Brings nothing new to the coming-of-age dance film. Worse, director Carmen Marron seems as bored with the movie's protagonist as we are.

The better actors — Kevin Costner, chiefly, as the adoptive Earth father — strain to supply warmth, but mostly, the minutes stretch into great expanses of blahness, much of them filled with Transformers-grade skyscraper snapping and bloodless catastrophe.

This iron lady of cinema deserves better.

A typically lax late-period Ferrara work, far from the glories of "King of New York."

Even Peña and an able supporting cast that boasts a bear-hugging Bobby Cannavale are hamstrung by a script where too many jokes fall flat.

The late Douglas Adams summed up Earth as “mostly harmless,” a description that also applies to this eminently tolerable animated time-filler.

A dumb comedy out to prove its genre-defying smarts--the title is both an onscreen-supported reference to Walt Whitman and a wacky-tobaccy allusion--Leaves of Grass is a mostly mirthless affair; not even the sight of Edward Norton portraying twins tickles as it should.

Streep's tentative foray into comedy is deliberately mannered, but the breathy delivery and constant fluttering of hands are nevertheless excessive. And in her film debut, Barr just isn't imposing enough to inspire notions of devilish vengeance. The film-makers have opted for frothy satire, but as comedies go this is lamentably short on laughs.

Some will call The Color Wheel daring. Others will remember that it takes more than desperate shocks to add substance to the sloppy diddlings of a dilettante.

Writer, director and star Fuller posits a dichotomy between belief and scientific rationality, only to gull us into accepting the former.

Mortal Engines really is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent slog, as characters leap unfeasibly out of planes on to bits of cities while a squad of rebel-fighter pilots straight out of Star Wars buzz around.

Admittedly the book, an elusive, mesmeric work of associated images and ideas, surreal and analytical, would present problems for the most talented of film-makers. But Schlesinger really blows it.

The promise Dumont once showed has ossified into unholy shtick.

This is bitter-sweet compartmentalised, with the saccharine spooned on at the end. Even then it lacks flavour.

Depending on what you need from this movie, there's slight redemption in its full-on commitment to raunch, both in baby-shit–to-mouth scatology and some choice zingers.

The film never really overcomes obvious budgetary constraints, with important moments drained of impact because the effects lack imagination. Kristofferson and Travanti (as a physicist) are effectively true to form, but Ladd is woefully inadequate.

The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.

Sadly, it collapses dizzily amid a baroque shower of bejewelled costumes, Kenneth Anger style colour overload, mock fairytale purple prose, and pixillated anti-naturalistic performances. Finally pretty tedious.

Let's not make 4:44 Last Day on Earth sound cooler than it is. Compared with Lars von Trier's histrionically doomed "Melancholia," the film lacks any serious attempt to grapple with mortality.

Robert Getchell's script milks the story for maximum tears, but wrestles unsuccessfully with the inherent absurdity of Stella's predicament, delivering clichéd situations and dialogue. And Midler's larger-than-life performance is daunting against the subtler approaches of Alvarado and Mason.

Ultimately, for all its running around in the middle of the night, Sex Tape plays it remarkably coy, reaffirming love, not lust. It’s the cinematic equivalent of sleeping in the wet spot.

The equivalent of a skin flick in which all the sex scenes are tastefully obscured by blankets and sheets.

And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.

‘Please don’t be boring,’ Nelson’s villain beseeches Wilson in a clutch moment. Who wants to tell him?

The unintentional hilarity of the whole enterprise - especially when Albert attempts to romance one of the hotel's naive employees (Wasikowska) - at least keeps you engaged, as does the scene-by-scene suspense over which pitiably wide-eyed expression Close will choose to use next. Hopefully, she's practicing her gracious-loser face for awards season.

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.

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.

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.

Once you get over the droll joke of seeing an equine Web surfer wearing a bathrobe and sipping his morning coffee, the movie settles into a shrill groove from which it never escapes.

There are occasional glimmers of what might have been in the fresh performances of the actresses. But it plods where it should sparkle, like a celebration where the champagne's gone flat.

Treasure of the Sierra Madness.

It’s a hit-and-mostly-miss affair: For every gut-buster like McBride and Franco’s lengthy exchange about drenching each other in seminal fluid, there’s a fall-flat gag.

Yet even with the rich, inherently cinematic texture of the urban setting and two excellent native outer-borough actors in Morales and Reyes, Gun Hill Road falters thanks to its paint-by-numbers storytelling.

No matter what the film says about sexual fluidity, you can't shake the feeling that 3 exists primarily to justify a shot of three figures impeccably posed together on a mattress. Everything else is reduced to trumped-up afterthoughts.

No matter how sensitive the orchestral-string score gets, the film can't locate the bone-deep sense of tragedy of Leslie Schwartz's novel - it just keeps belching out empty, grief-stricken histrionics devoid of insight.

Would-be thoughtful Western which ultimately resorts to killing and ketchup to make up for its lack of style and originality.

If there’s any justice, dawning or otherwise, at the multiplex, audiences will reject Zack Snyder’s lumbering, dead-on-arrival superhero mélange, a $250 million tombstone for a genre in dire need of a break.

It’s bad enough that Nancy Meyer’s latest conventional romcom is blessed with a title so bluntly unimaginative as to seem facetious; the rub is that it’s not even a truthful assessment.

Some will find the director’s toothless brand of epiphany comforting (and download his mixtape), but the vast majority will find it tired.

The potentially interesting material is suffocated by a B-movie story and a C-grade script.

So-so contemporary shows and cantankerous arguments are favored over in-depth looks at Reid's legacy. Any genuine weirdness about a funky, filthy-mouthed freak running around in a costume is left AWOL.

Menopausal male Wilder gets the frustrated hots for comely Ms Le Brock in this broad, unfunny Hollywood remake of the broad, only vaguely funny French original Pardon Mon Affaire (which at least had long-faced Jean Rochefort in its favour).

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

Antoine Fuqua’s second-rate retread of his own "Training Day" is a bloated, multithread drama concerning three burnt-out cops at the end of their seemingly unconnected ropes.

What's the word on the film debut of Rihanna, playing a sass-mouthed petty officer? Dreadful (ella, ella).

Things begin well, with Fisher adding some atmospheric touches and Cushing suggesting a man undermined by his excessive rationality. Unfortunately the script, which treads a wavering line between jerky comedy and seriousness, soon dissipates anyone else's better intentions.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, as the novel suggested, but steamy adaptations simply can't be doled out lukewarm.

Adding hot naked men to a predictable narrative doesn't equal titillating or taboo; it just means you've dressed up a messy melodrama

Zhang's mixture of unsparing violence, mawkish sentimentality and garish flourishes creates one uncomfortable aesthetic.

Has neither enough bite nor enough heart to sustain it as a female-revenge-fantasy-cum-romantic-comedy; even its “shocking” switcheroo and faux-edgy moments seem remarkably frivolous and flavorless.

Hall's puppy-dog charisma holds up under the strain, but it isn't nearly enough to keep this messy midlife-crisis dramedy afloat. A little of this Bliss goes a long way.

Overall, the movie has the bantamweight feel of a really long DVD extra: Little details of the director’s ancestral stomping grounds are appealing, but don’t jell into something satisfying.

Famous fans (Rosanne Cash! Oprah!!!) attest to the book and film's greatness, but at best, this is a half-hour A&E Biography episode padded out to feature-length with forgetful trivia, frustratingly facile history lessons and far too much fawning.

There’s no sense of what Wajeman is after here. A character piece should have some sense of a character’s who, what and why, right?

A perfectly boring movie from Julian Schnabel - is it possible?

Breillat, as always, goes her own way, but her impressionistic scenes barely cohere, even at this brief running time.

Stone looks distinctly ordinary in this glossy, glassy sex-thriller.

This sequel brings everything back to the original film – even recycling some of the same jokes. But they’re a pale echo of its greatness in an overly stuffed and only occasionally fun spectral adventure.

There’s plenty of on-screen talent involved here, but they’re all far better than the material. Hopefully, the all-but-certain Sonic 3 will level-up the script.

The ideas here aren't nearly up to the scratch that writers Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris established in Trading Places.

How Göran and his new charge bond (party boy Sven quickly splits) is the stuff of time-tested trite melodrama.

Writer-director Jane Campion approaches the tale with an artiste’s respectful solemnity, but it too often comes off like "Twilight" transplanted across oceans and centuries.

Equal parts Hollywood meet-cute and quirky coming-of-age tale.

Like the myriad dangers threatening the earth, the film is simply too unwieldy, a sprawling mass of ideas that are dutifully checked off and then given only superficial explanations in lieu of insightful explorations.

While his film is engaging enough when covering curiosities like a funeral directors' convention, the fact that it lacks an authorial voice of its own is a dealbreaker.

The characters may soar, but viewers’ spirits stay grounded.

For all of Cloud Atlas's pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the "natural order," the execution couldn't be squarer.

It's hard to truly hate any movie whose ending revolves around a clever Where's Waldo? gag. It's also near impossible to take it seriously for that exact same reason.

You can’t deny the inspirational qualities of the story or Parker’s screen presence, any more than you could accuse the film of subtlety or of masking its conspicuous pro-Christian agenda.

It also serves to undercut fine performances by Connelly and Harris, whose choices are constantly destabilized by scripted swings between comedy and drama, realism and fantasy, genuine catharsis and indie-film ornamentation. Black's overactive melodrama is more than a representation of schizophrenia; it's the embodiment of it.

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.

The tonal lurches – from jokey to earnest and back again – will have whiplash setting in by the time its eccentric fourth-wall-breaking coda comes around, while some odd casting choices (and accents) drain gravity from the serious moments.

The results make your head spin more than they make your spirits soar.

Protektor is simply another in a long line of diluted stories about life during wartime, one whose diminished returns only further trivialize a legacy of real-life horror.

The plot is so simple that psychological interest is needed to sustain it, and this would require stronger performances than those Widmark and Monroe give.

Widows' Cynthia Erivo supplies dramatic weight to a project that squanders it on awkward action moments and simplistic showdowns.

As Match wilts into a trite portrait of people who are at the mercy of their pasts, Belber’s menagerie of inexpressive shots leaves his film at the mercy of its own.

Must all films for kids be so shoddy, though? The music is appalling.

Before this star vehicle devolves into a soggy New Age sermon, Murphy's manic pantomiming offers a few faint flickers of the mad comic genius from 1987's "Raw".

If What to Expect represents the best tearjerking laugh-machine that Hollywood can birth, it's probably time to get those story ideas implanted in vitro.

Unlike O'Bannon's film, this is merely repetitive and dull, the tedium relieved only by the graphic brain-eating and Philip Bruns' deliciously OTT performance as the mad Doctor Mandel.

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.

The pomo thrill was already wearing thin a few "Shrek" entries ago; here, the reliance on self-referentiality really risks coming off like yesterday's Purina.

What it tells you most about is those kitschy concepts of 'stardom' and the like on a soap-opera/backstage drama level.

Too on-the-nose to resonate past the end credits, this slickly produced film still deserves praise for being progressive-minded, as Tarek isn’t a hateful man but a product of his circumstances who is only trying to help his family. It’s frustrating to see such a humane movie suffer from oversimplification.

There's nothing strictly wrong with any of this, except for the fact that even a buttoned-down period piece like "Topsy-Turvy" feels sexier.

Where the book had a kernel of intellectual irony to it — words betray a nation — this drama goes shamelessly for the heart.

Adapted from Thorne Smith's fantasy about sexual role reversal, this probably seemed daring once, but hasn't worn well.

The near-incomprehensible plot (something about French and American agents trying to find out more about a Russian undercover group, directly involved with Cuba and working within the French security network) might appeal to devotees of Le Carré et al, but it certainly doesn't make for dramatically exciting cinema, especially given Hitchcock's flat, seemingly uninterested direction.

So why does this animated kids' film fail to come together? Bursts of manic pacing steamroll over most of the wit, a little of Sandler's thick-accent shtick goes a looong way, and by the time the requisite life lessons about letting your offspring leave the nest get rolled out, the undead-on-arrival jokes are outnumbered by anemic sitcom gags.

Alas, unlike the duo's Crank films - also about a hero on the verge of explosion - Spirit of Vengeance lacks a solid gimmick to unify their transgressive gambits.

Why Stone also chooses to characterize those on his side as feeble-brained hippie protestors is a mystery, but in its attempts to debunk the feasibility of massive energy reduction, Pandora’s Promise at least brings some measure of rhetorical skill to its arguments.

Coyle's got charisma to spare - imagine a hard-man version of Andy Serkis - but even his screen presence eventually gets smothered by the film's cartoonish version of ethnic gangsters, macho caricatures and bruised-heart-of-gold hookers. The phrase accept no substitutes has rarely seemed so applicable.

Like a "Training Day" for spy thrillers, The Double provocatively pairs Gere and Grace as a gray-green odd couple, only to unravel as the double-crossed absurdities pile up and the duo start trading bad Russian accents in a private Mexican standoff. Oh nyet you didn't!

Material like this doesn't require the additional strain of overnarrated freeze-frames, a "Cuckoo's Nest" supporting cast of adorable crazies and a Glee-ified musical number set to Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure."

Jet Trash is not unlikeable, but nothing other than the scenery leaves much of an impression.

Mills stages the B-movie mayhem with gleeful abandon and geysers of blood.

Diced into hash, the action sequences are unusually painful: poundingly loud and punctuated by Liam Neeson's bark, Bradley Cooper's manic heehawing and a total lack of clarity.