Joe Williams

There are a few beguiling moments in Holy Motors, particularly a martial-arts sequence and an erotic dance while Mr. Oscar is dressed in a motion-capture body suit, but the road between those moments is so strewn with stalled ideas that audiences who care about character and plot are liable to take the exit to a movie that makes sense.

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

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

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

Congratulations, visitor. You have been randomly selected to beta test an entertainment-software product called “The Internship 2.0.”

Yet if you’re old enough to read this and you find yourself at a screening, try thinking about the munchkins who worked so hard on the psychedelic scenery.

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

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.

As in the mindless Man on a Ledge, the hero is never really in danger, we're the ones who are trapped.

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.

The documentary Live from New York is a separate thing. It doesn’t try to be wild and crazy, and it can’t be comprehensive. Like a land shark, it’s an uncomfortable hybrid that bites off more than it can chew.

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.

Pine and the always-watchable Banks make the best of a bad screenplay, but People Like Us gives us nothing that we can relate to.

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.

The wrinkles between reality and illusion soon become irritating.

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

Land Ho! is a tepid little movie that goes almost nowhere, and if I had to sit in that rental car for one more boob joke, I’d rather jump into a volcano.

Rooted in empty materialism, but it never evokes the heady rush of a guilty pleasure or the precipitous payback of a thriller.

Closed Circuit is not a tense thriller about the new era of surveillance — it's a tepid thriller about the old notion that no leader can be trusted.

If you don’t crave the taste of motor oil on your popcorn, Furious 7 can’t end fast enough.

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

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.

Fast Five represents Yankee ingenuity of the brutally stupid kind.

The only edge in the movie is represented by Russell Brand, who actually lived the lifestyle, but he's muzzled by a bad Liverpool accent and a gay subplot that's as insincere as the swaggering anthems by fatuous hacks like Foreigner, Starship and Journey.

The most grievous sins here are sins of omission.

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

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.

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."

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

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.

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

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.

Out of the Furnace is hot air.

Second verse, not as good as the first.

Fans of the franchise will greet Les Misérables as a feast for the senses, but the rest of us are left with crumbs.

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

Megamind falls flat.

It's as if there's a missing reel of film that could tie the story together and give it the emotional impact it takes for granted.

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.

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.

Squeezes plenty of color and noise from a thin concept, then runs with it until non-fanatics can’t keep up.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

A road-trip comedy that somehow renders both promiscuity and racism harmless. While we're soaking up the sunny surroundings, we're getting nowhere.

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

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

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.

Whose story is this? There’s an old saying that history is written by the winners. The screenplay for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies must have been written by elves.

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

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.

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

Everything about Trouble With the Curve is as streamlined and hollow as a Wiffle Ball bat.

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.

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.

Although it's stuffed with subplots, gadgets and bad guys, this tinny contraption is half-hearted.

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.

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.

This shrill caper is more like a blind date between fingernail and chalkboard.

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.

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.

His (Eastwood) first boring film.

Its mean-spiritedness, stupidity and squandering of talent is uniquely Hollywood.

It's eerie rather than wondrous.

Savvy filmgoers will know they are getting a stale product as soon as they see the wrapper: one of those vintage muscle cars that screams “stakeout.”

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

The film is constructed from four flimsy vignettes that are artlessly overlapped.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

A faithful remake of RoboCop would be timely. Instead, the producers of this new version have retreated back to the lab, concocting a creaky hybrid of “Frankenstein” and “Call of Duty.”

The derivative script and skimpy effects don’t convey either the power or the problems of being a young witch.

If you can’t guess that the whole thing ends with a big dance number, you’ve been snoozing in your samosas.

Ender’s Game is a blandly sanitized spectacle.

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

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.

Terminator Salvation is a tale told idiotically, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

30 Minutes or Less could have been a guilty pleasure, but the crusty caper is half baked.

This is a brutal and stupid movie.

Imagine if the "Godfather" saga had been told from the point of view of Talia Shire's character. The perspective of a don's daughter could produce a compelling movie, but The Sicilian Girl isn't it.

Red 2 is not just a bad movie, it’s bad karma. And the target audience of adult moviegoers who respect the names in its once-vital cast have a bull’s-eye on their collective cranium.

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

You ought to have a movie that's both smart and sexy. But Jennifer's Body is neither. Most damning of all, it's not scary.

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

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.

The diabolical sadist of the team was director Joe Carnahan.

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

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

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is supposed to promote healing, but as they say in New York: close, but no cigar.

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.