Betsy Sharkey

The problem with It's Complicated, a romantic comedy about the menopausal crowd starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, is that it's not nearly complicated enough.

When the movie should touch the heart, it just misses. When moments should produce gales of laughter, it struggles for a smile. When panic and fear should set the heart racing, it doesn't.

Lonergan has created a forceful yet extremely fitful film that teases with moments of brilliance only to frustrate in the end. Margaret is an unrealized dream, one you wish he'd gotten as right as his 2000 debut, "You Can Count on Me."

The look helps provide a little subtext, but not enough. For such an emotional piece, the dialogue stays too close to the surface. More problematic, the trio's encounters feel contrived; you can see the filmmaker's hand staging each one.

Lost is the fresh, perverse, painfully politically incorrect R-rated pleasure that came when "The Hangover" ate up the summer of 2009.

An old-style potboiler about desperate cops in dire straits that overcooks both its story and its stars.

Make no mistake, despite some well-earned laughs, "Horrible Bosses 2" is not what qualifies as a good movie or even a particularly good R-rated comedy. But there is more to laugh at in "2" than the first, so let's go with less horrible, shall we?

The good thing about All Good Things - that would be Kirsten Dunst, for if there is one thing this strange and creepy film does well it is remind us of just what a talented actress she is.

Although the movie isn't a complete disaster, it's not your father's RoboCop either.

Oh, there are sword fights aplenty (as bloodless as ever), but instead of a real story, we are left clinging to individual moments.

MacFarlane is a very funny dude, and there are times A Million Ways to Die is indeed funny. But too often the movie feels half-baked.

Filled with unrealized possibilities and fraught with flaws, Final Destination seems destined to be little more than a footnote in the anthology of extraordinary films to come out of the long creative collaboration between producer Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Brolin's intermittent voice-over narration proves to be the most powerful stuff, with the rest curiously sputtering.

Beautifully envisioned, badly constructed, the only truly terrifying things in the new horror movie Mama are the fake tattoos, short black hair and black T-shirts meant to turn "Zero Dark Thirty" star Jessica Chastain into a guitar-shredding, punk rocker chick.

Thanks for Sharing is a bit like the recovery scene it digs into — filled with intoxicating highs and dispiriting lows.

Far too conventional underneath all the trappings, you wish it would howl.

If you can get past the gross invasion of privacy issues that would exist if this were real life and not just a frothy confection, what you have is some bittersweet fun peppered by bursts of sharp patter, the best between the boys.

At best, the jokey bits are occasionally funny.

The movie version of karaoke. It sings the same tune as the 2007 British underground hit, but it's a little, and at times a lot, off-key.

The movie has a few bursts of energy and invention — a cleverly executed jailbreak is one. But the story drifts and the pacing drags, failing to gather much steam until the final moments.

The man was not, by most accounts, pedestrian. In trying to follow so closely in his footsteps, the film, however, is.

New players, a new story line, a new director and nearly three decades of improved technology including all the whiz-bang-wow the latest 3-D has to offer. Unfortunately, there's not nearly enough new life.

That sense of extreme, excess, over-the-top everything is there from start to finish. And isn't that what Bay fans count on even at cut-rate prices?

The veteran Marshall has proved a quick study, serving up the pastiche with panache so the stars mostly shine, the story snippets mostly amuse and you'll barely notice all the empty spots where a plot used to be.

With Snow Flower, the filmmaker is forever torn between two childhoods, two adulthoods, two distinct political and social eras, and two complex relationships, unable to make both equally relevant.

Though the film is peppered with one-liners tailor-made for Spacey to sling with stinging effect, it doesn't so much leave you laughing as just weary, and wishing this weren't a true story at all.

On the surface, Anderson seems to have all the necessary pieces for a surreal psycho pop. But the fear factor eludes him, leaving Stonehearst Asylum more insipid than insane.

Any comic relief it affords comes with such an undertow of repressed emotions and displaced anger that it all starts to feel more depressing than dramatic.

Sheridan seems as conflicted as the Cahills about their virtues and failings. The underlying themes -- love, loyalty, decency, duty, honor, betrayal -- that screenwriter David Benioff will use to both bind and break this family seem to bedevil him more than inspire him this time out.

Breathtaking moments give way to boring ones; searing emotions vie with the exceedingly bland.

This is Shakespeare lite, which ultimately makes for Shakespeare slightly trite.

By boiling too much down to black and white, Camp X-Ray's ability to say something significant is diluted.

Instead of a cautionary tale, they've looked at Flynn's life through rose-colored glasses.

Good stuff comes when bad stuff happens; that's when some of the movie animation prowess kicks into high gear. But too many of the "solutions" the guys concoct are so impossibly complex or just downright ridiculous — puppetry comes to mind — that like the continents, it's a little too easy to drift away.

The city's skyline is blown to bits. Burning, broken, blackened bits. So if that's what you're in the mood for, that is what the film delivers, endlessly, but in that cheesy-campy way that can make a bad movie good fun.

Sometimes the facts can get in the way of the drama, and that's the central problem here. That sense of needing to be true to the record is reflected in an overwhelmed screenplay.

Gorgeously shot, smartly conceived, cleverly cast, badly executed - the lush medieval beauty here is at best only skin deep.

FD 5 did not raise even a single goose bump - which for a movie that bills itself as horror is not a good thing. The camp factor, however, is high and makes the 95 minutes pretty much fly by.

A frustrating mix of smart flash and smirking impudence.

Romance, or the desire to find someone special, isn't a bad thing — if it's not the only thing. But as it stands in DUFF, the denouement at prom has cliché written all over it.

The pun is a gun for Penguins' writers. Not a sharpshooter rifle, but a machine gun that unloads a nonstop quip barrage, mowing down the real promise of this 3-D animation action comedy.

Paul Weitz has dialed things down considerably for Being Flynn, writing and directing with an earnest sensitivity that at times suits, at times undermines, the complexities of the story at hand.

What makes this intriguing, yet woefully uneven film so relatable is that there is nothing about Ned's experience that seems extreme.

Here that soul-baring, soul-searching is the centerpiece of the film. Unfortunately, not much else about Lola Versus matches that standard.

This is a disappointing turn coming from Phillips, particularly since "The Hangover" was such a fresh, bracing brew of black comic fun.

In Prince Dastan, he (Gyllenhaal) is supposed to be that heady mix of street smarts, roguish charm and barroom moxie with the noble heart of a lion underneath. It's a lot to ask and turns out to be something more than he can deliver.

Red 2 is much more of a mixed bag than it should have been.

That the plot is the problem comes as something of a surprise given Monahan's pedigree. The well-regarded screenwriter ("Body of Lies," "Kingdom of Heaven") won an Oscar for the deliciously conflicted cops and crime twister of 2006's "The Departed."

The plot is lean, the dialogue is spare and there are some intriguing stabs at intellectual and emotional terrain. But the pacing is deadly, so slow there might be time for a catnap or two without missing anything important.

Given all the impossible choices the young jockey had to face, The Cup should have been a weepie if ever there was one - but the filmmakers stumble on their way to the finish line.

The movie is not exactly a laugh riot. But its comedy is amiable enough — and surprisingly clean.

This drama, about an ordinary guy trying to keep his infant daughter alive in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, is sincere but struggles as much as its hero.

The laughs come easily, the screams not so much. It's as if the filmmakers got so wrapped up in the satire they forgot to include the intense sensation of rising dread that creates all the thrills and chills that are part of the attraction.

The writing-directing brothers are usually interested in the small stuff of everyday, but perhaps they've gone a little too small here.

In the end Anna Karenina lets you down - visually stunning, emotionally overwrought, beautifully acted, but not quite right.

Pattinson could have the makings of a brilliant career, something more than the hot streak he's got going as the "it" guy of the moment. The same problems plague the film, which is beautifully shot but its emotional potential unrealized.

Make no mistake, it is lovely to look at this celebrity bedazzled bit of L.A. crime history for a while. But the movie ultimately leaves you feeling as empty as the lives it means to portray.

The film's single saving grace is Turner, who channels that legendary Catholic guilt like there is no tomorrow.

Like Freeway, the lovable stray dog at the center of this very teary comedy, Darling Companion has lost its way. Even the marquee ensemble anchored by Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Kevin Kline and Richard Jenkins is not enough to rescue this motley mutt of a movie.

After scoring big in 1998 with "Mary" - the zipper issue, the "hair gel" mix-up, the roving troubadours - their (Farrelly brothers) raw inventive edge has never been quite as sharp. Hall Pass, starring Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis, continues that creative slide into everyday crude.

The satire is sagging, the irony's atrophied and the funny is flabby.

Despite the pretty overload and the smoldering blue-eyed handsome of Egglesfield, the heart-pounding, palm-sweating, heavy-breathing chemical reactions that should be causing major blackouts in Manhattan, where this story unfolds, are nowhere to be found.

Many of the transitions between narrative and music are rough. The temptations of the street, all too real in the real world, feel forced. Confrontations become clichés. The substance of human motivation is missing. And thus the heart never beats as it should.

It is a third man, a revolutionary, who nearly steals the show. Which might have been all right if writer-director Roland Joffé hadn't been so conflicted about whose story he wants to tell. But indecision can be deadly, and it proves to be here.

We're the Millers is full of moments that feel as forced as the marriage of convenience — and contrivance — in the movie.

The soul of the era is missing, and with it any reason to care. In Fleischer's hands, the high-stakes shootouts are as stylish as a GQ spread, but it's nearly impossible to figure out who's zoomin' who.

Really, truly, very scary … At least until about 30 minutes in, when you start to be distracted by the lack of logic in the storytelling and the fact that the nasty little gremlins responsible for all the bumps in the night can be offed pretty easily.

This is a movie that leaves you wanting more. To care more, to cry more, to love more.

Since it's a comedy, much could be forgiven if the film was consistent in generating laughs, but the comedy is as erratic as the couple's sex life.

Mostly Lockout is lost in space.