David Hiltbrand

The Boy Next Door aspires to be a cautionary tale, but it unspools like an infomercial - with a shockingly gory ending.

Nothing gets taken here except your ticket money.

Unbroken is a grueling endurance test - for the audience just as much as for its cutout champion.

To give the film its due, the stupidity is served up with energy and good pace. But it takes a thin premise and stretches it like Silly Putty. The title should really be "Obvious and Obviouser."

Clare Lewins' dizzyingly disjointed documentary, I Am Ali, has one thing going for it: its subject, boxing immortal Muhammad Ali.

The script depends entirely too much on a succession of reporters, announcers, and spectators to provide context and detail in clunky, implausible dialogue.

Mostly, Dinosaur 13 is far too long, slogging along without momentum or suspense. These events would have been better handled in a single installment of Dateline.

The animation in Planes: Fire & Rescue is considerably better, the landscapes grander, and the 3-D flight and firefighting scenes more exciting.

There isn't an original frame or line of dialogue in Rage. It's strictly paint by numbers. Or in this case, plasma.

Blended throws a lot of things on the screen, but in the end, it has to confront its awkward and artificial "romance." And that's just ugly.

When the big caper finally arrives, you will neither grasp nor care about what's going on.

Ride Along is a film so casual in its conception and execution, it should be titled Drive Thru.

It's highly doubtful that you'll grasp even a little of The Truth About Emanuel after seeing this film. It's not so much a thriller as it is a ride on a runaway crazy train.

The sheer brutality of Oldboy is stunning, especially a deeply disturbing scene in which Brolin tortures Samuel L. Jackson. But this is an unrelievedly grim and hermetic experience throughout, the cinematic equivalent of blunt trauma.

The animated film has all the hallmarks of a straight-to-DVD project - inferior plot, dull writing, cheap drawing.

Hit & Run is a pleasant enough diversion - but more of the PPV persuasion.

Rarely has a film so equally balanced macho and nacho, but Wrath does leave us with a few valuable lessons: a.) fratricide is a nasty business, best left to the Greeks and b) fighting fire with fire may sound good, but it turns out to be a really stupid idea.

The problem is that these stoic warriors infect Act of Valor with more wooden acting than you'd see at a ventriloquism school.

The film would be a moth-eaten mess without the wisecracking animals. Not that it's funny with them.

The aquatic and surf scenes are spectacular. The story, a clichéed climb to inspiration. Soul Surfer is more parable than plot.

As a cinematic experience, it's like being locked in a coffin for an hour and a half.

This one is so bad that even Ed Norton couldn't get this mess to move through the sewer.

Appalling sequel.

Can be described as whatever is the opposite of a Christmas classic.

This insipid take on the teens-in-peril formula, with a snake-bit ghoul chasing kids around the bayou, is truly a fangless task.

The acting is better than the script deserves and Lexi Alexander's cut-to-the-hearse direction lends the film considerable kick.

So achingly empty, it's nearly existential.

Surrogates, which borrows tone and content freely from "I, Robot," is all windup and no pitch.