A.O. Scott

Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as "pure violence and stupidity."

Preposterousness is not necessarily a vice, and plausibility is a weak virtue. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock. So to say that the conceits of The Forger (directed by Philip Martin) are ridiculous isn’t really saying much. It’s also dull, incoherent and drab to look at.

You are not, in a movie like this, supposed to think too much; you are supposed to be transported beyond skepticism on a wave of pure, tacky feeling. Instead, in this case, you drown in sentimental, ghoulish nonsense.

A witless, straining mess.

There is warmth and intelligence here, and undeniable sincerity, but also a determination, in the face of much painful and fascinating history, to play it safe.

There's so little chemistry between Mr. Wilson and Ms. Hudson that you begin to look back on what now seems like the halcyon time of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days."

The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.

Brand: A Second Coming wants to tell the story of a man overcoming temptation and trading a shallow approach to life for something more sustaining and profound. It’s undone by its own shallowness, and by the limited appeal of its subject.

It's fleet- footed, merciless entertainment. But the mixture of laughs, bathos and brutality is a big turnoff.

It's hard to take Passion seriously because it brings to mind the kind of shallow psychology that wouldn't be out of place in a history short about Sigmund Freud on "ABC Schoolhouse Rock."

Geostorm uses digital technology to lay waste to a bunch of cities and hacky screenwriting to assault the dignity of several fine actors.

Without a real-world correlative for the actions it depicts, Bertrand Bonello’s new film would merely be tedious and pretentious rather than repellent.

Forlorn melodrama, which is low on drama and high on mellow.

Filled with voyeuristic shots as the camera peers through picket fences and windows and around corners; the film looks as if it were shot with a surveillance camera from a 7-Eleven

Looks like a big-budget version of a Miller's Genuine Draft commercial.

Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself.

A soulless compilation of thrills.

Feels like an early rehearsal for a play where all the movement is being coordinated but the underlying emotional notes have yet to be set.

With the exception of some of the battles, which have the angry desperation of Mr. Yuen's inspired martial-arts choreography, Close is a nominal effort.

This, in the end, is a very bad movie, executed with enough visual polish and surface cleverness to fool the Cannes jurors, something Ostlund has done twice. Shame on them! But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.

You could accuse it of glamorizing the shallow hedonism it depicts, but that charge would only stick if the movie had any genuine flair, romance or imagination.

Nearly every time Mr. Jordan, working from a script by Mr. Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, tries for similar effects, he goes badly awry, so that you snicker when the movie is trying to be poignant and groan when it aims to make a joke.

It has the melancholy mildew of both "Marty" and the 1940's weepie "The Enchanted Cottage."

Rae and Nanjiani do their best, but neither the dialogue nor the direction serves their talents adequately.

To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. Joker, an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that.

The list of charges against this watery café au lait of a crime caper is extensive — wearisome ethnic stereotypes, cop-movie clichés, awkward pacing, a labored plot — but the chief transgression is that it wastes the time and talent of one of the supreme screen actors of our time.

Grisly but not especially suspenseful, tongue-in-cheek without any real wit, The Voices aims to hit the intersection of horror and comedy but tumbles into an uncanny valley of tedious creepiness.

Try as it might to be refined and provocative, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit.

The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.

What is harder to comprehend is how Mr. Clooney turned out such a sloppy, haphazard and tonally incoherent piece of work. Leatherheads lurches hectically between Coen brothers-style pastiche and John Saylesian didacticism, while Mr. Clooney works his brow and his jaw and waits in vain for his charm to kick in and save the day.

By interweaving several stories, the movie suffers from a peculiar multiplier effect: it deepens its shallowness.

What The Beach Bum celebrates as transgression is pure tedium. What it takes for divine lunacy is frat house doggerel. The booze flows freely. The women are topless and ornamental. The cars and boats are fast and expensive. There’s nothing much worth writing about.

A flimsy bit of mildly romantic, putatively comic Anglophile bait.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is likely neither to pique your appetite nor to sate it, leaving you in a dyspeptic limbo, stuffed with false sentiment and forced whimsy and starved for real delight.

The filmmakers feign boldness in tackling national politics, but revert to coyness and caricature when it comes to local matters, gesturing toward a multiculturalism that isn’t even skin deep and sweeping gentrification under the rug.

Magic in the Moonlight is less a movie than the dutiful recitation of themes and plot points conducted by a squad of costumed actors. The tidy narrative may advance with clockwork precision, but the clock’s most prominent feature is the snooze button.

Perhaps the directors are under the delusion that the dodging and leaping can make up for an ending that leaves the cast members of "Killer" adrift and nearly scratching their heads in puzzlement.

It is all a contrivance; the cast and filmmakers were under the delusion that putting unhappy women in a room would lead to drama.

Unreliability is a fascinating and tricky conceit for novelists and filmmakers. It should not be confused with bad writing. There is a lot of that here, and also, to confuse matters further, a lot of good acting.

Another movie -- Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "Team America," whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of 300 -- calculated the cost [of freedom] at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that 300 aspires to become.

It lumbers from one scene to the next with the stop-and-start mistiming generally seen in the outtakes shown at the end of the "Cannonball Run" movies, which this picture resembles in spirit.

What we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama.

This floppy British romance, directed by Thea Sharrock and adapted by Jojo Moyes from her best-selling novel, sits at the point where tedium, ridiculousness and heartfelt sentiment converge, separated by an all-but-imperceptible distance.

Misery Loves Comedy, Kevin Pollak’s survey of the opinions of a bunch of professionally funny people, is an evident labor of love and also a work of grating amateurism.

This may be the first movie that runs under two hours and yet has no attention span. Characters are abandoned and picked up; narrative threads dissolve before your very eyes.

Such few assets aren't enough to alleviate the film's shallowness.

The film falls far short of its goals, but it is a classic of sorts. It belongs in that Blockbuster on Mount Olympus, where pristine new copies of "I Changed My Sex," "Dracula's Dog," "Blackenstein" and "Battlefield Earth" play constantly.

The lip movements of the animated figures are slightly slow, so you feel as if you're watching a badly dubbed Japanese creature feature from the 1960's. The dialogue is almost as stilted, and after a while you drift into that half-dream state that inert movies can create.

A worthless piece of garbage.

A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by the lead actor, Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer.

The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.

A stupefying mix of action, politics and melodrama.

Straining to capture artistic frenzy, it descends into vulgar chaos, less a homage to Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (its putative inspiration) than a travesty.

Wants to be everything and adds up to nothing. "War" is a film that tries to excel on several levels and falls flat on all of them.

Various secrets come dribbling out... They add up to a sprawl of narrative that is as unconvincing as the suspiciously sprawl-free, nostalgia-tinged town where it all takes place.

A shallow yet empty action extravaganza.

The cast of The Core deserve Oscar nominations just for being able to speak most of the lines without succumbing to the chortles.

Few people other than future airline passengers should be subjected to such misery.

Its bone-deep willingness to do anything to entertain is exhausting.

The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.

This Rebecca can’t really suffer in comparison to its predecessor. To suffer it would need nerves, a pulse, a conscience, or at least some idea of its reason for being.

If you can discern any critical distance or interesting perspective here, or even a good reason to spend 90 minutes in such company, I'm afraid the joke is on you.

This movie is a suspense thriller whose only suspense comes from an audience wondering if the picture will hit its promised 97-minute running time.

Fifty Shades of Grey might not be a good movie — O.K., it’s a terrible movie — but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.

A loud, seemingly interminable, and altogether incoherent entry in the preposterous and proliferating “action-comedy” genre.

Lame, long, ugly joke of a movie.

Like his scripts for “21 Grams” and “Babel,” this one makes heavy use of happenstance and temporal displacement, and like them, too, it depends on ideas about human behavior that can only be called preposterous.

A Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others.

Pallid compared with the flaming id of television's "Will and Grace," the happy swizzle stick Jack, who's all appetites. When series television is more entertaining than a series of short independent films, that's something to worry about.

It is about as diverting as having a porcelain sink broken over your head.

There is almost nothing here that you haven’t seen a dozen times before, and even the surprises feel flat and familiar. More dispiriting still is that this drab complacency is wrapped around messages of daring, honesty and spontaneity.

It's the element of condescension, as the filmmakers look down on their working-class subjects from their lofty perch, that finally makes Sex With Strangers so distasteful.

Appears to be a somewhat sinister episode of "Nightline."

The most disturbing thing about this may be how dull and routine it seems. Computer-generated imagery can produce remarkably detailed vistas of disaster — bridges and buildings collapsing; giant ships flung onto urban streets; beloved landmarks pulverized — but the technology also has a way of stripping such spectacles of impact and interest.

Hot Rod might be called the poor man’s “Eagle vs. Shark” if “Eagle vs. Shark” were not already the poor man’s “Napoleon Dynamite.” It certainly lacks the conceptual purity and aesthetic integrity of the “Jackass” movies. In any case poor certainly describes the quality of the filmmaking.

Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, and propelled by the charisma of Janelle Monáe, it lines up moments of possible insight and impact and messes up just about all of them.

The law of diminishing returns is enforced so stringently that the movie succeeds not only in negating its own comedy, but its very being.

The movie is like spending an idle afternoon browsing, and not buying.

You'll see better film on ponds.

The unfortunate thing is that children will probably waste their summers indoors watching "Recess" over and over again.

A piece of moldy wax fruit if ever there was one.

However you take its politics, the film upholds a dreary tradition of simplifying and sentimentalizing matters of serious social concern, and dumbing down issues that call for clarity and creative thinking. Our children deserve better.

Tacky and disposable.

Overplotted, hollow thriller.

By Monday, Torque will look like a period piece with its expiration date, January 2004, prominently displayed. The inevitable movie-inspired video game will appear more realistic.

It may be too much to ask for anything more, but, on the other hand, if you’re going to go to the trouble of pretending to blow up the White House, you might also want to pretend that something was at stake.

The result is something that intermittently looks and sounds like a good movie without ever actually being one.

About 20 minutes in, it is clear that the couple will emerge as nothing more than crabby yuppies whose articulation of their pouts sounds like the same argument over and over again.

Wants to be sweet and dark at the same time, but it is as distant as a planet's satellite.

I don't think Mr. James intended to make a creepy, exploitative movie about teenage runaways - or, for that matter, a moralistic, cautionary tale of girls gone bad. But those are the default categories that Little Birds stumbles toward, perhaps because the filmmaker has not found a cogent way to channel his curiosity or his empathy.

This version, in the dreariest Hollywood-remake tradition, turns a grim, morally ambiguous story into a fable of empowerment. That might be kind of fun if it didn’t feel so tired and timid.

The stripped-down narrative is almost an apology for the ludicrous story -- but it's just not enough of one.

His (Fleischer) first feature, "Zombieland," was a half-witty genre parody. This one might be described as genre zombie-ism: the hysterical, brainless animation of dead clichés reduced to purposeless, compulsive killing. Too self-serious to succeed as pastiche, it has no reason for being beyond the parasitic urge to feed on the memories of other, better movies.

This picture is mostly a lump of run-of-the-mill profanity sprinkled with a few remarks so geared toward engendering audience sympathy that you might think he was running for office -- or trying to win over a probation officer.

It looks and sounds like a movie without quite being one. It’s more like a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art, the record of an enthusiasm that is, to the outside observer, indistinguishable from confusion.

So shameless in its pandering, sentimental vision of Frenchness as to constitute something of a national embarrassment.

Salinger, directed by Mr. Salerno, is less a work of cinema than the byproduct of its own publicity campaign.

The movie doesn't turn out to be as benignly right-wing as it initially suggests, though the plot turns can be spotted a mile away.