Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and Elaine try to become friends with benefits, and set up unsustainable ground rules for their new arrangement? Imagine it rewritten by the Romantic Comeditron 2000 as a profanity-laced schmaltzfest, and you've got this tone-deaf dud.

The real scam was the filmmakers tricking Rebecca Hall (and a cameoing Amanda Seyfried) into participating in this blunt instrument of an indie.

Old-school intrigue, informants and assassins, life-or-death pursuits in crowded places, characters who are adults and do not wear capes or pilot robots: This is pretty much what any filmgoer over the age of 13 pines for in the dog days of summer, so this courtroom melodrama/surveillance thriller should be manna.

Too sluggish for farce and too glib for a trenchant social satire, A.C.O.D. is several sessions short of a breakthrough.

Rosman's debut movie was a pretty fair show-reel promising, falsely it seems, more and better to come.

With its bravura camerawork, fetishistic Cenobite designs, nerve-jangling soundtrack, and literate Peter Atkins script, Anthony Hickox's film is a worthy successor to Clive Barker's flesh-ripping original. Forget the disastrous Hellbound: Hellraiser II; this is adult horror to die for.

It starts off promisingly with some stylised and ridiculous heroics involving a German sub, but once the island has been occupied and a few excellent monsters vanquished, the plot settles down to some very ordinary machinations.

Despite making use of Hackman, Christie and Marshall in supporting roles, and actual US newscasters to cover the election results, the film is still a complete mess. Barely held together by Cy Coleman's powerful score, it finally falls apart thanks to the embarrassing amateurism of the party political broadcasts the characters produce, and the Vidal Sassoon world they inhabit.

Though by no means a perfect film, it is a much more coherent work than it is given credit, held together by Siegel's exuberant eye for the incongruous.

But something compelling happens here that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Raging in Shange's still startlingly fluid verse like witches casting spells, this powerful cast (especially Jackson, Goldberg and Phylicia Rashad) reaches bravely, if sometimes clumsily, for emotional accountability.

An early twist means that the bloodletting develops a repetitive feel, and there are unfortunate parallels with the recent Ready or Not 2, but the wincing and guilty laughs never quite dry up. Cult status may await.

Antal and his performers’ pure B-movie esprit is undeniable.

The whole thing veers wildly in quality, and no Eastwood-hater should go within a mile of it; but few lovers of American cinema could fail to be moved by a venture conceived so recklessly against the spirit of its times.

For a film which defines its characters entirely in relation to each other, there's a curious lack of chemistry between the leads. Only in the childhood sequences are the undercurrents and tensions of the various relationships explored.

Interminable scenes of macho posturing and mock-Tarantino dialogue (including a lengthy dissection of the word fags!) mark time between a number of ineptly staged car chases that would embarrass the makers of "Cannonball Run II."

There’s no pleasure in trashing a film as humanistic and well-intentioned as Freeheld, but just because anyone would agree with its message doesn’t mean this glorified Lifetime movie does a worthy job of conveying it.

All of the performances are knockouts, especially The Visitor's Richard Jenkins as a damaged Texas spiritualist who steeps the movie in intimacy.

It's another episodic, shaggy-dog parade of L.A. denizens caught in moderately compromised positions.

This is extremely silly, good natured, superficial stuff; a lot depends on whether you take to Bill and Ted's unique lingo (which contorts surfers' expressions) and their gormless behaviour.

Rebirth knows it needs to make its scaly stars frightening and surprising again and manages it in Spielbergian style.

It starts strongly, with the gory deaths coming thick, fast and often unexpectedly, and Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse’s script giving the viewer no purchase on the unfolding mayhem. The underrated Gilpin is a steely, lib-owning presence, too. But the surprises soon dry up.

When Canet isn't dabbling in schmaltz, he's forcing text-message gags and metaphor-heavy vermin jokes down viewers' throats in a lame attempt at levity. Emotional fraudulence does indeed constitute a lie, just not a white one.

The animation has little depth of field (galloping horses hover inches above the ground), the colours are watery, and there's not much Englishness in the settings. The characters, too, are unimaginative, with only bad boy Ruber (voiced by Oldman) providing any originality (his song and dance number is the one highlight).

Very boring.

Craven tries to do this 'veggie-man' horror in a suitable DC Comics style; and with Louis Jourdan as arch-villain 'Arcane', not to mention Adrienne Barbeau (Mrs John Carpenter) as the Thing's object of desire, he's definitely on the right track. At other times, the picture is right off its trolley.

Despite a screenplay by the esteemed Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Scent of a Woman), this lacklustre espionage thriller is bogged down with the sort of clichés you'd expect from the height of the Cold War.

Washington has the quiet authority, and Fuqua the stylistic chops, but the story they’re telling becomes more predictable as it goes along. Once it’s over, you won’t necessarily be itching for an Equalizer 3.

There’s social satire for those who want it — don’t tell the rest of the neighborhood our daughter’s risen from the dead! — and a fine, simmering sense of apocalypse that turns this suburban community into a war zone. Still, it’s a lot of heavy lifting for what amounts to “he’s just not that into you,” mainly because you’re as ripe as a cadaver.

The "Pretty Woman"–style final act is fairly creepy, leaving a sour aftertaste to this otherwise sweet, if insubstantial, confection.

The logic wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, but García Bogliano’s unnerving mood, complemented by grungy camerawork and a shroud of sonic chaos, provides an emotional strain that makes anything possible.

Director Harris's strength is his ability to flesh out routine crime scenarios with credibly motivated characters, adding emotional depth and texture to familiar generic pleasures. That said, Snipes never quite finds the measure of his role; so, despite Hopper's unusually funny and warm performance, the final impression is tepid.

This is far from the disaster that was predicted. It’s cute and cheerful, but its efforts to make Snow White both respectful to the original and relevant to a new audience leave it stranded in some smudgy grey areas.

Soloway mines her ensemble of funny ladies more for laughs than emotional insight, but Hahn breaks through it all; she’s the one who provides the glossy rumination with actual heart.

Another of [Godard's] essays on the impossiblity of making movies in our time, this has all the dreariness of a pathologist's dictated notes.

Kilmer makes a surprisingly effective and effete Holliday, but Russell lacks the stature for Earp - Sam Elliott as his older brother Virgil suggests a better movie. There's a misguided romantic subplot and the ending rather sprawls, but mostly this is rootin', tootin' entertainment with lots of authentic facial hair.

Church oozes lonely-patsy schlubiness and Shue radiates crazed heat, but the movie ultimately relies too heavily on dry wackiness and goes too light on the fatalistic bleakness.

On one level, the film compels through force of intellect, but ultimately it lacks the cohesive emotional force, the ferocity, to consistently nurture its conviction over two hours.

What’s refreshing about Pascal-Alex Vincent’s dramatically thin but richly atmospheric feature debut is that it recognizes the essential truth of the conceit: all seminal voyages are journeys of heightened awareness, as visceral as they are emotional.

It’s a slickly enjoyable production (if unfocused and bloated), and his bullet-point tips are persuasive; but dude, there are better ways to humanize these issues than crying on camera.

‘Tell It to the Bees’ is a poignant story of a romance that’s crushed before it can take wing, even if it lacks the messiness of Fiona Shaw’s source novel.

As intriguing as the movie is, there's the sense that its free-associative story line has been dredged up from its maker's unconscious and recounted without filter or shape.

The sincerity that Eurovision fans might fall for is exactly what stops the comedy from taking off.

Lifeforce is a near-impossible film to review, at once indescribably awful and hugely, brilliantly entertaining.

Don’t think too much about the plot; it’s about as water-tight as a corporate-pension scheme. All three stars deliver exactly what you expect from them — nothing more, nothing new — but their onscreen familiarity is a strange comfort in itself.

Badham and scriptwriter Steve Tesich keep the syrup and scenery flowing along nicely.

An efficient, entertaining time-waster, but Snipes deserved better for his first solo starring role.

Fortunately, Teegarden and McDonell make up for the hand-me-down plotting with a sweet, unaffected chemistry.

Given how prominent the postcard sultriness of her backdrop is compared with the story's emotional ping-pong, all she ends up with is a kinder, chicer Adrian Lyne movie.

A down market youth pic with Laughlin as the half-breed Vietnam veteran who stands up for America's misunderstood youth and operates a sort of one-man Countryside Commission.

What's surprising is that Rogen and Streisand have a genuinely complementary chemistry, feeding off each other in a way that suggests that, given a halfway decent script, the two would make a better-than-decent screen duo.

Artless and unpleasant, this is the kind of late-summer swill that gives August a bad name.

Here Von Sydow's a rival beer manufacturer hoping to take over the world by drugging his brew, but the plotline (derived from Hamlet) soon goes flat.

This ride with Johnson and Blunt is so purely entertaining you may well want to go round again.

After the Wedding contains enough domestic revelations for several seasons of something delicious, but Freundlish’s showdowns all seem to dissipate or get curtailed abruptly.

It’s not going to win too many trophies, but Champions is still a cheering watch.

There's no suspense, even as Galifianakis's bone-dry earnestness sometimes kicks the movie into a realm of stealth drama.

Variously throughout the film, close-ups of hands stroking marble, bodies or linking fingers try their best to create a sense of visual intimacy that the script fundamentally lacks. In its absence, all that’s left is a run-of-the-mill queer story with one dimension.

While the tartness and wit is missing to elevate this anywhere near the romantic-comedy canon, the overall vibe is so cosy and frothy, you’d need a heart of steel to hate it.

From its opening montage of Hallmark-worthy kisses to a climactic clinch under the Tuscan sun, Letters to Juliet celebrates synthetic sentiment.

The film was rushed out to capitalise on its predecessor, with none of the subtext, but the animation is up to scratch, the action and direction efficient, and there is a nice melancholy to Denham’s regret for his previous conduct, which aptly prolongs the mournfulness of the original’s ending.

Even on its own limited terms, the jokes are sub–"Friday" sequel, and a last-act grab for "Boyz n the Hood" pathos is seriously reaching.

Director Maya Kenig's film never decides whether it wants to be a social satire, a familial drama or a parable about Israeli life during perpetual wartime; that it neither picks a route nor cohesively combines any of those strands doesn't make a fairly generic father-daughter story any more colorful.

It could have been so much worse; we wish it was a lot better.

Only Leo, always a dependable supporting actor, turns her character into something resembling a three-dimensional person. Watching her tentatively reconnect with her maternal instincts is a welcome surprise. Everything else here just feels like another descent into mediocre Amerindie miserablism.

Barkin may be the equal of Gena Rowlands or Liv Ullmann. Her director's clumsiness, however, suggests he isn't fit to hold Cassavetes's or Bergman's old camera cases.

They quickly smother whatever greatness was inherent in the material. Faulkner’s vivid, tragic and tender world is nowhere to be found here, and it's a deal breaker by any other name.

Despite a few moments of surprising insight, Twelve Thirty comes off as more mechanistic than organic; it's composed rather than truly lived.

Judging from Sánchez's Lovely Molly, he'd like to get lost in the trees again, but now knows the path too well.

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.

A ridiculous sequel, bad enough to be enjoyable, what with its jumbo jet crammed full of Hollywood celebs - Gloria Swanson, Myrna Loy, Sid Caesar, even Linda Blair (as a teenager being rushed to a kidney transplant) who looks like she is going to vomit over two nuns.

A Jerry Bruckheimer–produced video-game adaptation--it has to be good, doesn’t it? (Ya, sarcasm.)

The real mystery of Dark Skies isn’t who’s pulling the paranormal pranks — it’s lanky visitors from above, not vengeful spirits from beyond — but why Dimension is treating this reasonably effective potboiler like something that should be hidden away at Area 51.

At one point, Borba speaks with keen perspicacity about embracing Bahian folklore even when it verges on stereotype. This documentary mirrors the enthusiasm of that embrace, but not its artistry.

Messina and Ireland thrive under that gaze, and dismaying affectations aside-the characters go needlessly unnamed - the movie articulates the enduring allure of a love defined, and heightened, by restrictions.

Interesting only in so far as it reveals Eastwood's nonchalant attitude to the blockbuster. Unlike Sutherland, who tries desperately to act his way out of Troy Kennedy Martin's laboured script, Eastwood just strolls through the film, along the way creating its few cinematic moments.

Veering wildly between a quite well-written satire on the contemporary American political scene and a very ham-fisted nuclear blackmail thriller, its sheer eccentricity is quite engaging.

First-time director Yuzna is happier with the sly humour and clever plot shifts than with the appropriately iconic but sometimes dramatically unconvincing cast. He nevertheless generates a compelling sense of paranoid unease, and shifts into F/X overdrive for an unforgettable horror finale.

From the moment the picture wobbles reluctantly on to the screen, this clearly demonstrates that the Baltimore boy was ahead of his time when it came to punk aesthetics and shock for shock's sake.

There is a sense of déjà vu all right, but this is an extremely attractive valediction to youth, with farcical underpinnings ably handled by Reynolds.

The generally strong performances do justice to scriptwriter Barry Michael Cooper's evident desire to avoid the New Jack stereotyping of many contemporary black crime movies; the fluid camera and lush jazz score ensure that it looks and sounds classy; and much of the time the director's understatement and attention to detail are a distinct advantage. However, matters are not helped by an actorly tone, some plot-stopping big speeches, and an often sluggish pace.

Titillation and tentative stabs at gender studies do not a cogent cri de coeur make. It's simply a provocation that's all hopped up with nowhere to go.

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.

Mainly, though, this is a humorless film that skimps on the delicious opportunity for spousal retribution.

For all its freedom to reimagine her life and rescue her from cultural victimhood, Blonde is just a bit too willing to chuck her overboard and watch her flounder.

Engaging fare: part Dungeons and Dragons, part buddy movie - in the style of The Good, the Bad and the Very Ugly - and, finally, a tale of redemption.

A hammed-up version of the old chestnut about the ventriloquist who is 'taken over' by his dummy, clumsily adapted by William Goldman from his own novel and infinitely better done in The Great Gabbo and Dead of Night.

Though Summer of Goliath has its share of grace notes and gorgeous shots, the anxiety of influence hangs heavy over every real-time interaction, every direct testimony, every re-creation (and re-re-creation) of allegedly true incidents.

It's a saga whose clichéd corniness would be practically sinful if not for the mighty Gugino, who almost counteracts the material's pap with megawatt charm and steel-tough resolve - exemplified by a low-angled intro shot of the poised, strutting, tight-sweater-sexy actress.

Sophia Takal's update of the cult classic turns the real horror of campus assault into a springboard for cheap thrills.

This sex thriller is trapped in a tepid zone between quality trash and pretentious psychodrama.

Peeters also lays on the gore pretty thick amid the usual visceral drive-in hooks and rip-offs from genre hits; and with the humour of an offering like Piranha entirely absent, this turns out a nasty piece of work all round.

No new ground is broken, and viewers will, not unpleasantly, get everything they expect. It’s apparently morning in America again.

Some kind of napping for sure: The line between rigor and tedium is crossed in this Madrid-set home-invasion thriller, captured in a dozen or so claustrophobic shots but impoverished as a piece of drama.

No matter how thickly Russell piles on the masturbating nuns, tortured priests and dissolute dauphins, there's no getting round the fact that it's all more redolent of a camp revue than a cathartic vision. Derek Jarman's sets, however, still look terrific.

Director Jeanne Labrune (Vatel) makes the most out of having a compellingly watchable movie star at her disposal, but neither some odd stabs at humor nor Huppert's versatility do much to enliven what's essentially a superficially sexed-up soufflé.

What could have been one long, smutty joke ends up turning into a moving slice of midlife.

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.

Sinatra displays great competence as an action director, and a sequence where the Americans attempt to capture a boat laboriously built by the Japanese is beautifully choreographed, ending with a memorable shot of both sides staring in silence as a hand-grenade destroys their only means of escape.