Manohla Dargis

There’s more flab than muscle packed on this galumphing franchise reboot, which, as it lumbers from scene to scene, reminds you of what a great action god Steven Spielberg is. Too bad he didn’t take the reins on this.

There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points.

It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie.

But since Costner canít save his movie, it's something of a stretch to think he might be able to save the world.

At once illogical and insultingly stupid, filled with dead-end twists and the sort of dialogue that makes a mockery of actual adult relations.

The amateurish production values might be pardonable if the clichés -- the hard-core porn star with the soft heart, the therapist who needs to heal herself -- inside the poorly lighted, badly shot images weren’t so absurd and often insulting.

The television commercials for the movie say something about this being the same team that brought you “Face/Off,” which is about as relevant to this picture as noting that Paul Thomas Anderson got Wahlberg to drop his pants in “Boogie Nights.”

A.C.O.D., an unfunny comedy about a guy mooning over his parents’ divorce decades later, is so eager to please it’s hard to hate. But it’s sluggish even at 87 minutes, clichéd and gives you nothing of interest to look at other than some familiar faces.

Zombies, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a certain Terrence Malick je ne sais quoi — what could go wrong? More or less everything in this low-budget head-scratcher and periodic knee-slapper.

Doesn’t seem as if it would translate easily to the big screen. It hasn't.

The result is that what was once insignificant is now insufferable.

The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.

A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.

A tediously didactic, often condescendingly reductive 10-part lesson on cinema.

Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.

Marc Forster takes a maximalist approach to this mumbo jumbo, which means that in addition to lots of wacky angles, shiny surfaces, seemingly endless stairs, and sets of twins, triplets and quadruplets, he deploys the unsettling vision of three talented actors - Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling - straining credulity and neck tendons in the service of serious claptrap.

Banks wants to fight a righteous fight. But she is selling stale goods in which adult women spout girl-power clichés and conform to norms that make it very clear what kind of heroines still get to fly high: young, thin, beautiful, perfectly coifed, impeccably manicured and profoundly unthreatening.

An exploitation flick, but without the thrills or cleavage.

Something certainly blows here, but it isn't the archangel's horn.

As witless as it is formulaic.

A consistently underused and often underrated actor, Kinnear gives one of those sympathetic performances that prevent you from believing the worst about a movie despite the sounding alarms.

My hand trembles slightly as I type these words, but the truth is that while watching 2 Fast 2 Furious, the follow-up to the pleasurably cheap-thrills sleeper "The Fast and the Furious," I realized just how much I miss Vin Diesel.

A family circus of dysfunction that's so familiar you may feel tempted to place bets on how everything will shake out.

Dragon Blade is the kind of nutsy maximalist entertainment that isn’t content merely to tap a handful of influences. Instead, it stuffs an entire encyclopedia of dicey ideas (visual, narrative, political) into a blender to create a wacky, eyeball-popping and -glazing extravaganza.

Delectably vulgar for 20 minutes or so, almost too bad to be true, but because it lacks the demented conviction of real camp, the glint of madness that keeps a bauble like "Valley of the Dolls" afloat, it soon loses its cheap-thrills appeal.

Slight and goofy, this cut-rate attempt to mine "Harry Potterville" is undermined by its ostensible draw: the lead casting of Jonathan Lipnicki.

This banal horror retread involves a couple of critters flailing inside a sticky trap for what is, in effect, the big-screen equivalent of a roach motel.

Kidman, who speaks Russian for much of the movie, turns in a technically impeccable performance, but the movie gets far more out of her than she out of it.