Bill Goodykoontz

There should be a sense of, yes, wonder at play at all times here. Too often “Alice Through the Looking Glass” feels like a slog through time.

Diggs does what he can with the part, as does Patton. There are some funny moments, because most of the cast is so charming. But not enough to make up for the Stone Age attitude about women and marriage.

The Possession of Michael King is more scary than original.

It’s not clear that the movie has anything to say, new or otherwise. . . . Other than that it’s just blood and guts, and lots of it.

The movie is much like its hero, Freddie — straightforward, sweet, hard-working and predictable.

There's far too much going on in Valentine's Day, and far too little of it is worth the trouble.

Ultimately, and perhaps most disappointingly, The Mummy winds up being not so much its own movie as what, by the end, feels like the first episode of a show that's already been renewed for several seasons. Because, in some respects, that's what it is.

This is a funny movie, in places.

There’s a freewheeling spirit to The Bubble that’s meant to reflect the times during which the film was made, but instead of creative forces finally unleashed it comes off as half-baked, more like a first draft than a finished film. Apatow knows comedy, and his intentions here are good. It’s just the movie that isn’t.

Jonah Hex somehow manages to waste the talents of Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a story that combines vengeance, the occult and an Old West war on terror (really).

The utter lack of surprises and waste of a first-rate cast — Anthony Hopkins as Alfred "Freddy" Heineken; Jim Sturgess and Sam Worthington as kidnappers — make for a tremendous letdown.

Let's just call "Allegiant" what it is: A way for the studio to make money and bring you back next year for the real finale. See you then. Maybe.

The cast is impressive, and again, Bridges is always a welcome presence.

A strong cast can't save Virginia.

It seems unfinished, choppy, the storytelling almost of the after-school special variety.

This is a horrible movie. Which makes it not a lot different from the first film.

Just Go with It provides not only the title of the film but a one-step instruction for how best to enjoy it.

The jolts are of the jump-out-from-behind-the-door variety; you can see them coming from a long way off, too. Shyamalan seems to no longer have the confidence to let audiences figure things out or the patience to allow them to.

There’s so much bouncing around in tone and story that this film never really finds its footing. It flounders around trying to figure out what it should be, and never really settles on anything.

A by-the-numbers romantic comedy as predictable as it is cloying.

There are few issues more bitterly divisive than abortion, with emotions and rhetoric running at fever pitch. October Baby is a faith-based movie that resides staunchly in the pro-life camp. Yet directors Andrew and Jon Erwin, who also contributed to the story, rarely let their film get didactic, instead going for a more low-key approach.

It's big, it's loud and it's all over the place, never really making a lick of sense. To his credit, sort of, director Michael Bay tries to insert a little story into the film early on, even a little humor, but that's overrun at some point by explosions and plot digressions.

One of the joys of a good Brian De Palma film is his willingness to go over the top. In a film that isn’t so good, that excess becomes a lot less enjoyable. And Passion isn’t so good.

Laughably bad dialogue and wooden acting.

What Boyle and Sorkin are after here is a portrait of Jobs, not a photograph. And they have succeeded in making one, in wildly entertaining fashion.

Writer and director Jeremy Leven’s film is meant to be a trifle, a status which it achieves, but it’s nothing more than that.

Unfinished Business is a jumble of half-baked ideas, none particularly interesting.

In Chernobyl Diaries, directed by Bradley Parker, stupidity is taken to extremes.

There's not a lot of humor here, just violence and more violence. The acting is fine enough - Whitaker, of the talented bunch, seems to be having the best time - but the slicing and dicing overpowers the cast, the story and everything else.

Johnson and Dornan retain the chemistry of two mannequins knocked into each other in a department-store storage closet; the actual sex scenes play more like aerobics videos than anything actually steamy.

Aside from the waste of talent, the frustrating thing about The Lazarus Effect is how it cheats. Good horror movies work on internal logic.

It's just kind of a mess, as unfocused and immature as the four mutant turtles at its core. Stuff happens, stuff blows up and this is probably a good time to mention that Michael Bay produced the film.

It's an ironclad rule for comedies: Stupid is fine, as long as it's funny. But if it's not? Well, then it's just . . . stupid.

Individually they are all good here, though Hardy's skills don't necessarily translate that well to romantic comedy -- which could have been used to good effect, but McG doesn't have the touch to pull that off.

This is one of those movies you feel stupider just for having sat through. I think I'm already worse at math.

Could be fun, you might think. No. Bad acting and worse dialogue quickly put an end to that notion.

Blended is an Adam Sandler movie that isn't as bad as you feared it would be.

Director Jessie Nelson shoots it all like a Hallmark card that comes to life, which sounds like a cliche, which it is, which is the point.

A relentlessly unfunny comedy, it wastes the talents of Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as egregiously as one could possibly imagine, resorting to lame jokes, cliches and incompetent storytelling to pass the time.

A movie that makes little sense, is dumb when it's not being stupid and yet is still at times laugh-out-loud funny.

Some movies are kind of fake good — at first blush they seem to have all the ingredients in place to be successful. But on further inspection, it’s all a trick. That’s the kind of movie this is.

Earnest in its ambition but dopey in its execution, Winter’s Tale never takes flight.

There are a few scares in Come Back to Me. They would be a lot scarier if we either hadn't seen them coming, or hadn't seen them before.

Jang and Odagiri are good as the rival runners and soldiers. But they are surrounded by over-the-top performances, which play out like a mugging contest.

You can’t help feeling as if Miller has missed an opportunity. Punk rock was all about manic energy, unbridled (and often unfocused) passion. CBGB plays more like a folk tale.

It’s too bad The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It isn’t a vampire story, because the filmmakers are bleeding this franchise dry.

It's an unnecessary movie, with some funny parts and a few callbacks to the original, as if visiting Las Vegas for a bit might bring back some of the original magic. It doesn't, but at least this time it seems like they're trying. A little, at least.

Checking subtlety at the door, Monteverde goes for broke on the emotional-manipulation front. Perhaps that's OK as a device for illustrating a parable, but it doesn't make for much of a movie.

For the most part the jokes here are tired. William H. Macy is a welcome presence in the small role of Phil's offbeat-but- intense boss.

A clever, funny movie that will entertain kids and adults.

Dumb, lazy, obvious and largely pointless.

The resulting film winds up like a compelling story about an iconic civil-rights event buried beneath an avalanche of stereotypes and bad writing.

By far the scariest thing about director Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, a terrible would-be horror story that somehow roped in a couple of really good actors, is that the ending seems to suggest the possibility of a sequel. Now that’s horror.

The movie is a big disappointment, because ultimately Slender Man does not get the full-on creep-out treatment such an intriguing character deserves. Here he's just a generic horror bad guy, doing standard horror-bad-guy things. He could be anything, really, and therefore winds up, like the movie, being not much.

It's stupid, then it veers toward the absurd, but with James at its center it remains sort of sweet throughout. You can't hate James or the movie; both are just sort of dopey but well-meaning.

There are some laughs here, but not many. Johnson and Wayans have a pleasant enough chemistry, but the best parts of the movie are when Johnson gives Ryan an unhinged quality.

You know it's not working when you don't care about any of them. Sadly, that's the case with Answers to Nothing, Matthew Leutwyler's dud about a revolving cast of characters in Los Angeles.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is a movie that didn't need to be made, and certainly doesn't need to be seen — not when you can rent the original and still feel good about yourself afterward.

There is a sort of unintentional campy fun to be had in places. Just don't go in expecting much, in other words, and perhaps you'll live happily ever after.

Hector and the Search for Happiness is more like "audiences and the search for a good movie," and despite the effort of Pegg and the other actors, you won't find that here.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be swept away — about as much as you would be by artificial roses. Movies like this may look like the real thing, but they're not.

There are no surprises here, just a by-the-numbers comedy that's better, and funnier, than it has a right to be, thanks to the efforts of the actors in it.

Clearly, Zeroville is not a film for everyone. But if you love movies and you’re willing to experiment, it’s an enjoyable trip.

While some of the sequels have been entertaining enough, A Good Day to Die Hard signals that it may be a better day for John McClane to retire.

It's all silly and meant to be fun, except when Najafi tries to throw in some serious bits, which wind up being sillier still.

CHIPS is a miserable movie, an exercise in stupidity that takes whatever nostalgia one had for the late-1970s television series – this assumes anyone actually had nostalgia for it — and beats it to death on a bed of idiocy. The action scenes, though, are pretty well-directed.

There is nothing about the movie that isn’t utterly predictable. You meet a character, and it’s immediately obvious what’s going to happen to him (or her). And then it happens. Maybe it’s meant to make you feel good about your deductive reasoning skills or something. But mostly it just makes you want to see something else.

Grovic knows all the tricks of the trade, such as keeping the lighting dark (often too dark), in an attempt to add atmosphere. But in the end it seems like a series of shortcuts.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a curious mess, a movie that doesn’t really seem to have any reason to exist, other than maybe to give writer and director Roman Coppola and star Charlie Sheen something to do for a few weeks.

The acting is so poor and the story so badly told that the viewer's feelings about Rand's novel - an epic ode to free-market fundamentalism - are almost immaterial.

Sex and the City 2 isn't a feature film as much as it is consumer porn. The audience is not asked to relate to the characters, or at least what we remember of them, as much as to their shoes, their bags, their apartments, their couture, their stuff.

It's bigger and louder and, if not longer (checking in at a mere two hours and 28 minutes), certainly stupider than ever before.

Simply put, it's a mess.

It strains both credulity and patience in its attempt to be different, and it leaves you feeling creeped out as well.

He (D'Souza) reaffirms many of the complaints against Obama, and when he sticks to the facts is much more persuasive.

Innocence is a misguided little horror film, reminiscent of one of those cheesy '70s made-for-TV movies that kind of, sort of seem scary when you're 9 but are just dopey at any other age.

Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return lacks any sense of magic.

Maybe your kids will insist that you see Furry Vengeance. Then again, wouldn't this be the perfect time to let them test their independence and sit through it alone? Otherwise, good luck. You have my condolences.

Everyone here has been better, and funnier, in other things. This is a lazy story, wholly dependent upon the likability of its cast which, while considerable, isn’t enough to make it worth the trouble.

Gomez plays ... well, that’s one of the problems. Her character is so underdeveloped in director Courtney Solomon’s movie that she doesn’t actually have a name.

A harmless little mess of a movie whose cast you've mostly heard of, including Tim Allen, who also directed.

It means to be an interconnected story, in which one coupling leads to another in increasingly ridiculous fashion, until you're not only no longer interested, you're grinding your teeth, hoping it will end.

While the special effects are impressive enough, M. Night Shyamalan's film doesn't make a lick of sense.

Dinesh D'Souza's America: Imagine a World Without Her paints a genuinely troublesome portrait of the country — just not at all in the way he intends.

Left Behind is a terrible movie, bad in almost every way, not even qualifying as so-bad-it's-good material.

We get it, we get it: Capitalism is good, government is bad. But Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? is worse.

All I can say is, no matter who made it, no matter who paid for it, no matter who it's about, "Melania" is a singularly bad movie.

In the past, I’ve given D’Souza the benefit of the doubt, going out of my way to be extra objective. I actually gave “2016: Obama’s America” a somewhat positive review in 2012 (3 out of 5 stars). But this thing is madness.

D'Souza fans and Trump apologists will flock to this, misguided moths to a misleading flame. In that way, it's a perfect representation of the current climate. In every other way, it's a mess.

What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in Lee’s performance. He is effectively stern as the king. More importantly, he makes Ha-seon funny and movingly genuine.

An amateurish-looking disaster that makes you wonder if it isn’t some kind of in-joke, a stunt to see how bad a movie can be and still find its way into theaters.

Sole Survivor is a puzzle whose pieces don’t fit together perfectly, but still create an cohesive whole.

Murray doesn't ignore the abuse of power. He just eases into it.

On the plus side, Jones is a really good makeup artist, and he is adept at creating gross-out dead people and wounds, and violent acts intense enough that they make you want to look away. On the minus side, the acting and story are so bad you want to look away anyway. Follow that instinct.

Sizemore seems to be operating in his own dimension outside the confines of the film and script, just doing whatever he wants. That's not a compliment. Mills' direction is the movie's high point. It's assured, and he stages scenes with skill.

The handling of the faith aspect is actually one of the stronger parts of the film. Some movies like this lay it on thick, basically existing as a religious recruitment video. Here, and here alone, Ellis lays off and lets the audience think things through. The message is more effective this way.

Maybe there’s a place in the film world for El Coyote as a cult artifact, something that years from now enthusiasts will defend as a kind of dada experiment. In the moment, though, as you suffer through it, it’s just an ill-conceived mess.

Too often the jokes don’t land. Neither does the physical comedy. The story doesn’t really hold. It’s clear that Schneider and his daughter love each other, and this film is a way to express that. But it’s a lot to ask of the rest of us to watch it.

It’s not like the first film was some sort of idiot-comedy version of “Citizen Kane” or something. But that film played like a good buzz. The Binge 2: It’s a Wonderful Binge plays more like the hangover that comes after.