David Edelstein

Gleefully pushes everyone's buttons...and that manages to exploit our own racial discomfort and envy in ways that leave us hungry for more.

No one rises above the material, though, except for Walken, who looks pleased with the paycheck and the top-shelf tequila. As a shady lawyer, Mickey Rourke is smooth and funny, but recognizable only by his familiar purr.

Takes off into the comic stratosphere in its first sequence and then slowly sinks to Earth, made logy by its noble means and Sayles' increasing inability to shoot anything but fat clots of undramatic talk in the most boring manner imaginable.

I doubt many things — almost everything, to be frank — but I have no doubt that my Heaven Is for Real audience slept better that night. Whatever works.

Rock of Ages withholds nothing and makes miracles seem cheap.

It's bursting with goofy banter, Hollywood in-jokes, sexy love scenes, and chases that go on much too long but have the kind of madcap self-indulgence that makes questions of logic or credibility seem dull-witted. It's a great piece of mindful escapism.

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.

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

This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith.

Pellington and Perry can be accused of over-enunciating their ideas, but any film flooded with this level of emotion is worthy of our respect — and our tears.

Sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy.

Perhaps the late Blake Edwards could have found a balance between slapstick and psychodrama, but Ron Howard can't get the pacing right, and Allan Loeb's script is even wordier than the one he wrote for "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps."

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.

The only moments of conviction come from an Asian-American dominatrix called Pearl (Lucy Liu), who brings far more glee to the task of beating people up than the picture's star or director. If the audience could have half as much fun as Pearl is having, Payback would be a kick.

The (elderly) Burt Reynolds vehicle The Last Movie Star strikes a note of banality in its first sequence from which it rarely deviates.

The film, smoothly directed by David Dobkin, has a neat farcical structure but is too in love with its overly tight-lipped protagonist and deadpan pacing.

As you watch the nannies mistreated and the children left to cry themselves to sleep, the only surprise is that there are no surprises. It’s zombie-land.

Dr. Seuss's The Lorax [sic] isn't Seussian in spirit. It's shrill and campy and stuffed with superfluous characters.

But the question hangs: Does this artificial, three-hankie scenario justify its 9/11 appropriations? Dry your eyes and decide for yourself.

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.

Apart from Caroline Aaron's turn as Darin's overbearing sister...Beyond the Sea has nothing to recommend it.

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

Emminently skippable.

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 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.

King Arthur is profoundly stupid and inept, but it's an endless source of giggles once you realize that its historical revisionism has nothing to do with archeological discoveries and everything to do with the fact that no one at Disney would green-light an old-fashioned talky love triangle with a hero who dies and an adulterous heroine who ends up in a nunnery.

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.

Fifty Shades of Grey is nowhere near as laughable as you might have feared (or perversely hoped for): It’s elegantly made, and Dakota Johnson is so good at navigating the heroine’s emotional zigs and zags that you want to buy into the whole cobwebbed premise.

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

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.

Less a classical narrative than an ingenious machine for inducing terror, rage, and paralyzing unease.

Profoundly unnecessary -- cluttered, padded even at 90 minutes, indifferently narrated by Anthony Hopkins, and consistently misdirected by Ron Howard.

The 61-year-old Stallone would deserve a measure of respect for pulling Rambo off, appalling as it is, but this Fangoria-worthy circus of horrors also features footage of actual Burmese atrocities.

A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.

The acting in this movie is unusually bad--atrocious, even.

Coarse and chaotic remake.

The film is too wan and distanced to sweep you up, but it holds you.

Pain & Gain gives you a rush while at the same time making you queasy about how you’re getting off.

A riot of sleazy camera moves, bad acting, and maladroit profane dialogue.

A piece of exploitive schlock.

The film is based on a novel by Susan Minot--one of those books where the author doesn't deign to put dialogue in quotation marks for fear of dispelling the dreamlike mood. It works on paper, but Minot, who shares credit for the adaptation with fellow novelist Michael Cunningham, doesn't understand that screenwriting is the art of taking away.

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.

It's hard to get past the primitiveness of Allen’s fantasies.

Extraordinary Measures has a soppy piano-and-strings score, but the primal fear of loss sharpens every scene.

The movie goes soft. But it has the unpretentious energy and charm of a good YA girls' novel.

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.

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

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

Like most “universe” movies, this one has about five beginnings and then segues into a round-up-the-team section that ought to have been sure-fire. But the banter has a droopy, depressed air, as if the actors know they’re coming from behind.

In any case, the last twenty minutes of Breaking Dawn are so harrowing that it's possible to forget that most of the acting is soap-operatic (the guy who plays Carlisle is aging to look like Liberace) and the dialogue from hunger. The movie's that primal.

If the movie were just these two (Costner/Hurt), bopping around arguing and offing people, it would have been better than the unholy mess it turns into.

I'm genuinely of two minds about the picture. I want to say it's subtle, but I also want to say it's heavy-handed. I want to say it's incisive, but I have too many problems with its psychological elisions to let it off the hook.

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.

I've never seen a film in which what was actually onscreen seemed so irrelevant.

An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.

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.

It's a terrific performance-and terrifying. Owen Wilson is aging: Where goeth my own youth?

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.

Once the premise had been established and the leads began to interact, I stopped totting up the inanities and had a good time.

It's no wonder that Crowe can't generate any real feeling. The narrative is alien to him on every level. The ear-grating dialogue is a good indication that he didn't know what he was doing; he's usually pitch-perfect.

The Situation is, to put it kindly, a spotty piece of work. The script is by Wendell Steavenson, a reporter who seems to know everything about Iraq and next to nothing about screenwriting. The dialogue is flat, and the actors almost never rise above it.

Nicholas McCarthy, the director of the new bad-seed movie, The Prodigy, works in a low key that still somehow scrapes your nerves, so when the nasty stuff arrives, you realize (too late!) that you’ve been softened up for the kill. The film is cruelly well-made.

Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris celebrates old-fashioned American heroism, and I like it — in spite of its dumbbell infelicities.

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.

Bridges has evolved into a miraculous actor: one who signals wildness through the intensity of his containment.

I’m not sure about Hawn. A youthful twitterer, she has developed an expressively croaky voice, but nothing about her reads “nervous, agoraphobic cat lady.” She’s no longer a jumpy clown — she doesn’t need the humiliation.

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.

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

Again and again the killers linger sadistically over the dead or dying bodies of the people they've dispatched. Did Carnahan think these sickening scenes would give Smokin' Aces a moral complexity that's generally absent from this genre? I think they make the picture seem even more morally bankrupt.

I was all revved up to have a whale of a fascist good time, and S.W.A.T. left me let down and pissed-off.

It's totally implausible, and yet it gets at something unnervingly real: the way that people can blow a budding relationship by being too honest with each other.

Works only in spurts.

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.

Aside from a trio of witches that can hold its own with Eastwick’s in the dishiness department, Oz the Great and Powerful is a peculiarly joyless occasion.

A Joyful Noise overcomes. The big numbers are a gospel-pop-funk fusion that made me think, Hmmm, this seems very processed - before I noticed my feet were tapping of their own accord. How can you resist that wah-wah funk guitar?

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.

Bushwick is actually an amazing template for the kind of virtual-reality entertainment that I bet will be common in a decade or two.

In Last Man Standing, we don’t much care; Hill is too busy crafting a classic to pull us in. Apart from those high-impact action scenes, he leeches the movie of immediacy.

I also thrilled to identify with a male lead (Jon Favreau) who's as brilliant and crazy and self-absorbed as Woody Allen or Albert Brooks but whose self-absorption doesn't shape and color everything else in the movie.

I found "Pearl Harbor" annoying but not excruciating—even at three hours, it's less assaultive than either "The Mummy Returns" or "Moulin Rouge."

Begins too cruelly and ends too sappily but holds you somewhere between the two extremes until the semisweet finale.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is the bloated, campy, thoroughly stupid sequel to the 2014 action thriller "Kingsman: The Secret Service."

Weitz’s pacing is so limp you’re going to need the electricity generated by a live audience to keep from yelling, “Hurry it up!”

The new Tarzan film, The Legend of Tarzan, plays as if a dog ate part of the script.

Parts of The Brothers Grimsby are very funny.

Most of Brightburn belabors the obvious.

Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged--a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.

There isn't a mummy at the center of The Mummy, exactly, but a mutating Industrial Light and Magic Special Effect.

ark delivers an abstract exercise in style, a movie so dissociated from any recognizable human emotion or behavior that its actors come to seem like animatronics... I’m bored writing about it.

The movie is a peculiar and unsatisfying hybrid--but above all it's a pedestal to its popular leading man, Ben Stiller.

You couldn't ask for a better pair of wild eyes than Jackson's.

Weds an epic, sometimes visionary, depiction of the afterlife to a script and story with fewer psychological layers than the average Hallmark card.

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.

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

The photography is excellent! the music is striking! the movie is a stinker!

Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.

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

The movie is a polished muddle, fitfully amusing but with no spine.

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.

It’s a closed, depressing vision, elevated by compassion and superbly evocative filmmaking.

There are things in San Andreas that no one would have dreamed of seeing 40 years ago, when "Earthquake" (with its tacky, plaster-cracking “Sensurround”) represented the state of the art. But nothing means anything. The spectacle feels less earned than Dwayne Johnson’s biceps, which are ludicrous but not hollow.

The drama is so muddled that Shakespeare seems to be getting in the way of Taymor's spectacle, the magic long gone by the time Prospera hurls her staff off into the sea.

A passably diverting entry in the Tarantino genre of splatter and yuks and soulfully bumbling hit men.

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

9 Songs could have been "Last Rock Show in London." Unfortunately, it's stupefyingly dull, even with good music and at the short but resonant length of 69 minutes.

Anything Else feels driven. It's like a rant from a therapist's couch--angry, unmediated, free-associational, unleavened by sentiment or compassion. And it's something else that Allen hasn't been lately: funny.

Monumentally unimaginative. Thumbs down!

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."

There's no dramatic trajectory here at all.

A melodrama in which the clichés prove more lethal than the bullets.

Half the time in the mystical saga Youth Without Youth, I had no idea what the movie was about, but I always felt that the director and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola, did, and that he was deeply in tune--and having a hell of a time--with the material.

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

The more subversive Instinct gets in proclaiming free will an illusion fostered by a rigidly repressive society, the more captive it seems to a rigidly repressive studio marketing department.

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.

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

As a narrative, it’s clunky. As a whodunit, it’s third-rate. As the drama of a closed-off man’s awakening, it’s predictable. But Haggis has got hold of a fiercely urgent subject: the moral devastation of American soldiers serving in (and coming home from) Iraq. At its heart are deeper mysteries--and a tragedy that reaches far beyond anything onscreen.

Like most good superhero movies, Dark Phoenix operates on two levels, comic-book fantastical and psychological. Like most not-so-good ones, it doesn’t do justice to either aspect. The results here are middling, but the director, Simon Kinberg, throws a lot of ideas at you. It’s not boring.

The Circle is a tonal mess: part satire, part moralistic melodrama. Some of it is broadly acted, some of it subtle, much of it overheated. It has great moments, though.

If Shyamalan is an original, his originality is in draining the life out of pop archetypes, twerpily annotating them, and presenting it all as a gift from on high.

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.

The film has no spirit of inquiry -- no spirit at all, really.

Insurgent is not a very good movie, but it’s better than it needs to be.

Johnson rips off a lot of "Batman," especially in the cathedral climax, but that's not so bad: The movie looks best when it looks like other, better movies.

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.

Apart from those nutty camera angles and lenses, which throw you out of the action, The Current War is absorbing.... It never quite snaps into focus, though.

A grave screwball comedy. Its gags aren't just hilarious -- they have a weighty, plaintive soul.

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.

I found the movie cheap, muddled, and thoroughly devoid of insight.

I had a fabulous time. Well, I did once I accepted that it was a campfest--a great Provincetown drag show of The Stepford Wives.

Armageddon is awesome, dude, but it's, like, short on awe.

The absurdity is what makes it such a hoot-and-a-half.

But Besson — by no means a bad filmmaker — has gotten rich off that kind of violence that upsets no one, least of all jaded international action audiences. He tries to have it both ways and fails some of cinema’s most precious resources.

Morel will inevitably be compared to John Woo, whom he trounces. He has fewer mannerisms (no damn doves) and a keener eye; his fastest, most kinetic shots flow together like frames in a flipbook.

125 minutes is a long time to stare at a movie that's basically in bleached blue-and-white with occasional splotches of brick red. The palette reinforces the monotony of the storyline.

Cold Turkey is a simmering piece of holiday dystopia with a good, scorching boil-over.

There's a huge change that turns the nihilistic carnage of Craven's original into something suffused with old-fashioned family values, so that we can relax and enjoy watching the bad guys get beaten, skewered, dismembered by garbage disposals, and tortured with microwave ovens.

Hong Kong action fans hoping for spontaneous combustion from the American debut of superstar Chow Yun-Fat might want to turn their weapons on the producers.

Much of it is risible, yet I loved watching it -not because I thought that the emperor was wearing new clothes but because I thought he looked fine - beautiful, actually - naked. Figgis' camera is probing and alive, so that even when his meanings are laughable, his images remain allusive and mysterious.

The most charitable way to view it is as a Dadaist experiment, in which two tonally disparate movies were hacked down and their remaining strands woven together to bizarre effect.

The film is sometimes gentle to the point of blandness, but it's never flimsy.

It's fun to see.

The carnage (with its computer-­generated splatter) is meant to be campy fun, but it’s so offhand that there’s less suspense than in an Austin Powers movie.

One of the more enjoyably terrible movies of the year.

It has a bad, slapstick first act but by midpoint becomes strangely compelling, tapping into the fantasy of reliving one's high-school years (which did a number on us all) and getting it right.

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

Olympus Has Fallen is a disgusting piece of work, but it certainly hits its marks — it makes you sick with suspense.

Garry Shandling is poignant and hilarious as an alien stud.

Only a corporate entity could deliver an ending like this one. But only humans could devise and enact the often delightful scenario that precedes it.

Let's just say that in spite of its malignant sun-scorched palette, absurdist visions, and narrative loop the loops, the picture looks in hindsight like the same old vigilante crap.

The souped-up plot is certainly indigestible (cheesecake, beefcake, bullets — choke on that), and there’s a steady stream of bad laughs, but something genuinely frightening comes through: a woman’s sense of disempowerment by men on all sides of the law. Hardwicke sticks to her guns — meaning there’s no play in the gunplay, only horror.

If you can stay awake, you'll see a performance by ­Keaton that is radiant in its simplicity, all ditheriness shaken off. She's still ­peaking - ­someone give her a great role.

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.

Brutally exciting and sometimes brutally inept.

The film is overnarrated and in spots overwritten, but Brooks, who's primarily a screenwriter, does well with actors, and he has coaxed an extraordinary performance out of the young Jordana Brewster.

The period thriller Gangster Squad plays like an untalented 12-year-old's imitation of Brian DePalma's "The Untouchables."

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

The German reserve and Italian extroversion are in just the right balance. The movie exists on a tantalizing border -- and I don't mean Switzerland.

So-so quasi-thriller.

It’s so aggressively puerile and phallocentric (big swinging dicks, big guns) it could be taken as a parody of a puerile, phallocentric action comedy — a hotfoot to feminists and girly-men. That’s a distinction without a difference, though, since either way it stinks to heaven.

The visuals in the final battle have some charm: They reminded me of early Tsui Hark Hong Kong extravaganzas like Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain and A Chinese Ghost Story (which he produced). But there was passion in those HK pictures, along with acrobatic wire-work. Promiscuous CGI makes even the miraculous seem ho-hum.

Made for the most excruciating two-and-a-half hours I've ever spent in a theater.

The Goldfinch is too artful to deserve that kind of rejection, but too arty to keep you from saying, “What did I just see?”

Plays like an inflated Harlequin romance.

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

An overinflated B-movie with no grace, no subtext, no wit, and featuring beefcake/cheesecake actors who look like they've been plucked from the soaps.

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.

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

Yeah, they made a ton of junky movies in Hong Kong, but those were dazzlingly fluid and high-flying junky movies. This American retread has the same sort of hack plot but none of the bravura. It makes them look like monkeys, and not bulletproof ones.

Most of all, De Palma proves that greatest suspense (and horror) come from helplessness, a sense of impotence.

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.

Klaatu is a dream role for the beautifully blank Reeves, since he doesn’t even have to pretend to emote.

Serves up some of the most gruesomely misogynistic imagery in years, then ends with a bid for understanding. Are its makers so deluded that they think they're making the world a more compassionate place?

Apart from having no particular reason to exist onscreen, especially at these prices, it's not half bad.

It isn’t a train wreck--a train wreck would be memorable. What’s wrong is wrong by design.

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

A pretentious and stilted but weirdly compelling blend of sins-of-the-parent saga and horror movie.

So sniggeringly one-sided that the picture has no tension.

The Sitter feels slapdash and quick, but you might not want to have it any other way.

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

My daughter wants you to know that the movie is great and that you shouldn’t listen to a hater like me. I envy her belief.

It’s stuffed to the gills with effects executed by the highest-paid artists and technicians in the business. But it’s still a sorry spectacle.

Caruso is a much more resourceful director than this material deserves, but I resented being two steps ahead of the genius profiler and the genius serial-killer.

It doesn’t jell, though, and the movie’s philosophical message is especially grating.

One of those half-straight, half-spoof comic-book extravaganzas that don't ever work, and what's neat is that this one does--beautifully.

Unlike the '70s Italian cannibal movies, The Green Inferno doesn’t have a mondo vibe. It’s artfully made and acted with skill.

In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games" and Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke’s film would win--but only because he’s working so much harder to be noxious.

If the movie didn't pander so madly to the audience for "Sex and the City" and "Legally Blonde," it might have been a comedy touchstone instead of a cringeworthy footnote.

Yes, I cringed at the casting, too, especially when, watching the trailer, I heard Parker deliver the narration in the same voice she used for Carrie in "Sex and the City." But Kate is funnier - less arch - than Carrie, and Parker reminds you what a dizzy, all-in, high-risk comic actress she can be when she's not too busy showing off the couture.

DiVito turns actors like Robin Williams, Edward Norton, and Catherine Keener into nothing less horrific than giant Danny DeVitos.

The movie is a big, noisy mess, with a howler at its center: Overrouged psychiatrist Michael Douglas.

There are a bunch of other clunky immigrant subplots (the Jews get a comic one, the Turks a scary one), but it isn't until the massacre–cum–civics tutorial in the liquor store that Crossing Over crosses into the mythic realm of camp. What a waste. I still say it's better than "Crash," though.

The movie, written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, is desultory when it's not inept, but the set-up is so good that you can't help sticking it out to the (unforgivable) end.

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

It’s all so glancing and superficial that the movie doesn’t seem to have a present tense. It goes by like coming attractions. It is, however, a treasury of bad biopic dialogue.

It’s the smart-ass nerd’s Baywatch. The movie is okay, though, if you don’t mind manic pacing and icky dick jokes.

The Hong Kong vet director, Ronny Yu, did a bang-up job in 1998 with "Bride of Chucky," but he can't do much for this one except keep it moving, light it scarily, and pump that plasma.

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

Dante’s newest movie, Burying the Ex, doesn’t make the leap to satire. It has a lame-pun title, a zombie premise that might have seemed fresh two decades ago, and the sexual politics of an unusually backward adolescent male horror nerd. For all that, it’s a lot of fun, and Dante’s heart is palpably in it.

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.

The movie made me laugh a lot anyway. It has a big, inventive cast of loons and a great premise.

Domino seemed to me the end of the world for movies--a glimpse of a future so excruciating that I'd prefer to take my chances with Hitchcock's eye-gouging avians.

Appalling in ways that you could never have anticipated. The movie mixes mismatched-buddy high jinks with scenes of carnage.

Evan Almighty runs out of comic invention early, and the filmmakers fall back on what real politicians do when they exhaust their small stash of ideas: brainless piety.

When Lee isn't doing cinematic somersaults or mining for injustice, he doesn't seem to know where to put the camera. The logistics of the plot make no sense, and he has nothing to sell but the theme of our common humanity--in which, on the evidence, I don't think he believes.

It’s funny, clunky, earnest, and barely credible, but it’s all of a piece.

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

The first hour is evocative and creepy...But once the trajectory is clear and the squeamish New York intellectual Quaid has to stand up and fight for his homestead, the boringness seeps into you like the damp.

In my own world, Only God Forgives plays somewhat differently. I thought it was just about the worst f---ing thing I’ve ever seen. In fact, I was depressed it wasn’t laughed off the screen.

Things speed up too quickly, meaning just when the movie’s rhythms should become loopier and the action more eccentric, The Cloverfield Paradox becomes one more formulaic ticking-clock series of chases and shootings with a moral dilemma for pathos and then uplift.

Orgy, hell: The film is like a nightmare in which you're trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids. Based on an elemental but happily streamlined Japanese cartoon (an anime precursor), it's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.

Bizarrely depressing.

Aeon Flux is not that terrible. It's certainly more fun than a lot of films that get lovingly showcased.

In Arthur, the spectacularly grating remake of Steve Gordon's 1981 P. G. Wodehouse simulation (this time, Peter Baynham miswrote, Jason Winer misdirected), Russell Brand gives a career-killing performance.

The Canyons isn’t just bad, it’s rank — and it takes a peculiar sort of integrity to denude the frame of life to the point where it smells to heaven.

Michael Caton-Jones' pompous and coarsely stupid inflation of what remains a superior thriller, Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973).

Half inspired and half eye-rollingly terrible.

At heart, it’s about as naughty as an old Disney movie with Dean Jones, Suzanne Pleshette, and an unruly Great Dane. I liked its gung-ho slapstick spirit, though. No one’s slacking off.

Probably the most horrifying stuff I've seen all week.

It underscores the gruesome legacy of Saturday Night Live in American movies...They haven't liberated screen comedy, they've left it neutered--or, should I say, Spade.

I have to tip my cap to such a bold attempt to induce in the audience his heroine’s inner flux and fragmentation. The double-entendre title tells you to expect a trip, and you get one.

There's only one surgery scene, but it's the heart (and kidneys) of Turistas. The rest -- especially the incoherent action -- falls well below the mark set by the last Americans Abroad torture-porn picture, "Hostel."

The agreeable looseness edges into a less agreeable limpness.

Before I go into the grinding awfulness of Dumb and Dumber To, let’s get one damn thing straight: The original Dumb and Dumber is a clasick.

Unfathomably awful.

Mute is pretty meh but gets points for randomness.

Jumper is so in sync with the language of modern action movies that it’s possible to look past its soullessness and go with the quantum flow.

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.

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.

You have to feel for the army of talented FX people who must have spent months on scenes--trying to compensate, with their artistry, for the lack of dramatic logic--and having to listen to those lines over and over.

The filmmakers have separated themselves from all the emotions of filmmaking except anger.

It's a mystery how such a hodgepodge, at once incoherent and overfamiliar, could have come together on screen.

I wouldn't exactly call it entertainment; I found myself wanting to apologize on behalf of obnoxious heterosexual Jewish men the world over.

Dimly lit and slackly made.

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

Dull-witted.

He does gorgeous work, but in Mission to Mars he's only going through the motions.

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.

Enjoyable in patches, but only because of the goodwill that most of us still have toward Sandra Bullock.

A high-toned revenge-of-nature horror picture, it's a little depressed, with only gross-out shocks (gushing jugulars, bodies run over by lawnmowers) to relieve the torpor.

As a mascot, McConaughey embodies the movie’s lack of conviction, but as an indication that a star could conceivably be computer-generated with no loss of affect or facial mobility, he might inspire the next generation of bloodless fantasy epics.

It all adds up to one of the most brazen pieces of blame-shifting in exploitation-picture history.

You really have to screw it up to dishonor the memory of a movie as shitty as the original "Friday the 13th." Heads should roll.

It used to be that Midler was a life force, but whenever she tries to play one, she looks like she's floating in formaldehyde.

How bad is Zoolander 2? It’s "Batman and Robin" bad. It’s so bad that it makes you feel sorry for the scores (literally) of celebrities who show up in cameos, even the ones (Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger, Susan Sarandon, Ariana Grande, Kimye ...) who actively resist your sympathy, whom you maybe want to see taken down a peg.

Elektra isn't half-bad--only maybe two-fifths.

The Mummy is not your usual lousy movie. It has been made with skill and hits its marks. But those marks are so low and so brazenly mercenary that it doesn’t feel like much of an achievement. It’s not involving.

It's another dumb vengeance picture -- "In the Bedroom" for meatheads.

She's (Jolie) the most amazing special effect in movies. The best thing in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is a bungee-jumping ballet that Lara performs late at night in her mansion, soaring high and low in Japanese silk pajamas and with her hair pulled tightly back.

I'm not sure if the movie's lack of momentum is the fault of the director, the screenwriter, or the star, Romano. But most likely, it represents the luckless convergence of three dismayingly low-watt talents.

The new Annie musical starring Jamie Foxx and Quvenzhané Wallis is pretty bad, but let’s be honest: Despite some decent show tunes, the show was pretty bad to begin with, so it’s not worth getting all righteous about the dumb changes.

I'd like to tell you about the remake of The Amityville Horror (MGM), but I ankled after less than five minutes. It was something about the little girl holding the stuffed animal getting blown away with a shotgun at point-blank range.

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 captain narrates in a punchy, journalistic style that gives Elite Squad an air of sociological realism--it bears a resemblance to viscerally exciting seventies urban thrillers like "The French Connection."

The movie stinks to heaven.

Were Shyamalan and Smith deliberately invoking the terror — now omnipresent in urban African-American communities — of lethal asthma attacks in children? I’m not sure how I feel about something so real and so wrenching in the context of a Grade D (unfit for human habitation) sci-fi picture like After Earth.

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?

Passable--just.

A decent-enough rambunctious Southern-drive-in sort of time-waster, missing only the bare boobs that would make it the perfect socially irresponsible sexist entertainment for rednecks and uptight liberal elites who'd like to live the country-boy dream for a few hours. (Howdy, y'all!)

A sickeningly manipulative, by-the-numbers revenge movie.

Nearly three %$^&%!!# hours, and they’re brain-freezing.

This hodgepodge has been thrown together in so slovenly a way that it’s no surprise the studio didn’t show it to the press.

The first act is a thing of beauty and the second, good enough. Shame about that third act, though, and the ending that retroactively diminishes everything that preceded it.

By the third big climax the audience started to get impatient with the movie's pointless zigs and zags.

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

The film turns into one of those indie parades of eccentrics that are hit-and-miss but mostly miss.

A buddy cop movie that pretends to spoof buddy cop movies along with reality TV shows, Showtime is so lazy and artless that … that … it saps my will to come up with a good quip: Witless in itself, it is the source of witlessness in others.

The gut-whomping, high-concept romantic thriller This Means War is not a distinguished addition to director McG's oeuvre.

Libel on one of the true visionaries of American business in the 20th century, a man unfairly demonized for doing what others strove to do but doing it faster and better.

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.

The reason to see An American Affair is Gretchen Mol. She has a mild, natural way of holding herself that's likably unactressy--in every film, she seems both smart and grounded.

Fanning is a child actor with a grown-up soul, and every move, every breath, seems mysteriously right.

A depressing comeback for Jane Fonda, but it's still nice to see her in movies again, and in something that isn't dripping with self-actualizing virtue like her last projects.

George Lucas does it his way in the pallid Phantom Menace. Even cultists will wish he'd hired a director and some writers.

This mad prophet says it will die in a week.

Evocative as it is, The Road comes up short, not because it’s bleak but because it’s monotonous.

It’s a good family movie the way Hooters is a good family restaurant.

As I've implied, this is a great midnight movie: I enjoyed every patchily edited, ham-fisted scene. But I don't like seeing the wonderful Kate Winslet look stupid, or the wonderful Laura Linney abase herself.

What a whorish film this is: Even the serial killer lectures the detective.

And you wait--and wait--for the magic of movies.

More entertaining than it needs to be.

Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him -- even when you ought to be in stitches.

I like the movie, though. It forced me to rethink the way sexual desire saturates everything, along with extreme vulnerability of children.

Eckhart plays Frankenstein’s monster in a monotonous, teeth-gritting mode, as if someone had one gun on him and another on his family.

It’s actually worse than the 1981 Franco Zeffirelli–Brooke Shields version — which is worse than being waterboarded but at least bears some resemblance to the book and its brilliantly addled ‘70s vibe.

The first 45 minutes or so is stupefying--flat, disjointed, missing all human connective tissue.

The air of mourning might have worked as a counterpoint to the silliness if Mitch Glazer’s script had smart gags, but as one-liner after one-liner misses its mark, you begin to feel sorry for Murray, who’s really too old to be playing a guy who has a little daughter (not granddaughter) and likes to get kinky with Kate Hudson as a raucous, Dolly Parton–style hooker-businesswoman.

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.

A Good Day to Die Hard is the opposite of a labor of love. It has no good lines, no crackerjack fights, and only one mildly orgasmic revenge killing. It will satisfy no one — high-, low-, or middlebrow. Die Hard is finally in its death throes.

The best part is Jemaine Clement as Benjamin’s grandiose genre hero, Dr. Ronald Chevalier. Even if you love him on "Flight of the Conchords," you’ll be unprepared for his genius--and charisma.

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.

In the end, we must lay the badness of Mortdecai at the feet of its star. I envy Depp’s capacity for self-amusement, but it’s a pity he’s so rich and enbubbled that no one dares say to say to him, “Er, Johnny ... this is, er, really very bad.”

The Happytime Murders turns out to be a stupefyingly sh—y puppet movie.

I wish I could tell you they made a mistake and it’s not so bad, but, as Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man would put it, “Ees so bad, ees terrible.”

The most depressing thing about Sex and the City 2 is that it seems to justify every nasty thing said and written about the series and first feature film.

So vanilla yet so transcendentally sleazy that its target audience seems to be pubescent girls and dirty old priests.