At least this tepid satire can coast on the charms of its cast.

Codirector Ami Horowitz hogs the screen like a cut-rate Michael Moore, bringing a numbingly simplistic irony and smug self-satisfaction to his faux–rabble-rousing exposé.

A vividly told but crushingly literal dramatization of an event that’s in every psych textbook published during the last 40 years, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s new film is compelling and useless in equal measure.

A standout in smaller parts in films like "Kaboom" and "Atonement," this frizzy blond actor has the air of a star-in-training in search of the right opportunity. This isn't it, unfortunately, but Temple does turn what's essentially a magical-hussy role into something more grounded and human.

For all the footage of glistening flesh - most of the film takes place in a darkened room where the two explore the realm of the senses - this is basically a melancholic piece about the remembrance of times, places and passions lost (with voice-over narration by Jeanne Moreau).

The overall fist-pumping rhetoric (lots of earnest reciting of Abu-Jamal's prose) and a failure to address the possibility that he might have, in fact, shot that cop in 1981 make this profile more hagiography than history.

Clichéd and formulaic.

The story's treacly all-souls-in-alignment outcome is never in doubt, but as Kasdan dogs go, this is light-years better than Dreamcatcher.

Cracks simply doesn't make the grade.

With its rock-skimming male bonding alternating between grisly homicides and a florid Mexican standoff that begets a tidy take-the-money-and-run finale, this tale seems less timely than merely tall.

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.

Somebody give Werner Herzog an IMAX camera already, and let's see what a real filmmaker does with the format.

Each of the three intercut stories in Hello Lonesome - all dealing with characters trying to overcome solitude - begins promisingly enough. Eventually, though, they all run aground on questionable decisions.

Only the mighty Fonda cuts through the claptrap; the rest is just a long, predictable trip.

Mostly, it's hackneyed horror devices uneasily mixed with softball dramatics of atonement, to increasingly plodding effect. Somebody get a defibrillator in here, stat.

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.

Writer-director Austin Chick throws in echoes of Abel Ferrara's feminist grindhouse classic "Ms. 45," but the provocation feels hollow and the stylish direction - filled with pensive slo-mo - just slows things down.

This writer-director still has some evolving to do.

It’s a movie that got up on the wrong side of the bed and compensated with four quadruple espressos.

The story of a young woman (Juno Temple) discovering that she is both a lesbian and a werewolf, Bradley Rust Gray's oddball horror parable starts with an irresistibly trashy premise and proceeds to treat it with the po-faced pretentiousness of a film-school thesis.

Burdened with an underwritten part, the curiously flavourless Styles struggles to match Pugh for intensity as husband and wife fly at each other – one’s ambition at risk from the other’s intuition – and the couple’s chemistry fizzles out. It’s a crucial flaw in a film that needs to sell us at least one thing that feels real in its world of artifice.

The paeans about national pride and brotherhood may be regional, but constant slow-motion battle scenes and squishy sentimentality are strictly wanna-be Tinseltown.

With the film heavily favoring extensive on-court footage at the expense of in-depth individual portraits, the “more” offered here is merely skin-deep, basketball-is-a-brotherhood uplift.

Reitman, who also cowrote the screenplay, feels the constant need to "deepen" his characters, granting them wants and motivations--especially during the moralistic third act--that are totally alien to how they're initially portrayed.

Queens-born horror specialist Stevan Mena has mastered the slow camera creep and the unusually artful vista-he even composes his own orchestral scores, good ones. But he needs to give up screenwriting, pronto. Put down the laptop, Stevan.

Its refusal to dress itself up is admirable, but overall we're talking about a slow trudge through the sludge.

The star and co-director appears hopelessly out of place, trapped in a variety of awkward-fitting uniforms while forced to offer up laughably obvious battlefield advice ("Avoid gunfire!").

Palmer's acknowledgement of his own involvement in, and thrill at watching, these events speaks volumes, but simply showing generations of pasty, fat men pounding each other to a pulp shouldn't be mistaken for an in-depth exploration of Gaelic machismo.

Vampirism is the new monstrosity du jour, and with Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, tweener boys get their own testosterone-infused variant of Twilight.

Once upon a time, the star would have added both gravity and a manic edge to this wronged everyman. At this juncture, Cage is less believable as an average Joe than he is as, say, a cursed trick rider with a flaming skull for a head.

The use of real musicians (both professionals, like Nellie McKay, and street performers) provides a certain authenticity to the performances, but the film's wide-eyed view of New York as a wonderland of harmonic diversity soon grows as tiresome as the film's trite romantic shuffling.

Neither totally impartial nor a puff piece, Varon Bonicos's documentary on fashion icon Ozwald Boateng nonetheless evinces a minimal amount of interest in digging into what makes its subject tick.

'Mysterious' events are so heavily laden with symbolism that any possibility of suspense or credibility is sunk even before Nature can start to get really raw. Walkabout and The Last Wave did it much better.

Fightville doesn't pummel you with outsider viewpoints - it doesn't seem to display much of a point of view at all.

Perhaps the film might have survived the tortuous plotting, sub-sitcom jokes and drab direction if it wasn’t for Barnard’s woefully misjudged, wet blanket performance, but it’s highly doubtful.

Some poignant and charming moments undercut the Munchkin aspect of the ethnic elderly portrayed here, but on the whole Silver's direction spoon-feeds chicken soup covered in a slightly unpalatable patina of schmaltz.

A romantic fantasia set in Istanbul, George Miller’s mystical confection operates like the genie at its heart: it’s full of visual sleight-of-hand and boasts plenty of storytelling power, but soon disappears from your mind in a puff of smoke.

Five Feet Apart, with its phoney emotions and baloney contrivances — these love-struck kids can’t even hold hands let alone get to first base because two people with cystic fibrosis aren’t allowed to touch — just didn’t do the job for me.

Given the months-long hype, what’s most bewildering about Sundance sensation Precious is its overall shrug-worthiness.

There are a million coming-out stories in various naked cities, and filmmaker Bavo Defume's contribution to the genre initially differentiates itself with a vibrant, creatively campy color scheme. Once the visual touches fade away, however, there's nothing to stop the parade of clichés.

The performances are universally weak, and Losey's clearly ambivalent attitude towards the demands of the genre ensures that the film is never exciting. But as an ambitious oddity, it exerts not a little fascination.

As its title suggests, this is more of a self-conscious attempt to court quirky cult-film status. Nice try.

Eager to please and easy on the eyes, The Kings of Summer sails right down the middle, safely tacking between sitcom setups and grandiose MGMT-scored montages without forming its own distinctive feel.

This is little more than an episode of VH1's Classic Albums writ large. You'll learn everything you ever wanted to know about the making of this chart-topping behemoth - except for insights about the man in the mirror who created it.

The one real takeaway here is not that things are tough all over, or that movie stars equate slumming with authenticity; it’s that no actor should be asked to do a sexy dance to Crazy Town’s “Butterfly.” Ever.

Leads Thorne and Schwarzenegger are mildly charming in a TV-soap way, but it’s all so desperately clean and savoury (even her XP is photogenic – unlike in reality).

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.

Best of all is the reliably brilliant Rose Byrne, whose scathing Republican strategist turns up to torment Zimmer.

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

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

Other than giving Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura and Lola Dueñas plum supporting roles, that's the best you can say about Philippe Le Guay's trite-to-intolerable tale on the discreet eye-opening of the bourgeoisie.

One could dwell on Johnson's in-your-face performance, or how refreshing it is to see a black New York drama played out by homegirls. But, facing facts, the climax is unpersuasive and the happy end a cop-out.

No one expected this long-delayed piece of Michael Jackson pop-aganda to lay bare the man behind the myths and myriad controversies in forensic style. And yet… this soft-ball character study of the King of Pop only doubles down on the former, while completely ignoring the latter, hitting all the usual dreary biopic beats along the way.

It’s an engrossing, overstuffed disaster—sometimes captivating, sometimes too ingeniously terrible to turn away from; it’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion, if both cars were stuffed with confetti.

Unsatisfactory both for fans of star-studded prison escape dramas and for football fans hoping to see cunningly devised tactics from Pele and his squad of internationals.

How does one remain an unapologetic fan of Vaughn, abrasive though he is, even as his material fails him?

Turner seems stifled by the joyless role of a woman whose only purpose is to be taught the error of her sanctimonious ways.

There’s slow-burning, and then there’s simply slow; the difference between the two has never been so apparent.

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

A sad re-run of the Mean Streets idea (awkwardly adapted by Vincent Patrick from his own admirable novel).

There are tears, there is laughter, there are ups, there are downs, there is hugging and there is learning, but none of it will leave an impression. Instead, it leaves you only with a faint yearning for a proper, scary-Simmons chair-hurling freak-out.

Campy but never dull, this first of three installments ends on a fiery cliffhanger. The completion of parts two and three would represent a victory for irrationality.

The historical tragedy that's dramatized is heartrending; the movie itself is merely one cliché piled atop another.

Eventually, the self-regarding acting clan admits they're only human after all. By then, the audience may want to disown them.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's mostly whiffed docudrama makes the influential poem by Allen Ginsberg (Franco) seem dull, ordinary, pedestrian instead of pioneering.

A film that could have been memorably haunting is, sadly, all too forgettable

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.

Spacey is ever the pro, shilling Axle's absurd redemption and countenancing the likes of Johnny Knoxville and John Stamos as if a third Oscar were in the offing. Yet his female costars fare worse, forming an unfortunate collection of dismal, man-dependent stereotypes, from Belle's perma-pouting idealist to Heather Graham's breast-obsessed, sapphic-by-choice ballbuster.

Zack Snyder's films have some of the best opening-credits sequences in cinema; the unfortunate thing is that there's always a movie after them.

The fully committed Rush, at least, commands our constant attention, and no movie with a kookier-than-usual Ennio Morricone score (dig those staccato-chanting chorines!) could ever be a total waste of canvas.

Truth or Dare ultimately plays like soap-opera trash.

It's low camp for narrow-minded Middle Americans who can't cope with the idea of a co*k in a frock.

Since the gaff has long been blown (we know Chucky is alive from the outset), the original's menacing tension is entirely absent. Lafia attempts to compensate by relying heavily on Kevin Yagher's advanced doll animations, but articulated facial features, however clever, are no substitute for thrills.

Javier Bardem does what he can to maintain his dignity.

The film lacks any kind of human interest, relying instead on our inferred love of lengthy strategy sessions and displays of ruffled pride. When it comes to yakuza cinema, you can do better.

Played straight, this could make some quite serious points about the predicament of the unemployed (Pryor as prostitute), but the film finds it easier to opt for cheap laughs.

Neither as subversively fun as last year’s megadestructive "Project X," nor as creative as "The Hangover" (on which these codirectors broke through as screenwriters), this further installment in the millennials-acting-badly genre serves as a distinctly average placeholder.

If Merchants of Doubt ultimately proves that good data doesn’t often make for good drama, it’s only because this doc is such a hollow slog.

This was Italy's official submission for Best Foreign Film to the 2011 Academy Awards (a red flag more often than not), and, sure enough there's little here that rises above middlebrow.

On its way to an uncathartic climax that somehow involves a black-market-fenced oil painting and an Amsterdam shootout, The Goldfinch throws in so much diversionary character work that you wonder if anyone thought the stew was going to be edible.

If Gregorini and Von Furstenberg's goal was to construct a cinematic Sunday Styles spread of the plaid-skirt-and-tie crowd, then kudos. As filmmakers, however, these two have some serious growing up of their own to do.

There's bondage, buggery, and a clothes-ripping chase up the stairs. Apart from that, there's a bit of verbal back-and-forth in court between the DA (Mantegna) and defence about whether she used her body as a lethal weapon to kill her millionaire lover and inherit; a brace of shifty witnesses (Archer and Prochnow); no tension; and Portland, Oregon in the rain.

While the original movie persuaded us that the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina could inspire jaw-dropping behavior, its equivalent here feels extremely bogus.

John Patrick Shanley's screenplay, touching on themes of betrayal and corruption, honesty and trust, promises and teases but suffers from coitus interruptus.

As a thriller, the film tries to camouflage its lack of suspense with profligate and repetitive gunplay and a deafening barrage of noise (Ry Cooder's score is a plus, however). There's too much voice-over, and not enough for arch-nemesis Walken to do. but at least Willis has the hard-boiled hero down. An honourable failure.

The satire rarely stings, as first-time feature directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod give a polite Masterpiece Theatre gloss to this most impolite of tales.

So it's no surprise that what starts out as a beer-soaked cringe comedy about stunted masculinity ends up deep in the woods with noise-loving Japanese tourists and exploding craniums - or that such detours into psychotronic oddity for its own sake can make even a 75-minute running time feel like an eternity.

The more the veteran actor strives to give Joe a final dose of funereal dignity, the more the film around him seems intent on deep-sixing its MVP.

A few of his labyrinthine concerns and much advanced animation work (plus optical assistance from once-celebrated avant-gardist Jordan Belson) spice the thin conceit, but it's a doomed project.

While there are some atmospheric and absorbing moments, all involving Isaac monologuing or close-ups on his face depicting stormy thoughts brewing underneath, Schrader ultimately abandons his gambling subplots in favour of a two-fold ending that is both anticlimactic and empty.

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.

This sequel to House offers another blend of humour and horror, but the gags aren't particularly sweet, the chills aren't particularly spicy. On the whole an indigestible affair, which fortunately passes quickly through the system.

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

From a character conceived by Mel Brooks', reads the blurb, and there are various nods to his style of humour throughout this bitty spoof. But the rest relies more on technology than style, and on mediocre effects that can't carry the plot.

Director Spheeris (Wayne's World) seems to have taken her obsession with youth culture beyond the limit, including a scene of dancing teenies in pink leotards that would make John Waters blush.

The Magic Christian is all too clearly representative of the impasse independent mainstream film-making found itself in when given its head by the industry in the '60s. The result is a variety concert of a film in which most of the acts/jokes fall flat.

Elevate works as a sympathetic portrait of cultural adjustment (learning in a nonnative language, sticking to Muslim dietary restrictions), but never adequately addresses the problems of what's essentially a neocolonialist system designed to shape impoverished Africans into first-world profit-makers.

Non Stop doesn’t know how to hit it and quit; it’s a rock doc that screams loud and says frustratingly little