Kyle Smith

Thanks to an unexpected twist and a clever motivation lurking in the back story of the super-villain, G-Force has enough going on to more or less maintain grown-up interest, and there's plenty to please the kiddies.

Unfortunately, the film turns out to be not quite as twisty as promised: it’s less a pretzel than it is a Cheez Curl. And I do mean cheez: The resolution, when it comes, is wholly lacking in nutritional value.

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

Williams appears to be having trouble keeping his eyes open, and the audience will, too.

A movie that won’t knock you out with originality but may charm you with its wit.

Mojave is a movie-length standoff between two detestable villains. One is a serial killer. The other is a filmmaker.

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.

The real mystery here is why this slapdash semi-effort didn't go straight to video.

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.

Congratulations are in order to Table 19: This comedy about the random losers stuck together at a wedding reception actually, uncannily, creates an experience as dull, awkward and excruciating as the thing it mocks.

Refreshing as it is to see the military portrayed as something other than a band of neurotics and creeps, there's a reason this brand of rah-rah and bang-bang didn't outlast the age of Whitesnake and Marty McFly.

The three friends do things that venture beyond entertainingly dumb and into exasperatingly unbelievable.

The movie begins to wear out its welcome even before a conclusion of breathtaking corniness.

If it has a genius for anything, it’s disorganization: What promised to be a Super Bowl of villainy turned out more like toddler playtime.

At its best, the movie is an unbearably precious slice of stale imitation Wes Anderson. But at its worst, it's dull and strangled by its own would-be jaunty deadpan.

Damonically awful.

At last, someone has figured out that there might be laughs in teens trying to lose their virginity.

Tim & Eric seem driven by a hatred of the audience and a wish to punish the same. Every episode of every sitcom I've ever seen is funnier than this movie, and I used to watch "Just Shoot Me."

Besson provided the story and co-wrote the screenplay for a film directed by McG, who does his usual McGhastly job with action and is McGruesome when it comes to comedy.

The banality of evil has met its match in the banality of Good, a Holocaust parable that barely registers a pulse.

An essential document of bad taste that needs to go right into the time capsule. History must not forget.

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.

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.

Funny more often than not. Worth checking out on video.

Despite being named “Gator Bodine,” Franco seems like something Statham would scrape off his boots. Put it this way: Franco needs a baseball bat to be intimidating; Statham just needs to be Statham.

It’s all painfully exact and true. Myself a product of exactly this kind of blue-collar New England community, I winced as I laughed at this gang of badly dressed, foul-mouthed reprobates. My people!

It's another in the bicoastal indie industry's endless series of self-congratulatory comedies about the alleged dopiness of middle American hicks who do things like read Parade magazine and decorate with flags.

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

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.

While a mob thriller can be as nasty as it likes, what it can’t be is silly.

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.

A roaring old-school action adventure for kids, with as many mythical beasts as a year at Hogwarts and a healthy dose of smiting without the crazed bloodlust of “300.”

There is a passable 85-minute comedy in here, caked in an additional 30 minutes of flab.

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.

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

Halfway through, the jokes stop - the laughs never began - and give way to a tiresome thriller.

As sensuous as its title, Silk is an exquisitely felt love story that unfolds as delicately as a blooming flower. And as slowly.

Struggling for the same vibe as male-bonding comedies like “Diner,” Growing Up & Other Lies instead feels like a really long beer commercial, except beer commercials usually contain at least one witty idea.

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.

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

Successfully stringing together shocking, disgusting and terrifying moments counts as a solid day’s work for most horror directors, and since The Exorcist: Believer achieves all that it’s competent enough. But I expected better from Mr. Green.

It's fine for kids, though, and it doesn't try too hard.

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

Long on heart if short on surprises, Big Stone Gap is an easygoing visit to small-town America.

It's smart, funny, agreeably perverse and simultaneously abrupt and exhausting.

Ella McCay is not quotable. It is not believable. It is not likable. It’s not even digestible. For an ordinary filmmaker, it would be merely a disaster. For James L. Brooks, it’s more like a tragedy.

This kids' cartoon from France is such a surreally demented attempt to connect with children that it's the equivalent of foie gras breakfast cereal or a bleu cheese milkshake.

Those too young to remember Jackson will get what they want, which is a fantastically effective introduction to the talent.

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.

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?

As usual, Hartnett exhibits the acting ability of linoleum; his performance would not be measurably changed if he lapsed into a coma halfway through. Only an amusing cameo by David Bowie enlivens things, but he's onscreen for just about two minutes at the end.

In The Runner, the latest Nicolas Cage film to roll off his one-man assembly line of shoddy cinema, the star looks almost as tired of acting as I am of watching his acting.

Sandler's bizarrely clunky kiddie flick, is a sort of upside-down "Princess Bride."

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.

The Entourage formula feels warmed-over, played-out, spent.

Flash Point comes loaded with cliches and immediately starts blasting them in every direction.

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

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

What keeps the movie nervy and kinetic is that, for a good hour, it never seems that Jack and family are anything but average people who somehow manage to survive one hellacious trial after another, even when it comes to having to kill another human being.

The slacker comedy-drama-romance-whatever Gigantic will fulfill all your alterna-movie weirdness requirements.

Confessions of a Shopaholic -- a "Devil Wears Prada" for Chico's customers.

This one resembles a James Bond film about as much as Belgrade resembles London.

Frears has a lot of fun with the bad tempers and high spirits of this crew of adrenaline junkies, and though the story falls a little flat, the script is sprinkled with dry wit.

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.

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

At best a sporadically amusing sketchbook of theater types.

The good news about I Don't Know How She Does It is that it's so bad that it's another ovary-punch to the formula chick flick. Bring on more films like "Bridesmaids."

Paul Haggis’ Third Person has nothing to say and spends 2 ¹/₂ hours not saying it. Its combination of pretentiousness, vanity and vapidity suggests Alain Resnais directing a triple episode of “Guiding Light.”

All of the roaring and thundering in “Dominion” carries roughly the dramatic impact of a robust sneeze, because Mr. Trevorrow has forgotten that what we human beings care about, despite our addiction to spectacle, are human beings.

With its array of chases and shootouts and a sinister political plot, the movie at least holds your attention and keeps things brisk-ish. But every scene still bears the tags of the place from which it was stolen.

Fails to draw much humor from farcical situations.

At the end, as Shadyac proclaims, "I stopped flying privately" (well, hurrah for you, Mahatma), renounces his Pasadena mansion and moves into a trailer park, the results of his epiphany grow funnier than any of his movies.

The minimalist style keeps the suspense warm. The movie is unusual among teen horror flicks in that it largely avoids the usual cheap thrills and bursts of scare music. Instead, it carefully repeats isolated images and sound bites until they take on a shivery power.

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.

Dryly comic, arch, sleek, and suffused with mood-setting tracks by the likes of X and Depeche Mode, Electric Slide has some of the mordant absurdity of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis. Like its dim hero, it’s going nowhere, but traveling in style.

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

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

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."

Cage and director Joel Schumacher, who has fallen so far from the A-list that he provokes a demand for new letters of the alphabet after Z, have each found their cinematic soulmates.

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

This is one of those thrillers where the person on-screen is often the only person in the theater who can't guess what'll happen next. Lots of laughable moments provide camp value, though, and Bentley ("American Beauty") makes for a charismatic creep.

The mystery is why the filmmakers thought third-graders or anyone else would be willing to pay for this master class in tedium.

Son of God is guilty of all the sins of the 1950s Bible epics, but without any of the majesty.

Among the year's ultraviolent pulp movies, "Sin City" was prettier and "The Devil's Rejects" more focused.

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."

Annabelle is mostly a grab into the Great Big Bag O’ Horror Clichés: sound-bombs of shrieking violins explode randomly, doors slam unbidden, rocking chairs creak by themselves, machines suddenly whir to life.

It settles for being a bland and preposterous thriller.

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

An Eye for Beauty star Éric Bruneau proves to be a haircut in search of a man, which makes him ideal for this vapid adultery drama that delivers the character depth of your average spread in Architectural Digest.

Those expecting an exhilarating, "Pulp Fiction"-style wrap-up will also be disappointed. Instead, Flowers gives us the impression - as the end of "Traffic" did - that we've just taken a few turns on a merry-go-round of doom that is going to keep spinning long after the movie ends.

Don’t expect too much of Heist — it’s a cheesy formula picture all the way — but it has solid character foundations, the occasional bright line of dialogue (“Cops, this is robbers,” Morgan says on a phone call) and a neat final twist. As throwbacks go, it’s more bearable than shoulder pads.

Molly Ringwald-like, Wren must choose between two guys: the nerdy Roosevelt (Thomas Mann) and the Porsche-driving Aaron (Thomas McDonell), but both are so dull it's hard to care. So feeble is the movie that even the wacky, redheaded best friend (Jane Levy) isn't funny.

Sorry, but if your sensibility is pure trashy camp, don't expect anyone not to laugh when you try to be earnest.

A would-be piece of pulp fiction about a parolee trying to go straight, The Samaritan proves that even Samuel L. Jackson can be boring.

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.

There’s nothing wrong with making movies for 5-year-olds. But, as directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, “Galaxy” seems very much like a movie made by 5-year-olds.

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

This jagged blob of a movie features a solo dance in the 1930s scored to the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," several scenes of a rich Manhattan woman chatting with the ghost of Wallis Simpson and a Sotheby's auction that draws a crowd reaction of the kind associated with "Family Feud." Yet I found the movie fascinating. Except for the boring bits.

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."

A thoroughly amateurish effort at capturing clued-in and smartass teens.

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

For short stretches, the movie has a touch of surreal "Office Space" brilliance, but it's broadly acted, its characters are thin, and the production values are ragged. Still, it's hard to resist its goofy hostility: "You're like the drummer from REO Speedwagon. Nobody knows who you are."

By going exactly where you think it’s going, Victor Frankenstein doesn’t so much invent a fresh origins story as it essentially repeats, with a few uninteresting new details, all the same stuff we’ve seen in the other 457 Frankenstein movies.

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

Watching I'm Reed Fish is like being forced to read the diary of a dull-witted teen who is breathlessly beginning a lifelong fascination with himself.

It has a certain commitment to its cause, and by that I mean it supplies the necessary flayings, slayings, beheadings and, um, a be-nose-ing, all of it dancing to the tune of those amusingly stilted He-Man declaratives - King James Bible cadences applied to comic-book visions. It knows it's a B movie, and gets on with it.

That Awkward Moment is a rom-com for dudes that seeks to outdo the ladies by being even more insipid, formulaic and contrived than anything Katherine Heigl has ever done.

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.

The danger of dreaming up a predictable adventure for a group of nobodies you hold in contempt is that the audience will see your indifference and raise you.

Turistas has mastered the international language: stupidity.

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

This stuff is strictly run of DeMille.

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!

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

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

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.”

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.

A grubby cut-price sci-fi thriller.

Acquires a little vigor and some fun from Tracy Morgan as a friendly drug dealer who lives with his mom.

Even the audience at whom the movie is aimed — the crowd for whom dinner and a movie means meeting up at 3 p.m. — will be bored by the stale funk coming off every scene.

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.

At times Halloween II dances on the line between alarming and disgusting, and it doesn’t all hold together — I couldn’t figure out what the goblin banquet was doing in this movie. But if it was meant to freak me out, it worked.

So swaddled in good intentions that it's like taking a very short journey cushioned on all sides by air bags. That are stuffed with cotton candy.

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

Funny and promising as the first act is, the entire second act is pretty awful, as the script chucks in one tiresome, unlikely gag after another.

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.

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.

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.

Romantic comedies are often as contrived and irritating as Loosies, but few feature a lead character so lacking in appeal.

God, if you exist, why do you keep letting morons like Walsch get rich?

If someone ran this guy through a scanner, the readout would say: “Mark down and stock in straight-to-video aisle."

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

If there’s a single witty idea in the entire two-hour slog, I missed it.

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!"

Cody’s satiric knocks on Christians couldn’t be more blundering and obvious. Yet her dialogue is often funny, and the unusual three-way friendship is refreshing. Even former star Brand has learned to dial back his manic mugging, though maybe not quite enough.

The would-be noir Beyond a Rea sonable Doubt has an absurd story, but on the plus side you can hardly see what's going on because the photography is so murky.

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.

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.

Dull and dreary prequel.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Japan’s loony suicide culture seems like an adequately scary backdrop for a horror movie, but the routine horror flick The Forest mostly settles for cheap thrills.

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

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

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.

Thin yet excruciating, the film is a quintessential vanity production. The script feels like a first draft that aspired merely to mediocrity and fell well short.

At last, the missing link be tween "Phantom of the Opera" and "Saw." Welcome to the gonzo revenge saga Law Abiding Citizen.

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

The ludicrous action thriller Beyond the Reach fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency of “No Country for Old Men,” but there’s no denying it brings to mind another Southwestern classic about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons.

The movie seems to think it's building up massive suspense by not telling us our hero's back story, but given that the wife and kid aren't around and he keeps telling people who ask that he's not divorced, it's obvious they're dead. The only mystery, then, is what exactly happened to them. The answer is: nothing interesting.

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

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

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.

Far too childish to intrigue adults yet too slow and dull for kids.

Coincidence and contrivance are the name of the game throughout.

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.

In the ’80s, I hated Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan and the Smurfs. It’s comforting to know I got one thing right.

You certainly get your 20 bucks worth of spectacle out of Alice Through the Looking Glass. So breathtaking are the landscapes, so whimsical are the creatures, so marvelous are the marvels that I wanted to give a standing ovation to whoever signed the check to pay for all this. Expensiver and expensiver!

The Fourth Kind has a clever gimmick and nothing more.

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.

Despite the pace, though -- pedal, have you met my friend metal? -- Ninja Assassin still has some of its best stuff left at the end, when the master returns to demonstrate his extra-special, super-most-deadliest technique.

Maybe DVDs of "Buried" and ATM will be sold in the same package someday. You could call it a trapped-in-a-box set.

Kim Basinger gives one of her strongest performances in Even Money, a kind of "Crash" fueled by gambling instead of racism.

The dialogue isn't ridiculous, and sometimes it's witty: A cynical cop (Donnie Wahlberg) doesn't buy Jamie's theory that the doll had something to do with the murder: "The mystery toy department is down the hall. This is the homicide department."

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.

Just because your comedy is dumb doesn’t mean it’s funny.

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.

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.

Dull yet contrived drama.

Nutty? Maybe. But a pungent blast of the cinema du bonkers is just what this summer's multiplexes need after weeks of bromide-stuffed retreads that are as smug about their lack of originality as packs of teen girls who dress exactly alike. Mock Jonah Hex if you must, but you can't say you've seen a lot of other supernatural Westerns lately.

Three talking critters sing, dance and tell jokes, and I really wish they wouldn’t. Their act isn’t just dull — it’s almost as bad as One Direction’s.

A dull, trite thriller.

The twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: It is both surprising and inevitable.

Ultimately, this throwback, made-for-TV-style film takes the easy way out in a cheesy climax, but its resolute quaintness may appeal to the kind of viewers who regard electricity as disturbingly newfangled.

As for the script, a wittier director would have spotted the absurd elements and delivered a horror-comedy instead of a straight-faced bore.

Black was already the world's biggest little kid, and he might be the only actor who could have made this movie such nimble fun.

Love Happens is a weepie about the grieving process, mainly my own.

A dumbass "Kick-Ass," the superhero comedy Griff the Invisible sits on the screen like a steaming lump of Kryptonite.

Fifty Shades will make you dumber.

You know you're in trouble when you're suffering a comedy shutout and the pinch-hitters you send in are Kidman and Dave Matthews.

Thin characterizations, bland acting and a surfeit of bubbly cuteness combine to make a throw-pillow of a movie: It’s soft and decorative without being particularly useful or interesting.

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.

This is just a slow-moving skin flick broken up by lots of boring discussions about Cherry's future.

Not very haunty.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones hopes to be the start of a new franchise for tweens and Twihards, but the twuth is this twash is anything but a twiumph.

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

A buddy comedy that reeks like stale underpants.

At 86 minutes, the film spends exactly 86 more minutes with its subjects than can possibly be tolerated. Coincidence?

May be well-intentioned, but it's as obvious and inert as a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

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.

In the end, the movie (executive produced by the late Wes Craven) degenerates into a routine, though ably constructed, horror flick.

To call Ride Along 2 rubbish is unfair to rubbish, which at some point had a purpose.

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

Isn't especially hilarious, but it has a warm sense of humor instead of a string of gross-out jokes. It'll be a cable mainstay.

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."

This one is essentially “The Firm” with smartphones.

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

Formerly a real American hero, G.I. Joe is no longer a hero (it's a group) or American. (It's a multinational team of military superstars, though the way it does business, you'd feel safer with the Croatian navy on your side.)

Borrowing a few tricks from Martin Scorsese, the film isn’t a slavish imitation but an engrossing and grounded drama. It’s a pity, then, that director Federico Castelluccio, best known as Furio of “The Sopranos,” can’t deliver a powerful conclusion.

Martin Short as Jack Frost, means we're getting a turkey and a ham for the holidays. As for Tim Allen as Scott Calvin, an ordinary guy who took over Santa's job by chance, he's more like a tasteless lump of mashed potatoes.

Steve Jobs is a tale of two men, not one: A more accurate, not to say wittier, title would have been “Steve Jobs and Aaron Sorkin.”

No, Warcraft isn’t a ridiculous mess; it holds together on its own musclebound terms. It neither tries to be jokey nor undercuts itself by being unintentionally funny. And it offers a bit more complexity than some other nonstop action flicks adapted from video games. It’s a real movie, just not a good one.

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

Most of the comedy comes from dull situations like a fat guy trying to put on a fat suit for no reason.

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.

Buscemi is appealing as always, but the movie, is only sporadically funny.

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

Mostly Unfinished Business is a tale of unfinished jokes.

The writer-director of Dying of the Light is Paul Schrader, screenwriter of “Raging Bull.” The star is Nicolas Cage — Raging Tool.

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."

Either a ludicrously bad movie or a parody of same. Either way, it's pretty funny.

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.

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.

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.

That's My Boy is pretty raunchy, and by "pretty," I mean "amazingly," as in Howard Stern- or Seth MacFarlane-style gags.

A slow ride to nowhere.

Even Oliver Stone would giggle at the notion that the CIA couldn't reach JFK through any means except via one of his blond playmates.

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

Doesn't offer plot or an inquiry into the evil in men's hearts. It simply wallows in the filth and inhumanity that surround a father and his pre-adolescent son as they march across the shattered remains of this country.

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.

Unfortunately, director Jessie Nelson (“I Am Sam”) gradually turns the script into marzipan.

Grueling vanity piece.

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?

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.

Seventh Son is not a good movie, but it’s also not a pretentious one, and I call that a fair trade.

With its dopey fight scenes, grimy look and goopy gore, this movie is so far from ept that inept is the wrong word. It's anti-ept.

The year's dullest movie has arrived: the deeply silly Badland, which is as dead as winter and twice as long.

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.

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.

The good news is that The Hangover Part III isn't a rerun like the second episode. The bad news is everything else. For all the promise of mayhem and WTF moments, the final episode hits you with all the force of a warm can of O'Doul's.

A circle of lowlifes gradually kill one another off to no great effect in the dull and woebegone comic noir Kill Me Three Times.

Though Wilkinson gives an atypically restrained performance that lends the movie its best moments, and Watson manages to breathe a little life into her underwritten character, the movie is hopelessly simple-minded, with corny fantasy sequences, slathered-on folksiness and a plot twist that it would take a miracle of self-delusion not to see coming.

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

Like "Sex and the City 2," Marmaduke features well-coifed bitches in heat, nonstop puns and its very own Mr. Big. Unlike "SATC 2," this one is harmless and, on occasion, mildly witty.

When Grown Ups star and co-writer Adam Sandler repeatedly slapped Rob Schneider in the face with a dehydrated banana, I was jealous of Schneider, who suffered less than I did getting slapped upside the head by this rotting fruit of a comedy.

I enjoyed the visual effects used to create some hellish creatures and the amusing nods to "The Exorcist" - cranial rotation, even a spooky staircase. But the movie slips in the last act.

A low-watt, low-wit comedy.

Rookie director Sean Kirkpatrick keeps stomping on the drama pedal while blowing the cliché horn, yielding scene after tired scene of predictable developments as the principals keep shoving guns into mouths and screaming obscenities.

One of those Deep Dark Secret movies, the dull indie Lake City combines a wholly uninteresting family mystery with a wholly unconvincing crime drama.

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.”

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.

Within five minutes you’ll guess why John Cusack, not overly encumbered with big film roles these days, didn’t return for the sequel: The script is monotonous, meandering and witless.

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.

Small fry will learn an important lesson taking in the recycled storylines of Ratchet & Clank: Like nearly all recycling, it’s garbage.

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?

Much of this roams pretty far from Orwell’s vision, but that’s not the reason the film fails. It fails because it’s obvious, witless and dull. The animation is charmless and bland.

It’s all as pointless as the asthma inhaler with which one character treats his advanced lung cancer.

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

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.

A preposterous supernatural thriller that inexplicably managed to sign up Julianne Moore to star.

The film’s mix of elements of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Bad Santa” is amusing.

There isn't enough plot in this amateurish mope-athon to fill up a half-hour TV show.

The Hitcher is the Jessica Simpson of psycho killer flicks - cheerfully in touch with its own brainlessness.

Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.

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

It is a better option than the third "Santa Clause."

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.

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.”

Everybody flirts with everyone else as director John Irvin pours on a level of shopping-mall-gift-shop-kitsch that would shame Wayne Newton.

It stumbled onto an accomplishment truly awe-inspiring: It makes “Battleship” and “The Watch” look good.

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.

Mortdecai is mortdifying, a mortdal sin of a movie that’s headed for the cinematic mortduary.

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

As for Grant, who hasn't been this sharp since "Love Actually" six years ago, he is once again the prime minister of cute comedy.

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.

The makers of The Spy Next Door should give 50 percent of their profits to James Cameron for ripping off "True Lies." Let's see, what's 50 percent of nothing?

One of those movies that comes "straight from the heart" - the heart of the hack screenwriter's manual that pushes formulaic structure to cover up a lack of compelling characters, genuine emotion or actual humor.

A comedy that locks up Will Arnett's talent and throws away the key.

Little Fockers may not be the worst, most vulgar, most pathetic and least funny picture of the year. But it's a strong contender for second place behind the picture Brett Favre allegedly sent over his cellphone.

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."

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.

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

It's trashy and disgusting - and those are the best parts. Mostly it's just an endless, pointless drone with characters like bacteria and dialogue like an untuned radio.

A drippy romance that makes Nicholas Sparks look like Leo Tolstoy.

I still can't believe I Melt With You went there. Over the top, off the hook and just plain bonkers, it makes its mark.

Even if you overlooked the production values from a 1986 porno and special effects like something your nephew cooked up on his Mac, the movie's "Yay, money!" zingers are just a big bag of sad.

A sci-fi actioner with the production values of your average porno, Alien Outpost spews clichés like a machine gun set on maximum triteness.

A feeble dramedy about a Baltimore beauty shop where someone should come in to sweep up the clichés.

Succeeds completely at failure; the unified incompetence of its writing, directing and acting suggest a man who manages to be on fire and drowning at the same time, just as the bus runs him over.

WARNING: Do not take your mom to Georgia Rule unless she's Roseanne Barr. You may expect a three-generational chick flick, but what you get is a child-rape comedy.

Watching Robin Williams as a pastor giving premarital counseling to lovebirds John Krasinski and Mandy Moore in License to Wed is like having a laugh chastity belt cinched up tight around your funny bone.

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

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.

For a movie that so strenuously rips off “Ghostbusters” and “Men in Black,” R.I.P.D. manages to come up with fresh new ways of being absolutely terrible.

Good grindhouse fun until a last act that's like a meeting of a psychoanalysts' convention.

Actual abduction may be preferable to the movie of the same name, but only if your kidnappers don't torture you by forcing you to watch it.

Like the lobby of a Donald Trump building, it looks ever so expensive and amazingly cheap at the same time.

This film is headed quickly for DVD. In the video store, though, it isn't funny enough to be shelved in the comedy section nor dirty enough to be filed with the smut. It might be useful in propping up a wobbly chair, though.

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

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

A 2010 movie that could have been made in 1940.

The Love Guru is even funnier than "Wayne's World" or "Austin Powers." Not.