Joe Williams

The settings and supporting roles suggest that If I Stay started out as someone’s passion project, but the final product only requires its star to sleepwalk through buckets of schlock.

It's almost offensive that Danny Glover is relegated to playing the mysterious old confidante who haunts the same fishing hole as Cal. By the time Glover's character delivers the homily, Legendary is pinned to the mat.

As long as Hollywood keeps hitting us over the head with empty spectacles like G.I. Joe: Retaliation, regular Joes will be too numb to fight back.

With stingy portions and plenty of filler, Magic Mike XXL is the worst sausage party ever.

The most rewarding way to watch Water for Elephants is to focus on the sideshow of costumes and craftsmanship, because the romance in the center ring smells like trained animals going through the motions.

There's a fascinating story here for a bolder filmmaker, but after so much meandering it's a relief that "All Good Things" must come to an end.

Because we don't know or care much about the characters, this Israeli film never fulfills its potential as either an absurdist comedy or a humane drama.

’Round these parts, when a movie promises a million laughs but only delivers a dozen chuckles, that’s a hanging offense.

Here, Dan Aykroyd mimics the original voice, but the three-dimensional CGI isn't loose and lively enough to compensate for the unimaginative story.

Judged solely in comparison to its corporate cousins, Iron Man 3 is a defective model. It’s lightweight but slow, padded with cheap jokes to disguise how hollow it is.

Duvall is a powerful actor, and this folksy fable could have been a career-capping feat, but the movie is toothless and slow.

This gravely serious drama is as insular as a tomb with Muzak. It takes a particularly heavy hand to make us numb to the abduction of two children, but that's the effect of the wall-to-wall music and earnestly dour performances.

Back when it was planned as an African-American "Ocean's Eleven," this project might have been edgy, but the script has been whitewashed into a generic caper comedy with pretensions of timeliness.

The movie version of Fifty Shades is better than the book. It's still awful, but when a filmmaker starts with stupid source material, he's handcuffed.

This is an extremely gory flick, with autopsy scenes to complement Schwarzenegger’s usual shoot-first sensibilities. After 30 years, it’s pointless to complain about the collateral damage in his movies, but here Schwarzenegger is taking vigilante justice to dark new levels that can only be reached via plot holes big enough for a Hummer.

The questions raised by Oblivion aren’t especially deep, but the movie does answer a puzzler that has troubled humankind for generations: Can Tom Cruise build a concept so big that he himself can’t lift it?

The mediocre mushy stuff isn’t alleviated by enough action.

While it claims to be exported from New Jersey, The Oranges is peddling an alien motto: When life hands you lemons, fuhgeddaboudit.

The verdict on Snitch is that Johnson has attempted a career detour on a street marked Do Not Enter.

Considerably better looking than its predecessor, but it's spewing the same old gibberish.

Spacey evokes memories of other movies in which he's played a shark, and it's inherently fascinating to hear Aniston talking dirty and to see Farrell with a combover, but nothing in the film is genuinely provocative.

Because the affable Wahlberg is making the sales pitch, you could kid yourself that this is just a high-tech vacuum cleaner, built to siphon loose change like popcorn. But our failure to understand the terrifying significance of the “Transformers” series is why we're in the age of extinction.

It's a worn-out show-business fairy tale piggybacking on a nonexistent trend.

It's classic sitcom shtick, and The Dilemma is a painful reminder that director Ron Howard was trained in television.

A movie with no surprises at all, a streamlined chase flick that is running on the fumes from recycled fuel.

Here's a riddle: What's Alice in Wonderland without wonder? It's a beloved character landing in the rubble of wrong-headed revisionism.

It's eerie rather than wondrous.

This is another one of those phony movies in which a character burrows into someone else's life without telling them she's an axe murderer, a man or a vampire. Not only that, we're supposed to hope that they get it on. I was hoping that everyone involved would get hit by an asteroid.

We were promised desolation, but “The Hobbit” just keeps dragon on.

If Repo Men could have sustained its ghoulish humor, it might have been a guilty pleasure.

Although the ratio of comedy to drama becomes increasingly weighted toward tearjerking, few of the emotional moments are realistic or effective.

OK, the musical ode to Doby the shark elicits a grin, but the low-percentage script is loaded with buckshot, not harpoons, and Anchorman 2 ends up sinking.

How you feel about Fast & Furious 6 is a matter of perspective. While a middle-age egghead might note that a series that started out as a harmless cars-and-girls fantasy has devolved into a full-blown assault on human intelligence.

Written, directed and acted by Hollywood pros, Heaven Is For Real is a polished little movie with a hopeful message, but when it literalizes the divine mysteries, it opens the door to a Doubting Thomas.

One small step for action movies, one giant leap into the abyss of mindlessness.

Out of the Furnace is hot air.

As a sex-education comedy, Hysteria is flaccid, forced and unfunny.

Kevin Hart hits the vicinity of humor with a few of his drive-by wisecracks, but the movie itself has nothing under the hood.

The clichéd script doesn't develop the secondary characters or the critical theme of the mutants' alienation.

The delivery pouch for Premium Rush promises a white-hot thriller from the bike-messenger subculture. But what's inside the package seems like a lukewarm action-comedy from the pile of scripts that Matthew Broderick rejected after "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

There's nothing cinematic about this turgid tearjerker except the slumming presence of movie star Harrison Ford.

It's clear that Phillips is betting heavily on funnymen Jeong and Galifianakis to hide his creative bankruptcy.

A handsome movie with a handsome leading man. Christian Bale is widely considered the finest actor of his generation. Yet here he’s adrift in the bulrushes. This might be the most indifferent performance of Bale’s career.

J. Edgar is the kind of prestige production that apologists will call polished, but even the technical attributes are tinny. In the gay-geezers scenes, Hammer wears terrible old-age makeup, and the entire film is bathed in sepia tones as weak as its convictions.

The special effects remain good, but the jokes are creaky, the sentiments are forced and the pop-historical lessons are obligatory.

This movie, which was made by an animation studio in Spain, isn't trying to make a social statement; it speaks in the international language of lightweight comedy.

A medical drama that pays lip service to the healing power of music but never finds the rhythm.

The Big Year puts the focus on people who aren't inherently interesting - or funny.

Starved of sufficient comedy or drama, The Age of Adaline is a pipsqueak.

Minions is product, pure and simple. Little kids will love it, but grown-ups will feel like they’re being held hostage in a Fisher-Price test laboratory.

The most grievous sins here are sins of omission.

Hot Tub Time Machine isn't a good movie, but like a bubbling bath it keeps pounding at us until our resistance wears down.

Lovely to look at, and Vikander does nothing to derail her inevitable ascension to the A-list. But as a story, it evokes a word that no battlefield nurse would ever apply to her experiences: sterile.

The setting and offbeat tone may remind some viewers of another recent comedy, but whereas “The Descendants” was a substantive meal, Aloha is a pu pu platter.

Has a welcome message of personal growth and racial tolerance. And it's ably made, with evocative Memphis locations. But in the final sermon, it proffers some plot twists that are supposed to be miraculous but may strike a doubting Thomas as lame.

In getting so many of the Midwestern details wrong, worldly director Bahrani (“Chop Shop”) teaches an inadvertent lesson to aspiring filmmakers who want to follow his footsteps to the festival circuit: Grow where you’re planted.

To stand out in a crowded marketplace, a sequel can’t just kick ass — it has to blow minds.

Instead of entertaining us, director Robert Redford offers us a handsome history lesson that's as dry as a hardtack biscuit.

The few Jewish characters are cartoonishly evil, but even the Palestinians are sketchily dramatized or, in the case of a terrorist, clumsily legitimized.

Except for the dynamite finale, The Long Ranger feels like a long, slow ride to the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump.

Although The November Man shows us some attractive people in motion, the cumulative effect leaves us neither shaken nor stirred.

The diabolical sadist of the team was director Joe Carnahan.

It's a worthy cause and an honorable film, the first full-length Disney cartoon with an African-American heroine. But without a strong story, it's a case of one step forward and two steps back.

Even by the standards of light entertainment, This Means War is meaningless.

Once we've quickly digested the fortune-cookie message that modern women are as bound by obligations as their grandmothers were, all we can savor is the scenery.

Spurlock teases the baby sitter contingent with a brief scene where a scientist discusses the neuro-chemical appeal of pop music, but thereafter the film is aimed squarely at face-value fans of the Pre-Fab Five.

Colin Firth is an Academy Award winner, so perhaps his lack of chemistry with fellow honoree Nicole Kidman is a carefully laid clue that his middle-aged newlywed Eric Lomax is damaged goods. Yet to the drama’s detriment, Lomax is about as poisonous as a week-old crumpet.

The more suitably antic Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp were considered for the part before Franco wandered into the picture with his stoner grin.

We're the Millers is nothing but stems and seeds, with less buzz than a bag of oregano.

Despite the oddly literate title, Vincent Wants to Sea never deviates from the predictable bonding-through-misadventure script, and it has little to teach us about the nature and treatment of the traveler's respective maladies.

Weaver is a natural as the imperious Ramona, but the rest of the cast is flattened by the script, particularly White, who is just window-dressing in a movie that could use the rude humor she's displayed elsewhere.

The kiddie audience will laugh a few times, but it would take an electron microscope to find an original idea or joke in this entire cartoonish movie.

Footloose poses as a bold update, but it's shockingly out of step with the times.

Here, the scattershot spoofery never rings true.

Fast Five represents Yankee ingenuity of the brutally stupid kind.

Mostly "Hoodwinked Too" is playing to young video gamers, with overblown action sequences and slangy 'tude.

People over 60 are as sexual and complicated as their grandchildren, and there ought to be more movies about them, but only an audience as constipated as these characters could mistake this lukewarm stream of pablum for a hard nugget of truth.

Ultimately it's sunk by the hole in the middle: Paul Campbell (presidential aide Billy on "Battlestar Galactica") who substitutes smarm for charm as the archetypal player who gets played.

To paraphrase a classic of Reagan-era cinema, A Good Day to Die Hard is a bad day to stop sniffing glue.

Snark is not art. In the evolutionary spectrum of cinema, Natural Selection is like the duck-billed platypus, pretending to be warm-blooded but more than a little fowl.

By design it’s monotonous, and with so much clunky hardware, Liman can’t generate the same pace he produced in the “Bourne” movies. Edge of Tomorrow has neither an edge nor a vision of tomorrow that matters today.

It's hard to hate a movie that escorts us to such lovely locales, but instead of marking the territory as her own, Madonna has directed a potentially provocative story like a virgin.

Red is an insult to our memories and to our intelligence, an unfunny farce whose veteran cast is cashing a retirement check.

Damsels in Distress is shockingly tone-deaf. Stillman is still capable of a few amusing quips, but his storytelling is sophomoric.

So friction-free that it slips from memory before the credits fade.

In my old New Jersey public school, the first thing we learned was the smell of baloney.

We need to have a dialogue about the wages of war in the remote-control era. But it’s hard to spark a good dialogue with movies whose dialogue is so bad.

Proficient director Peter Berg ("Hancock") keeps the noise so deafening we can't think about how preposterous it all is.

There’s a good movie to be made about the alienating effects of modern technology. In 2013, a little-seen indie called “Disconnect,” starring Jason Bateman, came closer than this well-intentioned failure, which has virtually no heart, humor, sense of place or central point of view. In trying to be a big, important movie, Men, Women & Children is about none of the above.

The way that Muppets Most Wanted grabs for the green is criminal.

His (Eastwood) first boring film.

The latest Hollywood version of the Godzilla story is neither fun nor fearsome. It’s an empty spectacle in which the humans are as meaningless as the monster.

Technically proficient enough to keep us intrigued; but we shouldn't have to Google a movie to know if we were scared.

Letters to Juliet has about half as much Shakespearean content as "Shakes the Clown" and even less sincerity.

What it lacks is the human element. Charlie is more of a rat than a rascal, and instead of working hard to build and operate his robots, he's literally going through the motions.

Despite the title, My One and Only is irritatingly repetitive.

Initially, the puzzle structure and a pair of Oscar-winning actresses distract us from the dark vacuum at the center of this enterprise, but when it implodes, it doesn't reverberate.

With such a thin excuse for a leading man, Arthur is a dud.