It all amounts to a missed opportunity considering how many female athletes and sports fans would probably flock to the first film that targets their demographic since "A League of Their Own" nearly 20 years ago. The people behind The Mighty Macs could learn a lot from that film, especially that following formula is fine, as long as you don't skimp on the details that complete the portrait.

All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but J. Edgar instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea.

Conceived and directed by Madonna, W.E. is a gorgeous mess.

The war-movie cliches are as abundant as the antiaircraft fire, and the dialogue as wooden as a balsa glider. The leading characters are issued one personality trait apiece, and some don't even get that. Cuba Gooding Jr., for example, plays Maj. Emanuelle Stance as a man who smokes a pipe.

Here's a better title for Griff the Invisible, a well-meaning but unengaging love story about two 20-something misfits: "Griff the Implausible."

When all is said and done, Mike proves to be not only peripheral to the main thrust of the movie, but a drag on its momentum.

That Winterbottom has delivered a dud makes Trishna all the more disappointing, a rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career.

Blackthorn feels less like a proper sequel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which it purports to be, than a coattail rider.

In the final scene, the filmmakers nearly succeed in turning Suu Kyi into an Asian Eva Peron, down to the outspread arms, tossing an orchid to her worshippers.

Director Scott Hicks lavishes good taste and sunsets on a story that - devoid of genuine tension, conflict or combustible chemistry between its two stars - just prettily sits there.

First-time director Anne Sewitsky may intend Happy, Happy as a Chekhovian chamber piece or romantic bagatelle, but her smugness about racism - and her glib symbolic resolution of the conflicts she raises - suggests an ambition that far outstrips her ability, at least for now.

So why bother with this earnest but imperfect impersonation when the original artists are readily available on VHS and DVD?

It's a curio, ripe with dreamy atmospherics and intriguing mysteries, but little else.

Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies. A lot of movies.

A giant disappointment. It's as bustling as its titular city's piazzas, but it goes nowhere.

A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.

If it's art, it's only mildly interesting.

The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.

It's like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Catskills.

Even if a good phone-sex movie does exist, For a Good Time, Call . . . is woefully, definitively not it.

With the raunch of "American Pie" and the heart of an after-school special, the comedy turns out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts.

The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. They bring a rich expressiveness and sense of complex inner life to their characters. It's the movie - and its placard-sized message - that is more two-dimensional.

There's a nagging question at the heart of Chernobyl Diaries. It isn't what, or who, is stalking these kids. After awhile, the answer becomes apparent, leading to a denouement that, while mildly exciting, feels like a ride you've been on before.

If nothing else, the movie reminds filmgoers just how difficult it can be to pull off the multi-thread approach. Sometimes it's possible to take a spool of yarn and, with care and consistency, knit a stunning creation. 360 looks more like what happens when a cat gets ahold of the ball.

Jack Reacher is a wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise's virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher's alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.

It's just that Pattinson's performance is so enervated that his Georges Duroy comes across as something of a cipher. He's not quite alive, yet also clearly not dead, given the amount of sex he has. He's undead, or at least uninteresting.

Gerwig remains one of the most captivating new stars to hit the big screen, but she's still looking for a movie that deserves her.

A well-acted but narratively limp indie that's undermined by a failure to connect emotionally with its audience.