While Fischer handles every emotional curveball, she's not helped by the film's reliance on rote notions of piecing your life back together. Is it worth putting a good actor through the screen-martyrdom wringer for a minuscule payoff?

The Black Tulip is noteworthy for its existence alone - and not, unfortunately, for much else.

A new Red Dawn could have been so much more fun had it thrown a properly out-of-bounds tea party. (It lacks the signature brawn of original director John Milius, a guns-first libertarian.)

Director Tamahori caught the eye with Once Were Warriors, but his first Hollywood feature falls flat with a hollow thud. It doesn't help that, after an intriguing opening, Pete Dexter's screenplay fails to construct a mystery which really connects, that too many supporting characters never come to life, and that Malkovich invests a pivotal role with his peculiar brand of terminal lethargy.

Much cut-rate melodrama ensues, none of it particularly painful to watch, until a ridiculously redemptive finale negates almost all of the preceding dramatic tension and resurrects a cloying Richard Marx chestnut to boot.

The dialogue is blandly speechified and the film’s pro-Taiwan agenda seems to have taken precedence over our enjoyment.

The performances are thoughtful, and like a pinch of chilli, heat things up from time to time. But director Oren Moverman’s portrait of smug, toxic privilege misses its mark – and at the end of two long hours, this feels about as fresh as last night’s chips.

This Nickelodeon production may be designed for short attention spans, but must the characters have them as well?

There’s a heart here, but with all the superficial noise, it’s hard to hear it beating.

Given the film's inability to posit any significant objections - or, for that matter, alternatives - to the turbines, it all feels like so much petty sniping against progress.

We know how these bargains turn out, so all we're left to do is watch pretentious exchanges about grief pile up, laugh at the way the movie exploits its Indian-girl-as-innocence-personified notion and wish that Eddie Marsan's giddy cameo as Hell's personal weapons dealer were much, much longer.

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.

While Bier doesn't offer easy partisan answers, she still dilutes a social issue down to the level of soap-operatic background noise and back-patting platitudes. It-and we-deserve better.

Not helping matters is dead-eyed snark source Aubrey Plaza, somehow less expressive than the doll itself (creepily voiced by Mark Hamill).

All Turbo does is give Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson and Snoop Dogg the easiest paychecks they’ll ever make, and its corporate overlords the chance to sell a few toys.

No amount of eccentric Americana (or slyly marginal inventiveness) can salvage this strangely lifeless - and largely laughless - gonzo comedy, which is doomed by a flimsy script, one-dimensional characterizations and distractingly inept child acting.

Helnwein's elaborate vision bumps up against practical concerns and meets with resistance - a conflict that this superficial portrait glosses over almost as much as it reduces Helnwein to simply being a determined, intransigent creative type.

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.

It’s a lightweight drama filled with heavyweight war-is-hell monologues, delivered by a cast that lacks the gravity to sell them.

Queen to Play does slightly buck convention by depicting intellectual development (rather than lovey-dovey triumph) as the key to reshaping identity, as well as a form of class advancement and spiritual enlightenment. Such notions, however, are drowned out by deafeningly creaky conventions of cutesy self-discovery.

Less a nightmare than a case of bad indigestion, this ’80s horror reboot is a primer in the humorless recycling of potent pop culture.

Only "Slumdog Millionaire's" Dev Patel, as the bastard prince of the villainous Fire nation, truly gets jiggy with the fantasy. Everyone else stares off into green-screen space and waits for lunch to be called.

The closer this parable inches toward tragedy, the more you can feel the gap between good intentions and generic exotica-grandstanding widening into an unbridgeable chasm.

You doubt Wiseman's sense of pacing. Still, he must have had a good time shooting.

Only Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, directors of 2009’s stylish Amer, emerge intact with “O Is for Orgasm,” a surging montage of fluid colors and moans.

This remake of ’70s Spanish horror film "Who Can Kill a Child?" is less a contemporary upgrade than an eagerly creaky exploitative throwback.

To the movie's small credit, there's very little grasping for larger significance: It's a dumb horror film, complete with a sexy female lust object (Kaboom's Mesquida) undraping for a shower scene.

Once a scarred shark hunter (Liev Schreiber) enters the fray, the film’s tone shifts from madcap to maudlin, and the narrative from being merely grating to actually galling. Artistic inspiration can be close to madness, but Mental is just plain nuts.