It’s a hit-and-mostly-miss affair: For every gut-buster like McBride and Franco’s lengthy exchange about drenching each other in seminal fluid, there’s a fall-flat gag.

It’s hard to imagine a figure more courageous than activist David Kato: an out gay man—Uganda’s first, he says — who lives in constant peril from both private citizens and a government that wants to make homosexuality punishable by hanging.

The creepiness builds with symphonic precision until reality truly is indistinguishable from fantasy.

The sisterhood who have made this an art form mostly remain unsung heroes, as it were, of the hit parade. Their collective bow is long overdue.

The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s deceptively shallow but ultimately fascinating latest, is animated by that spirit of we-don’t-give-a-f**k playfulness.

The better actors — Kevin Costner, chiefly, as the adoptive Earth father — strain to supply warmth, but mostly, the minutes stretch into great expanses of blahness, much of them filled with Transformers-grade skyscraper snapping and bloodless catastrophe.

A movie sorely bereft of ideas, laughs and justification for the comic duo’s undifferentiating self-regard.

Director Max Mayer doesn’t find a way to make the ritual traumas of adolescence feel new again.

This pubescent navel-gazer has only its star Holland (Brian De Palma’s stepdaughter) to recommend it, not for her acting but only for her undeniable corn-fed–Emmanuelle Béart looks.

Deserves some kind of Bizarro World Robert Altman Independent Spirit Award for the Best Ensemble in the Least Interesting Movie.

It barely tries to offer insight into its much-debated subject, content to rip the scab off an ever-fresh wound for the sake of controversy. The most fitting punishment is to simply ignore its existence.

You’re probably better off heading to an actual watering hole than patronizing Douglas Tirola’s humdrum doc on the art of the cocktail.

With greater faith in its material, the movie could have dispensed with its time jumps and saved the reveals for when they matter most.

The closer we get to a climax (and the more that absurd reversals keep getting piled on), the less effective Dupontel’s brutish charisma is in keeping things interesting and afloat. You pray the next he-man outing makes better use of his presence.

The movie feels like too much of a lark. To paraphrase the play’s voice of reason, Friar Francis, it would be better if Whedon paused awhile and let his counsel sway us more.

The Mouth’s dubious legacy and his many off-camera complications are examined with a coarse affection of which he himself would surely approve.

What elevates the film is a pervasive, palpable sense of loss — between lover and beloved, young and old, stage and screen.

Dirty Wars leaves some deeper questions unexplored, mainly the philosophical struggle between security and secrecy, but makes up grandly with raw data and one correspondent’s passion.

The filmmakers are too much in love with their made-up holiday to observe it to the fullest.

When Mark Ruffalo shows up as a crumpled detective, you expect a dose of reality, yet on his heels come twin hams Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, whose solemn presences (as Christopher Nolan knows well) prove wonderful distractions from silliness.

What undoes the film is its rather rancid parent-child sentimentality (a Shyamalan staple, admittedly) and a charisma-free performance from the younger Smith that suggests the apple has fallen very far from the tree.

A sense of existential dread that would make the Russkie novelist beam is channeled beautifully, but for a filmmaker lauded for his minimalist aesthetic, Omirbayev sure loves broad-stroke symbolism and sloganeering.

The movie sags after Mary’s weak-willed acquiescence to crime, instantly turning her into a dull-eyed monster. You know her procedures are bound to stray from elective, but it’s hard to care.

Though its blanketed voiceover narration can be too on-the-nose—it’s a metaphor, we get it—the film packs a psychic punch, thanks to Gedeck’s spectrally wearied face.

There’s slow-burning, and then there’s simply slow; the difference between the two has never been so apparent.

Eager to please and easy on the eyes, The Kings of Summer sails right down the middle, safely tacking between sitcom setups and grandiose MGMT-scored montages without forming its own distinctive feel.

A movie of one billion cigarettes, Hannah Arendt is about moral reason, not personality. It could do worse than lead you straight to the woman’s books.

Eventually it’s go time, and if The East loses a little steam on the grounds of action mechanics (a skill these plots always require), it’s never dumb on the subject of covert allegiances.