Joe Neumaier

The movie even makes night-vision-goggle scares more irksome, a rare feat.

The mystery at the heart of the film is a riddle wrapped in an enigma covered in dullness.

The 6- to 10-year-old audience this movie is aimed at deserved better.

Broomfield's point that Palin followers threaten her enemies, though, is worthy of a different documentary - perhaps one about American fanaticism.

It winds up just being annoying.

The meta-satire hits you over the head until not just your Spidey sense is tingling.

Evil babies aren’t exactly fresh meat for parody. Then again, there’s hardly a laugh in this whole hellish thing.

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

It’s impossible to find anything that grabs you in Pompeii. This lumpen adventure with a misguided romance buries anything in the disaster-flick genre that might have been a blast.

This dull thriller wastes the potential of Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth.

Like the last gift buried under singing Billy Bass fish, dancing Coke cans, joke books and mounds of wrapping paper, there's a glimmer of fun in Four Christmases that almost gets vacuumed up with the tinsel.

Director Cathryne Czubek’s well-researched, incredibly lively chronicle of the way guns are marketed to, coveted by, and portrayed with women is a vital glimpse into a cultural phenomenon.

It appears that turning the John Ford/John Wayne classic "The Searchers" into the church-vs-vampire adventure Priest was not an altogether god-awful idea. As long as we don't get "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" as an elegiac zombie drama, this adaptation of a graphic novel has some bite.

The folksy shenanigans are well-intentioned but frankly interminable, with Kline's wry efficiency the best relief from all the yowling and whining.

There’s a good chunk of info for those eager to know how the sausage gets made, as well as the facts of life and death surrounding what we consume. You just have to pluck the PR feathers and find the good parts.

PA 4's best idea, besides reintroducing the slow-walking, statuesque Katie, is a strange video trick involving lots of little lights filling a darkened room. It's tough to describe, but the cameras, of course, capture a figure the characters can't.

Act of Valor is like watching the wrestlers in dramas produced by the WWE: They're great at what they do, but being in front of the camera isn't part of that.

So the big surprise of Horrible Bosses 2 is how far it gets on the hopped-up jabberjaw alliance of Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day. In the 2011 “Bosses,” they were swamped by the conceit: White-collar pals try to kill awful employers. Now, freed up to free-associate, they’re totally winning.

The modern stuff is undeniably fawning. But given the eye-popping visuals, you understand the enthusiasm. Especially if you left your heart, and thousands of dollars in quarters, in an arcade.

Sparky voice performances and heart make up for this family film's theft of Tim Burton's sensibility.

All banality, though it delivers some goodwill even as it pulls a muscle trying to get its premise going.

The problem with this hyper-verbal comedy is in the title.

There's an art to making a good spoof, but good luck finding it in Dance Flick, not only because the movie goes for easy toilet humor, but because it often relies on it to stay afloat.

Appearances from Jeff Goldblum, Zach Galifianakis and John C. Reilly help some, but all the mincing from Heidecker and Wareheim, the wanna-be, gross-out humor and THE CONSTANT SCREAMING get tiring.

It only comes alive when the star briefly shows the casual looseness that once was his calling card.

Aloha isn’t horrible, but it does have a pitiable odor about it, like a dog that’s sat too long on the beach. Crowe aspires to Golden Age of Hollywood repartee, but something feels off, just as it did in “Elizabethtown” (2005) and “We Bought a Zoo” (2011). Everyone just seems to be trying too hard.

Comes upon a few quirky solutions and movie-ripoff scares before settling into a kind of coma.

Even in shabbily put together dramedies, such as this one, there can be a glimmer of light. Here it’s Christine Lahti’s anguished, nuanced turn as a wife and mother excited to begin a new phase with her husband.

Talk about lost in space. The whacked-out outer-space melodrama Jupiter Ascending has embedded in its genes the DNA of “Barbarella” and “Flash Gordon,” some dust from “Dune” and even a bit of Michael Jackson’s Disneyland short “Captain Eo.”

A disappointing mess of a genre flick.

A clunky, dead-on-arrival scary drama that proves that even people with good taste need a good script or direction.

The film's major action sequences are never exciting, and even the now-requisite destruction of New York feels lazy.

There's less to Beastly than meets the eye - and what meets the eye is no great shakes, either.

"Wolverine" is silly and typical, not in spite of but because it bonds an undeveloped family feud onto the main character's renegade story.

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.

The effects are so omnipresent it's like Reynolds' perfect hair is floating in CGI limbo. Yet when they need punch, as in a "Superman"-ish display-of-powers scene involving a helicopter, there's no flair.

The film awkwardly mixes political, social and medical issues and ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

One of 2015’s dullest.

Whether the young ensemble attains it remains to be seen. The standouts, though, are Naughton, Pennie and Perez De Tagle.

Before it devolves into typical American-style action, there’s an intriguing, European-style complexity to Dead Man Down.

Can't overcome mythic stupidity.

The oh-so-out-there mentality earns some chuckles, but that, along with Piven's preening, gets very trying. A hard sell is still a hard sell.

Challenging and thoughtful, but is also, like its characters, a prisoner of its own anger.

What remains rote is how easily the fiend’s victims fall for his tricks. It’s almost as if they’ve seen too many movies like The Barber, and shaved away all common sense.

This movie is so dumb for most of its running time, you walk away wishing there was less plot and pointless posing and more of the fuel-injected coolness that brought you to the multiplex in the first place.

A lot of Aftershock predictably involves screaming or shock cuts, and the movie features a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from Selena Gomez.

Thuddingly awful.

Sean Penn’s bad side makes for good action-drama in The Gunman. There’s a grubby, redemptive quality that makes this tough-minded flick feel like the son of “Serpico” and “Salvador.”

Most of the acting is amateurish at best, and the tone is vintage "Afterschool Special." But it does aim to be family-friendly, and at least it succeeds there.

The Sitter is not only an atrocious shout-out to bad '80s comedies, it's also the kind of movie Jonah Hill should look at as a crass blast from his past.

The fact that it stars the extremely funny Melissa McCarthy is both its saving grace and incredibly frustrating.

Movie references abound, but there's not enough humor to fuel even 90 minutes.

Latest, dreadful entry in the vampires-battling-werewolves franchise.

Sandler's shambling Yogi Bear-ness will be the big appeal to holiday-vacation audiences.

Marries an unengaging love triangle to a flat visual style, nearly squashing the one good thing in it -- a scruffy, slouching performance from Peter Sarsgaard.

It's the same movie town we've seen many times before, with dingy mechanic's shops, barren parking lots and a greasy-spoon diner where all the clichés come together.

Entourage plays like a solid, if slightly too long, episode. But even given the bloat, the cast’s easy camaraderie and a “play it as it lays” atmosphere wins you over.

One achievement of James Cameron’s “Terminator” is that it overcame its low-rent, B-movie trappings. The great sin of “Genisys” is that it costs millions and yet isn’t worth a dime.

Cathy Moriarty and other Scorsese alums pop up, but these mean streets feel too derivative to thrill.

What this heavy-handed film mainly has to endure is a clunky story structure and an ending that wasn't original when it was seen four decades ago on "The Twilight Zone."

There’s no fleeing the clunkiness in No Escape.

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

Terminally silly, even more so for being "inspired by actual events."

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

The actors make the raucousness feel as easy as the cinematic couples therapy.

Bening and Dillon are equally misused, and the rest of the cast is frankly just annoying. Like Imogene’s early promise, Girl Most Likely is likely to be forgotten quickly. The sooner the better.

Director Mary Harron ("American Psycho") can do little with this bloodless drama.

If director Rob Reiner’s AARP-aimed comedy stumbles on several fronts, at least it provides a stage for some seasoned pros to strut their stuff.

While we're meant to feel claustrophobic, we're not supposed to fight boredom, which kicks in quickly.

Writer-director Wayne Kramer adds what could be called mainstream threads to his messy script, but the result is simplistic across the board.

See, everyone complains about humans in movies but no one does anything about it, so it fell to Eagle Eye to make everything laughably, ridiculously fake.

Though Fontaine makes sure the beaches are sun-dappled and the women’s shared house comes off like a sandy paradise, the movie is like the early-’80s groaner “Summer Lovers” with wrinkle lines. Hooray for the freedom and beauty of older women — a demographic that deserves better than the deplorable Adore.

Tis embalmed drama is a ghost from the '80s, a decade that regularly produced surprise-free, caramelized biopics. The airless Amelia is missing practically everything.

Overly analytical, cutesy comedy-drama.

Any urgency the movie has comes from co-star Terrence Howard, a firebrand of an actor who can’t be contained by a paint-by-numbers script.

This drama, as traditional as its subject was epochal, is earnest and studious to a fault. Rarely has a film about upheaval felt more like a textbook.

Muddled and inert despite the best intentions, this inescapably dull thriller plays like a Middle Eastern take on Liam Neeson’s “Taken.”

A young Aussie actress who seems as all-American as a Magic 8 ball, successfully walks the tightrope from precocious to exuberant, never once falling into obnoxiousness. That could describe this crackerjack of a kids' movie as well.

Goes about its game so bloodlessly, the result is some of the most unexciting action and seduction sequences in recent memory.

The biggest fault is that comparatively little attention is given to the monsters.

This smart-looking but empty adventure — with a hero that looks more Tom Ford than John Ford — suffers from a shambling script, shifting tones and a surplus of villains. Clunky and drawn out, “Ranger” shoots blanks, even with the star power of Johnny Depp behind it.

There's a climactic putt, of course, but by then you wish Duvall would get one more "Tender Mercies" under his belt so you can forget about this tin cup of a family flick.

Yes, the film’s CG dinos look great tromping in the Alaskan wilderness, but children deserve better than such unchallenging fare.

Cranston, in a fake beard and dark glasses, seems to be enjoying his goofy act. Trouble is, this isn’t the kind of movie in which goofy earns goodwill.

Has TOO much happening, which befits a comedy with a lot of targets but ultimately makes the whole operation scattershot.

This one isn't original, or even bearable. By its thudding end, audiences may wish they could be zapped from the theater to escape the buzzing in their ears.

This earnest, at times touching, reach-for-your-dreams doc about musical hopefuls in middle age gets sidetracked quickly. When it should focus on a reunited R&B group, it wallows in the self-aggrandizement of an L.A. producer and, most awkwardly, a New York cabaret singer.

Whether one thinks Only God Forgives is laughably awful — like, for instance, “Showgirls,” “The Color of Night” or “Battlefield: Earth” — or just plain terrible awful depends, appropriately, on how much you’re willing to forgive it.

What’s more depressing: that John Cusack chose the junky, un-exciting serial killer drama The Frozen Ground as his latest step away from John Cusack-y roles, or that Nicolas Cage chose to, at long last, be as un-Cage-like as possible?

The cast is generally game for playing cardboard cutouts, with Goodman having the most fun.

This Arthur is missing a soul.

The Canyons has more in common with Schrader’s opulent immoral tableaux “The Comfort of Strangers,” “Auto Focus” and “The Walker” than with his other work (including the script for “Taxi Driver”). It’s weaker than those, though, and less biting.

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.

Well-meaning but dreadfully executed movie.

Of the supporting performances, Gugino, Leguizamo and Wahlberg offer solid turns, but are let down by dialogue.

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

With the most growling and grunting of any movie this summer - and that includes those apes perched atop the box office - Conan the Barbarian seems at times to have actually been made by barbarians.

That Awkward Moment is eminently forgettable — but worth remembering as Poots’ moment.

The atmosphere surrounding them both is enveloping. While the story falls a bit into melodrama, that can’t chop away at the solid drama the stars and director build beautifully.

This is the kind of movie that, in order to puff itself up, quotes Meyer Lansky, Napoleon and Native American sayings. But according to Hoyle — as poker players would say — the film really just does boilerplate Hollywood drama.

A ghost-busting drama set in a world of mystics, mind-benders and various and sundry fake-psychic gobbledygook. But the weirdest thing is how all the fun gets lost in a bottom-drawer "X Files" story.

Every summer needs a super-turkey. So barring anything in the next 30 days that's the second coming of "Howard the Duck," the witless, completely terrible "comedy" now called The Watch should win hands-down.

It's also suffocatingly stagy, especially when the husband's new love (Kristen Bell) and a violent thief (Justin Long) show up.

From junky production values to the parade of unfunny supporting characters to its lazy energy, Dumb and Dumber To falls on its face.

I Am Number Four, with its gangly title, seems like a dimwitted cousin to those hipper properties - a Superman-come-lately tale of puppy love, extraordinary powers and puberty that's duller than a chalkboard and less powerful than an extraneous Jonas brother.

Martin starts at the outrageous accent and spins out from there, and that's fine for this. And there are a few snicker-worthy scenes.

Crisply directed but inescapably pious and, worse, narratively poky.

Fanning's watcher is watchable, yet the kid-actress extraordinaire is so polished it kind of makes your head explode.

This comic drama tries too hard to serve up a slice of manic life, but Eisenberg, along with Tracy Morgan and Isiah Whitlock Jr. as the affable druggies, provides some spark.

Problem is, this movie is all surface - to quote one character, it has hidden shallows.

The latest indignity.

The actor (Garcia), whose banked anger has been a secret weapon since "The Untouchables" 25 years ago, paints a fascinating portrait of a man moved by fate.

Dream House is the full magilla, with imaginary images, sanity questions, peek-a-boo startles and the usual are-they-real-or-not? characters.

Director Juan Feldman trusts his actors to charm us, which they do — up to a point. But there’s only so much that can be wrung out of this spinster-meets-exotic stud, “Summertime”-lite affair.

Hey, Michael: It's the robots, stupid. Despite all the mechanical mayhem, none of the Transformers stand out.

Despite the limitations inherent in the genre, it actually delivers.

It reads like a Cinemax special event, and as good as Leguizamo and Waterston are, the skeevy, fantasy-fulfillment plot that drives David Ross' movie is uncomfortably risky business.

The cast is uniformly appealing in out-of-left-field ways, but writer-director Brooks Branch lets the story amble lazily, which -- like Gabriel and almost every character like him you've ever seen -- gets a little tiring.

This rambling, unfocused, shuffling documentary paints the famous standup in broad strokes, only occasionally providing worthy examples of how Winters inspired generations.

This quirky indie has an off-kilter, shaggy appeal and a filling story.

The final fate of Adolf ­Eichmann is certainly a compelling subject. But its dramatic impact is severely diminished here by stilted filmmaking and wooden performances.

This sweet if limited film has an agreeable attitude.

What on earth is Salma Hayek doing starring in this exploitative, junky piece of torture trash?

Director Khalil Sullins’ movie has its heart and brain in the right place, but its guts are a mess.

The Expendables 3 lets down its cast with a film that’s about as thrilling as the arrival of a monthly Social Security check.

Ridiculous and mannered, Loosies is light-fingered but heavy-handed.

Now Bell can break out of the genre. She's served her time.

This comedy is empty.

A cringe-inducing, self-consciously kooky indie comedy that's best enjoyed for its taste of Rip Torn.

Ultimately, Paradise is a tiny version of a saint’s journey among sinners, an immature conception. Peramb-you-later, Lamb.

The eyewitness testimony of dozens of punk-era survivors and hotel denizens has a disorienting effect, and everyone gets sidetracked, though the colorful anecdotes are priceless.

The manic energy of Kevin Hart is, surprisingly, toned down in The Wedding Ringer. Which may account for almost the entire first half of this wannabe-raucous buddy movie being laugh-free.

Laughable/Bad

A movie needs to announce if it's playing games. Pulling the rug out from under a viewer is fine for whodunnits and psychological thrillers and the usual suspects. But a supposedly grown-up drama like The Other Man ought to have scruples about where it plans to take you.

Franco himself is ponderous playing Williams, which tends to overwhelm everything. A cool concept, and A for effort.

Get Hard isn’t edgy enough to be offensive or witty enough to be challenging. It’s just dumb.

Such a lazy action-drama underachiever, it seems unfair to target stars Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler for bringing their C game.

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 film doesn't play games; it's basically just Lucas going through a short story-like period of reflection and redemption almost entirely without dialogue. It's not enough, but it is what this underappreciated actor does best.

During all of the film’s oh-so-long 97 minutes, Year One, barely earns a snicker.

Motherhood's litany of complaints and trite comedy-drama comes off as thin, and targeted, as a flyer for The Children's Place.

Shares a spiritual link to the Japanese works of Hayao Miyazaki but lacks his films' narrative drive and magical overlay.

By the end of its way-too-long 98 minutes, there are four things audiences will be haunted by: Jovovich's annoying, whispery monotone; silly closeups of owls; Will Patton's Z-movie turn as a grizzled sheriff, and dialogue like "It's too late to forget what you already know." Ain't that the truth.

Janssen's affectionate, almost-1970s-style view of innocents-at-large may not be polished, but earns points for being from the heart.

This taut but cliched little thriller is like "Wait Until Dark" with neo-Nazis.

After a while, Vacation starts to reek like a car when the kids have their shoes off. Really, though, that stench is a studio digging through its old titles, trying to find something fresh to remake.

The Lifeguard is one of those deceptive movies that, to its credit, winds up being about more than just an easy-to-describe tagline. In this case, that line would be: “Woman goes back to hometown, sleeps with high school boy.”

This would-be satire earns an E for Effort for wanting to be to the advertising world what “Being There” was to television.

Sam Worthington and Jim Sturgess are solid as two of the four kidnappers, but Swedish director Daniel Alfredson pushes the caper button too many times. More sly wit would have helped things come to a head.

Though this family film is slick and well-intentioned, it comes off as shallow as a prom committee meeting.

Nothing terribly special here, but perfectly played and a spiritual cousin to such early ’90s indies as “Naked in New York” and “Ed’s Next Move.”

This odd Dickens-meets-Sunday-school movie is as artless as the setup is muddled.

The movie as a whole falls victim to a dewy kind of Tennessee Williams-itis, as Black plops too many wanna-be, colorful twists - imminent illness, botched robberies, fake pregnancies - into what is at heart a gently heartbreaking rendering.

This thought-provoking but overlong doc wins points for being all-inclusive.

Okay, y'all, the never-ending appeal of the Southern-fried crime caper for filmmakers hungry for flavor is back with The Baytown Outlaws. Only here, the drawling accents, screeching tires and sawed-off blasts that rise again don't amount to much.

History can be an equalizer, so director Roland Joffe ("The Killing Fields," "The Mission") makes sure saints and sinners all get painted with the same uninteresting brush in this fact-based drama.

This Canadian Hamlet, completed years ago, is as airless as a tomb.

Ah, perfect: A banal story to go with intermittently banal porn.

Summer 2013 has its first bomb, and sadly, it’s landed right on Will Smith.

If this is your particular poison, it won’t kill you. But anyone averse to Sparks’ sappy touch may get sick from all the bull.

Solid performances and a literary feel help turn a standard family-rift drama into a dry but saucy narrative.

If you're not an 11-year-old boy, or a grown-up in the mood to feel like one, the endless "wow!-that-car-is-now-a-deep-voiced-robot" scenes lack thrill. In fact, the action scenes, as in the previous films, are downright headache-inducing.

This unfunny, unoriginal, charmless teen comedy is so stunningly awful from start to finish, it's amazing to think its director has made a single film before, much less a dozen.

Paranoia’s twitchiness is like an actual twitch: it’s contrived and clunky, and you forget it in an instant.

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

There's a way to do this kind of thing (Just witness Hasbro's other toy-turned-dumb movie franchise, "Transformers"). G.I. Joe, though, hasn't got a kung fu-grip on what it is.

Sometimes a bit of befuddlement is exactly what you need. That's the driving idea behind writer-director Steven Peros' off-kilter, off-the-beaten path comedy, which owes a lot to 1980s indie cinema.

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

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.

Far from burning bright, this earnest indie starts out dull and gets duller.

The Transporter Refueled should be put up on blocks.

Unfinished Business squanders almost every opportunity provided by its potentially funny premise. Instead, it becomes yet another blotch on star Vince Vaughn’s résumé.

The big problem here is that dark sci-fi satire works best when it aims for several targets. Repo Men aims at corporate greed, which is good, but doesn’t fill in the details.

Tries waaay too hard, just like its motormouth jock-snark heroes.

Unfortunately, there’s a more potent power present here: dullness.

Forget the minor, derivative scares in The Lazarus Effect. The real jolt here is seeing a well-known name playing a monstrous evil force.

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.

This is a perfect example of the kind of indie movie J.K. Simmons will hopefully never have to do again if he wins an Oscar for “Whiplash.”

As awful as most of That's My Boy is, it's sort of mesmerizing to see how Sandler - in a script credited to David Caspe - keeps his touchstones in place.

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

This is one of those films in which almost every element is done in such an embarrassingly amateurish way, you want to put it out of its misery.

Intense and, yes, depressing - and earns every minute that it rattles inside your head.

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

Hot Pursuit gets cold quickly. That’s certainly not the fault of stars Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara, who work to keep this blessedly brief action-comedy shaking and cruising to an unthrilling end. The blame lies with a dopey script, director Anne Fletcher and a lazy Hollywood assumption that female buddy flicks should be as half-assed as their male counterparts.

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.

As an exercise in atmosphere, this claustrophobic creeper does a lot with a little, even if the movie winds up providing just superficial shivers.

There’s also little point and a garish quality that goes from pulp to junk fairly quickly, despite Pegg’s presence.

Director Sergei Bodrov’s movie is based on a kids’ book in which Tom was a 12-year-old, and the actors wisely pitch their performances to a young crowd.

Screenwriters Chris Shafer and Paul Vicknair’s script feels like a first draft that was written in one night as they got pumped up on Red Bull and speed-watched Netflix. Guys: Another few polishes could only have helped.

As a film, the result is static, like Ang Lee’s similarly muddled “Taking Woodstock.”

One we wish we hadn't seen

Galifianakis, though, is the key here. Able to smash a scene to smithereens with the simplest of lines, the hirsute comic is as unpredictable as ever, yet takes director Todd Phillips’ bait to up the stakes.

This Australian movie reminds you what can happen when directors pretend to be Quentin Tarantino, complete with snark masquerading as style, slippery timelines, blood and guts and guns everywhere.

The movie’s ennui feels like so much posing, and the Bret Easton Ellis-lite characters are monotone. It’s rich in effort, but it all comes to diminishing returns.

It’s Fatal Attraction 101.

If Marmaduke achieves anything, it's that it makes this past spring's "Furry Vengeance" look like a masterpiece by comparison.

Murder on the Orient Express, this ain’t.

The James Bond parodies and genre riffs feel at least 20 years past their prime, and most will fly right over the heads of audience members 7 and under

The movie devolves into a series of clichéd bits, none of which are that funny.

Azaria channels his inner Charles Nelson Reilly, which helps, as does an evil emoting cat. Kids under 7 will likely giggle at some too-harsh pratfalls, not care about a grown man's fear of procreation, not get all the tiny innuendos and possibly miss how the movie is a fairly successful tourism ad for New York.

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

Though it's rough around the edges, it is also, undeniably, a nervy, confident debut.

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.

Duchovny tamps down his sardonic style to play a quiet guy, but the result is blandness. Timothy Hutton gives a solid turn as a standup businessman. In all, director Anthony Fabian isn’t sure how to build a nontreacly movie out of an inspiring true-life story.

Only natural spitfire Spacek, as the pickup-driving mom of the land, feels fresh. There's even a mouthy kid Garity is "taking care of" - guess whose son he is?

The acting and general schlockiness make "Friday the 13th" look like "Macbeth," but it's clear D'Onofrio just wants to hang out. And actually, a lot of the music is really good. Let's hope next time, he decides to make something like "The Commitments" instead.

A romantic comedy that's neither romantic nor funny.

Apparently, it takes a village - or the collection of villages known as Los Angeles - to go nowhere slowly.

This version of the time machine is more powerful — it’s made me go back and hate the original.

Cusack and Jane look like they’re improvising much of the time, and while that doesn’t lead to a better movie, the off-the-cuff approach is the best thing in the film.

The amazingly awful dramatic thriller Red Riding Hood could, with tweaks, be enjoyably bad in a "Plan 9 From Outer Space" kind of way. Instead, it's M. Night Shyamalan-style bad, which means despite all the unintentional snickers, you feel trapped.

Hector wants to connect to our inner child, but it feels more like a long story from a good-hearted but dull grandparent.

A chatty little bore.

Hitman: Agent 47 is a by-the-numbers schlock action sequel that writes its own epitaph when a character mutters the dusty insult, “You’re dead, too. You just don’t know it yet.”

It should surprise no one that visually quirky, graphic-novelish, pulp-noir action flicks rarely come through the sausage machine intact.

Ultimately, even more than 2007’s “Live Free or Die Hard,” “Good Day” never lets McClane be McClane. Gone is his taunting snark and quick-witted preparedness; instead he seems like a jerk with a thing for guns.

Hemsworth has presence, but he also represents this film’s biggest problem: It feels like a bunch of good-looking kids putting on a show.

These World Wrestling Entertainment-produced movies are a world unto themselves: Cliché-ridden B-flicks anchored by monstrously huge grapplers giving acting their all.

In the monumentally dull 47 Ronin, Reeves mumbles monosyllabic claptrap between dull action scenes. And it’s a shame: At almost 50 years old, the actor allows this turgid, clanky flick to play to his worst stereotypes.

Hardworking Oscar winner Harden and beguiling Spanish star Watling do nothing for this haphazard film, which belatedly decides it wants to be a stage satire as the women lark into a ridiculous avant-garde production of “MacBeth.” Bloody awful.

Too many threads are woven together here, but occasionally, it just connects.

Flashbacks show samurai shenanigans, but it's all cluttered and rambling. Watch "True Blood," "Let the Right One In" or "Twilight" instead. Or wait for "Thirst" or "New Moon" or "Daybreakers" or ...

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.

The Big Wedding lets them all down with bottom-rung sitcom shtick and an undercurrent of squareness masquerading as absurdity.

Swan is so eager to be a trippy comic lark that it ends up resembling a clown trying to fit through a pea-shooter.

At least "Witch" offers Perlman's easy, early-hominid charm, and a semi-suspenseful rickety-bridge scene.

Comedy characters change and grow. Sometimes, as we see in Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas, they become so much like old relatives that their edge is gone.

Every joke is lame, every special effect unspecial.

The loping pace, inconsistent tone and lack of imagination are all deadly.

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

Preposterous things are everywhere in this lethargic thriller.

Someone forgot to put anything fantastic into Fantastic Four.

If only this Eddie Murphy flick had taken its own advice and spent a little more time being reflective instead of hyperactive, it might have overcome a trite script and awful, obvious excuses for comedy.

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

Director James Keach's movie is so annoyingly dipsy-doodle that TV veteran Bilson, trying hard to look haunted and angsty, is boxed in.

Riding in to save almost every scene, though, are recent Tony Awards host Harris and the wild and woolly Sedaris, who goes too far, but in a good way. Shelov could learn from them.

An atrocious mess.

Luke Evans, whose higher-profile work includes “Clash of the Titans,” this summer’s “Fast & Furious 6” and the next installments of “The Hobbit,” smolders embarrassingly. But he shouldn’t be embarrassed. In the shadows, that could be anyone.

Even Liam Neeson seems bored by the imbecilic, repetitive “Taken 3,” an action movie no one was clamoring for and no one will enjoy.

It's finally here: The most boring alien-invasion movie ever.

The crowd that likes these things will certainly be psyched. Everyone else, not so much.

The Identical is one wacky movie, based on a bit of truth.

Travolta, who was more believable as a middle-aged housewife in “Hairspray” than he is as a former Serbian commando, has the accent down pat. But his Boris-and-Natasha-style syntax seems to represent Killing Season best. Just imagine that voice saying: Dees ees very seelly movie. Catch on cable TV, please.

Regardless of where its stars want to take it, all roads here lead to blandness and inanity.

It's nothing special. Which sort of makes it a loser all the way 'round. Expect a sad afterlife for it on cable.

Unfortunately, the whole movie seems constructed just to get the singer/actress into a knock-down catfight, shoehorning one of show business's sexiest entertainers into a scorned-woman role. And even then, the pay-off feels cheap.

A ridiculously cheesy confection filled with unthrilling thrills, bored-looking adults and a comically overstuffed backstory.

“Um” winds up as empty as its mean streets are phony.

Has no thrills, no chills, no scares and contains a villain, or several of them, actually, that will turn you to stone -- from boredom.

Though Bloom feels like he dropped in from another movie, it all spins on screenwriter Thornton's charismatic performance, which also accounts for the survival instinct inside the film.

Still, in movie terms, Warrior's Heart makes curling look like gladiatorial combat.

All the men's wives are shrews, prigs or doormats; all the conquests doe-eyed blonds with sucked-in cheeks. All the dialogue is as witty as this exchange: "You're a sick f---!" "No, you're a sick f---!" They're all sick f---s, frankly, and the actors are dreadful while playing them.

Adds to the sad realization that this once-vibrant and witty actor (Cage) is completely controlled now by his inner teenager.

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

Half-assed, halfhearted attempt to copy the Farrellys' out-there style is missing both their jackassical riffs and their heart.

The kids' story gets out of control, but Andie MacDowell is a pleasantly earthy mess as Victor's out-of-it mother, and familiar New York faces (Ann Magnuson, Mark Boone Jr., Richard Edson) lend quirky support as the out-of-it elders.

An atrocious, idiotic 88 minutes of anti-entertainment. To borrow word-shtick from the guru Pitka, it's AWFUL as in, "Anyone Watching Feels, Um, Loser-ish."

Either the "Alvin and the Chipmunks" movies are getting better, or I've accidentally buried my brain for the winter. The third entry in the franchise - Chip-Wrecked - is, dare I say, the charm.

This is just one nutso, painfully unfunny family flick.

Alba certainly tries her best at portraying not just a beauty but also a beautiful mind, yet very few things add up despite director Marilyn Agrelo's efforts.

A dumb thriller starring Dennis Quaid as a weirdo mortician taunted by high school kids into revealing what he did with his wife and her lover years before - and look at the movies it rips off...

Filled with enough clichés to be broken up and sold in pieces as junk material.

This ludicrously written, buffoonishly acted, irritatingly filmed sword-and-sandals epic hasn't half the sand, sweat or saltiness of other titles in the genre.

What Getaway needed most is enough juice to get to the finish line, narratively speaking. Because while jumping into the car is great, the fun dies fast if there’s nowhere to go.

Another preachy, overacted message film that owes its out-of-time structure to "21 Grams" and "Babel," except writer-director Charles Oliver uses the idea of restorative justice.

The movie’s gimmick is having the actors visually superimposed over sets created from actual Civil War photographs. But this collage effect, while striving for truthfulness, comes off like a View-Master version of a tale already told.

Points for niche audaciousness, but that’s all.

Robert Luketic's bland action comedy focuses on the uninteresting relationship between its two bland main characters, and that's the deadliest thing in sight.

As ineffectual police work and broken feet stack up, the silliness gets out of hand.

John Peaslee's Screenwriting 101-style script has merely left everyone floating on their own.

The movie is played fast but lacks wit. The script, written by Kristin Gore — daughter of Al, and author of the book on which it’s based — mistakes frantic for funny.

Irritating and clichéd.

Everything that goes around comes around, but the roundelay in 30 Beats comes off, well, a little square.

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

Stein's schlumpy presence is disarming, though his know-it-all nature is at odds with his free-speech posing.

Unfortunately, its positive attributes are thrown out of balance by its abundant negatives - including chintzy effects, lumbering storytelling and an overstylized, earnest incompetence that evokes "Speed Racer."

What starts as a creepy, original conceit — mysterious Caesarean-section abductions during hospital stays — devolves quickly into standard talk-to-the-camera, jump-at-the-sounds, found-footage banality.

Heartening, and yet, a year after being filmed, unintentionally aggravating.

Unpleasantly icy film based on a true story.

This slimy, slug-minded mystery thriller starts out dead on arrival and then, like three-day-old fish, gets really bad really fast.

Since Bullock coproduced this masochistic venture, it seems she buys into the idea that fluffer-nut ditziness is what she does best. Except it isn't.

This pseudo-punkster hybrid of "Heathers" and "Thelma & Louise" loses its way almost immediately, veering from wannabe-shocking social indictment to stultifyingly obvious yawner.

Filled with second-rate Brian DePalma twists, noirishly blurred lights and usually solid actors mouthing potboiler brine, The Lodger resembles bottom-shelf '80s dreck.

Atrocious dreck that feels sitcomish, only without the polish or panache.

Finding a fresh setting for a comedy is difficult, but a Renaissance fair is too broad a target.

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

James' everyman appeal is stretched to the limits here, like that polyester shirt he wears.

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.

This is the kind of junky, hard-to-watch thriller that apologists claim is part of a long line of tough, grindhouse-style thrillers, but which is actually just amateurish gristle.

This god-awful, unfunny, stinkingly putrid sketch-comic movie has exactly one snicker-worthy moment, involving Kevin Nealon and a stolen grape. But watching the rest of it will make you whine.

It takes a really bad stupid comedy to make you appreciate well-done stupid comedies. And boy is Miss March a stupid comedy.

Director John Polson's elliptical storytelling style quickly becomes an irritant.

This dark lark is like walking around Times Square looking at the flashy logos and lights and thinking you see the message behind the medium.

A committed cast and pensive insights into family and self-expression help make this indie drama work.