Jon Frosch

The Cow is depressingly slack and indecisive, neither leaning hard enough into its B-movie preposterousness nor taking the time to build any real, sustained suspense.

But while the film is effective on its own narrow terms, it lacks the spark of urgency, suppleness of tone and freshness of insight that would make it truly compelling.

Flatly staged, patchily acted and hobbled by a script (by Meyers-Shyer) that substitutes strained cuteness for wit and texture, Home Again is like a feature-length sitcom sans laughs.

While The Only Living Boy in New York looks nice (it was shot on film by veteran DP Stuart Dryburgh), it's an unabashed fake — glib and movie-ish in a grating way, with lots of prefab "soulfulness" and none of the texture or rough edges of life.

Stale as week-old bread and every bit as bland, the movie saddles a strong cast with a groaningly ineffectual script (courtesy of Michael LeSieur, who wrote 2006’s You, Me and Dupree) and wastes the director’s gift for bringing lived-in charm and feeling to broad comic premises.

Mother’s Day is bad from the start, and it doesn't get better.

From the very first scene, the rhythm is off, the staging and editing graceless, and the dialogue (the screenplay is by Kyle Pennekamp and Scott Turpel) alternates between trying too hard and not hard enough.

Its rhythms are sluggish, its jokes predictable and the gags are set up with such thudding deliberateness that even the sight of Ferrell losing control of a motorcycle, careening through the air and crashing straight through his house barely raises an eyebrow.

A Christmas comedy of numbing tedium and tackiness.

Stacy Keach provides a bit of relief from all the oppressive earnestness in his brief appearance as Mia’s grandfather, evoking a depth of feeling otherwise missing here.

The humor here is sitcom broad, and Scott displays little sense of rhythm; the film runs under two hours, but feels considerably longer.