Saddled with an atrocious boy's own paper plot about a good brother and a bad brother, both in the Flying Corps and clashing over a girl, the end result is barely adequate. But it does feature a spectacularly elaborate World War I dogfight, and an equally fine Zeppelin sequence.

While visually stunning and stocked with enviable onscreen talent, this holiday confection falls flat.

Brittle, workaholic and bitterly single does not a Kate Hepburn make, and in this latest screen iteration of The Taming of the Heigl, she doesn't stray far enough from her standard rom-com shtick.

The fact that the film’s title is an Arabic word for “olive,” as in holding out said branch to your foes, gives you a sense of what Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree) is going for: a melodrama with a do-we-all-not-bleed? moral.

People become mere punch lines: fleshy avatars for the gory grist.

Forgive the film its "Napoleon Dynamite" overquirk; a loving god is watching all, genuflected to on bedroom-wall posters and seen in the film's final five minutes--and if you're not a Rush fan, this is not your movie

Bouchareb gives his actors room to roam, but you still get only skin-deep sketches instead of flesh-and-blood women.

Editor Marshall Harvey stitches the messy pieces together with considerable panache.

Some good special effects, but with strictly tele-standard acting, straightforward space opera plot, grandiose sentiment and slushy love interest, it's really only meat for genre fans.

It's certainly not a subtle movie, but with memorable performances, ludicrously over-the-top one-liners and amiable zaniness, it qualifies as a lot of fun.

Anderson utilizes slow-motion 3-D to hyperbolic effect while again casting Jovovich as the epitome of badass sexiness.

The only thing that remains a mystery is why anyone thinks they can pass off a poorly made, predictable-to-a-fault movie as inspiring entertainment.

Mills stages the B-movie mayhem with gleeful abandon and geysers of blood.

After "Pineapple Express" and "Your Highness," is Green now contractually obligated to revive every dead comedic subgenre of the '80s? What's next, a stoner-friendly "License to Drive"?

They have little feel for the technical side of filmmaking; the imagery is flat and the editing amateurish. Most shots seem held for a beat too long or too short, wreaking havoc with the comic rhythm. Nonetheless, McCarthy and Falcone’s attempts to make Tammy more flesh-and-blood than a figure of fun are often poignant.

Predicting that we might soon weary of downhill action, this virtually plotless ski picture is decorated with hot tub frolics and a wet T-shirt contest.

Part vigilante movie, part sitcom, part tearjerker, part cracker melodrama, it's redeemed by yet another of Garner's graceful, effortless performances.

The film's unlikely trump card is Richard Widmark as a credibly sceptical supernatural investigator, who romps through the proceedings with a disarming stoicism, but regrettably faces his devilish opponent Lee only in the closing sequence. It's a good deal more interesting than the rest of the possession cycle, but still a disappointment.

Terminally boring.

If Vincent Wants to Sea proves nothing else, it's that a moronically quirky take on mental illness is no more palatable when it's subtitled.

Platt’s fluid, emotional tenor voice is as beautiful as ever, and it’s easy to understand the desire to preserve his original performance. But the very mannerisms that were well scaled to a 1,000-seat house – the hunched posture, the tics, the blurts of speech – are off-putting in cinematic close-up.

No one expected this long-delayed piece of Michael Jackson pop-aganda to lay bare the man behind the myths and myriad controversies in forensic style. And yet… this soft-ball character study of the King of Pop only doubles down on the former, while completely ignoring the latter, hitting all the usual dreary biopic beats along the way.

Apprenticed under Corman, Wynorski is well-versed in double-bluffing his audience, denying them the chance of balking at dreadful special effects by implying that the ineptitude is deliberate. He opts for cheap nostalgic laughs and camp '50s sci-fi scenery; depending on whether you find this funny, you'll either smile knowingly or gasp in disbelief.

Neither the film’s main players nor its random period spoofery has any personality.

Also missing: the series' reliable camp heavies, Bill Nighy and Michael Sheen, and most of the so-called Lycans who, their appearance in a few respectable action sequences notwithstanding, are now nearly extinct. So is this franchise.

Flashes of genuine intelligence and wit in the writing only render the moral nihilism of the whole high-tack enterprise all the more inexcusable.

The characters may soar, but viewers’ spirits stay grounded.

Question: What's the only thing worse than doing an unfaithful film adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel? Answer: Doing a completely faithful one.