The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.

Sadly, it collapses dizzily amid a baroque shower of bejewelled costumes, Kenneth Anger style colour overload, mock fairytale purple prose, and pixillated anti-naturalistic performances. Finally pretty tedious.

Let's not make 4:44 Last Day on Earth sound cooler than it is. Compared with Lars von Trier's histrionically doomed "Melancholia," the film lacks any serious attempt to grapple with mortality.

Robert Getchell's script milks the story for maximum tears, but wrestles unsuccessfully with the inherent absurdity of Stella's predicament, delivering clichéd situations and dialogue. And Midler's larger-than-life performance is daunting against the subtler approaches of Alvarado and Mason.

Ultimately, for all its running around in the middle of the night, Sex Tape plays it remarkably coy, reaffirming love, not lust. It’s the cinematic equivalent of sleeping in the wet spot.

The equivalent of a skin flick in which all the sex scenes are tastefully obscured by blankets and sheets.

And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.

‘Please don’t be boring,’ Nelson’s villain beseeches Wilson in a clutch moment. Who wants to tell him?

The unintentional hilarity of the whole enterprise - especially when Albert attempts to romance one of the hotel's naive employees (Wasikowska) - at least keeps you engaged, as does the scene-by-scene suspense over which pitiably wide-eyed expression Close will choose to use next. Hopefully, she's practicing her gracious-loser face for awards season.

Photographically busy, though to no meaningful purpose, mildly amusing at best, the piece finally expires with what could be, but probably isn't, a parody of a feel-good ending.

While the tartness and wit is missing to elevate this anywhere near the romantic-comedy canon, the overall vibe is so cosy and frothy, you’d need a heart of steel to hate it.

There are occasional flourishes that testify to the director's ingenuity and ability - Expressionist lighting, faces looming over spiral staircases, hats blown off in the wind - and Hitch throws in plenty of knockabout English humour, but the plotting is half-baked and the special effects are so crude that they make the back projection in Marnie look like the last word in verisimilitude.

Once you get over the droll joke of seeing an equine Web surfer wearing a bathrobe and sipping his morning coffee, the movie settles into a shrill groove from which it never escapes.

There are occasional glimmers of what might have been in the fresh performances of the actresses. But it plods where it should sparkle, like a celebration where the champagne's gone flat.

Treasure of the Sierra Madness.

It’s a hit-and-mostly-miss affair: For every gut-buster like McBride and Franco’s lengthy exchange about drenching each other in seminal fluid, there’s a fall-flat gag.

Yet even with the rich, inherently cinematic texture of the urban setting and two excellent native outer-borough actors in Morales and Reyes, Gun Hill Road falters thanks to its paint-by-numbers storytelling.

No matter what the film says about sexual fluidity, you can't shake the feeling that 3 exists primarily to justify a shot of three figures impeccably posed together on a mattress. Everything else is reduced to trumped-up afterthoughts.

No matter how sensitive the orchestral-string score gets, the film can't locate the bone-deep sense of tragedy of Leslie Schwartz's novel - it just keeps belching out empty, grief-stricken histrionics devoid of insight.

Would-be thoughtful Western which ultimately resorts to killing and ketchup to make up for its lack of style and originality.

If there’s any justice, dawning or otherwise, at the multiplex, audiences will reject Zack Snyder’s lumbering, dead-on-arrival superhero mélange, a $250 million tombstone for a genre in dire need of a break.

It’s bad enough that Nancy Meyer’s latest conventional romcom is blessed with a title so bluntly unimaginative as to seem facetious; the rub is that it’s not even a truthful assessment.

Some will find the director’s toothless brand of epiphany comforting (and download his mixtape), but the vast majority will find it tired.

The potentially interesting material is suffocated by a B-movie story and a C-grade script.

So-so contemporary shows and cantankerous arguments are favored over in-depth looks at Reid's legacy. Any genuine weirdness about a funky, filthy-mouthed freak running around in a costume is left AWOL.

Menopausal male Wilder gets the frustrated hots for comely Ms Le Brock in this broad, unfunny Hollywood remake of the broad, only vaguely funny French original Pardon Mon Affaire (which at least had long-faced Jean Rochefort in its favour).

Medina is simply content to let the film’s sub-Jarmusch vignettes slow-fizzle to their finishes.

Antoine Fuqua’s second-rate retread of his own "Training Day" is a bloated, multithread drama concerning three burnt-out cops at the end of their seemingly unconnected ropes.