A.O. Scott

Aloha has too much story and yet not quite enough, and its rhythms are rushed and pokey. It skips like a record playing in the bed of a pickup truck.

Mr. Bar-Lev has made an excellent documentary, but it would have been better if he had not made it at all.

A painfully sincere study in creative passion, sexual ardor and political zeal that embalms a mad and exuberant historical moment within the talky, balky conventions of period-costumed highbrow soap opera.

A film that had seemed interested in the lives and feelings of its characters, and in an unlikely but touching relationship between two people at odds with the world around them, turns into a movie with Something to Say.

Her (Ms. Scherfig) eccentric eye and offbeat rhythm sustain One Day through its stretches of banality and mitigate some of its flaws.

Mr. Perry, a New York University graduate whose second feature, "The Color Wheel," provoked passion and puzzlement at several festivals, has a natural eye, an offbeat sense of rhythm and no great interest in conventional storytelling. This is both intriguing and a bit tiresome, as Tyrone stumbles and mumbles his way through a series of inscrutable encounters.

Because the material gives off such a delicious vibe, even though the movie itself feels a little old, you want to like Simone. It would be easier if it were a more forceful comedy. But Mr. Niccol's style is that of reticence -- as a director, he's a little coquettish.

You can't help feeling that the movie owed its subject - and its audience - a bit more.

Kandahar feels like a Magritte painting rendered in sand tones, and your eyes are drawn to the screen. There aren't enough of these moments, though, and Mr. Makhmalbaf lessens their power by repeating them.

La Vie en Rose, which Mr. Dahan wrote as well as directed, has an intricate structure, which is a polite way of saying that it's a complete mess... In the end, as often happens in movies of this kind, La Vie en Rose is saved by Piaf herself.

The sweet smarts of Mitchell’s first movie, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (treated to a bit of auto-allusion in “Silver Lake”) aren’t much in evidence here. Nor are the slippery psychosexual scares of “It Follows,” his breakthrough horror movie from 2015. The ambitions this time are grander, but also vaguer and duller.

Blown up way past television-set size, the animated film's squiggly lines and rushed renditions are pale and blurry. This may be the first cartoon ever to look as if it were being shown on the projection television screen of a sports bar.

Mothering Sunday never conveys the intensity of erotic passion, the ardor of creative ambition or the agony of grief. Even though it is ostensibly about all of those feelings, it handles them with a tastefulness that is hard to distinguish from complacency.

As television drama, Generation War is unquestionably effective. As dramatized history, it is pretty questionable.

Surprisingly . . . ept given that it is basically a dumb movie about smart people. This smooth but bland thriller may be the best we could expect from such a collaboration.

Much too long. It starts to feel like a flabby, dramatic version of the first "Austin Powers" movie, another exercise in living anachronism as a storytelling device. By the time the picture's final note about German reunification is struck, "Lenin!" has raised a wall of indifference for the audience.

The twists in the story are meant to raise the emotional stakes, but they have the opposite effect, undermining the credibility of the premise. The harder the movie leans into its own cleverness, the more it exposes itself as a diverting but ultimately unconvincing exercise.

The middle section of the film has some of the superficiality of a made-for-Lifetime drama of female distress and resilience, a bit too eager to make its points and solve its dramatic problems at the cost of the messiness that would bring the story fully to life.

Shallow and harmlessly diverting picture.

The self-consciousness of the premise and the playlike structure of Blind Date clash with the naturalism of Mr. Tucci and Ms. Clarkson’s acting styles, and the film never lifts itself above its origin as a well-meaning, underdeveloped exercise.

Less forgivably, the movie is dull.

If in the end the film is neither a cogent psychological thriller nor an effervescent sex comedy, it does at least have an interesting sense of place.

It's clear that this is a farce about ambition that is not ambitious enough, right down to its cutesy, punning title.

A funny-sad, icky-sweet comedy of family dysfunction.

There are aspects of “Horton,”... that are fresh and enjoyable, and bits that will gratify even a dogmatic and orthodox Seussian.

There is something shallow and cautious about this film, which strains to maintain a glib, cheery demeanor that is not always appropriate to the details of the story.

The story of self-discovery through which the writer and director Audrey Wells leads Frances is eminently superficial, although Ms. Wells keeps the movie going with a steady, commanding hand and casts it with an actress who can deftly downshift from serene to sodden.

Rather than finding an interesting, resonant ambiguity in his experience, Ms. Kim and Mr. Dano settle for a kind of suggestive vagueness, losing the thread of their character in the snow, steam and cigarette smoke that provide the film's main visual motif and perhaps also its dominant metaphor.

The big, climactic fight, complete with an epic snuffleupagus rampage, is decent action-movie fun. And as a history lesson, 10,000 BC has its value. It explains just how we came to be the tolerant, peace-loving farmers we are today, and why the pyramids were never finished.

The Pretty One is intermittently charming, occasionally touching and entirely lacking in credibility.

As a poky little character comedy, Cherish is enchanting in a small-scale way. But when Mr. Taylor tries to turn it into a genre thriller, Cherish deteriorates so quickly that it's unsettling -- but probably not in the way Mr. Taylor intended.

For all the profanity and naughty behavior, it has the timid, ingratiating vibe of a television sitcom, sticking to safe and familiar emotional territory.

As a whole, it does not quite work, especially at the end, when Mr. Chan tries for a Shakespearean climax of filial rebellion and paternal rage. But at its less grandiose moments, the combination of expressive acting and kinetic action pays off in ways that are likely to satisfy both novices and adepts in martial-arts fandom.

A sequel whose sugar-rush absurdity almost defeats the forces of logic, taste and conventional narrative. It is a defect that might undermine a lesser movie but that in this case proves to be as cheerfully, enjoyably humid as the first blast of summer light and heat.

This 2-hour-49-minute movie drags more than it jumps, wearing out its premise and possibly also your patience as it lumbers toward the final showdown. Along the way there is some fun — some scares, some warm feelings, some inventive ickiness — to be found.

Huppert’s uncanny mixture of self-possession and wildness is never not interesting to watch, but when Frankie is off screen she takes the film’s life force with her.

Tower Heist could and should have been much more. Mr. Ratner goes for the safe bet and the easy score.

You’re left wanting more, but not quite the “more” Iron Man 2 works so hard to supply.

It occupies its genre niche — the exuberantly violent Euro-action movie-star paycheck action comedy — without excessive cynicism or annoying pretension.

If this movie is not a ride, then what is it? One thing it may not be, quite, is a movie.

Michael Winterbottom’s nasty and uneven adaptation of Jim Thompson’s surpassingly mean little crime novel.

A potent, assured and ambitious piece of filmmaking brought down by weighted dialogue and, playing Americans, the British actors Adrian Lester and Joseph Fiennes and the Australian David Wenham.

This screen adaptation feels like a clumsy hybrid. It’s a little too long and winding to work as a feature film, especially in the horror genre, and might have worked better as a limited series, with a little more room for the many characters who populate its grimly imagined American landscape.

Somehow, the film is missing both adrenaline and gravity, notwithstanding some frantic early moments and a late swerve toward tragedy. It makes its points carefully and unimpeachably but does not bring much in the way of insight or risk.

There is plenty of nonsense, a great deal of stylish posturing and clothes-horsing, and a few action sequences that manage to be both gripping and preposterous.

Mr. Fehling, tumbling from puppy dog eagerness into weepy, inky self-pity, never quite rises to the requirements of the role, which may be hopelessly incoherent in any case.

This would-be spicy film has been made blandly palatable.

The Lego figures are rendered with playful rigor; their limited movements and expressions generate some amusing sight gags. But the physical world they inhabit is more of a generic digital-cartoon space than a snapped-together environment. And the themes they explore are tired, cynical, sub-Disney bromides about family reconciliation and self-discovery.

There are waves of brilliantly orchestrated anxiety and confusion but also long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere. We might be watching "Cold Case" or "Criminal Minds," but with better sound design and more expressive visual techniques.

Once the basic conflict is established, the story plods along, alternating between preposterous -- in a bad way -- speeches and even more preposterous -- but in a good way -- shootouts and slugfests.

The desert landscapes are gorgeously shot by Yves Cape, but Two Men in Town never seems to fully inhabit its setting. Nor does the schematic, occasionally clumsy story do justice to the skills of the cast.

While Mr. Molina and Mr. Cage supply a measure of well-compensated eccentricity, their labors ultimately serve to emphasize the grinding mediocrity of the enterprise.

The moderately arresting Risk/Reward suffers from a lack of resources and is writ small, suggesting that it may play better on television.

This compilation of blisteringly tight stunts plays like the world's longest Mountain Dew commercial.

The violence in his (Craig's) first outing, "Casino Royale," was notably intense, and while Quantum of Solace is not quite as brutal, the mood is if anything even more grim and downcast.

A passable piece of hackwork, with some adequately suspenseful passages and a few mild shocks near the end. But the psychological dimensions of the story are so risible, and its supposed insights into race and class so wrongheaded and ugly, that irritation trumps enjoyment.

Ms. Ryder, playing the least sympathetic character with unflinching dignity and candor, is in many ways the reason The Dilemma works as well as it does.

There is some cheap homophobia at the end, and a lot of the kind of misogyny that treats the existence of nonthin, nonrich, nonwhite women as a joke in itself.

A mild exercise in deliberate mediocrity, with chuckles and heartwarming moments distributed as carefully as nuts in a factory-made brownie. The movie's lack of ambition is hardly surprising, but both Ms. Moore and Ms. Keaton, who can wring flustered comedy out of the mildest provocation, deserve better.

In spite of its air of seriousness and sophistication, The Other Woman feels oddly shapeless and pokey.

What wildness there is in this Madame Bovary belongs to Ms. Wasikowska, an actress who is frequently more interesting than her material.

There is a plot, but no real intrigue, mystery or suspense, and no inkling of anything at stake beyond a childish and belligerent idea of fun.

There is a troubling complacency and a lack of compassion in The Impossible, which is less an examination of mass destruction than the tale of a spoiled holiday.

Mr. Dick, whose previous documentaries have examined sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, the inner workings of the movie ratings system and the life and work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is a cerebral muckraker. While his techniques are not as nakedly tendentious as Michael Moore’s (and his movies, as a consequence, are not as much fun), he hardly pretends to be a detached or unbiased observer.

Quite a bit less than the sum of its appealing parts.

The puppets and the music make Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life engaging, but it is also visually hectic and lacks either the dramatic intensity or the arresting insight that might have lifted it out of the pedestrian realm of the admiring biopic.

Sisters is both too careful and too sloppy to take full advantage of the thornier implications of its premise. It’s too awkward — because scenes drag when they should swing and jokes sag when they should pop — and not awkward enough.

Think of 44 Inch Chest as a piece of chamber music and you can compensate for the thinness of its story and the lack of visual distinction.

“Fallen Kingdom,” directed by J. A. Bayona, is in most respects a dumber, less ambitious movie than its immediate predecessor, and also, for just that reason, a little bit more fun. Some of its high jinks have a hokey, silly, old-fashioned mad-scientist feeling to them, especially when the dinosaurs are chasing people or vice versa. Which is reasonably often.

Apart from some half-cartoonish digital effects and the whole 3-D thing, Drive Angry could almost be mistaken for a raunchy, cheesy exploitation programmer of the same vintage as some of its cars.

Soars as much as it crashes.

Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.

The satire is cautious and the emotions restrained, so that what should be a swirl of lust, ambition, recrimination and bureaucratic absurdity rises only to genteel, nervous laughter and mild discomfort.

Overlong, predictable in its plotting and utterly banal in its blending of comic whimsy and melodramatic pathos.

To invoke the name of another underwhelming new film, Sinbad is legally bland.

Where you end up may not be where you thought this was going. The final act, including the post-credits sting (to infinity and beyond, as it were) brings a chill, a darkness and a hush that represent something new in this universe.

Mr. Goldberger's words are among the more substantive in a film that at times seems ready to levitate from the screen on puffy clouds of praise.

In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.

After a sharp and promising start, she (Ms. Scafaria) allows the movie to collapse into a mild, lump-in-the-throat romantic comedy that is not made significantly more urgent or interesting by the prospect of global calamity.

We can only view Windtalkers with the same shaken detachment that characterizes Mr. Cage's Joe Enders, wishing that the codetalkers' real story, a little known and fascinating chunk of American history, had been given its true dramatic import.

Isn't quite as much fun as it could be.

The movie is curiously unmemorable, partly because nearly all of its humor depends on your having seen something like it before, even if you haven't.

What should unfold like an unsettling chapter in a long, tragic story — or a tale of cruelty and heroism — feels more like an old TV show. Everybody is going through the motions.

Mr. Cuarón never quite finds the tone that would allow him to fuse belly laughs with the horror of illness and death, but then perhaps Pedro Almodóvar is the only filmmaker able to mix darkness and light in that way. Still it is hard not to admire the younger man's cheeky self-confidence, and hard not to enjoy the dexterity of his camera movements and the flair with which he attempts both low comedy and high melodrama.

The plot has so many moving parts - so many envelopes of money, dropped names, half-explained schemes and hasty flights - that it quickly becomes more frustrating than illuminating.

Starts with a great idea, but the movie's potential drops faster than the tech stocks on the Nasdaq.

Hannibal, a silly though handsomely staged adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel directed by Ridley Scott, is a movie meant for the whole family -- the Manson family.

The cinematic equivalent of a plate made of spun sugar.

The plot zigs and zags and sometimes accelerates in the direction of genuine hilarity...only to downshift into sloppy, easy jokes and gags.

This is "Pretty Woman" for children.

I don’t really buy Draft Day — it’s a shallow and evasive movie, built more around corporate wish fulfillment than around reality — but I have to say that it sells itself beautifully.

The director's breezy steadiness keeps the movie from hitting us over the head -- well, not too hard, anyway, no small feat since the steroid-juiced sentimentality of the ending may force some to flee before the outtakes unspool under the credits.

Whenever the picture tries to be about something bigger, it turns predictable or maudlin or, in a few sad instances, both simultaneously.

Never shows enough passion to be interestingly bad.

For what it is -- a romantic comedy about the rivalry between a jealous ghost and a flaky psychic for the love of a veterinarian -- Over Her Dead Body is not bad.

Defiance presents itself as an explicit correction of the cultural record, a counterpoint to all those lachrymose World War II tales of helplessness and victimhood. This is a perfectly honorable intention, but the problem is that, in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity, Mr. Zwick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Clayton Frohman) ends up affirming them.

There are some amusing moments, to be sure, and some touching ones as well, but the film is less interested in ideas or emotions than in illusions. It produces an aura of suspense without a sense of real risk, and offers devotees of fashion an appealing, shallow fantasy of inside knowledge.

What really drives the movie is its own search for something to make fun of, and for a comic style that can feel credibly naughty while remaining ultimately safe and affirmative.

In spite of Amelia Vincent's toothsome cinematography and the down-home locations, the movie often has the lumbering, literal-minded rhythms of a second-rate stage play -- not a moan or a howl, but a slow, anxious groan.

As it is, the movie is a hodgepodge of borrowings and half-cooked ideas, flung together into a feverishly edited jet-setting exercise in purposeless intensity.

While Ms. Dörrie’s film is exquisitely shot, its themes and metaphors are obvious rather than subtle, and its emotional rhythms -- rueful laughter punctuating the pathos -- would not be out of place in a television drama.

“Mark Felt” is a sharp portrait set against a blurry background, a history lesson that won’t help you on the test. It is possible to savor the crags and shadows of Mr. Neeson’s performance without quite grasping why Mr. Landesman thinks the story is worthy of such somber, serious and sustained attention.

Date Night, like so many other films of its type, too often relies on words, catchphrases and inflections that signify a generally accepted notion of funniness rather than being, you know, actually funny.

Ricki’s attitudes, and their place in the family and the society she inhabits, are the most interesting part of the movie, or at least they would be if Ms. Cody and Mr. Demme were not so weirdly conflict-averse.

Its flashes of style are sometimes lively but more often seem, like the slavish period décor, to be desperate attempts to overcome the built-in inertia of the genre.

Strictly for cultists, and even they might find less than 90 bongless minutes hard to sit through.

Patrick periodically criticizes his disciples, including Martha, for failing to be open enough with him, and that is also a shortcoming of Martha Marcy May Marlene, which is a bit too coy, too clever and too diffident to believe in.

Modest and diverting, rough and bland, with some good (if not quite Bette Davis caliber) actors and so-so special effects.

Plots and subplots are handled with clumsy expediency, and themes that might connect this movie with the larger Lucasfilm mythos aren’t allowed to develop. You’re left wanting both more and less.

The movie is exuberant, strapping and obvious -- a problem drama suffering from a steroid overdose.

It may be best to approach El Cantante less as a movie than as a two-hour promotional video for a must-have soundtrack album.

There is something both satisfying and frustrating about Madea Goes to Jail. Mr. Perry dutifully gives his audience what it wants, but you can't help feeling that he might also have more to offer: more coherent narratives, smoother direction, better movies.

The film points toward a rich and complicated story that only partly makes it onto the screen.

The facetiousness of this project is charming at first -- as is the conceit of depicting the hunt for Mr. bin Laden using video-game animation -- but the charm wears off pretty quickly.

For the most part, everyone struggles through, with at best mixed success. The audience included.

[An] entirely preposterous, not entirely unenjoyable movie.

Atonement fails to be anything more than a decorous, heavily decorated and ultimately superficial reading of the book on which it is based.

Little is overly protective of its characters and its audience; it’s soothing rather than sharp. That’s most likely because of an anxious concern for grown-up sensitivities. Smart 13-year-olds are likely to roll their eyes as well as laugh.

Novelty and genre traditionalism often fight to a draw. Too much overt cleverness has a way of spoiling dumb, reliable thrills. And despite the evident ingenuity and strenuous labor that went into it, The Cabin in the Woods does not quite work.

A movie far less interesting than its premise. It is also slightly less interesting than its hugely popular predecessor, "Bruce Almighty."

As the shills reveal their souls, the movie turns into an exercise in the very phoniness it initially set out to expose. And since you’ve already paid for the ticket, you might end up feeling cheated.

Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation.

Intermittently charming, sometimes tiresome celebration of quirkiness.

Bottle Shock is unable to figure out what kind of movie it wants to be, and flops around between madcap comedy and rousing drama. To borrow a wine-snob term of art, it lacks structure.

A crudely made, half-clever little frightener that has become something of a pop-culture sensation and most certainly the movie marketing story of the year.

The ending is also a test of the audience's openness to the kind of fantasy mocked, at the outset, by everyone in Jeff's life, including the filmmakers. They want to make us believe in something, though it's also possible that they are only fooling.

While France remains interesting, thanks to Seydoux’s tough and resourceful performance, “France” loses its emotional force and its intellectual focus. A potentially insightful exploration of the loss of self in a media-saturated world amounts, in the end, to a series of shallow images.

The dark, comic poignancy of the book is drowned in garish, self-conscious whimsy, and the work of a talented ensemble is squandered on awkward heartstring snatching.

Weightless and polite when it means to be magical and gentle, Return to Me is a piece of fruit gone soft from being off the vine too long.

Glazes over faster than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and neither is very flavorful after sitting around for a while.

What is most striking about this movie is how un-self-conscious it is as it conducts a prurient and superficial inquiry into adolescent female sexuality.

It’s not even very good as a genre exercise, and can’t always keep track of which genre muscles it wants to flex. For a while it’s a locked-room mystery. Then it’s a runaway-train thriller.

This uninviting and pallid version, starring Guy Pearce, is intent on grinding all the sharp edges off the original story, in effect making the movie childproof, so no one can get hurt touching it.

Mostly standard-issue muddle.

While the film has an appealingly dreamy, summer-in-New-York look and a pleasantly languorous rhythm, it gives the actors very little to do and the audience almost nothing to care about.

Occasionally funny, intermittently scary, but mostly hectic and sloppy, Krampus tries very hard to be a different kind of Christmas movie.

Instead of the kind of inspired imaginative synergy that distinguished the “Lord of the Rings” and later “Harry Potter” pictures, this movie, directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”), feels more like a sloppy, secondhand pander.

None of it works. Or it works too hard. Whatever.

Hit and Runway is a case of the emperor's old clothes: drab, sentimental rags that desperately want to be something else.

August: Osage County falls into an uncanny valley between melodrama and camp, failing to achieve either heights of operatic feeling or flights of knowing parody. The jokes are too labored, too serious.

For hard-core Godardians, Godard Mon Amour will be an indispensable hate-watch. For the Godard-ambivalent, the critical outrage of the partisans will provide its own kind of amusement. But you don’t need to have strong feelings about Godard to notice the off flavors in this airy, brightly colored macaron.

When Mr. Burton's "Planet" fixes on being entertaining...it succeeds. But the picture states its social points so bluntly that it becomes slow-witted and condescending; it treats the audience as pets.

A thriller wrapped in heavy-duty gauze to muffle the chills.

In spite of the golden presence of Brad Pitt as the killer, a level-headed professional named Jackie Cogan, the movie has an agreeably scuzzy, small-time feeling.

The most dispiriting thing about Something Borrowed is that with a little more art, craft and wit it could have been a lot better, maybe even good.

There are too many action-movie clichés without enough dramatic purpose, and interesting themes and anecdotes are scattered around without being fully explored. This is weak and cloudy moonshine: it doesn't burn or intoxicate.

Someone deserves the grand prize for persuading David Bowie to participate in this minor drama .The movie is bland and ordinary.

May have been tailored just for Mr. Chan, but it still feels like off-the-rack garb. And by now, Mr. Chan deserves much better than a hand-me-down suit that smells like a rental.

A superficially clever, self-important and finally incoherent thriller.

What is most striking about The Spirit is how little pleasure it affords, in spite of its efforts to by sly, sexy, heartfelt and clever all at once.

The acting and filmmaking are too crude to make you care about what happens to any of them, even though you know pretty much exactly what that will be.

“Another Earth” was a heartfelt entertainment that managed to infuse a tantalizing science fiction premise with thought and feeling. I Origins is too committed to explaining itself to repeat the trick and falls into the trap of taking its daffy intellectual conceits far too seriously.

For all its brooding atmosphere and visual poeticism, the film offers a perspective on the lives of its characters that feels narrow and superficial.

There doesn't seem to be an original moment in the entire movie, and the score is so repetitive that it could have been downloaded directly from EnnioMorricone.com.

Might more aptly be described as Bad Kurosawa, Bad Peckinpah or Bad Leone. Which might be a way of saying that it's better-than-average Stallone. I can't quite say that it's not bad: it is bad! But not entirely in a bad way.

The Film Critic is at once too clever by half and not as smart as it pretends to be.

Makes its points gently; the picture presents its socially conscious messages as if they were written in the sand, on the beaches where Felix would probably prefer to frolic.

Mr. Broderick and Mr. DeVito look tired and out of sorts, and you can hardly blame them, given the picture's inept, curdled mixture of sappiness and crude humor.

The movie turns into a cobweb of tricky spins and twists that seems like a hip-hop version of "Ruthless People."

It feels willed, aggressive and unconvincing -- clammy rather than cool -- in a way that suggests artistic frustration rather than discovery. The water shortage may be a metaphor for the director’s creative desiccation, which his admirers can only hope is temporary.

Rather than interweaving domestic drama, supernatural mumbo-jumbo and campus naughtiness, Pulcini and Berman lurch from one scene to the next, squandering scares and undermining the momentum of the story.

This movie, with its relatively modest running time and not-quite-household-name cast, is no more ridiculous than, let’s say, the “Thor” movies, and a lot less pretentious.

You can admire what he does without really enjoying it, and two hours and 46 minutes of pulverized architecture is a lot to endure. But in every Michael Bay movie there are at least a few moments of inspired, kinetic absurdity.

In trying to make "Othello" more lifelike and bring it down to a younger audience -- in effect, to make it more democratic -- the adaptation has rendered the material artless.

The movie is staged like a pit stop -- Reindeer Games goes from being fun to being laughable.

The ghastliness of this damp and squishy comedy is the byproduct of a confused and earnest sentimentality, a willful devotion to wide-eyed wonder that confuses simplicity with simple-mindedness.

The sin of Ted is not that it is offensive but that it is boring, lazy and wildly unoriginal. If Triumph the Insult Comic Dog ever got a hold of Ted, there would be nothing left but a pile of fluff and a few scraps of fur.

The real story of Christian Longo and Michael Finkel might be a fascinating and disturbing tale of crime, curiosity and journalistic ethics, but that’s not what this movie is.

The entertainment formula behind this short and nasty movie - devised according to someone's idea of what teenage boys with the guile, the facial hair or the "guardian" to gain admission to an R-rated movie are likely to enjoy - is sloppy and simple.

The humor is coarse and occasionally funny. The archly bombastic score, by Edward Sheamur, is the only thing you might call witty. But happily, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard show up, as the White Bitch and Aslo the Lion, to add some easy, demented class.

This breathless demi-noir has so much bounce that we barely get any time to mull over the gaping holes in its moth-eaten plot. It is competent but extremely slight.

While impressively made, this impassive and cold feature fails, in a spectacular fashion, to deliver the thrills.

It works in so many ways except for the script, which sounds laughable. And sadly, when Lost and Delirious trips over its own two feet, it is laughable. It needs to follow Paulie's advice and rage more.

Awkward, obvious and sporadically -- very sporadically -- amusing.

There are some jokey parts, some weepy bits, a sexy moment and a few fine displays of anger from Louis-Dreyfus, but they’re all just thrown together like salted nuts and cheap candies in a snack mix.

That potential is mostly squandered in The Dictator, which gestures halfheartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness.

The screenplay, by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, tosses out a few chewy bits of B-movie wit, most of them supplied by Mr. Jones, who expresses the ambivalence of an African-American visiting the motherland through a series of bitter jokes.

Sometimes the movie swerves toward farce, sometimes into the zone of smiley family comedy and at other times into full-on weepiness. None of it is especially credible or engaging.

There is a grungy high spirit during the first third of this film, but then it dissipates like a mist from an aerosol can.

Though Mr. Noé; displays prodigious filmmaking technique, his punk-operatic meditation on life, love, anger and -- most important -- guilt is superficially inventive, but singularly adolescent.

A bad-taste comedy with a heart.

It is by far the least strange of all the "Pirates" episodes so far, with none of the cartoonish exuberance or creepy-crawly effects that made its predecessors intermittently delightful.

No-Good Men, Foolish Choices and Birth on the Floor of a Wal-Mart.

This premise contains the seeds of an interesting economic and political allegory, but the ambitions of the filmmakers - lie in the direction of maximum noise and minimum sense.

May be simple, but it's also simple-minded; this is, after all, a movie determined to transform its Rebel soldier heroes into men of the people, making it as neglectful of politics as last summer's "Patriot," which evaded that nasty issue of slavery during the America Revolution.

The movie is smart in small ways, yet an underachiever in big ones -- but it will probably play very well on television. On the big screen, it's distended and diffuse.

Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons.

As an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, The Whale is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness.

Plays like a nutty psychological mystery.

Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don't be silly. But don't be fooled. This movie does not like you.

Like Mills’s emotional back story, the special effects seem to have been pulled out of a box of secondhand ideas. Nor is the execution all that impressive. There’s little in the way of awe, suspense or surprise.

The film, written and directed by Bart Layton, can’t quite decide what it wants to be: a slick, speedy caper; a goofball comedy; or a commentary on the state of the American soul. It’s none of those — a tame and toothless creature that is neither fish nor fowl.

The cast is large and the costume and set designers have been kept busy with period details, but “Marlowe” neither dutifully copies nor cleverly updates detective-movie tropes. The dialogue is spiced with profanities and anachronisms, and the plot moves ponderously through a thicket of complications.

The highest praise I can give Get Hard is that it is not quite as awful as it could have been.

A kind of murder mystery, but eventually the only victim is the audience's interest -- the picture is uncompromising and inauspicious.

The pieces of New York, I Love You make up a parallel city that no one would want to live in, much less visit.

There isn’t much of a love story here. There isn’t much of anything, even as there’s too much of everything.

The much too long, primitively plotted family action adventure Hidalgo, directed by Joe Johnston, has a handful of well-handled sequences but, given the young audience the film is intended for, the picture may be like having to finish an entire pot of broccoli to get a couple of jelly beans for dessert.

Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Allen, who have never aspired very far beyond their affable television-comedy personas, are easier to watch than Mr. Travolta or Mr. Macy, who both undertake what can only be called acting. This is more than the picture deserves, but then again, so is Ray Liotta, as the chieftain of the bad bikers, and so is Ms. Tomei.

It swerves from thriller to romantic comedy to farce without much conviction, though you can occasionally salvage a glimmer of amusing possibility. Mr. Williams scores with a few throwaway jokes.

Don’t be fooled. The Brave One, though well cast and smoothly directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.

This competently made picture seems a rehash, and not a terribly interesting one. What's remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is.

The lack of narrative sophistication allows an Ecstasy-like disposition to set in; "Liberty" becomes goo-goo eyed over itself. It lacks the discipline to define Anna sufficiently; rather, it portrays her as either a lovable naïf or a spoiled narcissist in desperate need of a lesson.

Thornton's performance is lost in a film that is more of a schematic success than a dramatic one.

Meet the Robinsons is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time.

The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre.

Its formal novelty aside, Redacted rarely hits the audience with a genuine shock or a clarifying insight. It churns through a set of ideas and emotions that are confusing and unpleasant, to be sure, but also, by now, dispiritingly familiar.

What saves Breaking and Entering from foundering altogether in earnest self-regard is Mr. Minghella's evident affection for London, a city of inexhaustible architectural and human variety.

It’s dispiriting to see a movie about interesting real-life characters reduce them to clichés, making them less vivid, less fascinating, less charismatic than they must have been.

Not exactly uproarious. But Mr. Murphy, going back at least to his Gumby and Buckwheat days on "Saturday Night Live," has always had the ability to turn broad caricature into something stranger and more inventive.

Its idea of the future is abstract, theoretical and empty, and it can only fill in the blank space with exhortations to believe and to hope. But belief without content, without a critical picture of the world as it is, is really just propaganda. Tomorrowland, searching for incitements to dream, finds slogans and mistakes them for poetry.

Nostalgia and comedy are run through a food processor until they become a flavorless paste.

All in all, it's a mess, and much as Ms. Blunt pouts, Ms. Adams twinkles, and Mr. Arkin growls, there's nothing they can do to clean it up.

The Raven tries to blend all of these motley genres together, and though the effort is valiant, the result is a mess. I suspect Poe's review of it would have been much more savage than mine.

There is a lot of nasty stuff to look at, but very little that is genuinely haunting, jolting or terrifying.

Mr. Bader was lucky to get a good cast.

Like other big-studio exercises in pseudo-subversion (very much including “Deadpool”), Birds of Prey is happy to play at provocation with swear words and violence while carefully declining to provoke anything like a thought.

You are left with the impression of an old woman who can't quite remember who she used to be and of a movie that is not so sure either.

Apart from the car chase, the only real fun in Jack Reacher comes from Mr. Herzog and Robert Duvall, called in near the end for some marvelously gratuitous scenery chewing as a gruff former Marine. They enliven the movie's atmosphere of weary brutality for a few moments, but they also call attention to the dullness of their dramatic surroundings.

There is nothing wrong with the story itself, but the tone is grating and the pacing sluggish. Episodes that might be howlingly funny on the page turn weirdly gross and sadistic on screen.

Rather than ascending to new heights of bromance, The Climb coasts down into the barren flatlands of masculine self-pity.

Mr. Rock's attempts to disentangle himself from his persona while offering audiences a sliver of insight into his world is a lofty ambition, but Down to Earth falls short.

Any movie that awards a former Monty Python cast member a Nobel Prize in anything cannot be all bad. And The Day the Earth Stood Still could be worse.

To say that “Valerian” is a science-fiction epic doesn’t quite do it justice. Imagine crushing a DVD of “The Phantom Menace” into a fine powder, tossing in some Adderall and Ecstasy and a pinch of cayenne pepper and snorting the resulting mixture while wearing a virtual reality helmet in a Las Vegas karaoke bar. Actually, that sounds like too much fun, but you get the idea.

Before I Fall is tactful rather than maudlin, tasteful rather than lurid, soothing rather than creepy. None of that is good news.

About as scary as a sock-puppet re-enactment of "The Blair Witch Project," and not nearly as funny.

Isn't much of a movie (it'll play much better on the small screen), but the likable chemistry between Dre and Snoop counts for a lot.

It feels warmed over, devoid of urgency and, in spite of Mr. Broomfield's on-camera displays of doggedness, lacking in curiosity.

Culinary purists have observed that much of what passes for the spicy Japanese condiment wasabi at American restaurants is an ersatz concoction of horseradish and green food coloring. The French-language action comedy Wasabi is just as artificial, pumped with horseradish to give it heat in lieu of actual spice.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine will most likely manage to cash in on the popularity of the earlier episodes, but it is the latest evidence that the superhero movie is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue.

There is all kinds of potential here, but Mr. Haggis lacks the Hitchcockian sense of mischief to make it blossom.

The story is both overwrought and underdeveloped, with potentially important plot details insufficiently explained or left out altogether.

Proust might have known what to do with the Baekelands, but Mr. Kalin and Mr. Rodman don't make much more of them than the mess they apparently already were.

The best cartoons are built on the contradictory pursuit of meticulously arranged anarchy. But they never seem needy, or desperate for laughs, as Home on the Range does. The film seems hungrier for a pat on the head than a chuckle.

Not entirely terrible. That is high praise indeed, given that this is a film aspiring to match the achievement of "27 Dresses," "When in Rome" and "Leap Year."

A very long, very busy movie that will unite the generations in bafflement, stupefaction and occasional delight.

It's this compulsion to solder melancholy to weightlessness that constantly trips up the movie; Mr. Kelly doesn't have the assurance to pull off such a difficult feat.

Another high-concept Irish Spring comedy.

The draggy, lurching two hours of Knowing will make you long for the end of the world, even as you worry that there will not be time for all your questions to be answered.

Aims for a blend of whimsy and tingly suspense but botches nearly every spell it tries to cast.

The few glimpses we catch of the Ford's Theater production of "Our American Cousin" are unfortunately the liveliest and most convincing moments in this well-meaning, misbegotten movie.

As predictable as a fast-food restaurant. The actors' exuberance goes a long way, but not far enough.

This could be called an art house version of "Pearl Harbor," except that sounds vaguely nutritious, like fat- free yogurt or a historical episode of A&E's "Biography." But Dark Blue World is all empty carbs, like malted milk balls.

The blandly likable computer-animation extravaganza Ice Age actually seems like a fossil, a relic from another era.

As a portrait of anxious, status-conscious Brooklyn parents living in a chiaroscuro of self-righteousness and guilt, Carnage misses its mark badly.

In this shaggy-dog version the wolfman’s story is both gratuitously bloody and, finally, bloodless.

The characters are trapped, suffocated, pushed through a story that gives them very little room or time to figure themselves out, and that finally turns their feelings into the wan stuff of fable.

As it is, the film is more curiosity than provocation, an artifact of a faded world brought to zombie half-life by the cinematic technology of the present.

As a five-minute clip on YouTube, this spoof might be a small masterpiece. As a feature film, it’s both too much and not nearly enough.

Has a burnished, high-quality look and a heart swollen with maudlin self-regard.

Yes Man rarely rises to genuine hilarity. It takes no risks, finds no inspiration and settles, like its hero, into a dull, noncommittal middle ground. Should you see this movie? Maybe. Whatever. I don't care.

So undistinguished that the moments you remember best are those that you wish another, more original director had tackled.

Some will find profundity in the film's reversals and revelations, but its provocations are not particularly insightful or original. The Death of a President is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it’s a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas.

Mildly amusing but wholly unnecessary comedy.

All it wants to do is scare a smile onto your face, and it often succeeds. After all, how can a movie that offers Michael Jeter as a mercenary not be fun?

Deep down, though, this movie by the first-time writer-director Abe Sylvia is desperate for approval. Starting out with a blast of profanity and sexual brazenness, it lands in a zone of earnest, sloppy weepiness.

The title may be mildly provocative in its vulgarity, but the most striking feature of this movie is its dullness.

Ms. Taymor's overscaled sense of stage spectacle can be impressive and effective, even moving, but her three-dimensional, high-volume compositions translate awkwardly into the cosmos of cinema, which turns her pageantry into mummery and the physical exuberance she likes to draw from performers into mugging.

As it is, Nancy Drew stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula -- a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case -- and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork. How this happened is hardly a mystery; botched adaptations are as common as BlackBerries in Hollywood. But it is nonetheless something of a crime.

It’s hard to emerge from “Into Darkness” without a feeling of disappointment, even betrayal.

This mishmash of emotional tones can't be redeemed by the performers' considerable investment in their work.

For all that abundance, something is missing. A lot of things, really, but mostly a strong idea and a credible reason for existing.