A.O. Scott

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.

The overall mood is of warm reassurance, and some of it is even pretty funny.

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.

Sitting through the accomplished but meaningless Black Hawk Down is like being trapped in an action film version of "Groundhog Day," condemned to sit through the same carnage over and over.

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.

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.

It wants to be fun and, to a perhaps surprising extent, it is. Largely forsaking the sweet multiculturalism of the original for white-dude bromance, and completely abandoning earnest teenagers-in-crisis melodrama in favor of crude, aggressive comedy, this 21 Jump Street is an example of how formula-driven entertainment can succeed.

The look, the rhythm and the scruffy, on-the-fly ambience of the film make it feel unusually fresh and lively. It may be the same old song, but it's also a catchy remix.

The most floridly enjoyable voices belong to Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, last seen together speaking Brooklynese in “The Drop.” In that film, Mr. Hardy dropped his r’s like a champ. Here he lands heavily on the aitches and contracts the words “it is” into the letter Z. “Zimpossible,” he says. “Zdifficult.” As for Child 44: Znot too terrible, but znothing great, either.

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

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

First Sunday sometimes feels more like a script read-through than like an actual movie, but its warmth is likely to carry you through the stretches of cliché and tedium.

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.

Manages to be fairly entertaining in that exhausting, rackety, late-summer-kiddie-movie way.

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.

The intentionally self-conscious style of R2PC is a little hard to take sometimes because the movie is trying too hard to be funny.

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.

Refreshingly tart and lean, forgoing the usual schmaltz and syrup.

Hop is innocuous, though occasionally annoying and also, less expectedly, occasionally funny. Both types of occasions are mostly provided by Russell Brand, who specializes in collapsing the distinction between the exasperatingly silly and the charmingly naughty.

The considerable wit, style, and skill that Mr. Nighy and Ms. Blunt bring to the project are squandered.

If you found "Benji the Hunted" unbearably intense or "Marley & Me" a bit too hard-edged, then Darling Companion may be the dog movie for you. On the other hand, if you like to watch cute pooches doing cute stuff on screen, you may be a little disappointed.

Has the sleepy feel of an urban fairy tale, but getting there is a long trip.

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.

Extremely enjoyable, though a few degrees shy of perfection.

You occasionally sense the presence of an interesting movie struggling to get out of this hyperactive action comedy — or even just a better Tim Story action comedy, something like “Ride Along” or “Ride Along 2.”

Suicide Squad is a so-so, off-peak superhero movie. It chases after the nihilistic swagger of “Deadpool” and the anarchic whimsy of “Guardians of the Galaxy” but trips over its own feet.

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.

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.

By any reasonable standard, 3 Days to Kill is a terrible movie: incoherent, crudely brutal, dumbly retrograde in its geo- and gender politics. But it is also, as much because of as in spite of these failings, kind of fun.

What makes the movie interesting — and disturbing on a few different levels — is how its sentimental, inspirational elements do battle with darker impulses.

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.

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.

It's hard to be drawn into a movie if you're never entirely sure what it's supposed to be about, other than about 100 minutes.

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.

It's empty calories trying to trumpet its bogus nutritional value, and the strain for social importance undermines the picture.

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.

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

Mr. Singh may have an artist's temperament, and he shows signs of being a director

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.

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.

Brawny, dumb and preposterous, it nonetheless comes tantalizingly close to being a high-impact allegory of race, class and real estate in a postindustrial, new-Gilded Age America.

It's one of the rare films for which a blooper reel would be redundant.

What Perry lacks in filmmaking rigor — like its predecessors, “Family Funeral” is a bit of a mess, formally and technically — he makes up for in generosity. The movie is the usual plateful of low humor and high melodrama, in no particular hurry to make its way through a busy plot.

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

High-school cafeteria soup has more flavor than this bland, tepid throwback.

An energetic, unpretentious B movie — the kind best seen at a drive-in like the one in an early scene — it is devoted, above all, to the delivery of visceral, kinetic excitement.

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.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but in general when the main character, sometime in the third act, says, “I did some bad things ... ” and stares off into the middle distance, the implied end of the sentence is “including this movie.”

You can't get more high-concept, or less plotted, than this, and Daddy Day Care is proof.

So campy it reflexively sends an elbow to its own ribs.

Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment.

Loads of fun. It has a jamming B-picture buzz -- the kind of swift filmmaking and high spirits that have been missing from movies for a while.

More silly than scary. This doesn’t seem to be entirely intentional, and it isn’t altogether unwelcome.

Its intentions are, to some degree, corrective: It mocks some of the popular corruptions of faith so as to invite the audience to reflect upon what real faith might be.

If realism is what you're after, you'll do better at "The Three Stooges." The Lucky One is where you will find death, redemption and kisses in the rain.

A clumsy and confused adaptation of Michael Chabon's 1988 novel.

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.

The idea of confronting an unknown second self is full of rich, uncanny potential — there’s a literary tradition going back at least to Edgar Allan Poe — but Gemini Man squanders it, along with what might have been two interesting performances.

Serves a reheated notion on a creaky TV tray.

Raunchier and somewhat more imaginative than “Hot Rod.”

Primarily a riveting genre film that neatly exhibits the director's growing assurance -- Donald Goines would be proud.

The movie is a bust, and, as usual in these situations, it is easier to say how than why, and best to say as little as possible, cut one's losses and move on.

Half a movie at best. The broad humor at times derails Mr. Murphy's performances, but the movie provides a vehicle for him to display his reach.

There are a few laughs, but I'm not sure that a comedy is supposed to make you recoil, which is what "Smoochy" does.

Veering between alarmism and cautious reassurance — between technohysteria and shrugging, nothing-new-under-the-sun resignation — Men, Women & Children succumbs to the confusion it tries to illuminate.

This is a very crowded movie — so many species of dinosaur, and I’m so bad at keeping track of them that my 8-year-old-self is no longer speaking to me. They are variously menacing, ravenous, bizarre and kind of cute, but the frenzied live-action and digital special effects rarely produce moments of Spielbergian awe.

One of the things that makes Adore, which was written by Christopher Hampton, hard to take seriously is how seriously it takes itself, how utterly purged of humor or credible human complication the drama at its center turns out to be.

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

The scandal of Mr. Clark’s more recent movies, including “Wassup Rockers” and “Ken Park” and this new one, resides more in its tedium and lack of insight than its strenuously provocative content.

Like its source material, Baywatch is sleazy and wholesome, silly and earnest, dumb as a box of sand and slyly self-aware. It’s soft-serve ice cream. Crinkle-cut fries. A hot car and a skin rash. Tacky and phony and nasty and also kind of fun.

This dumb, only intermittently (though sometimes even intentionally) funny sequel presumes that since almost everything else from the 1980's has come back, why not the cynosures of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th" movies?

The film is more of a pageant than a convincing drama. It’s so determined to deliver its moral that it loses its grip on the reality of its characters.

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

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

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

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

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.

It is in the fragile bonds that form between the black soldiers and the Italian villagers that Miracle at St. Anna breaks free of its own grandiosity and tells a grounded, moving, human story. Not a miracle by any means, but an earthy inquiry into death, duty, friendship and honor. What we’ve always wanted from war movies.

Like many of the nonpolitical terrorist-as-villain spectaculars that have been held back after Sept. 11, has the whiff of something gone stale. Though it may have sat on the shelf for a while, this project had gone bad long before it was released.

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

Nothing in the picture works. It is both overwrought and tedious, its complicated narrative bogging down in lyrical voiceover, long flashbacks and endless expository conversations between people speaking radically incompatible accents.

While I can’t exactly say that the movie cheered me up, it did give me something I needed. Not catharsis or uplift but a bracing dose of profane, sloppy, reasonably well-directed hostility. We take what we can get.

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.

As it lurches from Act II to Act III, Battle: Loss Angeles reveals itself to be a lousy movie.

This movie sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity.

The most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made.

The star does his patented shtick, supported by a handful of blue-chip supporting performers, as the story lurches through contrived, seminaughty comic set pieces toward a sentimental ending.

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

A smorgasbord that seems to have been picked out of a Dumpster. It clumsily combines a fish-out-of-water story with bits lifted from sources including the "Terminator" movies, "Star Wars," "Starman," "Close Encounters," a couple of Pink Floyd albums and H. G. Wells.

There is also much in The Art of Getting By that is worth praising, and if you can grade on a curve - setting the standard at "The Wackness" rather than "The Squid and the Whale" - you may find yourself touched, tickled and occasionally surprised.

The main reason that Sex Tape, while often quite funny, fails to qualify as a comedy is the absence of any real conflict or complication.

The dominant emotion in Pan is the desperation of the filmmakers, who frantically try to pander to a young audience they don’t seem to respect, understand or trust.

This mistaken-identity picture is so film-culture referential that the final product is a ghost.

It feels like a halfhearted bluff and has the stale smell of yesterday’s after-shave.

Almost creates a sense of dread as you sit watching its raft of aimless, self-absorbed neurotics clang into one another.

Stardom makes its metaphor of 15 minutes seem like a lifetime.

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.

Summer is like an episode of the religious children's series "Davey and Goliath," without the entertainment value of animation and a talking dog.

More abrasively quirky than a lesser Bjork B-side, though the hideous monster who co-stars hails from Iceland, too.

Like its title, it's a clumsy contraption.

Its badness is not extreme, but exemplary: It’s everything wrong with Hollywood today stuffed into a little less than two hours.

As the plot swerves toward an almost crazy conclusion, there is the inkling of a strong, interesting idea here, about how some versions of modern religion are predicated on the systematic denial of reality, but Salvation Boulevard is itself too loosely tethered to the actual world to make the point with the necessary vigor or acuity.

Comedy is in a weird place right now, and The Hustle deserves some credit for fulfilling its own modest, escapist ambitions. Unlike a lot of what we see these days, in movies and elsewhere, it doesn’t feel like a rip-off or a scam. It’s downright innocent.

This new version is mindless hot-rodding fun, especially for those with a weakness for vintage cars hurtling down city streets, a group whose members include -- sigh -- me.

Like a zombie picture directed by one of the undead.

So disorganized that it seems to be pulling its conclusions out of its pockets, along with scraps of paper, matches, lint and half-forgotten junk.

It’s moderately entertaining and instantly forgettable. Poor Freddy. I can’t help thinking he deserves better.

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.

The trouble with movies like those in the "Friday" series is that their success can lead to a need to inflate their importance, inviting pretentious descriptions like "folkloric" when "Friday" is much closer to chitlin circuit comedy.

Even the handful of moments that are amusing feel recycled from old sketches of Mr. Murphy's.

[An] entirely preposterous, not entirely unenjoyable movie.

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.

Whatever thoughtful instincts Mr. Castellitto might possess are undermined by his addiction to cinematic prettiness.

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

Sleepless, directed by Baran bo Odar, sets a low bar for itself, and then trips over it.

By the end the most vivid figure on the screen is the lovable doggie who goes wherever dangling fingers are waiting to give the happy pooch a scratch.

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

The film equivalent of the dark, boring period on a haunted house ride before the gondola crashes into another room filled with dirty mirrors.

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

Wears its preposterousness with a certain pride. It’s about the cat-and-mouse game between two very smart guys, and it’s perfectly happy to be as dumb as it wants.

Blends the least of Woody Allen with a plot complication out of "Love, American Style," stuck together with sitcom glue.

Has shockingly little to say.

If you're looking for laughs, give "Valley of the Dolls" another read instead.

You might be tempted to say, "Huh?" Or, if you're in the theater, to leave. But wait -- there's less.

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.

Has the dreary one-track banality of a feature-length version of an episode of "Red Shoe Diaries," Showtime's series for people who like soft core but are too lazy to leave the house.

Dreary.

The “Mummy” reboot from 1999, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess.

Manages to squeeze in several different endings — like a bad pop song that doesn't know when to fade out. But as Mr. Schwarzenegger's stature as an action figure diminishes, his effort to retain a piece of the market is touching.

Sitting through the lavish and dumb action spectacular Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is about as much fun as watching someone else play a video game.

Mr. Bader was lucky to get a good cast.

For myself, I was but seldom inspired to peals of true laughter, though I did relish that part when Mr. Black, confronting a fire raging in the Palace of Lilliput, douses the blaze through heroic use of such means as Nature has provided him.

There is nothing here to enjoy, beyond the tiny satisfaction in noting that the movie lives up to its name.

A movie that is as stuffed with bogus feeling and overwrought incident as a fast-food burrito.

The cast would have been better served by a middle school production overseen by a creatively frustrated, inappropriately ambitious drama teacher than by this hacky, borderline-incompetent production, which was directed by Will Gluck from a screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna.

No real mockery is intended by this harmless, mindless grab bag of slightly used gags, which lampoons some of the conventions of recent comic-book epics and adds the expected staples of juvenile humor: urine, vomit and intestinal gas.

Everything in this film is forgettable, right down to bongos pounding on the soundtrack to indicate a quickening of the pulse.

May lead to a new axiom: success has many fathers, but failure has "Project Greenlight."

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.

Fitfully amusing.

Someone put together a listicle! That’s the kind of criticism this brand was made for.

What makes Leap Year so singularly dispiriting is precisely that it is bad without distinction -- so witless, charmless and unimaginative that it can be described as a movie only in a strictly technical sense.

After about 20 minutes of "Thing," a concussion begins to look enormously appealing.

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.

This franchise is lucky to have Kevin Hart in that role, and his manic comic energy is enough to make the sequel something other than a complete waste of time. But the genre is also stubbornly innovation-proof, and there’s not much new to see here.

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.

Drab and incoherent teen comedy.

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.

Passion is often sleek and enjoyable, dispensing titillation, suspense and a few laughs without taking itself too seriously.

Strands one of the most gifted casts assembled in some time. Sadly, though many of the actors throw off a spark or two when they first appear, they can't generate enough heat in this cold vacuum of a comedy to start a reaction.

The problem with the baroque and overripe Tattoo Bar is that everybody has a past. And there's so much crosscutting to those pasts in flashbacks, it's hard to keep track of whose past you're witnessing.

Steve Jobs is a rich and potent document of the times, an expression of both the awe that attends sophisticated new consumer goods and the unease that trails in the wake of their arrival.... Mostly, though, it is a formally audacious, intellectually energized entertainment, a powerful challenge to the lazy conventions of Hollywood storytelling and a feast for connoisseurs of contemporary screen acting.

All hope is lost for those trapped in theaters with this picture.

Hallie's dad said it was Rocky Horror for toddlers whatever that is. Me and Hallie are 7 and we thought it was for babies.

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."

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.

Max’s righteous anger finds various allies and targets, though it is not always clear who is which. They are played by Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges and Ludacris with just enough panache and expressiveness to uphold the (increasingly irrelevant) distinction between a movie and a video game.

A weak-witted comedy.

Pootie Tang may be raw and slovenly -- hey, it often is raw and slovenly -- but it succeeds as a laugh getter because of the spot-on satirical notes. You might say that the movie walks it like it talks it; I'm not sure what Pootie would say.

Engrossing and at times impressive, a pretty good movie that is disappointing to the extent that it could have been great. Is this the way the world ends? With polite applause?

Most of Blended has the look and pacing of a three-camera sitcom filmed by a bunch of eighth graders and conceived by their less bright classmates. Shots don’t match. Jokes misfire. Gags that are visible from a mile away fail to deliver.

While a movie that fails to catch fire is disappointing, there is something even more dispiriting about a movie that doesn’t even bother to try, that tosses its stars a soggy book of matches and expects them to generate a spark.

It’s a phoned-in, gutless piece of hack work that reminds you of other, better films in the same vein.

Tries to show it has its heart in the right place, but it's such a crude undertaking that it doesn't actually seem to have a heart at all.

A thin line separates the magical from the preposterous, and by insisting so strenuously on its own magic, Winter’s Tale pitches helplessly into earnest ridiculousness.

Does it have to be so witless, so stupid, so openly contemptuous of the very audience it’s supposed to be pandering to?

There is no story to speak of. Just a series of anecdotes that gain very little when acted out on screen.

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.

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.

Has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's dreary, yet frantic.

"Queen" is a movie that stoops to jokes like calling Lestat's CD "a monster hit"; the movie is just a plain old monster.

Coasts to a smooth, frictionless stop, but its star doesn't; he works as if his career depended on this movie.

So lacking in shame that it finally seems laughable.

It is a dark, startlingly bloody journey into the bitter, empty, broken heart of the American middle class, a blend of farce and satire built on a foundation of social despair.

A washout.

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.

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

A desperate, broad comedy.

The picture is so predictable that the bad acting becomes a distraction.

All it has in common with the original is a few dumb fun scares. In the new version, what we're left with after the scares is just plain dumb.

Backstage isn't as good as the rap documentaries "Rhyme and Reason" and "The Show," but it still casts a keen, observant eye...on this world.

This crude comedy delivers on the "No Shame, No Mercy" threats from the original. Unfortunately, it all adds up to "No Good."

Will Finn and Tess find the treasure before the bad guys? Will they put aside their differences and rekindle their love? Yes to both questions! I haven’t spoiled anything, by the way. But perhaps I’ve saved you some trouble.

Everything that made the first “Die Hard” memorable — the nuances of character, the political subtext, the cowboy wit — has been dumbed down or scrubbed away entirely.

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."

As good as cut-rate animation that seems to consist of screen savers can be.

Could serve as a textbook example of what to avoid in nonfiction filmmaking.

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 documentary doesn't get near the prowess of its subject; it passes through your life like a minor daydream.

Ms. Mort’s writing lacks psychological texture, and her direction generates little intensity, or even continuity.

What holds this patchwork of naughtiness together is some pretty threadbare cloth.

The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.

The most indolent waste of screen time since Andy Warhol's marathon shot of the Empire State Building.

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.

The outtakes are not all that great but still better than anything else in the movie.

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

A witless, straining mess.

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.

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.

This Fantastic Four, directed by Josh Trank from a script he wrote with Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, feels less like a tale of superhero beginnings than like a very long precredit opening sequence.

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.

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

The worst that can be said of the first two-thirds of Tideland is that it is tiresome. Toward the end it becomes creepy, and not in a good way.

A mellow dream of a movie that's an acquired taste. It's attractive because of the oblique way that Mr. Wenders ambles through a murder mystery that's stronger on characterization than on plot.

Still never having to say you're sorry.

It's an interesting, maddening mess -- not a terrible movie, and by no means a dull one.

The only thing that kept me watching License to Wed until the end (apart from being paid to do so) was the faith, perhaps misplaced, that I will not see a worse movie this year.

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.

A dreary crash of malapropisms and slapstick maimings wrapped very loosely around a murder mystery.

There are dull stabs at verbal wit that leave you baffled, bored or slightly grossed out.

A shell game passing as entertainment.

A bad-taste comedy with a heart.

At least it isn't a remake -- though given how slovenly and forced this movie is, maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad idea.

Couldn't be more artless.

So minimally plotted that not only does it lack subtext or context, but it also may be the world's first movie without even a text.

Mr. Deeds is mostly terrible, a shambles of a comedy that looks as if it was shot by a tabloid news crew.

The picture, which fails to achieve its ambitions or to fulfill our expectations, is ultimately worse than a violent piece of hack work, in which the director isn't interested in displaying his integrity -- or taste. You'd be better off downloading the trailer: a much more convincing piece of storytelling.

The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

There are a few funny moments in Jack and Jill, most of them celebrity cameos that also serve to affirm what a cool, connected celebrity Mr. Sandler is. The most sustained of these is the appearance of Al Pacino as himself, falling for Jill and giving the film a jolt of genuine zaniness. I'm sorry to say that this may be Mr. Pacino's most convincing performance in years.

An R-rated version of this mess would be only more gratingly dishonest as it tried to hide its weak sentimentality behind a fig leaf of vulgarity.

After several scenes of this tacky nonsense, you'll be wistful for the testosterone-charged wizardry of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, especially because Half Past Dead is like "The Rock" on a Wal-Mart budget. And the marked-down price tags are incredibly visible.

Festooned with yards of gross-out jokes, sniggering allusions and, astonishingly, a sentimental climax that's more repellent than any of the crude effluvia the film is drenched with.

For his sins poor Stewart is kidnapped, tortured and shot up with horse tranquilizer after his leg is broken. It’s disturbing, and somewhat baffling too, until you grasp that this hapless sucker is a surrogate for the audience.

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.

An attempt to inaugurate a new movie franchise, something that might appeal to women and mystery fans. This is a perfectly sound ambition, but the movie, directed by Julie Anne Robinson from a script by Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius, is so weary and uninspired that it feels more like an exhausted end than an energetic beginning.

Mr. Law doesn't disgrace himself here, though he doesn't have much to do, and the director, Po Chih Leong, is deft at creating atmosphere, but it's an atmosphere we've all seen before.

If the film were a fight, they'd have stopped it.

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

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.

In spite of the charm and discipline of the stars, the jokes misfire and the scenes creak and stumble.

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.

The action is the best thing in the picture.

This bloated spectacle has all the get-up-and-go of one of the legendary late-era Elvis Presley concerts. The picture feels longer than Presley's career and as irrelevant as he was by the end.

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.

Like a soft drink that's been sitting open too long: it's too much syrup and not enough fizz.

The problem -- the catastrophe -- of The Last Airbender is not in the conception but the execution. The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there.

Relentlessly softheaded and softhearted.

Rarely has a movie worked so hard to be so inconsequential.

Mr. Baldwin's attack -- there's no better way to put it -- is unforgettable. He's the first shrunken narrator with a serial killer's swagger.

The main audience for this dim little sex comedy has no particular interest in seeing Ms. Alba act. They want to see her in her underwear and also to confront one of the central cultural questions of our time: will she take her top off?

The film isn't even as good as the second-rate game it is based on, which is nothing but a shootout.

It feels like both a joke and a turkey.

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.

If Boat Trip were screened on a cruise ship, most of the passengers would be dog-paddling back to shore.

Ops is too brain-dead to play the incognito war criminal segment for comedy, although when Will is seen thumbing through the pages of a newspaper called USA Daily, the picture has inadvertently tumbled down a Mad magazine wormhole.

A supernatural soap opera.

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.

It's the central story that's lacking.

The current version, however, like its predecessor, fails as entertainment. Mr. McTiernan's remake may be lighter on its feet -- the sober-minded original was as graceful as a tap-dancing rhino -- but it is just as boring and as obvious.

The only people who could be surprised at this movie will be those who wandered into the wrong multiplex theater by mistake.

The movie's comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant.

A film so family-safe it feels sheathed in plastic Bubble Wrap. Unfortunately, it's not even as much fun as popping the bubbles. It doesn't matter that the film is less than 90 minutes. It still feels like a prison stretch.

It's an oddity that will be avoided by millions of people, this new Pinocchio. Osama bin Laden could attend a showing in Times Square and be confident of remaining hidden.

This may be the worst movie Pauly Shore has ever been in. Think about that.

It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.

After a while the humorless solemnity of The Rocket stifles any interesting sense of Maurice Richard as a character. The hockey sequences are nicely done, though, and give a reasonably good sense of what a great player he was.

Has a lovely, unadorned, though distended sentimentality.

What makes Le Amiche so bracing -- so sad and, sometimes, so funny -- is that its heroines are fallible, flawed, vain and powerful, each in her own way. They often make one another miserable, but their company is always a pleasure.

Max et les Ferrailleurs, adapted from a novel by Claude Néron, has the matter-of-fact look and careful pace of a precinct-house procedural.

What you see is the intensity of rock 'n' roll at a time when it still felt risky and thrilling.

Heartbreaking and thought-provoking, Mille Soleils traces connections between Senegal’s past and present, and reflects on a cinematic legacy that remains insufficiently appreciated, in the West and perhaps also in Africa.

There are creatures fished out of formaldehyde, volumes flecked with rot, birds that have been hollowed out and stuffed, household tools battered beyond recognition. The effect of seeing all this is certainly haunting, but too beautiful to be morbid.

Mr. Marcello tells a simple, touching tale that seems to contain a whole cosmos of meaning.

There is something about the film’s brazen mixing of incompatible elements that defies categorization, imitation or even sober critical assessment. It’s anarchic and rigorous, sophisticated and goofy, heartfelt and cynical. The score, by Ennio Morricone, is as mellow as wine. The action is raw, nasty and blood-soaked. The story is preposterous, the politics sincere.

It was clearly made with slender financial means and abundant enthusiasm, and it functions simultaneously as a critique of the self-serious idiocy of authority and a celebration of the anarchic power of imagination.

The director, Ivaylo Hristov, is adept at slow-burning suspense and comic misdirection.

Its criticisms of patriarchal authority, bureaucratic corruption and superstition in rural India are sharp and unsparing, but its political themes are embedded in a humanism that is at once expansive and specific. The characters don’t deliver a message; their lives are the message.