Kyle Smith

As bland as the Kenny G-style smooth jazz its hero listens to in moments of distress.

Cavanagh, the always-engaging former star of "Ed" (with whom I am friendly), and the adorable Faris (whom I don't know -- but feel free to look me up, Anna!) make the non-animated scenes amusing, as the ranger and the documentarian fall in love and fight to save the park. But the script doesn't give them a lot to do.

If you're wondering why this movie must stretch past two hours, it's because it takes that long to read every item in the cliché dictionary.

Jacques Rivette's film is full of painstaking historical detail, but the behavior of the two nonlovers is mired in inaction and emotionally incomprehensible.

Can’t somebody come up with a monster that does something more interesting than run at you screaming, “Yeeaaaarrrrgh”?

Situations get increasingly ridiculous, and none of the characters ever seems like anything but a screenwriter's sketch.

Let’s say you wanted to have another go at “Red Dawn” but you think more like Redford. Voilà: You’d have The East, a cockamamie valentine to eco-terrorism.

In Pay the Ghost, Nicolas Cage investigates a supernatural abduction, but has no solution for the maggot-eaten zombie that is his undead career.

The movie has the feel of a weary business trip.

This mild drama plays out like one of those dull message movies that TV networks used to crank out almost weekly, but the earnestness is at times almost appealingly old-fashioned.

DiCaprio and Connelly give off the sexual tension of pickled herring.

It makes "Top Gun" look like the work of Orson Welles. At least the Tom Cruise movie remembered to cast actual actors.

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

The movie is trying to do far too much and doesn't do anything well. "Ambitious" isn't the word here; "random" is more like it.

The villains are all wrong, the motivations are muddy, even the gadgetry is off. And the swaggering genius at the center of it all has become a preening fool.

Less a movie than a checklist of indiecinema clichés. Youth on a journey of self-discovery? Got it. Dead mom? Uh-huh. Wounded and entitled when it’s trying to be soulful, plotless, laden with indie rock and entirely overhyped at Sundance? Checkarooney.

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.

A heist comedy in which the audience gets robbed.

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

The script suffers from blandness and aimlessness.

Argentine writer-director Juan Solanas’ fantasy romance Upside Down is such a gorgeous wreck that I could almost sense Terry Gilliam somewhere muttering, “Wait a minute, I should have been the one to screw up this idea.”

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.

Just Before I Go is a “Garden State” retread in which filthy jokes gradually cede ground to sentimental slush.

UH-UH. Non. Nein. Negative. Sept. 11 is not to be used as the setup for a cheesy disaster prophecy flick.

A great writer deserves a more penetrating and inquisitive documentary: Reverence is not the path to understanding.

At best a sporadically amusing sketchbook of theater types.

It sounds like it was written by the star pupils at the Cameron Academy of Screenwriting.

Satire is merciless; it demands that mocker be superior to mockee.

Banal at the beginning and preposterous at the close, the British horror film Kill List jumbles together wildly incongruous ingredients to create a dramatic mush.

A movie that appears to have been shot entirely on leftover sets from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

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

Both Adam and the stakes are so low, it’s like watching 100 minutes of a slug trying to crawl over a twig.

A flea market of fairy tales and hocus-pocus, Inkheart makes as much sense as an inkblot.

Elstree 1976 is an amazing experience. I’m shocked that a documentary revisiting the making of “Star Wars” could be this boring.

Throws in enough hurtling bodies, screaming bullets and totaled cars that it at least holds your interest, so it passes the worth-watching-if-you're-stuck-on-an-airplane test.

For John Cusack in Cell, the bad news is that his phone just ran out of juice. The good news, sort of, is that those who are on their phones were just attacked by a piercing signal that turned them into flesh-munching zombies.

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.

Things are so dull, rote and humorless that when signboards in a European scene read "Mondiale Grand Prix," I at first thought they said "Mondale Grand Prix," which sounds like an unwanted award this movie could easily win.

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.

For a noir, the film is way too talky and convoluted, yet for a physics lesson, it's trash.

Their '50s-style comedy mugging not only don't come across to Americans, it's hard to believe even New Zealanders would care.

Cop Car is an instance of what happens when an airy indie filmmaker tries to “do genre” and winds up being as convincing as John Kerry putting down his demitasse and dressing up in hunting gear.

Matthew Broderick graduates from "boyish" and lurches straight into "curmudgeonly" in the would-be indie heartwarmer Wonderful World.

A kid unversed in other name-brand fantasy movies might go for The Seeker, but in 2007 it's redundant, a puttering Potter without wit and whimsy.

A cheap exploitation picture wrapped in miles and miles of stale would-be Oscar scenes.

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.

Has the aroma of an autobiographical confession by someone for whom life hasn’t been overly difficult.

The cheesy techno-thriller The Outsider is a blaring B-movie that doesn’t have much going for it, but it does have an engaging action hero in its leading man, a snarling Cockney badass named Craig Fairbrass.

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

CHOKE tries to be dirty but manages merely to be dingy.

The first time I saw Yes Man, I thought the concept was getting kind of stale toward the end. As it turns out, that was only the trailer.

Sure to be a favorite with racists, Beasts of No Nation sheds no light whatsoever on Africa’s civil wars but turns its gaze on black people brutalizing one another with machetes, howitzers, rifles and anything else that comes to hand. I picture Calvin Candie, the plantation owner in “Django Unchained,” yelling, “Yeah! Git ’em!”

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

A slow train to Dullsville that makes all local stops. You know a film is in trouble if the most interesting thing in it is the luggage.

Ryan Reynolds isn't around this time - and neither is most of the wit.

The girl kept talking and strategizing as heavy string music played on the soundtrack. This was doubly weird because: a) it made me feel like the bad guy; and b) life doesn’t normally have a soundtrack. Somehow the bitch got hold of a flare gun. Ever had a flare gun fired into your hide? Unpleasant.

The Concert is an art-house trap, the cinematic equivalent of one of those salads that turns out to have more calories than a Big Mac. And for the same reason: gobs of thick, sweet dressing.

An occasionally revealing glimpse inside the mind of Chapman before, during and after the assassination.

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.

I’m probably more intrigued than 99.3 percent of the American public by the idea of deconstructing the hidden symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but the theories proposed in the doc Room 237 aren’t eye-opening. They’re laughable.

Even I realize that other people's babies are boring. So is Babies.

The movie doesn't really begin or end. Whether the lights have just gone down or the credits have begun to roll, things are pretty much the same for Henry.

As for a villain, you could do worse than Bryan Cranston as the evil political overlord who is trying to stamp out the resistance -- When he goes mano a mano with Farrell, it's not spine-tingling. It's embarrassing, like watching a dude beat up his dad.

A 12th-grade "Sixth Sense" with a third-rate plot.

The only possible interest the movie will inspire in anyone comes when Paltrow flashes a breast toward the end, far too late to pump any excitement into an aggressively boring film that gurgles with self-indulgence.

No, this film by director/co-writer Gillian Robespierre just isn’t funny, and the mismatched leads aren’t even interesting together.

There probably aren't enough futuristic Goth rock musicals, but Repo! The Genetic Opera is weak on a couple of things a musical needs: music and lyrics.

It’s kind of cute but mostly just awkward, somewhere between watching bros who slept through French class trying to work their game in Nice and endless CBS sitcoms about nutty guys ruled by exasperated, boring women.

Made to win awards, and I'm here to present it with one: the Cliché of the Year honors, otherwise known as the Hackney.

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

"Rush Hour" was acceptable. It was to "Rush Hour 2" what McDonald's is to White Castle. "Rush Hour 2" is to Rush Hour 3 what White Castle is to cat food.

The film as a whole goes from intriguing to irritating.

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

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

Goldblum's wobbly German accent and the staginess of the script doom this effort by Paul Schrader ("American Gigolo").

At some point, this movie must have been a screenplay. But it's an enigma why anyone would bet tens of millions of dollars that people would laugh.

I don't think he (Apatow) did enough research on his topic. Because no one could be as whiny, spoiled, tasteless, combative and reliant on annoying stand-up comedy riffs as the entire cast of this film, the most disappointing one of the year.

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

Isn't as bad as you'd think, but this comic mash-up of "The Bourne Identity" and "Fat Albert" doesn't have much heft.

Every Little Step shows only this: It hurts to flunk an audition, and it's nice to get hired. Everything it has to say about Broadway was said better in Bob Fosse's movie "All That Jazz" -- in its opening five minutes.

In Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler says, "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of that hurt a lot of people." But enough about "The Bounty Hunter," "The Ugly Truth" and "P.S. I Love You."

Better than most Martin Lawrence movies - much as strep throat is better than malaria.

Seldom does The Bang Bang Club show much interest in the big picture of South Africa. When moral issues do come to the forefront, the big worry seems to be not questionable behavior but bad publicity.

The mutants are brain-damaged; the filmmakers don't have that excuse to justify this movie, which is the kind of thing the sergeant would call "a stunning display of individual and group stupidity."

There's too little dog and too much fire house in Firehouse Dog, a mild kid comedy that turns into a flaming arson mystery with some scenes that could be too scary for little ones.

Fake documentaries annoy me — why not put in the effort and deliver the real thing? — and this one is not only aimless and stiff, it also rings false.

In “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy,” Robert De Niro did stand-up comedy badly. In The Comedian he does it badly again — there’s that same air of menace and gracelessness — but this time the movie want us to think he’s brilliant.

Nothing But the Truth is like listening to the fourth-best debater in middle school present a term paper called "Politics, Power and the Media."

Shot through with ’60s London energy, illuminating on several fronts and featuring bits of many great Who tracks, the film is nevertheless a mess that should be taught in film schools to illustrate how not to edit a documentary.

Finish your popcorn early if you’re going to The Green Inferno, and save the bucket to barf in.

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

You wouldn't call The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates.

The potential for an interesting sci-fi spectacle is there, at least at the start, but Tron: Ares does nothing with it.

As a comedy “Killing” is simply dead.

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.

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.

An experience that’s like being slowly asphyxiated by puffy clouds of baby powder.

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.

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.

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

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

Universal conscription for every able-bodied man from 18 to 40 is about to be instituted, and the events of this shallow, cheap and corny story seem unlikely to offer much in the way of comforting memories for those who get sent to the trenches.

I’m not sure I’ve ever before come across an original feature with a screenplay credited to 11 writers (not to mention four “story consultants”), and yet nobody in this mirth brigade brought any operational comedy ammunition.

Mr. Liman handles each plot beat maladroitly, piling one utterly absurd contrivance or coincidence upon another.

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 screenwriter starts to seem like a sweaty basement-of-the-coffee-house magician who keeps sawing ladies in half long past the point of diminishing returns.

The charming, gentle simplicity of the book, with its childlike art, has been displaced by a mania for digital images and frantic attempts to be funny. This crayon should have been left in its box.

Whatever the charms of the book, they are entirely absent from the dull and listless film.

Mr. Boyle has made more than his share of memorable films, but he has also delivered some stinkers and unfortunately his new one carries the fragrance of a zombie underarm.

The most annoying tactic in the script is its repeated, strenuous attempts to convince us that we’re in the rarefied air of serious literary discussion.

Why an Oscar-winning screenwriter would make a film that makes so little attempt to dig into its central character is baffling. That an Oscar-nominated director with a celebrated eye for the ethereal, strange world of girl-women living in beautiful boxes could make a film as workaday as this one is frustrating.

Mr. Urban has natural swagger and he’s the best aspect here, although that’s like singling out the most fragrant part of a swamp.

Mr. Fraser looks so spectacularly awful as Charlie in the film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, that this chamber piece amounts to a variation of torture porn for highbrows, with a fat suit rather than a meat cleaver as the bringer of cinematic shock.

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.

Tiresome digressions mixed in with philosophical banalities add up to a pointless, inert drama.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The inch-deep approach to history and social issues, the high-concept device, and the trite characters all seem better suited to a different type of movie—such as one of those gee-whiz featurettes shown at the EPCOT theme park.

Spectacular? I guess, if you’re wowed by soulless CGI chaos. Thrilling? Not really. At the end, I was left feeling the way Kong does at the beginning: tired and bored.

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

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.

Though Mr. Skarsgård (who played the terrifying Pennywise in “It”) is gravely charismatic and FKA twigs is touching, the dour, depressing dankness of Mr. Sanders’s vision makes The Crow a turkey.

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

As the Roses start to become increasingly hostile to each other in front of others, the tone is meant to be hilariously nasty. Instead it’s merely monotonously vulgar, as a long string of one-liners relies more on the supposed shock value of profanity than on wit.

What was once thrilling, inventive and funny is now desiccated and limp. The pertinent question, it turns out, is not “Who you gonna call?” but “Why did they bother?”

As the runtime lumbers on to the two-hour mark, with one scene after another fizzling out, its warm nimbus of niceness seems to be the sole reason for its existence.

The entire film feels like an exceedingly stale stand-up comedy routine, which is to say it’s exactly like one of Mr. Maniscalco’s stand-up comedy routines.

The director’s trying-too-hard approach to everything, meant to make the film exciting, instead makes it so frenetic that it’s a slog, and the script by Marco van Belle falls short of the standard that you would expect to draw a star of Mr. Pratt’s magnitude.

The several mediocre songs seem like filler intended to pad out the running time to 90 minutes, but then again, everything else seems like padding too.

Some movies are toxically misconceived, and “The Drama” is among them. It wants to be wicked and outrageous but it’s really just dismal and depressing.

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.

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 intricately choreographed fight scenes are amusing enough, not that they have a lot of impact given the overbearingly silly musical score and the lurching, chaotic plot.

Adolescent is the ruling adjective here; this is an increasingly tiresome and almost wholly senseless feature.

Mr. Hausmann-Stokes hopes to keep the movie darkly comic until pivoting to a final, emotional payoff, but the mawkish late scenes are even more inept than the supposedly funny ones, as the director stages tearful hugs accompanied by soapy attempts at emotional dialogue.

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

The film is painfully slow from the beginning, then really starts to drag as it reveals that it essentially has no plot. A late turn to drama makes a bad film even worse. May Mr. Brown and Ms. Hall quickly move on to more rewarding roles. The way this movie squanders their talents is a sin.

The movie takes on the shape of a video game, with the heroes swaggering confidently from one blowout action sequence to the next with hardly any thought given to making us care about the characters or establishing the film’s heart.

Mr. Tipping ditches reasonable motivation to deliver a satirical haymaker aimed at those whose religion is football. Like many failed satires, the conclusion is more vehement than amusing.

It ought to be a treat to see such charismatic talents falling in love, but the only overwhelming and unstoppable force in the movie is its love for cutesy and cloying gimmicks. It’s a cinematic crime to waste these two stars: I charge “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” with unconscionably aggravated whimsy in the third degree.

If the principal actors weren’t so watchable, the movie would be an outright bore.

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.

The plot beats are so dull, contrived and poorly engineered (for a few minutes the wolves must pretend to be rivals who don’t know each other) that the movie becomes an onerous chore comparable to the one that launches the action. Who can I call to make this dead movie disappear?

Even an audience expecting very little would be underwhelmed by this meandering, snowy dud, which, for all its extravagance, at a reported $120 million budget, combines insipid messaging with witless comedy and a weak plot that gets resolved in a silly way.

Even a day later, contemplating this willfully nauseating work carries much the same sensation as having ingested a plate of bad clams.

There’s no sense to almost every element in the movie, and its sensibility is this: that dull dialogue is bound to sound witty if delivered in an English accent. It doesn’t. At least the costumes are pretty.

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

Mannered acting, dismal cinematography, clunky attempts to enhance excitement via gimmicks such as slow motion, and a musical score like a fountain of goo all serve as flashbacks to Reagan-era network schlock.

"Dial of Destiny” is, if anything, even more breathless and filled with stunts than “Raiders,” but everyone’s feats look like insipid fakery.

This movie seems proud, even smug, about recycling scraps from other fairy tales.

No catharsis redeems the horrors we’ve witnessed; no useful lesson is learned; there isn’t even so much as a sociological observation. One leaves the theater with an unpleasant feeling, equal parts depleted and cheated.

The film proves to be as smug and shallow as the plutocrats it lampoons.

A few magic rocks and tepid battle scenes do little to inspire interest in the goings-on as Malcolm McDowell and Eric Idle spout villainy and punch lines, respectively.

A 2010 movie that could have been made in 1940.

Dull yet contrived drama.

The undercaffeinated middle of the film consists of dopey twists, slow-burning gazes and dialogue that aims for “heartfelt” but comes out “unfortunate.”

The dullness of this writing is more than matched by the dull look achieved by director Allen Coulter, who appears to have shot the film through a piece of yard-sale Tupperware.

The transformation of the girls from winsome wisecrackers into whiny bling-obsessed chuckleheads is complete.

At least there is a happy ending — DeChristopher, for wasting the government’s resources, properly served 21 months in federal prison. Now, he has moved on to Harvard Divinity School, where his sanctimony will serve him well.

Like its subject, a lawsuit that is expected to go on for another 10 years, Crude has no ending. This is the perfect ending for this Goliath versus Goliath documentary about powerful personal-injury lawyers taking on a powerful corporation.

A formula flick that should have tapped out in the script stage.

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

Though Freddy is basically the same guy as in the 1984 original, his back story is different. For a few minutes the movie threatens to become interesting -- then retreats.

The audience, if any, for Chaos Theory is going to be hit with a little puff of celluloid flatulence. The movie won't linger in the air, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing.

For all of its homicidal aliens and toothy beasts, I Am Number Four did contain one element that genuinely unsettled me: the line "produced by Michael Bay." Nooooooo!

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

Hot Rod started to go wrong at about the time someone in casting said, "You know what? I'll bet America's just about ready for the comedy stylings of Sissy Spacek."

Imagine “Moby-Dick” rewritten in crayon, and you’ll get the idea.

Vanessa Redgrave spends Evening dying, and so does Evening.

A wink of self-awareness might have made this a guilty pleasure; instead it's a howler along the lines of this fall's "Law Abiding Citizen."

Remember how "Double Indemnity" featured smart criminals and a smarter investigator? The indie film If I Didn't Care, with its dumb criminals and dumb cops, is a sort of "Double Stupidity."

A self-serving remark on the part of the filmmakers, who place only the tiniest fig leaf of a story on a panoramic canvas of the gory, gross and repellent.

The movie takes us on a journey to an ugly, contentious period in our misty, ancient past - all the way back to four months ago, when "Apocalypto" came out.

I'd call it a depressing soft-core porn flick, but that overstates its titillation factor. Mainly it's just icky.

A kill-a-minute gore-a-thon whose twist is so obvious your grandma Edna will see it coming, Kite never gets off the ground.

The movie, directed by the formerly promising Rawson Marshall Thurber (the hilarious “Dodgeball” and the awful “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”), thinks it’s subverting the conventions of the sitcom with a revolutionary new idea, which is: Do everything exactly the way a sitcom would, plus lots of swearing and dirty jokes.

The movie isn't insulting to homosexuals but to comedy.

Shouldn’t Moore run his yellow crime-scene tape around the White House instead of Wall Street? Anyway, President Obama said this month that in cases where the government has fully sold its TARP bank holdings, it has gotten back its money plus 17 percent. Damn those capitalist barons, breaking into our treasury and filling it with their filthy money.

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.

Stiller’s one good idea is turning things over to Will Ferrell, who does some amusingly demented things while haranguing Anna Wintour and Tommy Hilfiger and is probably funnier in his sleep than Stiller is at his best.

Trite and vulgar boxing flick.

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

This movie is resolute about being as homey and obvious as it can possibly be. Somewhere, Norman Rockwell is thinking, “Sheesh, even I was edgier than this.”

They’ve been around so long that they’re now the Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their ’80s vibe — cowabunga, dude! — is so strong that I kept expecting a cameo by Huey Lewis or Max Headroom.

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.

This whole movie is pretty much a mental colon blow.

A 42-minute TV soap has more story than this limp and familiar tale of domestic woe.

The Transporter Refueled is a story of bodies: sleek, curvy, luscious bodies, purring for action and ready to let you do anything to them. They’re hotties, these Audis.

Painful, misshapen and a little gross. It's an enlarged prostate of a movie.

Larry the Cable Guy channels both Moe and Curly in the Three Stooges-go-to-war comedy Delta Farce.

The real mystery is this: Even if you find this guerrilla art project utterly fascinating, why would anyone bother to release an incomplete film about it?

A searing, penetrating look inside schizophrenia is exactly what Enter the Dangerous Mind isn’t.

I have no idea how to blow up a two-page fairy tale into 100 minutes of blockbuster, but frankly I was hoping for more backstory about the titular cape in Red Riding Hood. Thread count? Machine washability?

This is a horror movie that’s really a supposed comedy; she’s (Lohan) a supposed comedy actress who’s actually scary.

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.

Ride Along tries to be a comic version of “Training Day,” only there’s nothing in it as funny as Denzel razzing Ethan. There’s nothing much funny in it at all.

A dull drama about domestic squabbling that hopes to be mistaken for a thriller.

A horror-comedy that takes a weak premise (do high school boys even go scouting anymore?) and barely uses it, anyway.

Though darker elements loom in the shadows, nothing in this painfully sincere film is remotely affecting; just think of it as “My So-Called Strife.”

The movie's last words are "This is how legends are born." Make that stillborn, because when the makers of this one pitch the sequel, the only answer is going to be, "Ah HA HA HA!"

Your average episode of “Days of Our Lives” is less soapy (and performed with more restraint).

When they came in to pitch A Thousand Words, no doubt by calling it "Jerry Maguire" meets "Groundhog Day," a studio exec should have raised the palm of rejection and said, "When you stop being sadly derivative and write an original idea that's as good as those two, come back."

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.

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

Dystopia’s supposed to be worse than what’s in the papers, fellas. Try to keep up.

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).

The Lord works in mysterious ways but Persecuted works in blundering, obvious ways, straining a Christianity-under-attack theme through a dopey thriller.

A depressing and tedious movie.

Tired? This series is as exhausted as Shrek after a day of baby wrangling and diaper changing.

Wind power plus solar power equals hot air in the propaganda piece Carbon Nation, a documentary so disconnected from reality it could have been produced by President Obama's speechwriters.

Rickman has fun playing a lecherous old bastard of a professor in Nobel Son, a pulpy would-be comic thriller, but the movie doesn't deserve him.

Nesting is a sitcom, but a really slow and dull one that barely grinds out 22 minutes' worth of plot to fill a 90-minute hole.

Holmes, with Alice Cooper hair and crazy Jim Carrey eyes, looks terrible and acts worse, unless this movie is unintentionally a lobotomy documentary. Whatever could have happened to her in the last couple of years to zap the talent out of her like this?

A weird mash-up of disaster, horror and dystopia genre pictures, Aftershock fails to make the Earth move.

Even for a mumblecore film, Computer Chess is weak stuff, a punitively dull chunk of quirk that is about, and feels like, being stuck in a motel with a gaggle of programming nerds for a weekend.

To compete with the quintessence of nullity that is Sofia Coppola's insufferable Somewhere, imagine a film called "Wanna See Me Crack My Knuckles?" or possibly "Let's Learn How Long It Takes This Shallow Dish of Liquid To Evaporate."

The terrorism thriller Java Heat sure is violent. I don’t even want to tell you how viciously Mickey Rourke mangles the French accent he’s trying to do.

This infomercial for Helnwein's work as designer for an Israeli opera called "The Child Dreams" doesn't tell us a lot about how opera comes together, but it is accidentally revealing about its subject.

Like one of those five-minute featurettes on star athletes deployed to soak up time on the pregame show -- expanded to a paralytic length.

There may be a lot left to say about Hurricane Katrina, but if so, I'm Carolyn Parker doesn't say it.

The script is blaring and obvious at all times, and in his second directorial effort, David Schwimmer doesn't have a clue how dull it is for the audience to endure scene after scene of anguish, crying and screaming matches

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.

In Vehicle 19, Paul Walker is back behind the wheel again, but this time it’s a rented minivan and the plot is brainless even for a Paul Walker movie. Get ready for “The Slow and the Spurious.”

Viola Davis lets her Charles Bronson flag fly in Lila and Eve, a ludicrous revenge thriller that should have been called, “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”

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.

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.

A pointless drama that trafficks in cliché.

When the legend of Elvis is reimagined as a mushy Christian heartwarmer in The Identical, it’s as if “Boogie Nights” is playing in the background while we hear about the life story of Edna, Dirk Diggler’s nice librarian cousin from Idaho.

Stakes aren't the only problem with this sloppy thriller, which combines careening images with turgid storytelling.

If Swedish villains are this dumb, put me on the next plane to Stockholm. Just don't make me watch these idiotic movies on the flight.

There’s nothing wrong with being a brainless B-movie, but this one is funless and lackluster, a grinding mess of pulp clichés with dull characters, perfunctory violence and dim plotting.

I was searching for a metaphor to capture the experience of watching The Night Before when a character fell backward into a dumpster full of garbage bags. Thanks, guys!

Biehn has appeared in dozens of B-movies and evidently had no greater ambition than to come up with a grindhouse movie full of sex, gore and cheap thrills, but there is far too little of any of these to maintain interest in a straight-on story that reserves its only surprise for the final 30 seconds.

A dull, listless, derivative chunk of celluloid lacking any spark or even basic storytelling ability.

At last: Uwe Boll has made his first intentionally funny film.

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.

The only part of this movie anyone's ever going to remember is the pair of scenes in which Ghost Rider pees flame.

I think I’d rather have the waterboarding than the movie’s bromides about how we’re all victims and hate must end.

Even at a supposed celebration, the well-bred and well-off aren't really happy at all. So the title is ironic. Thanks for that profound insight.

John Travolta's From Paris With Love assassin/ superagent Charlie Wax is the master of whatever the opposite of wisecracking is. Fooljoshing? Lametalking? Flatlining?

What's Spanglish for "oy"?

The thing is a virtual remake of the fusty oldie "Sweet Home Alabama," which came out back when movie scripts were written on stone tablets.

With its poky pacing, thin characters, obvious message and predictable plot, the movie amounts to a cinematic sermon that, like many of those given in houses of worship, has a good-hearted message that will be difficult to deliver to a snoozing audience.

This boring, torpid movie notices its own flaws and unwisely underlines them.

Yet the moral at the end is that we should all be more tolerant of different cultures. Is that really true, though, if the culture you're trying to tolerate is trying to open your skull with a circular saw?

Among gay Jewish French postman movies, Let My People Go! may be a Hall of Fame entry, but alas, by any other standard this would-be sex comedy is a dismal failure.

Barrymore is still cute, and she and Sandler at least seem to like each other as they get on with the grim business of rom-com contrivance.

Cheesier than a Kraft Singles truck but half as subtle, Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party is an attack on all things Democratic whose many valid points get buried under bluster

The climate-change documentary Time To Choose makes the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” look like a model of judiciousness and restraint.

Plays like an unintentional mashup of “Being There” and “Elf.”

Aheroin-stuffed hipster buys a dog, eats Vietnamese food and sells drugs to pay for rehab in Fix, the latest piece of cine-junk stamped out by the indie fakedocumentary factory.

Clive Owen stumbles around the scenery doing unfortunate drunken-writer shtick in Words and Pictures, a formula movie whose script is yet more unfortunate.

Neil Jordan’s Byzantium dares to rework “Twilight” with twice the teen moping and Robert Pattinson replaced by a guy with the sexual magnetism of a sickly Ron Weasley.

At first glance, Grassroots doesn't seem like much of an idea for a movie. Nor at second, third or fourth glance. Your fifth glance will be at your watch, and at sixth glance your eyelids will be getting very, very heavy.

The movie left me amazed — amazed that Nicolas Cage wasn’t in it.

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.

Dull and dreary prequel.

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.

Del Toro overdoes the anguish to the point of looking like he’s playing advanced constipation, and the film, by France’s Arnaud Desplechin, gets stuck in an endless series of therapy scenes built around cheesy re-enactments of Jimmy P’s dreams.

They go on a biker trip from Cincinnati to the West Coast because they are tired of being bored and would prefer to bore us instead.