Kyle Smith

A case can be made that it’s gutsy and honest for Mr. Apatow, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Eichner to place such an obnoxious (and recognizable) figure as Bobby at the center of a rom-com, but as we saw in “The King of Staten Island,” comedies about jerks work only if they’re funny, and Bros isn’t.

As cute and energetic as it is, The Lego Movie is more exhausting than fun, too unsure of itself to stick with any story thread for too long. The action scenes are enthusiastic, colorful but uninvolving, like an 8-year-old emptying a bucket of plastic blocks.

Only in the heartfelt closing minutes does the film cut any deeper than a tired episode of a sitcom about children of immigrants complaining about their hopelessly old-fashioned parents.

The documentary Darfur Now proves that - no matter how im portant the subject matter - following various people around with a camera doesn't necessarily make a film.

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

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

The tone is good-natured enough to make a simple movie semi-watchable.

Amusing and informative (and hyperbolic) as it is, All In: The Poker Movie is a documentary whose intended audience is unclear.

Having seen the trailer for Brothers and now the finished film, I feel as though I just watched the trailer twice.

What everyone will remember about Goosebumps is . . . nothing. Except that it was kinda like “Gremlins.”

Scenes that should be grotesquely funny deliver only chuckles rather than a big payoff.

Lacking either the narrative shiftiness or the trashy thrills of “Gone Girl,” this one is the kind of flick few will watch twice: It has about as many twists and turns as an L. The third act of a movie shouldn’t make you feel as though the first two acts were a waste of time.

A big warm cinematic jelly doughnut stuffed with youth, vitality, style, whimsy and other equally alarming properties. I tried to love it. But after 20 minutes, I sensed I was intruding on the movie's love affair with itself.

I was too bored to hate the movie. Besides, who hates a stuffed animal? If it actually said something intelligent or surprising, you’d be alarmed, not pleased.

Last Breath, which runs a compact 91 minutes, doesn’t feel like a finished film: The dialogue is strictly functional, and there is so little time for establishing character that none of the three principals really makes an impression.

You could say the 3-D animated kidpic How To Train Your Dragon is "Avatar" for simpletons. But that title is already taken, by "Avatar."

The film is plagued by flaws: James Newton Howard’s relentlessly bombastic musical score, an elementary storyline, underwritten characters. As expertly as Mr. Greengrass recaptures the flaming horrors, his film is a somewhat superfluous successor to an excellent documentary on the same subject, Ron Howard’s 2020 feature “Rebuilding Paradise.”

Romero's we're-all-doomed-and-maybe-we-deserve-it pessimism is so extreme he would fit right in with a real group of brain-eaters: the French.

By the end, we wind up pretty much where we were four years ago when the pictures first appeared in the papers: Inexperienced troops did disgusting things, but it's a mystery who else knew.

The attempts to out-Matrix "The Matrix," with bullet-time super-slo mo, are staged with such theatrics that they're unintentionally funny. This movie also has "Blade Runner" on its mind, and Raymond Chandler, but mostly it's a weak little sister to "Sin City."

I might forgive the slow start if it weren't for the slow middle and slow end.

An intriguing sci-fi thriller, but in the end it doesn’t do enough with its ideas.

A blast from the 1980s, when the idea that men were essentially rapists and women rapees was a popular way to score chicks on campus.

All of the actors are enjoying themselves, and the movie is stuffed with history, atmosphere and vivid characters. What's in short supply, though, is laughter.

Bursting with the usual colorful pop music numbers and lighter-than-a-soap-bubble quandaries, the film is a typical Bollywood entry, not likely to win over many new converts

Since the thing is increasingly impatient to jump forward to the next big torture set piece, there isn't any time to establish anyone's character. Butcher shops are bloody, too, but they're not scary.

The tales mostly drift along and wrap up unresolved. If this is an accurate slice of Paris life, I'll take the relative excitement of Topeka.

Even for a movie about complying with USDA regulations, Dolphin Tale 2 is a little lacking in excitement.

Allied is slow-footed and tepid, its plot twists dopey and soapy. I was rooting for things to get interesting, but I would have settled for a few surprises.

Anchorman 2 is like watching “Anchorman” being re-enacted by semi-professionals trying to cover up their lapses by being extra-emphatic, super-doofy: 2013 Steve Carell does a lousy impression of 2004 Steve Carell.

An occasionally amusing but strained fable about the dangers and delights of sibling rivalry that asks us to believe (for instance) that soccer scouts roam Mexico looking for 30-year-old recruits.

Wrath of the Titans suggests a franchise that isn't trying very hard, and I don't really expect a sequel. But if it does happen, I fear it'll be even less of an event: "Tiff of the Titans."

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

The doc consists of interviews with the absurdly grandiose Jodorowsky (whose fans include Kanye West) plus acolytes like current director Nicolas Winding Refn and film nerds, all of whom walk us through storyboards and tell us how awesome this “greatest film never made” would have been.

Although Hill failed to derail Thomas’ career, she seems to consider her testimony a success: She remains a highly sought public speaker about workplace sexual harassment, which in large part thanks to her is much less tolerated than it once was.

Bad Santa 2 is vulgar, nasty and offensive, but it has flawed aspects also.

The leads are likeable enough, but the script reanimates "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" tactics - a monster story supposedly made hilarious by being told by a savvy high schooler. These lines aren't even jokes, though, they're just collisions of the brutal and the banal.

The main reason to see it is for the hilariously nasty uses it devises for a bear trap, nail gun, etc.

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.

A kind name for this attitude is false moral equivalence, or perhaps post-imperial cringe. A less kind one is Western self-hatred, or an urgent plea to tolerate the intolerant.

When I go to a Mummy movie, I don't want ninjas and yetis and men turned to stone. I want embalmed corpses and hieroglyphics. I want pharaoh. I want pyramids and sphinxes and Ace bandages. Did "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" take place on the Nile?

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.

Limitless may please a few looking for a shallow fantasy thriller, but won't fire up the synapses of the intellectually demanding.

I understood two words of Youth Without Youth: "The End."

Drag Me to Hell is pure cheese. Goat cheese.

But for all its 21st-century special effects, the characters, dialogue and values of Fury are straight out of the ’50s. The 1650s, maybe.

Big Hero 6 even has a title that sounds like a product ordered off the takeout menu of the type of restaurant that recombines a few elements in many ways. That could work fine, if any of the ingredients were particularly flavorful.

The Club offers plenty of stifling, agonized atmosphere, but it’s all penitence and no redemption.

Dividing its loyalties between documentary and fictional narrative, it lacks the advantages of belonging to either side.

Mr. Peele has loads of ideas and builds up considerable suspense and dread, but he fails to tie everything together with a resounding final act.

The film seeks no more than to be fan service, a two-hour hangout with favorite characters and situations. Like many a runway trend, it isn’t going to last more than a season in anyone’s memory.

It’s somehow both too drawn-out and abrupt — but it’s got creepiness galore.

There might be a great movie to be made out of the financial crisis, but 99 Homes, which is like being shouted at by a man with bad breath while he grips your collar with both hands, isn’t it.

The oblique nature of the final act might perhaps be justified if the rest of the movie were better. As it is, I kept thinking, “I guess that’s funny, in a way” rather than actually laughing at any of Mr. Rankin’s aggressively whimsical notions.

The film achieves near-poignancy in its final act, when we finally meet one of the two elderly tipplers, plus a friend who occasionally stayed at their apartment and endured their shouting matches.

Caper movies rely heavily on how well they build plausibility into the doings of professional scam artists, but Emily the Criminal scores poorly on that front.

The gags seem fun and refreshing at first, but they get stale quickly. Moreover, since there is no plot and no dialogue, the quirky central idea never takes on any narrative momentum. What might have been a brilliant short subject—at, say, 15 minutes—gets stretched to its limits, and then some.

Stage Fright starts out as a funny musical mashup — “Glee” meets“Friday the 13th” — but winds up indulging slasher-flick clichés instead of spoofing them.

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.

The more the film trumpets its thematic seriousness, the sillier it gets.

As dry and matter-of-fact as Ms. Zhao was in Nomadland, which won her Oscars for best director and best picture (as she was one of its producers), she is the opposite here, driving her actors to maximal emoting. The movie purports to dip into the deep well of Shakespearean magnificence but emerges only with a ladle full of greasy schmaltz.

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.

Superman can be a myth, a god, an American emblem or a symbol of the overachieving immigrant, but making him a schmo who’s so weak he’d be in deep trouble if it weren’t for his ridiculous dog feels like a dizzyingly dismissive choice.

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.

Even though it starts out likable, it gets sillier as it goes along and winds up as camp.

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 intended overarching message is that vile men can exercise a kind of mind control over their innocent girlfriends. Perhaps. But Alice, Darling delivers an equally striking unintended message: that two people in a failing relationship have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other.

GOTG 3 is a blahbuster that, like other recent Marvel disappointments (“Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”), jogs along from one visually extravagant, strenuously jokey set piece to another without offering much in the way of either dramatic engagement or actually funny ideas.

It isn’t until the last half hour that the film finally switches tones from aggressively and charmlessly filthy to thoughtful.

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.

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

Villains who aren’t good at their jobs are a bit boring, and despite their menacing regalia these Nazis are effectively lambs to the slaughter. “Sisu” is simply the slaughterhouse Mr. Helander has built around them, with all of the narrative and thematic artistry that implies.

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 plays like pure television by an Aaron Sorkin disciple, and there is no reason whatsoever to see this on the big screen.

Neither the director, Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer and documentarian whose debut narrative feature this is, nor the film’s three screenwriters can solve its essential problem, which is that it amounts to a string of grisly anecdotes.

This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.

Sony Pictures is positioning “The Woman King” as not only a rousing action film but also an important one: At the screening I attended, a marketing slide read, “Join the conversation.” I’ll start: Is there any limit to Hollywood shamelessness?

As directed by Tom George from a script by Mark Chappell, See How They Run hits like a watered-down cocktail rather than a bracing belt of intrigue.

I dearly wished someone from Wick-land would emerge to take out this self-aggrandizing dunce.

The film may be pretty to look at, but this passion project isn’t likely to generate much of it.

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.

Cuckoo brings up a lot of ideas but doesn’t organize them into anything like a satisfying resolution. As frenzy follows frenzy, it aspires merely to create a feeling of senseless chaos.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever may not have the same flaws as Marvel’s other recent disappointments, but it continues what amounts to a creative losing streak.

Ms. Gladstone draws a lot of sympathy as the modest, helpless Mollie, but like everything else here her performance suffers from inertia. She spends the bulk of the movie mired in illness and despondency, and her look mirrors how I felt as I watched: numb and trapped.

Perhaps the Oscar winner was simply attracted to reliving glory days, just as Mr. Levinson must have enjoyed revisiting the territory of one of his best movies, the 1991 Bugsy Siegel saga “Bugsy.” "Alto Knights is, however, buggy: a curious mixture of the inert and the frenetic.

Someone makes a jokey reference to the cartoon contrivance of “Scooby-Doo,” and the comparison is brutally apt.

Ms. Aitken seeks to draw a connection between Terry’s life story and her dedication to helping these impossibly vulnerable and sweet birds, but a documentary that avoids important questions is a failure.

Jonathan Abrams’s script is so amateurish it feels like a first draft.

Like everyone else on hand, Mr. Woodall deserves a better director than he gets here, just as the audience deserves a better script than one that asks us to believe Göring was so clever he nearly dodged blame for the Holocaust.

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

The audience is left to feel sorry for characters we’re meant to find amusingly contemptible and to groan at the way the writing keeps taking potshots at the most obvious targets. When the film thinks it’s being wicked, it’s closer to being trite.

The editing is like a kaleidoscope fed through a food processor, the camera has less ability to sit still than a 4-year-old stuffed with birthday cake, and both lead actors veer into camp.

Even those who find Ms. Wilkerson’s thesis convincing are likely to concede that it is more at home in the library than at the multiplex. Many others will find Origin confusing and dry.

Mr. Scott seems content to restage story beats and action scenes from the first film. Most cold-case sequels aren’t very good, and maybe there’s a reason for that.

The director Don Hall and his co-director and screenwriter Qui Nguyen (who last year collaborated on a slightly less mediocre Disney picture, “Raya and the Last Dragon”) seem to have put all of their effort into gaudy backgrounds, wacky gadgets and strange ancillary monsters instead of into dramatic urgency or conflict.

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

Ghostface tends to veer from fiendishly brilliant to unbelievably thick depending on the writers’ limitations.

A general sense that things aren’t heading anywhere too exciting pervades this cinematic chunk of corporate synergy.

Written by Tim Smith, Keith Thomas and Arkasha Stevenson, and directed by Ms. Stevenson, The First Omen relies heavily on gory imagery, jump scares and shocking dream sequences to cover for its weak plotting.

Occasionally the movie does offer up a pleasing little nugget about the creative process, as when Springsteen changes a lyric from the third person to the first: There is glory in such little adjustments. But most of the movie’s backstage material is uninspired.

Though the new Little Mermaid makes excellent use of all that digital wizardry has to offer, its heart is lost at sea.

That mildness is characteristic of the film, which is colorful to look at but dull. The story is plodding, the characters are boring and earnest, and the supposed comic-relief act provided by the trio of stumblebums on Arco’s trail is a wince-inducing failure.

Mr. Stanfield is a gifted performer. Thanks to an amateurish script, however, Clarence is a lifeless Brian.

That “Crime 101” seeks to position itself as a successor to “Heat” is laughable. A more accurate title would have been “Lukewarmth.”

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.

Mr. Pearce (“Iron Man 3,” “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation”) and his director have no idea what kind of picture they want to make. Instead they have four or five different concepts which they set loose like cars ramming into each other as they jostle for position.

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.

As pleasing as the film may be to those who treasure ambiguity and nuance, it strikes me as dry and tedious.

Thanks to an inert story and disagreeable characters, its 90 minutes go by slowly.

The Life of Chuck is an overstuffed suitcase of a movie, one that comes off as a bit graceless and misshapen with all of the cramming and jamming.

The film’s airless, cramped quality demands consistently high-level dialogue—words that sting and burn. Instead, the two big speeches, especially the second one, land somewhat like filibusters.

There is less artistry to the film than there is sloganeering. Call Jane would be more effective if it stuck to human drama rather than having its characters make sweeping assertions that sound like stump speeches given at political rallies.

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

It’s a cousin to other superficially gritty but essentially cloying movies about the traumas of urban striving, such as “Precious” or “Moonlight.”

There’s a more interesting, less strident film under the surface, but it never manages to get out.

If Bono is melodramatic, Mr. Dominik is an enabler. Thom Zimny’s matter-of-fact direction of another paternally damaged rock star’s concert confessional, “Springsteen on Broadway,” let its star’s charisma shine through. “Stories of Surrender” is more like an epic of self-parody.

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

Despite the surface Mr. Safdie has designed—hand-held cameras, unglamorous sets, closeups of people in misery—The Smashing Machine is notably reluctant to go deep.

Civil War is superficially silly—Mr. Garland writes himself into a trap in one tense scene and gets out of it with an absurd moment of action-hero gusto that is, as presented, not possible—but it’s also deeply silly. It’s a statement movie that contains no insights at all.

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.

A dismal, low-energy affair.

A movie steeped in sin that squats awkwardly in a cinematic purgatory between tawdry and talky.

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

Boring movie.

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.

Its script isn't worth the papyrus it's inscribed on.

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

With its starkly contrasted visuals (fierce blacks, Clorox whites, a dash of unholy crimson), The Spirit may resemble a comic book more than any live-action film yet made, but it makes "Max Payne" look like a gleaming jewel of storytelling by comparison.

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

I tried squinting. Didn’t work. I turned my head slightly to the side. Uh-uh. No matter what I tried, I could not, cannot and never will be able to see Ewan McGregor as Jesus Christ.

Fine for fans? Sure. This stuff is crack for fans. Crack is really bad!

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.

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.

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.

As a comedy, The Brothers Grimsby is weak and scattershot, but it’s useful as an unintended self-indictment of the chattering classes’ disgust and disdain for white working folk.

Grunting and boarlike, Gérard Depardieu supplies a one-note rendition of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Abel Ferrara’s peculiarly unilluminating Welcome to New York.

The origins story Dracula Untold is Dracula unbold — unoriginal, unimaginative and utterly non-unprecedented. This Vlad the Impaler has all the edge of Vlasic the pickle.

This one is a “different kind of superhero movie,” meaning even more fiercely attached to the mode of artistic expression known as “puberty.”

I Saw the Light is as vital as a two-hour shrug.

Much of this footage might have been illuminating, even fascinating, in 2003. But seven years on, it's ancient history lacking insight, hindsight or a fresh take.

Needlessly violent? No, Rambo is needfully violent. Johnny R. is a man constructed of violence.

An icky S&M thriller.

A sour, plotless and witless comedy-drama based on the final Mordecai Richler novel, wants to remind you of "Sideways" and its forlorn drink-moistened soul search. Giamatti is an ideal casting choice, but even this talented actor can't sell a lovable-jerk

A popcorn picture that thinks it’s “The Last Emperor,” The Karate Kid is about as likely to grab your youngster’s attention as any other propaganda film made by the Chinese government.

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.

Feeble comic one-liners and slow pacing combine for a routine fangfest in this remake of the 1985 film.

A caper comedy that forgot to put in the laughs.

The bite and bark of Underdog are both pretty awful, but little kids might take this pooch for a walk.

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

Snowden could have been a character portrait, but instead it’s like “The Bourne Identity” minus the chases and fights, which is like a ham and cheese sandwich minus the ham and cheese. As a consequence, I suspect, this film will make no bread.

The ingredients are there for a cute con game, but instead the movie turns out to be a mushy melodrama.

Another project whose narrative gets swallowed by its design.

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.

We keep waiting for a story, or at least some comedy, but none ever materializes. The dialogue makes Algebra II seem fascinating by comparison.

Sarah's Key belongs to the Holocaust for Dummies section of Harvey Weinstein's History for Dummies series of mer etricious glossy dramas that ransack global events and turn them into middlebrow women's weepies to fill his trophy case.

With great power comes the responsibility to make a decent movie, but the mysterious force running through Chronicle is the power to supersuck.

A dreary message movie.

A lukewarm film about what might happen to three New York City friends if the draft were reinstated, proves that even the most controversial of topics can be the basis for the dullest indie films.

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.

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

It's a cute idea that a better filmmaker than writer-director Michael Schroeder could have done a lot with.

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

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.

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

Not very haunty.

Demonstrating the limits of being too clever in a genre movie, the art-house chiller Silent House lets the tenseness of its first act trickle away.

Tender, heartfelt and exquisitely dull, the drama Félix and Meira illustrates the perils of trying to tell an emotional love story with meaningful stares and long pauses.

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.

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.

This "Alfie" meets "Boogie Nights" bio fizzles because, although Sassoon never stops talking, he never says anything.

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.

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

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

Hop gives us . . . a bunny who poops jelly beans. That idea doesn't fill you with seasonal joy? Neither will the rest of the movie.

You know those one-joke "Saturday Night Live" sketches that start to age after six minutes? Blades of Glory is one joke that lasts 93 minutes, costs $11 and could involve sitting next to a guy who retells the movie into his cellphone.

The dull, predictable direction is the perfect match for a watery, nondescript cast.

What happens when several characters' lives intertwine with the maggot-infested corpse of a prostitute in The Dead Girl? A whole lot of crying.

The film by Yasuhiro Yoshiura suffers from many of the same flaws as other anime features — a plodding pace, broad humor, a bland heroine and snarly, one-dimensional villains.

Plotwise, the movie can (like many a Brooklynite) barely be bothered to comb its hair. Just when the pace needs to pick up, everyone sits around discussing fruity drinks.

The movie hopes to be regarded as childlike too, but there's a difference between kid-friendly and just regular old dumb.

The movie is neither an affecting romance (Coco even considers marrying Balsan because "I'd achieve social status") nor an inspiring success story. Chanel sold herself to one guy, happened to get customers through him, and took a start-up loan from another lover.

Edward Norton plays Ray, a (possibly) honest cop wearing an unexplained scar positioned just so on his cheek. It looks like it was bought in the markdown aisle of Halloween Mart on Nov. 1.

Everything is predictable three scenes in advance, and it's all stale, stuck, stolid.

If the jokes in Get Hard were a set of Jeopardy categories, they’d read as follows: Things Will Ferrell Puts Up His Butt, Butt Rape, Shots of Will Ferrell’s Bare Butt and Satirical Comparisons of Violent and Nonviolent Crime Not Excluding Mentions of Balzac.

Slow West certainly lives up to its title: It’s one poky Western, plodding and perambulating and moseying across the 1870 frontier on a grim march to a pointless ending.

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 computer-generated flying effects are the only reason to see the movie, but at some point somebody left the computer on too long, so it went ahead and spat out the script.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, as you'd expect, rubbish, but the word is slightly too kind. The David Fincher film (like the very similar Swedish one - released in the US just last year! - and the book) is not even good rubbish.

It’s as if a ruthless gang of Richie Cunninghams terrorized the Fonzies of the world.

One of the few monster-crocodile movies that simultaneously tries to rip off "Jaws" and "Meet the Press."

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?

An amusingly preposterous last act keeps you guessing, or maybe keeps you ducking, as it lets rip an avalanche of startling revelations and double-crosses. Nothing is what it seems - unless it seems cheesy.

Running and screaming may be essential to a lot of horror movies, but as Blair Witch shows, they’re not scary in themselves. For that, you need the stuff between the running and screaming.

Turistas has mastered the international language: stupidity.

Among group-suicide movies, A Long Way Down may prove uniquely inspirational: It’s bound to make audience members want to kill themselves. It might be the only summer movie during which the snack bars will be selling cyanide Kool-Aid.

A dull, trite thriller.

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.

A comic adventure that suffers from a dearth of both laughs and thrills.

Appalachian mountains get blown up to extract coal in the documentary The Last Mountain, a film in which activists are at least as hot as the TNT.

"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.

A dopey psychological thriller that combines elements of “The Sixth Sense” with an overbearing sentimentality, The 9th Life of Louis Drax flat-lines from beginning to end.

True, the stars are very good at what they do, but so what?

It's another flick about maps, landmarks and buried treasure that makes "The Da Vinci Code" look like TOLSTOY.

The film is Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The audience is the fire hydrant.

The movie doesn't do anything with these viney bastards. There's no back story, no satire, no allegory, no implications beyond what's happening on the pyramid.

Problem: Kidman is the only one in the theater who is turned on. The rest of us are giggling.

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.

When the studio tells us that parental guidance is suggested, does it occur to them that they should have taken their own advice?

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

I went to a wartime thriller, but then a Poli Sci 101 seminar broke out.

Watching Penn pump iron and denounce capitalism for two hours would be roughly as illuminating as this monotonous Euro-thriller.

Toby is so un-self-aware that his journey seems like mere obtuseness; what the film has to say about youthful degeneracy is less than zero.

The movie pretty much exists to sell tie-in products, and it's about as entertaining as watching little kids playing with their toys in the sandbox.

A comedy that forgot to install the funny.

They should have called it “Star Trek Into Drowsiness.”

So laugh-poor that it shoves all its comedy chips on a bet that you can build a movie around nose gags.

A woefully earnest indie about a crime and its aftermath.

The movie offers very little that food radicals don't already know.

A serial-killer flick told like an art lecture, Anamorph manages to be gruesome yet dull.

[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.

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

For all its promise to be a wry commentary on the savagery of office politics, The Belko Experiment is more like an experiment in how many cracked-open skulls can be crammed into one movie.

For a 99 percenter movie, then, Elysium is kind of a head-scratcher. It throws away its best opportunity for drama. It’s as if Han and Leia parked on the Death Star and started asking, “How much is a two-bedroom around here?”

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.

Misses everything that made the first one eat into your spine like meningitis.

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

I've seen a lot of rip-offs of "The Truman Show" and a lot of rip-offs of "Scream." I guess I have to give credit to The Cabin in the Woods for ripping off both at once.

You get the feeling the guy who wrote Transformers: Age of Extinction used the entire script as a passive-aggressive running joke on his boss, director Michael Bay.

It'll be a real miracle if anyone manages to stay awake throughout this extravagantly dull film.

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

The shtick movie Paranormal Activity 3 is the horror equivalent of vaudeville comedy: a little patter, a little pie in the face, repeat.

A movie that features Wahlberg suggesting everyone try to outrun the wind can barely be watched once.

New Moon is supposed to be an exciting love story plus monster action. So where’s the excitement? Where’s the action?

So Arnold Schwarzenegger has reached the shaky-cam-and-hoodies stage of his career. But it’s a bit late in the day for Arnold to try to get all indie and complicated.

About the only reason to stay with this increasingly histrionic film is to satisfy curiosity about exactly how Diego will (as we learn at the outset) die, but long before we learn that Twice Born chokes to death on its own melodrama.

The considerable talents of Banks make the movie bearable.

Jon Stewart’s filmmaking debut Rosewater has much in common with “The Daily Show” — it’s blaringly obvious, it’s naive, it plays to the cheap seats and it’s enamored with cheap jokes.

Argentina’s noir Everybody Has a Plan is as sludgy as the river delta in which it takes place.

A suspenseless rehash.

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.

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?

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.

Combines a sketch-comedy premise with pacing like a philosophy seminar.

A cinematic listicle of misleading economic talking points.

You can't spell cliché without Che. And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right?

Young men and fast cars are automatically stupid together, but even if you set your intelligence level at “off” — and you should — you’ll get a hangover from this cocktail of 200-proof stupid, clinking with moron ice cubes and with an idiot cherry on top.

This movie is basically “Spinal Tap” minus the jokes. Two of the band members have the word “Metallica” emblazoned on their clothing. Metallica — it’s the band that has to remind fans whom they’re watching!

Treading the same halls as “Kick-Ass” and “Kingsman,” Barely Lethal imagines an academy of teen assassins. Life there is deadly, but not as scary as high school.

Two dull people have a dull love affair in Summertime, a French drama that drags on like an August afternoon.

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

The tone of The Playroom is one of soppy moroseness. This imitation “Ice Storm” is as refreshing as a step into a puddle of slush.

The finest 1947 boxing picture of 2015 is here: Southpaw, a film that’s gruntingly insistent on its clichés.

It feels as shopworn as a dusty VHS tape of "Less Than Zero."

So moron-friendly they should have called it "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Checkers." The skill level in the script is elementary school, my dear Watson.

The film mangles its twist and fails to deliver an interesting coup de grace or a sharp line of dialogue.

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?

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."

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

Remember the old Ben Affleck, the one who made 28 consecutive bad movies before he turned out to be a pretty good director? He’s back! Behold, the second coming of . . . Badfleck.

It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling -- and then sits back awaiting congratulation.

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

It raises tangled questions about whether it is better to live humiliated or arm yourself, yet for the most part it's dramatically inert, talky and directionless, and it ends quietly without saying much of anything.

As Franco dilutes the drama with first-year-film-student gimmicks, like split screens and slow motion, it just seems like a dull collection of pointless monologues from actors who can’t even be bothered to match up their accents. Franco is a dilettante, and it shows.

This loopy farce has the feel of a wacky off-off-Broadway play with more energy than wit, but it has its moments. And the laid-back acting of Hoffman (son of Dustin) just about holds it together.