Irony can’t survive in Lee’s airless vacuum; he’s not an experimenter at heart, and as a result, his movie feels heartless.

If this remake of 2011’s French-Canadian hit "Starbuck" feels as if it’s just going through the motions, Vaughn himself radiates sincerity and good intention. The actor doesn’t get it right this time, but he’s earned himself another chance.

Ultimately pointless, Overboard makes you wonder why it exists at all when it offers neither a fresh angle into modern-day relationships nor an improvement upon its predecessor.

The results are often tasteless moments, like Hugh Jackman cackling over footage of an Australian aboriginal ritual scored to techno.

Injecting a devil-may-care attitude into a franchise-focused blockbuster only gets you so far. When all is said and done, this wasp's got no sting.

Whistle-blowing works best without gratuitous pop-doc debris, but there are only so many dry, fact-heavy testimonies from engineers you can take before a certain dullness uneasily settles in.

Even the show's disciples may feel like they've been cheated.

When Downhill works, it’s because the dynamic between Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell feels recognisably fraught. More often than not, though, this remake gets stuck in the snow.

A messy, meandering script ensures that, despite stylish camerawork and sturdy acting, this lengthy indulgence succeeds neither as jazz movie nor as cautionary tale.

Assets there are: Caine is served with some nice deadpan lines by Rod Amateau, and John Coquillon's photography is characteristically cool. But this is an unpleasant and invidious film, like Soldier Blue creaming the surface off profound racial issues to ease the killing along.

A huge hit in its native country, Hun Jang's epic doesn't lack for spectacle or incident: In addition to its war-what-is-it-good-for? moralizing, it also piles on bloody battle scenes, subplots involving a sniper and a supply chest, and a nihilistic last-minute twist. What you don't get is the sense that this pumped-up combat-fatigue chronicle is pandering-or, for that matter, particularly original.

Despite a few moments of surprising insight, Twelve Thirty comes off as more mechanistic than organic; it's composed rather than truly lived.

Robbins' handling of the human element is as sickly and soggy as a dunked doughnut, and the script makes gonks out of its characters. But the flirting frisbee scenes are pretty neat.

No movie that includes Tharpe's blistering electric guitar and the soaring falsetto of the Swan Silvertones' Claude Jeter can be all bad, but it's astonishing how little this time capsule adds to its phenomenal source material. You might even call it a miracle.

Childers's varied, charitable life story warrants a movie, but whether that means it's okay to simply mash up sappy Christian piety and action-movie chaos is highly debatable.

Sophia Takal's update of the cult classic turns the real horror of campus assault into a springboard for cheap thrills.

Ken Adam's sets are inventive, but the special effects are shoddy, the songs instantly forgettable, and the leisurely length an exquisite torture.

Winterbottom’s inability to bring off this lurid stew of sex and violence is one problem; his (mis)direction of Affleck is another.

Palin may have lost her taste for the responsibilities of office, but thanks to Broomfield's barely veiled condescension, this slightly prejudiced portrait could win her more supporters than it loses.

Not desperate, but disappointingly ordinary.

This visually epic, but monotonous collaboration between James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez is less than the sum of its slick parts.

For a faith-based film that aims to promote spiritual healing and prescribe forgiveness, The Shack is almost unforgivably joyless and visually bland.

Other than the Pottersploitation and presence of current It nerd Baruchel, this fantasy-action-comedy might have been spat out into multiplexes any summer over the previous two decades, yet it would seem like forgettable abracadabra filler regardless of the date.

If, as some critics have claimed, "The Cabin in the Woods" made the horror genre obsolete, someone forgot to tell screenwriter Oren Peli.

This isn't a sequel, it's a remake. Some ingredients have been substituted, but it's the same recipe of R & B and comic overkill. As before, the best thing is the music: Aretha Franklin, Sam Moore, James Brown. The rest is stale, cynical and hamfisted.

Ultimately, though, it's an uneasy blend of horror and whimsy, with the allegory being hammered a little too hard for comfort. It's also marred by some dreadfully tacky special effects and set designs.

Subversive elements or not, this is essentially little more than a TV soap opera spiced with hot-button topics (gender issues, clandestine gay trysts), and the combo of TV melodramatics and mumblecore-ish aesthetics eventually wears out its welcome.

And though Capper captures a few truly intimate moments, like the star humbly participating in a Rasta ritual, the whole thing ends up feeling like a superficial cross between a starstruck version of Vice’s gonzo travelogues and a highly (ahem) stage-managed portrait of an artist in transition.