Joe Williams

Killer Joe is one of the most repugnant parodies of small-town stupidity that you will ever see, and Friedkin amplifies the shrill obscenities with blaring cartoon and kung-fu footage from his art director's fever dreams.

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.”

Although this Swedish vehicle is thoughtfully engineered and has some vivid streaks of color, it could use a jump start to escape the vanilla ice.

A family flick that punches the right buttons like a trained seal.

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

The movie is an eyeful, especially in 3-D, but even with humans at the helms of the machines, it’s a hollow exercise in homage.

With its forked tongue planted loosely in cheek, this haunted-house flick is enjoyably retro in both style and substance.

The ingredients are in place for a potent finale, but “Catching Fire” is watered down.

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.

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.

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

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

L'amour fou means "crazy love," but we don't learn anything crazy about these devoted lovers.

It's not quite infectious, but some of the high notes manage to drown out some of the guttural lows.

With his glorified Frisbee and good-guy smile, Evans is engaging, but “The Winter Soldier” might be stronger with a little less Captain and a little more America.

Waiting for Superman raises important questions while wearing a big red heart on its chest, but inconvenient facts are its kryptonite.

Two incompatible movies duke it out in Bandslam. Although it's the wimpy teen musical that prevails, it's the misfit coming-of-age story that leaves an impression.

Weaving between freshness and formula, The Boys Are Back earns a gentle pat on the head.

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

Presented as a stand-alone film, but without an explanation for the protagonist’s physical and emotional injuries, it’s a head-scratcher. As with Joe’s sexual compulsion, scratching can’t cure the itch.

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.

The rapid dialogue is dry and mannered, like a David Mamet play, there's virtually no story and Cronenberg's visual scheme is cold and claustrophobic.

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.

It's a calculated crowd-pleaser that skims over the surface of the era like a cruise-ship production of "American Graffiti."

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.

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

Despite its brainy title, Monsters University only earns a passing grade on its looks.

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

There’s much to appreciate here. Like “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” which had a stronger sense of its place in the world, this coming-of-age movie should appeal to smart, sensitive young people who haven’t been exposed to the better examples of the genre.

Whether on stage or the screen, Much Ado About Nothing is a pleasure that passes like a midsummer night’s dream.

Watson is a revelation here as a brand-obsessed bad girl.

A bizarre buffet of buffoonery, brutality and beautiful landscapes.

As a diversion, Babies is like a wind-up toy that will tickle anyone with a pulse. As a documentary, it's like a cache of home videos that will frustrate anyone with an inquiring mind.

Like Ernest Borgnine, Philip Seymour Hoffman is an unconventional leading man with an Oscar on his mantle, and his bittersweet Jack Goes Boating has elicited comparisons with "Marty."

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

Typically lovely to look at, with big-eyed young people espousing high ideals amid natural splendor. But outside of their bubble, a prickly history looms, and Miyazaki’s dubious attitude toward the wartime role of his hero makes the movie a mixed blessing.

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.

A good and necessary film, but like the man himself it’s not immune to scrutiny.

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

The lesson of this likable little movie is that it’s never too late to reclaim your integrity.

A serviceable behind-the-scenes tour documentary with about as much insight as a talk-show monologue.

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

A tearjerking romance that belongs to another era, when female moviegoers wanted to be transported, not grounded in grim realities.

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.

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

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

The Holocaust must never be forgotten, but like many well-intentioned documentaries, The Flat derives more power from the implicit strength of the subject than from the explicit choices of the director.

The most provocative thing in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is the moment during the opening credits when we glimpse the comedy legend without makeup.

As the blindered Abe, relative-unknown Gelber earns a sympathetic pat on the head. But as the character is braying for attention, he's stuck in his stall, while genuine dark horse Donna Murphy carries the narrative load as the middle-aged co-worker who prances into Abe's daydreams.

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

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

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

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

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

While the rich people who violated a dead antagonist's wishes seem sleazy (especially when they refuse to be interviewed), transporting world-class artwork five miles to a bigger facility where more people can enjoy it hardly seems like the end of civilization as we know it.

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

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

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.

Second verse, not as good as the first.

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

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.”

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

Mired in phoniness up to its neck. And above that, there's nothing.

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.

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

For his complex portrayal, Day-Lewis is likely to have roses thrown at his feet, but for the dreadful film in which he's enslaved, emancipated onlookers will reach for the grapes of wrath.

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 wrinkles between reality and illusion soon become irritating.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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

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

In Couples Retreat, it's Favreau, not Vaughn, who is wound up, and this vacation comedy goes nowhere.

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

This is a brutal and stupid movie.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Megamind falls flat.

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

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

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.”

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

There are good movies to be made about romantic obsession, but the premise doesn't work if the crazy stalker isn't juxtaposed with a sympathetic victim.

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.

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

In this flick, the dark side is as bright as a cruise-ship showroom, where the singing and dancing would fit nicely, while the jokes are as dull as Disney sitcom throwaways.

Ender’s Game is a blandly sanitized spectacle.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

It’s preposterous schlock masquerading as art.

If instead of story and characters, your movie wish list includes projectile vomiting and erection gags, this lump of coal has your name on it.

Kingsman is like a high-speed collision between a Jaguar and a jaywalking soccer hooligan. It’s ridiculously out of balance, and when you’re stuck in the middle, it doesn’t seem so funny.

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

The message that needs to be posted at the theater door is "No trespassing."

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.

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.

Given the creator and the cast, "Morgans" is as drearily predictable as a plague of locusts.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Sorry, Keanu, but you stole my time and you murdered my brain cells. By the sacred oath of WHOA, there will be blood, and this time it’s personal.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Cinderella is so scrubbed of personality, it’s not even worth calling a mess.

Disney’s gimmick of naming movies for its theme-park attractions crashes and burns in Tomorrowland, a here-and-now caper that will confuse children, bore adults and offend anyone who’s ever taken a science class.

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

A soulless, overblown bore.

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

Where the original play "La Ronde" was a social satire about the transmission of venereal disease, 30 Beats is a sickly stepchild.

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

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

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

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

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.

Long before you’ve gotten a nickel’s worth of entertainment out of this dumb, unfunny flick, you’ll be wishing for the flashing sign that says “Game over.”

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

It’s nearly tragic to see America’s Greatest Living Actor on the guest list for The Big Wedding, the latest limp comedy about seniors behaving badly.

Old Dogs is so oafish, when it tosses us a biscuit, it feels like we've been smacked with a newspaper.

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

With the overlong, limp and lazy Spy, Feig has lost his mojo.

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.

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