Incestuous desires run rampant in the original novel by VC Andrews, but all the movie has to offer is soft-focus innuendo. As fantasy stripped of all its metaphorical trimmings, the sublimely ridiculous plot is more likely to reduce an audience to laughter than to tears.

Burdened with a bevy of unlikely plot twists, this is less a movie sequel than the latest installment in a big-screen soap opera.

The leaps made by Scott's agile mind in identifying both victim and usurper leave logic and credence on the starting block.

The lesson here, apparently, is that driven women just need to lighten up and stop being selfish - a message that really does feel backward.

Whether one takes the two-part movie as a glamorous epic or as a lengthy advertisement for the Italian communist party, it still looks like a major catastrophe.

The filmmaker throws in a strangely irrelevant twist before he’s through, but despite a lavish dose of gothic style, The Condemned’s trek toward absolution is pretty familiar.

You keep waiting for the movie to grow a brain, for that random attractive neighbor (Wilde) to turn out to be a decoy, for Banks herself to become suspect. Nope. The Next Three Days morphs into "The Fugitive" on steroids.

American Casino tries to connect the big picture regarding a major problem to a human pulse and comes up lacking on both sides. It’s a gamble that simply doesn’t pay off

This wisecracking saga of tween angst largely avoids the gimmicky saccharine aftertaste that's typical of the genre.

By the time this modest microindie noir starts laying its cards on the table, your attention will have already folded.

You can probably skip this one and still sleep soundly at night.

To be fair, pulling off complex action sequences in such unforgivingly high definition is a ballsy move—it’s much harder to hide the joins between what was captured in camera and what was added later. But as impressive as the action is—and a Smith-vs.-Smith motorcycle chase in Colombia is a superb sequence worthy of peak Bond—the high-definition format just doesn’t work.

The script is formula and so is the direction, which leaves the acting. According to the credits, Danson had an acting coach, but he's a warm enough presence to be able to carry a film as slight as this without needing one; instead the coach should have worked with Culkin, who can't even eat a sandwich convincingly.

Unfortunately, he's retained his previous work's touristy mondo italiano! vibe, all whimsical tunes and postcard scenery, while piling on enough ogling shots of nubile young women to make Hugh Hefner feel uncomfortable.

So it’s no surprise that, even with longtime screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala watching his back, the director never finds his groove with Peter Cameron’s tale.

Here's a film that definitely wants to play Hollywood dress-up.

This is fertile material for a darkly comic indictment. Instead, we get recycled cynicism (politicians are hypocrites! more dirty money, more problems!) and Spacey's gallery of impersonations-W.C. Fields, Stallone, Reagan-in lieu of a flawed, flesh-and-blood human being.

The culture wars may be simmering throughout writer-director Ben Hickernell's script-the Save the Whales and pro-choice bumper stickers on Will's VW invite a brutal barfly beatdown-but the real casualties are momentum and narrative cohesion.

Even this kind of WWIII escapism—it’s based on a 2012 novel by Don Keith and George Wallace called Firing Point—requires a sturdier hero than Gerard Butler, who finds himself in a time machine that delivers actors to rejected Tom Cruise projects.

Both Project Greenlight runners-up, directors Michael Aimette and John G. Hofmann get the teen angst and Gaelic aesthetic right; too bad their third-act thuggery isn’t just routine, but ridiculous.

As in the first film, the seasoned-pro cast provides the few fleeting pleasures to be found.

Second Act is an aspirational Pinterest board of a film, too bland to make an impression. If only the world saw street smarts as equal to book smarts, Maya wishes on her birthday. It’s a nice idea, but Second Act doesn’t possess smarts in either category.

The movie dies onscreen; it might be the best advertisement for avoiding the glories of Italy ever released by a Hollywood distributor.

In this breeding ground for date rape and HPV, there are some trashy kicks in seeing horrible people get theirs, plus housemother Fisher goes all buck wild with a shotgun.

An hour and half of comparable barbarity follows-all of it monotonous, none of it enlightening.

A miniseries, which the BBC once planned, might have worked. In this form, Midnight’s Children has the paradoxical misfortune of being both too rushed and too wearingly long.

The film is made up of plundered parts from the "Oceans" series and "The Usual Suspects," and—like several of the forged tomes that figure in the plot — it’s a pale imitation.

From its opening montage of Hallmark-worthy kisses to a climactic clinch under the Tuscan sun, Letters to Juliet celebrates synthetic sentiment.