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."