The script, credited to one Bert V. Royal, seems to have been run through an out-of-control sass machine (seriously, it'll make you appreciate Diablo Cody's tact).

Mostly pretty silly and uncertain whether to be tongue-in-cheek, it has one or two good scenes and some intriguing hardware, including the Looker (Light Ocular Oriented Kinetic Energetic Responsers) disorientation gun.

Hard to dismiss completely a film in which Broderick Crawford turns up as 'Brod', but with Olivier overdoing it dreadfully as the crinkly old ne'er-do-well who persuades misfit American teen Lane and French youth Bernard to run off to Venice and consolidate their love by the Bridge of Sighs, it's not one that'll win over hardened cynics either.

By the time the film takes a glib turn into role-switching farce - as Muslims become Christians and Christians become Muslims - the overall toothlessness of the satire becomes damningly apparent.

The books' ingenious wunderkind is MIA here, replaced instead by a generic eye-rolling, motormouthed preteen bopping around rote set pieces.

A former stand-up comic, Miller lends a sense of puckish mischief to his tenderhearted, troubled Cupid, yet everything else about this drama - even the cultural and spirit-of-'68 historical touches - feels like Nesher is simply mashing several stock elements together and gracelessly parading them around.

Is this family movie just an excuse for the star to romp around wearing not an awful lot? Very probably.

Adult children and friends watch nervously as Pippa reclaims a measure of spunk; too bad it all feels like one of those pharmaceutical ads for longer, healthier lifestyles.

The new recruits have standard issue hilarious-style problems - route marching, press-ups, food, the local brothel - but most of all they have psychotic, cruel-to-be-kind drill sergeant Walken. Why Walken plays him so dulcet and limp is beyond comprehension.

Huppert fans have long been tolerant of her hit-and-miss filmography, and while her double act with the rubber-faced Poelvoorde provides a few well-played scenes-two words: horsey rides-it's not enough to liven up a trite story of loosening up.

It's Goldthwait's first misstep, a serious one. He's simply not the filmmaker to mount a fierce takedown of Kardashian culture, thorough though his script's rage is.

The pity is that the people in People Like Us ultimately don't feel any more dimensional than the archetypes dutifully dotting his lowest-denominator multiplex fodder. He's just picked a different set of clichés to ransack.

If director Stephen Fung's frenetic visual style is the Red Bull in this cinematic cocktail, then the dozy plotting is the vodka - leaving you feeling momentarily excited but ultimately narcotized.

J. Edgar is infuriatingly coy and noncritical about its subject, an undeniable patriot but also an alarmist and a ruiner of lives.

Mea Maxima Culpa only gets messier the more it tries to iris out to a larger indictment. The central tragedy ends up diluted to a fault.

Though the director includes a few brief humdingers — a fight that involves a Rube Goldberg–ish tangle of wires; some munitions-fueled mayhem in a farmhouse — it’s not enough to keep viewers from wishing they were thumbing through a John le Carré novel instead.

It's gruellingly long, the four-track stereo relentless, and the music a mechanical recreation of Zeppelin standards (eg. 'Whole Lotta Love', 'Stairway to Heaven).

Director-cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s indifference to the material is palpable and of a piece with his deathly dull output of late.

Unfortunately, none of the subsequent noise is all that scary, and the striving for "Paranormal Activity’s" buzz is shameless.

The film spends too much time following a Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, limiting most of the substantive material to the last act.

First-time director J. Clay Tweel oversells the importance of both the Vegas event and of magic in general-you'd think he were filming a spiritual movement rather than hidden-ball tricks. His wide-eyed subjects do make magic happen-but that has less to do with illusion than innocence.

This is little more than an expensive-looking celebrity vacation video—more evidence in support of the notion that the Hollywood house always wins.

The Freebie grimly reaffirms the status quo, concluding it's better to have no sex at all than to forsake the Ikea-furnished domestic dream.

Irritated, you realize you've been watching an object that's all surface, no soul.

De Niro and Streep play two Manhattan commuters who fall in love, Brief Encounter style; but to invoke Coward and Lean's film is to realise just how thin and unsatisfying this one is.

This isn't a film, it's a recording of canned ham-tasty, certainly, but creaky nonetheless.

This behind-the-curtain portrait winds up revealing only the most superficial-and glaringly obvious-of truths.

There are few traces of irony, intended fun, or Casanova-style exoticism here: the director may intened a feminist Visconti, but he ends up with a Zalman King Red Shoe Diary crossed with a Dick Lester Dumas adaptation.