Good actors like Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson show up to bust balls and bark expository dialogue with check-in-the-bank-yet? proficiency. Add in a couple of dully pro forma narrative twists to keep you awake in between shots of distractingly exotic South African scenery, and you've got a first-quarter Hollywood release par excellence. Meaning not.

Best of all is the reliably brilliant Rose Byrne, whose scathing Republican strategist turns up to torment Zimmer.

More earnest than agile, the whole thing smacks of heavy-handed authorial jiggering-never mind that it's based on a true story.

You can see the sweat on stage, but it’s harder to detect in the filmmaking.

Other than giving Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura and Lola Dueñas plum supporting roles, that's the best you can say about Philippe Le Guay's trite-to-intolerable tale on the discreet eye-opening of the bourgeoisie.

One could dwell on Johnson's in-your-face performance, or how refreshing it is to see a black New York drama played out by homegirls. But, facing facts, the climax is unpersuasive and the happy end a cop-out.

No one expected this long-delayed piece of Michael Jackson pop-aganda to lay bare the man behind the myths and myriad controversies in forensic style. And yet… this soft-ball character study of the King of Pop only doubles down on the former, while completely ignoring the latter, hitting all the usual dreary biopic beats along the way.

It’s an engrossing, overstuffed disaster—sometimes captivating, sometimes too ingeniously terrible to turn away from; it’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion, if both cars were stuffed with confetti.

Unsatisfactory both for fans of star-studded prison escape dramas and for football fans hoping to see cunningly devised tactics from Pele and his squad of internationals.

How does one remain an unapologetic fan of Vaughn, abrasive though he is, even as his material fails him?

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

There’s slow-burning, and then there’s simply slow; the difference between the two has never been so apparent.

For a film about sexual conquest, Nobody Walks is a frustratingly flaccid affair.

A sad re-run of the Mean Streets idea (awkwardly adapted by Vincent Patrick from his own admirable novel).

There are tears, there is laughter, there are ups, there are downs, there is hugging and there is learning, but none of it will leave an impression. Instead, it leaves you only with a faint yearning for a proper, scary-Simmons chair-hurling freak-out.

Campy but never dull, this first of three installments ends on a fiery cliffhanger. The completion of parts two and three would represent a victory for irrationality.

The historical tragedy that's dramatized is heartrending; the movie itself is merely one cliché piled atop another.

Eventually, the self-regarding acting clan admits they're only human after all. By then, the audience may want to disown them.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's mostly whiffed docudrama makes the influential poem by Allen Ginsberg (Franco) seem dull, ordinary, pedestrian instead of pioneering.

A film that could have been memorably haunting is, sadly, all too forgettable

Aside from a few inspired vistas and alien life-forms (the Road Runner–fast red planet dog Woola is sure to sell a bazillion action figures), John Carter is as deadly dull as its basso-voiced, beefcake slab of a star, Taylor Kitsch.

Spacey is ever the pro, shilling Axle's absurd redemption and countenancing the likes of Johnny Knoxville and John Stamos as if a third Oscar were in the offing. Yet his female costars fare worse, forming an unfortunate collection of dismal, man-dependent stereotypes, from Belle's perma-pouting idealist to Heather Graham's breast-obsessed, sapphic-by-choice ballbuster.

Zack Snyder's films have some of the best opening-credits sequences in cinema; the unfortunate thing is that there's always a movie after them.

The fully committed Rush, at least, commands our constant attention, and no movie with a kookier-than-usual Ennio Morricone score (dig those staccato-chanting chorines!) could ever be a total waste of canvas.

Truth or Dare ultimately plays like soap-opera trash.

It's low camp for narrow-minded Middle Americans who can't cope with the idea of a co*k in a frock.

Since the gaff has long been blown (we know Chucky is alive from the outset), the original's menacing tension is entirely absent. Lafia attempts to compensate by relying heavily on Kevin Yagher's advanced doll animations, but articulated facial features, however clever, are no substitute for thrills.

Javier Bardem does what he can to maintain his dignity.