The web of relationships between English and Japanese is too schematic in its polarisation of characters, Oshima's handling of the narrative is not so much elliptical as awkward, and Bowie's performance is embarrassingly wooden.

The director has made disappointing films before — a more generous word might be transitional — but never one so slight.

Boy needn't be pop-culturally fluent to be relatable; believable human characterizations would have sufficed.

Despite its meticulously detailed gore, Jigsaw is rarely scary.

There's only one thing worse than a leaden moral fable that tackles issues of forgiveness with sledgehammer contrivances, and that's one that attempts to mask its manipulative corniness with an air of trumped-up gravity.

Only Kristin Scott Thomas channeling "In the Loop's" Malcolm Tucker offers a spark; the rest is simply hokum designed to land overly sentimental suckers hook, line and sinker.

Mirthless, episodic fantasy saga.

Bibliophiles, librarians and graduate students may swoon at the sight of the author's signature grotesquerie.

When the sing-song Jones and beatifically smiling Streep are allowed to carry the dramatic weight, you can see the raw, tough-love film that Hope Springs wants to be - until Frankel starts trying to be lighthearted and cute, at which point you see the movie's real troubled marriage in full bloom.

The young actors' vacant-eyed brazenness may be true to life, but there's a whiff of exploitation, matched by the script's disinterest in exploring any friction that isn't skin on skin.

The movie amounts to little more than Marky Mark's South American Vacation.

Listen to the rhythms of "Broadcast News" - from Holly Hunter's daily crying jags to William Hurt's cock-of-the walk patter - and you'll hear how romantic comedy can approach an art form, a roundelay that requires the ear of a conductor. How Do You Know, James L. Brooks's latest, has such tone-deaf passages that it feels made by a totally different man.

Unless you really dig "Glee"-level displays of high-school drama geekery, you and your date may want to quickly exeunt.

Viewers who can't get enough of ESPN's "30 for 30" docs will lap up this dual portrait.

Director Castle gets lost in fantasy, spoiling a promising portrait with some heavy-handed emotional manipulation and an escapist conclusion.

Any residual charm evaporates when the third-act dramatics start piling up and a must-be-seen-to-be-believed final twist redefines the word shameless, even by Sparksville standards.

Big on emotional highs but skimpy on details, Dressed rallies behind the orphan but fails to reveal the artist.

Lessons are learned, bullies get their comeuppance, and every Wonder Years plot device is trotted out for maximum and-I-was-never-the-same-again nostalgia.

The soundtrack offers the expected jazz, while Allen himself, now sounding mumbly, offers intermittent, awkward narration. In the pantheon of his films, it’s a pretty but minor distraction.

While you know the stakes are high, Call Jane never seems particularly interested in proving it.

Unfortunately, Truffaut fell into a pit of awkwardness on the project; editingwise, he's hardly in the league of Hitchcock, his sequences rushing ahead, his ironies too obvious. The Bride Wore Black only makes you yearn for better imitators like Brian De Palma. (Unlikely agreement came from Truffaut himself, ever the film critic, who hated his own movie.)

A fun-sapped maelstrom without meaning, 300 simply pummels you with endless loops of battle-porn. While you couldn’t classify the movie as entertainment, it might have a long, prosperous future as a Clockwork Orange–style Ludovico Technique.

For a few brief moments, the film becomes something close to Greek mythology, as opposed to graphic-novel imitator. What a feeling!

Bizarre and vulgar, certainly, but also very hard to follow.

Equals could be her least persuasive performance to date — and remember, Stewart has played a soldier at Guantanamo and a girl who dates a vampire.

Even in those well-executed gnarlier moments and winky character beats, Scream VI feels a lot more dated than the genre it’s deconstructing.

Comic interest is sustained by the entrance of prissy poodle Daphne (voice-over: Diane Keaton), but the preponderance of nudging innuendo was enough to earn the film a '12' certificate, thus excluding the audience of younger children who might otherwise have enjoyed the movie.

In a word: Ugh.