M. E. Russell

The fun thing about Eclipse is watching Lautner emerge as the Han Solo of this series, getting all the laughs and calling Edward and Bella on their preciousness.

The movie never recovers from its cheesy center.

Are Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay getting tired of their own shtick?

Chris Rock probably has a solid writer/director effort in him. This isn't it.

Hilariously, gut-bustingly, mind-blowingly, jaw-droppingly stupid.

Unfortunately, the film loses its merciless rage toward the end, devolving into a stock and broadly comic thriller about unpleasant people you never quite get to know.

As satire, it doesn't add up -- but it's an admirable, if dull, experiment.

It's just another bland, junior-high-basketball riff on "The Bad News Bears" formula, one that takes every single dramatic cue from the underdog sports-movie playbook.

Keaton offers glimpses of a directorial gift, but this odd little piece feels like a warm-up for something more compelling.

Does have its charms. While the videography and most of the supporting performances are amateurish, Clark and Caland are winning actors.

This will personally go down as the flick that really made me realize how much I hate CGI stunts.

That cast is precisely what makes the new Arthur so frustrating.

Freeman and Nicholson mostly stand in front of special-effects green screens and have the locales projected, like they're in a "Road" picture.

The film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling.

For starters, everything's grimy and humorless in a way that infects even Aniston.

The dialogue is dippy. And there's no real suspense: The filmmakers are so deadly earnest about the power of music and love and all that stuff, you just twiddle your thumbs waiting for the inevitable.

Do yourself a favor. Rent "My Bodyguard" instead.

Surprisingly dull.

The drama is telegraphed and glossy and un-fascinating; the edges have been belt-sanded until any camp value is lost. And it's filmed in that "Moulin Rouge"/"Chicago" style where you see half a dance move before the shot cuts -- which somehow makes a lot of difficult, sexy work seem simultaneously frenetic and boring.

Feels like a movie that wants to bare its fangs, but only manages a mild gumming.

If anyone could take a movie about a bunch of jerks who play poker and make it interesting, it should be Curtis Hanson. Or rather, it should have been.

Modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge.

The movie gets just enough right that the things it doesn't get right (beyond its overdependence on a not-so-surprising story puzzle) smack you cold in the face.

Sporadically funny, bland, talent-wasting junk.

Kind of a drag.

In drama, tone, character and examination of the social issues tormenting these kids, Wassup Rockers is . . . taxing.

I love that fanboys fought for Fanboys. Unfortunately, their passion was misplaced.

Transplanting so much of the original story to a 21st-century setting only amplifies how badly the story has aged.

Putting it another way: When spoofs of bad singing and songwriting are the sharpest arrows in your quiver, and your politics are diluted until they hit about as hard as someone sticking their tongue out, your satire has a problem.

The movie pads the good stuff out with a bunch of mediocre mainstream-thriller junk. It takes too long to get started, it pulls some key punches, its dialogue is deeply uninteresting, it relies way too heavily on endless jump-scares and its finale is pure slasher-flick formula.

I appreciate that talented people wanted to honor Shelly by making this film. They likely would have better honored her by mounting her script as a play.

Quality-wise, the crime drama Broken City lives in a frustrating mid-range area: It's too complex and competently crafted to dismiss as junk -- but it's also nowhere near sharp enough to work as the serious grown-up detective movie it clearly wants to be.

It gives me no pleasure to report that the Pimentel biopic Music Within plays like a well-intentioned TV movie.

Fine moments, images and performances stand cheek-by-jowl with the clichéd, the on-the-nose and the slightly dopey.

An extremely weird and frustrating viewing experience. I think it's that way because Eastwood, 78, can't be bothered to wrangle the vast material into a tighter shape.

After getting off to a decent, somewhat muted start, Skeleton Key just gets sillier and sillier and sillier until it's yet another one of those stupid, noisy thrillers where everyone's running around in a house, yelling and falling down, and you're mostly wondering why nobody bothered to call the cops.

Almost totally emotionally bankrupt. But it's a very specific form of total emotional bankruptcy, one that feels honest and even uplifting at the time, because the actors are great and the direction's well intentioned and just-so.

Dolphin Tale is inoffensive enough -- little kids will probably dig it -- and I'm not suggesting that family-friendly docudramas should tightly conform to real life. But when they do embellish, they should distill the story into something more compelling, rather than watering it down with pleasant-but-utterly-forgettable inspirational boilerplate.

The movie's excessive and logistically goofy in a way "Taken" wasn't.

The movie's not good, strictly speaking, but it is kind of fun.

Sporadically clever and chilling.

The actors are mostly charming; Bettany in particular is broody and cool.

Unfortunately, the dialogue undermines the movie's promise.

Unsurprisingly, the formulaic "Breakfast Club" casting yields a formulaic narrative.

The leads are just too good to commit fully to something this baldly formulaic. It's sad.

The new footage adds almost nothing and feels like a lame, double-dipping cash-grab.

Unfortunately, the film's charm ends with the plot gimmick.

Getting worked up about John Tucker Must Die is a bit like getting worked up about the taste of flan.

Jim Carrey kills it every time he shows up in his supporting role as street magician Steve Gray.

Serious Acting Opportunities abound! Unfortunately, sharp dialogue and characters who keep you riveted do not.

Suffers from the problem that plagues too many romantic comedies: The supporting characters are roughly 1,000 percent more interesting than the main characters.

Imaginary Heroes feels like an endless series of wakes, awkward cocktail conversations and teen house parties, which would be fine if Harris wrote less cartoony dialogue.

To my thinking, this splendid low-key bummer of a ghost story was eventually undermined by the film's increasing reliance on shock-scares, in which something suddenly and noisily jumps into the frame, over and over and over.

Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig are adequate leads, but no great actor will be more squandered this year than Jeffrey Wright, who does nothing but speak in vast paragraph blocks of exposition while looking haggard and bored.

If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

It's a shame The Matador isn't a better movie, because this semi-dark comedy contains one great, cackling, self-loathing performance by Pierce Brosnan.

At one point during the big race, the kids get passed at close range by a team of pros so seasoned, they wrote the navigation software the kids use. I was begging the camera crew to follow them.

The Rock charms you through the worst of it, but the effects are cheap, the dialogue is about as challenging as a "Hannah Montana" episode, and the pace manages to be both brisk and numbing.

There's a potentially innovative teen comedy in here somewhere, but it's surrounded by one that's much duller.

The story of Dito escaping and then facing his demons is meaningful. But that story is so buried in actorly noise that it feels false.

A modestly charming family crowd-pleaser despite too-broad characterizations by many in the supporting cast.

Still, this feels like minor Phillips to me -- something in the neighborhood of 2006's "School for Scoundrels," quality-wise, though with a much grimmer heart.

It's a waste of classic material. Rent "The Incredibles" and see what should have been.

Carrey fearlessly gives it his best shot, but this fundamental schizophrenia strong-armed me out of the film, and left me feeling like McGregor's more grounded performance existed in another movie entirely.

The characters devolve into boring narcissists. And the movie devolves into a broad-brush dark satire of emergency bureaucracy that feels a lot sillier than the post-9/11 panic attack of the first half-hour.

At the end of Martian Child, we're told the movie is "inspired by actual events." But the movie isn't even fully inspired by David Gerrold's source novel that was inspired by actual events.

Eat Pray Love is magazine-spread self-help bullcorn with the highest possible production values, and I wasn't having any of it.

Bees is a movie in which a bunch of powerful African American women get their lives upended and in some cases destroyed so a little white girl can feel better about herself.

The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's ideas impossibly trite.

Fans of Franken's wittier print and broadcast work might smile. But I haven't seen this much smug, awkward laughter and bathos since, well, "Man of the Year."

A few bodies pile up. Surprisingly little sex is had. And given that Catherine's true nature was revealed at the end of the first "Basic," the mystery seems superfluous.

An unfunny, undramatic comedy-drama that asks us to care about lying idiots making implausible choices.

As a chronicle of an extreme surfing subculture, Bra Boys is semi-fascinating. As a chronicle of rough-and-tumble street life, it's appallingly biased and self-glorifying.

A movie full of actors improvising their idea of how cops in a Scorsese flick would talk. It's a special sort of cartoonishness, a hard-to-pin-down brand of emotionally grandstanding fakeness you sometimes see in movies trying way too hard to be "gritty."

Joins the growing list of blandly made erotic thrillers that contain no eroticism, few thrills and fewer likable characters.

It's a cartoon that thinks it isn't one.

The movie is not so much horrible as it is drab -- from its lazy plotting to its uninspired yuks to its cop-out ending to its relentlessly yellow-brown sets. "Mad Money" does little more than take up space, and you will be two hours closer to the grave when you leave the theater.

A mild disaster.

There are two solid sight gags and funny supporting work by Amy Poehler as a boozy publicist.

Three stories in one. This might be two stories too many.

Good intentions and strong thespians aside, Seidelman's writing and filmmaking are bland, obvious and uninvolving.

Director Stefen Fangmeier, a well-regarded special-effects man and second-unit director ("Master and Commander," "Galaxy Quest") does a superb job visualizing the CGI dragon. But Fangmeier is working with a script without a single memorable line and far too many characters and creatures with silly names.

The writing is lazy, the movie focuses on all the wrong things and the tone lurches unpleasantly between gum-soft comedy and lukewarm thriller.

The only bright spot is Marsden, a great actor who's always stuck playing the less-desirable romantic rival (see: "The Notebook," "X-Men," "Superman Returns"). He finally gets the fun-guy role for a change and does everything he can to rip it up. He can only do so much.

Yet another mediocre-to-lame thriller shot in Portland.

Poseidon '06 is spectacularly noisy, uninteresting and character-free.

Norbit might have worked if it had fully committed to being over the top or made Rasputia the lead character and found the human inside the cartoon. Instead, the movie doesn't give us anyone to care about.

Has a surprising number of problems: dire scripting, sloppy plotting and coffee-jittery editing, for starters. But its biggest problem is that Blade himself takes a back seat to a host of new and mostly uninteresting characters.

Boring and fundamentally silly.

Has some good laughs courtesy of its cast -- but they're basically papering over a script that's masquerading as urbane and trenchant, when it's really self-involved and didactic and more than a little foolish.

Unlike its predecessors, this one doesn't even try to aspire to myth. It aspires only to merchandising.

Director R.W. Goodwin (an "X-Files" vet) makes a fatal mistake: He never takes a clear stance on the material he's spoofing.

What damage could Michael Bay inflict on Jason Voorhees that earlier producers hadn't already inflicted on everyone's favorite hockey-masked serial killer? Well, Bay could make Jason Voorhees ... boring.

After the initial charm wears off, the whole thing gets check-your-text-messages dull.

Grint's role is larger and more "mature" than we've seen from him. During his adventures, Ben is seduced by a Scottish lit-festival flack (Michelle Duncan). But in some ways, his work is more limited here than it is in the "Potter" films. I have no idea why so many people consider Ben worth fighting for, or over.

I'm all for hearty theological debate. But this is intellectual suicide. Even worse, it's boring intellectual suicide.

Other than its overwrought Herod-Antipas scenes, The Nativity Story sticks so closely to the text that it's a total snooze.

Grabs a fistful of hot-button story elements -- race, sex, politics -- and promptly mixes them into the thriller equivalent of tapioca.