If director Stephen Fung's frenetic visual style is the Red Bull in this cinematic cocktail, then the dozy plotting is the vodka - leaving you feeling momentarily excited but ultimately narcotized.

J. Edgar is infuriatingly coy and noncritical about its subject, an undeniable patriot but also an alarmist and a ruiner of lives.

Mea Maxima Culpa only gets messier the more it tries to iris out to a larger indictment. The central tragedy ends up diluted to a fault.

Though the director includes a few brief humdingers — a fight that involves a Rube Goldberg–ish tangle of wires; some munitions-fueled mayhem in a farmhouse — it’s not enough to keep viewers from wishing they were thumbing through a John le Carré novel instead.

It's gruellingly long, the four-track stereo relentless, and the music a mechanical recreation of Zeppelin standards (eg. 'Whole Lotta Love', 'Stairway to Heaven).

Director-cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s indifference to the material is palpable and of a piece with his deathly dull output of late.

Unfortunately, none of the subsequent noise is all that scary, and the striving for "Paranormal Activity’s" buzz is shameless.

The film spends too much time following a Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, limiting most of the substantive material to the last act.

First-time director J. Clay Tweel oversells the importance of both the Vegas event and of magic in general-you'd think he were filming a spiritual movement rather than hidden-ball tricks. His wide-eyed subjects do make magic happen-but that has less to do with illusion than innocence.

This is little more than an expensive-looking celebrity vacation video—more evidence in support of the notion that the Hollywood house always wins.

The Freebie grimly reaffirms the status quo, concluding it's better to have no sex at all than to forsake the Ikea-furnished domestic dream.

Irritated, you realize you've been watching an object that's all surface, no soul.

De Niro and Streep play two Manhattan commuters who fall in love, Brief Encounter style; but to invoke Coward and Lean's film is to realise just how thin and unsatisfying this one is.

This isn't a film, it's a recording of canned ham-tasty, certainly, but creaky nonetheless.

This behind-the-curtain portrait winds up revealing only the most superficial-and glaringly obvious-of truths.

There are few traces of irony, intended fun, or Casanova-style exoticism here: the director may intened a feminist Visconti, but he ends up with a Zalman King Red Shoe Diary crossed with a Dick Lester Dumas adaptation.

Clearly there's a lot of myth-dispelling to do; indeed, the film often seems like a public-service announcement wrapped around a sketchy narrative skeleton.

The movie succeeds in generating only mild outrage, tempered by impeccable tastefulness and the safe distance of time.

Another depressing example of the big-screen gag-string sitcom, it turns exclusively on a plot that grew from a concept that developed from an idea that somebody should never have had - Goldie Hawn joins the army.

What starts as an intriguing reverie ends as a hollow allegory.

Swiftian satires on popular taste can backfire badly, and Spike Lee's attempt at black consciousness-raising through the armature of Animal House movies almost dies of the contusion it is trying to lance.

Unfortunately, Mumbai Diaries addresses these weighty concerns with such delicacy that they barely make an impact, thus calling further undue attention to the creakiness of the warhorse plot.

You can go to one of those sweaty, immersive outdoor music fests and get splattered with the mud and euphoria that always engulfs fans. Or you can cheap out and see this predictable rom-com-shot at the 2010 edition of Scotland's then-in-progress T in the Park­-and boggle at finding strangers in the audience more appealing than our main characters.

So long as we're watching DeNoble recounting the details of his laboratory experiments, Addiction Incorporated remains sufficiently gripping; when Evans is reduced to observing his saintly subject educating high-school students about the dangers of nicotine addiction, it's considerably less so.

Fortunately, a few striking sequences break up the tedium.

Uneasily poised between glib irony and earnest melodrama, Patricia Riggen's coming-of-age tale is as scattered as its manic pubescent protagonist.

Directed by Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry), Nobody is a big old nothingburger. It has none of the balletic poise of Wick’s bombastic fight sequences, nor the droll humour that undercut those movies. It’s a real slog.

Paul Williams’ annoyingly hummable honky-tonk soundtrack punctuates proceedings, which graze the zenith of that seventies inclination towards sexualising teen performers (think ‘Minipops’ in America).

When it became obvious that the film's mix of cutesy sentiment and vague scariness wasn't working, the company ordered whole sequences to be rewritten, re-shot or re-edited, then imposed a stupid ending that explains precisely nothing.

The scripting is unimaginative, derivative, and desperately predictable as the film limps through its jokily cautionary tales.

Director Sam Miller’s attempt to take us on a thrill ride feels more like a slow train pulling up to the station.

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

Notwithstanding Brown's occasional half-baked critical comment about the sport's corporatization, the film ends up as a cliquish circle jerk that flatters those in the know and leaves neophytes little to mull over.

Pomes squeezes in a few well-observed details among the recycled white-trash clichés, but any AMC viewer who's tuned into the lead-in for Mount's TV Western - Breaking Bad - expects far, far more from his or her meth-fueled entertainment.

It’s unfair to blame Hess solely for condescension comedy’s bad aftertaste--he’s not the only perpetrator--but his particular brand is the most graceless.

Their brotherly bickering may be a useful time killer until the new Arrested Development episodes drop, but it's ultimately foamy filler added to a frustratingly frothy film that says nothing about its subject.

While the filmmaker may favor a classic Amerindie art-house style - shaky cameras, peekaboo framing, fill-in-the-gaps storytelling - he doesn't offer much in the way of corresponding insight regarding this social-issue case study, preferring to just construct a bare-bones stage on which his gifted performers can rage.

The tone never stops waffling, and nothing truly revelatory ever emerges about those terrible few days in Texas. What we’re left with is the Disney theme-park version of history — all waxworks and weepiness.

There are a few nicely turned moments... but they're scattered plums in a starchy, flavorless pudding.

Innocence is lost - as well as 90 minutes of your precious, precious time.

Even "Bwana Devil" showed less crassness in its attempts to wow, however, and the more this cardboard blockbuster piles on the cut-rate F/X, the less anyone - the cast, the filmmaker, you - can muster up the energy to care.

It betokens some kind of desperation (or perhaps the fact that this was produced by Disney's adult offshoot) that the comedy rests increasingly on the cute antics of the family dog.

There’s a ruthlessly effective movie to be made from this material, and you couldn’t hope for a better performer than Shannon, who can turn on a dime between quiet malevolence and volcanic rage, to inhabit the sociopathic central figure. Unfortunately, this overproduced biopic constantly counteracts the actor’s committed efforts with its pale-imitation slickness.

Oddly enough, the film's best pro-tech argument is its look; shot on a consumer-grade digital camera, it's a testament to how elegantly framed low-budget projects can look these days.

The result is a throwaway trifle that plays like it came together over the course of a slaphappy weekend, and while size may not matter (the movie runs a short 79 minutes), it’s not even relevant to something this flaccid.

The comic-book fight sequences, too, are a little more imaginative. But, like the series, the film is also corny as hell, with glaring continuity lapses, cringeworthy performances, silly monsters and laughable set-pieces.

All the problematic aspects of the Hollywood bad boy's filmography - reactionary rah-rah patriotism, sneer 'n' drool female fetishization, callously detached bloodletting - remain in soul-shattering force.

Brando makes a total mess of his English accent, the romantic interlude in Tahiti goes on endlessly, and the visuals (perhaps the main point of interest in the movie) too often resort to travelogue vistas and picture postcard lighting.

Content to be a typical piece of tween rural-versus-urban fluff from the old Hannah Montana: The Movie mold. Such lazy complacency is almost enough to make you see red.

The film is merely a series of random celebrity cameos and shameless product placements. (In one case, both-thank you, Jared from Subway!) But there are a few moments of inspired absurdity, mostly provided by a surprisingly energetic Al Pacino.

Only Gandolfini comes off as a character as opposed to an effigy, his sad-sack posture and f-it-all unprofessionalism truly capturing the tragedy of a working man with a one-way ticket to 99-percenter hell.

At the very least, this mush pot reminds us that countries other than ours also produce melodramatic mediocrities.

Lay the Favorite is frenzied without being funny. Like Judy Holliday on a particularly manic day, Hall tears from scene to scene with a bubbly effervescence that is technically impressive yet increasingly exhausting.

Unintentionally true to its title, The Divide first goes for a similar bleakness (it barely registers as entertainment), then lurches into a rousing, vengeful finale; both sides of the equation add up to less than zero.

This Age-of-Aquarius relic's dedication to utopian ideals is great; this superficial portrait, however, is merely grating.

So while the film clearly wants to be an affirmation of female agency, it plays instead like nothing more than the story of a girl who marries an ogre and waits to be freed by true love’s kiss.

Bitchy histrionics curdle faster than a spoiled soy latte in this distinctly unlikable comedy about a trio of coked-up gal pals who barely muster the strength to celebrate their happier friend's wedding.

The tone here is unhurried and the bursts of violence and narrative played at an aesthetic remove, but the cycles of languor and activity ultimately feel too calculated-the strained overlay of sensationalism onto a desiccated canvas.

Awkward banter, a lack of narrative thrust and concentrated character deep-digging, and a performance by Sally Hawkins as a Russian maid that seems beamed in from another movie all contribute to the cinematic equivalent of a half-baked fruitcake.

Save your pennies and watch the GoBots on TV instead.

As usual there are some incidental pleasures (among them a 'roo with its arm in a sling, and Scacchi continuing in her mission to spontaneously combust the male population of the planet). Against these, however, is a plot that goes AWOL in the interests of true love, and Roberts, as the kid from Coke, who is well on his way to becoming the world's worst actor.

There’s little that can be done with material wrung of its complications to accommodate an ultimately life-affirming, it-all-works-out agenda.

Let’s not dance around it: Nine--is a dud.

Credit Broderick and the cast for putting across the fey Indiewood bullcrap with committed, nearly convincing effort.

At its best, 5 to 7 is refreshingly sentimental in an age ruled by caustic irony, and the obvious fact that its romance is doomed from the start doesn’t make the film any less fantastical.

Earnest to a fault, this tale of vengeance and retribution strives for Faulknerian pathos, but never rises above amateur theatrics.

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 sole saving grace of this treacly middlebrow dross is the naturally sweet chemistry between Brosnan and Dyrholm. In the few scenes in which they’re alone together, wistfully recalling the past and discussing various misfortunes, you glimpse a much deeper movie.

In the wake of the spunkier "Your Sister's Sister," writer-director Brian Savelson can't seem to mount a head of steam, and his chamber piece feels underdeveloped. Even Slattery's sourness doesn't redeem the banality of impending heart-to-hearts.

A sense of the man himself seems absent in Fábio Barreto's portrait, however, and other than a rally scene with prescient Occupy Wall Street overtones, you're mostly left with facts, dates and iconic poses.

The sauciest of anecdotes are illustrated with faded vintage photos, all tiresomely filtered through the Ken Burns roving-cam effect and making for one chaste and unsexy cultural portrait--the biggest tease of them all.

What interest Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s does generate comes from the sections devoted to a pair of staff fixtures: Linda Fargo and David Hoey.

It’s all a lot of effort for very little output, sadly. The Current War has lots of flashy lights and whizzy features, but it remains fatally underpowered.

Lynskey has raised the quality of innumerable feature films (as a soft-spoken New Republic reporter in Shattered Glass; a housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Away We Go-that film's sole saving grace). So it's a delight to see this stalwart character actor move to center stage, even when the result is so by-the-numbers.

It may be petty to dismiss such a rags-to-much-better-rags story, but given how manipulatively constructed this music doc is, even in its rawest moments, you still leave feeling like you've been played.

After a bright start, this hunkers down to serious hand-wringing... Coop's hick (none too convincingly hinted at as the new Messiah) turns out to be a bore, and Capra strains to accommodate political chicanery and his own half-baked idealism.

This full-clip misfire reminds us of a valuable lesson: Not even talent, tastefully dressed tough guys and a metropolitan backdrop dripping with after-hours menace can compensate for a complete lack of momentum or drama.

Though seemingly a prettily made, pretty erotic exploitation movie, one suspects that there is value in Wertmüller's observation of the potency of sexual chauvinism. The film fails, however, through the absence of credibility and objectivity, and its refusal to move into the realms of fantasy, allegory, or even irony.

Most of the humour on display in this would-be screwball comedy has an inanity which follows suit with this central conceit.

Whether blithely comparing American prisons to retirement homes or gleefully recalling the time he chewed off his own fingers in Siberia, the moonlighting German New Wave auteur injects some much-needed black humor into what is otherwise a soporific star vehicle.

It takes a long time for Brothers to become the movie it wants to be, and even then, it stumbles.

Other than an impromptu spectacle in a downtown record store, little of the chops and charisma Buckley fils had in spades is channeled; this is still the usual Let Us Now Praise Famous Men karaoke session, wrapped up in some extra-discordantly warbled notes.

We've seen Nicolas Cage when he's angry-and we like him when he's angry. So why does this painfully loud revenge movie skimp on the Cage rage?

Though both lead actors are able to coast for a while on their natural charm, it's evident by the soppy finale that their "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Pretty Woman" salad days are long past.

Director Jacob Rosenberg's approach is heavy with archival footage and interviews, yet oddly features almost nothing from Way himself; his puzzling absence for most of the film turns the project into less of a biography than a one-note hagiography.

Schumer is a talented performer, and her physical comedy here draws some chuckles (as does Michelle Williams’ turn as Schumer’s helium-voiced ditz of a boss), but I Feel Pretty is consumed by an annoying premise that seems practically designed to generate think pieces.

Director Tim Story (Fantastic Four) locates the right blend of humour and action in a couple of taut sequences, but Ride Along is saddled with an uninvolving plot, and largely content to coast on cop-movie clichés.

If you think Donald Trump is a better POTUS than his predecessor, then fair warning: this is most certainly not the documentary for you. The problem is, if you’re of the exact opposite opinion and are, indeed, an irrepressible President Obama stan, you might just find it a bit hard to stomach too.

Bunraku aspires to be "Kill Bill: Vol 3"; it's more like an ornate pitch for a "Dick Tracy" reboot.

You know there's truth in these drab small-town lives, but, regrettably, there's little drama or humour to sustain interest in Ruby's vague musings on her bleak search for paradise.

Nemes wants to let the chaos and noise of Sunset overwhelm the audience, but like Irisz herself, it’s hard not to get a bit lost in the clamor.

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.

At least Thomas gives a suitably burned-out performance as Williams. He's almost enough to melt your cold, cold heart.

This is poor-man's action cinema with zero characterization.

Lee's satire on American TV is an intriguing failure.

Disappointing plod of an espionage thriller.

Vamps is commendable, even moving, as a raw-nerve confession of anachronism - but it's also what keeps this strained satire from drawing any real blood.

Fast-paced and quite atmospheric in its tacky way, but definitively sabotaged by Lugosi as the monster; at last getting to play the role he missed out on in 193l, he gives a performance of excruciatingly embarrassing inadequacy.