Frey didn't really need a ghostwriter for this story, he just needed an archivist with a Xerox machine and a mercenary streak.

The main difference is that while the "Twilight" films strive for straight-faced grimness, Red Riding Hood often verges on outright florid hilarity. It isn't laughing at itself, but that needn't stop the audience.

The sequel remains visually beautiful and strikingly designed, but otherwise, it's a surprise in all the wrong ways.

By the end, the most charming thing about The Art Of Getting By is that while its adults cut Highmore far too much slack, they aren't Hughes-movie oblivious idiots, and they eventually draw a few firm lines. Unfortunately, the movie isn't daring enough to follow suit.

While FD5 is less generic and less facilely goofy and ironic than past series installments, it's still a rote execution of formula that scores its biggest points with self-aware references to its predecessors - including a closing-credits montage of kills from Final Destinations past.

The film's ambitions are woefully small and familiar.

For a film that takes place in such a cold locale, it all feels awfully warmed-over.

Strangely, this Thatcher biopic might have been far more worthwhile if it wasn't about Thatcher: The aged, dotty stranger hanging out with her dead husband is a more compelling subject.

Westfeldt has a tendency to go over the top, and Friends With Kids in particular has a shrill, smug edge that kills the comedy and the drama alike.

There are complicated elements at work here, with threads of curdled vengeance, victim entitlement, and insanity bound together in ways it would take a much smarter film to unravel. Snow White And The Huntsman doesn't try, and the film just keeps getting dumber as it goes along.

The training montage where Lincoln learns to twirl his axe around his body like a baton for no apparent purpose is neither the movie's first laughable sequence nor its last, but it sums up the movie's aesthetic: The filmmakers mistakenly think nothing is silly if it's done with a grim enough facial expression.

Those dance sequences are Step Up Revolution's major sticking point. No one goes to a dance movie for the plot, but the lower the expectations drop for the story, the higher they rise for the raison d'être performances.

Delpy's work lacks Allen's wry humor and eye-rolling, philosophical acceptance of those characters and their quirks. Her stable of sniping couples and relatives are openly hateful in ways that defy comedy.

Unfortunately, Canet's 2010 film Little White Lies feels like "Tell No One" minus that inciting incident, and therefore minus the plot.

Jack Reacher isn't much of a man, and Jack Reacher isn't the story of a man. It's mythmaking for self-satisfied sociopaths.

The grim heroes don't have a nuance or more than a hint of emotion between them, and the same goes for the film around them.

The extra shading is nice, but it doesn’t change the degree to which Jack The Giant Slayer feels like a paint-by-numbers story.

Many of the shorts are visibly impressive, given their scant budgets, and there’s no end of visual and thematic creativity stretched throughout the anthology; there are, after all, a million horrible, memorable ways to die.

The ambition is laudable, but the execution is wanting, and the attempt itself may indicate that Watanabe and company have forgotten what made Cowboy Bebop so much fun.

Tamala 2010 feels like either a singularly detail-organized dream, or an exceptionally formal drug trip.

At times, Innocence feels like a clip show of Oshii projects past. But the effect proves more dulling than warmly familiar.

Its busy, stiff, artificial graphics are a perfect match for its busy, stiff, artificial plot. A simple Shirow pinup parade might almost be preferable.

Reeves rigid delivery makes Constantine's occult backstory sound pretentious and silly, and converts Constantine himself into a repressed cipher. The film's biggest revision isn't in not making him blonde, or not making him British. It's in not making him human.

Still, the central mystery remains effective and compelling for most of the film, until it becomes clear that it's all image and no intent.

House Of D never feels honest, but when Duchovny consciously tries to score sentiment points, the strain is more than the film can handle.

A short and soppy story that Coyote lends some dignity, but not much power.

It's a low-key actor's showreel, harmless and toothless and sleepy. It'd go pretty well with a glass of warm milk.

It was made fast and cheap, which shows in every none-too-slick frame.