It’s exciting watching the celebrity commentary pile up — Giorgio Armani; Patricia Field, the Sex and the City costume designer; Vogue contributing writer Lynn Yaeger; Jason Wu, etc. — until you realize they’re all performing the same cheerleading routine. And why would they do otherwise? It’s clear that Bergdorf Goodman is not a store you want to disappoint. Or, as designer Isaac Mizrahi puts it, “If your clothes are not at that place, then they have no future.”

Too often, when it suits Meyer’s preoccupations, the rules of her dystopian future are suspended as she attempts to juice as much fabricated emotion and excruciating melodrama from her story.

I swear that I saw every minute of G.I. Joe: Retaliation. I didn’t fall asleep, not even for like a half-second bob of my head. I was also of sound mind throughout the screening — hadn’t had anything to drink, nor were my senses impaired by heavy allergy medication. And yet, after I’d driven home from the theater and was asked as soon as  I’d walked through the door what I’d thought of the movie, I had to take a beat or two to recall where I’d been for the previous two hours. Its cotton-candy weight had already nearly evaporated from my thoughts.

What’s the worst bit about Admission? Is it that Rudd and Fey have zero chemistry and their supposedly strained romance possesses fewer sparks than a wet firework?

For all its cosmic fluff and visually stunning hot air, Upside Down fails to evoke any genuine character depth or emotional authenticity to match is visually expansive and innovative conceptual design.

Thanks to a long-lasting relationship with playwright Ronnie Claire Edwards, Theatre Three snagged the regional premiere of her Idols of the King. And that’s about the only positive thing I can say about it.

In Snitch, Dwayne “You Probably Still Call Me ‘The Rock’” Johnson plays John “Can You Think of a More Generic Character Name?” Matthews, a father who volunteers to help bring down a drug lord in order to get a hard-nosed U.S. Attorney (Susan Sarandon. Yes, that Susan Sarandon) to reduce the prison sentence facing his teenage son, who was arrested for holding a package full of the drug ecstasy for a drug-dealer friend.

Five lessons from the film, which was “inspired by true events”:

I was already sharpening my knife, ready to skewer A Good Day to Die Hard. I had just written, on the notepad I keep at the ready during screenings, that this latest installment of the further adventures of John McClane (Bruce Willis) contains no memorable action sequences. But then came the last 20 minutes.

During that grand action climax, about the time that (obviously CG versions of) John McClane and his son Jack (Jai Courtney) hurtled out of a building and through the air past an exploding helicopter, taking time to turn and taunt the vehicle’s occupants as they did so, the film reaches an operatic level of dramatic absurdity that almost (almost) redeems the unremarkable business that preceded it.

Boiled down to its essential brew, the teen witch melodrama is just a one-dimensional story awash in angst.

Comic pandering, a one dimensional King Lear, and poorly justified cross-gender casting strip Dallas Theater Center’s King Lear of its pathos.

Runway Theatre often makes the most of limited resources. Unfortunately, this time that’s not the case.

Clearly straining to distant itself from its children’s story origins, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters layers on the ultra-bloody violence, nudity, and even jarringly out-of-place F-bombs.

On the one hand, Mama stars Jessica Chastain, one of the finest actors of her generation. On the other hand, the movie is exactly the kind of movie you would expect to hit theaters in late January – a rather dull spook flick.

I am not opposed, every once in awhile, to turning off my brain at the movies, for a bit of dumb fun. For instance, I liked John Carter more than pretty much every other person on the planet and even found Battleship a harmless screen spectacle. (I give outlandish science fiction a lot of leeway, as long as it’s showing me sights I’m not used to seeing.)

But two movies opening this week, The Last Stand and Broken City, demand much more from their audiences than simply shifting their minds into standby mode for a couple hours. These films — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first lead role since before his political career began, and another Mark Wahlburg vehicle in which he plays an unassuming blue-collar guy in a world rigged to favor the conniving white-collar crowd — seem to expect each paying customer to undergo a lobotomy in order to enjoy them.

The film that never manages to give its characters any personality beyond a quick backstory brush strokes: the pregnant wife, the admiring son, the cultural pride, the dame at home.

If anything can thwart the terror incited by yet another found-footage horror film, maybe Marlon Wayans is it. Or not.

David Chase’s Not Fade Away is a nostalgia trip of such a specific nature that it’s unlikely to resonate much with anyone who wasn’t in high school or college in the suburbs of the New York metropolitan area during the mid-1960s, spending countless hours listening to the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Best known as the creator of the acclaimed television series The Sopranos, Chase tells here a semi-autobiographical story of a garage band that never made it big. A group of a friends in a middle-class New Jersey town in 1964 see the way the girls swoon for the Fab Four and Mick Jagger and decide to pool their limited talents.

Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible, about a family hit by the brunt of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, is a dramatized account, and not quite a movie.

I’ll give Playing For Keeps credit for one slightly interesting stray from convention. When the big game in this soccer-centric movie comes, and the protaganist’s team (spoiler alert?) wins, it ends up a complete disaster rather than a moment of triumph. Other than that, there isn’t a truly original moment in the movie, and if a movie isn’t going to bother with originality in its storyline, it sure better be chockfull of delightful characters and dialogue.

A new bio pic uses the making of Psycho to explore the great director’s own Freudian quirks.

An independent production staged in an eerie and empty mall tries to draw connections between fact and fiction.

“We all come from the sea, but we’re not all of the sea,” Gerard Butler intones in voiceover as the image of a teenage boy floating peacefully underwater ripples across the screen. “We children of the tides must return to it again and again.”

So right from that first shot, Chasing Mavericks seeks to imbue its extreme-sports story with a deep spiritual and philosophical significance.

Unfortunately for its ambition, too much of the film employs After School Special-style storytelling. Every emotion is spoken about, remarked upon, or gestured grandly. Every character choice is underlined, with exclamation points. Its messaging is in big, bold lettering: “Hey, kids, there’s always a path to your goals if you face your fears” and “Hey, kids, drugs and alcohol are for losers.”

Haunted houses (the sort found at carnivals or fairs) don’t scare me. They just piss me off. You wander through the dark as hidden people jump out at you, and you’re startled for a fraction of a second, sure, but not frightened. I hate being startled.

Paranormal Activity 4 is no more sophisticated than the typical Halloween attraction, and it’s got few tricks that you haven’t seen before — including in the previous three installments of this movie series. Once again the story is crafted from supposedly “found footage” of home video cameras, security cameras, and webcams that details a supernatural menace terrorizing a suburban family.

The multi-talented Tyler Perry took over the title role in Alex Cross from Morgan Freeman, but despite Perry’s often strained, bewildered performance, it is hardly certain that the senior actor could have saved this movie.

Welcome to Istanbul (not Constantinople), the legendary city where East meets West, where Europe and Asia collide. It’s been the epicenter of clashes between civilizations for centuries. There’s simply no better place to visit with your ex-wife, with whom you’re hoping to reignite the old romantic spark, and teenage daughter, who’s recovering from having been kidnapped by a sex-trafficking ring the last time she went abroad.

Before you jet off, a few suggestions to ensure your vacation in Turkey is all that you dreamed it could be.

— Smart travelers know that using a money belt is a wise precaution to take so you needn’t worry about pickpockets. Smarter travelers know that concealing a tiny, one-button pre-programmed mobile phone in your sock is the thing to do whenever you head out for lunch in a local bazaar. You just never know when a gang of revenge-seeking Albanians will start tailing you.

— Memorize the layout of every street and building throughout Istanbul. That way, if you have to tersely and quickly give your ex-wife instructions on how to navigate a maze of shops, back alleys, and side streets to find the nearest cab stand so that she can return to the hotel and evade the bad guys out to kidnap and torture you and your family, you’ll instantly have that information at top of mind. Really, with the abundance of data freely available on Google Maps these days, there’s no excuse not to be prepared.

— It pays to mix business with pleasure. Consider working a private security detail in Istanbul for a few days before your family arrives. You’ll earn yourself an envelope full of cash, plus it’ll provide an excuse for traveling with your suitcase full of the weaponry. Just don’t skimp on the grenades. They’re great tools enabling one person to use sound to determine the location of another who has been kidnapped. For example, just have your daughter hurl one under a (preferably unoccupied) car or a water tower, and the noise will help you lead her to where you’re being held. The police in Istanbul are entirely unconcerned about blonde American girls who cast explosives all about the city.

— Istanbul taxis are built like armored assault vehicles. Don’t even hesitate, if the situation demands it, to drive one straight through the gate at the U.S. Embassy. The barrage of weapons fire from the soldiers stationed there can’t stop you, so long as you duck down in your seat a little. And, believe me, there will be plenty of time for that quiet father-daughter heart-to-heart before members of the military swarm the car. Our fighting men and women are professionals. They will give you all the time that you need.

— Don’t try any of this without Liam Neeson. Even with his gravitas lending the tiniest semblance of reality to the proceedings, you’re bound to involuntarily expel all memory of this adventure from your mind before it’s even finished.