Lisa Schwarzbaum

No less sweet for being unoriginal: A guy (Charlie Sheen) mourns a bad breakup with the woman he loves (Katheryn Winnick). The execution, on the other hand, is perilously self-absorbed.

In the way of workaday flicks built around long-in-the-tooth badasses, Die Hard 5 leaves room for McClane to make a few jokes about his thinning hair and to rue that he wasn't a better father when his kids were growing up. Oh, boo-hoo.

The movie is a morals-free procession of bang bang bang! and blood blood blood!, and men slamming each other with blunt objects and slicing each other with blades.

That Cruise fails to make a case for Reacher's allure, though, has less to do with physical dissonance than it does with the film's inability - stupefying inability, really - to otherwise make a case for the character's originality in a movie so choked with visual clichés and dreadfully moldy dialogue.

This steam-driven military weapon of an enterprise is a sobering reminder of just how tinny a musical Les Misérables was in the first place.

It's tastelessness like this, served up as fair-game dish to a Downton Abbey-loving audience, that sours the flavor of this tittery production.

Everyone in the cast (including Geoffrey Arend, Mark Webber, and Caplan's Party Down colleague Martin Starr) is talented enough to deserve a stronger story line than this.

Thor's Chris Hemsworth leads the pack as a high school football star-turned-Marine, while Josh Peck plays his stubborn younger brother. There's also a collection of junior guerrillas, including The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson and Friday Night Lights' Adrianne Palicki. Take that, screaming North Koreans with no agenda!

Russo-Young studies the strange species of affluent Angelenus erectus under a microscope that distorts every character into unbelievability.

A cloddish, harmlessly drecky comedy from the Sandler factory of crude mush.

You know what happens in Taken 2, don't you? The same thing that happened four years ago in Taken, but different. (But the same.)

Even those who don't know a foul tip from a chicken wing will be able to spot the desperate plays.

Ellis (The Good Wife's Graham Phillips), an alienated teen, smokes weed and hangs out with a goat-obsessed, pot-cultivating surrogate father (David Duchovny, hidden by hair). New Age details aside, though, Ellis is easily identifiable as a distant cousin-by-genre to J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield.

The cockeyed C-quality B movie, shot on location with a Balkan supporting cast and crew, mixes a precarious pileup of visual clichés with over-staged action sequences.

If this amateur justice league spent as much time analyzing clues as they did analyzing their junk, in every slang variation available in the Urban Dictionary, the murder mystery in The Watch could have been solved on the first night of surveillance.

Killer Joe throws down a dare by expecting its audience to be the cool connoisseurs of the story's "comic" outrageousness, then rubbing viewers' faces in close-up scenes of brutality that reasonable people ought not to be able to watch. That up-close experience, however effectively done, is a movie specialty that's its own kind of mean.

A crotchety, alcoholic, wheelchair-bound coot played on cruise control by Morgan Freeman learns these recycled lessons in a pastel-colored, embroidered wall-hanging of a drama directed by Rob Reiner.

And yet. And yet, Gawd help me, the always surprising Mark Wahlberg throws himself into his thespian adventure with such radiant wacko energy, so full of Boston beans, that Ted is also kind of, well, impressively nuts.

With so much flesh crunching and bloodletting, it could have been scary as all Walking Dead get-out. Instead, the movie plays safe by cutting every theme down the middle - a swing that's effective when splitting wood or vampire skulls, but dull when applied to filmmaking.

Gandhi tries to dodge criticism of his mocking scam by rationalizing that even a phony wise man can offer real solace.

The editing in Battlefield America is super-speedy: Each shot lasts about three seconds, and then it's off.

What's shocking this time is how tame Sacha Baron Cohen's newest wild man is, for all the kerfuffle the comedian can stir up on the ­promotional trail.

As with his previous film "Fireflies in the Garden," writer-director Dennis Lee scratches the skin of family bonds until it bleeds. This time, he uses whimsy as a salve.

Filmmaker Greg MacGillivray, a specialist in gigantic-screen nature movies including "The Living Sea," is up to date in his use of 70mm IMAX film, but he's stuck in the past about how to tell a story.

Her (Harron) torpid adaptation of Rachel Klein's novel about female sexual desire, jealousy, death wishes, and vampires at a girls' boarding school defeats Harron's talent for exploring darkness on the edge of kinkiness.

With no thriller cliché left unused, the gaily outlandish plot is matched by tin-eared dialogue, ripe tough-guy overacting from the very game Pearce, and best-that-she-could acting from Grace.

Gerwig can't make her character come alive, though, and neither can Adam Brody as one of their neediest male cases. In the midst of the froufrou, lovely, stalklike Analeigh Tipton (Crazy, Stupid, Love) is delightful as a student who enjoys being normal and living in this century.

A dull and unbewitching movie.