Barbara VanDenburgh

Redemption doesn’t have the chutzpah to let loose and be as dumb as it needs to be, so it instead bores the audience comatose with long stretches of sad-face Statham putzing around an apartment to justify the too-brief bursts of giddy bone-breaking.

Austenland plays out like an overly elaborate excuse to have people act silly in corsets and bloomers.

The film is packed with moments of rank idiocy.

Its real accomplishment is that, with so much money behind it and a true visionary at the helm, it manages to feel so dated.

Breaking In is a shallow nod to female empowerment, not the embodiment of it.

Despite its familiarity, A Bad Moms Christmas is a touch better than the first bacchanal.

If you’re just going to rip off the action movies of yore, why not rip off more of the good stuff?

It fails to offer as single compelling character as a sacrifice to the angry volcano.

There are brief bursts of hilarity, and they are all, without exception, owed to McCarthy’s innate charisma and comedic timing.

It’s a juicy story squandered by the poor telling. It’s got all the trappings of a good ol’-fashioned Merchant Ivory pic — lush locales, exotic period trappings — but none of the soul.

The laughs don’t add up. There’s no dramatic arc. Jackie doesn’t grow or learn from his downfall, so much as bumble his way out of it to an unsatisfying conclusion.

This fully animated reboot embraces the Smurfs Saturday-morning-cartoon roots and creates a sprightly, brightly colored, age-appropriate adventure for young children fresh to the little blue woodland creatures.

Aside from Dance and some hazy views of impaled bodies, the film is low on shock and gore. It's aiming more for sweeping historical epic, but it doesn't work on either level.

It’s all joyous silliness, as a My Little Pony movie should be, packed with clean humor and pony puns.

Inexpert execution, lazy attention to detail and a lackluster lead performance conspire to render a juicy mystery rather boring.

The film ricochets between Tammy being an oblivious cartoon goblin and a textured, sympathetic human being who just wants to be loved. Perhaps if the film had catered a little less to McCarthy's comedic gifts — the curse-word fugue states, the slapstick humor, the non sequiturs — the end result would have felt more balanced and rewarding.

There’s daring in the film’s slow unfurling. The problem, though, isn’t one of patience but of payoff. Woodshock is beautiful but it’s all chassis, a root-dead tree that crumbles beneath the ax.

The characters aren’t the only things painted in broad strokes. Sweetwater is rife with gauche symbolism and imagery.

Nothing fresh is being brought to the table, but it's a sufficient bit of fun for anyone who longs for the days of Brosnan's spy swagger.

It's the PG-13 version of "The Hangover," and more than anything, that's just boring.

For a film that purports to love dinosaurs, this bigger, flashier Walking With Dinosaurs sure doesn’t trust them to be interesting enough to carry five minutes of a movie without the copious aid of slapstick and bathroom humor in a screenplay so rote it makes creatures that have been dead for 65 million years feel less fossilized than the jokes.

When all the parts are sewn together, the end result proves as crude and slapdash as the monster itself.

For a movie filled with amateur porn, sex toys, cocaine and Cameron Diaz's butt, "Sex Tape" is awfully tame. You're in greater danger of taking a nap than needing a safe word.

Another entry in a long line of good video games adapted into terrible movies, Assassin’s Creed is ragingly stupid. That its incoherent plotline is treated with the utmost reverence by skilled thespians only brings its idiocy into sharper relief.

The Kitchen requires Scorsese levels of charisma to work, and only McCarthy comes close out of sheer professionalism.

Director and co-writer Jeremy Garelick doesn't even reach high enough to pick the low-hanging fruit, opting instead to gather half-rotted, fly-infested jokes off the ground and expect Kevin Hart to make them funny by virtue of being Kevin Hart. Only grudgingly will I acknowledge that he sometimes does.

There's nothing surprising or fresh about these people, their problems or their pairing, each character fitting snugly into his or her familiar archetype.

It wouldn’t make the movie good, but at least a meteor strike would preclude the possibility of a sixth “Ice Age” film.