Revenge may be a dish best served cold, as the novel suggested, but steamy adaptations simply can't be doled out lukewarm.

Adding hot naked men to a predictable narrative doesn't equal titillating or taboo; it just means you've dressed up a messy melodrama

Zhang's mixture of unsparing violence, mawkish sentimentality and garish flourishes creates one uncomfortable aesthetic.

Has neither enough bite nor enough heart to sustain it as a female-revenge-fantasy-cum-romantic-comedy; even its “shocking” switcheroo and faux-edgy moments seem remarkably frivolous and flavorless.

Hall's puppy-dog charisma holds up under the strain, but it isn't nearly enough to keep this messy midlife-crisis dramedy afloat. A little of this Bliss goes a long way.

Overall, the movie has the bantamweight feel of a really long DVD extra: Little details of the director’s ancestral stomping grounds are appealing, but don’t jell into something satisfying.

Famous fans (Rosanne Cash! Oprah!!!) attest to the book and film's greatness, but at best, this is a half-hour A&E Biography episode padded out to feature-length with forgetful trivia, frustratingly facile history lessons and far too much fawning.

There’s no sense of what Wajeman is after here. A character piece should have some sense of a character’s who, what and why, right?

A perfectly boring movie from Julian Schnabel - is it possible?

Breillat, as always, goes her own way, but her impressionistic scenes barely cohere, even at this brief running time.

Stone looks distinctly ordinary in this glossy, glassy sex-thriller.

This sequel brings everything back to the original film – even recycling some of the same jokes. But they’re a pale echo of its greatness in an overly stuffed and only occasionally fun spectral adventure.

There’s plenty of on-screen talent involved here, but they’re all far better than the material. Hopefully, the all-but-certain Sonic 3 will level-up the script.

The ideas here aren't nearly up to the scratch that writers Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris established in Trading Places.

How Göran and his new charge bond (party boy Sven quickly splits) is the stuff of time-tested trite melodrama.

Writer-director Jane Campion approaches the tale with an artiste’s respectful solemnity, but it too often comes off like "Twilight" transplanted across oceans and centuries.

Equal parts Hollywood meet-cute and quirky coming-of-age tale.

Like the myriad dangers threatening the earth, the film is simply too unwieldy, a sprawling mass of ideas that are dutifully checked off and then given only superficial explanations in lieu of insightful explorations.

While his film is engaging enough when covering curiosities like a funeral directors' convention, the fact that it lacks an authorial voice of its own is a dealbreaker.

The characters may soar, but viewers’ spirits stay grounded.

For all of Cloud Atlas's pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the "natural order," the execution couldn't be squarer.

It's hard to truly hate any movie whose ending revolves around a clever Where's Waldo? gag. It's also near impossible to take it seriously for that exact same reason.

You can’t deny the inspirational qualities of the story or Parker’s screen presence, any more than you could accuse the film of subtlety or of masking its conspicuous pro-Christian agenda.

It also serves to undercut fine performances by Connelly and Harris, whose choices are constantly destabilized by scripted swings between comedy and drama, realism and fantasy, genuine catharsis and indie-film ornamentation. Black's overactive melodrama is more than a representation of schizophrenia; it's the embodiment of it.

Atmosphere and acting can't save a script filled with easy-target irony ("Who ever heard of gettin' rich from workin' with computers?") and a plot that telegraphs every left turn miles in advance.

The tonal lurches – from jokey to earnest and back again – will have whiplash setting in by the time its eccentric fourth-wall-breaking coda comes around, while some odd casting choices (and accents) drain gravity from the serious moments.

The results make your head spin more than they make your spirits soar.

Protektor is simply another in a long line of diluted stories about life during wartime, one whose diminished returns only further trivialize a legacy of real-life horror.