It almost becomes comical to count the number of "who's holding the camera now?" reverse shots that the filmmaker haphazardly inserts to propel the story forward. Such visual ineptitude, like much else in this tediously cocky enterprise, is downright criminal.

The predictability is crushing, and with movies like "Crazy Heart" and Sofia Coppola's distinctly personal "Somewhere" so close in the rearview, David M. Rosenthal's estrangement drama feels especially soft.

Though there are some small, beautiful moments in Nettelbeck’s drama, Last Love as a whole feels like it’s been dosed with Xanax.

You can feel Chbosky's blood, sweat and tears oozing out of this highly personal project, but that holy trinity of fluids isn't enough to wash away the sense that you've seen this before - many, many, many times.

In our chatty "Game of Thrones" moment, you'll thirst for a sidekick: a sly dwarf, a wisecracking female warrior, a huggable wolf, anything. Solomon Kane has none of these, and even heavyweight speechifiers like Max von Sydow and the late Pete Postlethwaite (that's how old the film is) have little to gnaw on.

Cornball mish-mash.

Leaving is a tawdry potboiler slathered riotously in portent, complete with a lamebrained detour into vengeance that only Claude Chabrol would be able to pull off.

Still Life constantly threatens to become a better movie: John’s scrutiny of photos feels vaguely serial-killer–esque, and there’s a late-inning love interest (Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt) that you privately cheer for.

Fans of the gritty, era-defining precinct drama will bristle at how the program's realism has been replaced by a generic Tinseltown U.K. slickness. But regardless of whether you’re a longtime devotee or not, you’ll be left saying, “This is The Sweeney? I’ve been rooked.”

There are no memorable action scenes—the closest we get is a virtual rerun of the time-freeze sequence from the previous movie. And the script is just nonsense, comprised entirely of sarcastic asides, portentous gobbledygook ("The dawn of a new age will rise!" cries Isaac) and insider references that only the faithful will appreciate. Unless that’s you, it’s best to steer clear.

The question of whether the couple can overcome respective traumas and inbred social attitudes is essentially moot; the real query is how much insufferable Gallic tweeness you can stand before simply shouting "no, merci!"

Everything from the direction of actors to the dialogue signifies the work of a filmmaker who favors easy audience-baiting reactions over dramatic momentum. Doesn't the man who would later teach Bruce Lee how to kee-yah deserve better than a chopsocky Punch-and-Judy show?

Props should be given to Rodriguez’s breathless “let’s put on a show” inventiveness. Plus, Macy and the booger--kick ass!

The movie's multitasking creator seems to have bitten off more then she can chew. Her friends should have advised "baby steps."

It’s truly a milquetoast Scooby Snack for pet-friendly families who thrill to computer-generated mouth movements on real-life four-legged critters.

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.

If you’re not a #ReleasetheSnyderCut signee, you’re still better off watching the original, patchy as it is. At least it’s short.

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

Who knew entering a belated adulthood could be so easy-and so utterly joyless?

As with many young-adult book-to-film series, Beautiful Creatures plays like an illustrated compendium of scenes from the novel, as opposed to a finely tuned narrative all its own.

The film will do until "Fifty Shades of Grey" turns up. The more you think about Labor Day, the more calculating it gets.

This recasting of The Servant as a war film, with Courtenay playing the working-class deserter whose helplessness traps the liberal middle-class officer (Bogarde) assigned to defend him at his court-martial, fails precisely because the sexual element in the relationship, so explicit in The Servant, is so repressed.

As an info dump, Table is admirably efficient, addressing everything from obesity to the limits of charity. As a film, it’s less compelling, with only one subject — Philadelphia single mom Barbie Izquierdo — getting enough screen time to put a human face on the crisis.

The grizzled veteran actor, naturally, elevates the material like a pro, yet the entire exercise feels thin and reedy, trading in geriatric sentiment instead of hard-forged emotion.

An uneasy blend of neurotic comedy and mawkish sentimentality.

It's a functional sequel, but with all that spirited slicing and dicing, the director could have at least broken a sweat.

Brittle, workaholic and bitterly single does not a Kate Hepburn make, and in this latest screen iteration of The Taming of the Heigl, she doesn't stray far enough from her standard rom-com shtick.

There’s nothing more boring than a life embalmed with halfhearted Hollywood bombast, which only makes the film’s fleeting pleasures stand out all the more.

Sadly, most of the film's dull edges have to do with De Niro, who is clearly in rest-on-his-laurels mode; at his worst, he approaches radioactive, Robin Williams levels of bathos, as when Jonathan - roaring like a bush-league Lear - is banned from the shelter for bad behavior.

It's such a haphazard, absent-minded history lesson that you'd think the filmmakers had ingested some of the era's pharmaceuticals before concocting this tribute.

A misfire.

This is strictly an amateur-hour affair.

Sadly, the faults in the film lie in Harold Pinter's uncharacteristically bland script, and often woefully inadequate design and direction: the latter often missing opportunities in key scenes, the former full of rather tacky and silly uniforms, symbols, vehicles, and particularly crass watchtowers.

The whole film seems dead set against offering up any kind of salaciousness. Like the overly arty "Zoo" and other indie experiments, it misses the point in a disturbing way.

Charlie Victor Romeo would probably work best as a training tool for commercial airline pilots (the play, interestingly, has already been used in this fashion by the Pentagon). In a movie theater for a paying crowd, it’s little more than minimalist snuff.

Several quick-witted touches-such as a hilarious nod to Depp's role in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"-can't make up for Gore Verbinski's leaden direction of this digitally animated feature.

Class, gender and ethnic issues get pushed to the sidelines in favor of rote who-will-win suspense; all that finger-crossing and Lucky Charms flavoring, however, doesn't keep Jig from being just another in a long line of nonfiction soft-shoe routines.

Kudos to Evans for making up for the galling lack of gay African-American screen representation while delivering hot-body eroticism, but reducing complex relationship issues to a typical indie-flick blatherathon—complete with performances of varying quality and stilted dialogue—isn’t helping anyone.

The web of relationships between English and Japanese is too schematic in its polarisation of characters, Oshima's handling of the narrative is not so much elliptical as awkward, and Bowie's performance is embarrassingly wooden.

The director has made disappointing films before — a more generous word might be transitional — but never one so slight.

Boy needn't be pop-culturally fluent to be relatable; believable human characterizations would have sufficed.

Despite its meticulously detailed gore, Jigsaw is rarely scary.

There's only one thing worse than a leaden moral fable that tackles issues of forgiveness with sledgehammer contrivances, and that's one that attempts to mask its manipulative corniness with an air of trumped-up gravity.

Only Kristin Scott Thomas channeling "In the Loop's" Malcolm Tucker offers a spark; the rest is simply hokum designed to land overly sentimental suckers hook, line and sinker.

Mirthless, episodic fantasy saga.

Bibliophiles, librarians and graduate students may swoon at the sight of the author's signature grotesquerie.

When the sing-song Jones and beatifically smiling Streep are allowed to carry the dramatic weight, you can see the raw, tough-love film that Hope Springs wants to be - until Frankel starts trying to be lighthearted and cute, at which point you see the movie's real troubled marriage in full bloom.

The young actors' vacant-eyed brazenness may be true to life, but there's a whiff of exploitation, matched by the script's disinterest in exploring any friction that isn't skin on skin.

The movie amounts to little more than Marky Mark's South American Vacation.

Listen to the rhythms of "Broadcast News" - from Holly Hunter's daily crying jags to William Hurt's cock-of-the walk patter - and you'll hear how romantic comedy can approach an art form, a roundelay that requires the ear of a conductor. How Do You Know, James L. Brooks's latest, has such tone-deaf passages that it feels made by a totally different man.

Unless you really dig "Glee"-level displays of high-school drama geekery, you and your date may want to quickly exeunt.

Viewers who can't get enough of ESPN's "30 for 30" docs will lap up this dual portrait.

Director Castle gets lost in fantasy, spoiling a promising portrait with some heavy-handed emotional manipulation and an escapist conclusion.

Any residual charm evaporates when the third-act dramatics start piling up and a must-be-seen-to-be-believed final twist redefines the word shameless, even by Sparksville standards.

Big on emotional highs but skimpy on details, Dressed rallies behind the orphan but fails to reveal the artist.

Lessons are learned, bullies get their comeuppance, and every Wonder Years plot device is trotted out for maximum and-I-was-never-the-same-again nostalgia.

The soundtrack offers the expected jazz, while Allen himself, now sounding mumbly, offers intermittent, awkward narration. In the pantheon of his films, it’s a pretty but minor distraction.

While you know the stakes are high, Call Jane never seems particularly interested in proving it.

Unfortunately, Truffaut fell into a pit of awkwardness on the project; editingwise, he's hardly in the league of Hitchcock, his sequences rushing ahead, his ironies too obvious. The Bride Wore Black only makes you yearn for better imitators like Brian De Palma. (Unlikely agreement came from Truffaut himself, ever the film critic, who hated his own movie.)

A fun-sapped maelstrom without meaning, 300 simply pummels you with endless loops of battle-porn. While you couldn’t classify the movie as entertainment, it might have a long, prosperous future as a Clockwork Orange–style Ludovico Technique.

For a few brief moments, the film becomes something close to Greek mythology, as opposed to graphic-novel imitator. What a feeling!

Bizarre and vulgar, certainly, but also very hard to follow.

Equals could be her least persuasive performance to date — and remember, Stewart has played a soldier at Guantanamo and a girl who dates a vampire.

Even in those well-executed gnarlier moments and winky character beats, Scream VI feels a lot more dated than the genre it’s deconstructing.

Comic interest is sustained by the entrance of prissy poodle Daphne (voice-over: Diane Keaton), but the preponderance of nudging innuendo was enough to earn the film a '12' certificate, thus excluding the audience of younger children who might otherwise have enjoyed the movie.

In a word: Ugh.

Incestuous desires run rampant in the original novel by VC Andrews, but all the movie has to offer is soft-focus innuendo. As fantasy stripped of all its metaphorical trimmings, the sublimely ridiculous plot is more likely to reduce an audience to laughter than to tears.

Burdened with a bevy of unlikely plot twists, this is less a movie sequel than the latest installment in a big-screen soap opera.

The leaps made by Scott's agile mind in identifying both victim and usurper leave logic and credence on the starting block.

The lesson here, apparently, is that driven women just need to lighten up and stop being selfish - a message that really does feel backward.

Whether one takes the two-part movie as a glamorous epic or as a lengthy advertisement for the Italian communist party, it still looks like a major catastrophe.

The filmmaker throws in a strangely irrelevant twist before he’s through, but despite a lavish dose of gothic style, The Condemned’s trek toward absolution is pretty familiar.

You keep waiting for the movie to grow a brain, for that random attractive neighbor (Wilde) to turn out to be a decoy, for Banks herself to become suspect. Nope. The Next Three Days morphs into "The Fugitive" on steroids.

American Casino tries to connect the big picture regarding a major problem to a human pulse and comes up lacking on both sides. It’s a gamble that simply doesn’t pay off

This wisecracking saga of tween angst largely avoids the gimmicky saccharine aftertaste that's typical of the genre.

By the time this modest microindie noir starts laying its cards on the table, your attention will have already folded.

You can probably skip this one and still sleep soundly at night.

To be fair, pulling off complex action sequences in such unforgivingly high definition is a ballsy move—it’s much harder to hide the joins between what was captured in camera and what was added later. But as impressive as the action is—and a Smith-vs.-Smith motorcycle chase in Colombia is a superb sequence worthy of peak Bond—the high-definition format just doesn’t work.

The script is formula and so is the direction, which leaves the acting. According to the credits, Danson had an acting coach, but he's a warm enough presence to be able to carry a film as slight as this without needing one; instead the coach should have worked with Culkin, who can't even eat a sandwich convincingly.

Unfortunately, he's retained his previous work's touristy mondo italiano! vibe, all whimsical tunes and postcard scenery, while piling on enough ogling shots of nubile young women to make Hugh Hefner feel uncomfortable.

So it’s no surprise that, even with longtime screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala watching his back, the director never finds his groove with Peter Cameron’s tale.

Here's a film that definitely wants to play Hollywood dress-up.

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.

The culture wars may be simmering throughout writer-director Ben Hickernell's script-the Save the Whales and pro-choice bumper stickers on Will's VW invite a brutal barfly beatdown-but the real casualties are momentum and narrative cohesion.

Even this kind of WWIII escapism—it’s based on a 2012 novel by Don Keith and George Wallace called Firing Point—requires a sturdier hero than Gerard Butler, who finds himself in a time machine that delivers actors to rejected Tom Cruise projects.

Both Project Greenlight runners-up, directors Michael Aimette and John G. Hofmann get the teen angst and Gaelic aesthetic right; too bad their third-act thuggery isn’t just routine, but ridiculous.

As in the first film, the seasoned-pro cast provides the few fleeting pleasures to be found.

Second Act is an aspirational Pinterest board of a film, too bland to make an impression. If only the world saw street smarts as equal to book smarts, Maya wishes on her birthday. It’s a nice idea, but Second Act doesn’t possess smarts in either category.

The movie dies onscreen; it might be the best advertisement for avoiding the glories of Italy ever released by a Hollywood distributor.

In this breeding ground for date rape and HPV, there are some trashy kicks in seeing horrible people get theirs, plus housemother Fisher goes all buck wild with a shotgun.

An hour and half of comparable barbarity follows-all of it monotonous, none of it enlightening.

A miniseries, which the BBC once planned, might have worked. In this form, Midnight’s Children has the paradoxical misfortune of being both too rushed and too wearingly long.

The film is made up of plundered parts from the "Oceans" series and "The Usual Suspects," and—like several of the forged tomes that figure in the plot — it’s a pale imitation.

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

Bouchareb gives his actors room to roam, but you still get only skin-deep sketches instead of flesh-and-blood women.

The rest of us will just be left to puzzle over Aniston’s exhibitionism obsession and pray that Sudeikis’s smirking-douche leading-man shtick won’t constitute his entire post-SNL career.

The narrative is a mess despite the simplistic twinning of tales, and - worse yet - keeps interrupting the heart-stopping hoofing.

A smart concept is thoroughly wasted in this cute but grating DreamWorks animated comedy.