Despite the unlikely script credit for Rita Mae Brown, Jones's debut feature is little more than a Halloween clone, reliant on buckets of blood and sudden surprise rather than suspense.

It isn't the first time death has figured in an Allen movie, but the way he grapples with it here (leaving each character at a moment of irresolution comparable to staring down the man with the scythe) is much more potent and direct.

Phillips goes too far sometimes (border-jail breakout?), but his new direction is promising.

Lots of machine-gunfire, explosions and disposable khaki-clad extras, as you'd expect.

Nothing here will blow you away—think of this one as taking baby steps away from what's formulaic.

There are occasional flourishes that testify to the director's ingenuity and ability - Expressionist lighting, faces looming over spiral staircases, hats blown off in the wind - and Hitch throws in plenty of knockabout English humour, but the plotting is half-baked and the special effects are so crude that they make the back projection in Marnie look like the last word in verisimilitude.

Both the martial arts and the slightly dull narrative patchwork are too choppily edited to gain much of a foothold.

It feels a little too skin deep; a film content to get by on its vicarious thrills. And the rush eventually wears off.

So many blockbuster movies are impersonal, micromanaged hashes that Jack, with its bare minimum of craft and commitment, comparatively comes off like a diamond in the rough.

Proving that a comedy’s performers are sometimes more important than its jokes, this remake of Frank Oz’s dreary 2007 British farce of the same name livens up the proceedings by subbing in a comic African-American all-star cast.

This is welcome summer fare; if we’re going to have space operas, let them sing in the strangest accents possible.

Both as a modern Western and as a Hill movie, this is efficient but middling - which still, finally, means that it's worth catching.

Nègre is free to fictionalise the story any way he wants. The times, however, arguably call for a more clear-eyed examination of the dangers of turning a blind eye to the less palatable actions of ostensibly friendly nations.

Lilien certainly captures Pale Male's wild animal beauty in loving close-up. What his film needs, however, is distance.

The action is lean and tough, the body count huge, and the final shootout an obvious reprise of Peckinpah's finale. But where the latter's vision transformed The Wild Bunch into a savage elegy for the passing of the Old West, Hill can only duplicate its choreographed violence.

Surprisingly entertaining, thanks to the cast's collective chemistry and the film's balance of appealing elements for both sides of the gender divide.

Jim Henson's Creature Shop has created splendid animatronic characters (including a four-foot talking rat), though extra distinguishing marks between the turtles would be appreciated. Between the dubbed dialogue and the dark visuals, the cumulative effect is curiously dislocating.

Snitch is a movie that cries out for the wiry B stars of yore: Robert Forster, a younger Tommy Lee Jones. And it would have occurred to a craftier screenwriter to make his hero’s walk on the criminal wild side a touch more tempting.

Melodrama often risks the ridiculous to achieve the sublime, and though this unabashedly earnest tearjerker doesn’t completely transcend its narrative absurdities, it’s enough of a distinctively odd duck to keep you engaged.

The material isn’t excited or shaped toward any insight — the Mike Leigh of "Naked" did this sort of thing brilliantly — and the arrival of a sluggish investigating journalist (Richard Jenkins), himself a bar fixture and underachiever, doesn’t offer a valid counterpoint.

An idea worthy of Harlan Ellison, but disappointingly fumbled. Taylor handles most of the aircraft carrier material like a recruiting film, and though the script manages a few deft twists and turns, and even a neat final frisson, it ultimately works more on the tease level of a TV episode than as a movie.

Mindless, immature, slapstick twaddle.

It’s not often that faith-based films, competing in the same marketplace that rewards action, embrace the deeper, more difficult idea of meeting hate with love, but Risen tries. It’s a drama that neither seeks to convert viewers, nor confront true believers with anything uncomfortable—only reaffirm their bedrock convictions, the ones that are worth repeating.

For a film about sexual conquest, Nobody Walks is a frustratingly flaccid affair.

This is fertile material for a darkly comic indictment. Instead, we get recycled cynicism (politicians are hypocrites! more dirty money, more problems!) and Spacey's gallery of impersonations-W.C. Fields, Stallone, Reagan-in lieu of a flawed, flesh-and-blood human being.

This new version features the voice of Pharrell Williams as the narrator, dipping in and out of Dr. Seuss’s warming rhymes. That binds to the film to its authentic source, but the gaps between the spoken verse still remind us that this is a slender story s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d into a feature.

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

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.

Its willingness to take risks, and its insights into the frailties and confusions of teenage friendships ('She might have been lonelier than I was', reflects Coop at the end), lift the film right out of the rut.

Schrader can’t seem to choose a proper outcome, and the lack of a higher morality is weird, especially from a filmmaker who managed hints of spirituality in a movie about Bob Crane. Still, if you suffered through Schrader’s Exorcist prequel Dominion, you’ll know he’s somewhat back on track.

Even leaving aside the fan-pleasing sight of Burton’s Dark Knight and Penguin sharing the same big top, the Batman parallels are inescapable. Keaton tears a page from the Jack Nicholson Joker playbook with his most deliriously huge performance in years.

Given its multitalented cast, Rough Night should have committed to the darkness (originally, the screenplay’s title was Move that Body). In execution, the women are asked only for flop sweat and nervous jabbering. Party on.

It’s certainly a new spin, but those who make the leap will do so vigorously.

It’s the kind of two-hander that relies solely on the chemistry of the actors, both of whom banter, parry and bum rush their way through various left turns with grace. Their pas de deux almost makes up for this threadbare tragedy’s no-win endgame. Almost.

That it doesn’t have anything new to say about the coldly efficient Hollywood machine and its stratum of fearsome executives only hinders it further, leaving you with a film that feels every bit the product of its purportedly ruthless and artistically corrupting milieu.

Atmosphere and acting can't save a script filled with easy-target irony ("Who ever heard of gettin' rich from workin' with computers?") and a plot that telegraphs every left turn miles in advance.

This is merely a vanity project that shamelessly plugs Roitfeld’s new stateside brand.

A typically plot-heavy script from Ernest Tidyman survives unimaginative direction to deliver that current rarity, an unpretentious action movie. A bit out of its depth at the top of a bill, but vastly superior to the ostensibly similar Jaguar Lives.

After the self-satisfied The Gentlemen and the slick but sparkless Wrath of Man, it’s a nice reminder that at his best, Ritchie remains an accomplished teller of tall tales.

The sense of location is strong, emphasising a hostile, nightmarish terrain; but Winner's recourse to caricature when dealing with police and thugs, and his virtually overt sympathies with the confused, violent Bronson, make for uncritical, simplistic viewing.

Highly enjoyable.

Aussie director Wincer handles the action convincingly, and Rickman's splendidly snide villain is a real treat.

There are sparks here that suggest the smarter movie a more scientifically minded director--say, David Cronenberg--might have made.

Terry Southern's dialogue occasionally sparkles, and the imaginative designs, as shot by Claude Renoir, look really splendid.

Fantasies that are gratuitously sexist and Fascist (macho whoring and warmongering), and whose roots reach all the way back to post-hippie paranoia, feed the tangled plot-lines of a movie that, given the orchestral overkill and surprisingly low profile of heavy metal music, should disappoint even the teenage wet-dreamers it's aimed at.

To her credit, Howard’s performance as a class-obsessed Southerner is decent enough to keep things from completely devolving to community-college level. But such weak work needs strong hands all around to guide it, and one pair isn’t enough.

The Dark Knight director has had a mortifying effect on movies. In this case, it’s almost as if Affleck’s somber plunge into the calamitous, Nolan-produced "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" has followed him into other projects, like a heavy cologne. Avoid this one like the stink it is.

You'd have to be blind to miss the moral.

Younger audiences will see "The Fault in Our Stars’" Shailene Woodley once again excelling in an emotionally tricky role: Kat, a 17-year-old blooming into her wild years while reckoning with an increasingly unhinged mother, Eve (Eva Green, crazy-eyed and just this side of Faye Dunaway).

Fast-paced and quite atmospheric in its tacky way, but definitively sabotaged by Lugosi as the monster; at last getting to play the role he missed out on in 193l, he gives a performance of excruciatingly embarrassing inadequacy.

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 hard to care much about Jamie Conway, an aspiring novelist who is dissipating his substance in New York on cocaine and parties: Fox hasn't the range to play anguish, so the explanatory voice-over is less a survival from the best-selling novel than a necessity.

The odor of musty, late-’80s nostalgia may still hover around this already threadbare brand, but you simply don’t see movies that leave both the curious and the fans who truly care this viscerally satisfied anymore.

Too much of this love triangle rings false.

Everything is predictable, except perhaps for the searching close-ups of the star's behind. In other respects, Lowe's performance is quite decent, and he cannot be blamed for the puerile humour of a director who considers putting false teeth into someone's beer to be a good joke.

It’s gratifying to see Eisenberg move past nerdy-cutie parts; his slim shoulders, it seems, are capable of handling more than Michael Cera’s leftovers.

A bizarre mix of actors goes some way towards bolstering this flyweight caper; but the last third degenerates into farce, with nuns and thugs playing cat-and-mouse in a Reno casino. A one-note movie.

The performances are all reasonably enjoyable, but it's the sort of film the British cinema could well do without.

The highlight is a bruising pas de deux between Statham and direct-to-video star Scott Adkins, a sequence that channels yesteryear's testosteronized cinema instead of exhuming it. You can only hope the inevitable third entry will use that as a model.

The Score doesn’t always strike the right notes, but it has its high points thanks to a simple, rewarding romantic arc.

Mercifully, the book has escaped the typical Disney demolition; Bakshi's version, using animation and live-action tracings, is uniformly excellent, sticking closely to the original text and visually echoing many of Tolkien's own drawings.

The film succeeds only in turning one's stomach via implausibilities, inanities and the unwelcome sight of Brian Dennehy's naked ass.

A glossy, violent, pointless movie from the team who later perpetrated Death Wish; mildly entertaining if you want to watch Bronson suggesting silent, brooding menace for the umpteenth time.

Just because you tart up a typical romantic comedy with trash talk doesn't make it edgy or real.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates follows a sturdy trajectory toward incipient maturity (and ceremonial catastrophe). If you don’t think about it too hard, you won’t hate it.

The film stumbles through rounds of ham-fisted melodrama.

A delightfully quirky movie about a New York lawyer (Scott) who imagines he is Sherlock Holmes, adopting the deerstalking garb and savouring four-pipe problems.

Amazingly, the remake—by Danish director Michael Noer—is nearly as long and equally as depressing. But he’s made a slightly more exciting movie.

Its only remarkable quality is how much less appealing our wimpy hero seems when lifted off the page.

1956 was way too soon for an unfettered treatment of the central premise: an 8-year-old serial killer. On the other hand it was too late in Mervyn LeRoy's career for him still to command enough speed and style to overcome the staginess of it all.

As Black Panther, Boseman is a hero in spandex; here he’s a hero with a badge and gun, who looks the devil in the eye, and stares down the evil in the system. It’s a smart way forward for an actor who has suddenly become extremely famous, yet wants to be perceived as more than just a cartoon. He’s got the chops to take us anywhere he wants.

Don’t look to this skin-deep biopic to offer any insights beyond the head-slappingly superficial.

By allowing viewers to step into the shoes of a wall-climbing Jackie Chan, a parkour-sprinting Daniel Craig or a bullet-spraying Ahnold, it does something that live action has never attempted before. The carnage flies—it’s possible to miss a lot of it. But if action movies are meant to be stunning, Hardcore Henry can proudly take its place among the giants. Even better, it lets you stand with them.

The tone never stops waffling, and nothing truly revelatory ever emerges about those terrible few days in Texas. What we’re left with is the Disney theme-park version of history — all waxworks and weepiness.

Aside from a few inspired vistas and alien life-forms (the Road Runner–fast red planet dog Woola is sure to sell a bazillion action figures), John Carter is as deadly dull as its basso-voiced, beefcake slab of a star, Taylor Kitsch.

Director Tamahori caught the eye with Once Were Warriors, but his first Hollywood feature falls flat with a hollow thud. It doesn't help that, after an intriguing opening, Pete Dexter's screenplay fails to construct a mystery which really connects, that too many supporting characters never come to life, and that Malkovich invests a pivotal role with his peculiar brand of terminal lethargy.

Becomes a clumsy gringo approximation of something else. In this case, it's the old respectable-man-obsessed-with-fallen-angel cliché, which Demy fils tweaks with broad melodramatic strokes and Freudian flotsam, as well as a complete lack of focus or storytelling chops.

Other than ludicrously pulpy fun, Anonymous, true to its title, ultimately signifies nothing.

Somewhere in the Hollywood hills there's a computer loaded with a software programme called BuildaStar. A hack punched in the script requirements for this intended star vehicle for Selleck: an action yarn pitting an American loner against evil Nazis, bent coppers, a sultry girl-friend; sardonic sex with a lashing of perversity and gratuitous nudity; dare-devil stunts and chases for excitement.

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.

Director Medak goes off the rails in high style with this dementedly doleful exercise in pop noir. But the film plays out the battle of the sexes at such an unflinchingly amoral pitch it really isn't funny anymore. Like Oldman's deluded operator - playing both ends and getting caught in the middle - Hilary Henkin's script isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and only Olin's breathtakingly excessive femme fatale hits the right note of campy panache.

Logan's rotund version of Lerner and Loewe's musical Western may lack actors (Presnell excepted) who can actually sing, but that's compensated for by a solid plot involving a farcical discovery of gold, and the growth of a mining town (No Name City) that develops from amoral shantydom to respectability and a holocaust.

Skip this one, even if your hipster significant other whines a blue streak.

With its intensely-felt performances, haunting winter lighting, and seemingly inescapable claustrophobia, it leaves a mark.

Please. If you're going to ask audiences to submit to a dim theater themselves, at least greet them with the proper monster they paid for.

As it is, it’s an atmospheric, sporadically disquieting depiction of fatherhood in freefall.

If Stevenson's performance were equal to his mammoth physique, the movie might have a shot, but even his broad shoulders aren't up to carrying this much dead weight.

Subversive elements or not, this is essentially little more than a TV soap opera spiced with hot-button topics (gender issues, clandestine gay trysts), and the combo of TV melodramatics and mumblecore-ish aesthetics eventually wears out its welcome.

While he's lying through his teeth or improvising a sales pitch that might save his skin, Williams is funny and convincing; but once he starts getting dewy-eyed and sincere, flesh-crawling embarrassment takes over.

La Syndicaliste is a weird footnote to Huppert’s long career, one that feels hampered by its ‘true story’ status to the point where it can’t really say much about anything. It’s quietly intriguing. But let’s hope her next outing gives her something that’s really worth dressing up for.

It’s made with too much slickness, and you’ll be way ahead of it.

Such manic fumblings and desperate crassness might be more forgivable were any of it actually, y’know, funny, but other than Olivia Colman’s occasional cameos as a raging therapist, the laughs have been granted a leave of absence.

Any longer-in-the-tooth fans of gritty sci-fi action will find this maze a little too easy to escape.

The trek to get there is sluggish at best, torturous at worst. March away, penguins. Far away.

If Last Christmas isn’t quite irresistible in its emotional moments and the cheesiest bits are borderline indigestible, its effervescence makes it a fun enough watch. At the very least, it’ll make you fall hard for its other romantic lead: London.

Despite classy production values, Mulcahy's attempt to emulate the sombre appeal of Tim Burton's Batman movies is too episodic, sketchy and uneven.

But you do take the film home with you - to all your own toys - and that's what decent horror is supposed to do.