Connie Ogle

Merely adding an older generation of lovers to a love story does not make your romance one for the ages. Doesn’t even make it "The Notebook."

Even the most ardent fans of Braff’s first feature film, the charming Garden State, will struggle to warm up to this self-indulgent, uninvolving drama about an immature, almost-middle-aged guy trying to find himself with questions he should have had answers to long ago.

The cinematic equivalent of herpes, Sex Tape is an uncomfortable embarrassment to raunchy comedies everywhere. Fortunately, no medication is required after being exposed to it: The effects are not permanent, only painful.

Derivative and self-important, Third Person is a concept and not much more, precisely the sort of film that makes you wonder why anybody would bother to see it at all.

The arsenal is empty, and there’s nowhere for The Truth About Emanuel to go except — unfortunately — downhill.

What you don’t expect is camp. The Counselor is more "Wild Things" than "No Country for Old Men", with which it shares a border town setting. But at least "Wild Things" knew what it was. The Counselor treats its material seriously and seems to have no idea it’s a joke that can’t even muster up a bit of smarty-pants Tarantino cleverness or energy.

In Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, choosing the dumbest character is a colossal task.

It’s bad enough to make you look askance at Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, and Maya Rudolph, all of whom deserve a chance to do something funny other than pose as wives exuding various degrees of sexiness.

An invasion of the body snatchers is preferable to realizing that the true horror perpetrated here is not on the characters but on the audience.

Maybe there's a good movie to be made about the affair between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a distant cousin. I wouldn't bet on it, and Hyde Park on Hudson isn't it in any case.

This is 40 is crude and dull, with a supporting cast that reminds you how utterly uninteresting the main characters are.

What we are not spared is the sort of trite movie that lacks the backbone of any good dysfunctional-family comedy: a thread of the universal amid the absurdity.

Nothing wrong with a movie having a point of view, but watching people spout jargon or exposition doesn't really make for riveting entertainment.

You don't believe Celeste for a minute when she tells a new guy that she needs to be alone for awhile. You know he's coming back in short order to provide the happy ending. Here's hoping she doesn't want him to get a job, too.

The new Total Recall fails on the most basic levels: Its characters are dull, and its action is duller.

Oddly tone deaf.

There's no real reason to see this movie. It's exhausting and pointless and not amusing enough to make up for its failings. You can do better. The filmmakers could have done better. Honestly, you're better off staying home and making hummus.

Slow-witted, clumsy and almost pathologically reliant on crude name-calling for laughs - Horrible Bosses represents the lowest end of the comedy spectrum.

According to legend, a silver bullet can kill a werewolf. Too bad it can't slay bad writing, without which the ill-conceived Red Riding Hood would not exist.

Shameless in its desperate grab at the heartstrings.

The best thing you can say about Scooby-Doo is that Matthew Lillard makes a really, really good Shaggy.

Filmmaker Christopher Cain has turned a national tragedy into a teen romance, and not in a grand, entertaining, "Titanic" way.

It's a cannibalization of "Sleeping With the Enemy," a not-so-good Julia Roberts film, with a ridiculous female-empowerment subtext and a relentlessly stupid script that goes nowhere you can't predict before the opening credits roll.

Watching Wilson and Hudson toil thanklessly through this mess is more laborious than writing the Great American Novel. And a lot less lucrative.

A cliché-ridden, condescending and ham-handed film that clumsily fails to bring to life what should be an interesting story. You might say none of its punches even comes close to connecting.

But if My Date With Drew is what passes for filmmaking these days, the movie industry is in more trouble than we thought.

Crudup is about as effective as anyone could be in the dreary World Traveler, but he can't keep this shallow, pretentious film from wallowing in banality and staggering self-indulgence.

The Last Song, yet another maudlin remake of a Nicholas Sparks bestseller.