Rote ageist jokes abound (“Do you guys have drugs?” asks a bachelorette; “Does Lipitor count?” responds Kline), but they come with an inclusive, self-deprecating spirit that grows more endearing over the duration.

To call this a turkey would be an insult to poultry.

Keanu Reeves’s five-years-in-the-making directorial debut won’t dispel the notion that his acting range begins and ends with monotonous recitations of “whoa.” But this wuxia does establish him as a deft helmer of cinematic combat.

Edited to ribbons so that every peripheral player — Kate Bosworth, Radha Mitchell, Josh Lucas, Henry Thomas — is even more one-dimensional than Kerouac himself, it’s a work that accurately expresses the awfulness of narcissistic self-destruction, and nothing else.

Those reunions are not always happy ones—one relative claims that his nephew would be less trouble dead — but they offer a brief, striking glimpse into the situations that make such a organization necessary.

A certain Hollywood self-absorption is on display here, but the family’s depressing story merits Mariel’s vigilant defensiveness.

Both Baetens and Heldenbergh do their best to sell the story’s ups and downs even when the narrative gets bogged down with science-versus-religion ranting, yet you’re still left with a movie a little too reliant on playing clawhammer on your heartstrings.

In a word: Ugh.

Watts’s work is extraordinary, sometimes keying off the same illicit register as "Mulholland Drive"; she risks being goofy, awkward and bratty.

With its slow-burn pacing and horrifying reveals, Aftermath remains a deeply compelling puzzle.

It’s exhilarating, even exhausting stuff, though Fiennes lightens the weight of Zizek’s dense discourse with a welcome scattering of sight gags. He’s a man to be taken seriously, but not averse to donning a nun’s habit — and for that we love him.

Only 20 minutes in and you’re not going to think of another lead who could pull off this kind of reckoning — tangy, furious and about to become whip-smart.

Though there are some small, beautiful moments in Nettelbeck’s drama, Last Love as a whole feels like it’s been dosed with Xanax.

There are a handful of brilliant set pieces, including a scorched-earth attack on child beauty pageants. But this exercise in wink-nudge bad taste simply leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

For every camp element like Javier Bardem’s rainbow-vomit outfits or Diaz’s onanistic tryst with a car windshield, there are a dozen poetic-pulp moments that channel McCarthy’s pitiless view of the world to a tee.

Capital ends up being neither a high-stakes thriller nor a cutting commentary on real-world bad behavior. It’s just CEO exotica, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

The overall effect is not unlike watching a chef de cuisine experimenting in his off-hours; not everything takes, but you still come away with a pleasingly stimulated palate.

I Am Divine shows how the future John Waters muse transformed from an isolated, weird kid into an over-the-top, proudly freakish star who influenced everything from the aesthetics of first-wave punk to the performance style of today’s drag queens.

The Square offers more than just pictures of a revolution; it lets you into the mind-set of those fighting for their future, and that makes all the difference.

If Bastards is cold, it’s never clinical; rather, it’s a fully engaged, deeply moral movie about people who are neither.

The rich atmosphere of the movie may be the sexiest thing about it: It’s no wonder these women breathe in the air of possibility and find themselves imbued with boldness.

Only Julianne Moore, as the Bible-thumping mom, has an instinct to go softer — how couldn’t she, after Piper Laurie? — and paradoxically, it’s a move that feels wrong, the role requiring its cantatory bigness.

No new ground is broken, and viewers will, not unpleasantly, get everything they expect. It’s apparently morning in America again.

If mean-spirited snarksters had set out to trash the reputation of "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody, they couldn’t have done a more vicious job than the Oscar winner herself does with her directorial debut.

The scenes of the film’s exuberant, frizzy-haired protagonist wandering Naples and revisiting old haunts, however, seem much more unfocused—a ramshackle search for insights into the man’s art and life that rarely come. The instruments are in tune, but the rhythm is off.

There’s a heart here, but with all the superficial noise, it’s hard to hear it beating.

While Stephenson and Brewster’s big-picture attempt to tackle a sociopolitical issue from the most personal of perspectives lacks the state-of-the-nation impact of that landmark doc, it doesn’t mean you won’t feel the pleasure of these kids’ triumphs, the pain of their tragedies or the pressures of ambition, affecting parents as much as students.

Brühl, meanwhile, is saddled with the unenviable task of being this hollow movie’s slow-dawning voice of reason: His climactic conversation with newspaper editor David Thewlis (never worse) is one of the most embarrassingly didactic Way We Live Now™ summations ever filmed.