Joe Morgenstern

Depressed and depressing drama.

A slow start, a single star performance surrounded by indifferent acting and an onslaught of computer effects that range from seen-it-all-in-"Transformers" to a whole sky full of spectacular stuff in the midtown Manhattan climax.

The film turned out to be plodding and boring. No one can accuse Hardcore Henry of being plodding. It does get to be boring, but in the high-tech, cutting-edge mode of first-person-shooter videogames that dazzle your eyes, spark your synapses and numb your brain.

This new Disney film, marked by myriad lapses and marketing follies, bears the woefully familiar earmarks of a big studio production that was pulled and hauled every which way until it lost all shape and flavor.

For all its awkward structure, the film is heartfelt and deeply affecting.

There's a good subject for satire here, the extended adolescence of American kids. But satire presupposes maturity, or at least some perspective. The movie's calculation is that its subjects and audience share the same point of view. The results are truly ghastly.

In a movie that rings false at every turn, Ms. Redgrave's Elizabeth is truly and infallibly regal.

Jack Reacher, which Christopher McQuarrie directed from his adaptation of a Lee Child crime novel, is not just another dumb thriller. It's almost peerlessly self-important, weirdly incoherent and eerily smarmy. It's also mysteriously inept, considering that Tom Cruise plays the title role.

Serendipity is "Sliding Doors" with no alternate versions; it's willed enchantment all the way.

A Hollywood production that appeals to our patriotism while respecting our intelligence.

All three performances are excellent, in their different ways.

Far from rising to the level of truthiness, let alone truth, True Story rings false from start to finish.

Ivan Reitman directed, with great verve and unflagging finesse, from a terrifically funny script by Elizabeth Meriwether.

A cry of anguish for the youngest victims of every war.

The action looks impressive, even when nothing much is happening beyond local explosions or shattering glass, and the drama turns, affectingly, on a mysterious female sniper with a partitioned soul.

Still, Eat Pray Love preaches a sermon it doesn't practice-the need to open one's self to the world. In a pictorial sense this is exactly what Liz does; she vacuums up the transformative essence of three continents. Yet the world gets weirdly short shrift because this transcendently narcissistic movie is, in a narrative sense, almost entirely about Liz and the movie star who plays her.

Mr. Pandya tells a story of conflicted assimilation that's been told before, but he and his exuberant cast invest it with fresh energy and winning humor.

My Homo sapiens brain was boggled by the movie's clumsiness, while my heart was chilled by the chance that otherwise mature members of my species might mistake this disjointed botch for summer entertainment.

Constantine is yet another studio extravaganza that's all aswirl with atmospherics, though empty at its center. The invasion of the soul snatchers proceeds apace.

The Hunt occupies a special place in the chockablock landscape of movie junk. This gleeful, gross-out gorefest looks as tacky and violent as its trackdown plot would suggest, and lives up to certain parts of its bad reputation. It is also funny, genuinely topical, extremely shrewd and, heaven help us, slyly wise. I liked it quite a lot.

You're tempted to keep watching, even though the running time is a bloated 154 minutes, to see if anyone, or the movie itself, turns remotely likable. The answer to that, alas, is no.

Among the books that McCall carries with him is a volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”; we see the cover in pointed close-ups. That can serve as one of the hero’s life lessons. Take a pass on the movie and you avoid losing two hours.

There’s also a sense of ineptness in a script that constantly reaches, with only modest success, for amusing things that the mammoths and their friends can do.

Sara is supposed to be an adorable screwball with a fatal disease. Ms. Theron certainly gets the adorable right. With a comic style that's close to unerring, she not only deserves better than this junk but the very best.

The pretext of the movie, which was directed in broadbrush-cartoon style by Anne Fletcher from a coarse-textured script by Dan Fogelman, is a road trip taken by mother, Joyce, and son, Andrew.

A sentimental -- and modestly enjoyable -- fantasy of mutual need.

The shallow-seated problem with Murder by Numbers is that it's serious and doggedly intricate but not much fun.

A ponderous pirate saga, 168 minutes long, with more doldrums than "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Those doldrums are relieved from time to time by spectacular effects.

The last thing I want to do is represent The Stoning of Soraya M. as entertainment, summer or otherwise. This is classic tragedy in semimodern dress that means to horrify, and does so more successfully than any film in recent memory.

Fur starts stylishly, and confidently, but the film dwindles down to a chamber piece in a claustrophobic chamber. Enter at your own risk.

Instead of biting wit, though, the movie settles for sketch humor, standard-brand raunch and toothless slapstick that trivializes everything it touches.

A provocative but eventually dislikable two-part film that dares us to dislike it.

(It doesn't hurt that Ms. Redgrave gets to play opposite Franco Nero, who was once the love of her life and is the father of her son.) Not even she can transform lines like "Destiny wanted us to meet again."

The story line, a sequence of very loosely connected events, sustains a state of almost pure brainlessness with its indifference to dramatic development and the dictates of logic, even the fantasy logic of cartoons. It’s as if most of the script had been generated by algorithms.

Comes on like an overproduced coma, and leaves you comatose by the end. In between are 127 minutes of intermittent chaos that feel like a lifetime.

This dreary drama telegraphs every punch, emotion and plot point with a dedication that would have done the old Western Union proud.

Any shortfalls in Home on the Range a conventional but perfectly pleasant entertainment, have more to do with the ABC's of storytelling than with the D's of animation.

A deeply dreadful movie -- no, a shallowly dreadful movie -- that's too unpleasant and repetitive to be entertaining, even as camp.

After covering much of its ground at a stylish canter, The Other Boleyn Girl finishes at a plod.

Talented as they are, the wheelchair-bound stars of Rory O'Shea Was Here can't transcend a manipulative script.

The lesson here is simple: In the digital realm, the bigger the worse. What looks distinctive and believable in short takes and small doses can turn blatantly phony and deadly familiar when the scale is pumped up. Prince of Persia pumps itself up to the bursting point, and bursts.

Cowboys versus aliens is a concept that may make you smile in anticipation, but wipe that smile off your face before buying your ticket.

This new Alfie is earnest -- irony is so last century -- and not angry at all, since working-class anger would mean nothing here, because class means nothing here. Nothing means anything here.

Guess Who is, impurely and simply, a comic premise borrowed, turned around and dumbed down to the level of sketch or sub-sketch humor.

Five or 10 children might have led to comedy; 533 of them make for farce. All the same, Mr. Huard is endearing in the role of a perpetual adolescent who finally wants to stand up to his responsibilities, which include the one baby he has fathered the traditional way, and in his own name.

Steven Soderbergh's new film is a puzzle wrapped in a mystery inside a perversity. The puzzle is Mr. Soderbergh's approach to what might have been an intriguing experiment, rather than the off-putting one it turned out to be.

This horror-free horror flick sent me wandering through my own memory warehouse, where, at every turn, I bumped into images from similar -- and mostly superior -- entertainments.

Operates in a dead zone roughly equidistant between parody and idiocy. You do get the connection between tongue and cheek, but much of the humor still goes thud.

The crucial evidence has to do with rigor mortis. The movie's a stiff too.

A plausible premise, right? Yes, absolutely, but it’s squandered in a slapdash, scattershot sendup that turns almost everyone into nincompoops, trivializes everything it touches, oozes with self-delight, and becomes part of the babble and yammer it portrays.

It's dispiriting to see how little attention the filmmakers have paid to the dramatic - read human - possibilities of the original, or how much they've been overwhelmed by technology's demands. It's as though rogue programs took over the production.

Despite a synthetic optimism in the script, the movie's pervasive bleakness is relieved only by some bright performances.

Liam Neeson has never had a richer character to play on screen -- including his landmark role in "Schindler's List" -- and has never displayed such formidable energy and virtuosity.

The Fifth Estate gives us an obsessive-compulsive messiah with a taste for martyrdom, and full-screen cascades of computer code in place of a coherent plot. Exhausting in a new way, the movie is a data dump devoid of drama.

I can't find much slack to cut the film, except to say that it's a potboiler cooked in an upscale Teflon pot.

What's remarkable here is the consistency of the mediocrity.

Going on too long seems to be the disease of the week; it's certainly what brings this movie down, though the going on here stems from a surfeit of implausible plot that suffocates the main characters and the excellent actors who play them.

The only reason to see this dreary parade of deception and venality is Mark Wahlberg's performance as a disgraced ex-cop caught up in the thick of menacing events he can't understand. It's striking how this tightly focused actor can find his own firmly grounded reality in the falsest of surroundings.

It's a deafening, sometimes boring, occasionally startling and ultimately impressive war movie with a concern for what it is that makes us human.

Any notions of demolishing black stereotypes -- and what else could have possessed Mr. Smith to do this? -- are dashed by the coarseness of it all, and by the narrative incoherence; a surprising plot twist turns a sloppy action-comedy into a totally different movie, and an even worse one.

This one is both demanding and extremely rewarding, because it's really a meditation on violence.

By turns repellent, powerful and ludicrous, Antichrist piles horror on horror with pitiless passion.

There's nothing to be said in favor of sitting through garbage, and this movie is awash in the stuff, both figuratively and literally: One of its main locales is a vast garbage dump.

What's strong and true in Harrison's Flowers -- the hideous chaos of war, the stirring heroism of photographers and journalists -- falls victim to what's familiar, melodramatic and false.

There's no transcending a prosaic plot and several flat performances.

In the end, the only question of consequence that the story poses is whether superior acting can prevail over inferior writing. The answer lies not in the stars.

You could call it, more accurately, a middling notion that flies off the rails.

It's interesting to see how a potent premise -- those among us who behave like aliens probably are -- can sustain, more or less, an erratic, disjointed sequel.

A tatty but good-natured time-passer.

The production certainly looks sumptuous, and certifies Mr. Hartnett as a mainstream movie star. But the script is frequently impenetrable, the pacing is ponderous, and the film noir style can't conceal a crucial piece of misconceived casting.

This would-be epic is beautifully photographed, elegantly crafted and adventurously cast. Unfortunately, though, it plays like a gargantuan trailer for a movie still to be made.

The carnival is loud, brash, brassy, sexy and sometimes tacky or silly, but always entertaining.

To its perverse credit, “Venom 2,” as it’s being called, manipulates its audience with all the tentacles it can deploy, most of them cheerfully ridiculous, although a climactic battle between Venom and Carnage is the dreariest face-off since the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel duked it out in Zack Snyder’s 2016 “Batman v Superman : Dawn of Justice.”

If glum were good and bleak were best, Hart's War would be a standout.

Ever so slightly defective in the area of coherence; it plays as if it should have been written by a committee but they didn't bother to convene one.

A movie's script is its fate, which means this one is doomed.

When Kevin Spacey takes center stage, our planet really does seem bright.

Mr. Statham, the specialist in English tough guys who was so affecting in "The Bank Job," has more to offer than The Mechanic has the grace to receive.

Congrats to Mr. McConaughey, usually a beanpole, for making himself unfashionably fat. The movie, though, is thin, if semi-clever, the synthetically exuberant tale of a rogue’s journey from rags to riches and back again.

For all its sporadic philosophizing and belated stabs at romance, Live by Night is cold and inert at its core. That’s really the long and short of it.

Not since the thunderous digital onslaughts of "Jumanji" has the big screen seen such too-muchness.

At many points along the way I wanted to wash my hands of Scotland, PA., but then this sly, silly comedy got me smiling again.

Movies often turn on slender notions worked up to look like full-fledged ideas. Once in a while, though, a notion will be fertile to begin with, a self-renewing source of delight. That's the case with Luc Besson's Angel-A.

An odd but agreeable little comedy.

The movie is a relentlessly intense, grotesquely overblown and numbingly long account of extraordinary heroism on the part of six American security operators in the midst of horrific chaos.

Terrific performers doing what they're often forced to do, overcoming sorely flawed material.

It's a movie devoted to showing it, shaking it and selling it with huge zest and self-delight, a movie that raises MTV-style dada to the status of superheated mama, even though, toward the end, it wears awfully thin rather than svelte.

Now the two men are back, along with Irene. But she vanishes all too soon in this overproduced, self-enchanted sequel, and so does the spirit of bright invention that made the previous film such a pleasant surprise.

There’s an old Broadway joke about a musical being so bad that you walk out humming the scenery. Six Minutes to Midnight is a spy thriller, not a musical, and it isn’t bad at all; the factual history it was based on is fascinating. Still, the scenery was what stayed with me most vividly.

My First Mister, which was written by Jill Franklyn, watches Jennifer with lively interest, but rarely pierces the mysteries of her soul.

In a movie devoted mainly to making you laugh, it’s a plea for tolerance that takes your breath away.

In all candor, and with all the amity I can muster, Divergent is as dauntingly dumb as it is dauntingly long.

I've enjoyed Ms. Leoni's comic gifts in the past, and I'll enjoy them again, but Spanglish asks her to play crazed, and she delivers with a performance of unremitting, crazymaking shrillness.

A minor comedy, though a major delight.

What's missing is an emotional center. This Sinbad, with its flying ship and becalmed script, seems destined to be DreamWorks's version of Disney's "Treasure Planet."

Adam Sandler's 50 First Dates isn't just slovenly and smarmy but creepy.

Relevance can't rescue this would-be epic from the swamps of inertia, absurdity and sentimentality.

What's missing is dramatic subtext and surprise, as well as any playfulness that might have kept us guessing about the plot.

The perverse fascination of Jet Lag is watching two superb actors struggle with material that doesn't suit them.

The movie is counterfeit too, a coarse imitation of a stylish star vehicle for stars who deserve the real thing.

Ms. Vikander has leapt into the void of a franchise reboot, based on a video-game reboot, that generates no joy, makes negligible sense, and seals its own tomb with a climax of perfect absurdity.

If I could find some facet to praise, I'd be glad to do so, but the production's mediocrity is all-pervasive -- story, character, graphic design, even music -- and it all points to a failure of corporate imagination, or maybe just nerve.

Built from an alloy of absurdium and stupidium, with the latter, heavier element dominating the mix.

The only parts of the film that ring true -- and they sometimes ring touchingly true -- are the ones that give Mr. Allen simple human themes to work with.

It's a movie at war with itself. The first half, more or less, is witty about California culture, or the lack of it, in a "Clueless" kind of way, which is a very good way.

By the end I could have used a Bulleit to the mouth.

Angels & Demons is a serious slog. Still, it's an odd kind of a slog that manages to keep you partially engaged, even at its most esoteric or absurd.

Ms. Judd commands the screen with consistent authority, and Mr. Freeman brings expansive humor to the role of a self-styled wildcard who's still dangerous in court.

What they've done here goes beyond gross -- or clumsy, or dumb -- to genuine ugliness, both cutaneous and sub.

That's what is missing from The Longest Yard most egregiously. Charm has been kept on the bench.

In this frustrating fizzle, the friendship does keep struggling to change into a love affair. But year after year, July 15 after July 15, it's the same old same old - two increasingly tedious people talking self-conscious talk.

Penelope was in a trough of trouble before the oink on the script was dry.

Nobody doesn't like Tina Fey, and anyone aware of her starring role in Admission will be wishing her well. But wishing won't make this dramedy any less dreary than it is.

The movie finally comes together into something that is genuinely -- and almost quietly -- stirring.

Buck is so precocious, such a relentlessly clever construction, that he leaves nothing to our imagination. He’s the soul-free star of a movie that’s dead in the icy water.

The writers haven’t given her the nuance needed to differentiate confident from crazy, and the directors, who are two and the same, haven’t given the production as a whole consistent verve; the pace drags when it isn’t frenetic.

Why is she (Bullock) demeaning herself with such shoddy goods? She’s a talented woman with a faithful following. She has made formula films of varying quality before, and her fans may well swallow this one, but it’s a formula for disappointment laced with dismay.

This frenzied sequel has all of the clank but none of the swank of the previous version.

The story leaves you snoozing with the fishes.

The movie's real star is the cinematographer, Elliot Davis -- his images carry more emotional freight than all the performances put together.

To the Arctic 3-D is an impassioned plea for action on global warming, and the passion is intensified by the music.

A film that tries constantly to amuse, but succeeds only fitfully.

A remarkably dislikable film, long on atmosphere -- I admired Dion Beebe's brooding cinematography -- and desperately short on vitality.

Productions can go wrong. Certain elements can fail to ignite or cohere. Bad stuff happens all the time, especially in industrial enterprises of this magnitude, but usually there’s some good stuff to dilute the debacle. Not here, though.

There isn't a milliliter of honest feeling from start to finish, and precious little comedy or romance.

Any movie that gives Helen Mirren a chance to shoot really big guns, wear an ermine astrakhan and channel Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth can't be all bad, and Red 2 isn't, though it comes close.

Thanks largely to Ms. Parker and to the delectable Zooey Deschanel as her anhedonic house-mate, the filmmakers still manage to squeeze some juice out.

The possibilities of the dating game are endless and the potential for pain is great, yet the permutations of the movie's plot are predictable and repetitive.

Smith is only a rogue computer program, but this morbidly dispiriting movie makes him sound like a prophet.

The script, by Charles Leavitt, is dead in the water, and the drama is too, despite billowing sails and pods of whales. Instead of “Jaws” it’s a turgid “Tails.”

How much do I loathe this film? A lottico is putting it mildico.

You could make a case for this as a feature-film version of the FCC's fairness doctrine, but it feels more like a blandness doctrine, a pulling and hauling of the tone-deaf script, which is credited to Matthew Michael Carnahan, to the point of perfect vacuousness.

One of the strongest arguments yet for making sequels illegal.

There's nothing wrong with the structure of Heartbreakers, but David Mirkin's direction is woefully clumsy -- and the movie's tone is nasty.

A little humanity can go a long way to make up for a movie's shortcomings, and there's more than a little in Ladder 49, a surprisingly stirring celebration of heroic firefighters.

Basically a theme-park version of a tawdry tradition.

A godawful gothic horror flick.

Malevolence is in generous supply throughout the film. Easy enjoyment is not.

Kevin Spacey's pinched portrayal of Quoyle as a scared palooka rarely transcends its own artifice.

A remarkably ill-advised remake.

Seldom has grandeur struggled so mightily, and fruitlessly, with rampant goofiness.

Spasms of kung fu wire fighting, Spider-Man acrobatics, huge explosions and a lethal polo game can't replace the first film's beating heart and witty soul.

This fine and welcome piece of family entertainment, directed by Boaz Yakin from a script he wrote with Sheldon Lettich, gets to a sweet spot by way of a smart premise, patriotic undertones and a coming-of-age story that’s downright stirring.

The film, streaming on demand, brings old news that can’t hold a flickering candle to the events of our flabbergasting moment, and a clever twist doesn’t redeem long passages of gratingly broad and awkward humor.

Katherine Heigl carries 27 Dresses when all else fails, which it does with great regularity.

The movie's leisurely, elegant setup makes its action payoff seem, by contrast, particularly mechanical, cynical and grotesque.

Mr. Sayle's portrait is painfully unfunny, and the movie as a whole is a plodding polemic.

Unfortunately, the movie could use a bit of pachyderm memory, given its habit of flashing back to Tien's childhood with exactly the same footage used in previous flashbacks. Instead of the narrative being deepened, it keeps getting shallowed.

What's not fine is the dead zone occupied by the monster of the piece, Tom Cruise's veteran rocker, Stacee Jaxx.

This Flubbery fantasy won't win any prizes for elegant craftsmanship or originality, but it's entertaining, good-natured and a slam dunk to be a hit with young kids.

Combines silly stuff about life in Los Angeles with buoyant energy, a couple of chases worthy of the Keystone Kops and quick-witted actors playing droll characters with obvious affection.

Grindingly tedious.

With all its misfires, though, and with a Strangelovian twist that's a dud, Big Trouble remains a reasonably pleasant way to spend an hour and a half and still get change.

A misshapen semi-spectacle that seems to be simulating an epic, and getting away with it only occasionally.

What was weirdly but deliciously scary has grown ponderously out of scale, even for witches at their malign worst.

Joyless and airless suspense thriller.

If you're looking for logic or finesse, The A-Team can be numbing. If you're looking for good cheer, hold out for egg nog at Christmas. But if you're a fan of causeless effects, consequence-free causes and digital Dada, let the silly times roll.

What I do know is that I was gripped for a while by the strength of Mr. Gibson's filmmaking, only to be repelled and eventually excluded by his literalist insistence on excruciation. There is watching in horror, and there is watching in horror.

Whatever possessed the people who made this film to believe its ponderous style would appeal to contemporary audiences? One answer may lie in a variant of the mostly true proposition that no one sets out to make a bad film. No one chooses ponderousness as a goal; it comes unbidden, with deadly earnestness.

Mr. Walken performs with a marvelously minimalist precision.

One could argue that the target audience - black teenagers, Mr. Lucas has said - might be most receptive to a film that conveys history through contemporary entertainment. But this isn't contemporary entertainment, it's antiquated kitsch reprocessed by the producer's nostalgia for the movies of his boyhood. The story has been stripped of historical context - don't black teenagers and everyone else deserve hard facts? - and internal logic.

A deadly earnest and deadly dull psychological thriller.

The production's penchant for contrivance is insufferable - not a single spontaneous moment from start to finish - and the boy is so precocious you want to strangle him. It's surely not the fault of Thomas Horn, the remarkable young man who plays him.

Can't hold a candle to Robert Altman's 1992 comedy "The Player." Both films present themselves as knowing views of the movie business, but Mr. Altman and his writer, Michael Tolkin, really knew.

Little more than a showcase for Owen Wilson's amiable shtick, and a showcase in the merchandising sense of the term.

Instead of growing from a sweet young thing into a strong woman who is Maxim’s equal, this bride stays scared and vulnerable until close to the end, when the script turns her implausibly into a sort of Nancy Drew doing detective work for the husband she adores. Who could have guessed that the film with a modern perspective on gender politics was the one made 80 years ago?

Hate is too strong an emotion to spend on such a clumsy, bloodless broadside against human foibles in general and American follies in particular.

Almost every sequence contains references to other films. Spotting them is a pleasant distraction from figuring out the plot, an absurdly rococo structure that rivals the most flagrant befuddlements of “Inception” or, for that matter, the latter stretches of “Westworld.”

A shopworn studio contraption, slapped together from second-hand parts.

No need to belabor the awfulness of this film, a romantic comedy devoid of romance - instead of chemistry there's the flow of reverse magnetism - and lacking in comic timing, let alone comic content.

Bleak, remarkably turgid, tediously violent, devoid of drama, deprived of magic, stripped of romance and, except for one of the oddest boy-meets-girl scenes in movie history, a befuddled and befuddling excuse for entertainment.

The production as a whole is awfully clumsy, and Ms. Moretz, who is only 17, needs more help than she gets from the first-time feature director, R.J. Cutler.

I took it as a pretty piece of ephemera, and I must confess that I laughed a lot.

Secret Window has an ending that lets one of our most reliably interesting actors pull out all the stops. But getting there from a good beginning followed by a slow, repetitive middle is a test of resourcefulness for him and a test of patience for us.

It’s billionaire-glossy, as much an ode to consumerism as a study in sadomasochism; intermittingly titillating, with fugitive flashes of droll; and, bondage apart, a dutifully romantic tale of an old-fashioned girl who takes a particularly roundabout route to true love.

Mr. Hardy does have a few sensationally lurid moments, but the stuff of high drama isn’t there. Most of the time his character is a minimally animate object, scowling furtively and growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking’s synthesizer.

Even as a visual aid, though, The Da Vinci Code is a deep-dyed disappointment. Paris by night never looked murkier.

It's thanks to her (Leoni) that we stay tuned to Mr. Allen's comic premise long after it has gone from delightfully outrageous to off-puttingly preposterous.

As long as this deity remains childish, materialistic and narcissistic, Jim's in his heaven and all's right with the world. It's when the story reaches for maturity, spirituality and altruism that the divine spark of comedy sputters and nearly goes out.

Horns is uncertain in tone — most of its attempts at humor fall flat — and amateurish at best.

It's not a good sign when a movie is called The Break-Up and you can't wait for the couple to split so they'll get some relief from one another, and give the audience some relief from them.

The source of this movie's energy is near-perpetual desperation. You can see it in Tom Cruise's fixed grin, and in the mad proliferation of unspecial effects.

The film as a whole never takes flight, though not for lack of trying.

Short on dramatic energy, Must Love Dogs settles for a cheerful drone.

All that's missing is wit and humanity.

Enjoyable enough for what it is, a clever idea developed by fits and starts.

Something of a shambles -- a shambles about a shambles -- but bound for big success and deservedly so.

A not-bad idea lurks inside this insipid story.

I can't say anything nice about Flipped, a painfully clumsy adaptation of a tween novel by Wendelin Van Draanen.

Michael Bay's absurdist comedy is all pain, no gain and an utter monstrosity. It may be the most unpleasant movie I've ever seen, and I'm not forgetting "Freaks," which Pain & Gain resembles, come to think of it.

Talk about tin ears. Black or White comes off as the product of clouded eyes, sour stomachs and addled brains.

Downey is undone by a woefully amateurish production that, sadly and ironically, looks like a cheap TV show.

The performances, under Mike Newell's direction, range from conventional (Ms. Roberts) to dreadful, and the script is as shallow as an old Cosmo cover story.

The movie on the whole is joyless. Whatever Works doesn’t.

Extraordinary Measures requires extraordinary tolerance for bathos, bombast and plain old unpleasantness.

If less is more, Uncharted must be a masterpiece. It’s bloodless, heartless, joyless, sexless and, with one exception, charmless. The exception is Tom Holland, but what’s he doing in a slapdash action adventure adapted from a videogame? Making money, of course—gamers will flock.

The last thing we need is entertainment that evokes the horror and then trivializes it with cheesy heroics. Never has a movie taken on a subject of greater immediacy, or handled it more ineptly.

The only rewards, and they are real albeit insufficient, involve watching Jane Fonda in full cry and Catherine Keener in a quieter fullness of feeling.

Good fun -- more fun than in the original -- punctuated by some lines of admirable awfulness.

The battles to save the world are generic/titanic; the villain is a bloodless bore with a boom-box roar; and the screen, like the ragged story, is chockablock with such underdeveloped overachievers as Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and the Flash.

Before Firewall crumbles into foolishness, Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany make an oft-recycled plot look like a stylish model that just rolled out of a showroom.

Mr. Brooks manages to be deeply loathsome -- no small feat for a film that's shallowly amateurish.

J.Lo should sue her handlers for damages.

Mark Andrus's script is built on soggy sandstone, and Irwin Winkler's bulldozer direction keeps unearthing toxic epiphanies. That's not to say the movie isn't occasionally moving, as well as exasperating.

Mr. Samuell's stylistic revelries are meant as comments on the conventions and excesses of movie romance, but his approach is glib and self-congratulatory. No feelings dwell beneath the layers upon layers of faux-naïve artifice. I dare you to sit through this movie and not wish you were somewhere else.

The movie stands as a genuine offense against the venerable and indispensable institution of satire.

The IMAX print I saw was so murky as to make you give thanks for the few scenes shot in simple sunlight, the 3-D wasn't worth the bother, and never before have I wanted to chloroform an entire orchestra.

The psychodynamics may well be sound, but the problem is that Léa and François, whether in or out of bed, are much more appealing than Roland and Vanessa. The camera is in the wrong room.

An abomination.

Ms. Blanchett can do no wrong, and does none here, though the movie around her, a popcorn-worthy sequel to the 1998 "Elizabeth," often lapses into opacity or grandiosity.

The whole dumb movie is a baloney cake, but the enticing icing on it is Reese Witherspoon, who manages to have a few moments of spontaneous fun in this half-baked store-bought comedy.

At a time when so many movies look alike, and studio productions sometimes look aggressively ugly, here's a quirky vision at the intersection of sci-fi and romance. Upside Down can be beguiling if you're willing to invert disbelief.

By all that's unholy, this third edition of the high-emission franchise should have been at least as awful as the second one was. (The first one was good fun.) Yet it's surprisingly entertaining in its deafening fashion, despite the absence of Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, the co-stars of parts one and two.

A film that asks its audience to invest serious thought, and in return, bestows serious pleasure.

A saga of static set pieces and strenuously clever notions, this is a fiasco of a film if ever there was one.

Its tone is unquenchably pretentious, and its scale is overblown.

The situation in The Situation is grimly photogenic, yet persistently opaque.

One of those rare and complex dramas that you can enter, not simply watch.

Still, human doesn’t leap to mind, even though Ms. Lively works hard to inject blood in the veins of her feminist avenger. The Rhythm Section isn’t a human movie. It’s as cold as the waters of that loch, and nowhere near as lucid.

Starts out stylishly, and promisingly, but then coarsens into a silly parody of film noir.

This is little more than a big-budget sitcom, with a guest appearance by Mike Ditka, who plays an unfunny version of himself as Phil's assistant coach.

Rather than a character rooted in some sort of reality-social, satirical, psychological, take your pick-Hesher is an abstract notion animated by false energy.

Calling Joe Carnahan's movie heartless implies that this auteur of affectless anarchy might have meant to invest it with detectable human feelings, and failed. Better to call it heart-free.

Against heavy odds, Mean Machine adds darker flavors to the plot without curdling it. Beneath the comic craziness is real craziness, and desperation. These goal-kicking, bone-crunching cons are both actors in and prisoners of their own horror show.

Country Strong comes to spontaneous life from time to time, despite maudlin devices and manipulative set pieces.

Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.

The movie isn't all bad, and it's sure to succeed with its target audience.

Dud notions abound. So do belabored situations, misguided performances and ritual salutes to other films. Even the cinematography is ill-advised, since it’s literally off-color; warm tones meant to evoke romantic feelings come off as a jaundiced homage to Woody Allen, from whom many of this film’s tropes have been not-so-piquantly purloined.

Predictably dumber than its predecessors, though that shouldn't get in the way of its profitability.

For all its seriousness, though, Levity struck me as pretentious and intractably lifeless.

Alan Arkin does the best trick, bringing a dollop of humanity to the role of Rance Holloway, the magician who was young Burt's inspiration. Apart from Rance, the whole production is slovenly nonsense, photographed on the cheap with blaring ghastliness. Yet it poses an intriguing mystery. Did the producers appeal to a denominator even lower than common by making their film as dumb as possible, or did it just turn out that way?

Cherry is a film for the age of information overload. It shows us more than we need to know, and leaves us feeling little or nothing about it.

Reasonably entertaining time-travel romance.

Although mood often substitutes for momentum in Ms. Kalem's film, both of her stars give affecting performances, and there's growth on both sides of the unlikely romance.

Oz the Great and Powerful, like so many products of movie studios that have lost their way, is a Tin Man of epic proportions — bright and shiny, with no heart.

Todd Graff's would-be inspirational film lift their voices in song that makes you smile, and squander their voices on dialogue that makes you cringe (but also smile in oddly pleasurable disbelief).

Some of it sputters, settling for smiles instead of laughs, and much of it flounders while the slapdash script searches, at exhausting length, for ever more common denominators in toilet humor.

Choose to pass this one up.

Littered with low points -- lame comedy, dubious history, fumbling drama and a love story so inept as to make a pacifist long for war.

If claustrophobia's your style, The Jacket is a perfect fit.

It's a bad idea done disastrously.

The Legend of Tarzan, for all its anticolonialist posturing and eminently attractive co-stars, has a dead soul.

Stepping is everything in Stomp the Yard, and, dare I say it, a stepping stone to DJ's redemption. The movie itself is redeemed -- slightly -- by its almost touching devotion to the hoary Hollywood traditions of college movies with battling frats, as well as its earnest endorsement of education.

Audacity can’t carry a drama that’s unequal to its subject in almost every respect. ( Brian Cox does what he can, sometimes admirably, to breathe life into the title role.)

The movie as a whole is nonsensical. And long. And slow. And head-poundingly loud as it culminates in slavering horror.

The movie itself is neither a catastrophe nor major.

Every scene in this oppressive film has a theme or didactic purpose, but little life.

The film’s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since “Last Year at Marienbad,” and its actors’ shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.

In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense.

This is silliness of such a special grade, performed with such zest, that it makes you forgive and even forget the movie's foolishness and borderline incoherence.

To give the film its full due, the people who made it — the writer, John Swetnam, and the director, Steven Quale — got wind of a genuine trend and ran with it. Everyone on screen is busy filming everyone else. It's a shakier-camera version of "The Blair Witch Project" in the era of YouTube.

A wispy, fundamentally sentimental tale about a nice girl who has to support herself by working as a phone-sex siren, Spike Lee's movie takes the better part of an hour to get started. Once it does it still can't dramatize the script's one good idea. [2 Apr 1996, p.A12]

What was fresh and surprising in Las Vegas turns rancid and predictable in Bangkok.

In the not-so-grand scheme of such things, Along Came Polly is certainly harmless, and occasionally very funny. It's just not clever enough to keep you engaged.

Since Mary rarely gets to see any of the good stuff, neither do we; Dr. Jekyll hides most of his switcheroos behind closed doors. [23 Feb 1996]

Somewhat sluggish but reasonably scary.

Spasms of highfalutin philosophy, and howlingly pretentious dream sequences, serve only as the thinnest of veneers for incessant action in one of the most assaultive movies ever made.

This is one of those overworked and generally airless comedies with a sitcom premise that can't sustain life.

Fitfully amusing.

It's bad enough to make parable a four-letter word.

In case you were holding your breath, Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones is still sweetly earnest, chronically overweight and swinging once again from lovestruck to lovelorn.

San Andreas changes all too quickly from satisfyingly foolish to dismayingly dumb to genuinely stupid.

The film suffers from a style that settles for pleasant or touching at the cost of spontaneous or impassioned. Too bad, because Ms. Garner is a genuinely pleasing presence.

Can't lift the double curse of too little genuine action, as opposed to quixotic events, and too many fancy words.

If this adds up to a full-fledged feature film, I'm a monkey's uncle.

The nadir of the movie -- or cheesy zenith -- is Ollie's sodden soliloquy, delivered in the presence of his baby, in which he laments the loss of her mother and his wife. All that's missing are the strains of Ravel's "Pavane For a Dead Princess."

The stars were misaligned from the start for this frantic, turgid thriller. That’s no knock on Ms. Foy, who might have surprised us if she’d had a different director working from a different script under a different set of studio imperatives that didn’t involve extracting blood from a very cold stone.

The Shaggy Dog is paint, or more appropriately here, pant by the numbers. It also manages a one-two punch -- it will upset small children and bore their parents. There's just no other way to say this: Disney, that movie of yours is a dog.

The big-horned heroine is played once again by Angelina Jolie in this dull sequel to the not-so-sparkling 2014 original.

Lacks both taste and flavor.

Too labored to be romantic and too derivative to be funny.

The remake has no grace notes, or grace, no nuance, no humanity, no character quirks, no surprises in the dialogue and no humor.

It's as if the filmmakers, having committed themselves to the book, fled from its essence, which is wildness.

This is an odd and ultimately dispiriting film, despite some intriguing ideas about brute force vs. moral authority, the elaborately staged uprising -- and impressive actors in the cast. That is to say, they've been impressive elsewhere.

Alice and John are good company — especially Alice, thanks to Ms. Temple's buoyant humor and lovely poignancy. The problem comes when the couple gets greedy, the gods grow angry and the tone turns dark. It doesn't stay dark, but getting back to the brightness is a painful process.

What happens when a genuinely dear John gets a Dear John? For the answer, just meander--no need for running or walking--to your local multiplex. That's where Dear John, based on the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name, will be meandering on its downward path from sweetly tender to terminally turgid.

The essence of Youth Without Youth, which was shot -- luminously -- in Romania, lies in its solemn speculations about aging, time and consciousness. Mr. Coppola is one of the cinema's peerless masters, and I would have enjoyed nothing more than a chance to celebrate his new film. I'm truly sorry to say, then, that I found it impenetrable.

This time, though, the happy ending plays out in real life, while the screen version falls afoul of a laggardly pace, an earnest tone and a surfeit of domesticity.

I enjoyed the film, as many will, in a split-brain way that goes to the essence of fantasy — half-believing what I wanted to be true, embracing the emotional manipulation whenever possible.

The production can best be described by several f-words. It is frenetic, frazzled and febrile. It is also feeble -- almost touchingly so, if you think of what bottomless insecurity must have prompted so much bombast.

Dumbfoundingly erratic, for the most part, but smart and funny from time to time.

A gross-out saga that sentient adults should avoid like the plague.

Adam Green's Frozen explores a tiny idea exhaustively, and I mean exhaustively.

The plot borrows as freely from Hitchcock and Henry James as from the Bard of Avon, and doesn't make scrupulous sense, though I'd have to see the film again, which I won't do, to make sure it doesn't cheat.

The failure lies not with the film's director, Marc Forster, nor with its impressive star, Gerard Butler, but with Jason Keller's dreadfully earnest script, which charts the hero's spiritual journey, and his Rambo-esque exploits, without offering a scintilla of mature perspective on his state of mind.

It's "The Sixth Sense" as nonsense, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" without the sunshine. Or the mind.

The more I thought about it, the less I liked what it turned out to be -- a vague promise unkept.

The most surprising thing about the production, which was written and directed by Simon Kinberg, is how grindingly dumb it becomes after a promising start.

All I can say is that A Dog’s Purpose left me cherishing my borderline-venerable Skeezix; longing to see Scamp and Fluff and Sukoshi and Sally, the dear departed dogs of my life; and wishing I could have been reincarnated as a better master than I was.

Whatever one may think of the overall style--I think it's ludicrous--Mr. Fuqua clearly wanted his film to be operatic, and so it is, in a tone-deaf way.

Mr. Shyamalan’s movies have often been turgid in a distinctive way, with overtones of lofty sadness, and dramatized deliberately or violently, but seldom spontaneously. This one follows the pattern, for not so good and worse. It’s a lofty letdown.

A surprise and a not-so-guilty pleasure.

Maybe there’s no such thing as an innately bad dog — or, who knows, maybe there is. But there are inherently bad ideas for dog movies, and one of them has just manifested itself in The Art of Racing in the Rain.

While the action flashes back and forth in increments of centuries, years or months, we're adrift in the here and now, trying to get a grip on the characters and their relationships, yet finding it loosened with every new dislocation.

I watched the film in an agitated space between engrossed and aghast.

Go in with lowered expectations, and expect to have them dashed.

Joyless and largely witless sci-fi fantasy.