Neither as subversively fun as last year’s megadestructive "Project X," nor as creative as "The Hangover" (on which these codirectors broke through as screenwriters), this further installment in the millennials-acting-badly genre serves as a distinctly average placeholder.

If Merchants of Doubt ultimately proves that good data doesn’t often make for good drama, it’s only because this doc is such a hollow slog.

This was Italy's official submission for Best Foreign Film to the 2011 Academy Awards (a red flag more often than not), and, sure enough there's little here that rises above middlebrow.

On its way to an uncathartic climax that somehow involves a black-market-fenced oil painting and an Amsterdam shootout, The Goldfinch throws in so much diversionary character work that you wonder if anyone thought the stew was going to be edible.

If Gregorini and Von Furstenberg's goal was to construct a cinematic Sunday Styles spread of the plaid-skirt-and-tie crowd, then kudos. As filmmakers, however, these two have some serious growing up of their own to do.

There's bondage, buggery, and a clothes-ripping chase up the stairs. Apart from that, there's a bit of verbal back-and-forth in court between the DA (Mantegna) and defence about whether she used her body as a lethal weapon to kill her millionaire lover and inherit; a brace of shifty witnesses (Archer and Prochnow); no tension; and Portland, Oregon in the rain.

While the original movie persuaded us that the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina could inspire jaw-dropping behavior, its equivalent here feels extremely bogus.

John Patrick Shanley's screenplay, touching on themes of betrayal and corruption, honesty and trust, promises and teases but suffers from coitus interruptus.

As a thriller, the film tries to camouflage its lack of suspense with profligate and repetitive gunplay and a deafening barrage of noise (Ry Cooder's score is a plus, however). There's too much voice-over, and not enough for arch-nemesis Walken to do. but at least Willis has the hard-boiled hero down. An honourable failure.

The satire rarely stings, as first-time feature directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod give a polite Masterpiece Theatre gloss to this most impolite of tales.

So it's no surprise that what starts out as a beer-soaked cringe comedy about stunted masculinity ends up deep in the woods with noise-loving Japanese tourists and exploding craniums - or that such detours into psychotronic oddity for its own sake can make even a 75-minute running time feel like an eternity.

The more the veteran actor strives to give Joe a final dose of funereal dignity, the more the film around him seems intent on deep-sixing its MVP.

A few of his labyrinthine concerns and much advanced animation work (plus optical assistance from once-celebrated avant-gardist Jordan Belson) spice the thin conceit, but it's a doomed project.

While there are some atmospheric and absorbing moments, all involving Isaac monologuing or close-ups on his face depicting stormy thoughts brewing underneath, Schrader ultimately abandons his gambling subplots in favour of a two-fold ending that is both anticlimactic and empty.

Detailing his efforts to distribute Bananas!*, his 2009 exposé on Dole's use of toxic chemicals in Nicaragua, Swedish documentarian Fredrik Gertten's latest plays as an occasionally fascinating, if ultimately reductive, showdown between First Amendment rights and corporate power.

This sequel to House offers another blend of humour and horror, but the gags aren't particularly sweet, the chills aren't particularly spicy. On the whole an indigestible affair, which fortunately passes quickly through the system.

It could have been so much worse; we wish it was a lot better.

From a character conceived by Mel Brooks', reads the blurb, and there are various nods to his style of humour throughout this bitty spoof. But the rest relies more on technology than style, and on mediocre effects that can't carry the plot.

Director Spheeris (Wayne's World) seems to have taken her obsession with youth culture beyond the limit, including a scene of dancing teenies in pink leotards that would make John Waters blush.

The Magic Christian is all too clearly representative of the impasse independent mainstream film-making found itself in when given its head by the industry in the '60s. The result is a variety concert of a film in which most of the acts/jokes fall flat.

Elevate works as a sympathetic portrait of cultural adjustment (learning in a nonnative language, sticking to Muslim dietary restrictions), but never adequately addresses the problems of what's essentially a neocolonialist system designed to shape impoverished Africans into first-world profit-makers.

Non Stop doesn’t know how to hit it and quit; it’s a rock doc that screams loud and says frustratingly little

All of them slog through countless boring sword-and-sandal skirmishes, none of which feel remotely suspenseful, until the hugeness of it all becomes a mildly passable joke.

The Flat details his efforts to understand this unusual situation, and although the film suggests that his relatives may have maintained this odd friendship as a denial of their homeland's betrayals, there's only so deep Goldfinger can dig.

While the documentary offers some insights into the pervertion of art for ideological purposes, too much of it simply finds Fry standing in dumbfounded awe of the holy sites that populate his journey.

There's shockingly little thrill in watching Carano bounce off walls and pummel antagonists.

A tedious example of speculative fiction.

This is like a subpar "Naked Gun" feature cooked up by Eisenstein and Godard during a drug-addled lost weekend. Where's Leslie Nielsen when you need him?