Cringeworthy feel-good weepie, which finds Kate Hudson's vivacious ad-pitch whiz questioning her life choices after being diagnosed with terminal colon cancer.

For what it's worth (very little), probably the best in the series.

Mark Young’s bargain-basement thriller is as witless as the captor’s motive; to paraphrase another well-dressed Madsen psycho, this little doggie barks, but it has no bite.

Dean Morgan’s cheeky-chappy act is grating indeed, while his tight-lipped rival’s so utterly stolidly Firthian we could easily be watching his Madame Tussaud’s mannequin. Painless anodyne fare, though genuine laughs are few, apart from comfort-eating Firth’s illicit ‘naughty choccy’.

Erotic, surely, only for the very easily pleased, with Dereks J and B and Cannon Films converging to form a matrix of sustained, tawdry silliness.

Only old pros James Brolin and Jane Seymour, as Eva's colorfully squabbling parents, occasionally rouse the film beyond its fate as fodder for a Snuggie-wrapped slumber.

Clichéd and formulaic.

It might be possible to extort money from Benjamin and Prentiss to forget you've seen this.

Why do these 'zany' comedies fall back on the corniest situations and the most predictable stereotypes?

There are nun jokes, mafia jokes, big breast jokes, karate jokes, Jaws jokes, more big breasts. It's a long ride.

Dreary jousting, production values that make Monty Python and the Holy Grail look lavish, and an excruciating synthesiser score make this a real trial.

Good God almighty: Not since Edward D. Wood Jr. unleashed a flotilla of paper-plate UFOs on beautiful downtown Burbank has there been a movie as stem-to-stern inept as this adaptation of the bestselling Christian novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

Stupid, offensive and as substantial as a text message, this toxic piece of kiddie trash isn't worth the pixels.

Lame, sloppy, cack-handed, utterly redundant - put succinctly, the very worst of the series.

A crewless Nazi torture-ship malevolently hunts down and sinks Caribbean pleasure cruisers. Good enough. But a Ten Little Indians plot soon takes over which is as rusty as the evil vessel.

A series of competently engineered shock moments jollied along by a jazzed-up version of John Carpenter's original electronic score: slicker than crude oil and just as unattractive.

The first version played with moral dilemmas but reached only Bible-class conclusions. By '84 independent and liberated women can pay to see themselves represented as slutty, avaricious and brutal.

Just another miserable muddle from the Lew Grade empire; there's more fun to be had cleaning out your cat litter tray.

This movie is dire, soul-crushing stuff.

A last-minute twist implicating the audience in the bloodlust isn't clever so much as hypocritical.

One-joke spoof on that B movie staple of the '50s, monstrously enlarged scientific mutations. The big red ones have their way with corrupt politicians and (via bloody Bloody Marys) housewife tipplers, while the pastiche '50s soundtrack croons 'I know I'm gonna miss her, a tomato ate my sister'.

Provides more groans than laughs.

Soft porn from Columbia Pictures (let's name 'n shame 'em) without a single redeeming feature.

Perkins asks us to bask silently in the majesty of an artist in his element; in one unforgettable shot, Francis stands atop a newly finished canvas, utterly transfixed. It’s a stirring snapshot of that strange space where the act of creating can be a religious experience.

Mendheim’s stereotypical portrayal of the South boasts some real affection, but mostly it’s just whistling Dixie

The film fingers public ignorance and governmental inaction as causes, but its horrifying first-person testimonials of exploitative abuse are what make this call to arms resound loudly, angrily, urgently.

If you can roll with Almereyda’s free-form vibe, you’ll find the docu-essay’s cumulative effect goes a long way toward proving his thesis

It’s an unnecessarily quirky affair, with collages, archival footage and interviews in extreme close-up, which--perhaps intentionally--make it seem like an experimental ’70s throwback.

This shapeless series of unfunny vignettes (interspersed with pointless street interviews) deserves to be slapped hard.

Strangely enough, our knowledge of what’s to come makes Word Is Out that much more affecting, because it shows that there were—and are—pockets of peace amid the brutality of an ongoing civil-rights struggle.

Sontag’s true talent was for the printed word; behind the camera, her limitations come more harshly to light. Upon Promised Land’s release, she recounted her experiences in Vogue--an all-too-appropriate forum since her film is mostly chic posturing.

Though it’s divided into three chapters--“Voices,” “Recollections” and “Innocence”--the film takes a largely free-form look at a dying community that’s more reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s nonfiction case studies than the usual sociopolitical hand-wringing.

The film fails to latch on to a consistent tone, shifting between scenes of prison life and the struggles of the family matriarch left alone--both of which are a bit too polished--turning a moving story into something emotionally lifeless

But while you can’t fault this labor of love’s conception, you can take issue with its leaden execution.

An overall lack of drive drops the pacing from languorous to a slow, stalled crawl, but the journey itself isn’t the point here. For once, it’s the destination--forgiveness--that really counts.

Convention plays like 11 cameras in search of drama.

Focus, instead, on the perks that Nightfall does offer: You still get the criminally underrated Aldo Ray trading hardboiled barbs with Anne Bancroft (“I’m a painter.” “Soup cans or sunsets?”); Brian Keith and Rudy Bond’s giggly good-thug-bad-thug double act; and the joy of watching beefy guys in boxy suits dangle cigarettes off sweaty lips and talk tough.

It’s a trial run that puts many of his peers’ masterpieces to shame.

The Law is everything that this season’s lackluster blockbusters are not: a damn good time.

Alexei Kaleina and Craig Macneill's proudly minimalist affair favors ambiguity over soap-operatics, evoking the inescapable heartache of a loss so great, it cannot be uttered.

The film favors conspiracy theories and half-truths, in addition to discrediting Planned Parenthood as a racist institution and "Silent Spring" as the work of a vindictive cancer victim. It will incense you-for all the wrong reasons.

Though the movie is a testimony to one man's will to survive and a testament to a vanishing art form, Tibet in Song's greatest achievement may be the way it shows how China recast traditional songs as modern pro-Communist propaganda-an eradication of an invaded country's culture through insidious co-option.

It's an inspiring narrative-as are the interwoven stories of three students hoping to earn that educational gift-but the doc itself is more of a telethon-ready fund-raiser than a work of dramatic reportage.

Queens-born horror specialist Stevan Mena has mastered the slow camera creep and the unusually artful vista-he even composes his own orchestral scores, good ones. But he needs to give up screenwriting, pronto. Put down the laptop, Stevan.

The film ham-fistedly hammers home its message more than the usual collateral-damage drama.

You can easily see why Ichikawa's vision of the 20th-century Japanese-lit landmark is considered definitive; the way he elevates the story's soap-operatic elements to a level of extraordinary sublimity makes the melodramatic seem positively majestic.

Suddenly, everything clicks; this snooty art merchant may love the sound of his own voice, but you're reminded how much Rohmer valued the sound of others' voices above all, and why going out on a whimper occasionally works wonders.

Best seen on the big screen; even those with a cursory grasp of avant-garde cinema are likely to come away with their minds opened and altered.

Turning the on-location Tokyo streets into the perfect backdrop for a cartoonishly colorful version of hardboiled drama - call it Pulp Art - House of Bamboo keeps its story line about an undercover Army cop (Stack) battling a gangster (Ryan) on the lean and mean side.

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.)

You think you're in for another coming-of-age movie about getting into someone's pants until you realize Deep End's real goal is getting under your skin.

Blessed with a weeklong run at the end of Film Forum's bliss-inducing Robert Bresson retrospective, the French filmmaker's 1956 tale of steel bars and iron wills boils a true-story prison break down to its bare necessities.

Come Back, Africa is a work of amazing grace - and a forgotten treasure.

Once the story takes a murderous turn, things quickly fall apart. Too many perfunctory side characters, such as Dennis's clueless parole officer, dilute any sense of tension; the bargain-basement visuals-all overlit interiors and unmotivated zooms-never rise above the luridly cheap; and hoo-boy, those final scenes.

Only Dissolution's divine climax feels truly poetic. Having the stamina to not break down on the journey to that moment is half the battle.

Shockingly modern and the most politically enlightened (and enlightening) comedy of the 1930s, Leo McCarey's winning quasi-Western is a model of Hollywood broad strokes coalescing into a sophisticated whole.

If you know nothing of the concentrated work of France's Robert Bresson, it's almost a crime to start here - like launching yourself, on the "expert" level, into the most boring, baguette-laden video game ever.

Ron Honsa's PBS-appropriate doc pays lip service to the utopian space's history, and features (too-)brief snippets of performances and modern-dance legends - Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris, Suzanne Farrell - praising the landmark.

By boiling a dysfunctional couple down to a worst-hits clip reel, the director created one painful autopsy of an affair, the polar opposite of those frolicking montages so prevalent in American rom-coms. (He's also gave his actors a hell of a valentine; neither Yanne nor Jobert has ever been better.)

Thirty-six years later, this Molotov cocktail of fizzy champagne and feminist theory has not lost any of its combustible carbonation.

As a tone poem, Tocha's documentary can be mesmerizing. As a memento mori, It's the Earth feels a little lost in space.

The haphazardness of the film's structure mutes the power of the subjects' recollections.

The deep cynicism would be depressing if it weren't so riveting.

It may be a stretch to call the filmmaker a forgotten genius, but if nothing else, Le Grand Amour makes a case that Étaix was a fertile clown, overdue for a bow in the spotlight.

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 result is less an ode to late-'60s California dreamin' than an NYC-hip riff on SoCal somnambulism, one that occasionally Pops with Warhol's mondo minimalism yet never snaps nor crackles. "Lonesome Cowboys" this is not, despite the fact that Surf uses virtually the same cast.

Smitten to a fault with high-art predecessors, Eric Atlan’s excruciatingly bad drama takes place in an abstract Buñuelian hotel room, glows luminously like Last Year at Marienbad and concludes with a Bergmanesque card game on which the fate of souls rests.

The longer the film goes on, the more it seems like a collection of gorgeous images without an overall organizing structure. Our youthful lead’s slow disillusionment with his complicated surroundings ultimately plays less profound than petulant.

The extreme variance of style and scrutability makes for wildly disorienting viewing.

Stations of the Elevated plays like a time capsule, particularly for having no dialogue or plot. It swings to Charles Mingus’s hardest bop and evokes a long-gone city, somehow more adult and confrontational even in silence.

Music’s healing power fires off rays in all directions. Cave often looks like a healer himself, swooping about among the front-row faithful, a shaman in a sea of desperately reaching, lit-up hands.

With its silly script, lame acting, naff special effects, and laughable model work, this unfunny supernatural comedy looks like the sort of film its leading characters - a pair of teenage home movie-makers (Lively and McDaniel) - might have made themselves.

Wright may not be in the class of Robert (El Mariachi) Rodriguez, but he has talent. Best seen after a couple of beers.

For all its sombre revelations, A Cambodian Spring exudes a powerful sense of possibility. In these days of popular protest, it makes for an enthralling case study.

As a study of early midlife crises Tides is well performed and convincing, finding the loneliness in what passes for friendship. All four characters are hemmed in by their own self-absorption; trouble is, that also cuts them off from the audience.

A nasty and simplistic urban-Western parable for Reagan's America. Stranger-in-town Vincent takes it from a marauding Puerto Rican street gang 'til he can't take no more, then comes on like a righteous Cruise missile to trash the bad guys on a wave of populist reaction. Objectionable.

Touching, intense, sometimes unexpectedly amusing, sometimes agonising, and always achingly sincere.

The storytelling never lacks for sincerity and quiet power. It’s a cry from the heart with a courageous message.

The characterisations are turned on their heads.

Whether it’s the filmmaking pair’s insider/outsider dynamic working to keep the story accessible to non-Aussies or just the depressing universality of Goodes’s experiences, The Australian Dream echoes far beyond national boundaries. So, in a much more positive way, does the man himself.

A lot of weak action scenes and weaker lines, but still a vast improvement on Dracula A.D. 1972.

At a seriously economical 72 minutes, director Daniel Vernon crams in a lot, leapfrogging between the tawdry racist subculture that spat out men like Copeland and London’s bubbly, multicultural communities that they hated so much. The courage and tenacity of anti-fascist campaigners like Searchlight gets its due, too.

Director Michael Caton-Jones’s approach is brash, vigorous, and not always interested in the complex contents of a teenage girl’s head.

Overlong towards the end but beautiful to look at, the pastel tones on the new material blending with black-and-white archive still and movie footage, which instead of distancing the music even further places it vivdly in its period.

Haunting and narratively spare, Europa is a plea for humanity wrapped inside a gripping survival story.

Ultimately it's a tribute to a woman well-loved, and to the family who will never forget her, even if they slip slowly away from her mind.

A monument to Australia's thriving music scene, it will have you whooping with joy one minute, then fighting back the tears the next.

It encapsulates the power of a community to protect the environment.

Although the direction is occasionally a little precious - with studiedly stylish tableaux accompanied by Ravel - Sutherland is suitably haunted and cold as the confused assassin, and John Alcott's superb camerawork, on location in an icy Canada and a leafy Suffolk, is a definite bonus. And there are some fine supporting performances, particularly from Warner, Hurt and, most memorably, McKenna.

It’s just a shame we couldn’t go further into his universe to lift this portrait further out of the landfill of mediocre concert documentaries. For now, you may need to stick to Instagram Live and TikTok for a deeper glimpse into who Montero is.

It’s a bleak, brooding tale, steeped in folk mythology and infused with so much atmosphere you may feel the fog closing in around you in the cinema.

It charts an unexpected success story that leaves you hopeful others will embrace its lessons.

It's amazing how impressive Richard Wordsworth's performance remains.

There’s so much in Grenfell: Uncovered about the state of modern Britain that Sadiq does brilliantly not to get sidetracked.

Sure, it’s a somewhat honeyed portrait that lacks voices to put the other side across. But as the flimsiness of the case against Assange is laid bare, so too is a system that tried to suffocate, torture and crush him to protect its interests.

Kangaroo has a love for the people, landscape and wildlife that leaves a warm glow. It’s not doing anything wildly different or unexpected, but it’ll put a smile on your face.

There are no easy answers in this raw but deeply empathetic film.

The Magic Faraway Tree isn’t on Wonka’s level, let alone Paddington 2’s – two other Farnaby joint – and the aesthetic is occasionally a bit CBBC, despite the bucolic settings and intricate sets. But with the cracking cast, thoughtful message and the odd rollicking adventure, it’s a fun family movie that’ll finally give you permission to switch off the wifi.