Dana Stevens

Inconsequential documentary.

Bachelorette places a trio of women front and center who are so irredeemably loathsome, it's kind of refreshing. At least until a conventional third-act redemption undercuts some of the movie's sharpest insights and funniest jokes.

Wanderlust is about two or three script passes away from being a consistently funny, dramatically coherent romantic comedy.

Whether you find Deep Water deliciously preposterous or just … preposterous may depend on how much you miss that kind of movie. In my case, the answer is “a lot.”

Beauty Shop extends the popular "Barbershop" franchise to Atlanta and provides a sassy feminine counterpart to its cozy men's-club vibe.

It batters you with novelty and works so hard to top itself that exhaustion sets in long before the second hour is over.

Fly Me to the Moon’s foundational silliness could have been compensated for, and maybe even turned into the premise for a lightweight but charming romance, if not for two things: the failure to grapple with the larger historical implications of the fake-moon-landing subplot, and the fatal miscasting of Johansson and Tatum as oil-and-water opposites.

Niccol's bizarrely stilted sci-fi thriller In Time, a movie so consistently flat-footed, with pauses between lines of dialogue so vast, that you begin to wonder if the whole thing might be a psychological experiment of some kind...Or has he just made a really dull movie?

It never pretends that it's anything more than trashy, cheesy fun. But even trash -- especially trash this expensive -- should at least be well made. Sure, it's easy on the eyes, but would a little brains be too much to ask?

Unfortunately, all of these supremely expressive vehicles come equipped with drivers, principally a pair of crash-test dummies played by Paul Walker and Tyrese, whose low-gear dialogue makes the whine of engines sound like the highest poetry.

Even as the story accrues preposterousness, the action moves along crisply, and Tatum and Foxx hit a nice buddy-movie vibe.

Finds a sprawling, vivid middle ground somewhere between documentary and myth.

A loose- jointed, not especially memorable comic caper with some lovely moments of humorous invention, many patches of clumsy writing and a few game performances.

Works hard to earn it and is, for the most part, intelligent and amusing, even if it never achieves the full-tilt zany desperation of Delbert Mann's "Lover Come Back," the best of the real Hudson-Day movies.

Lithgow and Molina play Ben and George with such depth, tenderness, and history that their affection for one another’s bodies (there’s no sex, but loads of snuggling) seems like a natural extension of their pleasure in being together.

There is really no other way to categorize this splendid, crotchety artifact.

Mild, harmless and occasionally affecting, possessing the fizz of diet soda and the sweet snap of slightly stale bubble gum.

Its warm, occasionally off-putting individuality is more like what you look for in a friend than in a movie, and like a friend it invites you to see the unique beauty that lies under its superficial flaws.

Ultimately The Switch can't escape the constraints of its own formula.

The movie is, above all, a showcase for its stars, who seem gratifyingly comfortable in their own skin and delighted to be in each other's company again, in another deeply silly, effortlessly entertaining movie.

The film, scripted by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, and Ryan and Kaz Firpo, weaves plenty of jokes in with long stretches of intergalactic hocus pocus and equally long action set pieces. But the parts only sporadically cohere into anything like a whole.

Possession is in the end an honorable, interesting failure. It falls far short of poetry, but it's not bad prose.

Sexy and infectious in spite of itself.

It is Ms. Dunst who carries the movie and unifies its disparate elements. She's a terrific comic actress.

To the disappointment of this once-enthusiastic ogler, Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails to capture the eponymous magic of the first two very different but both delightful movies.

The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles.

(Fishburne's) performance here, witty and profane, vulnerable and strutting, nearly holds the movie together.

By the time the great vampire showdown finally got started, I was good and done with Breaking Dawn, Part 2. But the big action scene is so campily over the top - with one twist so unforeseeable - that it sent me out on a burst of grudging goodwill.

It's deeply committed to its own weird conceit, diminishing returns and all.

300 will be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

The cast, working in conditions that appear to have been only slightly less dire than those portrayed in the film, work together in a grim, convincing improvisatory rhythm.

Yes, this is the kind of movie you could imagine seeing with your grandmother at a suburban mall, but does everything have to be edgy and dark and genre-reinventing?

Ms. Thurman is the one bit of genuine radiance in this aggressively and pointlessly shiny, noisy spectacle.

Depp's witty, spare performance gives the picture a poignancy -- a depth of feeling, if you'll allow the pun -- that Mr. Demme's hectic direction and the hurried script by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes don't quite earn.

A sluggish romantic drama

Neither Alex Murphy’s internal moral conflict nor the larger, vaguely satiric portrait of a global culture dependent on high-tech law enforcement seem to be the main point of this Robocop remake, which raises the question of what is meant to be the point.

(Garvy) has helped advance our understanding of a difficult and exhilarating time.

Sadly, You’re Cordially Invited eventually founders on the same rocky shores as many recent attempts to revive the rom-com.

Entertaining without being especially illuminating. If you must see only one documentary about a Slovene philosopher this year, it might be better to read his books.

Better than its predecessor, and also superior to most other comic-book-based movies. It has a more credible (and more frightening) villain, a more capacious and original story and a self-confidence based not only on the huge success of the first "Spider-Man" but also on Mr. Raimi's intuitive and enthusiastic grasp of the material.

Soul Kitchen is sprawling, undisciplined, raucous, occasionally crass-and so full of life you forgive it everything.

The kind of middling-but-watchable heist thriller that, days after seeing it, already feels like something you caught half of on a plane two years ago.

The most offensive bodily fluid being hurled around in Due Date are the tears that Phillips dishonestly tries to wrest from the audience's eyes.

A thin and unsatisfying concoction that somehow manages to make one of the richest and most durable sources of culture-clash comedy into an occasion for dullness.

Unlike most movies of this kind, which run out of steam and ideas as they go along, Johnny English gains momentum, nudging you along from a few stray giggles to helpless, giddy laughter.

The aspect of the book Linklater has chosen to focus on, and the one he infuses with playfulness and warmth, is the complex bond between a flawed but loving mother and her devoted if perhaps too-responsible child.

Lovely though it is to look at, it does not reveal very much. Sampling the works of three prominent directors in one sitting may be what gives anthology films like this one their appeal, but the experience is often more frustrating than fulfilling.

There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

I can understand wanting to skip Ender’s Game as a matter of moral principle, but you can also feel free to blow it off just because it’s not that good.

Without Ms. Kidman's brilliantly nuanced performance, Birth might feel arch, chilly and a little sadistic, but she gives herself so completely to the role that the film becomes both spellbinding and heartbreaking, a delicate chamber piece with the large, troubled heart of an opera.

There's just not quite enough to the movie: not enough jokes, not enough obstacles, not enough sex.

The film has its creepy, suspenseful moments -- but it shrinks a rich, strange story to the dimensions of an anecdote.

Because it pulls off the tricky feat of combining multiple pre-existing Marvel franchises into a reasonably entertaining and tonally coherent whole, The Avengers will likely be hailed as a kind of thinking fan's superhero film, the way Whedon's recent "Cabin in the Woods" functioned as both a horror movie and a critique of same.

The fact that Marry Me contains anything so formulaic as a third-act separation montage should spell out clearly what you’re getting in for.

This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun.

What's disappointing about Anonymous is that it isn't dumb enough.

Stumbles from restrained, fine-edged realism into blunt and muddy melodrama.

No Strings wants to be raunchy enough to pull in the dude crowd and snuggly enough to draw couples on dates. Instead, it's an inoffensive bore with occasional R-rated sex scenes that strain for cutesy shock value.

Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.

In short, Elizabeth Gilbert is the Julia Roberts of writers, which means that the film adaptation by Ryan Murphy (the creator of Nip/Tuck and Glee) got at least one thing right.

Tilda Swinton is the Angel Gabriel, adding a touch of high-class celestial cross-dressing to this overblown, overlong attempt - which falls just short of success - to make a movie dumber than "Van Helsing."

The film's last half-hour -- or do I mean its final two weeks? -- is meant to keep the audience sniffling and sobbing uncontrollably, but the only thing likely to elicit tears is the sight of Mr. Reeves dressed in a white dinner jacket crooning "Time After Time."

To attempt a culinary metaphor, Ms. van der Oest manages a yolky, runny sitcom omelet rather than the airy soufflé of farce.

A curiously thrilling and often hilarious experience.

A refreshingly mean-spirited gothic real estate comedy.

In casting about for new sources of fear, Marebito achieves its own level of mediocrity.

The real surprise, given the secondhand material, is that not everything proceeds by rote in Murder by Numbers.

The most pleasing paradox in Storytelling -- a determinedly paradoxical and, in spite of much of what I've said here, a genuinely pleasing movie -- is that it sets out to debunk this notion and ends up affirming it.

Glossy, witty eye candy with some moderately chewy stuff in the middle. This lavish, exhaustingly kinetic film is smarter than you might expect, and at the same time dumber than it could be. It's an impressive product: a triumph of cloning that almost convinces you that it possesses a soul.

Pretty much pure boilerplate: a reasonably well-executed throwaway that, when you finally get around to seeing it in its proper setting, will make you glad you decided to travel by air instead of by sea.

Once again, in trying to find our way past the icon to the woman underneath, we have only pushed Norma Jeane further away.

Chloe remains engaging for longer than any movie this schlocky and overwritten has a right to be. But the movie loses what little goodwill it's managed to build up by the last act, which feels clumsily grafted from a completely different film.

So mild and thin that it doesn't inspire much of a reaction at all. With one exception - a dinner table scene that is by far the most memorable in the movie - the racial humor is studiously unprovocative.

Will provide preschoolers with comfort and amusement, though not rapture or enchantment.

As five or six bad movies squished together, it almost seems like a bargain.

The combined efforts of this fine ensemble cast make Tower Heist go down easier than it otherwise might, but the film's potential as a buddy comedy is sadly wasted.

Trudges along the well-trod path of high-minded, schematic storytelling.

Even his fans may find themselves frustrated, since the film observes Mr. Franken closely without generating much insight into him.

Tron: Legacy is the kind of sensory-onslaught blockbuster that tends to put me to sleep, the way babies will nap to block out overwhelming stimuli. I confess I may have snoozed through one or two climactic battles only to be startled awake by an incoming neon Frisbee.

The time is right for a breezy, captivating New York romantic comedy. Sidewalks of New York is not an especially good movie, but it will do.

While it demonstrates some formal ingenuity, it is for the most part a tasteless and derivative stew of overdone jokes, chronological tricks and labored shock effects.

Mr. Condon's great achievement is to turn Kinsey's complicated and controversial career into a grand intellectual drama.

It’s the (Russo) brothers’ touch with comedy (they collaborated on the wisecrack-rich script with their former Marvel co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) that sets this hyper-violent, stylishly shot thriller apart from your average espionage-themed bone-cruncher.

The movie's curious capacity for self-erasure makes it a tough one to write about; less than 24 hours later, I recall it with all the clarity of something I half-watched on a plane with a hangover in 1996.

Beneath its stylistic and structural quirks, Big Bad Love -- is a self-indulgent celebration of self-indulgence.

A good summer movie isn't just an uninterrupted crescendo of cacophony. You need stuff IN BETWEEN the fireballs and the cyborgs.

It’s Pitt’s wry presence, and his playful relationship to his own movie-star persona, that provides a still center amidst the CGI-smeared chaos and keeps this train from (metaphorically at least) going off the rails.

Just as the vast, square Imax screen magnifies panda-haunches and steep, jungle-clad gorges, its relentless scale also enlarges a half-baked, mediocre little adventure story into something almost grotesquely bad.

Mr. Toback uses his improbable, conventional story as the trelliswork for a series of wild and florid riffs about sex, ethics and the delirium of renegade moviemaking.

Outrageous fun.

Instead of suspense, there is confusion; instead of intrigue, a lot of inexplicable confrontation among characters whose significance is not so much enigmatic as obscure.

As fizzy as the first, but not quite as refreshing. The pleasurable, eye-popping sense of surprise has diminished, and the teasingly referential attitude shows signs of fatigue.

Immerses you in violence and agony, but it may leave you with a curious feeling of detachment.

The humor in Me, Myself and Irene is often outrageous but rarely cruel.

Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there's something commendable about the directors' commitment to their grandiose act of folly.

30 Minutes or Less is a second movie that feels more like a first: slipshod, derivative, and unsure what tone to take toward its own sometimes distasteful subject matter.

Mr. Murphy is not given much to do in this sloppy, good-hearted sequel, so he graciously allows himself to be upstaged by all manner of animatronic, celebrity-voiced talking animals.

Carefully sets itself up as an obvious, transparent morality play, and then just as deliberately refuses the easy payoff. This is both impressive and a little disingenuous: the film is in effect congratulating itself for refusing to offer a neat and tidy view of life without offering much else.

It's hard to watch these two actors plow through the nonsense of K- Pax without feeling that a terrific opportunity has been squandered.

Feels fresh and satisfying. Maybe it's the presence of Jason Statham, the British action star who has a physicality like no other actor out there right now.

His (Lee) Oldboy is relentlessly unpleasant and difficult to watch, without offering audiences much moral or aesthetic payoff for its hour and 40 minutes of graphic violence and abject degradation. Oldboy is both original and uncompromising, I’ll give it that—it just doesn’t happen to be any good.

Permeated by a self-pitying, adolescent naïveté.

If Remember the Titans is corny, it's unabashedly, even generously so.

Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of "The Drew Carey Show."

Mr. Sandler has a solid, fumbling likability, without which Spanglish would be not merely annoying but despicable in its slick complacency.

The unlikely sweetness of the story carries the day. What is most astonishing is the confidence with which the filmmakers push their premise to its logical conclusion, turning an ending that could have been either laughable or appalling into something so effortlessly heartfelt as to be nearly sublime.

Unfortunately, the movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment.

A searching and wide-ranging debate has unfolded about America's response to terrorism and, more broadly, about the history and future of its role in the world. Mr. Junkerman's film is best understood as a necessary, if partisan, text in that continuing argument.

There is no credible feeling here, no comedy, no eroticism.

The result feels like a sketchbook, both in a good and bad sense; it's alive and spontaneous and surprising in some parts, underdeveloped and shapeless in others.

Though its story is fuzzy, the acting and direction in Final give it an air of quiet, dignified ambition.

The movie is full of scattershot gags and indifferent acting, but you get the feeling that it's bad on purpose, which makes it, given the number of teenage movies that are terrible by accident, not bad at all.

The action and humor are enough to make an hour and a half pass quickly and pleasantly.

If you're amused by jokes involving male genitals, female pubic hair, flatulence and dismemberment, it should be a big hit.

A hectic, uninspired pastiche of catchphrases and clichés, with very little wit, inspiration or originality to bring its frantically moving images to genuine life.

Has nothing on its mind besides the squirming discomfort of its audience, the achievement of which it holds up as a brave political accomplishment.

Captures the true spirit of the holiday. It's mildly sentimental, unabashedly consumerist (with anything-but-subliminal advertisements for McDonald's hamburgers and Nestlé candy tucked inside), studiously inoffensive and completely disposable.

The gags and subplots, rather than adding up to sustained hilarity, compete with each other.

Bad and tasteless. You laugh neither with it nor at it but rather sit counting the minutes while the movie laughs, for no good reason, at itself.

The worst thing about I'm Still Here is the fact that it exists.

The movie version overflows with affection and good intention, but unwittingly turns a bauble of cheerful fakery into something that mostly feels phony.

For his part. Mr. Freeman shows himself, once again, incapable of giving a bad performance.

The most shocking thing about it may be its unabashed sincerity.

I found myself curiously willing to overlook Admission’s weaknesses, or even to reinterpret them as strengths — couldn’t those inconclusive endings be seen as a refreshingly un-rom-com-like embrace of life’s open-endedness and complexity?

Reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting.

Imagine "Last Tango in Paris" remade as a wan, low-budget romantic comedy.

A disjointed, sometimes fascinating mélange of moods, associations and effects.

Offers a view of pornography that is nonjudgmental, even celebratory, but at the same time its premise -- that Danielle must be rescued from the shame and degradation of her old job -- suggests a more traditional, disapproving point of view. Instead of addressing this contradiction, the movie is happy to wallow in it, which would be fine if it had any real pleasure to offer.

There is very little that is tantalizing or suspenseful. The feeling of revelation is gone, and many of the teasing implications of "Reloaded" have been abandoned.

From time to time, Bad Teacher gestures vaguely at the movie it could have been. Diaz slouches and snarls effectively through the early scenes. It isn't till we realize her redemption will be unsatisfying that the character starts to curdle.

Naughty is an outdated word in an era of proud nastiness, but Heartbreakers has a slinky, teasing quality that recalls the dressed-up comedies of the studio era.

Not only is it excruciatingly boring -- but its central premises are so banal and dubious as to border on offensiveness.

Laborious and logy when it should be madcap and effervescent.

The glacierization of half of the world's inhabited land is contemplated with barely a hint of horror. In fact, it looks kind of cool.

This is a time-tested movie con, but rarely has it been deployed so contemptibly.

Nobody in it seems organically connected to anybody else. In a movie devoted to the idea that everything and everyone is connected, this is a serious failing, and it undermines Mr. Sayles's noble intentions.

Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario.

He (Ford) slips into the role as if it were a pair of well-worn loafers, the left inherited from Peter Falk, the right from Clint Eastwood, and then proceeds, with wry nonchalance, to tap-dance, shuffle and pirouette through his loosest, wittiest performance in years.

Only a sourpuss could fail to be amused by this movie's sight gags and action sequences or to be charmed by its lighthearted good humor.

It's not heaven, exactly, but after the purgatory of the late summer movie season, it may be close enough.

Like Cooper's lady-killing character, Face, The A-Team is utterly convinced of its own lovability even as it strains our credibility, abuses our patience, and punishes our eardrums.

On its own, apart from whatever beliefs a viewer might bring to it, The Passion of the Christ never provides a clear sense of what all of this bloodshed was for, an inconclusiveness that is Mr. Gibson's most serious artistic failure.

Has the scruffy charm you expect from this kind of picture, and some admirable feminist pluck. But the story is -- forgive me -- a little thin, and the filmmaking clumsy and rushed.

Some of the performances show flashes of idiosyncrasy and flair that are nearly snuffed out by the pedestrian script.

Brooks has given us the rare contemporary rom-com that's by turns (if intermittently) thoughtful and funny, and that doesn't feel focus-grouped, cynical, misogynist, or mean. It seems ungenerous not to cut such a generous movie a break.

It is also possible that the problem lies not with Mr. Desplechin but with Ms. Phoenix. Her Esther is a fascinating mixture of passivity and ferocity, but it's not clear that she has the range to show both sides of the character.

I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.

By any reasonable measure this is a terrible movie, too long and too self-serious and way too dramatically inert, a regrettable waste of its lead actors’ boundless commitment to even their most thinly written roles.

The script (by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender) strains hard after a few easy jokes, and the whole movie feels dull and trivial.

The character of Roy Miller is so quintessentially Cruise-ian that he skirts the edges of self-conscious parody.

While not especially good - judged strictly on its cinematic merits, it ranges from O.K. to god-awful - it is still a fascinating cultural document in the age of intelligent design.

It's as if the director, Andrew Fleming, and the screenwriters, Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, set out to make a movie that would be mediocre in every respect. If so, they have completely succeeded.

Parsons himself might have written a surreal, funny-sad ballad about the aftermath of his own death, but Grand Theft Parsons is little more than a surreal anecdote, told in too much detail and without enough soul or imagination to make anything more than a footnote to a legend.

The filmmakers try to balance pointed, often incisive satire and unabashed sweetness, with results that are sometimes bracing, sometimes baffling and quite often, and in unexpected ways, touching.

A day and half after walking out with a sensation, primarily, of physical relief—at two hours and nine minutes, Pain & Gain makes for a long, loud, relentlessly assaultive sit—I find that my thumb is wavering at half-mast. I’m still not sure whether to mildly like or mildly hate this movie.

Lurches when it should glide, shouts when it should whisper and mumbles when it should sing.

It's instructive to compare Bully with Jean-Pierre Ameris's "Bad Company," which tackles similar themes and manages to be explicit without stooping to cheap salaciousness. It's a genuinely disturbing film. Bully, in contrast, is merely disgusting.

One seriously sick little blockbuster.

The parts of Get Rich or Die Tryin' that feel most genuine have to do with friendship and family, rather than with criminal intrigue. But the movie ultimately lacks an emotional core. It will certainly make 50 Cent even richer, but it wouldn't have killed him to try a bit harder.

Blandly charming.

For a series so steeped in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, Pirates of the Caribbean displays remarkably little sense of wonder.

Hall Pass is about two guys trying to recapture their youthful mojo, but it also appears to be made BY men who fit that description.

Elizabethtown is a long, lurching trip to nowhere in particular, but Elizabethtown is a place where you wouldn't mind spending some more time, though perhaps under different circumstances.

Surely the best movie yet made from Mr. Irving's fiction. It may even belong in the rarefied company of movies that are better than the books on which they are based.

Nothing is particularly believable here, but there are still a few moments of silly, sinister fun.

The aesthetic of Full Frontal is as rough and grainy as the off-the-rack digital video in which much of it was shot.

To the film’s credit, nothing in Paint comes off as mean-spirited or patronizing, including the treatment of the town’s many less-than-sophisticated consumers of televised artmaking. But by the last half, the ambient niceness felt so pervasive and the film’s ultimate purpose so vague that, even when the performances and much of the dialogue remained sharp and funny, the movie around them seemed to dissolve into one of those happy little clouds.

At best, this film is half-inflated.

The surface is rough and profane enough, and the acting sufficiently restrained, to cover the sentimental story with a varnish of gritty realism. But stylish bravado and bad-boy performances don't make the film any less predictable.

It does have its tart, fizzy moments.

Surprisingly enough, it often soars to heights of not bad.

The actors, too, bring more realism -- more gravity, if you will -- to the film than its wobbly premise deserves.

The best thing in Burt Wonderstone, besides that final gag, is the second-sickest: Jim Carrey's performance as a David Blaine-esque street magician named Steve Gray.

A Slipping-Down Life has a worn, scruffy feeling. It gazes lovingly at vintage clothes and battered old cars as if they were the visible signs of authenticity, wishing that its morose, disconnected inhabitants could somehow be touched with the same elusive quality.

A visually over-crammed, emotionally empty mega-spectacle on the model of Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland."

Comedy, like marriage, takes more work than this.

Works best as a bang-and- boom action picture, a loud symphony of bombardment and explosion juiced up with frantic editing and shiny computer-generated imagery.

This movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible.

This is bad cinema and bad history. Ms. Bravo is unstinting in her praise for the omelet and her admiration of the chef, but she refuses to admit that she's walking on eggshells.

In a culture apparently defined by lap dancing, ersatz architectural sublimity and the virtual contact of cyberspace, how do we know what is real? The Center of the World, for example, is as phony as can be.

Dreamy touches can't compensate for the film's main flaw, which is that the relationship between the two main characters never really develops.

Many American viewers may take Haneke at his word and walk out midway through this grueling ethics exam of a movie. But much as I may resent the facile polemics of Haneke's shame-the-viewer project, I have to respect the way that he nailed me, trembling, to my seat.

What should be a soufflé of gender-bending mischief is more like a bowl of oatmeal.

The very confusion that has made him (Rock) so unpredictable and funny onstage makes this on-screen exploration of contemporary racial mythologies curiously tentative and unfocused.

That minute and a half of still photos packs in more dense, economical laughs than all the laborious gross-outs and chase sequences that came before. Maybe The Hangover Part III should consider restricting itself to the slide-show format.

The film's ridiculousness would not be so irksome if Mr. Shyamalan did not take his sleight of hand so seriously, if he did not insist on dressing this scary, silly, moderately clever fairy tale in a somber cloak of allegory.

Like a bottle of lukewarm Champagne -- an expensive one, judging by the label -- America's Sweethearts opens with a promising burst of effervescence and quickly goes flat.

The "American Pie" movies succeed where many other comedies aimed at the youth market falter: they manage to be both lewd and sweet, exploiting the natural prurience of young people while implicitly comforting their raging anxieties.

Small-scale and loose. It feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breathe, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh.

With its flashbacks, split-screen montages, decade-jumping soundtrack, sped-up action and frequent shifts of light and color, Wonderland feels like "Law & Order" on crack.

The movie is quiet, modest and sympathetic almost to a fault; its scenes of emotional discord, accompanied by a swooning, sniffling score, seem best suited to cable television. It's like a Lifetime movie about men.

Though the movie never overcomes the miscasting of its lead couple, The Romantics does show a surprisingly fine authorial touch.

Supporting performances add comic spark to a movie that otherwise seems happily, deliberately second-rate.

Never quite comes to dramatic or comic life.

The usual double-crosses and convolutions ensue, but the narrative is so haphazard that the whole thing -- both the caper and the movie that contains it -- seems to have been hastily improvised.

In essence, it's a ragged collection of bits and sketches cobbled into about a dozen plots, most of which call upon the cast to do a lot of tongue and neck-spraining French kissing.

Hathaway and Ejiofor seem excited to play edgier, less nice people than they often get the chance to, and the early scenes of them locking horns in their claustrophobic (if posh) flat generate enough energy to carry the movie almost all the way over the finish line.

Transcendence is nowhere near as elegant, witty, or insightful as "Her." Pfister and the screenwriter, Jack Paglen, grapple ponderously, sometimes oafishly, with the ethical and philosophical issues at stake in the film’s premise.

Like a documentary version of "Fight Club," shorn of social insight, intellectual pretension and cinematic interest. It also offers a supremely literal-minded version of slapstick.

It appears to be relying on name recognition to garner an initial burst of curious viewers before word gets out about what a dud it is.

Drags and meanders when it wants clarity and clockwork, and bogs down in hazy, vague emotions.

It does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.

Marveling at its grotesque gigantism doesn't make this two-and-a-half-hour-long movie any less dull.

Sadly Persuasion, not only the worst Austen adaptation but one of the worst movies in recent memory, delivers on all the agony and none of the hope.

This script - a collaboration between Hanks and Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" - would need multiple punch-up sessions to attain mediocrity. Roberts and Hanks aren't just prevented from playing their A games; they're never even taken off the bench.

This is the kind of summer movie that softens your brain tissue without even providing the endocrine burst of pleasure that would make it all worthwhile.

21 Jump Street isn't a wild, fresh reinvention of the movie-cliché-spoofing genre - this isn't "Airplane!" we're talking about - but it's also not a drearily overfamiliar retread of it.

As a lifelong aficionado of sprawling, dopey disaster movies with plenty of character back story—your Poseidon Adventures, your Twisters, your Titanics—and as maybe the world’s biggest fan of Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), I was naturally inclined to enjoy Moonfall, and I did, though maybe with not quite as much glee as I vibed with the fevered conspiracy theories and lovingly preserved world treasures of 2012.

Would have worked brilliantly as a five-minute late-night comedy sketch, flogs its premise for nearly an hour and a half, generating too few laughs to justify the enterprise.

The set design is fairly elaborate by the standards of the genre, and the victims don't die in precisely the order you might expect, but everything else goes pretty much according to formula, including a last-minute plot twist that opens the creaky door to a sequel.

Unfortunately, The Invisible Circus, which follows Phoebe as she retraces her dead sibling's steps from Paris to Berlin to the coast of Portugal, doesn't so much illuminate Phoebe's confusion as share it.

The movie itself evolves in reverse, starting life as a moderately clever grab bag of high-concept noodling and half-witty badinage before descending into the primordial ooze of explosions and elaborate lower- intestinal gags.

While there are some genuinely dazzling moments of visual bravura, the marriage of flatness and depth that Mr. Aramaki attempts doesn't quite work.

Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste - an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets.

The movie is booby-trapped with so many loud gags that some of its sneakier humor is nearly lost in the din.

Compared with the psychological probing and spiritual brooding of "Batman Begins," Fantastic Four is proudly dumb, loud and inconsequential.

That mystery is certainly hardy enough to withstand the voyeuristic onslaught of this self-aggrandizing, lurid documentary, which leaves the viewer feeling that we’ve been given a tour of Salinger’s septic tank in hip waders without ever getting to knock on his door and say hello.

Too much seriousness can be fatal to a picture like this one, since it impedes the efficient delivery of dumb laughter and easy thrills.

It's so enamored of its own upbeat view of human nature that it expects you to overlook its stick-figure characters, its creaky plot machinery and its remorseless assault on your tear ducts.

Every so often a movie comes along that's bad in such original and unexpected ways that it inspires an almost admiring fascination

Even by the standard of a fourth-in-a-series summer blockbuster, Wolverine, the first X-Men movie directed by Gavin Hood ( Rendition), is remarkably lame.

Even by the standards of the current run of mediocre comic-book movies, this one stands out for its egregious shoddiness.

To call The Change-Up misogynistic would be to shortchange the equal-opportunity disgust this anal-regressive film demonstrates toward men, babies, old people, and corporeal existence in general.

Sadly, these small bursts of beauty seemed so at odds with the movie's general crushing mediocrity that they were like quickly squelched protests against it.

Like a ham-fisted high-concept public service announcement, directed with stagy deliberateness and written with tin-eared vernacular speechiness.

From a technical standpoint, Taking Lives is competent and sometimes even impressive. It is cleanly edited and nicely shot -- at times as cool and rich as a York Peppermint Pattie. Beyond that, there is not much to say.

Seems both overplotted and underimagined, though there is at least some creativity and a dose of realism, evident in the hairstyles themselves.

The best moments come when Mr. Smith and Mr. Lawrence are permitted to pause from their action-hero duties and run their funny, unpredictable mouths.

"Ouch!" is also what you might exclaim as you pinch yourself to stay awake through the film's slow, labored contrivances.

Laws of Attraction, like the somewhat better "Intolerable Cruelty," seems desperately unsure of itself at crucial moments.

Clouds is about the dumbest intelligent movie I've ever seen.

True to the rom-com tradition, the film ends in apologies, tears, and redemptive hugs, but the sour taste it leaves behind feels less like victory than like morning sickness.

I Don't Know How She Does It feels like a relic from the "Sex and the City" boom times. If there were even a passing nod to economic reality - for example, an acknowledgement that not all stay-at-home mothers are pampered trophy wives who live at the gym - this self-satisfied domestic comedy might not leave behind such a tinny taste.

Confuses an empty and derivative stylistic bravura with formal cleverness, and a sterile, mechanistic sensationalism with emotional intensity.

It's a clever idea bogged down in sophomoric sloppiness. Sitting through it doesn't feel like eternal damnation, but it's not exactly heaven, either. It's a $9.50 tour of adolescent purgatory.

Has a ghoulish wit. It's not as cheekily knowing as the "Scream" movies or as trashily Grand Guignol as the "Evil Dead" franchise, but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand.

Proves to be both too much and not enough: yet another slick, empty package of ersatz entertainment.

Unfolds like the slow-motion dismantling of the world's most boring matryoshka.

Baywatch is surprisingly without sexism or condescension: It’s equal-opportunity stupid.

It's not so much the nonsensical nature of the plot that rankles; it's the movie's wrongheaded approach to the material.

If these two can figure out a way to love each other, maybe it isn't necessary for us to like them very much.

Unapologetically a B movie, its narrative premise whittled down to a mean little nub and placed carefully on the borderline between the wildly implausible and the completely absurd.

Some of it is, I'll admit, pretty funny.

The real question raised by The United States of Leland is not why, but how. How, that is, did so many talented actors find their way to this dreary and derivative study in suburban dysfunction?

Natalie Portman may have the black swan and the white swan down, but she's still working on the gray.

Honey brings out the wholesome, affirmative side of the hip-hop aesthetic without being overly preachy, and it offers a winningly utopian view of show-business success without real costs or compromises.

Sandwiched between the musical numbers are an eclectic assorment of cameos, including Willie Nelson, Queen Latifa and Elton John. The funniest one comes during the closing credits, when the rapper Xzibit testifies that the Country Bears were a formative influence on hip-hop, certainly something the Eagles could never claim.

Succumbs to its blockbuster ambitions and turns into a noisy, bloated mess.

The proliferating subplots require many big emotional confrontations, so the movie seems to reach its climax 20 minutes in, and then every 15 minutes or so thereafter. This is fairly exhausting.

It's a movie best appreciated for the costumes, the sets and Ms. Theron's haughty athleticism.

If you get caught between the moon and New York City--or even just between two movies at the multiplex--the best that you can do is skip this one.

The simplicity of the tale becomes a bit tedious.

There is a real subject here, and it is handled with intelligence and care.

A movie like this can survive an absurd premise but not incompetent execution. And Mr. LaBute, never much of an artist with the camera, proves almost comically inept as a horror-movie technician...It's neither haunting nor amusing; just boring.

Sex Tape, conversely, is as timid, bland, and predictable as romantic comedies come — though it’s a hard movie to hate entirely.

His (Culkin's) performance is earnest and brave, but also mannered when it should be un-self-conscious, and awkward when grace is called for.

Both grueling and dull. Imagine (if possible) a Pasolini film without passion or politics, or an Almodóvar movie without beauty or humor, and you have some idea of the glum, numb experience of watching O Fantasma.

Even though Love's Labour's Lost is, in showbiz terms, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts, you wouldn't trade it for a pot of gold.

I suppose Rumor Has It could be worse, though at the moment I'm at a loss to say just how.

A likable, featherweight romantic comedy that hardly asks to be taken seriously, but its very triviality is, in some ways, quite significant.

Not entirely without charm.

For all the talk of artistic and amorous passion, the film is trapped in snobbish inertia; its idea of period drama amounts to a kind of highbrow name- dropping.

Proves that a movie about goodness is not the same thing as a good movie.

Despite the rococo obsessiveness of its special effects and its voracious sampling of past horror movies, Van Helsing is mostly content to offer warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills.

Ms. Depentes and Ms. Thi -- push such chic amoralism to its logical conclusion, composing a numbing alternation of pornographic scenarios and brutal killings. The result is like something you'd see momentarily unscrambled on a hotel television set, but with better music and a little more of a story line.

It would be easier to forgive Identity Thief its overfamiliar comic setups and shameless gag-recycling if the movie’s second half didn’t make such an abrupt about-face from soliciting our revulsion to begging for our pity.

Broadly acted, clumsily written and directed with crude sincerity, it is a well-meaning feminist morality play unlikely to be of much interest outside the community in which it takes place.

May have had the unintended effect of obscuring the original it meant to honor.

A thin, pleasant teenage heist comedy with a chewy nugget of social criticism buried inside it.

That What's Your Number? is a bad movie is the least of the reasons to walk out of it feeling awful. Competing for the top spot are these two: the criminal misuse of Faris; and the casual endorsement of courtship practices as arcane and sadistic as Chinese foot-binding.

In the end, Loser disappoints.

The Glass House is hardly insane, just absurd, and the only damage it does is to itself.

Brain-dead.

Works hard at being charming, but comedy is best when it looks effortless.

This movie, a chaotic caper film at heart, wrecks its comic tone with some moments of gruesome violence.

For all the contemporary relevance of the issues it explores, there’s something morally and aesthetically muffled about The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Nair is so busy making sure we never lose sympathy for her handsome and charming protagonist that the film ultimately founders in a tangle of humanist platitudes.

It cheerfully invites the audience to descend to their level, where no joke is too silly or raunchy, and a plot is just a way of passing time between game levels and bong hits.

The burden of the story, which is maudlin and entirely unbelievable, weighs down even the more credible performances.

It is not saying much to point out that the sequel is better than its predecessor (directed by Abdul Malik Abbott), which was crude and amateurish in every way.

The ending is meant to be clouded with ambiguity, but really it is unequivocally happy because it means the movie is over.

A comedy so noxious it seems the product of deliberate malignity. Surely the sour, vapid, miserable world of this movie can't reflect any real human being's notion of what love or humor or good storytelling is-not even a Hollywood screenwriter's.

The story is laughably incoherent, which would be less bothersome if the movie were not also so unremittingly pretentious.

In his defense, the kid is saddled with a task that even a more experienced actor might have trouble pulling off: He must carry an entire action movie on his slender shoulders, given little more to act opposite than a succession of green-screen predators. Even with his charismatic dad in his earpiece calling the shots, Jaden can’t turn himself into a movie star by sheer force of Will.

It's like watching two superbly conditioned rowers try to race a boat made of folded newspaper. Hard as they work, they just can't make it go any faster.

While nothing in the movie - least of all the two main performances - is especially fresh or original, it does have a few decent gags and amusing moments.

It would help if the movie were actually funny - or if it actually bothered to be a movie, rather than some car chases punctuated by shots of Ms. Simpson sashaying toward the camera (or more often, away from it).

Polished and bouncy without being overly mawkish or unduly obnoxious. Above all, it is short.

Its lack of subtlety is clearly a point of pride, and Mr. Hensleigh's flat-footed, hard-punching style has a blunt ferocity that makes "Kill Bill" look like "In the Bedroom."

With its studied nonchalance, Loners reaches neither the hilarity of an episode of "Friends" nor the ethnographic stickiness of "The Real World" on MTV.

A happy, nasty and frequently hilarious assault on 20 years' worth of youth pictures.

The disaster sequences themselves — of which there are many, placed at regular intervals but disconnected from the story, like operatic arias — have a dreamlike and weirdly exhilarating quality that’s quite different from the plodding wham-bam destruction of the average action blockbuster.

Mr. Jones, who recently starred in "Zig-Zag," a similarly striving, overwrought picture, is a disciplined and likable performer, and he bravely perseveres in the face of narrative absurdity and rampant overacting.