Surprise! The upper-middle-class family is still rotten to the core. In Vivi Friedman's overstuffed farce, the parents cheat on each other, the daughter dresses like a streetwalker, and the Bible-thumping son starts carrying a Glock.

Director Jeanne Labrune (Vatel) makes the most out of having a compellingly watchable movie star at her disposal, but neither some odd stabs at humor nor Huppert's versatility do much to enliven what's essentially a superficially sexed-up soufflé.

Despite the chronological juggling, the film's stylistic debts (a Hitchcock flashback borrowed from Stage Fright, a Bertolucci-esque apartment sequence that could be titled Last Tango in Auschwitz) are simplistic to a fault; they lack the multifaceted suspense and sensuality typified by those directors at their best.

Despite the attention the film pays to the divide between the man as the ungainly, loving second-gen immigrant versus the boozy provocateur, it's not a portrait of much psychological depth.

Documentarian Jon Foy spent a decade following both the phenomenon and those who've tried cracking the code, and while his film offers little in the way of answers, it says volumes about delusional obsessives.

The equivalent of a skin flick in which all the sex scenes are tastefully obscured by blankets and sheets.

The film doesn't come within spitting distance of vintage Landis, e.g., "Animal House" or "An American Werewolf in London." But at least it's not "The Stupids."

If Gregorini and Von Furstenberg's goal was to construct a cinematic Sunday Styles spread of the plaid-skirt-and-tie crowd, then kudos. As filmmakers, however, these two have some serious growing up of their own to do.

The repeated sight of people watching video monitors or communicating with others via laptops becomes a stilted, gimmicky affectation, and there are only so many times you can watch a camera panning and zooming over still photos before your tolerance for the Ken Burns effect reaches its limit.

Throw in some quirky interludes of a Norwegian quartet singing old American spirituals every so often, and you've got something that's truly messy, messy.

Any analysis of her philanthropy or character is traded for blind idol worship; only intermittent footage of the subject interacting with the natural environments she hopes to save (hippo habitats, arctic snowscapes) manages to sidestep bland reverence.

Writer, director and star Fuller posits a dichotomy between belief and scientific rationality, only to gull us into accepting the former.

No matter what the film says about sexual fluidity, you can't shake the feeling that 3 exists primarily to justify a shot of three figures impeccably posed together on a mattress. Everything else is reduced to trumped-up afterthoughts.

So-so contemporary shows and cantankerous arguments are favored over in-depth looks at Reid's legacy. Any genuine weirdness about a funky, filthy-mouthed freak running around in a costume is left AWOL.

A few awesome firefights does not an action film make, and even De Niro's Ronin-esque interlude can't shake the feeling that the thrill, like the '80s, is gone.

Childers's varied, charitable life story warrants a movie, but whether that means it's okay to simply mash up sappy Christian piety and action-movie chaos is highly debatable.

Barkin may be the equal of Gena Rowlands or Liv Ullmann. Her director's clumsiness, however, suggests he isn't fit to hold Cassavetes's or Bergman's old camera cases.

The first-person source material might explain the one-sided account of the struggle, but the film is crippled by its underhanded treatment of Bonham Carter's character, including a healthy dose of unmitigated middle-class snobbery.

It may be petty to dismiss such a rags-to-much-better-rags story, but given how manipulatively constructed this music doc is, even in its rawest moments, you still leave feeling like you've been played.

Bunraku aspires to be "Kill Bill: Vol 3"; it's more like an ornate pitch for a "Dick Tracy" reboot.

Palin may have lost her taste for the responsibilities of office, but thanks to Broomfield's barely veiled condescension, this slightly prejudiced portrait could win her more supporters than it loses.

A standout in smaller parts in films like "Kaboom" and "Atonement," this frizzy blond actor has the air of a star-in-training in search of the right opportunity. This isn't it, unfortunately, but Temple does turn what's essentially a magical-hussy role into something more grounded and human.

The star and co-director appears hopelessly out of place, trapped in a variety of awkward-fitting uniforms while forced to offer up laughably obvious battlefield advice ("Avoid gunfire!").

Other than giving Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura and Lola Dueñas plum supporting roles, that's the best you can say about Philippe Le Guay's trite-to-intolerable tale on the discreet eye-opening of the bourgeoisie.

Trespass is assembly-line product through and through - unabashedly mediocre and instantly forgettable. A Joel Schumacher joint, in other words.

She never figures out what, exactly, the deal is regarding our short attention spans, but her ADD-afflicted film definitely provides evidence that they exist.

Spacey is ever the pro, shilling Axle's absurd redemption and countenancing the likes of Johnny Knoxville and John Stamos as if a third Oscar were in the offing. Yet his female costars fare worse, forming an unfortunate collection of dismal, man-dependent stereotypes, from Belle's perma-pouting idealist to Heather Graham's breast-obsessed, sapphic-by-choice ballbuster.

So it's no surprise that what starts out as a beer-soaked cringe comedy about stunted masculinity ends up deep in the woods with noise-loving Japanese tourists and exploding craniums - or that such detours into psychotronic oddity for its own sake can make even a 75-minute running time feel like an eternity.

Elevate works as a sympathetic portrait of cultural adjustment (learning in a nonnative language, sticking to Muslim dietary restrictions), but never adequately addresses the problems of what's essentially a neocolonialist system designed to shape impoverished Africans into first-world profit-makers.

Even with incredible fight footage, however, all we have here is a standard if formless ESPN hagiography, complete with a cheesy cop-show score and little sense of who these guys are outside of the ring.

It's a saga whose clichéd corniness would be practically sinful if not for the mighty Gugino, who almost counteracts the material's pap with megawatt charm and steel-tough resolve - exemplified by a low-angled intro shot of the poised, strutting, tight-sweater-sexy actress.

The documentary soon becomes just a chronologically structured update of continuing progress, one that functions like a mildly engaging but generally inconclusive "Time" magazine feature. Anybody throwing the word revenge around right now is being a tad premature.

Muskets and swords are a bit old-fashioned for the director of "Resident Evil" - Paul W.S. Anderson has added flying battleships and elaborate diamond heists. (With material as shopworn as this, an anachronizing approach seems as valid as any.)

It's hard to truly hate any movie whose ending revolves around a clever Where's Waldo? gag. It's also near impossible to take it seriously for that exact same reason.

The pomo thrill was already wearing thin a few "Shrek" entries ago; here, the reliance on self-referentiality really risks coming off like yesterday's Purina.

Like a "Training Day" for spy thrillers, The Double provocatively pairs Gere and Grace as a gray-green odd couple, only to unravel as the double-crossed absurdities pile up and the duo start trading bad Russian accents in a private Mexican standoff. Oh nyet you didn't!

The predictability is crushing, and with movies like "Crazy Heart" and Sofia Coppola's distinctly personal "Somewhere" so close in the rearview, David M. Rosenthal's estrangement drama feels especially soft.

Niccol's attempts at satire are toothless.

The more the veteran actor strives to give Joe a final dose of funereal dignity, the more the film around him seems intent on deep-sixing its MVP.

Cool, it's a rom-com featuring the man who'd influence Romanticism.

A set piece involving a skyscraper and a sports car proves he can induce sweaty palms, but one nail-biting moment and some much-misssed Murphy mouthiness won't keep you from feeling like you're the one being ripped off.

J. Edgar is infuriatingly coy and noncritical about its subject, an undeniable patriot but also an alarmist and a ruiner of lives.

Content to be a typical piece of tween rural-versus-urban fluff from the old Hannah Montana: The Movie mold. Such lazy complacency is almost enough to make you see red.

This full-clip misfire reminds us of a valuable lesson: Not even talent, tastefully dressed tough guys and a metropolitan backdrop dripping with after-hours menace can compensate for a complete lack of momentum or drama.

Subversive elements or not, this is essentially little more than a TV soap opera spiced with hot-button topics (gender issues, clandestine gay trysts), and the combo of TV melodramatics and mumblecore-ish aesthetics eventually wears out its welcome.

The film is merely a series of random celebrity cameos and shameless product placements. (In one case, both-thank you, Jared from Subway!) But there are a few moments of inspired absurdity, mostly provided by a surprisingly energetic Al Pacino.

The trek to get there is sluggish at best, torturous at worst. March away, penguins. Far away.

Whether sleuthing or smacking around thugs, Sisley makes a dashing hero, but this glossy action flick is heavy on tedious convolutions and depressingly light on character depth, suspense or political-economic intrigue.

The movie meanders like its dissatisfied, part-time pothead protagonist, not wisely but too well.

Simon Curtis's watchably third-rate biopic doesn't try to sort out truth from fabrication; that would be like "teaching Urdu to a badger," as the short-tempered Olivier - played by a whole-hog-slicing Branagh - might say. Better to print the legend and be done with it.

Both Reitman and his first-rate cast do their best to add depth. The real tragedy of Young Adult, however, is the story's lack of tragedy.

Palmer's acknowledgement of his own involvement in, and thrill at watching, these events speaks volumes, but simply showing generations of pasty, fat men pounding each other to a pulp shouldn't be mistaken for an in-depth exploration of Gaelic machismo.

So long as we're watching DeNoble recounting the details of his laboratory experiments, Addiction Incorporated remains sufficiently gripping; when Evans is reduced to observing his saintly subject educating high-school students about the dangers of nicotine addiction, it's considerably less so.

Pomes squeezes in a few well-observed details among the recycled white-trash clichés, but any AMC viewer who's tuned into the lead-in for Mount's TV Western - Breaking Bad - expects far, far more from his or her meth-fueled entertainment.

This iron lady of cinema deserves better.

The unintentional hilarity of the whole enterprise - especially when Albert attempts to romance one of the hotel's naive employees (Wasikowska) - at least keeps you engaged, as does the scene-by-scene suspense over which pitiably wide-eyed expression Close will choose to use next. Hopefully, she's practicing her gracious-loser face for awards season.

No matter how sensitive the orchestral-string score gets, the film can't locate the bone-deep sense of tragedy of Leslie Schwartz's novel - it just keeps belching out empty, grief-stricken histrionics devoid of insight.

Zhang's mixture of unsparing violence, mawkish sentimentality and garish flourishes creates one uncomfortable aesthetic.

Whatever possessed Bell & Co. to turn a slow-burning creepfest into a frenzied freak show of multiple exorcisms (including one in a moving car), the devil only knows.

Innocence is lost - as well as 90 minutes of your precious, precious time.

Unintentionally true to its title, The Divide first goes for a similar bleakness (it barely registers as entertainment), then lurches into a rousing, vengeful finale; both sides of the equation add up to less than zero.

A sense of the man himself seems absent in Fábio Barreto's portrait, however, and other than a rally scene with prescient Occupy Wall Street overtones, you're mostly left with facts, dates and iconic poses.

The movie amounts to little more than Marky Mark's South American Vacation.

There's shockingly little thrill in watching Carano bounce off walls and pummel antagonists.

So narratively old-fashioned it creaks.

A huge hit in its native country, Hun Jang's epic doesn't lack for spectacle or incident: In addition to its war-what-is-it-good-for? moralizing, it also piles on bloody battle scenes, subplots involving a sniper and a supply chest, and a nihilistic last-minute twist. What you don't get is the sense that this pumped-up combat-fatigue chronicle is pandering-or, for that matter, particularly original.

A better movie would have explored Foster's way-of-the-future objectives with more beyond-the-hype insight and less Zen-master bullshit.

Trusting an action drone like Worthington to anchor the human drama is a fatal mistake. With him perched on that narrow slab of concrete, it's only a matter of time before the film plummets.

Filmed with the somber pretentiousness of a "Babel," the movie never quite converts its premise into something grander (never mind believable). Meanwhile, the world starts to riot, yet their bed is warm. Will love save the day? Unfortunately for us, our sense of smell remains intact.

Riseborough's acting offers total commitment in the face of lunacy, but it's a shame she's flapping around in an egotistical film with such a terribly warped sense of purpose.

Given the film's inability to posit any significant objections - or, for that matter, alternatives - to the turbines, it all feels like so much petty sniping against progress.

You doubt Wiseman's sense of pacing. Still, he must have had a good time shooting.

You'd have to possess a heart colder than the Northern tundra not to care about these poor animals working their flukes off to jerk audience tears, but emotional manipulation or not, this is still a movie about people standing around a hole waiting for something to happen.

Even on its own limited, rigorous aesthetic grounds, there are far superior movies (including all of Tarr's own work). It's a sad way for the 56-year-old to go out, almost a caricature of his funereal mood and of art cinema in general.

Even "Bwana Devil" showed less crassness in its attempts to wow, however, and the more this cardboard blockbuster piles on the cut-rate F/X, the less anyone - the cast, the filmmaker, you - can muster up the energy to care.

Good actors like Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson show up to bust balls and bark expository dialogue with check-in-the-bank-yet? proficiency. Add in a couple of dully pro forma narrative twists to keep you awake in between shots of distractingly exotic South African scenery, and you've got a first-quarter Hollywood release par excellence. Meaning not.

Credit the appealingly paired McAdams and Tatum for making this Valentine's-month hokum watchable.

Lise Birk Pedersen's documentary offers some compelling peeks into Russia's bureaucratic skulduggery, but her attempt to frame the situation through a young convert's coming of age never really coheres. Innocence was lost; so, apparently, was much of the insightful commentary.

More than a moral dilemma is needed to make up for the uneven performances, slack pacing and wonky dialogue, and while MacLean certainly has a keen eye, the rest of his storytelling facilities haven't quite caught up with it yet.

Alas, unlike the duo's Crank films - also about a hero on the verge of explosion - Spirit of Vengeance lacks a solid gimmick to unify their transgressive gambits.

Much cut-rate melodrama ensues, none of it particularly painful to watch, until a ridiculously redemptive finale negates almost all of the preceding dramatic tension and resurrects a cloying Richard Marx chestnut to boot.

Like all advertisements, this scripted movie is a perfect fantasy: expertly coordinated, simplistic (the bad guys like yachts and bikini girls while our heroes have loving families) and more than a little scary.

Sadly, most of the film's dull edges have to do with De Niro, who is clearly in rest-on-his-laurels mode; at his worst, he approaches radioactive, Robin Williams levels of bathos, as when Jonathan - roaring like a bush-league Lear - is banned from the shelter for bad behavior.

Boy needn't be pop-culturally fluent to be relatable; believable human characterizations would have sufficed.

Unfortunately, he's retained his previous work's touristy mondo italiano! vibe, all whimsical tunes and postcard scenery, while piling on enough ogling shots of nubile young women to make Hugh Hefner feel uncomfortable.

The movie's multitasking creator seems to have bitten off more then she can chew. Her friends should have advised "baby steps."

Only Kristin Scott Thomas channeling "In the Loop's" Malcolm Tucker offers a spark; the rest is simply hokum designed to land overly sentimental suckers hook, line and sinker.

Unless you really dig "Glee"-level displays of high-school drama geekery, you and your date may want to quickly exeunt.

Aside from a few inspired vistas and alien life-forms (the Road Runner–fast red planet dog Woola is sure to sell a bazillion action figures), John Carter is as deadly dull as its basso-voiced, beefcake slab of a star, Taylor Kitsch.

Before this star vehicle devolves into a soggy New Age sermon, Murphy's manic pantomiming offers a few faint flickers of the mad comic genius from 1987's "Raw".

It's a rebound-romance movie that's simplistic but sweet, an uncomplicated cinematic bonbon. It'll only take a few quick bites, however, before you'll be ready to move on to something meatier.

The movie is one big scream, clichéd and hardly credible as an oblique call to civility.

This writer-director still has some evolving to do.

Once upon a time, the star would have added both gravity and a manic edge to this wronged everyman. At this juncture, Cage is less believable as an average Joe than he is as, say, a cursed trick rider with a flaming skull for a head.

Let's not make 4:44 Last Day on Earth sound cooler than it is. Compared with Lars von Trier's histrionically doomed "Melancholia," the film lacks any serious attempt to grapple with mortality.

Hall's puppy-dog charisma holds up under the strain, but it isn't nearly enough to keep this messy midlife-crisis dramedy afloat. A little of this Bliss goes a long way.

Fresnadillo, working with screenwriters Nicolás Casariego and Jaime Marques, might be angling for the same YA fantasy as "Pan's Labyrinth," but they've forgotten about that film's violent underpinnings, a mistake that leaches their movie of suspense.

Close to a parody of a French sex drama - complete with bored, bourgie bed-swappers and a dull sense of amoral sophistication - this autopiloted import does no favors to the legacies of Truffaut and Godard.

Green was meant for quick-witted comedy. Unfortunately, she's becoming a mainstay of painfully sincere slogs.

The fact that it's far more concerned with burnishing an overly fetishized lit movement than serving as an in-depth exploration of the hotel's inhabitants may make you want to check out early.

All of them slog through countless boring sword-and-sandal skirmishes, none of which feel remotely suspenseful, until the hugeness of it all becomes a mildly passable joke.

The satire becomes more scattershot and strangely cuddlesome (didja know sequestered holy men enjoy socializing and playing sports, just like us?), while the usually great Piccoli-saddled with a ridiculously contrived failed-actor backstory-comes off like an unholy mix of Gérard Depardieu and Robin Williams at their sad-puppiest. That's some cinematic blasphemy, Moretti.

Despite toggling among the three characters' story lines, the film is barely concerned with the who, what or where of the incidents, much less a deeper why. It simply wants to milk this real-life example of courage (and chaos) under fire for multiplex thrills, reducing everything to a cheap adrenaline rush set to a pulsing soundtrack.

The movie spends almost as much time allowing the filmmaker, playing a progressive-minded teacher, to push his students to be better citizens by interviewing homeless people on skid row (!) as it does watching the younger generation trying to get some. It's an uneasy mixture of crude yukking and mixed-message uplift that satisfies on neither level.

Like the myriad dangers threatening the earth, the film is simply too unwieldy, a sprawling mass of ideas that are dutifully checked off and then given only superficial explanations in lieu of insightful explorations.

Who would have thought that the man behind such wackadoo fantasies as "The Professional" and "The Fifth Element" was capable of being so bloody boring?

Schemel is a major rock & roll survivor; Hit So Hard is a minor rockumentary at best, as well as a seriously missed opportunity.

In allowing Dreier to shape his own narrative, too many lame excuses are allowed to pass, as the financial schemer spins his own story dangerously close to self-pity.

No one's asking for a somber account of simian life, but perhaps Buzz Lightyear could keep quiet for a bit and let the monkey business speak for itself.

Question: What's the only thing worse than doing an unfaithful film adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel? Answer: Doing a completely faithful one.

The story's treacly all-souls-in-alignment outcome is never in doubt, but as Kasdan dogs go, this is light-years better than Dreamcatcher.

Somebody give Werner Herzog an IMAX camera already, and let's see what a real filmmaker does with the format.

The paeans about national pride and brotherhood may be regional, but constant slow-motion battle scenes and squishy sentimentality are strictly wanna-be Tinseltown.

The use of real musicians (both professionals, like Nellie McKay, and street performers) provides a certain authenticity to the performances, but the film's wide-eyed view of New York as a wonderland of harmonic diversity soon grows as tiresome as the film's trite romantic shuffling.

Fightville doesn't pummel you with outsider viewpoints - it doesn't seem to display much of a point of view at all.

This is the same old safe, sappy movie that shows up on TBS every weekend.

The film cuts with such precision that there's scarcely any room to breathe; it's the rare thriller that is perhaps too tightly structured.

Bibliophiles, librarians and graduate students may swoon at the sight of the author's signature grotesquerie.

Madden pads the film with shimmering images of Jaipur and its surroundings; a midmovie funeral sequence - 'cause somebody's got to kick the bucket! - even manages to be somewhat evocative and moving. The rest makes you long for senility to set in, but quick.

Turner seems stifled by the joyless role of a woman whose only purpose is to be taught the error of her sanctimonious ways.

By the time the film takes a glib turn into role-switching farce - as Muslims become Christians and Christians become Muslims - the overall toothlessness of the satire becomes damningly apparent.

It's Goldthwait's first misstep, a serious one. He's simply not the filmmaker to mount a fierce takedown of Kardashian culture, thorough though his script's rage is.

You can go to one of those sweaty, immersive outdoor music fests and get splattered with the mud and euphoria that always engulfs fans. Or you can cheap out and see this predictable rom-com-shot at the 2010 edition of Scotland's then-in-progress T in the Park­-and boggle at finding strangers in the audience more appealing than our main characters.

Uneasily poised between glib irony and earnest melodrama, Patricia Riggen's coming-of-age tale is as scattered as its manic pubescent protagonist.

Oddly enough, the film's best pro-tech argument is its look; shot on a consumer-grade digital camera, it's a testament to how elegantly framed low-budget projects can look these days.

Filmmaker Gérald Hustache-Mathieu has fun recasting Monroevian moments and setting up parallels between the fromage-hawking hottie and the late silver-screen sex symbol - bring on the Miller, DiMaggio and JFK avatars.

Some will call The Color Wheel daring. Others will remember that it takes more than desperate shocks to add substance to the sloppy diddlings of a dilettante.

What's the word on the film debut of Rihanna, playing a sass-mouthed petty officer? Dreadful (ella, ella).

It also serves to undercut fine performances by Connelly and Harris, whose choices are constantly destabilized by scripted swings between comedy and drama, realism and fantasy, genuine catharsis and indie-film ornamentation. Black's overactive melodrama is more than a representation of schizophrenia; it's the embodiment of it.

If What to Expect represents the best tearjerking laugh-machine that Hollywood can birth, it's probably time to get those story ideas implanted in vitro.

There's nothing strictly wrong with any of this, except for the fact that even a buttoned-down period piece like "Topsy-Turvy" feels sexier.

Judging from Sánchez's Lovely Molly, he'd like to get lost in the trees again, but now knows the path too well.

Their brotherly bickering may be a useful time killer until the new Arrested Development episodes drop, but it's ultimately foamy filler added to a frustratingly frothy film that says nothing about its subject.

Cluzet and Sy nonetheless make for ingratiating foils; the extended opening sequence in which the duo outwits a pair of cops like a hell-raising Laurel and Hardy could be a stellar short comedy if it weren't married to the deadly self-serious shtick that follows.

Despite a committed performance from Palminteri (ripping through scenes like an aged bulldog), Debbie Goodstein's loosely autobiographical drama is as nondescript as made-for-pennies independents come.

If, as some critics have claimed, "The Cabin in the Woods" made the horror genre obsolete, someone forgot to tell screenwriter Oren Peli.

This is mostly all reefer, no madness.

Though the fallout is utterly predictable, director Steve Rash at least brings an engaging fluidity to the high-energy sports scenes.

Codirector Ami Horowitz hogs the screen like a cut-rate Michael Moore, bringing a numbingly simplistic irony and smug self-satisfaction to his faux–rabble-rousing exposé.

This is a man-versus-nature parable heavy on the sappy existentialism that's very much of our time. Call it Nicholas Sparks's The Grey.

Madagscar 3 is less interested in plucking the last bit of meat off the series's bones than with simply picking the lowest-hanging fruit.

Gerwig is plenty charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with. Yet this still feels like a real devolution - hopefully short-lived - after her distinctively eccentric turns in "Greenberg" and "Damsels in Distress."

Only the mighty Fonda cuts through the claptrap; the rest is just a long, predictable trip.

The satire rarely stings, as first-time feature directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod give a polite Masterpiece Theatre gloss to this most impolite of tales.

As it is, this attempt at an Altmanesque ensemble piece feels a little dramatically flat even as it's dazzling your retinas.

Becomes a clumsy gringo approximation of something else. In this case, it's the old respectable-man-obsessed-with-fallen-angel cliché, which Demy fils tweaks with broad melodramatic strokes and Freudian flotsam, as well as a complete lack of focus or storytelling chops.

Irritated, you realize you've been watching an object that's all surface, no soul.

The casting is spectacularly wrong, and even on its own scant merits, writer-director Lorene Scafaria's screenplay has little insight into apocalyptic licentiousness, barring a tart line or two.

This isn't the NASCAR-fellating cash grab that is the Cars franchise, but it's still Pixar on preachy autopilot.

At least Thomas gives a suitably burned-out performance as Williams. He's almost enough to melt your cold, cold heart.

The pity is that the people in People Like Us ultimately don't feel any more dimensional than the archetypes dutifully dotting his lowest-denominator multiplex fodder. He's just picked a different set of clichés to ransack.

The writer-director-star still hasn't learned to smoothly blend broad comedy and family-values sermonizing.

The 3-D performance footage is impressively lavish, though the film's unending idolization of the amiable singer will quickly exhaust all but the most devoted fans.

This time, Stone is just sloshing around in the shallow end. When John Travolta and Benicio Del Toro show up for extended, cartoonish dialogues, you'll wonder what year it is, and let out a sigh of relief that the moment is long gone.

They're not doing themselves any favors by letting this oldie out of the vault.

Lotz's grudging fortitude provides enough engagement to let you overlook the cracks in the film's facade, but when she cedes the screen to Casper Van Dien's thick-witted police detective, all you can see are the gaps.

Sorvino's Bronx bawler veers from mascara-streaked monster to outer-borough sage as each scene requires, while Savoca's agitated camera strains for handheld immediacy but ends up just looking amateurish and ugly.

Factor in a questionable use of 9/11 footage, and this is one film as misguided as the business-as-usual subject it aims to critique.

An adaptation of Mike Batistick's Off Broadway play, this stagy character study about immigrants living off the crumbs of the American Dream revels in cut-rate street smartness. Then comes the third act, at which point the film moves from obvious message-mongering to the beating of a post–9/11 dead horse.

A business-as-usual slog.

Bergès-Frisbey and Duvauchelle make for a deliciously ripe pair - their cheekbones defy both gravity and sound facial architecture - but Auteuil is less interested in young lust than old world values.

There's an interesting idea about the way people assume wildly disparate personalities to please different sexual partners, but the flaccid execution of this promiscuous–New Yorkers circle jerk is more worthy of the clap than a round of applause.

The Fifth Generation filmmaker has aced such recipes before (e.g. The Emperor and the Assassin); this time, both the spectacular and the human elements have apparently been offered to the gods.

Detailing his efforts to distribute Bananas!*, his 2009 exposé on Dole's use of toxic chemicals in Nicaragua, Swedish documentarian Fredrik Gertten's latest plays as an occasionally fascinating, if ultimately reductive, showdown between First Amendment rights and corporate power.

There's a secret weapon embedded within The Watch, however, and his name is Richard Ayoade.

Scene by scene, you want to laugh at all the ham-fisted kismet, even if the committed cast holds your attention. Hopkins is especially good in his chaste May-September interactions with Flor, and he has an AA confessional that is genuinely moving.

Bound to surprise absolutely no one, Donald Trump comes off like a shameless boor in this slack, hiss-jerking documentary about his efforts to build a luxurious golf resort on hundreds of pristine acres of the Scottish coast.

Munn has proved on TV that she has solid timing, but she does little here other than look pretty and, when the plot calls for it, outraged. As for the likable Schneider, the "All the Real Girls" actor demonstrates that he's better off as a straight man than as a physical comedian.

When the sing-song Jones and beatifically smiling Streep are allowed to carry the dramatic weight, you can see the raw, tough-love film that Hope Springs wants to be - until Frankel starts trying to be lighthearted and cute, at which point you see the movie's real troubled marriage in full bloom.

Both Rock and Delpy the actor invest so much in their respectively harried, recognizably human urbanites that you wonder why Delpy the director keeps undermining things by engaging in easy Gallic caricatures and generically Gotham-ming it up at every opportunity.

Timothy is apparently nothing more than practice for when a real child comes along - at which point the movie's cloying cotton-candy flavor develops a seriously astringent aftertaste.

The pleasure of watching the star sling barbs at Sarsgaard's sandpaper-dry android, shyly court sexy librarian Susan Sarandon and rage against geriatric befuddlement doesn't offset what's essentially a mediocre character study dipped in sci-fi conventions and Social Security–age sentimentality.

Even with Gallic neomusical royalty like Catherine Deneuve joining in the fray, the whole endeavor reeks of the filmmaker throwing everything against the wall yet barely making anything stick.

A former stand-up comic, Miller lends a sense of puckish mischief to his tenderhearted, troubled Cupid, yet everything else about this drama - even the cultural and spirit-of-'68 historical touches - feels like Nesher is simply mashing several stock elements together and gracelessly parading them around.

When Canet isn't dabbling in schmaltz, he's forcing text-message gags and metaphor-heavy vermin jokes down viewers' throats in a lame attempt at levity. Emotional fraudulence does indeed constitute a lie, just not a white one.

The problem is that screen mayhem has a tendency to translate as hip posturing, and Little Birds' scenes of shoplifting shenanigans and pistol-whipping showdowns all too readily conform to indie-film form and style.

Had Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley accidentally weaseled his way onto the set of E.R., it might have played out something like Lance Daly's medical-drama-cum-upward-mobility-thriller about a hospital's new resident (and resident sociopath).

Morgan and preteen dybbuk host Calis draw some pathos out of their father-daughter discord, but you can't have a possession without a soul.

The connections among the film's various plot strands are painfully obvious; by the time a grizzled Jeremy Irons saunters in, ready to dole out a comeuppance, perceptive viewers will have mentally flipped to the last page.

Almost half a century after "Night of the Living Dead," filmmakers are still misunderstanding how George Romero made his besieged shut-ins compelling.

Bitchy histrionics curdle faster than a spoiled soy latte in this distinctly unlikable comedy about a trio of coked-up gal pals who barely muster the strength to celebrate their happier friend's wedding.

Lynskey has raised the quality of innumerable feature films (as a soft-spoken New Republic reporter in Shattered Glass; a housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Away We Go-that film's sole saving grace). So it's a delight to see this stalwart character actor move to center stage, even when the result is so by-the-numbers.

Even the show's disciples may feel like they've been cheated.

Rather than presenting the original Czech version, American distributors have opted to release an English-dubbed edition, headed up by writer, director and actor Vivian Schilling (who voices the kidnapped doll Buttercup) - and the result is a tonal disaster.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is strictly an amateur-hour affair.

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

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

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.

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.

The problem is that the filmmaker brings D-grade craft to these B-movie exertions, making his florid maximalism more entertaining to talk about than endure - despite the best efforts of his ardently slumming A-list cast.

It's too bad V/H/S starts off on such a high note. Mainly, the omnibus film feels undercooked, even on the grounds of its forced technological setup.

If its juxtaposition of bad behavior and dairy products leaves you stone-faced or wearily sighing, you should exit the theater posthaste.

The novelty of their industry aside, there's little to differentiate this from any other relationship-centered Amerindie.

Lovers of the TV biker drama may find pleasure in the duo's surreal scenes together, but everyone else will likely view this story about a writer (Hunnam), his film-obsessed drug-addict brother (Chris O'Dowd) and a viral amateur-porn movie as one limp farce.

You never lose the nagging sense that you're simply watching a high-school drama club's production of '40s fatalism chic.

For a film about sexual conquest, Nobody Walks is a frustratingly flaccid affair.

Eventually, the self-regarding acting clan admits they're only human after all. By then, the audience may want to disown them.

The Flat details his efforts to understand this unusual situation, and although the film suggests that his relatives may have maintained this odd friendship as a denial of their homeland's betrayals, there's only so deep Goldfinger can dig.

Huppert fans have long been tolerant of her hit-and-miss filmography, and while her double act with the rubber-faced Poelvoorde provides a few well-played scenes-two words: horsey rides-it's not enough to liven up a trite story of loosening up.

If director Stephen Fung's frenetic visual style is the Red Bull in this cinematic cocktail, then the dozy plotting is the vodka - leaving you feeling momentarily excited but ultimately narcotized.

This is little more than an episode of VH1's Classic Albums writ large. You'll learn everything you ever wanted to know about the making of this chart-topping behemoth - except for insights about the man in the mirror who created it.

Apart from a hi-def night-vision gimmick, returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman don't take advantage of either upgrade.

For all of Cloud Atlas's pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the "natural order," the execution couldn't be squarer.