Kyle Smith

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.

As subtle and careful and slyly disturbing as Child’s Pose is though, it and many others of its genus suffer from an airlessness, pacing like the growth of algae, a dishwater color palate and a dirge-like monotone.

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

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.

Najafi stages action scenes with an intense, queasy beauty and elevates what is in its outlines a routine crime drama to near-operatic proportions.

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

A dismal rom-com for dudes that makes the average beer commercial look nuanced and plot-heavy.

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.

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.

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

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.

A good documentary uses judicious editing to make an important addition to your knowledge of a subject, and Mitt does so in a big way.

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.

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

A film so self-serious that it demands to be remade as a Seth MacFarlane farce, The Truth About Emanuel mixes the ludicrous and the pretentious in a story about mommy issues gone wild.

It settles for being a bland and preposterous thriller.

It’s unspeakably depressing to see Anna Paquin playing the mom (of a teenager!), but the pointlessness and mediocrity of the Paquin-produced Free Ride is even more depressing.

Long on atmosphere and less sentimental about poverty than “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the film carries a potent charge of authenticity.

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

An intriguingly Hitchcockian premise gradually takes on a preposterous air in the art-world noir The Best Offer.

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 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.

There hasn’t been this bizarre mixture of hooah and death since John Wayne hung up his combat boots.

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.

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

American Hustle is a movie that was built backward, or inside out: It puts actors’ needs before the audience’s. There’s no heart under those polyester lapels, and what all that Aqua Net is pasting together is a few sparse strands of wispy story.

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 Coens, so cutting to so many of their characters, are gentler with Llewyn, inviting us to wander and wonder along with him as he ponders why he must forever play the jerk.

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.

Provides a different take on its subject than many of us are accustomed to: Nelson Mandela is no Martin Luther King Jr., and he was far more radical than even Malcolm X. If you’re under the impression that his ideas got him imprisoned for 25 years, think again: It was his bombs.

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.

A great big snowy pleasure with an emotionally gripping core, brilliant Broadway-style songs and a crafty plot.

With Philomena, British producer-writer-star Steve Coogan and director Stephen Frears hit double blackjack, finding a true-life tale that would enable them to simultaneously attack Catholics and Republicans. There’s no other purpose to the movie, so if 90 minutes of organized hate brings you joy, go and buy your ticket now.

There’s an exhilarating sadness to it all that amounts to cinematic poetry.

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

A likable cast and interior-­décor porn worthy of Martha Stewart Living are the highlights of The Best Man Holiday, but the mix of raunchy sex comedy and Christian faith doesn’t quite come off.

At Berkeley casts a nonjudgmental eye on everyone from cement layers to students discussing Thoreau to administrators complaining about budgeting. If only everything were interesting.

An honorable, sober but completely unnecessary take on the Dickens novel, Great Expectations serves as a fine introduction to the story but won’t excite those familiar with previous versions.

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

To keep this one-man show visually engaging, director Sophie Fiennes places the professor in sets and costumes from the movies, talking about “Full Metal Jacket” from atop a barracks toilet and “Brief Encounter” from a 1940s British train.

It’s Margaux, the tragic supermodel and failed actress who took her own life at 42, who emerges as the film’s fount of heartbreak in several stunning scenes.

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

Mostly a routine love story elevated by one of the year’s most magnetic performances.

This whole movie is pretty much a mental colon blow.

The film is still a gripping experience, though, with its circling sharks, its sun-dappled beauty and its agonies of shattered hope. At one point I was convinced that Sandra Bullock would splash down next to our man in her space capsule and Hanks’ Maersk ship from “Captain Phillips” would steam by to pick up both of them.

Any prison-break yarn that includes Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering the line “You hit like a vegetarian” is OK by me.

Hire “Dreamgirls” director Bill Condon to tell the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? Sure, and next let’s hear from Lady Gaga on the Higgs boson particle.

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.

Drifts awkwardly between popcorn entertainment and angsty mood piece.

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.

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

Entertainingly gruesome in parts, and not without a certain anarchic wit, it’s the kind of movie you pause to watch when it’s on TV, but after half an hour, you’ll click over to something else.

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.

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

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

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

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

Rush, though it will win no trophies, is fine filmmaking, a smart, visually engorged, frequently thrilling tale of boyish competition — inspired by a true story. At heart it’s “Amadeus” on wheels, only this time Salieri is the Austrian.

Blue Caprice takes a minimalist, documentary-style approach that proves harrowingly effective.

Remember when Robert De Niro was an interesting actor? These days his talent, like his character in The Family, is in the witness protection program, never to be seen again.

The movie jogs along nicely without ever getting a case of the stupids; far from being a bloated “John Carter,” it’s just a pared-down yarn of survival: “Die Hard” on a planet.

A disarming but low-impact documentary that amounts to an odd dual biopic, Shepard & Dark can feel a bit like intruding on a conversation between two old friends.

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!

A cinematic listicle of misleading economic talking points.

Whelk, I hope the makers of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs earned a nice celery, but I’m afraid they made a hash of things. A hash seasoned with oy sauce.

Dull yet contrived drama.

Getaway is so bad that what’s most surprising about it is that Nicolas Cage didn’t manage to star in it. But one man can only do so many low-rent projects a year.

Bloody horror flicks need not be anemic when it comes to intelligence. The victims of You’re Next, as well as their slaughterers, are reasonably smart and resourceful. Their clash may not be as nasty as the battles of academia, but there’s a lot more common sense involved.

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

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.

In mashing together story elements from Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” with the look of Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” Lowery put 90 percent of his energy into the atmosphere and 10 percent into the script.

This one is essentially “The Firm” with smartphones.

I do get a chuckle out of movies with wildly inappropriate behavior, rude language and ultramayhem, especially when they involve children, but Kick-Ass 2 sometimes felt like being trapped in a room with the funniest guy in seventh grade.

An uneasy mix of Richard Linklater and Abbott and Costello, Prince Avalanche is an oddment, but one that brings some small, peculiar pleasures.

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?”

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

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

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.

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

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

I liked that The Wolverine (which saves a nifty twist for a surprise scene in the middle of the end credits) turns down the volume on the usual din of colliding mutant superpowers.

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.

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.

How bad could the boneyard be compared to sitting through this execrable piece of non-entertainment? Better dead than RED 2.

The film, then, places a heavy hand on the scales of justice as it winds up with a fuzzy plea — an implied demand for a second, federal civil rights trial for the cop, who got a light sentence. But the shooting wasn’t a racist one.

Anything can happen when Michael Cera wanders around Chile without a script on a mission to get high on mescaline. Or, in the case of Crystal Fairy, nothing could happen, too.

The Way, Way Back is balanced, satisfying, wholesome. Dig in.

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.

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

The movie, told from the killer’s point of view, is genuinely unsettling and propelled by a terrific, buzzing synth soundtrack straight out of the early ’80s. But the only suspense is in which woman will be the next victim.

Somm does a fairly impressive job of making wine tasting somewhat cinematic despite its being essentially unfilmable, at least until taste-o-vision comes along.

So once you figure out the first rule of Zombie Fight Club — nothing too bad can happen to Brad Pitt — the movie is, despite intermittent thrills, rote.

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.”

A clever, elliptical, slightly bizarre and altogether transfixing psychological thriller.

In other words, this punkish, sleek film about beautiful kids wallowing in purloined Prada could have been written by a grumpy 65-year-old white guy in gabardine, provided he had a sense of irony. The Bling Ring is the bridge between Coppola and Bill O’Reilly.

There is stuff in This Is the End that had me laughing so hard, I sensed new body parts joining in to help out — my pancreas was heaving, my bile ducts ripped.

This material cries out for big-budget treatment by a real master like Paul Thomas Anderson or Martin Scorsese.

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.”

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

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

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.

Someday, when gay Americans enjoy full equality, we can all hope their sexuality will finally stop being used as fodder for dopey, hopelessly contrived dramas like I Do.

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.

Despite Gibney’s best efforts to put a halo on Manning, the enormity of what the soldier did towers over what has been done to him.

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.

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.

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.

Baumbach seems mainly interested in capturing the whimsical rhythms of unformed post-college life, with money too scarce and roommates too ample — but he already did that, did it better and with more rueful feeling, in the much funnier “Kicking and Screaming,” the debut he made at 25 and one of the best films of the 1990s.

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.

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

What begins as an alert and witty barbed satire degenerates into a senseless bloodbath in the black comedy Sightseers.

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

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

This is a fine idea for a PSA TV commercial, but (a) they already did it back in the ’70s and (b) it goes on well past the 30-second mark.

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.

Just because two people are miserable doesn’t mean they’re interesting.

In the most thrilling sequence of this consistently rousing old-school adventure, Heyerdahl grabs a passing shark with his bare hands, thrusts a hook into it, drags it aboard and guts it with a knife. Now that’s what I call entertainment. I haven’t seen such crazed brutality since Lou Lumenick’s review of “Movie 43.”

A dizzying lowlife saga that’s fast, smart, wicked, sort of ambitious and blazingly ironic. It’s as unpredictable as a Lindsay Lohan drive to the grocery store, as overstuffed as the pictures on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed and as hilarious as me on the bench press.

In the House promises to be a social satire with a flash of Hitchcockian menace, but gradually it turns into a routine thumb-sucker on reality versus fiction.

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

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

Soulful though the film is, melodrama gradually sneaks in, and then it takes over.

Typically, To the Wonder seems mostly locked in the thoughts of its characters, whispered so only we can hear, with no more actual back-and-forth dialogue than would cover the back of your ticket stub.

Writer-director Antonio Campos, making excellent use of the queasy rhythms of a percussive musical score, keeps piling up the dread as we wonder just how dangerous Simon can be to the women who keep taking pity on him.

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

This exhilarating brain-twister is a nonstop visual, aural and intellectual delight, steeped in movie conventions and yet fizzing with freshness. It’s what happens when film noir goes out to a rave.

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.

Like the paintings of the master, Renoir is beautiful to look at, but it would be a mistake to call the film (or its subject) shallow.

Willis is at his relaxed best this time.

Don't let the quiet, indie stylings of The Place Beyond the Pines fool you. This is a big movie with a lot on its mind. Slowly, it unfolds into a kind of epic.

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

You do have to give Starbuck credit for engineering perhaps the largest group hug ever put on film.

This unapologetic B-movie at least keeps the action rolling, and the time goes by quickly. To put it another way, I’d rather see Gerard Butler stab a terrorist in the neck than flirt with Katherine Heigl.

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.

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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

I don’t know how many sex scenes featuring Winstone and Atwell you can handle, but the movie breaches my limit, which is a firm zero.

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

Nature films don’t come any more spectacular than the BBC’s One Life.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

McAleer is an expert practitioner of cinematic jujitsu.

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.

The line between honey and syrup is a fine one, I'll grant you, but "Best Exotic Marigold" was on the wrong side of it. Quartet carries a noble glow, as serene and beautiful as sunset.

56 Up is as good a point as any to get hooked on the magnificent half-century series of documentaries, beginning in 1964 with "7 Up."

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

I 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.

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

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

Django Unchained might have been a revelation in 2005. But after Quentin Tarantino and others have spent years spoofing '60s and '70s genre movies, this mock spaghetti Western tastes like it came out of the microwave.

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

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.

This is grim, bleak material that at times is monotonous, but its woe feels authentic.

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

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.

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.

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.

A fantastically entertaining biography.

Carlyle gives a quietly engaging performance as a Golden State farmworker with a secret in the likable indie California Solo.

An intensity of purpose and a patient, suspenseful directing style make the B-movie Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning superior to most of the big-budget action films I've seen lately.

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

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.

The visual effects are amazing, but they don't make up for acting that is restrained to an uninsightful fault.

I can't remember ever seeing such a spectacular implosion of a squad of all-stars as Rise of the Guardians. Well, not since Yankee Stadium in October.

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

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

Picture "Raging Bull" with a sleazy prep from the Brooklyn hipsteropolis of Williamsburg, and you'll get the idea of The Comedy, a character study that tries to make the revolting compelling.

A hilarious Parker Posey provides her customary blast of brittle energy in Price Check, an engaging corporate comedy.

A low-watt, low-wit comedy.

The film as a whole goes from intriguing to irritating.

Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.

In the utterly routine effort Skyfall, we're actually expected to cheer each chord we've heard so many times (here's a martini shaker! Look, it's a Walther PPK! And there's an Aston Martin!) We've been turned into wretched Pavlovian dogs, salivating at the bell instead of the snack. The highlight, by far, is a classic animated credit sequence: Adele, you are the new Shirley Bassey.

Visually dazzling, intermittently funny.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The parallels between the kids' war and the real one are made far too obvious by Christophe Barratier, who made the equally treacly "The Chorus" and infests the movie with nonstop musical goo.

In the end (which continues into the credits), I was left thinking McDonagh can do better than this, and yet I was slightly more agog with admiration than peevish with frustration. Most of all, I wanted to see the film again.

There needs to be a 12-step program for movie people to stop sharing their "deeply personal" yet insight-free stories of addiction.

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.

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

The Paperboy can't decide whether to be an unfunny sex comedy, a half-hearted detective story or a woeful race drama - so it decides to be all three, then becomes yet another movie (a swampy "Heart of Darkness") in the final act.

It's a time capsule from a strange moment - like "Hair" without the groovy music.

I haven't seen a timelier or more important film this year, and the film's passion for school choice could hardly be more warranted. Along with documentaries such as "The Lottery" and "Waiting for 'Superman,' " the film comes with a background sound of the ice of inertia cracking.

Bouncy vocal rearrangements of pop songs, sparkling choreography and a hilarious script make for a movie that's made to be obsessed over, seen 50 times, quoted as devoutly as such sacred texts as "Heathers" and "Bring It On."

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

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

Baseball movies tend to be lyrical, deeply felt, aggressively metaphorical and (consequently) terrible, but Trouble With the Curve has something most others lack: Eastwood's superb, cruel sense of humor, which reaches all the way back to "Every Which Way But Loose."

All I wanted to do was escape from this aggressively ugly world and its equally unattractive characters. It's not that the movie is in bad taste or cheesy (though it is) but that all of its hyperviolence adds up to nothing: This thing is dedd.

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.

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

Every episode of "Law & Order" I've ever seen has a more complicated and plausible plot, punchier dialogue and more New York authenticity, all in less than half the time consumed by this poky would-be finance thriller.

Sundance Mopey Alienation Flick No. 4,228 is For Ellen, an empty angst-athon that proves 90 minutes of close-ups of Paul Dano looking wounded can be even less interesting than it sounds.

It turns out that constraint is really what the show is all about, or to put it another way, I'm disappointed that they turned my horny-teen comedy into a gross-out comedy.

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.

Picture Graham Greene crossed with James Bond, with a splash of Sacha Baron Cohen, and you'll start to imagine the nervy talents of Mads Brügger, the fearless Danish filmmaker who has for a second time come up with a stunning, funny, and vital piece of guerilla cinema.

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.

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

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

A shoddy, slapdash look at issues raised by the Great Depression that neither gives an adequate overview nor manages to argue a coherent thesis.

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

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

The climax is as dull as reading the dictionary of a language you do not speak.

If the movie's story is anything but daring, it does takes guts to make a movie so shamelessly emotional as this one. Not that guts are the same as taste.

A Walmart "Wall Street," the hedge-fund drama Supercapitalist is junk merchandise stamped "made in China."

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

Put it this way: Jimmy Carter was funnier than this movie.

Corny action scenes and borderline-hilarious direction by Isaac Florentine mark the film as an obvious straight-to-video item that somehow took a wrong turn into a movie theater.

A sort of "Babel" of bonking, 360 gives us much in the way of international anguish, frustrated coupling and longing stares, but there's very little plausibility or genuine emotion in its egregiously contrived story of ardor gone amiss.

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

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.

Like Provence itself, Auteuil is in no hurry to get anywhere, reveling instead in the southern region's brilliant light and whispering crickets. His tangy accent and evident fondness for his character make the picture enjoyable enough as it plods along, and the final act wraps things up on a fulfilling note.

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.

Gritty visuals and a strong central performance elevate the routine crime story at the heart of Sweden's Easy Money, a sort of mash-up of "Goodfellas" and "The Great Gatsby."

Jacquot's lavish décor and costumes are like the perfume the women use instead of bathing: They may cover up the willful carelessness at the center of the project, but it's still there.

At best, the film serves up mild chuckles, with occasional cute jokes.

A decent idea for an episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond," The Do-Deca-Pentathlon falls short as a movie.

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

Despite its excesses, Savage" is never unintentionally funny, just gritty and mean. The run time is more than two hours, yet it's also tight: no drag, no waste, no message.

The nicest thing I can think of to say about the doc Neil Young Journeys is that at least it isn't in 3-D.

The considerable talents of Banks make the movie bearable.

The surprise of Ted is that it goes for honest Spielbergian wonder, too, and even earns some tears.

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

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

I didn't know whether to be more offended as a moviegoer or as an American, but I do know I'd rather gargle nitroglycerine than watch this again, though given that the film looks like it were buried under a log cabin for a century, I barely saw it the first time.

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

The movie is so inept - with its flat characters, histrionic acting, dull dialogue ("Killing him is not going to change anything"), a dreadfully overdone musical score and la-la-la flashbacks starring the kid - that its clichés grow slightly funny. But not funny enough to make the endless torture scenes bearable.

The main flaw is that, as an actor, Duplass isn't able to make the audience love him. Picture "Bottle Rocket"-era Owen Wilson in the role, and you've got something special.

Gorgeous set pieces thrill the senses, but there is philosophical inquiry as well. "Alien" was, after all, just "Jaws" in space, but Prometheus ponders where evil comes from and how it conquers its makers.

Grueling vanity piece.

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.

If you can overlook Andie MacDowell's Mitteleuropa accent as a Jewish Holocaust survivor (I know: big if), the cinematic roman a clef Mighty Fine has some quiet charms.

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.

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

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.

Wilkinson's reflective and regretful searcher, burdened by secrets, is also touching, as are Dench and Nighy's creations, so it's easy to cheer them on as they inch toward revelations and rebirth.

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

Fightville, you had me at "gladiator school."

An appropriately respectful and dignified biopic.

Like a dedicated teacher, this is a film that stays with you.

Besson co-wrote and produced this cheesy mash-up of elements from James Bond and "Battlestar Galactica."

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.

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

The script suffers from blandness and aimlessness.

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

Dafoe proves to have the right blend of ruggedness and sensitivity for this conflicted hero. The actor's habit of maintaining a lavishly styled coiffure in all situations, even when his character is meant to be sleeping in the rain for days on end, is becoming distracting, though.

The dialogue, while filthy, is wickedly funny, and sounds perfect coming out of the mouths of these beaten-down characters in their low-rent surroundings.

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."

There is one big winner in this mess, though. Congratulations, 1961's "Snow White and the Three Stooges": You're now the second-worst movie on the subject.

Fails to draw much humor from farcical situations.

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