Thompson's imagination-she's also the screenwriter-knows no bounds, and she does a brilliant job of connecting the fantastical elements to the sobering realities of life during wartime.

Now, with this underwhelming sequel, Spain proves it can stand toe to toe with any nation in the manufacture of unnecessary follow-ups.

Lise Birk Pedersen's documentary offers some compelling peeks into Russia's bureaucratic skulduggery, but her attempt to frame the situation through a young convert's coming of age never really coheres. Innocence was lost; so, apparently, was much of the insightful commentary.

Photographically busy, though to no meaningful purpose, mildly amusing at best, the piece finally expires with what could be, but probably isn't, a parody of a feel-good ending.

Never once does the film feel sharp on black identity (as did Bill Gunn’s original), and the terror is theoretical only.

It’s a gut-wrenching yet redemptive tale of fathers, sons and the horrors of war, which Marder allows to unfold with minimal intrusion or manipulation.

While American Animal's finely tuned filmmaking is leagues above the usual Indiewood sloppiness, all the movie-quoting manic episodes feel like empty grandstanding; it's hard to tell where D'Elia's own psychotic cinephilia ends and the character's begins.

For all of its #MeToo heavy lifting, though, the film still doesn’t work, mainly for the same reasons as before: Constructed as symbols (not human beings), these characters have too much spy stuff to do and yet, not quite enough.

Malek’s twitchy brand of anti-charm makes him an unusual lead for a film like this, and his outsider energy works better as the tormented killer-to-be than the doting husband. Heller is not always easy to root for, which can make The Amateur a chilly experience.

There’s righteous fury here, and while Winterbottom and Coogan’s sincerity isn’t in doubt, it feels like they’re coasting a bit. There are laughs, but no surprises and not much heart. They have no love for this guy, but as a result, we’re left with something a little one-dimensional.

One problem here is that the jokes aren't funny; another is that Sally Field is funny by mistake.

The script shoehorns in more identity-grappling this time—half-baked and sub-Westworld though it is—and the squelchy synth score (by Black Swan’s Clint Mansell) supplies a playfulness that’s unearned by the visuals. Find a handy film geek to tell you all about how Ghost in the Shell was a massive influence on The Matrix. Better yet, just rewatch The Matrix.

While the film's interviews with students, parents and educators tend toward the repetitious, the hammering of the same bullet-point ideas time and again only lends greater urgency to this exposé of an increasingly rotten system.

You can see the sweat on stage, but it’s harder to detect in the filmmaking.

The movie is one big scream, clichéd and hardly credible as an oblique call to civility.

Swiftian satires on popular taste can backfire badly, and Spike Lee's attempt at black consciousness-raising through the armature of Animal House movies almost dies of the contusion it is trying to lance.

None of this is particularly well wrought, and only a bizarre gas mask worn by the séance leader counts as an inspired (if slightly silly) touch.

Did we really need this Dracula footnote to set sail at all? Perhaps not, but while Øvredal’s expansion on the world isn’t as fun as the grim fables from which it draws blood, it still has some bite.

It’s a waste, for sure — of talent and your time.

Such niceties as a plausible plot and three-dimensional characters are trampled under Weejun-shod foot, but sheer energy, a handful of good tunes (including a great theme song from the Four Tops), and some very funny one-liners save the day.

This iron lady of cinema deserves better.

A favorite at this year's SXSW, Kyle Smith's real-time look at curdled relationships is a modest take on indie psychodramatics - and little else.

A Euro gloss on "Pretty Woman" suddenly turns into "Occupy Gaul."

The real problem here is technical; Eastwood the director is far less sure-footed than he was with the likes of Play Misty for Me or The Outlaw Josey Wales.

This is Seagal's best movie since Out for Justice.

I can’t fault Ridley Scott for wanting to stage a version of this saga, just as I can’t ignore the fact that my dad tells the same tale every spring, but much more engagingly, in half the time and drunk on Manischewitz.

Surface stuff, with neither actor up to the ambiguities, but entertaining enough around the car chases.

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.

Medina is simply content to let the film’s sub-Jarmusch vignettes slow-fizzle to their finishes.

This is a movie too enamored of its own tawdriness, turning every violent act and violation into gratuitously salacious grindhouse set pieces.

The second part in the ‘Harry Potter’ spin-off provides twists and glorious visuals, but has too much plot to truly soar. These beasts are overburdened.

As billion-dollar Hollywood franchises go, this is one of the drawn-out dumbest. The stake through the heart comes not a moment too soon.

A wanton, playful film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy.

The company's effects team have excelled themselves in the creation of spectacular settings and holograms, but the script reads as though they simply ordered up a melange of Forbidden Planet and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (with a little bit of R2D2 on the side). Next time around they ought to pension off a few designers to pay for a decent screenplay.

Despite the testosterone-charged violence and jaw-dropping sexism, the tone is one of self-conscious excess - a strategy which constantly undercuts the film's celebration of male bonding conventions.

If director Stephen Fung's frenetic visual style is the Red Bull in this cinematic cocktail, then the dozy plotting is the vodka - leaving you feeling momentarily excited but ultimately narcotized.

Granted, there’s something charming here — Ping Pong Summer itself feels like an underdog — and there are retro touches that children of the ’80s will smile at (remember smelling the liner notes of cassettes?). But ultimately, those are too few and far between.

Chu does his best to humanize his subject, showing him surrounded by devoted friends and family, and wringing much drama from an on-the-road vocal-cord strain.

When it became obvious that the film's mix of cutesy sentiment and vague scariness wasn't working, the company ordered whole sequences to be rewritten, re-shot or re-edited, then imposed a stupid ending that explains precisely nothing.

Excellent support from Davidtz, Goodman, and Joy, as Hobbes' brother, though as the plot twists take precedence over character, much of the film's nuance trickles away and, along with it, the tension.

While the star himself effortlessly commands attention, the film around him too often collapses in a welter of rhubarbing locals, piffling model work, and the most cardboard sets Elstree could offer. The result is weird, but not wonderful.

The oddest thing about the movie - and perhaps the asset that will tip it over into the plus column for you - is that it's a bona fide scuzz-Western.

A fun-sapped maelstrom without meaning, 300 simply pummels you with endless loops of battle-porn. While you couldn’t classify the movie as entertainment, it might have a long, prosperous future as a Clockwork Orange–style Ludovico Technique.

Although the film is well performed and beautifully shot by Robert Surtees, its ideology is highly objectionable, celebrating as it does the turning of the boys into hardened killers.

Don't go in expecting scares so much as laughs. Scream 4 is a better "Scary Movie" than any of the "Scary Movies" ever were, from its inventively gut-busting kills (watch out for that mail slot!) to the unintentionally humorous sight of the three leads acting as if they're in three separate films.

Without larger-than-life drama or a steady stream of historical detail, it's merely a gargantuan production that's been lavished on a story hardly worth trumpeting.

The direction is agonisingly pedantic for a comedy, and leaves O'Neal and Reynolds totally exposed, mugging away in charmless and clumsy fashion.

There are no memorable action scenes—the closest we get is a virtual rerun of the time-freeze sequence from the previous movie. And the script is just nonsense, comprised entirely of sarcastic asides, portentous gobbledygook ("The dawn of a new age will rise!" cries Isaac) and insider references that only the faithful will appreciate. Unless that’s you, it’s best to steer clear.

Christopher Felver, while an inspired photographer, is not the director for the job; he dutifully ticks off Ferlinghetti’s major achievements — such as the founding of North Beach’s literary mecca, City Lights — yet never imbues his life with anything more than lefty zeal.

Clooney occasionally shows a surer hand: He gets great work from Downton Abbey’s Bonneville — notably in an emotionally charged scene revolving around Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges — and has a fine monologue himself, in which Stokes dresses down a high-ranking German commander (a moving encapsulation of the American spirit at its best).

Alda's skill is with witty, fast-talking patter and in coaxing fine performances from his actors (playing an extended family of gently caricatured New York types). The values are bollocks, but the film is fun.

What really makes Rudderless a full-blown affront is a late-breaking narrative revelation (no spoilers here) that’s meant to add resonant emotional depth, but instead comes off as jaw-droppingly repugnant. That’s appropriate, though, for a movie with no sense of direction.

Judging from the title, Spielberg's Gremlins would be the immediate target, and indeed Critters does share a sardonic similarity. In fact, Critters looks like several dozen films without looking like any one of them, the action and characters lifted whole from a dissimilar plethora of cinematic sources and underscored with a sizzling sarcasm which elevates it from its source material.

Considering neither Bisset nor Bergen had ever shown the slightest acting ability before in movies, their performances in the Bette Davis/Miriam Hopkins roles in this loose reworking of Old Acquaintance are very capable.

But the virtue of Russell's writing is that, for all the cracks, occasional duff lines, and tendency to simplify and stereotype, few can match his ability to make us laugh, cry and ultimately care.

At times the relentless special effects and tangled plotting veer towards visual and narrative overkill, but the final tonal swerve is shocking and effective.

The predictability is crushing, and with movies like "Crazy Heart" and Sofia Coppola's distinctly personal "Somewhere" so close in the rearview, David M. Rosenthal's estrangement drama feels especially soft.

Good actors like Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson show up to bust balls and bark expository dialogue with check-in-the-bank-yet? proficiency. Add in a couple of dully pro forma narrative twists to keep you awake in between shots of distractingly exotic South African scenery, and you've got a first-quarter Hollywood release par excellence. Meaning not.

Schemel is a major rock & roll survivor; Hit So Hard is a minor rockumentary at best, as well as a seriously missed opportunity.

Defined by "Three’s Company"–grade humor, this attempt at male-anxiety cringe-comedy is little more than a sitcom writ large that — courtesy of several awkward transitional fades to black — already feels constructed to accommodate commercial breaks.

The film will do until "Fifty Shades of Grey" turns up. The more you think about Labor Day, the more calculating it gets.

Visual sensualities will have a feast, but you'll have to read Whitley Strieber's novel if you don't want to emerge with a badly scratched head.

Fashioning "The Great Dictator" and "Inglourious Basterds" into a cross joint and then lighting it from both ends, Goldberg and Rogen’s second directorial effort follows the hysterically violent misadventures of idiotic talk-show host Dave Skylark (James Franco, hamming it up) and his underachieving producer, Aaron (Rogen).

It’s oh-so-familiar terrain, yet writer-director Scott Wiper lets a deadening sense of inertia creep in, leaving the payoff feeling like a Guy Ritchie movie played at the wrong speed.

Unlike the clothes, though, the film is shapeless, running at its subject from all directions but never quite reaching its core.

Although convincing as athletes, neither Miller belongs on a movie screen; personal parable or not, this feels like a too-familiar trip around the bases.

As with many young-adult book-to-film series, Beautiful Creatures plays like an illustrated compendium of scenes from the novel, as opposed to a finely tuned narrative all its own.

The film works to inform as well as to preserve an air of mystery around Bernstein, an apt approach that occasionally slips into the willfully opaque. By all accounts, this secretly important man was tough to live with, but not too hard to love or admire.

The acting is a bubbling fondue of clashing styles.

Mediocre action pulp.

Based on a French play (La Cuisine des Anges by Albert Husson), it's static and laden with leaden talk, with nothing to interest the eye as recompense.

The movie’s ideas run out quickly, but De Niro is easygoing, and The Intern is indulgent good fun. Just don’t go in expecting nutrition.

Notwithstanding Brown's occasional half-baked critical comment about the sport's corporatization, the film ends up as a cliquish circle jerk that flatters those in the know and leaves neophytes little to mull over.

It's a treat to see the double-barrelled menace of Woods and Madsen together at last.

There are few traces of irony, intended fun, or Casanova-style exoticism here: the director may intened a feminist Visconti, but he ends up with a Zalman King Red Shoe Diary crossed with a Dick Lester Dumas adaptation.

The film cuts with such precision that there's scarcely any room to breathe; it's the rare thriller that is perhaps too tightly structured.

Everyone in this movie - adapted from a flummery stage comedy by Hugh and Margaret Williams - stands around like mannequins in Bond Street stores.

There are powerful and enlightening scenes, and there’s a catchy energy to the battlefield action. But the immediacy and credibility of the women’s mission feels compromised by one-too-many corny moments, unconvincing dialogue and a sense of uncertainty on Husson’s part over whether she wants to take a poetic or realist approach to her tale.

Across 146 minutes, the film does its best to cram in every detail on the pop singer and actor (played by Naomi Ackie) and her meteoric ascent from the gospel choir to the Superbowl. Such a tack normally spells only the most surface level engagement with the subject. Unfortunately for this biopic, it follows suit.

Only Streisand's second movie, but already (as co-star Matthau grumbled) she was hogging the screen. The trouble is that there isn't much to hog in this elephant which gave Star! a helping hoof in burying the Hollywood musical.

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 resolute Greyeyes and the always-brilliant Chastain chart their respective characters with real chemistry, and White captures the pair’s brewing romantic tension. For underscoring the brief but beautiful optimism of two ill-fated outliers, her woman comes out ahead.

The mix of comedy, '90s sensibility, and swashbuckling action is more hit than miss, even if the overall effect is rather slapdash. Spirited, irreverent stuff, but not for those who like their myths kept sacred.

Dedicating a movie to John Hughes doesn't equal capturing the master's ear for the universality of adolescent angst.

This fun, pacy addition to the dino disaster franchise doesn’t do much that’s particularly new – though what it does, it does with a fair whack of panache.

Moodysson hasn’t exactly descended to "Babel"-level pabulum with Mammoth, his first foray into English; these characters are too fascinatingly thorny, and he still has a supple way with a pulse-throbbing dance tune.

Luisito (Perez) is the only vegetarian butcher working in the Dominican Republic-which may, alas, be the only original aspect of this well-intentioned, well-worn revenge saga.

A better movie would have explored Foster's way-of-the-future objectives with more beyond-the-hype insight and less Zen-master bullshit.

Problems arise from an uncharacteristically loose structure, which frequently brings the movie to the brink of narrative collapse; Craven's visual flair and enthusiastic pacing nevertheless deliver ample (if sometimes frustrating) rewards.

William Goldman, in his first solo script credit, plays knowing games with the Chandlerish conventions, while director Smight pumps up the pace and tags along with the allusive casting of Bacall. Enjoyable performances throughout.

Low key and, despite the music, rather likeable.

Although one may mourn the lost opportunity to say something about the Stones other than that they are twenty years older than they were twenty years ago (cue 'Time Is on My Side'), a Stones concert is still worthwhile entertainment.

Filmed in the usual crisp AIP style, with dazzling sunlight and ominous shadows.

It has a kernel of raw torment and an unforgiving streak that hints at still-unreconciled wounds, too. It’s not the best film of the year, but it’s definitely one of the most personal.

Amiable but half-baked remake of what was anyway one of Preston Sturges' least satisfactory comedies.

Grief is fertile territory for horror, but while the script picks at Baghead’s thematic underpinnings, Corredor skips all but the most essential exposition, staying focused on delivering what the audience wants.

The movie amounts to little more than Marky Mark's South American Vacation.

The movie sometimes strains for visual impact: A German medical facility is designed like a Kubrickian nightmare. But by film’s end, Robin and Diana’s devotion to each other wins you over — as does Serkis’s devotion to his story.