Kyle Smith

Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one’s own infant ever seems to occupy anyone’s attention.

Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

Almost without exception, the men are either sickening deviants or wise mentors while the ladies tend to be kickboxing hipsters or victims of sexual abuse (many are both).

Name names, please. Or shut up.

Is the Crystal Lake PD really doing such a good job? You'd have to go back to Phnom Penh in 1975 to find a place with a higher per-capita rate of unprosecuted homicides.

The movie boasts five Oscar winners. That figure exceeds by five the number of times I laughed at this cheap collection of icky jokes.

Formerly a maker of bad, but at least angry, movies, Spike Lee now seems to be trying to be the world's oldest student filmmaker. Take out the rookie mistakes from Red Hook Summer, and there'd be nothing left.

It's supposed to be about a Kafkaesque experience. Instead, it IS a Kafkaesque experience. Why are we here? Is everything absurd? Is anyone in charge?

Dopey as the film is on a plot level, it’s equally vapid in its psychology.

It’s thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it’s billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety.

The film is an exposé only of a filmmaker's senseless contempt for the military.

Turn the River lacks almost everything Eigeman has as a performer: charisma, wit and snappy delivery.

You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.

Attempting to fill Dudley Moore's top hat in Arthur, Russell Brand rapidly descends the rungs of the comedy ladder from "unfunny" to "irritating" to "vulgar" to the bottom one - "Andy Dick."

An indie exercise in macho posturing disguised as a tale of grief, reminds us that losing one’s parents is psychically debilitating. But that’s about as useful as knowing that rain is wet.

Not very haunty.

A sleazy and pointless film about sleazy and pointless people, Killer Joe reminds us that what Quentin Tarantino does isn't easy.

The teen movie The Spectacular Now begins like “Say Anything” but soon turns into “Drink Anything.”

Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes tell the story out of order, jumping around in time so often that it becomes tiresome, especially since there is so little forward-moving plot.

The movie chides us for being a sick voyeuristic society, hungry for the sight of violence. The purity of this moral stance is somewhat clouded by the movie's habit of staging sick violent acts.

Inherent Vice, meandering even by Anderson’s standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2½-hour endurance test.

No, which has been nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988. That means light flaring up to spoil the image, bumpy camerawork, a nearly square picture and all-around grubbiness.

There’s laying it on thick, there’s laying it on with a trowel, and there’s laying it on like A Man Called Otto.

At the end of it all comes McKay’s big angry harrumph about the meaning of the crisis — a sign of failed, frustrated satire. If you can make your message clear through comedy, there’s no need to say, “Here’s my moral.” A funnyman can’t afford to get caught wagging his finger.

The movie independently bungles everything it tries, like a Central Park busker who simultaneously sucks at juggling, harmonica playing and skateboarding.

Although the climactic battle sequence is, as usual in these movies, teeming with spectacle . . . it feels busy rather than exciting.

Only rarely does the film present a genuine insight, such as the observation that many black people loved to dress up in their finest for church because, during the week, they were so often dressed as servants and manual laborers.

It seems more likely that a dumb movie will lead only to a time-wasting surge in applications from dummies. Maybe The Internship was secretly funded by Bing.