The film captures a few surprising similarities to the West: One dead-eyed club kid says she’s “tired of everything,” while a hopeful young actor seems to be trying out for her own reality show, breaking down in front of her estranged mother. The experiment isn’t more than a slice of life, but at least it’s a generous one.

Such manic fumblings and desperate crassness might be more forgivable were any of it actually, y’know, funny, but other than Olivia Colman’s occasional cameos as a raging therapist, the laughs have been granted a leave of absence.

With so many ideas to work with, why does Bell infantilize her elsewhere-confident main character as yet another disheveled woman-child?

Don’t look to this skin-deep biopic to offer any insights beyond the head-slappingly superficial.

Prince Avalanche — Green has admitted that the unrelated title came to him in a dream — evaporates after a while, although it’s never less than quizzical and charming.

Combining footage of embattled town meetings and raucous boardwalk scenes with evenhanded interviews and visualized statistics, Zipper is a compelling argument for a populist Coney Island whose days are, alas, numbered.

Despite the usual end-of-world crisis and Mount Olympus MVP characters, there’s no sense that anything’s truly at stake; rather, it feels as if the filmmakers are coasting on the fumes of teen-angst fantasy and making up their fairy-tale rules (Cyclopes are fireproof!) as they go along.

The rest of us will just be left to puzzle over Aniston’s exhibitionism obsession and pray that Sudeikis’s smirking-douche leading-man shtick won’t constitute his entire post-SNL career.

Hollywood loves these apocalypse-soon stories, however, because they function as blank canvases for ruin porn, and if nothing else, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium gives us the realistically trashed tomorrow we suspect we deserve.

Only a periodic focus on the troubled backstory of the team’s coach, American cyclist Jock Boyer, strikes the wrong note, distracting from a far more compelling tale.

Smash & Grab aims to replicate the mesmeric tension of a Michael Mann thriller (the crime-cinema impresario is even explicitly referenced by one of the cops assigned to hunt down the group), though the film is so all over the place stylistically that it often seems like several different movies cut together.

What’s missing is the onstage archival footage that would show us why this humor mattered in the first place—there are only a handful of five-second snippets.

While veteran director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) and writer Jean-Claude Carrière don’t bring much novelty to the May-December/muse-artist/naked-clothed cliché, they do imbue the material with genuine feeling—exploring the melancholy of waning days and a defiantly naive belief in artistic transcendence.

She (Lohan) isn’t the best thing about this awful, lounged-out drama — it has no best thing — but in her defense, Lohan has been atrociously directed, allowed to get away with the worst aspects of her vocal-fry laziness, and trotted out like a symbolic objet d’art.

It’s a near-perfect portrait of a domestic tragedy as a master-and-servant psychodrama, one that leaves catastrophic collateral damage in its wake.

Nothing about The Spectacular Now feels easy or After-School Special, although it tidies up too much (the personal essay should be retired as a device).

2 Guns quickly degenerates into boilerplate Hollywood sound and fury, complete with a climactic Mexican standoff that revolves around a massive, burning pile of money. Irony, thou art lost.

Patient Adult Smurfs will be checking their watches as Excitable Child Smurfs lose themselves in the high jinks.

The sights are gorgeous—a seamless mix of archival imagery and impressively rendered digital views of our galaxy—and the science is, to layman’s eyes and ears, more than credible.

It exists in fits and starts: a Blade Runner–esque moment of rainy contemplation on a hotel balcony; some weird sexual tension with a lizard girl (statuesque Svetlana Khodchenkova) who steals away Wolverine’s healing powers.

It’s too busy pleasing itself with lame references to (among others) Eddie Vedder and Hillary Clinton that suggest the film believes old stuff is funny because, you know, it’s old.

[Viewers] won’t find much here besides Langella’s typically austere performance, some lazy character sketches...and the sensation one gets after having watched paint dry, painfully slowly, on a canvas.

It’s a waste, for sure — of talent and your time.

As with his previous film Golden Door (2006), Crialese proves that he’s more adept when evoking a lyrical naturalism practiced by his directorial ancestors than when he’s hand-wringing over social issues.

The director/subject uses a confessional tone, showing herself nude in the tub and slathering the movie in emotive voiceover. But her self-regard never matures into self-examination, and the only time she steps outside of her own perspective is to moan about how others have it easier.

Not a bad setup for a cops-and-robbers thriller, and in the hands of action-movie maestro Johnnie To, the result comes very close to greatness.

It’s real Streetcar Named Desire territory as the fights pile up, and if you think that doesn’t sound entertaining, know that it is, in a hypnotically catastrophic way.

Tired byplay between Reynolds’s mystified straight man and Bridges’s supernatural old pro will kill off any fond memories you have of zesty buddy films past and present.