Betsy Sharkey

The two-plus hours is mostly marked by an emptiness born of scene after scene designed to blatantly manipulate emotions rather than trigger them.

Get Hard... is certainly a better name than, say, Laugh Hard, which you won't do nearly enough.

I know it's early, but Seventh Son may actually be the worst movie of the year. It will most certainly be a contender. The medieval/fantasy/action/drama/romance hits pretty close to a perfect 10 on the egregious scale.

The look of the animation has limited charm. The story is primarily a string of life lessons for little ones, impossible to miss. And there is a great deal of singing. I don't think even fools will fall in love with Strange Magic.

This time around the dramatics and dialogue are so laugh-out-loud funny that if there is a "4" — despite the promises that "3" is the final chapter — maybe it should be a straight-out satire.

Director Will Gluck's glam, grim re-imagining of the Depression-era musical about the hard-hearted rich man and the little girl who melts him, is truly depressing.

A few steps further and Reitman might have turned Men, Women & Children into parody — at least that might have made for some laughs.

Little more than torture porn tricked out in art-house finery. That is the bigger crime here.

Mostly, the movie swings wildly between mania when Hart is on-screen and relative serenity when he's not. It gives the film a multiple-personality feel that does not work in its favor.

The Moment is a psychological thriller more muddled than the mind and the maze it is caught up in.

It is difficult to tell whether the filmmakers intended Welcome to the Jungle as a satire or a farce. It is neither funny enough, nor clever enough, to measure up in either case.

The laughs here are lazy, and any sense of logic is definitely on the lam.

For cheap thrills, Nothing Left to Fear is true to its title. Director Anthony Leonardi III and writer Jonathan Mills have let not one scary moment on screen.

I'm not going to get into the acting, because there's not much of it, frankly. No one is embarrassingly bad; no one is exceptionally good.

The Danish filmmaker's latest theater of the macabre is brutal, bloody, saturated with revenge, sex and death, yet stunningly devoid of meaning, purpose, emotion or decent lighting. Seriously. Artful shadows can certainly set a mood; too many and it merely looks like someone is trying too hard.

The script has no nuance, none. And when Shyamalan moves into the director's chair, the script problems are magnified. Everything is spelled out, underlined in red.

Chow is actually an apt metaphor for the movie - indescribably irritating and only in it for the money.

The English Teacher is a tragedy masquerading as a comedy and doing a disservice to both.

To be fair, there are moments that earn their laughs and nostalgic memories for the marriage that was and the relationship that is that are sweet. But like many big weddings — a lot of things go wrong and not much goes right.

The story goes slack onscreen, so much so that the movie's two-plus hours will seem an eternity.

Inescapable is like "Taken" without the tension.

This sloppy sentimental journey is long on beauty shots, short on depth and seriously intent on tugging your heartstrings. Indeed, it demands you reach for those tissues. Sob.

The best of the Alex Cross mess suggests that as an actor, he has the talent to move beyond the world of Madea should he want to. He just needs to look for much better material.

I fear the furry singing sensations may have finally run completely aground. If only they were truly stranded on that desert island…

I'm going with the filmmakers as the folks most responsible for perpetrating this terribly unfunny and overwhelmingly raunchy film that stars the normally likable, or at least comically forgivable, Jonah Hill. He is neither here.

The barbs feel stale at best, squandered at worst, and the ominous music that accompanies each sounds as if it has been lifted from the silent movie era.

A not very good romantic comedy made somewhat bearable by Faris.

This animated-live action hybrid is really more 3-D disaster than family comedy. Even Neil Patrick Harris, who has proved he can save just about any sinking ship, cannot make this boat float.

Meanwhile, Mirren, that grande dame of cinema, just seems tired. And who could blame her? She's in the midst of this disaster, literally and figuratively dying right in front of us. Made me want to cry, just not for Arthur.

It is incredibly tempting to resort to the implied off-color word play made possible by the Focker name and suggest that this third edition is totally - but I won't.

Grant has never been less charming and Parker never less fashionable or more grating than they are as Paul and Meryl Morgan.

What are in very short supply, though, are the central chords of Dickens' carol: Crachit's generous spirit, Tiny Tim's sad plight, Scrooge's emotional arc as he finds his humanity. Oh, the scenes are there amid the action, but they are fleeting. By the time A Christmas Carol finishes piling its many shiny presents with their many bells and whistles under the tree, there's no room left for tears for Tiny Tim. Bah humbug indeed.

Female sexuality has evolved into pure evil here with Von Trier looking ever so much like the Marquis de Sade of filmmaking.

Did I mention the dialogue? Well, really the armored car driver put it best when he said, "We're in trouble here…" No joke.

Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not. So what does that leave Nine with? Well not much.

What the plot doesn't decimate, the film's slower-than-a-clogged-drain pacing does. Sadly, this is one box that's just not worth picking up off the porch, much less opening, not even for a million dollars.