its most generic.

Kosinski continues to lavish far more thought on how his elaborate fantasy worlds look than how they work, and neither the politics nor the human stakes here coalesce into rational or relatable drama.

'We need an edge!' is Coach Ulbrickson’s verdict on his crew, and the same can be said about the film as a whole. But there is enough in The Boys in the Boat to keep you invested come the final showdown.

Though the director includes a few brief humdingers — a fight that involves a Rube Goldberg–ish tangle of wires; some munitions-fueled mayhem in a farmhouse — it’s not enough to keep viewers from wishing they were thumbing through a John le Carré novel instead.

While Fischer handles every emotional curveball, she's not helped by the film's reliance on rote notions of piecing your life back together. Is it worth putting a good actor through the screen-martyrdom wringer for a minuscule payoff?

Just as you're reeling from the tackiness of this premise, set within such an explosive context, the plot doubles down on it.

An unabashed piece of political activism arriving three weeks before the election.

Short on plausibility but preserving the psycho-sexual ambiguities throughout, Bigelow's seductively stylish, wildy fetishistic thriller is proof that a woman can enter a traditionally male world and, like Megan, beat men at their own game.

While everyone is proficient, this uneasy mix of comedy, thriller and melodrama fumbles its way through a forest of clichés and contrivances.

It’s gory and mildly funny but its joke – that the bear is acting like a serial killer – is the only one the film has. It wears thin very quickly.

Plainspoken music doc relies on firsthand testimony from band members and key observers.

Wah Do Dem simply mopes along before aimlessly stumbling to a halt.

The Freebie grimly reaffirms the status quo, concluding it's better to have no sex at all than to forsake the Ikea-furnished domestic dream.

If Fuqua and his screenwriters (including True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto) slightly botch the underlying theme of redemption—Ethan Hawke’s haunted ex-Confederate sharpshooter could have been more developed—it still makes good on its ideas of community pride.

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

The movie will make you tap your toes; don't expect much for your head or your heartstrings.

Illegal has caused a stir in Belgium, and the sincerity of the movie can't be denied. But there's little emotion to hold on to, apart from a mother's impotent concern about her wayward teenage son (Gontcharov), still on the outside.

Detailing his efforts to distribute Bananas!*, his 2009 exposé on Dole's use of toxic chemicals in Nicaragua, Swedish documentarian Fredrik Gertten's latest plays as an occasionally fascinating, if ultimately reductive, showdown between First Amendment rights and corporate power.

There is some freaky fun here. Niccol’s food for thought leaves a lingering taste.

An outrageous, melodramatic shocker touching on madness, homosexual prostitution, incest, disease and cannibalism, replete with enough imagery to sustain an American Lit seminar for months.

Things quickly fall apart, with a pileup of sub–Rod Serling narrative twists, a choppy action sequence heavy on the Michael Bay slo-mo and a sequel-ready climax that reveals the whole project as little more than a feature-length calling card.

This is a warm-hearted account of an adult’s painful journey, aided by a chirping counterpart.

Robbins' handling of the human element is as sickly and soggy as a dunked doughnut, and the script makes gonks out of its characters. But the flirting frisbee scenes are pretty neat.

Even with the original stars returning, the sequel feels weightless, disposable and hardly the stuff of Skynet nightmares.

The potentially interesting material is suffocated by a B-movie story and a C-grade script.

This is strictly an amateur-hour affair.

Despite the barrage of one-liners and almost farcial plot twists, Zieff's light touch and some unselfish ensemble acting make this team genuinely endearing.

The dialogue is the stuff of rapidly closing Off Broadway plays; the camerawork is flavorless and haphazard. Tucci hits every line like he’s about to break into a malicious tap dance, and Eve looks as if she was handed her script on the way to the set.

The novelty of their industry aside, there's little to differentiate this from any other relationship-centered Amerindie.

Rockwell’s performance is impressively flinty, as is the rest of the cast (including William H. Macy delivering some twitchy character work), and the dialogue sparkles with brilliantly colorful mountain-man slang. Despite its byzantine narrative, the film remains never less than absorbing, as the walls slowly close in on this good-hearted but ultimately flawed protagonist.

The impression is less of calculated ineptitude than of seasoned professionals (director Tod Williams made The Door in the Floor) playing dumb, as a checklist of household items-frying pans, endlessly shutting doors, a pool cleaner with a mind of its own-test viewers' reflexes.

Hyams has not come up with a climax to match Kubrick's rush through the star-gate; but this is still space fiction of a superior kind, making the Star Trek movies look puny by comparison.

For all its inspired moments, this is a movie content to coast on the charms of its terrific cast of comedic actors. Welcome to Night of the Living Deadpan.

Props should be given to Rodriguez’s breathless “let’s put on a show” inventiveness. Plus, Macy and the booger--kick ass!

Starting off as lurid, documentary-style melodrama before it settles into an over-extended and often risible cat-and-mouse chase, this witless pile of prurient sleaze is poorly paced and saddled with a predictable script, stereotype characterisations, and distastefully voyeuristic direction.

Paranoia can of course be an excellent dynamic for movie-makers, and within its own dream-like structure, Red Dawn is both compelling and witty (the town's drive-in becomes a 're-education camp'). But it also contains moments that are repulsive in the grand right wing tradition, all the more so since Milius, who once held the fascination of a rebel, is here voicing sentiments that the Reagan administration actually believes.

Sinister has so much going for it - adult psychology, a great bitchfest of a marital meltdown - that you wince when it finally makes some rather dull choices involving the supernatural.

Unlike Carroll’s perversely idealized protagonist, Burton’s Alice is just another anachronistic feminist tearing down Victorian patriarchal norms. Even her—[shudder]—Avril Lavigne–blared theme song is a skin-deep grrrl-power accessory.

There’s something deeply moving, almost tragic, about a good man being slowly enveloped by the dark times around him. Munich captures it nicely.

No Hollywood film can ever solve the central problem of adapting this book, in that it inevitably does too much of the imagining for you. DuVernay makes a big-hearted go of it, even if she seems slightly dazzled by her own magical mystery tour.

Like Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it both records and condemns the passage of time and the advent of progress; and there is a sombre, mournful quality which places the film very high up in the league of great Westerns.

A predictable quest plot is unwound with tremendous verve, and the only real disappointments are some ropey special effects. But Fleischer's zest for action carries it all along splendidly.

The School of Rock funnyman flies highest; passion, be it for rare birds or the Yardbirds, is a plumage he wears wonderfully.

After the nuance of what comes before, it’s annoying that the knottiness vanishes in an ending that wraps everything up in a neat bow.

It all adds up to a pleasant diversion, but you might wish this cinematic bonbon offered something closer to a meal.

Meticulously schoolmarmish, John Hale's script lays out all the power plays behind Elizabeth Tudor's battle to keep Mary Stuart off her throne, but fails to provide much else.

Together with Hamburger Hill, this illustrates that Irvin probably couldn't stage an action scene if you held a gun to his head. Even more turgid and unconvincing are the quieter 'dramatic' scenes, which serve only to arrest the plot's minimal momentum and prolong the agony.

This family endeavour is an acting masterclass, and we should be grateful that it’s lured Daniel Day-Lewis back into acting after eight years in the metaphorical woods.

As envisioned by Japanese director Sion Sono, the brains behind blood-drenched show Tokyo Vampire Hotel and flushed turtle-turned kaiju film Love & Peace, it’s a hoot. But Sono fans expecting the combo with Cage to go properly off may be somewhat surprised by a slightly sedate pace.

First-time director Stern - Macaulay Culkin's punching bag in the Home Alone films - gives a broad performance as the pitching coach who knows nothing about baseball. Approach with aspirin.

Midler gets to play her vulgar, trashy self twice over, Tomlin introduces a little comic variety as the gutsy blue collar worker and the drippy sister, and Abrahams handles the mechanical plot with skill, if not style. The frenetic fun reduces everyone to a cipher; it's difficult to care about any of them.

It’s just blinkered middle-class pandering at its most shameless.

Superb limb-erasing effects and lush cinematography are bonuses, though not so much the cloying presence of American Idol's Carrie Underwood.

The plot (Stallone scheming himself and his two brothers uptown on the tails of ambitious gimmickry) is shot full of sentimental holes; but the creation of a floridly fantasticated netherworld of low-life high-rollers and their inevitably multi-coloured circumlocutions is irresistible.

One of Hollywood's better 'growing up' movies, this steers well clear of tear-jerker material by tracking the on-off juvenile romance of car-mad (post-Star Wars) Hamill and apprentice hooker Annie Potts through the neon glare of Las Vegas.

Unfortunately for this rock documentary, this fan-to-frontman saga is not that interesting a turn.

This visually epic, but monotonous collaboration between James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez is less than the sum of its slick parts.

Where the book had a kernel of intellectual irony to it — words betray a nation — this drama goes shamelessly for the heart.

It's a rebound-romance movie that's simplistic but sweet, an uncomplicated cinematic bonbon. It'll only take a few quick bites, however, before you'll be ready to move on to something meatier.

It all feels pretty familiar: the tortured genius, the younger woman, the plot taking a suffocating turn, murder as an existential debate, the world increasingly closing in on our antihero. But there’s something sloppy and sluggish about Irrational Man, even by Allen’s uneven standards.

Fists fly furiously and much blood is spilled; there's a sacrifice via sword that's both cringe-inducing and cheerworthy. Even special guest star Jackie Chan gets in on the fun with a hilarious bit of food-jitsu. It's almost enough to make you forget that this entertainingly hollow film is populated entirely with toy soldiers.

Obviously made on a TV budget, the plot is weedy, and the film is saved only by some neat stunts and the splendour of the Australian landscape.

It feels like a massive retrenchment—privately, a rebellion seems to have been fought and lost—and only the most loyal fans will be happy about it.

The film is made up of plundered parts from the "Oceans" series and "The Usual Suspects," and—like several of the forged tomes that figure in the plot — it’s a pale imitation.

The web of relationships between English and Japanese is too schematic in its polarisation of characters, Oshima's handling of the narrative is not so much elliptical as awkward, and Bowie's performance is embarrassingly wooden.

Sadly, the faults in the film lie in Harold Pinter's uncharacteristically bland script, and often woefully inadequate design and direction: the latter often missing opportunities in key scenes, the former full of rather tacky and silly uniforms, symbols, vehicles, and particularly crass watchtowers.

Despite the film's odd assembly of talking heads (Koufax, sure, but Ron Howard?) and narrow scope that rarely addresses how a first-generation community sought a new-world identity via knuckleballs, Miller's survey is a breezy compendium of fun facts and colorful figures.

Cast largely with untrained actors and musician friends, including Shins singer James Mercer and Sleater-Kinney alumna Carrie Brownstein, Some Days unspools in a depressive deadpan that might be more effective were the characters' plights not so clearly of their own making.

Some will call The Color Wheel daring. Others will remember that it takes more than desperate shocks to add substance to the sloppy diddlings of a dilettante.

The dialogue-free story makes for an accessible blast, although it's tricky to gauge individual personalities.

Sadly, most of the film's dull edges have to do with De Niro, who is clearly in rest-on-his-laurels mode; at his worst, he approaches radioactive, Robin Williams levels of bathos, as when Jonathan - roaring like a bush-league Lear - is banned from the shelter for bad behavior.

Hitchcock's sly blend of fantasy, game-playing and frightening lechery, and his continually inventive visuals, make for an intriguing exploration of '20s high-life.

When the doll has more vitality than the movie around it, there's a problem.

Can they really be setting up a sequel at the end, with Robin as an outlaw? Let’s hope so--that’s the movie you actually wanted.

On the plus side are vast, brilliant sets by Tony Walton, a couple of well-staged show-stoppers ('Everybody Rejoice' in the Wicked Witch's sweat-shop, and 'Emerald City Ballet'), Michael Jackson (the Scarecrow), Richard Pryor (The Wiz), and Diana Ross who, as Dorothy, is just gorgeous.

Dreams like Garriott's shouldn't be available only to the highest bidder. If you end up taking the kid in your life to go see it, urge them to start saving their allowance.

Unfortunately, in trying to rein in the material and impose some kind of closure, the film-makers plump for an inadequate, bourgeois sit-com mode and the movie evaporates before your eyes. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, and hats off to Michael Keaton, Michael Keaton, Michael Keaton and - very funny in a supporting turn - Michael Keaton.

The lavish production has some good effects sequences, but its plot is as corny as the dreadful lurex drape costumes and Jerry Goldsmith's slushy score. Fundamentally, this is just further proof of Hollywood's untiring ability to reduce all science fiction to its most feeble stereotypes.

The first feature from British theater director Rufus Norris deftly mixes gritty realism and lyrical impressionism, though its five-car pileup of a climax ultimately makes the film feel less a Greek tragedy than a miniseries in miniature.