Dana Stevens

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

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.

As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.

The particular kind of “fun” to be found in a slick and shallow spy fantasy like Atomic Blonde feels peculiarly arid in a moment as desperate for substance and meaning as our own.

Just My Luck is a bit of lukewarm cappuccino froth confected to float Ms. Lohan to the next stage of her career.

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

Blandly charming.

An entertainment choice I wouldn’t recommend, but one you might not regret if you dial your expectations down (or your drug intake up).

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.

A sluggish romantic drama

With its likable blue-collar characters and its unpretentious exuberance, Everybody's Famous is reminiscent of recent British comedies like "Brassed Off" and "The Full Monty."

The film spends too much time wringing its hands over the all-too-evident fact that journalism is in crisis, when it could be documenting that crisis from the inside.

Red simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough.

There’s a rueful irony to the fact that it’s this supposedly human inspiration for the beloved toy who feels more like a plastic action figure.

The tedium of Into the Woods’ second half has less to do with the downbeat subject matter than Marshall’s clumsy direction.

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

Beneath the rough vérité exterior beats the same slick, corny heart.

Secretariat is a by-the-numbers sports-hero picture with an inexpressive hero (horses look great in motion, but they can't carry a close-up) and a preordained outcome.

The movie's atmosphere is, in many ways, more interesting than its story. Mr. Robbins and Ms. Morton are not the warmest actors. He can be mannered and smug, and she often seems to beam her performances from a strange, private mental universe.

In parceling his story into discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a bland and clumsy film. A Home at the End of the World, is so thoroughly decent in its intentions and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good.

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

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.

Should have been more polished, and less tame.

In the end, though, The Ant Bully is adequate rather than enchanting. Unsure of its ability to charm, it compensates with noise, sentiment and low humor, the usual synthetic stew served to children,

Throughout The Imitation Game, there’s a sense the filmmaker is trying to shield viewers from the story’s most difficult parts — whether it’s the horrors of war, the technical complexity of the Enigma code and its solution, or the bleakness of Alan Turing’s final fate. I wish Tyldum had trusted the audience enough to let us in on the worst. It would have made his movie so much better.

The 19-year-old actress Summer Bishil captures the terrifying combination of lubricity and innocence that is being 13. Her performance is the truest thing in a movie that, for all its good intentions, feels thoroughly phony and mildly embarrassing.

I'm not sure it would be possible, or desirable, for a documentary to reveal any more about Stephin Merritt than this one does. But I would have loved to see one that revealed more about his music.

What was it trying to do? Did it succeed on its own terms? Why did I find myself admiring nearly every external element of the film — performances, lighting, editing, costuming — and yet find Guadagnino’s extremely aesthetically pleasing assemblage of these same elements into a whole somehow drab?

Frances Ha feels like a collaboration between two people in love, and not always in the best way. There are too many scenes in a row that make the same point.

At best, this film is half-inflated.

Triumph of Love, Marivaux's 270-year-old romantic comedy, is a beguiling trifle, a gauzy, teasing inquiry into the fungibility of emotions.

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

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.

We're all familiar with the experience of seeing movies that cram ideas and themes down our throats. Les Misérables may represent the first movie to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors.

The result is a minor, meandering film.

Stiff, talky, and airless, a textbook example of that not-always-true cliché about the unfilmability of theater.

Portman toils slavishly to realize Aronofsky's mad vision. It isn't her fault that, despite Black Swan's visual splendor and bursts of grand guignol excess, this emotionally inert movie never does grow wings.

In spite of my general distaste for Friends With Kids, let me cast my vote on the side of those who liked the ending. I wish more of the film had had that scene's fresh mixture of casual banter and breathless intimacy, instead of sounding like half-remembered dialogue from a movie we've all seen too many times before.

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 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.

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

If this version of Superman is to have a future — as Warner Brothers seems convinced he will, having already green-lit the sequel — I hope Snyder will dial back both the casualty count and the Krypton mythmaking and instead focus on establishing a fictional Earth that’s rich enough to be worth saving.

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.

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

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.

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.

Whether unintentionally or by design, the movie never really makes a case either for or against the troubled figure at its center.

Taken on its own, without comparison with its literary source, the movie, Mr. Schreiber's first as writer and director, is thin and soft, whimsical when it should be darkly funny and poignant when it should be devastating.

Might have been richer and more observant if it were less densely plotted. The characters would resonate more if there were fewer of them, and if they were not pushed through so many contrived dramatic incidents.

Though it's about a pair of lovers whose passion is strong enough to break down the barriers between life and death, this mildly amusing, sort-of-sweet comedy is strangely sexless and passion-free-these bodies, whether human or zombie, feel room-temperature at best.

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

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

Unabashed, and often quite diverting, technological overkill.

Django Unchained provoked a lot of contradictory feelings in me, including some that don't usually come in pairs: Hilarity and boredom. Aesthetic delight and physical nausea. Fist-pumping righteousness and vague moral unease.

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

This film is a curiously paradoxical achievement: a visual and aural marvel that is also a crashing bore.

The movie's energy peters out in a series of book-club conversations about divine will, the power of storytelling, and the resilience of the human spirit. The ending's pious dullness is enough to make you wish you were back on that lifeboat, where the most pressing questions weren't spiritual but gastronomic: What's on the menu for lunch, and what can I do to make sure it isn't me?

I wouldn't recommend Hitchcock to cinephiles seeking a bold new take on the master's life or work, but if all you want is to while away the afternoon in the company of some excellent actors in plummy period costume, Gervasi's film is not without its pleasures.

Hyde Park on Hudson has little more on its mind than hot dogs and hand jobs - which, come to think of it, would have made for a much catchier alliterative title.

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.

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.

Told in the usual sequence, the story of Gilles and Marion would be a banal bell curve of infatuation, bliss, boredom, regret and recrimination. As it is, 5x2 does not quite make the case that Gilles and Marion are entirely worth our interest, let alone our sympathy, but the reversal of narrative order gives their ordinary moments together a faint aura of mystery, as Mr. Ozon teases us with the conceit that it will all make sense in the end - or rather, the beginning.

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.

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.

Prometheus is more interested in piling on big questions than in answering them. It's deep without being particularly smart, although the dazzling design and special effects keep you from noticing that basic flaw until at least an hour in.

The character as written is incoherent, but Ms. Witherspoon has the reflexes to make Elle both appealing and ridiculous. It's funny -- in that slightly queasy, un-P.C. Doris Day kind of way.

Mr. Costner's relentless, root-canal humorlessness turns what might have been an enjoyable B-picture throwback into a ponderous drag.

The dad minds behind Bad Moms don’t seem to understand, or be terribly curious about, the minds of mothers.

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.

The Help is a high-functioning tearjerker, but the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient, a Barbie Band-Aid on the still-raw wound of race relations in America.

In the end, though, Robots is hollow and mechanical, an echo chamber of other movies and an awkward attempt to turn the intrinsically scary sensitive-robot theme into something heartwarming and cute.

Feels more like a grueling road trip in search of a family comedy.

Not entirely without charm.

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.

The simplicity of the tale becomes a bit tedious.

Comedy, like marriage, takes more work than this.

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.

Fraser’s all-in commitment to playing Charlie—300-pound fatsuit and all—put me in mind of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker, an act of faith so complete it managed to be the only transcendent element of a thuddingly bad movie. But Fraser’s beautifully judged performance isn’t enough to save this abject wallow through a mire of maudlin clichés about trauma and redemption.

The visual intensity and the relentless degradation visited on the characters begins to feel prurient and dishonest.

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.

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

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.

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.

Laborious and logy when it should be madcap and effervescent.

Madagascar arouses no sense of wonder, except insofar as you wonder, as you watch it, how so much talent, technical skill and money could add up to so little.

A dreamy, impressionistic inquiry into the legacy of the 1960's, but it's less concerned with history than with mood.

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.

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.

Martha Marcy May Marlene took a good hour to start really getting on my nerves. Up till then, I kept cutting this maddening little psychological thriller break after break, because it has the outer form of a promising debut.

More time in Middle Earth is exactly what The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey provides - so much more that the movie starts to feel like some Buddhist exercise in deliberately inflicted tedium.

Speaking for myself, I’m fine with the concept of terminating The Terminator — and there’s no need to blue-orb back any more augmented hitmen or - women to do it.

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.

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.

If Confidence was made by people who have seen too many movies, it seems to be aimed at people who have seen too few. It offers up stale lessons in vocabulary and technique, all of them easily gleaned on a trip to the video store, as if they were choice bits of inside knowledge.

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

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

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

This movie feels phony and slick, as if it were cooked up by Darrin's cynical ad agency, rather than at his aunt's stove down in Montecarlo.

United 93, as grueling as it was to sit through, left me feeling curiously unmoved and even slightly resentful.

What limits The Guys -- what makes it an exercise in art therapy rather than a work of art -- is its decorous refusal to probe deeply into its characters, or to exploit any of the dramatic potential their accidental relationship might contain.

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.

The conventional meet-cute love story at the center of The Dictator feels like a bizarre concession to some nonexistent demographic that prefers its sick black comedy with a side of humanist sentiment.

The pleasure of watching McConaughey strut, preen, and menace his way through this Southern-fried black comedy (at least I think it's a comedy) isn't quite enough to save Killer Joe. The whole movie has something tonally off about it, not to mention a theatricality that works against it in a way Bug's didn't.

Nightcrawler, like its entrepreneurial-to-a-fault protagonist, is ambitious but ultimately hollow, eager to dazzle and shock us but reluctant to let us inside.

Occasionally, real dramatic scenes will spring from the loamy soil of von Trier’s free-wandering fantasy. But they’re isolated sketches, little one-act plays in the theater of degradation.

Gladiator 2 (or as it’s spelled in the opening title, GladIIator) sadly comes off as less a reinvention of the original than a curiously literal retread of its plot beats, characters, and themes.

The film is ultimately done in by Dominik's bursts of directorial grandiosity.

Laborious and nonsensical psychological thriller, a mediocre piece of studio hackwork unredeemed by a first-rate director.

Block intended this movie as a loving portrait of his relationship with his daughter. Instead, it's a reflection, and not always a kind one, of the man behind the camera.

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.

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.

At over two hours and forty minutes long, with repeated scenes of bone-crunching violence and a maddeningly unrelenting percussive score by Hans Zimmer, The Dark Knight Rises is something of an ordeal to sit through.

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

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.

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).

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?

With so much going for it, how could the movie be such a dud?

The Hateful Eight is bold, gorgeous, verbally clever, morally repellent, and, in some way I am still struggling to put my finger on, possibly somehow evil. Any movie that inspires mixed feelings that intense can, I suppose, be said to have done its work on the viewer. But I’m not sure the work The Hateful Eight performed on me was what the filmmaker intended or that it’s an operation I would consent to again.

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.

The mystery of Enigma is how a rich historical subject, combined with so much first-rate talent -- a highly capable (if not always exciting) director, a fine English cast, a script by Tom Stoppard -- could have yielded such a flat, plodding picture.

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.

August: Osage County is a mess, an overcooked movie-star stew that never quite coheres into a movie.

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

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

For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass.

Any movie that makes you root against the underdog, though, is cause for suspicion, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Montana, perhaps aware of this, try belatedly to restore Mr. Duffy's status as a victim.

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.

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

Babylon is a defecating elephant of a movie: gigantic, often repulsive, but hard to look away from.

Though The Fantastic Four: First Steps has all the elements in place to make it the keystone of a new Marvel era, the script (by Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, and Ian Springer) never loses a vague, hand-waving quality that leaves its central characters as indistinctly drawn as the moral conflict they ultimately face.

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.

Still, the movie’s mores can feel cluelessly retro as the ever-dithering Bridget lurches between one man and another.

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.

The main thing this "Assault" lacks is a point. Mr. Carpenter's film still resonates with the political paranoia and social unease of the era. Mr. Carpenter's cynical refusal to distinguish clearly between good guys and bad guys feels freshly unsettling, while Mr. Richet's "modernization" looks like something we've seen a hundred times before.

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 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.

The mostly unprofessional cast does a lot of shouting and swearing, and Mr. Henry's face has a haunting impassivity, but the film does not offer much in the way of social insight or credible emotion.

I object to A Dirty Shame not because it is offensive - to do so would be another way of congratulating Mr. Waters for his bogus daring - but because it is boring. Beyond offering a catalog of interesting practices and lampooning their dedicated practitioners, the movie has very little to say about sex.

Sharp Stick is less a movie than a symptom, a tangle of would-be feminist ideas that, let us hope, needed to be gotten out of its creator’s system so she could get back to making something good

Aiming for lighthearted, bittersweet charm, But Forever in My Mind slips into predictability and condescension.

As Passionada ambles toward a formulaic fairy-tale ending, it exudes such giddy self-assurance that you wish you could believe in it.

An autopsy for The Town would list multiple causes of death.

Not a bad movie, and its intentions are unimpeachable. But its sentimentality is so relentless and its narrative so predictable that the life is very nearly squeezed out of it.

Inconsequential documentary.

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.

It is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.

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.

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.

Never quite comes to dramatic or comic life.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The second half of the movie squanders suspense and momentum, solving its riddles by deflating them.

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

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

Sloppy when it should be incisive, indulgent when it should be astringent, and ultimately unsure of what it is mocking and in what spirit.

I watched it not as a critic preparing to summarize its merits or flaws to an audience of readers curious whether it was worth their time to see it, but as a sickened and disappointed fan, saying an unsentimental but still sad goodbye to one of her cultural crushes. Under those circumstances, I Love You, Daddy seemed less like a movie than like a series of symptoms presented, with shocking directness, for the viewer’s clinical consideration.

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.

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.

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

In spite of some acute observations and a few interesting performances (most notably from John Malkovich as Jerome's drawing teacher and the ever-reliable Jim Broadbent as Strathmore's least illustrious alumnus), Art School Confidential is a dull and dyspeptic exercise in self-pity and hostility.

Quantum of Solace, the first bona fide sequel in the Bond series, has the poky pace and expository padding of the middle chapter of a trilogy.

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

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.

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

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

As for The Drama, it runs out of big ideas—and, seemingly, compassion for its characters—before the audience has had a chance to develop our own rooting interest in, well, the drama.

Epic in size but claustrophobically narrow in scope, The Wolf of Wall Street maintains a near-exclusive focus on the greed and self-indulgence of its proudly rapacious hero.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Permeated by a self-pitying, adolescent naïveté.

Anyway, you will be glad that they have found each other, and eager to wish them a long and happy life together -- somewhere else, as 95 minutes in their company is plenty.

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.

With its low-stakes chase scenes, obvious-from-the-get-go villains and nonsensical plotting, this feels more like a 96-minute-long episode of Scooby-Doo that's been laboriously translated into another language and then back into English.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Snow White and the Huntsman, the first feature from British commercial director Rupert Sanders, has its work cut out for it if it wants to be a truly dull piece of junk - but it manages.

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

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

Like licorice, Marie Antoinette is a confection you either love or hate, and both affects seem tied to your feeling about the director herself and her apparent identification with Louis XVI's bride. For my part, I can definitely say that I love licorice and hate Marie Antoinette. But I'm still wrestling with the enigma of Sofia Coppola.

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.

The only thing missing is a coherent story -- or even, for that matter, an interesting idea for one.

Even fans of open-wheel racing, the high-speed, high-stress pastime that is the subject of Renny Harlin's hectic new film, may walk away from it more logy than exhilarated.

It might have been a satisfying if not terribly original piece of historical melodrama, but its clumsiness turns it, against its best intentions, into half-baked operatic kitsch.

At first fascinating and never less than bonkers movie is eventually sunk by its own theological overreach.

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?

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.

Exists in a realm beyond sense, and induces in the viewer a trancelike state, leaving the mind free to ponder the mysteries of the universe.

I don't know how much The Score cost, but it's pretty close to worthless.

In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.

The relentless upbeatness of Life or Something Like It wrecks the possibility of either real laughter or genuine pathos.

I didn’t like the movie at all — found it boring, unintentionally comical, at times even (a word I seldom use) pretentious — but I admire the rest of your work so much that I nonetheless feel the need to defend To the Wonder.

An unholy, incoherent mess.

Clearly, this is an affair to forget.

The best thing that can be said about Boys and Girls is that it is studiously inoffensive.

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

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.

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

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

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

Having established its premise and set in motion an overloaded plot, the picture lurches this way and that, evoking more restlessness than laughter and more boredom than pathos.

The absence of a single noteworthy villain is perhaps this movie’s most salient flaw (along with the jumbled, barely coherent editing of a seemingly endless chase through a Moscow traffic jam).

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.

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.

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

Yes is not just a movie, in other words, it's a poem. A bad poem. There is no denying Ms. Potter's skill at versifying - or for that matter, at composing clear, striking visual images - but her intricate, measured lines amount to doggerel, not art.

Plays every convention twice, once as parody and once by the book, but the movie, trying to be two things at once, fails at both.

The problem, as it is so often in well-intentioned movies of this kind, is that rather than illuminate the enormity of Nazism, The Aryan Couple trades upon our knowledge of it for emotional impact.

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.

The end titles and the ones that introduce Veronica Guerin...are the most informative parts of the film, and also the most powerful. What comes between them is a flat-footed, overwrought crusader-against-evil melodrama, in which Ms. Blanchett's formidable gifts as an actress are reduced to a haircut and an accent.

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

Suffers from a fatal lack of modulation. It paints a picture of inner-city life as an endless sequence of beatings and shouting matches, and in its glum cartoonishness insults the people whose strivings it means to honor.

Mr. Gianvito's approach cannot really be called critical, since criticism would require some cogent analysis of causes and events.

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

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

Any irregularity in tone becomes a part of the movie’s intentionally rough, imperfect surface — a formal strategy I might find interesting if I could make head or tail of what the movie that’s using it is trying to say.

The human landscape of Palindromes is a vista of grotesqueness, dishonesty and creepiness. These are qualities Mr. Solondz has explored before, but this time he fails to make them interesting, partly because he lets himself and the audience off the hook.

Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.

A howlingly silly, moderately diverting exercise in high, pointless style.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Emotionally incoherent.

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."

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.

Before Civil Brand erupts into over-the-top melodrama (which is pretty early), it shows some interest in its characters, and in its less screechy moments the dialogue has the rough, bantering ring of actual speech.

At its worst, This Is 40 feels like being condemned to watch two hours of someone else's home movies - overly long, self-indulgent, and bone-crushingly banal.

It's not bad enough to make you curse, but you are likely to laugh when you should scream, and to roll your eyes when you are meant to laugh.

Has some funny, dirty-minded jokes, a few amusing cameos (including Julianne Moore in clown makeup) and a soundtrack loaded with juicy cuts of mid-70's vintage soul and funk.

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.

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

This forced march through a chamber of personal and sociological horrors is difficult to endure but easy to forget.

Blomkamp proceeds to spend the last two-thirds of his film crashing spaceships into lawns, or staging high-tech fistfights between Elysium’s stolid hero and his even duller arch-nemesis. It’s a waste of a perfectly good dystopia.

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.

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

Where are we? What is this empty, science-fiction-like space in which luxury goods and women who resemble them are ceaselessly rotated in front of our eyes? Oh, it's Hollywood.

This violent meatball western deserves to be forgotten quickly.

This picture achieves a level of badness that is its own form of sublimity. You almost - please note that I said almost - have to see it to believe it.

After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already.

Completed before the release of "American Beauty," this contrived, puffed up little picture nonetheless seems like a ripoff, perhaps because it mines the same tired assumptions and unexamined stereotypes about suburban family life.

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

The project as a whole conveys a drab sense of bureaucratic necessity, a "let's get this over with" wheeziness.

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

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.

That Garfield speaks in the supercilious, world-weary drawl of Bill Murray is some small consolation, as are a few of the animal tricks.

The latest bit of damaged goods offered up in the Miramax clearance sale, Underclassman plays like the longest episode of "21 Jump Street" ever made.

A patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos...The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage -- or if you prefer, rubbish.

Does occasionally rise out of the sewer of its self-imposed idiocy, ascending in brief moments from utter witlessness to half-witlessness, mostly thanks to the loose comic byplay between Mr. Black and Mr. Zahn.