Third times are rarely charms in the movies, much less fourth go-rounds, and it takes more than ho-hum 3-D and video-game-ready action sequences to liven up diminishing returns

What undoes the film is its rather rancid parent-child sentimentality (a Shyamalan staple, admittedly) and a charisma-free performance from the younger Smith that suggests the apple has fallen very far from the tree.

Chock-a-block with cute reminiscence - which is a shame, because if it weren't so knowing, this would be quite a likeable little comedy about nothing in particular.

Capital ends up being neither a high-stakes thriller nor a cutting commentary on real-world bad behavior. It’s just CEO exotica, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Harry Dean Stanton provides some much needed humour, but the film's celebratory attitude towards a dangerously wild love that defies logic and convention lacks depth and genuine insights.

Cannonball lacks its predecessor's dramatic tension, and by the middle of the film Bartel's disregard for narrative in favour of a series of jokes leaves no dramatic resolution.

But mostly, knock it for reducing Ice Cube to the tired sneer he’s been successfully avoiding in recent films, especially in last year’s Barbershop: The Next Cut.

At least Mark Ping Bing Lee’s luscious cinematography distracts from the shallow storytelling. There are worse things than luxuriating in a two-hour Côte d’Azur travel ad.

There’s a lot more Majors to come in future Marvel films and he’s really the only thing here that makes a continued story look even vaguely enticing. With this functional sequel Marvel is still on a dud streak. They now have the whole multiverse to explore. But can they settle into a reality where their films are fun again?

The film doesn't come within spitting distance of vintage Landis, e.g., "Animal House" or "An American Werewolf in London." But at least it's not "The Stupids."

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

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

There’s plenty of action—and laughs here and there—but when a repeated cameo from Elton John is the best thing in a movie like this, you know you’re in trouble.

Documentarian Anailín Lucy Mulloy’s eye for the decaying textures of modern Cuba on the ground is sharp, and there are passages—as the dull characters mope and kill time and work up snits—in which you wish the movie were simply nonfiction. As it is, everything feels fake except the Centro Habana barrios themselves.

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

The movie meanders for two and a half hours, has glaring continuity gaps, and repeatedly confuses self-consciousness with irony, sincerity with significance. There are grace notes here, but Wenders' ambitions seem far, far away.

The simple storyline is quickly grounded by flying chunks of exposition that director/actor Eastwood tries to ignore. Eastwood the director disregards many Cold War possibilities, preferring to dawdle over a first hour that mooches along while Eastwood the actor enjoyably dons various disguises, playing a man who can't act (or so everyone tells him) and is happiest left alone with his gippy nerves.

The set pieces are grand—gloriously dumb and never realistic enough to make you wince at the fact that billions of microscopic souls are dying before your eyes. Rather, you wince at everything else.

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.

The razzle-dazzle can't distract from the monotonously overstuffed spy-film plot.

Bell’s film ends up stuck between being a standard audience-pleaser and something more subversive. For a movie about marriage, you wish it would commit one way or the other.

Lacking the grace and humor of the Fogelman-scripted Crazy Stupid Love, Life Itself gives its talented cast occasional affecting moments, but its thesis—life is full of pain that must be endured—is ultimately reflected by the experience of watching the film itself.

Good policy does not ensure good drama; Gerrymandering summarizes an urgent issue but forgets to detail the true fallout.

A tepid rom-com, replete with a nostalgic Bangles tune.

Even the admittedly thrilling gameplay footage and time-capsule news reports are couched in contexts that seem crudely sketched out.

Fresnadillo, working with screenwriters Nicolás Casariego and Jaime Marques, might be angling for the same YA fantasy as "Pan's Labyrinth," but they've forgotten about that film's violent underpinnings, a mistake that leaches their movie of suspense.

Only Andrea Riseborough comes close to rising above it all, and even she’s undone by what may be the crassest climactic slo-mo montage ever. The lucky will have logged off by that point.

With more imagination, more of Faith Brook's send-up of a well-known lady PM, and less of Moore's excruciatingly smug misogyny, this might just have made it to comic levels.

The Fifth Generation filmmaker has aced such recipes before (e.g. The Emperor and the Assassin); this time, both the spectacular and the human elements have apparently been offered to the gods.

Evans and Eve are always charming, but Brooke’s real-world problems ring false in a story held together by chintzy fatalism and the logic of a first draft.

The movie leans on symbolic imagery that’s alternately tired and ridiculous: Hunt’s impatiently flicked cigarette lighter (yes, he’s a candle waiting to be lit) or a black-widow spider crawling up the stands of one particularly dangerous course. These are classic frenemies; their tale deserves more gas in the tank.

Solet has turned out a very slick product and handles some of the action with brio, particularly a chase-across-buses set piece. But with too little freshness for crime-drama devotees, too many furry corpses for animal lovers and a thoroughly predictable wrap-up, Bullet Head ultimately screws the pooch.

Working from his own script, Harris shows no sense of detail; characters barely develop, London becomes a topographical mess, and each time the plot falters, we get long '60s-style interludes with no dialogue, cut to bland pop. The result is without dramatic or moral weight, despite Highway's contrived comeuppance, and it's impossible to care about the characters.

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.

It has enormous charm in its folklorish fancies, and a performance of great gentleness and good humour from Ingram which is never tainted by the mawkish religiosity that creeps in towards the end. What is offensive is the way in which the depths of plangent suffering that inspired the spirituals are totally ignored.

Gerwig is plenty charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with. Yet this still feels like a real devolution - hopefully short-lived - after her distinctively eccentric turns in "Greenberg" and "Damsels in Distress."

Favreau's direction is so boulder-heavy-the action sequences, especially the climactic assault on the alien mothership, are an eye-and-ear-shattering mess-that the small moments of poetry...are lost amid too much digital sound and fury.

Even though the Bello-Hurt thread is unconvincingly brought up to date at the end, this inside-out movie gets good mileage out of letting us watch characters watch each other.

Children of Invention seems furiously scribbled in shorthand, undermining what it has to offer in contemporary resonance.

The intensity of the melodrama here is undermined by a camp-ish turn from Robert Downey Jr as Morgan's leathered friend and by risible musical outbursts from Spader and Kim Richards.

Newlyweeds looks and sounds primo. Storytelling-wise, however, it’s more than one toke over the line.

There are occasional visual flourishes — a nightmarish PowerPoint presentation ending with a slide about mock burials — that hint at the better-balanced film The Report might have been. But mainly we’re pinned down by a firehose-stream of didactic outrage.

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

There’s little of the Church’s perspective in this doc, but you can’t really fault the filmmakers--Mormon leaders refused several overtures to participate. Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/86550/the-mormon-proposition-film-review#ixzz0r2j38wUF

Madden pads the film with shimmering images of Jaipur and its surroundings; a midmovie funeral sequence - 'cause somebody's got to kick the bucket! - even manages to be somewhat evocative and moving. The rest makes you long for senility to set in, but quick.

The film quickly abandons any sort of broader cultural interest in favor of a typical womb-to-tomb, warts-and-all examination of recent history’s most visionary CEO.

You could call it fan service, if the service is to teach fans that mimicking Stanley Kubrick’s chilly elegance—and even reshooting scenes from the original film with lookalike actors, a crime bordering on sacrilege—doesn’t make your take nearly as scary.

The first Reitman film to make the 36-year-old director seem about 400 years old.

You'd have to possess a heart colder than the Northern tundra not to care about these poor animals working their flukes off to jerk audience tears, but emotional manipulation or not, this is still a movie about people standing around a hole waiting for something to happen.

A misbegotten musical adaptation of Dickens' much too perennial tale, featuring songs by Leslie Bricusse that are not only anaemic but piffling in their up-front relevance.

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

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

It isn't long, however, before the film's caricatured bad-guy shtick starts to wear gossamer thin, and an overabundance of "clever" twists-no one is [Yawn] who they seem to be! - begins to sap whatever little goodwill has been built up.

"Chocolat" director Lasse Hallström’s tastefully old-fashioned melodrama has exactly one objective: yanking gallons of cathartic tears out of your face by any means necessary.

Kudos for stepping outside your comfort zone, sir, even if the result just translates as old-fashioned cultural slumming masked as tear-jerking humanism. Better luck next time.

Geostorm is a watery blend of Armageddon and 24, with enough action to entertain on a basic level. It’ll probably be most appealing to scientists looking for a good laugh.

This charmless movie thinks it can soft-sell its date-night love story and its media meta-jabs without people feeling they've been bamboozled on either count.

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 film’s Antarctic framing device (wait, what?) feels unearned and distracting, regardless of its veracity. But there’s plenty to behold, including a killer Gâteau Saint-Honoré.

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 fact that the film’s title is an Arabic word for “olive,” as in holding out said branch to your foes, gives you a sense of what Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree) is going for: a melodrama with a do-we-all-not-bleed? moral.

With its silly script, lame acting, naff special effects, and laughable model work, this unfunny supernatural comedy looks like the sort of film its leading characters - a pair of teenage home movie-makers (Lively and McDaniel) - might have made themselves.

People become mere punch lines: fleshy avatars for the gory grist.

Even on its own limited, rigorous aesthetic grounds, there are far superior movies (including all of Tarr's own work). It's a sad way for the 56-year-old to go out, almost a caricature of his funereal mood and of art cinema in general.

You brace for a certain amount of hand-wringing, lip-biting and pinup posing aimed at middle-schoolers; given the way that Eclipse initially suggests a potential for reaching beyond a preteen audience, you just wish the beefcake and cheese didn’t eventually overshadow its better qualities.

It's "Centurion Deux" without the second-coming-of-Carpenter pretense, though you still wish the trashiness were more distinctive.

There is no depth or resonance to anything we see and hear-everything is as it seems, no more, no less, and the reactionary superficiality dulls the senses. General Orders No. 9 strains for elegiac profundity and ends up as bad, backward-looking poetry.

The hard fact, though, is that Harlin's instincts - always toward the massive and slo-mo - make him a fairly dunderheaded political analyst.

Feste's ode to showbiz clichés is closer to contemporary Nashville pop: twangy enough to qualify as Southern-fried, but too slick and disposable to be truly deep.

Though the fallout is utterly predictable, director Steve Rash at least brings an engaging fluidity to the high-energy sports scenes.

Ford has come up with a nifty way of exploring the enduring allure and troubling underside of the superhero myth. It's just too bad his own all-too-human powers aren't quite up to the task.

The sex scenes are, save the occasional bit of exposed flesh or brandished toy, fairly mild—Freed is probably the least provocative film of the trilogy.

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.

Close to a parody of a French sex drama - complete with bored, bourgie bed-swappers and a dull sense of amoral sophistication - this autopiloted import does no favors to the legacies of Truffaut and Godard.

Eckhart’s status as the most likable too-handsome man this side of Chris Isaak will endure long after this film is erased from memory — which starts immediately.

When Mark Ruffalo shows up as a crumpled detective, you expect a dose of reality, yet on his heels come twin hams Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, whose solemn presences (as Christopher Nolan knows well) prove wonderful distractions from silliness.

Zombie is still committed to showing how violence perverts all touched by it, yet his carnivalesque approach undercuts his empathy. He panders to the cheap seats whenever he’s not being scary.

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.

A long, dull swim through narrative syrup interrupted occasionally by poorly choreographed acts of violence. It’s essential only for those wanting to hear Farrell try on a Hungarian accent.

The original film, for all its zaniness, existed in a recognizable Koch-era metropolis, one that paradoxically added to our hero's likable haze of denial. This time, the town is far shinier (what recession?).

Cowriter Branch isn’t much of a dramatist either, as this hoary midlife-crisis tale is watchable solely for its reliable cast.

No one's asking for a somber account of simian life, but perhaps Buzz Lightyear could keep quiet for a bit and let the monkey business speak for itself.

On one level, this is almost a really intriguing study of a very particular kind of first-world creative anxiety, but unfortunately, the fly-on-the-wall stuff just sounds like – as one of them calls it – ‘whining’. It looks like a real chore being in a-ha, around a-ha or possibly even a fan of a-ha.

Tossed together from a Hanif Kureishi screenplay which labours so many right-on themes that none leave their mark

The script – chronologically linear yet disjointed, averse to melodrama yet often clichéd in a ‘hello Monet, hello Rilke’ kind of way – is deeply inadequate.

Question: What's the only thing worse than doing an unfaithful film adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel? Answer: Doing a completely faithful one.

Well-intentioned but ultimately mishandled, it commits the cardinal sin of indecisiveness, middling out in a purgatory of daddy issues and Sunday service pamphlets.

Snoozeworthy diplomatic lark.

Granted, Boyle may be a competent director, but he’s missed the mark by not focusing on anybody with real heart: the father and his son, the cousin and her beau--basically, every person here who isn’t a cretinous, developmentally arrested creep.

Closer to a special episode of "Diff’rent Strokes" than to "12 Years a Slave," the movie seems to exist to give its white characters belated moments of conscience.

For a man so singular, the film’s chronological approach feels conventional and there’s little of the spark or fantasy he infused into his work in evidence.

As we work our way back to that cliff-hanger of an opening, it becomes clear that the movie is no acid critique, but a hollow endorsement of high living. Guess every generation gets its "Boiler Room."

Like a "Raging Bull" that’s been clocked one too many times in the head, Antoine Fuqua’s blood-simple boxing melodrama is so loaded with obviousness, it gets more pained groans from the audience than the guys in the ring.

Mona Achache's character study plays like a Gallic version of a Sundance flick, complete with on-the-nose references - Igawa's character is named Mr. Ozu - and just enough offbeat touches to make it seem more deep than it actually is.

Havana, Cuba, 1959. Lucky they print this on the screen, as it's the first and last coherent piece of information you can glean from Lester's political love story, which mentions neither politics nor love but plays out its actions against a background of both.

Jennifer Aniston delivers the saltiest lines as the company’s ruthlessly humorless CEO, though it’s a coal-lump of a part.

This slapdash parody will simply inspire shrugs.

Merely a paint-by-numbers condemnation of social intolerance. It's a slog of a sermon.