Artless and unpleasant, this is the kind of late-summer swill that gives August a bad name.

Mainly, though, this is a humorless film that skimps on the delicious opportunity for spousal retribution.

Spencer, a superb performer mainly known for small character parts, gives a star-making turn as the won't-take-no-guff Minny.

Warm Bodies wants us to believe in the transformative power of love, but what of Julie's poor, devoured boyfriend? There's Stockholm syndrome, and then there's cozying up to the monster who ate your sweetheart.

If you’re not already a member of the “Johnny’s Angels” fan club, you might wonder why other equally outrageous athletes weren’t bestowed with their own cinematic tributes.

Reynolds and Curtis (in a disposable role as Charlie's permanently aghast best pal) race at full speed through reams of dud dialogue, while Minnelli amuses himself colour coordinating costumes and set decorations. Based, very noticeably, on a stage play (by George Axelrod).

It’s a waste, for sure — of talent and your time.

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

Comparisons are odious, but this remake of Hitchcock's thriller continually begs them by trampling heavily over its predecessor. The original anticipated, with some poignancy, a Europe at war. This version uses hindsight entirely to disadvantage.

In all aspects, The Girl can’t help it — this is headline-torn cinema du tearjerking at its most generic.

Only the irrepressible Luis Guzmán, stuck in a walk-on bit as the stereotypical mooching Hispanic, is able to milk this cash cow and exit with his dignity intact.

Very sticky.

The 3-D performance footage is impressively lavish, though the film's unending idolization of the amiable singer will quickly exhaust all but the most devoted fans.

The fact that director Darragh Byrne has laden things with a Celtic Whimsy 101 score and a sketched outline of a script makes it even tougher for Meaney to lift this film out of its social-drama rut.

Despite the best efforts of its committed young cast, and especially a game (if suspiciously old-looking) Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien in his late teens and early twenties, it’s a plodding and polite portrayal that holds few surprises.

Harry’s haunted by his own identity crisis, but that breakdown translates into nothing but smeary, slo-mo flashbacks. Forget about insight into the macho mind-set.

A Jerry Bruckheimer–produced video-game adaptation--it has to be good, doesn’t it? (Ya, sarcasm.)

Kilcher makes the slog worthwhile--her face gleams with possibility, even in the character’s darkest moments--though one prays she escapes the typecasting trap ASAP.

It's a pleasure to watch the granite-faced action star do his own stunts, particularly a death-defying leap from a bridge. Yet everything feels hurried.

This time, Stone is just sloshing around in the shallow end. When John Travolta and Benicio Del Toro show up for extended, cartoonish dialogues, you'll wonder what year it is, and let out a sigh of relief that the moment is long gone.

Despite a few felicitous moments, the film is turgid, pretentious, and dramatically lifeless.

As an exercise in grief, Orser’s drama is affecting, exhausting and something of a shortcut.

Mainly it lacks director Terry Zwigoff who, as he did with "Ghost World" and "Crumb," suggested a vital, original voice.

Few of the laughs land, either.

Top-notch computer graphics, star voices and a gaggle of gadgets cannot disguise the fact that this family of the future is stuck firmly in 1962.

Some kind of napping for sure: The line between rigor and tedium is crossed in this Madrid-set home-invasion thriller, captured in a dozen or so claustrophobic shots but impoverished as a piece of drama.

About 45 minutes in, the film’s uneasy détente between subtlety and movie machinery fails outright, as heretofore shown-not-told themes are spelled out — “You forget where you live!” yell family members on both sides — and the paramours try to outrun violence and structural contrivance.

She never figures out what, exactly, the deal is regarding our short attention spans, but her ADD-afflicted film definitely provides evidence that they exist.

A lobotomised ice-skating obsessive (since many of the skating sequences are choreographed by former Olympic gold medallist Robin Cousins) might find something praiseworthy in all this predictable, ham-fisted, romantic tosh.

The overall effect is glassy and inert, with Rooney Mara’s Mary an oddly elusive presence in the film that carries her name.

Cluzet and Sy nonetheless make for ingratiating foils; the extended opening sequence in which the duo outwits a pair of cops like a hell-raising Laurel and Hardy could be a stellar short comedy if it weren't married to the deadly self-serious shtick that follows.

They're not doing themselves any favors by letting this oldie out of the vault.

The gang-war intrigue is strictly formula, and too much of Mary’s character development is delivered through expository dialogue.

With Ustinov's energetic impersonation of Poirot and Anthony Shaffer's traditionally structured script, Death on the Nile offered a fair recreation of Agatha Christie's world, but this time Christie herself would rightly have disowned the film.

This could have been a true urban mosaic. Instead, we simply get a vision of Paris as the city of lite.

Despite a committed performance from Palminteri (ripping through scenes like an aged bulldog), Debbie Goodstein's loosely autobiographical drama is as nondescript as made-for-pennies independents come.

A better movie would have explored Foster's way-of-the-future objectives with more beyond-the-hype insight and less Zen-master bullshit.

Vallée and his lead get high marks for kittenish revisionism. In all other respects, however, this movie is indistinguishable from every other throne-and-scepter biopic to hit the screen.

The film has the look of unflinching truth, yet it too often feels like a calculated ploy to stoke viewers' liberal-guilty consciences.

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.

As the film advances its more adventurous ideas about privacy, it suddenly feels like a lecture written by a twelve-year-old. Worse, The Circle ends precisely when it’s getting interesting; you’ll wonder if the production simply ran out of money. Movies about the dangers of rampant interconnectivity are welcome in this day and age, but let’s please make them a little more courageous.

Missing is Cameron’s signature action modification, best exploited in Aliens: the strapping female heroine. McG’s testosterone-juiced world feels a little doomed without her.

Glib, underdeveloped dreck.

That we never actually meet his Mr. Hyde is an inventive twist, but all the labored explanations (and tedious psychology) that follow the bad behavior and bloodshed make for a serious buzzkill.

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.

Four-letter words and gags about periods fail to disguise the adolescent wish-fulfilment quality of script and direction.

This routine animated feature is a perfectly fine thing to waste.

A too-pleased-with-itself action comedy.

The satire becomes more scattershot and strangely cuddlesome (didja know sequestered holy men enjoy socializing and playing sports, just like us?), while the usually great Piccoli-saddled with a ridiculously contrived failed-actor backstory-comes off like an unholy mix of Gérard Depardieu and Robin Williams at their sad-puppiest. That's some cinematic blasphemy, Moretti.

The truly mystifying thing about the movie is how desperately it caters to Gen-X junk nostalgia without bothering to think that maybe those Reagan-era kids have grown up a bit.

Provides more groans than laughs.

The 20-year-old Hubble Space Telescope--whose repair mission is the subject of this chronicle--turns out to be a bit of a stage hog, and audiences expecting a blissout of swirling galaxies will wonder why so much time is spent on astronauts sweating over screws and bolts.

Lotz's grudging fortitude provides enough engagement to let you overlook the cracks in the film's facade, but when she cedes the screen to Casper Van Dien's thick-witted police detective, all you can see are the gaps.

Impossible not to admire the total withholding of irony in Claxton's approach to this kamikaze project.

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.

A grimy kitchen-sink melodrama with an Ajax cleanser script: The muck is all surface, the turmoil cleanly shallow and contrived, though never less than gripping.

Though the credits include an impressive roster of names, this low-stakes poker hand feels like an undiscovered relic from the early ’90s, and that’s not a good thing.

This is a man-versus-nature parable heavy on the sappy existentialism that's very much of our time. Call it Nicholas Sparks's The Grey.

There's a resolutely untouching scene in which the pair discuss their relative philosophies for dealing with disability, but otherwise it's a long, painfully unfunny series of things being smashed up and fallen over.

The more substantial material, including Spitzer's feuds with vindictive New York politician Joe Bruno and financier Ken Langone, gets short shrift.

Mad axeman action yet again, cravenly conformist in every department.

The spot-on cast almost holds the movie together, but whatever potential this timely premise has is wasted on reworking the same gag about overconsumption.

Fine performers can’t salvage a toxically precious script, though Stone (Zombieland), with her disarming poise, makes a go of it.

Hilariously horrible when it isn't just plain awful.

Silly and nasty.

The writer-director-star still hasn't learned to smoothly blend broad comedy and family-values sermonizing.

You never lose the nagging sense that you're simply watching a high-school drama club's production of '40s fatalism chic.

A slipshod documentary about a fascinating subject: the loaded history and current complications of African-American hairstyling.

Though it holds your attention all the way through to an enigmatic, spiritually tinged climax, the movie leaves you wanting more than the Vega Vidals' secondhand artistry is able to provide.

As it is, this attempt at an Altmanesque ensemble piece feels a little dramatically flat even as it's dazzling your retinas.

Patient Adult Smurfs will be checking their watches as Excitable Child Smurfs lose themselves in the high jinks.

The juxtaposition of head-spinning break dancing and mild martial arts (in which the fighters glow to show their level of mental attainment and nobody gets badly hurt) provides lots of whirling limbs, but the working into the storyline of a crook who wants to take over the nightclub to provide valuable exposure for his aspirant rock-goddess girlfriend seems lame indeed.

All in all, it's just another flick to appal.

Crawford plays Speed with his foot in his mouth rather than tongue-in-cheek, and instead of glorying in the experiences of the pulp novel dialogue, dissipates all the comic potential by his evident bewilderment.

There's probably a moderate little romantic comedy crying to get out here, but the film's vain striving for casual hip proves suffocatingly obtrusive.

Working with uneven material, the illustrious cast is too often stranded in a realm of tony, high-art camp.

Old-fashioned, overlong costume epic, comfortably reactionary in its view of the Tsar Nicholas as a saint who knew not what he was doing to the Russian people, and of the revolutionaries as potential tyrants reaching hungrily for power.

Once this cultural exploration devolves into just a forum for grating geek griping and Jar-Jar Binks hatred, however, you'll wish you could escape to a galaxy far, far away.

After the novelty of these backgrounds and comin'-at-ya bits wears off, Mars Needs Moms has to rely on Fogler's obnoxious Jack Black Jr. shtick, a weak subplot involving a '60s-obsessed Martian graffiti artist (Harnois) and rote video-game-y action sequences to carry it along-and that simply won't cut it.

A much more conventional and unexciting piece of work.

Despite toggling among the three characters' story lines, the film is barely concerned with the who, what or where of the incidents, much less a deeper why. It simply wants to milk this real-life example of courage (and chaos) under fire for multiplex thrills, reducing everything to a cheap adrenaline rush set to a pulsing soundtrack.

A ludicrously overblown soap opera set in Italian Brooklyn which races from childhood anorexia to adolescent sexual trauma via wife-battering.

2 Guns quickly degenerates into boilerplate Hollywood sound and fury, complete with a climactic Mexican standoff that revolves around a massive, burning pile of money. Irony, thou art lost.

The frustratingly artless He Named Me Malala is but the latest of Guggenheim’s paeans to the global need for education

Sometime stunt co-ordinator Baxley directs this feebly-scripted, sporadically exciting crime pic like a showpiece for his former speciality.

Just because you tart up a typical romantic comedy with trash talk doesn't make it edgy or real.

There’s something admirable about the anything-goes energy that Van Peebles brings to this tall tale, but the amateurishness and Video Toaster–era technical tricks start to grate after a bit. It’s a funky, free-form fairy tale, but one that only a mutha could truly love.

Filmmaker Gérald Hustache-Mathieu has fun recasting Monroevian moments and setting up parallels between the fromage-hawking hottie and the late silver-screen sex symbol - bring on the Miller, DiMaggio and JFK avatars.

Morgan and preteen dybbuk host Calis draw some pathos out of their father-daughter discord, but you can't have a possession without a soul.

Destroyer is a movie that confuses Kidman’s unmodulated funk for actual depth. In fairness, a brooding depression may be the reality of much police work, but onscreen it plays like a two-hour murder of our patience.

Benton's movie is eventually suffocated, perhaps by the gloss of the Manhattan auction world in which it is set. The plotting becomes rushed and implausible, while Streep falls into the breathless clichés of screen neuroses.

Eddie the Eagle may suffice for a brainless Friday night, but an honest account would have been a lot more memorable.

The idea of pitting karate champion Norris against a virtually indestructible psychopath is intriguing, but the resulting confusion of clichés proves disappointingly incompetent.

Rosenberg here confuses seriousness with tedious solemnity, and with the star glut has produced a compacted TV series.

Lambert is as uncharismatic as ever, while Van Peebles is as frightening as a wrestler in mock angry mood, and just as ridiculous. To Morahan's credit, however, he smoothly continues the series' tradition of flashy images, showy sfx, aerial landscape shots and driving rock tunes.

Foregoing the special effects bonanza of its predecessor, it settles for low camp humanoid melodrama.

It does confirm Argento's dedication to the technicalities of constructing images - Grand Guignol for L'Uomo Vogue, perhaps - but you'll still end up feeling you've left some vital digestive organs back in the seat.

Syrupy schlock from perhaps the most sentimental of all Italian directors, a pointless update of King Vidor's '30s weepie about a former champion boxer's attempts to hang on to his doting son when his estranged wife reappears on the scene.