Kyle Smith

The movie is about a situation, not a story — there’s little narrative momentum — and as is often the case with movies about journalists, the mood of smug sanctimony becomes unbearable.

Graham Greene's guilt-and-gangsters tale "Brighton Rock" gets an even more melodramatic telling than in the 1947 film version courtesy of first-time director Rowan Joffe, whose histrionic adaptation screams "student film" with practically every frame.

There is also something surgically sterile. The movie sounds as though it was recorded in a padded chamber instead of a bustling school, and it looks like it came from some alternate world, one that basks in the eternal sunshine of the spotless skin.

They don’t make ’em like A Walk Among the Tombstones any more. Mainly because everyone got bored with ’em and stopped watching ’em.

There's a pleasing tension in the air as their relationship comes to seem like something of a contest: With two women this needy, who will out-crazy the other?

For all of the moments of splendor and awe in The Mountain, I’d have preferred a less open-ended film.

Idiocy can be funny, but let's not forget that for all of this movie's aspirations to be out-there, it relies on the staple of the sitcom mentality.

First-time writer-director Andy Muschietti, an Argentine discovered by Guillermo del Toro, relies too much, especially in the early going, on horror clichés (sudden loud noises and jagged blasts of music), but he does make the tension hum.

Some ideas are auto-stolen (from Coupland's last novel, "JPod"), but those quirky atmospherics aren't enough to sustain a largely plotless film.

The chatty killer and the nervy atmosphere are both so depraved that the film, though it contains hardly any explicit violence, is like stepping into a blood Jacuzzi, and there is a biblical severity to the ending.

The attraction between the resolutely empirical scientist and his “spiritual,” hippy-dippy girlfriend gives the film an unpredictable quality.

After an hour or so, when the would-be comedy War Dogs finally gets around to a point to focus on, it’s stale ammunition that’s been sitting in a dusty Albanian warehouse for 40 years. I assume the movie got its jokes from the same place.

Soundly structured, smart and fast, with a plausible central scenario, several gripping moments and well-wrought dialogue.

Sherlock Holmes dumbs down a century-old synonym for intelligence with S&M gags, witless sarcasm, murky bombast and twirling action-hero moves that belong in a ninja flick.

Ms. Buckley quickly becomes the centerpiece of the movie, or rather its central headache. Her overacting meets Ms. Gyllenhaal’s over-filmmaking like the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.

Sounds like a great idea for a gay porno, but the soapy Save Me actually takes itself seriously.

The big cats of Mufasa: The Lion King take a long walk from an arid and desolate climate to one teeming with life. The movie itself represents a journey in something like the opposite direction, from the bountiful gardens of creativity to the chilly environs of the corporate brand-extension department.

It all leads nowhere. There are pull-the-rug-out endings, and then there are pull-the-floor-out endings. The Escapist leaves you standing on nothing, like Wile E. Coyote, wondering why you bothered to come this far.

Their conversation is so insipid that watching this movie is no more interesting than talking to any random New York couple about what makes them tick.

For an animated feature, Scarlet is unusually ambitious: It’s a “Hamlet”-adjacent existential pacifist revenge parable. It contains lots of instances of its heroine stopping to wonder what everything means, which is another way of saying it’s ponderous and pretentious.

Hutcherson isn’t particularly adept at playing moral anguish, but the film maintains an electrifying tension for its first half as we wonder just how far his character will go. In the second half, though, the film degenerates into a desultory action movie as everybody starts creeping around trying to shoot one another.

So the film is a head-spinning mix of dead babies and romantic dinners, pillow talk and mass executions. Blood and honey don't taste right together.

This is a useful primer on what went wrong — and right — in 2008.

An interesting failure, not a fascinating one.

If Martin Scorsese were 30 and a Los Angeleno, he'd be making movies much like this one.

Oh, and one more thing the comedy of Jackass 3D has in common with "The Divine Comedy": Neither of them is funny.

Fatally mild, slow and factory-made, Million Dollar Arm belongs somewhere less competitive than the multiplex. Like the ABC Family Channel — the entertainment industry minor leagues.

Plodding drama.

It's condescending, it's vague, it's unfair and, ultimately, it's pointless.

Maher's sense of humor deserts him in the end, though, when in an apocalyptic montage of fire and hate (bin Laden, Pat Robertson), he suggests all religions are equally bent on destruction of the Earth. It's fatuous to suggest that the Iraq war was launched because of religion or that belief in the Book of Revelation is the same as organizing terrorist attacks.

It's the snobs against the slobs at a Martha's Vine yard wedding in Jumping the Broom. Mostly, it's a tie: Both sides are equally irritating.

Even for a horror movie, The Crazies is a bore, and we're talking about the most boring genre this side of dysfunctional-family indie drama.

There was a time when the climate-change alarmist movement was like a guy with a megaphone at your ear, but now it’s more like a squirrel at your shoelaces.

Hitler didn’t actually snub Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics, but the story is too good not to tell, so Race tells it anyway — adding the (true) detail that Owens was snubbed back home. By someone called “the White House,” because this supposedly truth-telling movie can’t bear to spell out the words Franklin D. Roosevelt.

What's best about the film are its quick jumps from one depravity to the next as jazz rambles on the soundtrack: Youth is a candle to be burned at both ends, with (as it was once said about Bob Dylan) a blowtorch in the middle.

Cancels itself out by being too campy to take seriously and too tragic to laugh at.

The setup is fun to explore. But after establishing it, the movie essentially gets stuck delivering variations on the idea of Mother splitting into two selves, the domestic and the feral.

Director Zack Snyder's cerebral, scintillating follow-up to "300" seems, to even a weary filmgoer's eye, as fresh and magnificent in sound and vision as "2001" must have seemed in 1968, yet in its eagerness to argue with itself, it resembles "A Clockwork Orange."

Messy as it is, Deadpool & Wolverine is the first MCU movie in several years that’s mostly enjoyable.

Preposterous, slipshod, unfunny and emotionally null.

As portrayed by Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky weren't exactly Rhett & Scarlett.

The fur flies, the claws come out and the bad jokes hit the fan.

Less enjoyable than making a baby but more enjoyable than raising one, the animated feature Storks delivers a bouncing bundle of blah.

A taut suspense flick for grown-ups.

Douchebag belies its abrasive title with a soft touch for two wobbly souls.

Harks back to a 1960s idea of what a horror film should be.

The film is a lesbian-road-trip gangster farce with a hint of political satire, and though it’s admirably offbeat I found it only mildly amusing.

The mild British wackiness is more droll than funny, but the movie is a pleasant cup of tea.

Slightly radical in portraying high schoolers as human beings of normal niceness and intelligence. That means this winsome comedy is a little low in the stakes department, not to mention predictable, but it gets an “A” for charm.

Armie Hammer has given several of the worst performances in recent years — see, or rather don’t, “Mirror Mirror” and “J. Edgar.” The big surprise in The Man from U.N.C.L.E is that Henry Cavill is even worse.

By far, the highlight of Minions is hearing The Beatles’ “Got To Get You Into My Life” over the closing credits — the first time I think I’ve ever heard it used in a movie. Otherwise, the prequel to “Despicable Me” is like trying to form a rock band out of three Ringos.

Real Steel is to action what the Anthony Weiner habit was to sex: It's so virtual, so distant from the thrill, that you wonder what the point is. Do you really want to pay to watch an actor playing a kid who in turn plays what amounts to a video game?

The legend of Thompson is immortal, though, and it'll fall to each generation to jam him into its own mold. Depp and Robinson's view is that Thompson was like a mullet: a party in the back but all business upfront.

Writer-director Jon S. Baird has devilish fun with the hilarious black-comic elements of Irvine Welsh’s novel, but the incessant bad behavior does get a wee bit monotonous, and the twist ending is disappointingly pat.

Sheen's throwback portrayal is appealing enough, but flat characters, dull revelations and uninvolving complications make this deliberately small film feel nearly microscopic.

When an 80-year-old director turns his attention to death, you hope for some insight, or gravitas, or even whimsy or anger. Hereafter has none of that.

Hiring France’s Louis Leterrier to direct was a bit like managing the pandemonium at a toddler’s birthday party by bringing in a soda machine.

Mr. Powell remains one of today’s most promising leading men, but he’s running in place here.

Darlings, there's nothing quite so tragique as a boring eccentric.

The funniest movie of Smith's I've seen. It's "When Harry Did Sally."

Edward's a remarkable young gentleman when you consider the hell he's been through: It turns out he's always 17, his fate to keep repeating high school, forever and ever. If that's my only option, kindly burn me at the stake.

Its priceless clips from the disco era aside, The Secret Disco Revolution laughably fails to turn Barry White and Donna Summer into the Che Guevara and Emma Goldman of the dance floor.

The film is sober, honest and serious about an important subject.

The potential for suspense is dropped (there's a subplot about the receptionist's flight from her violent husband, but he appears in only a couple of scenes) in favor of lots of hushed interludes in which nothing happens.

This pointless study of a witless character is a sad waste of Law’s talents. The more zestily he delivers Dom’s profane tirades, the more you wish Shepard gave us a reason to care about this lout.

It may be impossible to make an uninteresting documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, but is it unfair to ask Gonzo for more Hunter and less Jimmy Carter?

Credit Westfeldt, who is also the writer and director, with a classic setup for farce, brightly executed.

Unless the director was aiming for a Victorian "Black Christmas," though, he overshot his mark

The movie has the feel of a weary business trip.

Having simplified matters, Ms. Fennell sloughs off the psychological depth of the novel and instead lavishes attention on the heavy breathing and the decor, exhibiting much interest in the ornate mansion in which the Linton family lives (one room is set aside for ribbons only) and the costumes and accessories with which Ms. Robbie is gloriously draped.

Instead of trying to make Austen's life entertaining by pretending it was just like her work - as in the dull recent French movie "Molière" - Becoming Jane has a more astute appreciation of how Austen, or any fiction writer, works. There's a bit of stealing from life, lots of exaggeration, some wish fulfillment, mix-and-match character assembly.

A long slog through ancient muck, so-so sword fights and dumb luck.

I'll grant that the film has many layers. All of them are terrible.

When Hopkins' Hitch directs the audience by waving his hands like a symphony conductor - it's a nice callback to a Hannibal Lecter highlight - it's one of the best scenes of the year: a delightfully personal way to show how the story of "Psycho" concluded.

Bolstered by a spooky musical score, credited to the musician Rob, a tightly wound performance by Ms. Berry, and creepy unexpected appearances by beings who may or may not be manifestations of the Evil, Mr. Aja makes the most of an uninspired script. In this type of film, however, everything depends on the third-act resolution. It doesn’t deliver.

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

In the mood for some dead-child entertain ment tonight? Reservation Road has what you're looking for. It's "In the Bedroom" crossed with, um, "Fever Pitch."

Never before have I been so emotionally involved with an apple core, or seen salvation in a flip-flop. Taika Waititi, you had me at nunchuks.

A wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn't care.

The Purge: Election Year imagines that, right now, laws are being ignored, people gun each other down with impunity and the death toll is horrendous. It’s too bad the title “Chicago” was already taken.

A horror flick is only as good as its ending; It either delivers on its promises, or it disappoints. This one builds up to a climax that is meant to be spectacular, but is actually a bore thanks to its literalism.

So gripping and focused that it easily bests Hollywood movies with 50 times its budget.

The bulk of the movie consists of scene after scene coyly setting up the same ironic juxtaposition, in the exact same way, about innocence vs. Nazism.

Not every movie can come from the heart: This one is from the crotch. But what’s left for the sequel? Maybe it’ll feature Mark and Denzel sporting matching leather codpieces or giving each other bikini waxes. We can only hope.

For all its glutinous cuteness, damn if About Time doesn’t sneak up and sock you in the tear ducts. I tried not to fall for it. I failed.

There is too much funny here for a movie (even though it continues into the closing credits). Step Brothers should be a TV show.

There is a difference between gleefully bonkers and tragically inept, and I’m afraid this omnishambles has earned a place in the anti-pantheon of the worst films ever made by a great director.

For a kiddie adventure, the movie, based on the Jeanne DuPrau book, has a pleasingly moody, eerie quality.

The beginning and end are classics.

There are many smart comic ideas in Violent Night, but they are scattered unevenly throughout, the villains are dull, and most of the imaginative energy goes into devising spectacularly gory murders involving the distressingly off-label use of Christmas paraphernalia.

Dialogue, we seem to have forgotten, matters, and the words — by the brutally funny screenwriter of “The Departed,” William Monahan — are electric eels, slithering and sinister and nasty. They sneak up and sting you, or sometimes tickle your toes. Lowlifes don’t actually talk this way? Yeah. But if only they did.

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

Fans of Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Reynolds have likely never seen them in anything this earnest and tacky before, and are liable to feel somewhere between betrayed and stunned.

Dire musical interludes are sprinkled throughout the sprawling mess Beloved, an uninvolving would-be romantic epic that spans 45 years in the life of a mother and her daughter, starting in the early 1960s.

Much has been made of the fact that Promised Land was partly funded by the enemies of our domestic gas industry - the foreign oil nabobs in the United Arab Emirates. But the film gets so cheesy that I suspect it was also secretly funded by Velveeta.

I’d like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he’s equally terrible when he’s only on the soundtrack. And yet Cage is the least of the problems with The Croods.

Rendition has the depth of a bumper sticker without the brevity.

If the makers of Trolls must keep going, I won’t be present for the next entry unless it’s “Trolls Meet Smurfs.” With chainsaws. In the Thunderdome.

The film is narrated by Russell Crowe, whose star power is probably the only reason it's being released here.

It has a classical moral that would have made Aesop salute: Greed is not only corrupting, it can be self-defeating. Moreover, suspense lies both in wanting to know whether Miller’s quest will succeed and in what lessons might be learned. Though Miller’s actions drive the story, it is mainly an education for Will, the observer.

Porno plus Parkinson's don't quite add up to sexy fun.

A chilling pulp movie told with a pavement-eye view of the dregs of humanity.

David may be a towering figure of biblical lore, but this telling of a chapter of his story is not merely animated, it’s cartoonish.

A sometimes insightful, sometimes absurdly devotional but steadily engaging film.

There’s a fine horror film inside Tusk, but it’s only 20 minutes long. The rest is just blubber.

Screamers, one of the most bizarre documentaries you'll ever not see.

It has cult item stamped all over it, and fans of (severely) experimental cinema might see it as a revelation. Most others will find that watching this movie is like having your senses beaten with a rake.

Liberal Arts comes to us produced by Josh Radnor. Written by Josh Radnor. Starring Josh Radnor. Josh Radnor is much like Woody Allen, except for the talent.

The movie is essentially a theater piece in which Nolan (Walker) is mostly alone on screen, making use of what he finds a la John McClane, but without the smart pacing or inventiveness of “Die Hard.”

The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.

It’s a passable bloody-knuckles action piece for those who enjoy relaxing with a couple of hours of crazed carnage.

As the film floats on, drifting from one extravagantly engineered reverie to another, the filmmaker only occasionally succeeds in making the audience feel his sorrow, regret and alienation. More often, his flights of fancy are merely exasperating.

It follows exactly the same path as both "Glory Road" (except that was basketball) and "Gridiron Gang" (football).

Tenderness and good intentions don't necessarily add up to a movie.

An open- and-shut case, but that doesn't mean it can't also be an entertaining one.

The smart indie comedy Diminished Capacity deals with three kinds of dementia: those relating to aging, concussions and being a Chicago Cubs fan. Tying those three things together is a task that the witty script does with surprising adroitness.

Directed by journeyman actor Matthew Lillard, this tame and by-the-numbers effort never succeeds in making the outcast situation cinematic or interesting.

At the end, as I stumbled back onto the street as disoriented and grateful as a released POW, I thought I'd need a calendar to calculate the length of time I'd been away.

Familiar elements such as a dark family secret, a ghost and a Ouija board start to seem trite after a while, and the third act is a little ridiculous, but debut writer-director Nicholas McCarthy does a lot with a little and seems fully prepared to handle a big-studio horror project.

In To Rome With Love, Allen approaches the leitmotif in a strange, oblique and interesting way. I fear, though, that the Italian entry in his "Let's Go: Grab Some Euro-Film Subsidies" period will be remembered as being forgettable.

The entire script, which boils down to a hopelessly embarrassing lesson about "this beautiful place that can make people live again," seems to have been written within arm's reach of a bong.

Alan Rickman holds the film together.

Cutesy? My pain was acutesy as the entire plot yawned before me.

The story of a guy who never goes anywhere or does anything. Until he goes everywhere and does everything, but he might as well have stayed home.

"Dark World” is low-stakes, low-emotion, lowbrow.

Mr. Kormákur somehow elicits a shoddy performance from the sturdy English actor Idris Elba, whom I’d never seen flail like this.

Despising the British upper class is so utterly common, as we see in The Riot Club, a farcically heavy-handed attempted satiric takedown of an elite group of Oxford students.

This comedy is cringe-inducingly lame and the dramatic turns are visible as far in advance as utility poles on the prairie.

Rookie filmmaker Michael Maren’s script isn’t deep, but it’s heartfelt without being sticky, suggesting that the best way to deal with aging parents is to savor every tender frustration while you can.

Imagine "Clerks" director Kevin Smith with a background in poetry and painting instead of comic books and bestiality jokes, and you'll have an idea of what to expect from an exciting new filmmaker named Sean Ellis, whose terrific debut is called Cashback.

Aggressively ugly and intergalactically boring, the dismal sci-fi kiddie cartoon Battle for Terra is too weak to be shown anywhere except maybe on the next flight to Saturn.

Touching and unexpectedly funny moments (such as McCartney busting out the theme song from “The Monkees”) mingle with highlights from the show for an unusually compelling keepsake from what might well be the last time many of these ’60s rockers perform together.

Mr. Kamiyama has sent into battle nothing but armies of clichés.

A yellow dog of a movie that delights in offending the offendable. It's also a whitesploitation classic, from its menacing sideburns to its demented laughter.

This whole movie is pretty much a mental colon blow.

I went in expecting to be disappointed, but even so, I was disappointed.

Trite and vulgar boxing flick.

A wan effort at "Annie Hall"-style comedy, has about as much Manhattan sophistication as a gas station in Chippewa Falls, Wis.

The movie falls into all the usual rhetorical traps.

Not many performers can please an audience as much as Mark Wahlberg, but the pooch comes close.

The laughs begin with the excellent title Hamlet 2 - and they end there.

Fewer and better-drawn supporting characters would have helped give some substance to Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s script, but as it is the movie centers on the chatter of the two principals, creaky one-liners and blowout action scenes that mistake frantic editing for excitement.

Strays is wildly inappropriate. It’s also wildly funny.

If Young ever converses with the gentlemen from al Qaeda, I expect his comments to be along the lines of "Please don't cut my head off."

Like a Canadian "Six Feet Under," the indie dramedy Whole New Thing mixes characters (teen and adult, gay and straight, married and single) who seem both completely plausible and capable of anything.

Director Griffin Dunne's adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn's fiercely personal novel ambles pleasantly through coming-of-age movie territory, then takes a jarring Agatha Christie detour.

It's something old, it's something new, it's something borrowed and it's something that blows.

The film should have been cleverly dark and dripping with insider takes. Instead, it’s boringly schematic.

Wittily written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who directed but did not write the first film, the follow-up is notably clever, amusing, ambitious and densely plotted. Unlike its predecessor and most works from the horror-thriller production company Blumhouse, it combines a high-concept premise with a highly complicated story.

Can a series of irritating events make a movie? Yes, but an irritating one: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

You’d be unwise to look to the movies for economic insight—this one amounts to an extended fatuous argument that an individual who behaved like a corporate restructuring would be a psychopath. But among contemporary socio-economic parables, Mr. Park’s latest is an amusingly cutting one.

Paper Heart is like a really special five-minute YouTube clip that goes on for an hour and a half.

Without an exceptionally skilled director of actors (such as Cameron Crowe), Cruise can’t dial up much emotion, so the two love interests for his character are two more than he can convincingly handle. He may be at home in the cockpit of a killing machine, but when it comes to displaying his humanity, he’s no Wall-E.

If the poor really interested such filmmakers, these movies would have something to offer other than lugubriousness masquerading as seriousness, and clichés presented as hard truths.

File this one in the same category of edgy Long Island comedies as the equally smart 2009 Alec Baldwin film "Lymelife."

It's ragged, and at times it scrapes your comedy ganglia like a cheese grater. But 15 minutes or half an hour is an ideal chunk of time to set aside for truly inspired absurdism.

Draft Day is lumbering and predictable, and its hero general manager is so dumb it should have been called “Dummyball.”

Stewart’s restrained performance is affecting, the film seems well-researched about what it’s like to try to deal with Gitmo detainees who throw their own feces, and it isn’t as tendentious as the average Hollywood take on the subject.

The title is by far the most noteworthy element of this lumpy horror-comedy.

Essentially amounts to an extended interview with a psycho, fleshed out with background material that, while suitably shocking, is not always illuminating or even frank. The film is curiously shy about calling Varg what he is: a Nazi.

This more than 2 1/2 hour film would rank as one of Hollywood’s sleepiest fantasy blockbusters of the century even without the pointless musical interludes, of which there are at least half a dozen.

Mr. Forster’s affinity for flat dialogue, cartoonish characters, hokey contrivance and dull inspirational messages continue to be his hallmark, and the Hallmark Channel seems like an ideal place for his future work.

Dazzling fun. Jerry is master of a new domain.

Camp often means a lack of feeling and generalized disdain; not so in Spork, which has as much heart as "Sixteen Candles."

Its young director, however, has a considerable flair for surprise and visual gusto, and he even, on a shoestring, delivers sharp-looking special effects.

Initially, this low-budget film writes a lot of checks on the First National Bank of Whimsy, but I was astonished when none of them bounced.

The film does a poor job of illuminating human frailty because everything in it is so transparently contrived, so clumsily aimed at your tear ducts.

Mr. Woo’s frenzied love of operatically heightened violence may have influenced some talented younger directors, but without an interesting screenplay to work from his movies sink into mindlessness. “Silent Night” is nothing to shout about.

The movie is as lumpy and misshapen as a giant booger.

More like Disney's "Sleeping Beauty," somber, slow and elegant instead of frantic and dazzling.

The Beekeeper, which is both a bee movie and a B movie, falls in the same category as many other Statham-versus-everyone action thrillers: not very good, yet enjoyable enough.

Though all of the film’s events could be recounted in a few sentences, “Anemone” is a vivid character study and an acting showcase for the four lead performers, each of whom gets ample opportunity to show a deep understanding of their tortured pasts.

Occasionally there is a striking image or a moment of wounded sweetness, but mainly the film provides ample proof that it's possible to be bizarre and boring at the same time.

Chop up the film’s segments, replay them in any order, and things would make no more or less sense.

The movie approaches the final scene with a straight face, but it left the audience giggling spasmodically. This script probably should have gone all the way and thrown in a few quips: If your movie is a joke, at least be intentionally funny.

The paranoia is as thick and luscious as that Reddi-wip, and it's served from both left and right.

If it’s possible to make a morally old-fashioned film about teen orgies, writer-director Eva Husson has done so with Bang Gang, a quietly chilling look at the sex lives of a group of bored high-school students.

A sharp comedy as well as a punk-pulp spree. Don't go if you can't handle Brit slang. ("Grass" = informer.)

A supernatural horror-comedy that's frighteningly lacking in wit, John Dies at the End thinks it's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for dudes. But in its randomness, its vulgarity and its level of humor, it's more like the collected writings on the walls of a roadside men's room.

Emancipation is tonally discordant, attempting to merge serious historical drama with the silly dynamics of an action thriller.

The oddly compelling documentary Moving Midway is an engineering tale combined with a family history and a ghost story.

The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.

Has the kind of soulful subject matter that will strike some as profoundly emotional, but it gets a flag for roughing the tear ducts. This isn't football - it's cornball.

The eye-popping and entertaining The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader offers a merry seafaring jaunt together with plenty of adventures led by magically empowered kids.

Rendering the life of young Abraham Lincoln as a tone poem, The Better Angels sags under the weight of its own resolute earnestness.

The Amazing Spider-Man is more like an old Xerox copy: Greasy, paper-thin, slightly faded, and probably made unnecessarily, but in any case destined to get lost in a pile of things exactly like it.

How cheap-looking is the modern-day romantic tragedy Private Romeo? Take a couple of friends to see it, and the amount you spend may exceed the amount the filmmakers did.

Beyond Outrage fails to live up to its title as Japanese superstar Takeshi Kitano can’t find much in the way of fresh ideas for the genre.

Free State of Jones is enticingly difficult to chart. It’s anti-war, anti-plutocracy and anti-racist, but it’s also pro-Bible, pro-gun, anti-tax and sympathetic to the poor whites who usually get tagged as racist. Its hero is an avowed Republican named Newt.

As Popper himself notices, his and the penguins' saga gets so endearing that it could have been narrated by Morgan Freeman.

The film as a whole goes from intriguing to irritating.

Cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending, but what's strangest about it is that it actually thinks it's pro-soldier even as it portrays vets home on leave as foolish (Rachel McAdams), desperate (Tim Robbins) and dishonorable (Michael Pena) while playing all three situations for laughs.

There's no way to put this gently: Watching people slam their heels and toes on the boards while drifting around the floor is about as fascinating as watching the carousel rotation in your favorite microwave oven.

Even at a cramped and frenetic 82 minutes, the movie feels long. That’s what happens when the audience can guess everything that’s going to happen in advance.

Dramatically inert, satirically inept and thematically insufferable, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the most disappointing film of the year.

The movie is still a mess, stumbling from comic-relief scenes that aren't funny to a job-training interlude in which we learn that, among other things, owls make excellent . . . blacksmiths?

We watched a story of a Labrador. Who eats the couch and disobeys. I said to Lady, "It's a labra-bore."

A gooey morass of indie-movie clichés, the wacky-family dramedy The Hollars marks yet another egregiously cutesy attempt to rekindle that “Garden State” magic.

After an intriguing start and a strong middle, however, the film can’t quite deliver a satisfying ending.

Mr. Luhrmann successfully makes Presley’s concerts fresh again.

Fly Me to the Moon could have worked beautifully, if only someone had first figured out a coherent story.

The men who made The Guardian strive to be the averagest of the average - and don't quite succeed.

This future looks awfully passé: The stimulus didn't work out. Neither did 1917 Russia.

De Palma is extreme, visceral, usually in bad taste but almost always riveting. De Palma's Redacted, a no-budget fake documentary that imagines the circumstances behind a real rape and murder of a civilian girl committed by US troops in Iraq, is a piece of anti-war propaganda whose aims I don't agree with, but it jolted me nonetheless.

Proving it’s still possible to stick to the broad contours of “The Graduate” story and come up with something brightly endearing, 5 to 7 is a memorable directorial debut for “Mad Men” writer Victor Levin.

This Michael Mann-directed film is full of Michael Mann-isms, many of them familiar from, and done better in, “Heat.”

Fay Grim is like watching stoners playing Risk and Clue at the same time.

There isn't anything especially wrong with Who Do You Love but there's nothing here that cries out to be seen, either. Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/who_do_you_love_VZgyGvsv0ruc9teHrzQIlJ#ixzz0kcaj8Mwl

Some movies present their whole story in a two-minute trailer, but Gridiron Gang says it all in its poster.

Prieto does what he can to keep things roaring along, but the overall effect is not a lot more stimulating than your average diet cola.

Robin Williams’ last live-action film, Boulevard, is a frustrating ending to a stellar career, a cramped and melancholy film about a cramped and melancholy man.

I didn't buy how The Next Three Days plays out - but I almost bought it, and that's good enough for a thriller.

Bidding to be the “Terms of Endearment” of zombie movies, Maggie sucks all the life out of an idea that just won’t die.

No one loves a broad comedy like the French, but Gallic touches of restraint tend to keep such light entertainment pleasing rather than blundering.

Take a stroll down London Boulevard if you enjoy surly, smart, hard-edged British crime movies like "Sexy Beast" and "Croupier."

Mr. Malek is incapable of providing the audience with an emotional hook.

Considering that Gracie says nothing that hasn't been said in dozens of films, one does wonder whether Hollywood is being as diligent as it could be in digging up fresh story ideas.

Self/less is a celluloid smoothie blended from dozens of familiar elements, but it’s neither tasty nor nutritious.

It may be cheaper than a trip to see the gentlemen of Chippendales but, artistically speaking, it’s on roughly the same level.

[Director Kaye's] dedication to the material is admirable, but his tactic of following one dismal development with an even more depressing one comes to seem monotonous and pointless.

Creepy spirits in old-timey dress, ear-stabbing sound cues, slamming doors and bloody handprints: The horror flick Insidious isn't scared to be trite.

The shallow, derivative and contrived British heist thriller Wasteland lives down to its unfortunate name.

Sincerely directed by one woman (Phyllida Lloyd, who did "Mamma Mia!") and smartly written by another (Abi Morgan), the film stars an unsurpassable Meryl Streep, whose ability to empathize with her characters has never been more gloriously impassioned than it is in this titanic performance.

The subject matter is worthy of serious dramatic interrogation, and there’s a good movie in here someplace. But “After the Hunt” feels like a messy first-draft script, shoddily directed, rather than an accomplished feature from a veteran filmmaker.

Its characters are likable enough to settle in with for a pleasant hour and a half.

Really it's just a trashy bid to be the "Scarface" of Mesopotamia.

A Working Man is watchable enough, with the occasional interjection of humor, but it’s a formulaic punch-’em-up that simply jams in as many fights as it can with little effort expended on plausibility.

Spits out enough scares and twists to maintain our interest, but the film's psycho-sociological layer is almost as cheesy and unconvincing as its low-rent action scenes.

Sensory gluttony is reason enough to see a movie, and few epics overstuff the eyes like this one.

Bears all the signs of having been composed by an inferior race of alien screenwriters from the Hackulon System.

Why doesn't anybody just buy a gun? I guess the female characters spent all their money on tight tank tops.

The heart of the Gru-niverse is slapstick and capers, but the balance is all off here.

I had the sensation of sitting through a fourth-grade school play that contained no children of my own: the very definition of a nightmare.

Safe House may strike you as a brilliant movie, provided you've seen fewer than, say, 10 spy thrillers.

The indie road movie Janie Jones is billed as "inspired by the true story" of its writer-director, David M. Rosenthal. Impossible. No one's life is this boring.

Chism’s characters are pleasingly odd, and though she can’t string much of a narrative together — there is a stop-and-start quality to the picture that grows tiresome — a few of the set pieces are funny.

Though on the surface Slingshot looks like a space-exploration thriller with many cinematic forebears, it makes elegant use of misdirection.

RoboCop is topically up-to-the-moment but stylistically it’s retro. Far from using the story as an excuse to string together cheap thrills and blowout spectacle, its hero has all the heart of the Tin Man.

The danger of trying to do a supernatural comedy-romance is that you’ll wind up being as funny as “Twilight,” with all the raw sexual energy of “Bewitched.” Beautiful Creatures isn’t quite that bad, though it did make me long for the cleverer “Dark Shadows.”

You may protest that this is just a splattery feature-length sketch, and you’d be absolutely right. Why not have a laugh at this absurdly trite concept? I’ll take the cheesy breeziness of “CVZ” over the frowny somberness of “World War Z” any day.

The film is as tender and endearing as a lamb, a lamb at rest in a fragrant atmosphere. It’s a film that has a determined, unironic respect for things past. It’s as if millennial hipsterism, with its feigned fascination for all things retro, took a surprising further step: actual respect for learning, for experience, for wisdom.

Following closely the standard playbook for biographical movies of the kind that television smoothly produced in the ’80s and ’90s, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody may score low on creativity and originality but it’s effective throughout.

Five minutes before The Golden Compass started, I was wondering when it was going to start. Forty minutes into it, I was wondering exactly the same thing.

Mr. Novak comes up with so much funny dialogue and so many intriguing ideas that I mostly forgive the creakiness of his plotting. The basic mechanics of the whodunit seem to elude him, and he leaves important matters dangling at the end. But questioning the failings and prejudices of his tribe (Mr. Novak grew up in greater Boston, went to Harvard, worked in Hollywood, and has also written for the New Yorker) has provided him with a wealth of material.

Contraband aims to be dumb fun but gets only the first half right.

While the film is partially redeemed by a couple of surprisingly touching late scenes involving Ridley and her dad, for the most part it’s merely a weak satire in which we’re meant to cheer as the moneyed class gets a sanguinary comeuppance, with crushed skulls and spilled intestines presented as hilarious.

It’s too busy with feel-good slogans like “Si Se Puede.” The slogan may be nice, but it’s meaningless. So is the movie.

not so much a movie as an "act," one that belongs at a club called Shenanigans or maybe Chuckleheads.

At 96 minutes it is exactly 93 1/2 minutes too long. If they're going to put this artifact in theaters, they'd better charge 1973 grindhouse prices: a dollar a ticket.

This digitally tricked-out fairy tale makes for a reasonably engaging kids’ fantasy, but at best we’re talking about a junior varsity “Lord of the Rings.” It’s March. What did you expect?

Don’t expect the real dirt on “Saturday Night Live” from the doc Live From New York! The movie is fun, but it’s a cinematic coffee-table book.

As for Hoffman, the shambling Everyman naturalism he shows here gives God’s Pocket an added elegiac layer that makes its bitter ironies that much more painful.

Everyone's Hero, a tame CGI cartoon for the simple-minded: the very young, the very old and Yankee fans.

Risen veers so far off the Bible’s path that it might as well be a tale of this 13th apostle, called Marty, who was in charge of snacks and mini-golf reservations.

Transporter 3 is made for airplane viewing, and not just any airplane: an Eastern European one, on the flight from Hrubbishnik to Slutnya.

None of Dunham's humor comes across, except when someone says, "And when you speak, your words are snakes I swat at with swords," which is hilarious, but not intentionally.

Given that the character is a literal saint, and the script never stops reminding us how brave, honorable, loving and committed Mother Cabrini is, the movie suffers from a certain steadfast tone. It’s warm with fondness but never boiling with passion, and a major star might have succeeded in making Cabrini larger than life. As it is, she comes across as so pure that it’s a little difficult to relate to her.

A 2 1/2-year-old collection of mediocre stand-up routines and dull backstage chatter, Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show demonstrates why comedy clubs require you to have a couple of drinks.

Writer-director John Gray, who created "Ghost Whisperer" on TV, is a son of Brooklyn whose love for the borough is as thick as a pint of Guinness, and he keeps finding fresh ways to present familiar plot points.

For all its outré set pieces it never rises above the level of pretentious trash.

What the Charles Darwin biopic Creation mainly creates is a do-over for Paul Bettany: This time he gets to have a beautiful mind.

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.

There's a geyser of ambition in the visually stunning The Fountain, but the story of a thousand-year quest for the Fountain of Youth eventually trickles out.

The movie makes no attempt to dress up any of its many clichés.

If Broadway shows had DVD featurettes, the unexceptional documentary Broadway Idiot would be perfect for one.

A dreary message movie.

Kids will be as enthralled by this film as you were by the live-action Disney movies of the '70s. It doesn't get any sweeter than a roomful of mattresses with kids and dogs jumping on them.

Say hello to my leetle dagger! Shakespeare meets "Scarface" in an Aussie adaptation of "Macbeth" gone gangsta.

As filthy as the back of a sanitation truck — but it has heart, too. Most of the comedy is funny, some of it is hilarious.

Seventh-graders are far cooler and more anarchic than depicted in this often-dopey movie, which is aimed at more of a fourth-grade sensibility.

The Avengers is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. What it expertly is, is whelming.

It’s breathtaking. It’s dazzling. It’s world-altering, is what it is. For the first time ever, a movie has actually done it. Hardcore Henry has precisely replicated the experience of watching someone else play a video game.

All of this is secondary, even tertiary material, even if much of it is interesting and even wrenching to behold.

A Liam Neeson thriller so lacking in ambition they should have called it "Paycheck."

Cruise's Jack Reacher is a loner who doesn't smile, charm, love the ladies, aim his index fingers to the heavens or sing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" in bars. Here he just snarls and kills people. Yes, please, and let's have more of the same.

In stripping down the legend—no talk of ancient curses or silver bullets here—Mr. Whannell may have modernized it, but he has also made it so joyless that it might as well have been produced by Glumhouse. This “Wolf Man” chases its own tail.

If you're in the mood for a clichéd gangland B-movie, though, you could do worse.

"Happy Feet" was one of the greatest and most original animated films, but the sequel can't even decide what it's about for the first 40 minutes.

Final Destination 5, which, despite its lowbrow story, turns out to be one of the fastest-moving films of the year, is a suspenseful and macabre exercise in dread for the absurdly cosseted.

With so much going on, there’s no time to make any of the action truly engaging, especially given Mr. Fleischer’s rigid determination to be as flashy as possible all of the time.

A contrived comedy that could have made an especially weak episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

An English-language debut by Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who also co-wrote its script, They Will Kill You is tongue-in-cheek but not witty, reveling in its excesses without bringing anything fresh to the party.

The movie, a sequel to 2009's much more sprightly and amusing indie "Women in Trouble," seems to be reaching for Robert Altman territory. Instead of offering many intriguing stories, though, it can't come up with even one.

Directed by James Griffiths, “Wallis Island” is warm, endearing and very funny, a quintessential indie smile-maker about nice, humble people adorably stumbling their way toward a little happiness.

At no point does anything shocking, or even interesting, happen.

France's friendship dramedy Little White Lies is such a blatant rip-off of a far better American movie that it could have been called "Le Big Chill."

No matter how good Blethyn is at playing up the sweet hurt of a woman who is well on the decline but never made it in the first place, your admiration for her shrieking-and-drinking breakdown scenes is likely to be tested after about the fifth go-round.

A pleasingly weird, dryly funny little indie.

“Snow White” is the fairest of them all, in the sense that fair can mean mediocre.

Suspenseful though it is, the movie is quiet to the point of being sleepy, and Worthington is simply not working out as a screen star.

Another project whose narrative gets swallowed by its design.

It's a one-joke movie, if "Jewish mothers are annoying" is a joke. But just as a film about boredom should not actually be boring, no movie should credibly simulate the experience of being stuck in a car with Barbra Streisand for eight days.

The film is a failure if it can't convince us that these two people belong together. It can't, and barely tries.