Arthur Schnitzler’s landmark play “La Ronde” has inspired any number of revivals and knock-offs due to its structure where Character A meets Character B, who in turn encounters Character C, and so forth until Character M winds up back with Character A. Paul Haggis’ dreadful movie “Crash” has inspired any number of ripoffs in which it turns out that Character A is Character D’s neighbor after Character L saves Character E’s life in an airport.

Put both of these tired tropes together, and you’ve got “360,” a movie that thinks it's brimming over with profound observations about alienation and interconnectedness but is instead a hollow collection of coincidences interspersed with platitudes about This Modern Life.

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Even by the silly standards of the series, “Step Up Revolution” giveth, and it taketh away. There’s too much color and energy and frenzy in this movie to discount it entirely, but it has a disconcerting tendency to undercut its best notions with some singularly awful moves.

Some of these flaws pop up in the script -- never the strong suit of the “Step Up” franchise, of which this is the fourth -- but others have to do with where these movies excel, which is in the presentation of impossibly beautiful young dancers executing eye-popping, elaborately choreographed hip-hop moves set to an endless wall of fat beats.

This time out, we...

To be fair, “Ruby Sparks” is probably the best amalgam of “Annie Hall,” “Weird Science,” “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “Stranger than Fiction” and “Xanadu” that anyone’s ever going to make.

But the fact that I could so easily come up with that list of titles while watching the movie — when I would rather have been watching any of the films on that list — doesn’t speak all that well for this second effort from “Little Miss Sunshine” directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

There would be interesting connections to be made regarding the fact that Zoe Kazan...

“Merely great” feels like the most backhanded of compliments, but when a filmmaker is coming off a one-two punch of pop masterpieces like “The Dark Knight” and “Inception,” expectations get invariably raised for what comes next.

“The Dark Knight Rises,” while offering all the thrills and brooding and shadows and angst and adrenaline and grandiloquence that fans of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy will no doubt be expecting from this final entry, comes up short in only one department: the shock of the new.

This time around, Nolan (who co-wrote with his brother Jonathan) doesn’t rewrite the rules; he lives up to his own previous standards without exceeding them. Whereas his two previous films offered continuous jolts of discovery, “Rises,” for all its unquestionable virtues, winds up enhancing the...