There have to be better ways of wasting money and killing time than the fashionable nihilism of Killing Zoe.

Yes, it’s a coming-of-age story: If Boogie were fully evolved, woke and enlightened, there would be no "Boogie." But the film is just rough and unformed enough to suggest that Huang might still have some growing up to do as a filmmaker, too.

Beware of horror films that begin with a bad dream -- they usually go on that way as well. Case in point: Popcorn, which has several good ideas that, unfortunately, go unrealized.

True Colors rushes by at a hectic pace, never allowing the story to gain momentum. Despite good performances from the two leads, the film has the feel of a cautionary stampede. While it aspires to lofty heights, it never really goes much beyond the rules of behavior prescribed by the Boy Scout Handbook.

People bicker and play word games with each other to hide their true feelings, just like you and me, and yet absolutely nothing is at stake.

Crimes of the Heart is a well-intentioned effort, but also a deeply misguided one -- Henley's humor, while suited to the stage, disintegrates in a more literal-minded medium.

Unfortunately, director Randall Miller can't put an original spin on the familiar material; he just doesn't have the offbeat comic gifts that the Hudlin brothers brought to the rap duo's first film outing in House Party.

It doesn't help matters much that director Thomas Schlamme pays homage to great marital murder mysteries of the past, mostly because the attempts to borrow from the classics are so halfhearted.

Filmmakers John Hughes and Chris Columbus go for repetition over comedy.

With its musty scenario of a dissolute middle-aged man and a clingy, devouring child-woman, 60-year-old co-writer/director/producer Polanski's film smacks of wish-fulfillment and self-justification.

An uneventful actors' exercise better suited to off-off-Broadway theater.

In this touching story of boy toys helping boy toys, it's almost impossible to root for characters who are dead in the first place.

The Cursed is stylish and scary enough for what it is. That’s an old-fashioned creature feature, effective enough to give you a mild case of the heebie-jeebies but nothing chronic.

The movie sounds — and looks — tasty enough, but this “Strawberry Mansion” just doesn’t bear much fruit.

The finale isn't quite as chillingly nerve-wracking as one would hope. Schloendorff, who also made The Tin Drum, directs with a uniform dullness that creates little sense of suspense. In replaying the Atwood novel, he and Pinter ultimately fail to create a significant timbre of their own to make the transmogrification truly effective.

All of the actors acquit themselves admirably, especially Stolz, who has a star's low-key magnetism, and the jazz stylist Harry Connick Jr., who makes his acting debut here as the drawling rear gunner. But the roles are too generic for anything like real depth. The fight scenes are about what you'd expect; they're competently shot, but even when they deliver thrills, every scene, every passage, is familiar. We've seen it all before.

The domestic drama, like the heist story line, fizzles out in the end.

An uneven look at the reclamation of a former child star, "Life With Mikey" has the strangely amiable feel of a cult movie for the peanut gallery. It's camp and cutesy all at the same time, like a kiddie-car ride down "Sunset Boulevard" with an aging Gary Coleman behind the wheel. Caught somewhere between a spoof and a celebration of child-powered sitcoms, it only hints at the real toll of being a has-been teen.

Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake.

Director Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapter Gerard Brach provide more than a few effective moments. Beyond her corporeal qualities, March is thoroughly believable. When she walks up to Leung in his car and plants a kiss on his window, her swoonish tentativeness gives the act incredible weight. But the story is dramatically not that interesting. After establishing the affair and its immediate problems, "Lover" never quite rises to the occasion. Scratch away the steamy, evocative surface, remove Jeanne Moreau's veteran-voiced narration, and you have only art-film banalities.

And you thought the Mapplethorpe show was shocking....But then incongruity is fundamental to comedy, and at least "Ladybugs" has that, if nothing else, going for it.

The sci-fi thriller Voyagers is grounded in very real current fears. But otherwise, it’s a bit of an airhead.

It’s a heady dramedy, albeit without terribly many tears or laughs, except those that arise, perhaps unintentionally, from the incongruity of Stevens being repellent.

Rourke is, in fact, exceedingly creepy. There's an unpredictable, resonant menace in his eccentricity. But Cimino can't connect the movie's thriller elements to its themes. We end up spending way too much time indoors while this thug waves a gun at these poor innocents.

Fat Man seems unsure of which human story to concentrate on.

Nothing in Dad moves below the surface. When the inevitable tragedies come, they take their expected forms. And because we have at least some susceptibility and human feeling, we give the expected response. What we are responding to, though, is not so much the film as the issues it raises.

Maybe it’s true that it’s never too late to find a new home. But in some ways, it feels like “Cry Macho” has missed the bus. Perhaps Eastwood should have kept his hand on the reins of this pet project while letting someone else sit in the saddle.

Betsy's Wedding is white cake and warm bubbly, not an unsuitable marriage, just a tepid one.