Only Andrea Riseborough comes close to rising above it all, and even she’s undone by what may be the crassest climactic slo-mo montage ever. The lucky will have logged off by that point.

With more imagination, more of Faith Brook's send-up of a well-known lady PM, and less of Moore's excruciatingly smug misogyny, this might just have made it to comic levels.

The Fifth Generation filmmaker has aced such recipes before (e.g. The Emperor and the Assassin); this time, both the spectacular and the human elements have apparently been offered to the gods.

Evans and Eve are always charming, but Brooke’s real-world problems ring false in a story held together by chintzy fatalism and the logic of a first draft.

The movie leans on symbolic imagery that’s alternately tired and ridiculous: Hunt’s impatiently flicked cigarette lighter (yes, he’s a candle waiting to be lit) or a black-widow spider crawling up the stands of one particularly dangerous course. These are classic frenemies; their tale deserves more gas in the tank.

Solet has turned out a very slick product and handles some of the action with brio, particularly a chase-across-buses set piece. But with too little freshness for crime-drama devotees, too many furry corpses for animal lovers and a thoroughly predictable wrap-up, Bullet Head ultimately screws the pooch.

Working from his own script, Harris shows no sense of detail; characters barely develop, London becomes a topographical mess, and each time the plot falters, we get long '60s-style interludes with no dialogue, cut to bland pop. The result is without dramatic or moral weight, despite Highway's contrived comeuppance, and it's impossible to care about the characters.

Unlike Carroll’s perversely idealized protagonist, Burton’s Alice is just another anachronistic feminist tearing down Victorian patriarchal norms. Even her—[shudder]—Avril Lavigne–blared theme song is a skin-deep grrrl-power accessory.

It has enormous charm in its folklorish fancies, and a performance of great gentleness and good humour from Ingram which is never tainted by the mawkish religiosity that creeps in towards the end. What is offensive is the way in which the depths of plangent suffering that inspired the spirituals are totally ignored.

Gerwig is plenty charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with. Yet this still feels like a real devolution - hopefully short-lived - after her distinctively eccentric turns in "Greenberg" and "Damsels in Distress."

Favreau's direction is so boulder-heavy-the action sequences, especially the climactic assault on the alien mothership, are an eye-and-ear-shattering mess-that the small moments of poetry...are lost amid too much digital sound and fury.

Even though the Bello-Hurt thread is unconvincingly brought up to date at the end, this inside-out movie gets good mileage out of letting us watch characters watch each other.

Children of Invention seems furiously scribbled in shorthand, undermining what it has to offer in contemporary resonance.

The intensity of the melodrama here is undermined by a camp-ish turn from Robert Downey Jr as Morgan's leathered friend and by risible musical outbursts from Spader and Kim Richards.

Newlyweeds looks and sounds primo. Storytelling-wise, however, it’s more than one toke over the line.

There are occasional visual flourishes — a nightmarish PowerPoint presentation ending with a slide about mock burials — that hint at the better-balanced film The Report might have been. But mainly we’re pinned down by a firehose-stream of didactic outrage.

It’s made with too much slickness, and you’ll be way ahead of it.

There’s little of the Church’s perspective in this doc, but you can’t really fault the filmmakers--Mormon leaders refused several overtures to participate. Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/86550/the-mormon-proposition-film-review#ixzz0r2j38wUF

Madden pads the film with shimmering images of Jaipur and its surroundings; a midmovie funeral sequence - 'cause somebody's got to kick the bucket! - even manages to be somewhat evocative and moving. The rest makes you long for senility to set in, but quick.

The film quickly abandons any sort of broader cultural interest in favor of a typical womb-to-tomb, warts-and-all examination of recent history’s most visionary CEO.

You could call it fan service, if the service is to teach fans that mimicking Stanley Kubrick’s chilly elegance—and even reshooting scenes from the original film with lookalike actors, a crime bordering on sacrilege—doesn’t make your take nearly as scary.

The first Reitman film to make the 36-year-old director seem about 400 years old.

You'd have to possess a heart colder than the Northern tundra not to care about these poor animals working their flukes off to jerk audience tears, but emotional manipulation or not, this is still a movie about people standing around a hole waiting for something to happen.

A misbegotten musical adaptation of Dickens' much too perennial tale, featuring songs by Leslie Bricusse that are not only anaemic but piffling in their up-front relevance.

The movie is one big scream, clichéd and hardly credible as an oblique call to civility.

There are sparks here that suggest the smarter movie a more scientifically minded director--say, David Cronenberg--might have made.

It isn't long, however, before the film's caricatured bad-guy shtick starts to wear gossamer thin, and an overabundance of "clever" twists-no one is [Yawn] who they seem to be! - begins to sap whatever little goodwill has been built up.

"Chocolat" director Lasse Hallström’s tastefully old-fashioned melodrama has exactly one objective: yanking gallons of cathartic tears out of your face by any means necessary.