Knuckleheaded though this faculty-member-turned-MMA-fighter comedy is, there's no denying the plot's lefty credentials, snuck in like Raisinets among the popcorn.

Whether sleuthing or smacking around thugs, Sisley makes a dashing hero, but this glossy action flick is heavy on tedious convolutions and depressingly light on character depth, suspense or political-economic intrigue.

With the screenplay dabbling with too many issues and stereotypes, the characters are largely one-dimensional and the relationships unconvincing.

Hitchcock matches the play's compassion for women suffering in the face of feckless men, especially in the film's powerful final shots. [07 Oct 2010]

Barker calls his shambolic, uninvolving narrative 'scattershot'; put less kindly, it's as explosive and directionless as a blunderbuss.

Ceremony passes by quickly and painlessly, its annoyances easily forgotten. On the plus side, Thurman and Angarano do work up a sweet odd-pair chemistry.

On its way to an uncathartic climax that somehow involves a black-market-fenced oil painting and an Amsterdam shootout, The Goldfinch throws in so much diversionary character work that you wonder if anyone thought the stew was going to be edible.

Although Fessenden does fine work shooting his equivalent of Lifeboat, the movie’s surface is often rough. Yet the title doesn’t just refer to what lurks in the lake’s still water. It’s a guide to where Beneath’s substance lies, the acid heart inside its plastic chest.

The Virginity Hit is elevated by its cast of very funny young actors who match good comic timing with relaxed spontaneity.

Well-intentioned but ultimately mishandled, it commits the cardinal sin of indecisiveness, middling out in a purgatory of daddy issues and Sunday service pamphlets.

If Gregorini and Von Furstenberg's goal was to construct a cinematic Sunday Styles spread of the plaid-skirt-and-tie crowd, then kudos. As filmmakers, however, these two have some serious growing up of their own to do.

Fans will love the funny and subversive moments; anyone who didn't "get" them premakeover may simply feel like they've been sitting in a "brown bath" for 93 minutes. Don't ask.

The dialogue is Texas crude, the sentiment Bible Belt coy, and the songs conveyor-belt Broadway: stale air on a G-string.

Sure, the footwork is flawless in this 3-D rendering of Michael Flatley's high-kicking show; it's the filmmaking that's dull.

Bless you, R.Patz & Co., because this gloriously steaming pile is officially in the bad-movies-we-love pantheon.

The real mystery is what Schlesinger and Sheen are doing making this schlock.

Manly, sharp-edged submarine B movies don’t come along often anymore — so consider this Cold War off-white-knuckler a welcome blast of recycled air.

Though there’s no shortage of biographies on the notoriously private writer, no one has had the stones to try making a comprehensive visual documentary on someone as camera-aversive as the Catcher in the Rye author. The effort itself should be applauded.

The film is set in a celeb-owned Miami restaurant and many of the gags--exploding entrees, the swallowing of a diamond ring, on-the-job drunkenness--feel like leftovers.

Once AIDS rears its head, this nostalgic look back goes into melodrama mode - and quickly descends from bad to much, much worse.

But scary? Not so much.

Making excellent use of Nolte's controlled toughness and Short's hysterical freneticism, Weber plays the comic action hard and fast, grounding the humour in believable reality that has spiralled out of control.

When De Palma started taking himself too seriously—circa Casualties of War—is when he lost the thread. His genius was always in voluptuous nonsense. He needs to drop the politics and get back to baby carriages.

The film is cut together with the haphazard feel of a posthumously completed record, its ungainly structure a macrocosm of the awkwardness with which the individual scenes are Frankensteined together into a lumbering monster built from close-ups and music cues.

Even before Wilson goes full Jack Torrance and Barbara Hershey shows up to investigate an abandoned hospital Scooby-Doo-style, one could technically call this sequel a gorefest—thanks to the guts of every other horror movie being splattered across the screen.

Forget cowabunga, this is cowadunga. Still, the Oscar for Most Shamefully Contrived Scene goes to the scriptwriters for managing to get franchise eye-candy Megan Fox into a sexy schoolgirl outfit, which, any shorter, would land the film with an R rating.

Ex-Glee geeks and those who sing in the shower: Your passable time-waster has arrived.

The idea of two Van Dammes must have seemed workable on paper, but both exude the charisma of a packet of Cup-a-Soup, and not even Van Damme seems able to tell himselves apart.