Joe Williams

Fuqua is a proficient action director, and the boxing scenes deliver plenty of whomp. But the music-saturated scenes involving the media, the law and a turncoat friend played by Curtis (“50 Cent”) Jackson are trying to appeal to fans of “Empire,” not “Raging Bull.”

It's a credit to the cast and to the worthiness of the idea that this overlong movie works at all. But those of us who already know that racism is bad could use a little more challenge and a little less help.

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

Cars 2 is like a gorgeous sports car with a toxic tailpipe, a busted navigation system and a loud stereo that plays only commercials.

Toast is lovely to look at, evoking both the gray-green milieu of Midlands life and the sensuality of good food, but it's like a whipped topping with no base.

The multiple cameras that shadow Anker and his novice partner provide unprecedented images. But they also raise unintended questions about the vanishing frontier.

So stupid and hateful, it needs to have a stake driven through its heart before it can spawn a franchise.

Mainstream moviemaking at its most proficient, with a zippy script, comfort-food casting and a breakout performance by a deserving star.

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.

Redford is an adequate director, and he keeps things moving at a moderate pace, passing up exits to more spectacular vistas or hotter issues.

It's funny but (sorry, ladies) unrealistic that Jake continuously sneaks away from his young wife to canoodle with Jane. Baldwin is a blast, but the role requires him to indulge in indignities such as a naked webcam conversation.

A film that aims for the stars and may have found one here on earth.

The crescendo of two resonant careers makes the false notes of Unfinished Song forgivable.

The Equalizer, loosely based on the TV series of the late ’80s, is a guilty-pleasure platform for Washington’s slow-cooked, kick-butt heroism.

The result is only half as hip as hoped. Yes, this Holmes is leaner and meaner, and Watson (Jude Law) is nearly his equal. But there’s still something fussy about the result, as if bobbies had broken up the party at 11:59.

In the infidelity drama Leaving, British reserve gets overtaken by French passion, and the subsequent events have the horrific momentum of a slow-motion car crash.

With its broad strokes, this invitation to an important discussion is hard to ignore, but the blood and honey on the table is an unpalatable mix.

A Knight's Tale succeeds as light entertainment if not as historical record. [11 May 2001, p.F1]

As predictable as a 3-and-0 pitch down the middle, but when it’s baseball season, who wants dark clouds?

It may not be original, but Adam could leave a lump in your throat.

Notwithstanding the characters’ spiritual camaraderie, Salles’ emphasizes the hard physical labor and loneliness in Sal’s story, including the jittery rigors of the writing process. When he reaches a crossroads choice between down-and-out Dean and his own rising career, Sal senses that except for the words on a typewritten scroll, his life on the road is gone, real gone.

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.

After some overly talky revelations, the cornered writer/directors are forced to shatter their absurd shell game with a final act of violence that spoils the breezy, capering mood that prevailed for much of the movie.

It's a little black dress of a movie, an elegant hint of something sensual that is ultimately denied to us.

Non-Stop: It is what it is.

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.

Although Steadman’s artwork seems like sloppy pen-and-ink caricature, there’s a method to the madness.

On a minute-to-minute level, it's an engaging mystery, the kind that rewards our participation with eye candy and adrenaline shots. But when we pull back for an overview, we see that it's flat and that pieces are missing.

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

His (Eastwood) first boring film.

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

Here most of the punishment is inflicted on the audience, which gets nailed to a cross of boredom.

The movie is best enjoyed as a minor-key operatic, not a coherent story. While Law bellows blasphemous poetry, his director orchestrates a noirish light show with a cockeyed rhythm.

It’s amusing fluff, but from an Oscar-winning dramatist, this return to comedy is a bit of a letdown.

While Walt and El Grupo is less than a penetrating analysis, it's more than a Mickey Mouse advertisement.

Like an acquaintance couple's baby pictures, Friends With Kids induces coos but isn't as cute as they think.

A soulless, overblown bore.

It's eerie rather than wondrous.

Taiwanese director Ang Lee sees the '60s through a rose-colored telephoto lens, but his sympathetic spirit extends the generous message of the hippie era like a passed joint.

It's pure speculation on the filmmakers' part that Gaelic pagans were adorned with bones, blue mud and Mohawks, but the fire-dancing spectacle is a welcome respite from the beefcake of the journey scenes.

Hitchcock is an amusing lark, but the clumsy way it dissects the director is for the birds.

There's an alliance of interesting stories fighting for dominance here, but instead of a clear victory, Hyde Park on Hudson is the site of a muddled truce.

The Hefner we meet here is the likable rogue we already know.

May be too light for vampire purists or fans of the original show, but fresh blood is just what the doctor ordered.

Ondine is dipped in whimsy and might have drifted out to sea, but it's bounded on four sides by love stories -- between a father and a daughter, a man and a mermaid, an actor and his co-star, and a director and his country.

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.”

There’s a lot of comic and fantasy potential here, but much of it gets squandered.

Three actors portray the clumsy-but-limber Li in the years of his arduous training, when he is pulled between a teacher who's inspired by Mao and another who's inspired by bootleg videos of Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Although the outcome is as predetermined as a prix-fixe menu, the storytelling is as smooth as goose-liver pate through a pastry nozzle.

Because he's the protagonist of the movie and played by the likable Matt Damon, we keep an open mind, but Promised Land is morally ambiguous to a fault.

Successful in small doses, but the full regimen needed more testing.

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

Sticks to the syllabus of a decidedly minor movie, but its humanities faculty is first-rate.

While Black is painfully effective as the dork who drops slangy kudos on his new BFF, Marsden is a revelation.

The spoof of consumerism scores some predictable points, but the tidy ending is a sell-out to the ultimate marketing machine: Hollywood.

Home delivers like a mailman on Valentine’s Day. But when we scratch beneath the sugary surface, there’s something tart inside that’s difficult to digest.

The Great Gatsby is both swooningly romantic and giddily energetic.

This jam-packed picture is too zippily scripted and edited to get stuck in message mode, yet the stellar cast achieves a rare harmonic convergence.

Director Philipp Stolzl worked in the same dangerous conditions as the original climbers, and we can feel the chill and peril in our bones. It's a shame, then, that the screenwriter, unlike the camera crew and the characters, was afflicted with such timidity.

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

Compared to other Marvel characters, Thor is a difficult sell.

While the cast includes Luis Guzman (as a buffoonish deputy) and Johnny Knoxville (as a local gun nut), there's no sense that these are real people in a real town, and Schwarzenegger's Sheriff Owens has the weakest backstory of all.

Although the characters are three-dimensional, the simultaneous crises and last-act resolutions are a little too neat for a movie about the messiness of life.

The simmering rivalry between Di and Fiamma, inflamed by the kind of glimpsed indiscretion that makes adolescent melodramas tick, explodes in a thriller ending that turns an observant coming-of-age story into something resembling "The Lord of the Flies."

The worst thing about this multifaceted failure is the two-time Oscar winner behind the camera. Where there ought to be a director, there’s nothing but an empty chair.

This movie may be sickly sweet, but it's harmless; and as a handcrafted antidote to a toxic toy story like "G.I.Joe," Paper Heart has healing properties.

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?

Draft Day isn’t quite a comedy, but it’s got a similar kind of flow that makes it as easily consumable as lite beer.

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.

Michael as a character is defined almost solely by his helplessness and gratitude. He's as lovable as a lost puppy, but a more perceptive movie than The Blind Side would have let us see him from another angle.

It's a compelling tale of surf and survival.

What the movie crucially lacks is the clockwork complications that produce a payoff.

He might be guilty of showboating, but De Niro's knockout performance is a declaration that the star of "Raging Bull" isn't ready to hang up his gloves.

A lot of care went into crafting the handsome production but not enough into making the handsome hero come alive.

Some of the themes and the hallucinatory special effects are reminiscent of Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch,” and there are cheeky allusions to “Dawn of the Dead” and even “Eyes Wide Shut,” but a viewer with an open mind might say that this midnight-style movie is more enjoyable than any of them.

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

An utter shipwreck, a would-be adventure with meager rations of magic and a listless crew.

Easy to watch but hard to pin down, like a creature with eight legs going in different directions.

The moral lesson that this movie feeds us smells fishy - because it's not in the book. But the backbone story about a guy who inherits some penguins is enough to tickle the kids.

Like black coffee that's flung in our face, The Killer Inside Me silences the question of whether it's good or bad. But for darn sure, it's strong.

Stays too low to the ground to become an animated classic, but if there's a fairer midwinter's tale, wherefore art thou?

It's zippy, and the movie version has both a computerized sheen and handcrafted detailing. Because the details are cribbed from classics, parents can enjoy this 'toon as much as their kids.

A buddy comedy disguised as a political thriller. It’s full of malarkey, but as a campaign of shock and awe, it’s hard to resist.

It's deliberately difficult to untangle the crossed allegiances of the people that Kelly interviews, and it's melodramatic that he tries to smuggle Ming and a surrendered assassin onto a plane bound for the United States. But dramatizing such a complex situation is a necessary evil.

What makes Love Is Strange so special is that the challenges the couple face are more mundane than menacing.

With its seductive images and smart dialogue, The City of Your Final Destination has the setting and circumstances for a ripe family drama or a literary love story, yet it never awakens from its siesta.

There aren't enough surprises to justify the title, but The Switch produces sufficient light for a late-summer diversion.

For real balance, the debate needs fiercely leftist truth-tellers in tri-corner hats, calling themselves the Organic Chai Tea Party.

The Women on the 6th Floor shouldn't work, but this efficient flick whisks away our cynicism.

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.

It's not a good film, but viewed from a cockeyed angle, it's a great guilty pleasure, and director Bill Condon is in on the joke.

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.

It’s admirable, but Monuments Men just poses on a porous foundation like a statue.

In the roll call of visually distinctive ’toons, Epic looms large.

The action is contained within a coherent dramatic structure and the puzzle-box paranoia of spy-agency protocol.

Comedies about privileged princesses and unsuitable suitors come in all colors, but Peeples is only palatable on a double bill with pink antacid.

With Labor Day, director Jason Reitman turns a Nicholas Sparks scenario into an Alfred Hitchcock creep-show.

Within the bloodshot-eye perspective of their other stoner comedies, it’s bluntly funny and ever-so-slightly sweet.

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.

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

96 Minutes is a mere introduction to Sociology 101, but it's brisk enough to rustle the reading list and keep the conversation alive.

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

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.

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

You can tell by some loose threads and hurried workmanship that God’s Pocket is a knock-off, but it’s so stuffed with value, it’s an offer you can’t refuse.

The Woman in Gold works, largely because of the odd-couple chemistry between Mirren and Reynolds. It just goes to show that broad strokes are appealing when they’re in the right frame.

It's smart, heartfelt, handsome and just mutated enough to sustain interest in a specialized subject.

Ender’s Game is a blandly sanitized spectacle.

As a testament to traditions that are usually kept hidden from Hollywood, Holy Rollers is a mitzvah. But as a thriller, it's bubkes.

While it's both too crude and too commercial to be mistaken for journalism, the good news is that the headliners deliver.

The fiery finale is good enough to leave the legions smiling. But when a movie is expected to lift an entire industry, "good enough" shouldn't be good enough.

The most grievous sins here are sins of omission.

The libido and bloodlust flowing from the pint-size Page is the funniest thing in the movie, but elsewhere, the mix of the goofy and ghastly is hard to digest.

Call it "On the Lakefront." Or "Pretty-Good Fellas."

While the movie sometimes seems like faux Fincher, the symbiotic acting, artful imagery and punchline ending turn True Story into credible entertainment.

The best thing you could say about Happy Feet Two is that it doesn't have any product placements or potty jokes. Other than that, this charmless Antarctic cartoon is what it looks like when hell freezes over.

Crowe is effectively restrained in his acting, but in his debut as a director, he overdoes the manipulative music and the pretty images from cinematographer Andrew Lesnie.

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.

Hit and Run isn't a catastrophe, but it leaves loose ends and a more adventurous map by the side of the winding road.

This broadside against sharia law lacks the finesse of an import, but it's effectively melodramatic.

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

Prince of Persia is woven of recycled fibers, but by the slipping standards of summertime entertainment, it's a magic carpet ride.

Elles is provocative company, but it leaves us feeling hustled.

This true story fills a needed niche, spotlighting women's basketball in the era before Title IX promoted equal treatment.

A high-concept comedy that peddles some slapstick laughs and life lessons but little insight.

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.

This long, ludicrous soap opera is also a mighty spectacle, a new standard in disengaged destruction.

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.

It's a triumph of streamlined design, but TRON: Legacy never enters the fourth dimension where it's worth a plugged nickel to humans.

A solid sci-fi/horror hybrid, but this iceman doesn't deliver enough to chew on.

This thriller about the game-changing website Wikileaks is as smart about cyberspace as “The Social Network,” but there’s a glitch when it shifts the focus from felonious leaders to the misdemeanors of the man who exposed them.

There's some laughing gas left in the cupboard, but this series may require an infusion of new blood to last until "American Funeral."

Neither a comprehensive guide nor consistently good, but because the theme is romance, most of these small bites of the Big Apple are easy to digest.

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.

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

With this unfunny fourth installment, the "Ice Age" franchise has skidded so far into kiddie land that adults who tread there risk extinction.

The movie looks like it was made for broadcast television, the place where words and pictures go to die.

As much Fosse as Fellini. It’s a shadow of a shadow, refracted through a fun-house mirror. For all the noise and color, it feels like an exercise and not a natural expression.

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

Even by the sloppy, soulless standards of hit man movies, The Mechanic is a mess.

Despite playing with a stacked deck, The Judge is guilty of exceeding expectations.

As in the first "Sherlock Holmes" movie, there are plenty of pratfalls and bare-knuckle brawls but no sleuthing for us to share.

One man’s mirth is another man’s poison, this critic can only consult his belly as the barometer. On a gut level, Ted 2 is a funny film.

In trying to lift this lame schtick, De Niro, Douglas, Freeman and Kline are stand-up guys, but Last Vegas is a case of erectile dysfunction.

In its cross-cultural breadth, director Ridley Scott’s smart and violent film merits comparison to Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” but the dialogue delivered by the stellar cast is incomparably McCarthy’s.

Without the kindling of character development, Planes: Fire and Rescue is no smoldering success, but if Disney’s flight plan is to share Pixar’s airspace, it’s getting warmer.

This true-ish story adds a romantic subplot to the prosecution of Japanese war criminals by American general Douglas MacArthur, but neither the love nor the war are completely 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.

Whether true or a hoax, I'm Still Here represents real risk-taking that I can only applaud.

The CGI effects are a familiar sort and so is the heroic-quest motif. The principal virtue in this modest entertainment is that the young characters act like real teenagers.

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.

Brazenly funny in its own right - until it turns into a goody two-shoes.

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

If you haven't seen a wasting disease in real life, you might think Restless is romantic. If you have, you might diagnose it as terminally cute.

In its last act, Max is reminiscent of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie serials, with a frosting of freshly minted multiculturalism.

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 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.

Kids are too smart to fall for it, and any grown-up who thinks that The Odd Life of Timothy Green is funny or heartwarming has a head made out of cabbage.

What's finest about Everybody's Fine is to watch a good fella groping hopefully toward old age.

What enriches the recipe is that no one is quite as cagey as they seem. Colin is officially thuggish, but he's a blinkered romantic. Archie is a mama's boy, Meredith is gay, Mal is impotent, and Peanut wears dentures.

The diabolical sadist of the team was director Joe Carnahan.

In Secret is so stifled, it makes “Les Misérables” look like “Amélie.”

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.

For anyone expecting the second coming of Clouseau, Johnny English Reborn is a karmic catastrophe.

Alba is a showstopper in a fringed cowgirl outfit. But nine years wiser, we know that pretty things aren’t always worth killing for.

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.

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.

As phony as a poodle-skirted waitress at a mall diner, yet it's as sweet as a malt. A vanilla one.

In telling a true story about hapless thugs who are the embodiment of Michael Bay fans, the director has made the most fiendishly enjoyable movie of his career.

A textured and unexpectedly entertaining drama about the human toll when racial assumptions crash.

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

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

On Stranger Tides has the fishy smell of something washed ashore and sold as new. But this shipwreck isn't worth a wooden doubloon.

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

Like the middle-aged dads in this flaccid fiasco, Hall Pass is a decade behind the curve of what's happening.

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.

For the rest of his life, Spencer Susser can brag to the other ditch diggers that he persuaded two of the best young actors in Hollywood to star in one of the worst movies ever made.

If your inner amphibian craves a wave, you have the right kind of brain to appreciate the elemental story and scenic backdrops. But advanced mammals might smell something fishy.

It’s too cheesy and predictable to be a real miracle, but by Vegas standards, it’s a winner.

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.

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

It requires a mild suspension of disbelief to accept that slacker David would suddenly intervene in so many lives, pretending to be a good Samaritan.

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

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

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

Whether you're betting on action or laughs, this is a lose-lose scenario.

A bland family-feud potboiler with no sign of the cook.

Mainstream audiences will note that Hudson has never been better and that the tearjerking taps into something universal. For audiences seeking shelter from superhero carnage, Wish I Was Here is a lovely place to be.

The richly constructed first hour is so superior to any feat of sci-fi speculation since "Minority Report" that the bland aftertaste of the chase finale is quickly forgotten.

Reilly is very funny as the sarcastic mentor, and director Paul Weitz strikes a loopy tone in the scenes at the freak encampment.

If you'd pay to see a film called "Hotel Rwanda: Maniac Manager," you might be receptive to this mixed-message movie, but skeptics should keep one eye on the exit.

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.

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.

Yet so much about The Lovely Bones is so skillfully orchestrated, from the chillingly methodical villainy to the thrillingly paced manhunt, we can accept that we're in the hands of a higher power.

There is such a thing as an infinitely bad movie, and this is it.

While the cast is filled with award winners, writer-director Daniel Barnz is a dunce who can't construct an argument without employing flimsy logic and cardboard characters.

An ambitious movie, but ultimately there’s too much “artificial” and not enough “intelligence.”

As a critic who complains about painless and brainless action movies, I hoist a glass of mead to the men and maidens of Ironclad.

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

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

A blast, the best action movie of the summer.

Hits most of the markers of a flashback film but not enough of the beats.

Anyone old enough to have read Jules Verne or seen the way his work was successfully adapted in the past will suffer worse than the kids in the audience who just came to laugh.

War of the Buttons is handsomely crafted and it's touting tolerance, but as long as we open the gates to the Trojan horse of historical simplification, there's a danger that Hollywood could attack us with "The Goonies Go to the Gulag." Be vigilant!

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.

When a celebrity chef like Rodriguez is just going through the motions, we can smell that the grindhouse fad is way past its expiration date. It's time to put a fork in it.

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

He's not in Mark Wahlberg's league, and 21 Jump Street isn't quite as funny as "The Other Guys," but by lampooning himself here, Tatum has bought himself a grace period to grow in.

Dare we say it? Even the acting is atrocious, with pop-eyed Pacino chewing the scenery like a geezer gumming his oatmeal.

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

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

Strikes an uneasy compromise between liberty and justice. It marches at an efficient pace, but there's too much collateral damage to believability.

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.

It's supposed to be sweet, but Hop is a headache waiting to happen.

Shakespeare’s play evokes the poetry of undying love, but this Romeo and Juliet is prosaic.

Act of Valor is a competently directed action movie, but forcing the audience to wear such narrow goggles is a dereliction of duty.

Further proof that likable actors have to take an occasional sick day.

Loud, incoherent and unfunny, Here Comes the Boom is the sound of American culture imploding.

a horrific misstep in the branding of Robert Pattinson. The erstwhile teen vampire, who daringly portrayed gay surrealist Salvador Dalí in last year's "Little Ashes," lurches backward into a pile of romantic rubbish.

This documentary reconstructing the life of the ultimate cult author is like a three-act thriller, and the character at the center of the story is a mute man of mystery. Salinger would have recognized the irony, even as he hated the film for invading his privacy.

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.

Channing Tatum is a lot of things, but he’s not a stoic Superman like the role he plays here, which is made more laughable by prosthetic pointy ears.

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

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

The spectacular collapse of Green Lantern is bound to be blamed on Reynolds, but the villainy has its origins in an injustice league of TV-trained screenwriters and tin-hearted studio suits.

I still think it's a funny movie, but given its genes, it's a bit of a slacker.

Offers about as much flava as a Dr. Pepper commercial and about as much drama as a “Sesame Street” rerun.

In the new Clash of the Titans, the effects are computerized, the hero is questionable and, instead of an owl, we get a turkey.

The best excuse for watching The Gunman is Penn. His first mainstream leading role in a decade is worthy of comparisons to Matt Damon in the “Bourne” movies; yet it’s also disappointingly shorn of the humor and humanity of which this great actor is capable.

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.

McCarthy and first-time director Falcone must have assumed that tossing a drunk and a dunce into a Cadillac would negate the need for a motive or even a script.

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.

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.

On that vicarious-pleasure level, the movie version delivers. Yet for anyone with a sense of irony or social justice, it’s also frustratingly soft around the edges, with no real sense of the drugs-and-violence underside of show business or the spiritual cost of failure.

This mash-up movie is like a greatest-hits collection for obsessive collectors. On its own terms, Terminator Genisys makes virtually no sense.

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

If cranking out this kind of mediocre, head-scratching blarney is the only option available to Hollywood veterans like Reiner, we have some friendly advice: Open a haberdashery.

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.

Although the choice of interviewees skews the movie in a New Age-y direction, there's less pseudoscience and more heart than in the kindred documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know?"

The fatal flaw of this screenwriting term paper is that Cooper's character is a boring jerk we're supposed to regard as a nice guy who made an honest mistake.

The actress and the aviatrix are a match made in heaven, but surrounding the soaring performance is a movie that's mostly earthbound.

Although it’s superficially grungy, this true story isn’t much more substantive than something that star Vanessa Hudgens might have made for the Disney Channel and considerably less shocking than her career gambit in “Spring Breakers.”

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

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.

It's more like a shelved episode of "Touched by An Angel." The sappy script is a disservice to the naturally effervescent Efron, whose character is so mopey he makes Robert Pattinson seem like a song-and-dance man.

Strange hybrid of science lesson and Saturday-morning cartoon.

Annabelle is so lazily coat-tailing on Roman Polanski, they should have called it “Rosemary’s Barbie.”

Compared to most teen comedies these days, Fun Size is almost touchingly tame.

This dead-on-arrival ’toon is some of the worst p.r. for rodents since bubonic plague hit medieval Europe.

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.

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

Yet notwithstanding its derivative dolefulness and PG-13 timidity, The Art of Getting By is smart and sweet enough to become the favorite film of some Midwestern adolescent who wrongly believes he's already seen the dark side.

Based on an acclaimed novel by Ron Rash, Serena is like a towering tale that’s been fed into a woodchipper.

If this movie wanders into your neighborhood, the only watch that will hold your attention is the timepiece on your wrist.

It's a pleasure to watch Ryan resurrect her trademark persona, a mix of perkiness and pique, as she flounces around the room. But it's shaded with a middle-age desperation that's half real and half chick-flick shtick.

The cheap, indifferent, teen-alien thriller I Am Number Four delivers none of the spectacle of a competent sci-fi film, none of the emotion of an effective teen romance and none of the giggles of a kitsch fiasco.

Here, the scattershot spoofery never rings true.

Suffering through this felonious farce could only inspire a prison riot.

It does induce a few giggles like cheap champagne.

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.

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

A vigilante/torture-porn potpourri, is particularly toxic because it's scented with phony importance.

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

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.

This amateurish action flick is so lacking in personality or punch, it ought to be titled "V for Video Store Discount Bin."

What might have seemed like a lively idea -- an all-star roundelay about love in Los Angeles -- is as fossilized as the wooly mammoths in the La Brea Tar Pits.

Hallstrom (“Chocolat”) makes the mishmash palatable, and romance mainstay Duhamel provides some sweet-and-salty charm, but there’s not much they can do with Sparks’ canned dialogue and Hough’s undercooked acting.

There Be Dragons is tethered to the earth by a tangled plot, wooden acting and the heavy burden of healing old wounds.

Sadly, The Last Song is badly out of tune with real filmmaking.

Surprise — this bad dream is for real.

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.

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

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

In matters of personal taste, there is no right or wrong, so if erasing brain cells is your idea of a good time, That's My Boy could be your cup of turpentine.

This world is divided between the makers and the takers, and after just a few minutes of Red Dawn, you'll realize there's not much more you can take.

The Road has the signposts of an important film, but it lacks the diversions of an inviting trip.

As usual for the comedies he produces, Sandler keeps pooping in the sandbox, and he expects the audience to give him a cookie for it. It’s a shame that he forces Barrymore to get soiled too.

While the plot is as flimsy as a hooker's halter top, it's buoyed by two actors with attitude and timing.

Formulaic serial-killer crapola.

The good news is that Ed Helms doesn’t wake up in a Tijuana brothel with an amputated leg and a donkey in the room. The bad news is that you’ll wish he had.

More benevolent than Bill Maher's snarky flick "Religulous" and a heaven-sent affirmation of our common humanity.

"Beverly Hills Chihuahua," we owe you an apology. Among talking-dog movies, Marmaduke is the runt of the litter.

Between the carefully trained animals and their computer-animated mouths, the movie doesn't have much room for realism; but the 3-D effects are surprisingly effective, and this playful pic earns a pat on the head.

Nobody escapes unscathed, except, of course, for Sandler, who co-wrote the infantile screenplay.

This stinker is only good for endless laughs.

Such a sorrowful attempt to resurrect the marketing magic of "Twilight" that it ought to be titled "Career Eclipse."

Sparks would be delighted if this movie were compared to his other story about reunited lovers, but compared to “The Notebook,” The Best of Me is the coffee-stained outline of a sales pitch for sleeping pills.