Running With Scissors (15)

Augusten Burroughs (Joseph Cross) has a rough childhood - and not just because he's lumbered with the name "Augusten". His alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin) abandons him, and his egomaniac mother (Annette Bening) sends him to live with a quack psychiatrist (Brian Cox) who's even less stable than she is. He has to share the world's messiest mansion with the psychiatrist's family (Gwyneth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood, Joseph Fiennes), who are madder still.

Based on Burroughs' best-selling memoir of his 1970s boyhood, Running With Scissors has some treasurable black comedy and career-best performances. But Ryan Murphy, the creator of TV's Nip/Tuck, hasn't threaded the author's reminiscences together into a story. They're no more than a series of unfortunate events, as Lemony Snicket might say. Murphy is more interested in stack heels, flares and Seventies rock hits than he is in investigating how all the craziness must have affected Burroughs.