Joe Neumaier

The always beguiling Radha Mitchell can’t save this stunted procedural-horror combo.

This Arthur is missing a soul.

The result is a dull, high-minded soap opera.

The bad news about Admission is that this thin envelope of a comedy checks all the boxes for being a phoned-in, phony, padded rom-com.

Laudable as its world-building is, the film drags not just in its interminable middle hour, but also during the redundant monster-on-mechawarrior smackdowns.

Travolta’s face looks immobile, while Plummer and Jennifer Ehle, as Cutter’s estranged, strung-out wife, look out of place. Sheridan (“The Tree of Life”), though, does seems comfortable in a movie where the colors blur sloppily.

Like a worst-case-scenario, indie-movie cliché, Wendy and Lucy throws every bone it can at the screen.

Who let an unfunny, irritatingly acted two-hour commercial for Google onto multiplex screens?

Its creepy atmosphere aside, Maggie is a slog of the living dead.

Less the opulent retelling she (Taymor) intended and more like a high-minded midnight movie, filled with Ricky's-style costumes, black swans, sprites that flit across the screen and a cave filled with boiling beakers.

This film, though, lacks any spine. Director Jean-Baptiste Leonetti isn’t sure if he’s making a Hemingway-lite faceoff or a hemmed-in horror flick.

The former “Friends” star clearly wanted something special, but sadly the result is ... this.

This slovenly, self-indulgent riff on Charles Bukowski-like fringe-livers has all of the naked harshness of Bukowski with none of the poetry. At least Haas gives it a good shot.

Goats is just b-a-a-a-aad.

Carpenter's economical but mundane chiller is possessed more by previous ghoul-friend flicks than it is by his better work.

Luckily, folks like Snoop and good sports like Sheen and, yes, Lohan, break up the monotony. Until, like an undead beastie, the boredom and dumb jokes come roaring back.

The father is the only one who can leave the house to go to his factory job, and that seems like a paradise for viewers trapped watching this clinically shot claptrap.

No Good Deed is an example of the worst kind of exploitative thriller — and it’s being released during the worst possible week.

Jamie Bell gives a watchable performance in this self-conscious, coming-of-age drama, though the film's overall effect is best described as David Lynch lite.

What the movie needs more than anything else is a fast-forward button.

Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s film underserves its cast of up-and-comers (Thomas Mann, Ezra Miller, Tye Sheridan), allows the usually solid actor Michael Angarano to go astray with a scenery-chewing role and buries Crudup in fretting and sanctity. Worse, the experiment’s inherent drama is exacted with a tin ear and a cheesy style.

With a bit less grisliness, it could have been a mystery dinner-theater performance.

A documentary with too much dead time between the arduous tasks at hand, never grabs a viewer because -- sad to say -- it's too dull.

The film is an exasperating bore.

Polanski views things so mischievously that the naughtiness is neutered long before sniveling Thomas is tied to a pole. He’s a captive not only to Vanda, but also to all the dull, reductive mind games.

Neighbors stakes its claim in suburban-property cliches. Given the dull, stale results, maybe the end of the world was a better fit.

Johnson is convincing as a swaggering, jokey Lennon, but the photos of young John, Paul and George that end the movie ultimately have more punch than this bubblegummy montage.

It would be easy to say that the final minutes of this mixed-up thriller make everything before it meaningless, but that would indicate the odd conclusion has meaning, too.

Willing as Campbell is to Shatner-ize himself, his movie will appeal only to true believers.

Alas, this learned woman of letters - her expertise became the work of Dostoyevsky, whose major novels Geier nicknames "the five elephants" - is ill served by a trudging approach and dry-as-dust, procedural style.

Kick-Ass - based on a graphic novel - thinks it's so brave and bold. But it's more like the title character, a dweeb who just thinks he's tough.

Splice is an unholy mess because it fuses together the worst parts of every bad medical-monster thriller, and then boldly cranks up the ridiculous.

The film is put together too choppily to appreciate the bounce-off-walls athleticism of parkour. That’s a shame, since “District 13” star Belle is known as a founder of the sport.

Texas Chainsaw 3D sees itself as over-the-top and knowing, but what we ultimately get is simply eyes without a face.

I Love You Phillip Morris not only blasts gay stereotypes back decades, it could actually make people wish for a third "Ace Ventura" movie. Both of those are an accomplishment, though neither is a compliment.

Likely to draw a range of responses. Many will be transported by its gorgeous construction and breathless emotion. Others will find it patently ridiculous.

Corey Stoll is the only reason to sit through this muddled Jersey-set drama.

Danish director Lars von Trier makes this tale of one woman’s banal sexual adventures into inadvertent comedy. The film makes an analogy between sex and fly-fishing — and fly-fishing comes off as more intriguing.

There's a reason potboiler paperbacks don't make good movies - there's too much outlandish plot, even for Hollywood.

The charmless but harmless A Cat in Paris hits theaters yet doesn't enchant.

The Last Exorcism trods on previously stomped ground and has almost no good jump-outta-your-seat moments.

Sort of “An American Psycho’s European Vacation,” this indie dramatic thriller mixes sex and violence and still winds up dull.

It is no summer thriller. It’s an anemic actioner that fosters excitement like dead limbs as it lumbers toward a conclusion.

The cloddish, confusing action scenes make no sense. Young viewers’ eyes will glaze from the first-person video-game style. Nonaction scenes feature people sniping at each other, or, in Arnett’s case, croaking out the script’s half-assed witticisms, until the Turtles show up.

The end result is like Quentin Tarantino reworking a Charles Bukowski story.

Early scenes set up the tragedy, but the majority of Oliver Hirschbiegel's movie is set in a TV studio where the two eventually face each other, and the tension, unfortunately, quickly becomes stagey.

Director Michel Leclerc's comedy plays like one of those foreign-movie spoofs Jerry and the gang would go to see on a "Seinfeld" episode. Only here, there's no "young girl's journey from Milan to Minsk" - just from madcap to moronic.

This is what happens when the Norwegians try to make their own "Blair Witch Project": We get three-headed trolls that hate Vitamin D and references to "Deliverance."

The movie soon turns into only a production-designed run-and-chase game, and our curiosity about what happened to Earth and the crew is teased and teased again until the movie’s big letdown of a reveal.

When people complain about movies glutting the market, this moronic “Black Swan”-meets-“Phone Booth” thriller is what they mean.

This fawning appreciation wears thin, despite the good-natured clowning of Alabama dentist/would-be actor George Hardy, who's like a poor man's Bruce Campbell (our apologies to Bruce Campbell).

The result: a dangerously cracked creep flick.

Though Julia Leigh's surprisingly dull debut is meant to present the mysteries of a troubled young woman, you're more likely to wonder why its star, Emily Browning, is drawn to such demeaning roles.

Here we go again. Danish director Lars von Trier has pumped out Nymphomaniac: Vol II just a few weeks after “Vol. I” came out. And the results are the same: zero stars.

Where on the evolutionary scale of wacky-dudes-learn-to-grow-up movies does Role Models fall? Certainly less evolved than "Meatballs," but head and hairy knuckles above "Daddy Day Care" or "The Benchwarmers."

Gets old fast.

The drug that Ma-Ma trafficks in, Slo-Mo, slows its user's brain to 1% of its normal speed. Dredd unfortunately makes you feel as if you, too, have partaken.

Trust - a drama about the dangers of teen sexting and online predators - plays as prurient, ham-handed and amateurish.

Madagascar 3 can't upgrade its own shtick, becoming a craven example of a fast-buck, no-fun family film.

Harlin even makes poor Kilmer go running about. Just like that image, "5 Days" is embarrassingly clumsy.

Fatigue is all we get from Run All Night.

Viva needed to be shaved down to about 70 minutes, the better to really let loose and jettison some over-the-top jokiness.

Brothers tries to delve into how war can tear families apart, but only succeeds in showing how miscasting and melodrama obscure good intentions.

By the middle of the second hour, you'll be wishing a zombie would just chomp off your head to end the pain.

Has warmed-over chills and a muddled, zombie-like execution.

Will Smith may have run through every trick in his bag. In Focus, the one-time fresh prince and former box-office champ looks tired, bored and, even worse, uninspired.

If there are Nazis fighting other Nazis in a movie and it's still boring, something's gone wrong. Valkyrie has a coterie of problems, and represents a whole new front in Tom Cruise's public relations war, but first and foremost there's the tedium.

It’s slow, lethargic, utterly lacking in charm and undeserving of the Cold War setting that is its best trait.

It doesn't help that Eastwood's laconic style is as torpid as it was in such misfires as "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" and "Changeling."

Safe arrives filled with bombast and sneers but barely any thrills.

So that's three snickers, not counting the Bush quote, 'cause including that one ain't fair, man.

Rois has moments of desperate urgency and depth, but Twyker's love of parallels is finally done in by artsy shots of the threesome au naturel against stark white backdrops.

With no heat at all and a woefully disjointed cast, De Palma’s danse macabre never catches fire.

Well-intentioned but as earnest as a college freshman discovering campus politics.

And then there is the most annoying animated sidekick in a long time: a bulb-headed, trying-to-be-cute glow creature called Kilowatt (Kristen Chenoweth), who sings an ear-piercing, high-pitched note when it's scared, which is often.

The Tracey Fragments is a grating stunt that plays like a film-school project, cutting a bland story into a million tiny irritating pieces.

The title of The Misfortunates ­really applies to any audiences unlucky enough to sit through it.

“Holiday” is more palatable than similar, American-bred films like “The Family Stone” or This is Where I Leave You. Still, once Connolly’s sad-eyed, hippie-ish cancer sufferer is gone, there’s little reason to keep going.

Has raw action and urgent performances, but loses power due to an amateur approach.

Irrational Man plays, like so much of Woody Allen’s work over the past 20 years, like a bad Woody Allen parody.

This is perhaps for Shakespeare completists only.

A children's comedy about talking animals that feels as if it were written by children or, perhaps, by talking animals.

Sadly, for 99% of its running time, this muddled sci-fi drama is filled with enough overplotting, bad acting and riddle-speak dialogue to stop a clock.

Only viewers wondering if James Van Der Beek has finally outgrown "Dawson's Creek" will be at all satisfied by this dreadful police procedural that contains good history lessons and bad TV-cop-show drama.

This dour, hyperactive family film is joyless, overly busy and starchy.

Laughable/Bad

This eye-rollingly bad movie is silly, sluggish and miscast.

It's an unfunny Spanish movie that worked best as a two-minute trailer.

At 67, maestro Argento's taste still runs toward bloody entrails and eye-gougings, but Asia's sexy sour-lemon smile is underused in his movies.

Even young would-be botanists will find this charmless animated adventure as exciting as watching grass grow.

The remake of the 1987 cult actioner Robocop is a misguided failure — not only because its retooled half-man/half-machine hero now has emotions, but also because its “fear the machines” message winds up feeling creaky.

This nothing-new-here documentary presents basketball’s onetime celebrity point guard in unguarded moments. But the result is banal and fawning, with Lin coming off as a pious, charmless subject.

The overlapping stories, the emotional disconnect, the heavy-handed symbolism -- no, it's not a movie from the makers of "Babel," its a mumbling, stammering copycat drama from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson.

This lumbering, ha-ha-look-what-we-remade action-comedy is a high-concept disaster.

Ender’s Game, the book, may have a special place in pop-lit. The movie, however, is as special as a migraine.

This empty, immature romantic comedy ultimately feels as if it's filled with all the hot air that separates New York and San Francisco, yet still manages to be a suffocating bore.

An epic example of muddled storytelling, chintzy excitement and scatter-brained execution.

As clichés trot through their sessions - it's like "In Treatment" as bedroom farce - we check out. Huppert, though, is as fearless as ever.