The film slowly reveals its true colors, pointing a fanatically accusatory finger at teachers' unions while using twisted Obama-esque sloganeering about "order" and "hope" to further its simplistically anticollectivist agenda.

The film feels naive for an audience that's ready for some harder truths.

The documentary's scope feels a bit small overall - more concerned with capturing the episodic adventures of these disparate subjects than with connecting their experiences to larger societal ills.

This film could have done with a few more mouth beats and unlikely moments of extracurricular celebrity.

In our chatty "Game of Thrones" moment, you'll thirst for a sidekick: a sly dwarf, a wisecracking female warrior, a huggable wolf, anything. Solomon Kane has none of these, and even heavyweight speechifiers like Max von Sydow and the late Pete Postlethwaite (that's how old the film is) have little to gnaw on.

So why does this animated kids' film fail to come together? Bursts of manic pacing steamroll over most of the wit, a little of Sandler's thick-accent shtick goes a looong way, and by the time the requisite life lessons about letting your offspring leave the nest get rolled out, the undead-on-arrival jokes are outnumbered by anemic sitcom gags.

The most "Naked City"–worthy aspect is the film's temperature, fixed precisely between cool posturing and broiling anomie. Its vision of contemporary Thailand is recognizable as another society undeserving of redemption, but worthy of poetry.

As time-travel action films go, here's one that's brainy, stylish and carries itself with B-flick modesty - all of which feels like some kind of alchemy.

Utterly incompetent psychological thriller.

Draws on archival footage and firsthand accounts from both players and outside observers to reveal the complex interaction of politics and athletics that colored the Euro-on-Euro competition.

The lesson here, apparently, is that driven women just need to lighten up and stop being selfish - a message that really does feel backward.

The results are, cinematically speaking, a little diffuse, but any parent who's contemplating whether they should sign their kids up for Pop Warner this fall may want to watch this first.

Given that porn star and academic Lorelei Lee cowrote the script, we can assume that the film's portrayal of the cine-erotica industry is accurate. Which simply means that, while totally botching little things like how people speak, act and live in the real world, the film gets at least one thing right.

Viewers who can't get enough of ESPN's "30 for 30" docs will lap up this dual portrait.

Only Lieberman's intrusive, slightly arrogant onscreen presence distracts from the profile, introducing an unwanted hint of American privilege to the film's perspective.

It's as haunting and heroic as anything you'll see on the big screen this year, even if the film itself has a tendency to traffic in an abundance of dead air.

This is strictly an amateur-hour affair.

Anna Wintour? Feh! There never was, and never will be, a style icon quite like Diana Vreeland.

Underwater shots of spherical midsections floating past the camera prove that they understand the beauty of bodies in motion, even if their storytelling feels a little stillborn.

Adams gets a delectable onscreen partner in Justin Timberlake as a novice scout who takes an interest in Mickey. Even the old half-naked-moonlight-swim gambit feels fresh with these two involved.

You can feel Chbosky's blood, sweat and tears oozing out of this highly personal project, but that holy trinity of fluids isn't enough to wash away the sense that you've seen this before - many, many, many times.

It almost becomes comical to count the number of "who's holding the camera now?" reverse shots that the filmmaker haphazardly inserts to propel the story forward. Such visual ineptitude, like much else in this tediously cocky enterprise, is downright criminal.

The impressively lean script by Alex Garland (28 Days Later) is shorn of almost all superfluity beyond a few dud Schwarzeneggeresque kiss-offs, while Anthony Dod Mantle's sensational widescreen cinematography harkens back to the tension-inducing inventiveness of early John Carpenter.

The true value of the film is universal: These kids study the knotty viral science, pressure doctors into taking daring, inventive steps and make their cause a global emblem.

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

The tone here is unhurried and the bursts of violence and narrative played at an aesthetic remove, but the cycles of languor and activity ultimately feel too calculated-the strained overlay of sensationalism onto a desiccated canvas.

Sensibly rationing his facial expressions at this early stage in his career, 29-year-old actor and future Superman Cavill lacks the gruff authority of Liam Neeson - the go-to guy for tacky Euro-thrillers about dogged men shooting up the Continent - but looks better in a tight T-shirt.

Step Up to the Plate doesn't skimp on the food-porn goods, but the dynamic between its two stoical subjects is too undercooked to truly resonate.