Warm Bodies

A promising premise is frustratingly under-utilized in Warm Bodies, a zombie romantic comedy without any brains. In a post-zombie apocalypse world, survivors struggle to find food and medicine while avoiding packs of roaming corpses. But after kidnapping a young woman he's attracted to (because he's stolen the memories of her boyfriend by eating his brains), suspiciously handsome zombie R. starts thinking, speaking and feeling all over again. Zombies breaking free from their routine existence due to the magical healing powers of love is a novel take on the now ridiculously overused undead genre, but Warm Bodies would rather focus on Hoult's fairly creepy courtship and some paramilitary action from a barely present John Malkovich. With pacing as stunted as their corpses it stars, Bodies shambles along with little direction and exists mostly as an excuse for Hoult's blue-eyed rotting hunk to stare longingly at the camera. —Jacob Boon