While Monster Trucks may be bizarre, haphazard and deeply silly, hey, it’s a movie about monsters that live in trucks. It was never going to be Citizen Kane.

You’re thankful when Ayer stops trying to artistically tart up this Peckinpah-lite tale of vengeance and just lets his leading man do what he does best: blow the bad guys away.

Only the most easily pleased fans of foul-mouthed comedy will respond to these jokes and set pieces, which generally lack cleverness or comic imagination.

Quentin Tarantino showcased her bubbly personality (and ass-kicking dexterity) in 2007’s terrific gearhead horror movie, "Death Proof." Now, seasoned stuntwoman Zoë Bell gets a vehicle all her own—a disposable battle royal no-budgeter that’s immensely elevated by her presence.

When Van Damme is doing what he does best - narcissistically displaying his body and thumping the bad guys - the film works reasonably well. By contrast his attempts to lighten up and play quieter dramatic scenes offer an embarrassing array of boyish smiles, dumb looks and stilted dialogue.

The various plot threads-E.B. is pursued by a trio of ass-kickingly cute long-eared operatives; a disgruntled worker chick (voiced in emphatic Telemundo tones by Hank Azaria) orchestrates a coup d'état-mostly get lost amid all the allusions. Even Hugh Hefner pops up because, you know, Playboy Bunnies.

Doomed love will never go out of style, but would it have killed director Carlo Carlei to inject the proceedings with some modern-day aloofness? Today’s version will likely become a cheat sheet for slacking students, but it won’t inspire them to open their hearts to the text.

It's entertainment designed to resemble a good time without aspiring to provide one.

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.

An adept turn from Murphy as San Francisco hostage negotiator Scott Roper knits together a functional assembly of stock cop-movie elements. This is probably the closest to a genuine dramatic part Murphy's ever played, and his snappy patter is persuasively integrated into Roper's daily routine.

Here’s a mathematical formula for you: Take one overlong, nonsensical script; multiply it by terrible editing and design; then divide the whole thing by wooden performances. Voilà: You’ll have Jeff Lipsky’s unwatchable indie.

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.

Though based partly on actual events, Ruben Fleischer's ludicrous shoot-'em-up plays fast and loose with the facts, and plenty else besides.

What this sequel delivers is still the kind of high-speed roller-coaster action that producer Joel Silver's films often do so well.

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

Apart from a hi-def night-vision gimmick, returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman don't take advantage of either upgrade.

Despite committed and heartfelt performances - especially from the perennially charismatic Peters - director Lisa Albright's soapy semi-autobiographical tale fails to scale the low hurdle of believability.

The movie hinges on a lengthy lesbian sex scene between in-on-the-joke leads Asta Paredes and Catherine Corcoran; "Blue Is the Warmest Color" this ain’t.

That old Shakespearean magic survives even this loosest of adaptations, and by the end one is wallowing in the length and indulgence of it all.

Avildsen draws good performances from the three actors who play PK, as well as from the ever-reliable Freeman and Müller-Stahl, but subtlety is abandoned when he focuses on the ring and teen romance. The climax is a slugging match between PK and a former school bully which would make Rocky proud.

Like all advertisements, this scripted movie is a perfect fantasy: expertly coordinated, simplistic (the bad guys like yachts and bikini girls while our heroes have loving families) and more than a little scary.

This, as Fuller said, is film as battleground, love, hate, violence, action, death - in a word: emotion. Pity it's about Rocky.

First you laugh at McCarthy’s harshness in front of the kids, who aren’t used to her screw-the-competition ethos, then you sigh realizing this is no School of Rock.

Despite abundant action and a start involving a fistful of murders, the overall effect is sluggish.

An overlong, hardly believable psychological thriller.

Crowe’s satisfyingly nasty turn deserves a bit more brains to go with the brawn.

The Good Heart dilutes Cox’s gravitas with quirk.

Knuckleheaded though this faculty-member-turned-MMA-fighter comedy is, there's no denying the plot's lefty credentials, snuck in like Raisinets among the popcorn.

Whether sleuthing or smacking around thugs, Sisley makes a dashing hero, but this glossy action flick is heavy on tedious convolutions and depressingly light on character depth, suspense or political-economic intrigue.

With the screenplay dabbling with too many issues and stereotypes, the characters are largely one-dimensional and the relationships unconvincing.

Hitchcock matches the play's compassion for women suffering in the face of feckless men, especially in the film's powerful final shots. [07 Oct 2010]

Barker calls his shambolic, uninvolving narrative 'scattershot'; put less kindly, it's as explosive and directionless as a blunderbuss.

Ceremony passes by quickly and painlessly, its annoyances easily forgotten. On the plus side, Thurman and Angarano do work up a sweet odd-pair chemistry.

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.

Although Fessenden does fine work shooting his equivalent of Lifeboat, the movie’s surface is often rough. Yet the title doesn’t just refer to what lurks in the lake’s still water. It’s a guide to where Beneath’s substance lies, the acid heart inside its plastic chest.

The Virginity Hit is elevated by its cast of very funny young actors who match good comic timing with relaxed spontaneity.

Well-intentioned but ultimately mishandled, it commits the cardinal sin of indecisiveness, middling out in a purgatory of daddy issues and Sunday service pamphlets.

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.

Fans will love the funny and subversive moments; anyone who didn't "get" them premakeover may simply feel like they've been sitting in a "brown bath" for 93 minutes. Don't ask.

The dialogue is Texas crude, the sentiment Bible Belt coy, and the songs conveyor-belt Broadway: stale air on a G-string.

Sure, the footwork is flawless in this 3-D rendering of Michael Flatley's high-kicking show; it's the filmmaking that's dull.

Bless you, R.Patz & Co., because this gloriously steaming pile is officially in the bad-movies-we-love pantheon.

The real mystery is what Schlesinger and Sheen are doing making this schlock.

Manly, sharp-edged submarine B movies don’t come along often anymore — so consider this Cold War off-white-knuckler a welcome blast of recycled air.

Though there’s no shortage of biographies on the notoriously private writer, no one has had the stones to try making a comprehensive visual documentary on someone as camera-aversive as the Catcher in the Rye author. The effort itself should be applauded.

The film is set in a celeb-owned Miami restaurant and many of the gags--exploding entrees, the swallowing of a diamond ring, on-the-job drunkenness--feel like leftovers.

Once AIDS rears its head, this nostalgic look back goes into melodrama mode - and quickly descends from bad to much, much worse.

But scary? Not so much.

Making excellent use of Nolte's controlled toughness and Short's hysterical freneticism, Weber plays the comic action hard and fast, grounding the humour in believable reality that has spiralled out of control.

When De Palma started taking himself too seriously—circa Casualties of War—is when he lost the thread. His genius was always in voluptuous nonsense. He needs to drop the politics and get back to baby carriages.

The film is cut together with the haphazard feel of a posthumously completed record, its ungainly structure a macrocosm of the awkwardness with which the individual scenes are Frankensteined together into a lumbering monster built from close-ups and music cues.

Even before Wilson goes full Jack Torrance and Barbara Hershey shows up to investigate an abandoned hospital Scooby-Doo-style, one could technically call this sequel a gorefest—thanks to the guts of every other horror movie being splattered across the screen.

Forget cowabunga, this is cowadunga. Still, the Oscar for Most Shamefully Contrived Scene goes to the scriptwriters for managing to get franchise eye-candy Megan Fox into a sexy schoolgirl outfit, which, any shorter, would land the film with an R rating.

Ex-Glee geeks and those who sing in the shower: Your passable time-waster has arrived.

The idea of two Van Dammes must have seemed workable on paper, but both exude the charisma of a packet of Cup-a-Soup, and not even Van Damme seems able to tell himselves apart.

Williams has been playing nauseatingly cute for ages, but achieves a new squashiness here as a chatterbox Andy Pandy. Unbelievably rotten.

Why introduce two female characters — played by Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder, both excelling at trashy desperation — if the script’s ultimately going to forget them? The worst sin is visited upon Statham: Sure, those fists fly, but his poetry has become a chopped-up hash.

The familiarity of the high-armour shoot-outs and sfx-assisted set-pieces make most of this sequel feel surprisingly low-tech. Not bad entertainment, though.

Gallo and Dalle are sublimely tragic figures; the scene in which Shane stalks around Notre Dame like Frankenstein unleashed is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the way the film plays with and deepens movie-monster archetypes.

A low-budget sequel which tries, and fails, to make a virtue out of adversity by substituting cheap mechanical effects for the expensive light and magic of Parts I and II.

Trusting an action drone like Worthington to anchor the human drama is a fatal mistake. With him perched on that narrow slab of concrete, it's only a matter of time before the film plummets.

The snowman's a bland shuffling blob (from Jim Henson's Creature Shop) with two expressions, an all-purpose smile and a vague look of resignation.

Writer/director Dearden's version of Ira Levin's novel is routine stuff, neither thrilling nor revealing as a portrait of a psychopath.

The fact that it's far more concerned with burnishing an overly fetishized lit movement than serving as an in-depth exploration of the hotel's inhabitants may make you want to check out early.

If its juxtaposition of bad behavior and dairy products leaves you stone-faced or wearily sighing, you should exit the theater posthaste.

Dull and perfunctory, the film's saving grace is MVP Neil Patrick Harris as Kyle's blind tutor, who has a witty aside for every woodenly expressed sentiment. You go, Doog!

Drab, silly and mind-numbing, this Dracula is strictly for the suckers.

Whenever this Lantern returns to terra firma (too often), its imaginative flights are ground down under the Warners overlords' demographic-pandering heels.

Even with the grungy aesthetics and earnest preaching, Inhale is really nothing but crass topical exploitation, milking this social issue for every salacious drop.

Substantially recut by Boorman after his original version was derided in America, but it's still easy to see why New Yorkers jeered. Boorman completely avoids gore and obscenity, treating the original as a kind of sacred good-versus-evil text, and weaving its sets and characters into a highly traditional confrontation of occult forces.

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.

Despite the usual end-of-world crisis and Mount Olympus MVP characters, there’s no sense that anything’s truly at stake; rather, it feels as if the filmmakers are coasting on the fumes of teen-angst fantasy and making up their fairy-tale rules (Cyclopes are fireproof!) as they go along.

Close to a parody of a French sex drama - complete with bored, bourgie bed-swappers and a dull sense of amoral sophistication - this autopiloted import does no favors to the legacies of Truffaut and Godard.

Despite its meticulously detailed gore, Jigsaw is rarely scary.

It helps that Fame has been cast with performers who have the glow of possibility about them.

A long, dull swim through narrative syrup interrupted occasionally by poorly choreographed acts of violence. It’s essential only for those wanting to hear Farrell try on a Hungarian accent.

With the exception of Abraham's world-weary performance, and a couple of nicely nasty cameos from David Rasche and Richard Young as the crooked cops, this is a disposable affair. Yates' ham-fisted direction cranks the film up into melodramatic hyperbole, but Selleck is the real villan, portraying his transformation from wide-eyed innocent to hardened man of the world by changing from clean-shaven mop top to stubbly slicked-back, with reflecting shades to boot. Laughable.

Twenty years after the taut Klute, Pakula's touch has deserted him; the glossy, literalist approach he favours here works firmly against the arrant contrivances in Matthew Chapman's screenplay, rendering already convoluted events even more ridiculous.

Alas, it all comes off as hit and myth, mainly due to our leaden, buzz-cut hero, Perseus (Avatar’s Worthington, no Harry Hamlin), and zero sparks of heavenly-body chemistry or humor.

His closing dedication—“For my daughter”—turns this into something actively creepy, as opposed to merely brainless, boring and inept.

The escapades are tossed off and fall flat, all products of the business-as-usual template created by the film’s producers, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell.

The script – chronologically linear yet disjointed, averse to melodrama yet often clichéd in a ‘hello Monet, hello Rilke’ kind of way – is deeply inadequate.

There might have been a thorny dark comedy in this chauvinistic pissing contest. But in trying to get us to like both opponents, the film undercuts most of its sharpest comic potential, leaving us instead with musty jokes.

Injecting a devil-may-care attitude into a franchise-focused blockbuster only gets you so far. When all is said and done, this wasp's got no sting.

Despite a plucky soundtrack and frantic editing, the movie shows otherwise wan interest in the gaggle of faux-transgressive bad girls who bare their dulled claws at England’s establishment ethos, as though that notion alone were somehow fresh and cheeky.

Hiller's sledgehammer direction turns the problems common in education into an endless parade of clichés, feebly propped up by wacky humour, inarticulacy, ham and corn. Avoid.

A deafening sonic yawn signs off this desperate finale to Universal's Arthur Hailey-inspired quartet of in-flight entertainments.

Saddled with an atrocious boy's own paper plot about a good brother and a bad brother, both in the Flying Corps and clashing over a girl, the end result is barely adequate. But it does feature a spectacularly elaborate World War I dogfight, and an equally fine Zeppelin sequence.

While visually stunning and stocked with enviable onscreen talent, this holiday confection falls flat.

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.

The fact that the film’s title is an Arabic word for “olive,” as in holding out said branch to your foes, gives you a sense of what Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree) is going for: a melodrama with a do-we-all-not-bleed? moral.

People become mere punch lines: fleshy avatars for the gory grist.

Forgive the film its "Napoleon Dynamite" overquirk; a loving god is watching all, genuflected to on bedroom-wall posters and seen in the film's final five minutes--and if you're not a Rush fan, this is not your movie

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

Editor Marshall Harvey stitches the messy pieces together with considerable panache.

Some good special effects, but with strictly tele-standard acting, straightforward space opera plot, grandiose sentiment and slushy love interest, it's really only meat for genre fans.

It's certainly not a subtle movie, but with memorable performances, ludicrously over-the-top one-liners and amiable zaniness, it qualifies as a lot of fun.

Anderson utilizes slow-motion 3-D to hyperbolic effect while again casting Jovovich as the epitome of badass sexiness.