David Edelstein

Watching The Hunger Games, I was struck both by how slickly Ross hit his marks and how many opportunities he was missing to take the film to the next level - to make it more shocking, lyrical, crazy, daring.

For all sort of reasons, I was disappointed that there is barely anything of Bruce McGill as the family's hearty swindler. And there is too much of Sarandon, whose big scene--a speech at her late husband's memorial service, complete with jokes and a tap dance--is the movie's most egregious misfire.

This is one of Penn's punishing, single-dimension performances, and it seems to be even more whiningly masochistic than what's called for in the script.

Given all its World War II references and parodies, the best audience for Valiant would be addled, octogenarian ex-RAF pilots in the old folks' home.

So Shazam! feels blessedly old-fashioned, which isn’t to say it’s perfect — or even very good. It’s certainly fun when the juvenile actors are front and center, before the CGI moves in for the last half-hour and change.

To return to why Murder on the Orient Express was remade: Beats me. Maybe it’s someone’s idea of counterprogramming when every other film in the multiplex is for kids or yahoos. Maybe it’s a tax shelter.

A second-rate but bearable black comedy.

Watching the rest of the movie, I wondered if Allen had discovered the script in an old file cabinet (maybe meant as a play?) and appended that meta intro to account for how obvious and old-hat the rest of it is. Probably a good strategy.

I generally like Rogen a lot but this performance is bad — worse than it even seems because of the drain it is on the movie.

A production designed to within an inch of its life, Knives Out always seems on the brink of being cleverer than it is, never quite shaking off its cobwebs and entering the present tense.

The main problem with Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is superficial, literally. Lee has opted for the rare 120-frames-per-second format, allegedly because he thought it would deepen our connection to the characters. He thought wrong.

Maybe my assessment is colored by the dud ending, since the journey to its criminally unsatisfying final scenes is tantalizingly dreamlike and unnerving.

Not even the actress' soulfulness can save the generic climax, in which she tussles with the badder bad guy on a collapsing terrace above a crashing surf. As a colleague muttered, "Murder by numbers is right."

Howard might be a major actor. His DJay, though, is a major character in search of a major author.

Slapped with the generic title The Wolverine, the fifth feature-length appearance of Hugh Jackman’s X-Man John Logan is basically "The Bad News Wolverine Goes to Japan" and is not especially world-shaking.

Scene by scene his (David Gordon Green’s) new film, Snow Angels, isn’t terrible. Parts of it are amusing, and there are wintry images that eat into the mind. But it’s one of the most disjunctive things I’ve ever sat through.

The movie is OK for a January horror picture, but given the premise and the cast--it should wring you out emotionally as it's scaring you witless.

The Predator throws enough at you to keep you distracted from seeing all the marks it’s not quite hitting. Rhodes’s pop-top vet is amusing and scary in equal measure, and little Jake Tremblay is as good as you’d hope, especially when his Rory mouths off to the Machiavellian Traeger on the subject of reverse psychology.

Lovelace is a respectable job, but it never goes deep.

A central figure who’s all bad is even more boring than one who’s all good. He has no dramatic stature. He’s a case study. The audience should be paid to listen up.

The movie’s take at times is fascinating. But it’s basically one long, sick joke played at half speed. It’s a ponderous, sick joke.

Unsatisfying even if, like me, you're a lifelong aficionado of Nixon-bashing.

It’s not so much bad as dismayingly bland. It’s WTF for all the wrong reasons.

Boundaries is earnest in way that partly makes up for the overbroad characters and stale setup.

It's a charcoal draft of a movie -- magically allusive on some levels and utterly opaque on others, a strange combination of the overexplicit and the unwritten.

Crowe gets to use his real Aussie voice, which works better with that poker face, and his underplaying at times has a psychotic intensity. But Ryan looks dopey when she's supposed to be stressed-out.

We’re supposed to take this more seriously because it takes itself more seriously.

At one point, Van Damme delivers a long, tortured soliloquy about his alienating stardom to the camera in a single take. It's the most amazing piece of acting I've ever seen by a martial artist. But the film itself doesn't rise above the level of a good try.

This is an ambitious midlife-crisis movie that valiantly weaves together big themes, among them the nagging guilt of the successful, wealthy artist.

The movie should by rights be a “Wow!” But it feels bloated, self-conscious, and pretentious, with long waits between its few dazzling fights. Evidently, it’s hard to build on a premise that’s basically so vacuous and dumb.

Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?

Passable--just.

The sad part is that How Do You Know is nowhere near as dumb as it looks. A couple of comic set pieces are inspired-or would be, if Brooks's timing weren't off.

Most of Brightburn belabors the obvious.

At least The Green Hornet is likable, and a refreshing change from the heavy, angst-ridden superhero pictures so beloved by obnoxious fanboys.

This is another moderately interesting but shallow biopic with an actor going for broke — to win, not to draw.

Marathon of misery.

The preview—if that's truly what it is—has a beginning, a middle, and an end; a host of good lines; and so many goofy surprises that it's hard to believe that there's anything more to see in the picture itself. I mean … they wouldn't show you the entire movie in the coming attraction, would they?

Curtis isn’t the director of Yesterday; Danny Boyle has been brought in to lend his shallow virtuosity. But fluid transitions don’t make the movie less clunky. Patel has an appealing presence and a lovely, McCartney-­like tenor, but the musical numbers leave an odd taste.

The ending is powerful..., but Shutter Island is a long slog.

It's too bad that halfway through, Collateral turns into a series of loud, chaotic, over-the-top action set pieces in which the existentialist Mann proves he's lousy at action.

I hope I'm not raining on Beasts of the Southern Wild's deluge to say it doesn't always live up to its pretensions. There's a lot of unshaped babble and draggy landscape shots, and the music, so lovely in small doses, is numbing when it's ladled over everything.

I'm glad Korine has pulled himself together, but the film is pretty ramshackle, full of obvious group improvisations that fail to spark and an overdose of bathos.

Anger Management is bearable up to its protracted climax, set in Yankee Stadium, which gets my vote for the most excruciating wind-up of any comedy, ever.

Despite glimmers of wit and a hipper-than-thou cast, it's painstakingly smug, and smaller than the sum of its parts.

Che is an impressive physical feat, but especially in the second part, which gives you day after day of rebels being killed and indigenous poor people not joining the good fight, you start to look forward to Che getting riddled by bullets. The whole movie is a forced march.

The style is immersive, meant to envelop us and bring us into the story, but it ends up making the movie feel abstract and distant. And there’s a void at the center.

Forget Alexander: The film is a pedestal to Angelina the great.

There is one nice pop-up scare against a dozen or so false, ineffectual ones - a poor percentage. As the title states, she is a woman and wears black, but she might as well be a hastily decked-out script girl for all her impact.

The chief casualties are the good actors, who are forced to turn themselves into cartoons.

This is another of those dead-kid dramas in which the terrible event is handled like a striptease--tantalizing flashes until the climax.

In the all-star movie adaptation of August: Osage County, another play that holds the stage with fang and claw feels less momentous onscreen.

I can’t tell if Korine is a true dramatist or a simpleminded provocateur who lives to mess with our heads. Both, probably. To him, the joke is that it’s all movie fodder. Moondog is an existential hero for a weightless universe.

The first half-hour or so of this caper comedy, which is based on an Elmore Leonard crime novel, goes down like a strawberry daiquiri with a little umbrella.

It's coarse, primitive, regressive, often very stupid, and sometimes, against all odds, really a hoot.

As an actor, Matt Damon has too much integrity to pretend he can multitask to that advanced degree and still be, you know, a fun person. So he turns his face into a mask of stoicism and gives the dullest performance of his career.

Death Wish is a classier version of what you can find on cable in the wee hours — it’s not worth seeing in the theater — but it’s worth pausing over its politics of guns.

Superficially respectful but ultimately cruel.

That City by the Sea isn't laughed off the screen is testament to Caton-Jones' attention to actors and to some tightly written scenes.

I suppose it's too much to expect Pirandellian stature from the madness of Chuck Barris -- but that's about the only thing that would have made this mixed-up ego trip work.

A few billion 1s and 0s in search of a movie.

The movie isn’t dead on arrival, like Snyder’s over-reverent "Watchmen." But it’s pleasure-free.

Turns out to be semi-enjoyable, semi-tacky retelling/updating of the old Elizabeth Bathory legend.

For In Bruges to click, McDonagh needed either to get more real or more fake.

Too often, it’s the MOVIE that isn’t there. What’s meant to be archetypal comes across as superficial.

A spare, melancholy film that is so far in spirit from its source, Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal."

Few films go as obviously and bewilderingly wrong as Chloe, but for the first hour it’s a potent little melodrama in which the smooth, super-controlled storytelling contains the theme of unruly obsession like a straitjacket.

It’s not the weighty emotions that drag Vol. 2 down. It’s the plot that chases its own tail and the cluttered visual palette.

The story doesn’t feel dramatized. It feels pitched.

As a ravishingly photographed, high-minded meditation on the potential of art and therapy to exorcise the vilest sort of psychological poison, it is positively riotous -- an Everest of idiocy.

Mary Poppins Returns is a work of painstaking re-creation, and it’s full of nice touches. But it’s a bit of a dud.

Mapplethorpe doesn’t linger long enough to have a present tense. It hits its marks and breezes on. It’s not inept — there are few bad scenes. It doesn’t risk enough to be bad.

Just don't believe the anti-hype. There are lots of reasons to have a good cry these days -- here's a nice, warm place to get squeezed.

Somewhere in this mess, there might be a very good movie.

As a scare picture, Signs is good enough. As a religious parable, it's scarier -- and I don't mean that as a compliment.

The movie is a noble enterprise, and Downey is stupendous as usual, but Joe Wright's direction is too slick to elicit much feeling.

It's fun to see.

Mute is pretty meh but gets points for randomness.

The problem is the enervated pacing and ludicrous depiction — after much fancy skipping back and forth in time — of the murders themselves.

Streep and Jones make themselves small: She's chirpy; he's crusty. Incessant pop standards on the soundtrack supply the emotion the director can't. All that's missing are commercials for estrogen cream and erectile-dysfunction meds.

The last hour is like a night at the comedy club after the headliners have left and the room has the smell of stale beer and flop sweat.

The finished product is in a different league than the whompingly terrible Men in Black II - it hits its marks. But it's not inventive enough to overcome the overarching inertia, the palpable absence of passion.

I laughed -- but mostly to keep from getting depressed about the devolution of mainstream movies.

People are calling Fifty Shades Darker the worst movie ever made, but it’s really not that terrible. It does, however, misrepresent itself, which is true of most mainstream American films about sex. The movie’s real subject is wealth.

The bigger problem is that stupidity just isn’t a very interesting subject.

The movie plays like a strenuous imitation of Steven Spielberg instead of the real deal.

A perfectly decent second-banana, Rob Schneider, has been over-optimistically elevated to the top of the bunch.

The non-ending turns the whole movie into an elaborate tease, too creepy to dismiss, too shallow to justify its "ambiguities."

The actors are good, but their lovemaking has no raw edges, no messiness. Deschanel lights them like sculptures — art objects — while Richter saws away to serenade their transcendent oneness. It’s Middlebrow Realism, comrades.

The story is hell to follow--the flashbacks aren’t in chronological order--and the nonacting variable.

It delighted me; it disgusted me. I celebrate it; I lament it. I'm sure of only one thing: that I don't trust anyone--pro or con--who doesn't feel a twinge of doubt about his or her responses.

Size really is about all that this tedious, underpopulated beanbag of an epic has going for it.

The passing of the torch from Raimi to Alvarez is not a momentous occasion. In the end, who really cares? Five years from now, will you want to watch this bloody $14 million extravaganza or Raimi’s shoestring original, which was Amateur Hour elevated to pop art?

Working in a mini-genre whose bones would appear to have been picked clean by the likes of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven, Glosserman and Stieve find a few pints of fresh blood.

"Three Kings" is fictional, obviously, and Mendes and Broyles were bound by the facts of Swofford's life. But the violence in "Three Kings" was visceral, whereas Jarhead's never penetrates the blood-brain barrier. It's locked away in its narrator's jarhead.

This one is a mess--a misshapen, mawkish tragicomedy bordering on self-parody. Its ambitions deserve respect, though.

The movie doesn't have any undercurrents, psychological or cinematic. -- The Blessed Mother ends up looking like a drunken housewife.

It's the only Almodóvar movie in which feeling, emotional or sexual, doesn't suffuse the imagery and hold the ramshackle melodrama together.

The Snow White comedy Mirror, Mirror turns out to be not that terrible - or maybe it's that the terrible first half hour wears you down so much that the rest seems relatively pleasant.

This slender, increasingly monotonous stalker plot feels ludicrously overintellectualized-full of hot air.

The action is bludgeoning. When Max gets pummeled by fists and lethal objects, we get pummeled by light and noise and rock-'em-sock-'em editing. No shrimp, though. As a narrative, "District 9" wasn't particularly original, either — in the end it was a standard conversion melodrama. But everything is better with shrimp.

The whole movie is like an NRA wet dream, with Robert Duvall as a crusty gun-range owner who pitches in to shoot bad guys. Jack Reacher already feels as if it belongs to another era.

The movie is better than you've heard, although that's not saying a lot.

The scale of the enterprise is thrilling; it's too bad the movie is so muddled on so many different levels.

Some of that fun is infectious. For a while. Maybe 45 minutes. But when actors look as if they’re having a better time than you are, the buzz wears off fast. You turn into a wallflower at an especially obnoxious party.

If I’ve made Robert the Bruce sound laughable, I’ve misrepresented it. It’s not bad at all. Though he is unusually uncharismatic, Macfadyen (who co-wrote the script) is an excellent actor, and Richard Gray directs ably. But that word — “ably.” I never used it before. It’s the bottom of the neutral zone, before you dip into negative territory.

If the staging were as witty as the plotting, Quantum of Solace might have been a corker like "Casino Royale." But when the action starts, art-house-refugee director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) mashes together close-ups in the manner of "The Dark Knight," and every big set piece is borderline incoherent.

Gomorrah isn't memorable. The structure feels random, and the characters remain at arm's length. Next to HBO's "The Wire," which depicted an enormous financial ladder and also brought to life the characters on every rung, the movie is small potatoes: excellent journalism, so-so art.

Watching this Pelham--a money job from its conception--you can believe that there's no other motivation on Earth.

As drama, Hilary and Jackie is merely sketchy and superficial. As a portrait of the artist, it's puritanical crap.

Creative Control is the most elegant vision imaginable of a world in the process of losing its moorings.

Although it's shot in lovely, dusty shades of brown with splashes of Coca-Cola red, John Hillcoat's Lawless is dead weight: listlessly classical and then bludgeoning.

The movie is lighter, more fun, and ultimately more satisfying than its weighty predecessor.

The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice.

Travolta keeps you grooving even when the movie's motor runs down--although it has never revved too high to begin with.

He's (Reeves) not as good as he was playing a menacing Georgia wife-beater in The Gift, but he's an awfully convincing jerk.

Moderately entertaining, immoderately splattery spaghetti Western.

With all the narration and fits of slow motion, the movie seems like the work of a nervous chain-smoker. It lacks concentration--and with it, the potential for rapture.

Hopelessly amateurish, the troupe is saved by a remarkably pretty young blonde called Douce with a sweet soprano to match her angel face. The gifted, unknown actress-singer who plays her, Nora Arnezeder, also saves the movie, which would otherwise blur into a mass of droopy, mustached, big-honkered Gallic character actors.

As Brown becomes more flagrantly self-destructive and at the same time more deluded, you realize you're watching "Bad Lieutenant" made by a tediously finger-wagging Jew instead of a tediously desecrating Catholic.

The performance is extraordinary, literally: Close resembles no man I've ever seen, or woman either. She's the personification of fear - the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is.

The film would be better if it were gentler. It's broadly written and played, the actors too busy telegraphing their characters' emotions to let us contemplate their faces in peace.

The movie substitutes milky, washed-out color and funereal music for insight. The murders are purposely un-fluid: When you see Mohammad or Malvo take a shot, you don’t see the impact of the bullet. When you see the victim struck, you don’t see the shooter.

It will resonate with anyone who has ever buried a loved one and struggled to reconcile the myriad emotions--grief, anger, helplessness. Which is to say, everyone. And yet out of this premise comes glop. Departures needed a little more work in the morgue--like cutting to the bone.

It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors’ workshop.

It has strong moments and fine, unsentimental performances, but it doesn't jell as a story.

Sour and mostly feeble, with a depressingly curdled worldview. It bears no resemblance to Allen's surreal, open-ended comedies.

Johnny Depp makes a valiant stab at the part, but even with his hair thinned and lightened and his face hardened, Depp remains Depp: I never forgot I was watching a big star doing an impersonation. It’s as if the spirit of a psychopath like Bulger resists the camera. Or maybe the movie isn’t imaginative enough to penetrate his shell.

It's good enough that you forget how much better Brian De Palma could do it. The rest is a slow road to nowhere, less clunky than "The Interpreter" but bogged down by its own cynicism.

Works only in spurts.

American Ultra is undemanding late-summer studio fare — ultraforgettable. But I’ll remember the faces of Eisenberg and Stewart, who are easy to ridicule but, whatever the pundits say, very much movie stars.

What Hooper can’t manage is to put us inside his characters’ heads — where we should be in a story that makes every surface suspect.

Hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained.

Their amalgamations can be feats of genius, like their stoner-gumshoe farrago "The Big Lebowski." Or they can pretty much lie there, like much of their new, star-packed comedy, Hail, Caesar!, which is nothing but movie fodder.

The movie, based on the terrific book Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, is only so-so, but it moves at a fair clip and fills in a lot of details about the early successes of the Afghanistan war.

At its best, 25th Hour is a melancholy tone poem -- But the movie is also muddled by its own ambitions. There is simply no connection between the themes of Benioff's screenplay and 9/11, and every time Lee over-inflates the story, he loses its real pulse.

The final 10 minutes of Win A Date With Tad Hamilton! are likable: one cliché following another, but with charming restraint. Or it might just have been that the movie's simple-mindedness wore me down.

I know I'm going to bring down the room by saying I think it's just okay. Well, Jennifer Hudson is more than okay.

This is the first big-studio action picture with some of the disgusted, bloody nihilism of the post-Vietnam era.

Without a character, he’s (Pitt) back to that soft, appraising, Robert Redford Jr. stare, his mouth half open as if he’s about to speak but plainly with nothing on his mind apart from, “This is what a movie star looks like without any lines.” The ghouls are having deeper thoughts.

The highest-gloss revenge porn imaginable. It’s hard to believe that so much visual elegance has been brought to bear on material so ugly, and yet the disjunction is intentional, and the film is all of a piece.

"The Silence of the Lambs," was morbid but also a rich and satisfying serial-killer thriller—a cunning weave of the fairy tale, the forensic, and the fetishistic. Hannibal, on the other hand, is simply a fat slab of sadism.

If you're in the mood for a liberal message movie in which the only surprise is no surprise, American Violet is the ticket.

The picture has some fun slapstick set pieces and an inventively manic turn by Gibson.

The sheer novelty of the enterprise is probably why Once Upon a Time in the Midlands has gotten so many rave reviews when it's actually sort of … middling.

So-so quasi-thriller.

The problem is that he — unlike most modern sci-fi directors, who throw so much CGI at you that they make miracles cheap — seems peculiarly stingy when it’s time to deliver.

The movie’s satirical backbone softens and dissolves, and watching it go wrong might make you realize it wasn’t that good to begin with — that Bell had been getting by on energy and the audience’s goodwill.

Serenity isn’t just meant to surprise you — which it will — but to give you an emotional wallop — which it may or may not. It didn’t work for me: I was too hung up on the fanciness (and, in truth, ridiculousness) of the final half-hour to feel everything Knight wanted me to feel.

More entertaining than it needs to be.

The director's knee-jerk anti-capitalism often sticks in my (white, well-fed) craw.

What's a shock is the crudeness with which Spielberg fills the scenario in -- how he neuters his protagonist and short-circuits the inner workings of his human characters.

Good enough to make you wish it were better.

The movie feels autobiographical--emotionally authentic (with a fair amount of bitterness toward women) and somewhat unshaped.

The movie improves on Koppelman’s ungainly novel but is generally dreary and light on insight. Director Adam Salky steers clear of the usual addiction-movie clichés, but he doesn’t have anything to replace them with, so it’s as if all the connective tissue is gone.

These are Doritos movies, indeed: a lot of crunching, a lot of empty calories.

The film is a hodgepodge, and it closes with a whimper. But along the way some lucid voices slip through.

It's about unruly passion, but it's icy and cerebral, and Robbins has become a disappointingly tentative actor, playing emotionally straitjacketed men in a self-imposed straitjacket.

Underwhelming.

It walks and talks and moves very fast, but it never lives.

I’d see a whole film about the adventures of Hader’s desperate-for-transcendence roadie. Unlike Popstar, it might actually go somewhere.

If you want proof that Will Ferrell is the most riotously funny straight man since Jack Benny, observe the way his utter sincerity (in the Ralph Bellamy role, as Wendell’s rival for Eva Mendes) lifts this two-ton piece of whimsy into the stratosphere.

As a movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has no inner life -- no pulse -- of its own: It's secondhand.

Zalla, a graduate of Columbia's film school, is talented and single-minded. He needs to lighten up, literally. He frames his characters to bring out all their sweaty desperation, and his palette is dark with splashes of muddy brown; even the street scenes look as if they were shot in a dungeon.

Pontypool doesn't jell--its pretensions way exceed its reach--yet it's madly suggestive, and it rekindled my affection for the genre.

Everything Is Illuminated is not a fiasco, but in some ways I'd have preferred a fiasco—something overreaching and inchoate instead of this self-consciously artistic mood piece.

The Science of Sleep transports you, but it strands you, too. Apart from the time-machine bit and two or three other daft exchanges, Gondry’s scenes tend to circle around the same drain: the hero’s insufferable narcissism.

Anyone who has ever ended a relationship and taken long walks in the rain will relate, at least until the characters open their mouths.

The novelty wears off and the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag. The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.

JT LeRoy isn’t a bad movie, and with these actresses it’s certainly worth seeing. It’s a passion project for Knoop, who co-wrote the script (songs by her brother, long divorced from Albert, all over the soundtrack) and has been promoting the film.

Some people are finding it difficult to live with the idea that Kaleil could put his employees through hell, lose $60 million of other people's money, and wind up a movie star.

I like my God, though, like I like my comedies: ruder, cruder, and able to show me things I haven't seen before. Bruce Almighty is sadly miracle-free.

To the Wonder feels like generalized woo-woo—and self-parody.

Bloated and often boring and has absolutely no reason to exist, but that it also hits its marks. No fanboy will pass it up. No studio head will lose his or her job.

Ender’s Game’s only lyrical presence is Breslin’s. The actress has a gentle soul. In the end, she’s the movie’s mascot, and its mournful spirit.

Sandler isn't afraid of plumbing his dark side, but Apatow fails him: Scenes of George's self-pity drag on too long, and as the character loses stature, Sandler recedes from his own vehicle. Rogen doesn't fill the vacuum.

The segments are essentially monodramas, so sketchily written that the big moments feel less like recognizable human behavior than recognizable screenwriter overreaching.

It's depressing when the best thing you can say about a comedy is that its second-rateness is pleasantly in sync with its unmagnetic hero.

From the start the jokes are on a different level than the last one: coarse, aggressive, and poorly timed by director Jay Roach.

Succeeds in dramatizing the resentment and guilt on all sides without just adding to the noise.

Steven Soderbergh is usually an inspired chameleon, perfectly suiting his style to his content. But The Good German is an ambitious miss...It's all very beautiful, high-minded, and remote.

The line between eeriness and tedium is fatally fluid.

Directed by David Zellner from a script he wrote with his brother, Nathan, the film has its tender mercies, as well-meaning Minnesotans attempt to reach out to this preoccupied Japanese woman with almost no English.

There’s a special kind of hell for artists who array vigilante revenge-porn in saintly garb, and Denzel Washington and director Antoine Fuqua should go to the front of that damnable line after The Equalizer.

Gibson is better in the later scenes, when Walter tries to escape the Beaver's nefarious influence. And Gibson's never bad. It's just that we know how much is missing. As a raging nutcase, he's capable of so much more.

Unlike your average comic-book blockbuster, The Hulk isn't a bad cartoon. It's a bad modern Greek tragedy. It's a swing at the moon that looks (and smells) like green cheese.

Half inspired and half eye-rollingly terrible.

The movie would be more bearable without the unyielding score by Clint Mansell, which somehow melds the worst of Minimalism, art rock, and New Age music. It's what you'd hear if your massage therapist wanted to induce a stroke.

I wouldn’t believe that Run, Fat Boy, Run was co-written by Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) if he weren’t up there on the screen in teeny briefs and with his gut stuck out, trying to endear himself to the American audience in material maybe a notch above Rob Schneider’s.

You could get high on this movie's technique, dizzy on its storytelling. Yet it's one of the most lucid bad trips ever made.

The Magnificent Seven has the trappings of a classic Western and it hits its marks. All of Fuqua’s movies hit their marks — even sadistic formula junk like "The Equalizer." But there’s no grandeur in its images or generosity in its soul. I don’t think Fuqua ever loved Westerns. And by the time this movie ended, I’d forgotten why I do.

In any case, the best performance is by Bridgette Wilson-Sampras as the conniving but peppy slut at the perfume counter. Her big scene--farcical, filthy, surprising--is also the best in the movie. Otherwise, Shopgirl is sadly vacuous, with a sadly vacuous center.

Quick as it is, though, you have time to wonder how these Mexican assassins can watch their comrades getting skewered, dismembered, and eviscerated by Rambo’s traps and not think, Maybe we should pull out and rethink this assault.

The movie doesn’t expand in your mind — it shrinks along with its protagonist, its conclusion a reductio ad absurdum.

The Lords of Salem is gloomy, lacks variety, and is not without its flat patches. Heidi is an increasingly dullish heroine, and in the first 15 minutes you’ll know what’s going to happen in the next 80.

Tom Hanks takes his art down a peg with another paycheck performance as the dramatic cipher Robert Langdon in Inferno, Ron Howard’s mostly lame adaptation of Dan Brown’s wholly lame novel.

Say this for actors: Too self-centered to be embarrassed, they can be existential heroes of a (moronic) sort.

W. isn't gripping enough as drama or witty enough as satire. It's neutered.

Those shots are in contrast to those landscapes, which are craggy, primordial. It’s meant to be a haunting combination, and I have colleagues who’ve found it just that, who came out of the movie ashen, devastated. But I found it bludgeoning — I think it gives new meaning to the phrase hammer of God.

Using R.E.M.'s impassioned "Everybody Hurts"--written by Michael Stipe after the suicide of Kurt Cobain--to underscore shots of Kidman and Ferrell feeling blue about their inability to pair off is an aesthetic crime. The Ephrons should be fined and forced to do a few hundred hours of community service.

I'd like to recommend it, but it's too silly. On the plus side, it's ravishingly well directed by Antonia Bird.

I hesitate to label the result as bad or good. It’s just … off.

Isn't bad as these things go, although these things go nowhere a healthy individual should want to. Having never claimed to be a healthy individual, I found it tolerable.

There’s enough going on to keep you watching — and, as I said, to keep fanboys wowed by the scale of the production and pretension. But most people will leave feeling drained and depressed, wondering how a studio can get away with withholding so much.

Oblivion is like that movie-within-a-movie: Everything in it feels 100 percent inauthentic. That vibe, as it happens, turns out to be intentional. But when the humans arrive, it’s still a narcotic.

I've shot people for less.

The fact that the movie’s focus is how and why he renounced the world, moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, and stopped publishing makes it worse, somehow. Salerno probably didn’t mean it this way, but he gives you the impression he came to mock his subject: We’ve got you now, you antisocial bastard.

A pretty good action flick -- twisty, marvelously acted, and energetically (if not always coherently) staged.

Full Frontal could not be more opaque. I honestly don't have a clue what it's about; it went completely over my head.

Gladiator's combination of grim sanctimony and drenching, Dolby-ized dismemberings left me appalled.

As Willie Stark, Sean Penn demonstrates how a great Method actor can make the world’s most unconvincing rabble-rouser.

It’s painful to report that Jarmusch’s deadpan is in the rigor mortis stage in The Dead Don’t Die. His own creative ferment isn’t happening this time — the acid cynicism has killed the yeast — and the actors seem unsure whether to commit to the material when their director plainly hasn’t.

A veritable orgy of immorality, each scene making the same point only more and more outrageously, the action edited with Scorsese's usual manic exuberance but to oh-so-monotonous effect.

The screenwriters go out of their way to prepare you for Taken 3: Serbedzija has more sons, and Kim's virginity is getting harder and harder to preserve.

There isn't anything in this Total Recall to match the immortal Arnold Schwarzenegger send-offs, "See you at the pah-ty" and everyone's favorite alimony killer, "Consider this a divorce."

The new Ghostbusters isn’t a horror, exactly. It’s just misbegotten. It never lives.

Its combination of lavishness and lack of imagination is the only thing memorable about it.

Actually, the whole movie is grim — drearily so.

It's empty and formulaic, with plotting that's lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer.

The new Carrie isn’t atrocious — just flat and uninspired and compromised by the kind of mindless teen-movie “humanism” that De Palma so punkishly spat on.

The picture is an empty parlor trick, but it's carried out with a master's concentration.

Freed from the original Halloween template, Zombie is aiming for something hallucinatory, almost abstract: a tone poem of madness and sadism and family ties that bind (and garrote). But the picture runs out of ideas about halfway through, and what’s left is splatter in a void.

Under J.J. Abrams, The Rise of Skywalker hits its marks and bashes ahead, so speedy that no emotion sinks in too deeply.

He’s a deceptively crafty director (he fakes naturalism beautifully in movies like "Dazed and Confused," "Before Sunrise," and "Boyhood"), but he can’t find a suitable form for Maria Semple’s patchwork best seller about a misanthropic, malcontented ex-architect named Bernadette.

The lesson of this is that there’s no easy way to dramatize the story of Julian Assange and that trying to turn it into a conventional melodrama is not just politically irresponsible but dull-witted.

It's evidently important to Allen to work, work, work, but he's starting to make his movies by rote instead of passion. Could he handle -- psychologically -- a year or two off? Could he afford -- creatively -- to keep grinding them out?

Planet of the Apes has been designed and photographed (by Phillipe Rousselot) with real artistry, but in all the ways that matter it's hack work.

As a film, it's overly tidy, and the surreal concentration-camp climax gave at least one viewer an inappropriate fit of giggles.

Love & Other Drugs is crazily uneven, jumping back and forth between jerk-off jokes and Parkinson's sufferers sharing their stories of hope. It's the sort of movie in which half the audience will be drying their eyes and the other half rolling them.

The movie's themes are enormously resonant, which makes its doddering tastefulness that much more frustrating.

You can see the potential, and you can also see the places where Allen didn't (couldn't?) rise to the occasion.

The best thing about the movie is that you don’t have to invest a lot of time into seeing Austen’s prose manhandled. You can enjoy the film — well, parts of it — as a middling stock production with flurries of gore to break the monotony.

Michelle Pfeiffer is brittle in a way that's not especially French, but she's poignant and very lovely. Rupert Friend, on the other hand, is difficult to warm up to, especially with his features hidden behind all that hair. It's not a good sign when you have to take the movie's word for it that the lovers at its center are really, really into each other.

The elements of Precious are powerful and shocking, but the movie is programmed. It is its own study guide.

Luc Besson's Jumping Frog Action Factory looks mighty lame in Colombiana.

It's written and directed by Kevin Smith--and hats off to him for being savvy enough to go for a piece of the Apatow action! Too bad he doesn't rise to the occasion.

Some of the gags do land — maybe one in four. But the genre-parody genre with big stars and poop jokes needs a little more class than MacFarlane is capable of providing.

The climactic interaction between Rachel and the film that Greg has made for her is so ecstatically weird that it gets points for its audacity. It’s almost inspired. But the coda — an ode to Greg’s self-sacrifice — is unforgivable, a testament to the ego - and power-trip that is the movie’s ultimate reason for being.

Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the lot. Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull. You have to admire a director who works so diligently to help us rise above all the bad karma.

A movie about a man forced to stop thinking of himself as the center of the universe ends up feeling suffocatingly self-centered.

Seyfried (of Big Love and Mean Girls) is a radiant object and can sing, but I'd like to forget the others--especially Brosnan, whose singing is the best imitation I've heard of a water buffalo.

The only surprise is the level of violence — not just beyond "The Karate Kid" but beyond "Fight Club." The problem with that strategy is that unless you’re knocked out, you’re just grossed out and eager to go. You practice the art of self-defense against the movie.

Travel--finding the self by escaping the self--is central to the novels of Eggers and Vida, but Mendes knows where he's going before he gets there. And so the subject of Away We Go turns out to be not travel but child-rearing, which is at best well-meaning and anguished and at worst downright monstrous.

Plays like an inflated Harlequin romance.

After a few minutes you know everything about Louis you’re going to know; the only surprise in Nightcrawler is the level of grotesqueness it achieves. There’s more insight (and entertainment) in an average sketch from the old SCTV series; I kept imagining Joe Flaherty’s horror host Count Floyd climbing out of his coffin and chanting, “Oooh, that Louis, he’s veh-ry skerrrr-y, kiddies — ahwoooooooo!”

A shapely, stylish, white-knuckle horror-thriller that hits its marks with blood and thunder. It stinks to heaven, too, but it isn't lame. The streets of Rome haven't run this red since the Inquisition.

That first half of Admission is a lot for an actress to overcome. It’s not just very bad, it’s very fast, as if someone had overwound the metronome. Fairly naturalistic lines are delivered at the pace of screwball zingers — which stubbornly refuse to zing.

The revulsion that Steven Spielberg maintained to the end of "Saving Private Ryan" is nowhere in sight — Ayer betrays his own values with a climax that’s like a hack gamer’s recreation of Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch." The final encounter between Ellison and a German soldier is meant to offer humanist balance, but in context it’s ludicrous. You can’t believe Ayer thought he could get away with it.

This Aladdin’s sole innovation is a feminist Jasmine who refuses to be controlled, but the song is so saccharine and the vistas are so synthetic that it doesn’t feel as if she’s being liberated. It feels as if yet another man is trying to engineer her responses. Aladdin might as well have put a VR headset on her.

The moral contortions of 8MM seem especially bogus, a sadomasochistic peep show booth pretending to be a confessional.

For all the Saturday-matinee heroics, the movie is dreary and monotonous, the vision junky in more ways than one.

The restored footage, nearly an hour of it, has at once bloated and diluted the work we've known and half-loved, undercutting its still-astonishing strengths while making its flaws leap out with unprecedented clarity. You can now fully appreciate the job that Coppola and his colleagues did in 1979 of salvaging what might have been a dud on the order of … Apocalypse Now Redux.

Foster’s feminist victimization complex seems to be looping around to meet Nixon and Agnew. Next she’ll be hunting Commies for the FBI.

The Australian actress Radha Mitchell is the only reason to see the movie: She has an extraordinary open face and a way of mixing dreaminess with sudden bursts of lacerating emotion that recalls Jessica Lange.

I found it tiresomely undramatic, even saccharine. Not to mention monotonous.

One of the deadliest things I've ever sat through and which doesn't display someone's strange mind--only someone's predilection for sniggery camp.

I can't think of a movie this long that has left me so starved for a movie.

In the golden turd that is Eat Pray Love, everyone helps Julia Roberts find herself so she can then experience true love.

It was probably hopeless from the start: The Warhol cosmos is too weird and complicated to lend itself to a conventional Hollywood biopic, and this one is conventional down to Warhol's first glimpse of his future "superstar" bouncing up and down vivaciously in tacky slow motion.

This director is too calculating to hold our trust for long, and skepticism will kill transcendence every time.

With a million times more computing power at its disposal than its 1982 predecessor, Tron: Legacy still looks like Disco Night at the jai alai fronton.

Had enough grit to scratch its way through my cynical defenses, at least until its grotesque ending. But that capper isn't an aberration -- it's the logical extension of the movie's grandiose ambitions.

Every bit as dumb as August's "Conan the Barbarian" but awash in neon-lit nightscapes and existential dread, with killings so graphic that you can't entirely believe what you're gagging at.

Thanks to Hancock's evasive storytelling, it's never clear why Houston moved so slowly or why so few Texians came to the Alamo's aid. The middle of the movie is pokey and unfocused--and, given the circumstances, bizarrely lacking in urgency.

The most fluid, lyrical, and even-toned work of his (Burton's) career. It's also the most boring by a factor of 10.

Hannibal Rising is basically a Steven Seagal vigilante movie with a hero who eats the people he kills. At least it's ecofriendly.

The Camden 28 is slapdash: more talking heads, reunion footage with the mother reading from her own testimony, newscasts of the day. But the editing supplies some urgency, and the subjects remain radiant yet down-to-earth--too good-humored to be beatific.

Is Brad Pitt the worst actor on earth? The case could be made, and Meet Joe Black could serve as Exhibit A.

The cast comes off like a third-rate stock company on the matinee after the night on which everyone got bombed on mescal (and possibly mescaline).