Manohla Dargis

The humanity of the leads fills up the hollowness, putting flesh, or at least charm and attitude, on their archetypes.

Noé;, with his Nietzsche-for-knuckleheads nihilism and extreme-cinema ambitions, clearly fancies himself a visionary, but mounting a camera on a roller coaster or putting a story into rewind doesn't make a film formally adventurous or interesting. Conceiving of a gay club as an antechamber to the inferno and sexualizing a woman's rape, however, do make it titillating.

The joke of it is, for all the pricey bangs and booms, the whiplash cinematography and the editing that turns film space into cubistic tableaux, a Bruckheimer-and-Scott partnership is only as good as its screenplay, and this one is a mess.

In his debut the director, Dan Bradley, a stunt coordinator with a long list of credits, handles the low-fi action well, which helps divert attention from the bargain-bin special effects, bad acting and politics.

The upshot is that instead of a film about a love that conquered a king and nearly undid a kingdom, Madonna has come up with a female friendship movie, which would be fine if she weren't busy trying to prove her art-film bona fides.

Etched in acid, stoked by wrath, it is one of those big-ideas novels that fits perfectly in human hands, where it can be savored over time or wrestled with page by page. But big ideas don't always size down for movie screens.

The director Susanna White makes a lot of strange choices, including the dark, fussy visuals best described as stained-glass noir. As an Expressionist choice, it doesn’t make much sense. Then again, neither does much of Our Kind of Traitor, which has loads of twists and all the ritualistic pessimism you expect, but none of the political and moral outrage that might have elevated this genre story into a le Carré one.

The multiple viewpoints are just a clever, self-satisfied device to deliver stale goods and familiar ugliness with a soupçon of glib class politics.

An overstuffed, intellectually underbaked portrait of a poor little rich girl.

Favreau wavers uncertainly between goofy pastiche and seriousness in a movie that wastes its title and misses the opportunity to play with, you know, ideas about the western and science-fiction horror.

Wonder Wheel, Woody Allen’s latest movie, is one of his more unfortunate contributions to cinema.

Forced to compete for kingly favors, the women were soon rivals, a contest that, in its few meagerly entertaining moments, recalls the sisterly love in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

Without question, the whole thing's absurd -- this is, remember, about a guy stuck in a phone booth -- but for its first 40 minutes or so it's also mildly entertaining, fueled by the nuttiness of the setup and Schumacher's energy.

Burns, who made a career out of his mildly charming Irish-American rogue persona, has, with his latest and fourth feature, finally sloughed off the remaining traces of that charm, along with, apparently, the vestiges of a personality.

Because no one involved with Starsky & Hutch actually seems to care about the movie, all Wilson can do is idle in neutral while Stiller frantically shifts gears, looking for an excuse to split.

Mackenzie does nice, tight work now and again, mostly in more intimate sequences, but too many scenes drag, and his fetishistization of violence proves numbing.

In its exploitation of human misery, Monster's Ball doesn't just invite cynicism; it provokes hostility.

Style is content in action movies, but when all the style originates elsewhere, it's just plain lazy.

The less ticklish bad joke of Scream 2 is that self-referentiality has its limits.

Mr. West sets the scene reasonably well, ratcheting up a sense of unease with old-fashioned shadows and some nighttime scrambling, but he gets lost once he shifts from fooling around in the dark to recreating mass death.

The story here, plucked from Thomas's life and embellished, proves almost entirely devoid of interest.

This kind of glance at history is a poor substitute for a hard, steady and expansive examination.

As is often the case when ambitious young filmmakers have murder and profit on their minds, Mr. Alvart is finally less interested in the nature of man than in the cool stuff you can do with a camera, which he tosses about the set, swooping it up and down and all around, without rhyme or reason.

Mr. Caine is one of the few reasons to sit through Harry Brown, an exercise in art-house exploitation directed by Daniel Barber and tarted up with self-importance and a generally striking visual design.

The producers are going to have to hire a better director if they want moviegoers to be curious enough about this Galt guy to buy a ticket for the presumptive third and final chapter.

A clutter of recycled cop-movie and serial-killer film clichés.

It’s evident that the filmmakers wanted to create a different, tougher and putatively more serious Pinocchio than the Disney version that has been lodged in the popular imagination for decades. But the movie’s decontextualized and disturbingly ill-considered use of Fascism is reductive and finally grotesque.

The downer here is that Lowery doesn’t seem to know what to do with his stars, performers who are never better than when they’re just doing what they do best — you know, acting.

In this kind of industrial entertainment, particularly one that seems to be missing some connective narrative tissue, it’s hard to know if the writers or the director can be credited or blamed for what’s left on screen.

That Mr. De Niro and especially Miss Fanning manage to register through all this murk is a testament to their talent, which however squandered does nonetheless shine.

[Mr. Sanders] likes a dark palette and is good with actors, but there’s little here that feels personal, and he mostly functions as a blockbuster traffic cop, managing all the busily moving, conspicuously pricey parts.

Mr. Marshall, is not much of a film director. Depending on the budget, his movies look either cheap (like this one) or studio slick ("Pretty Woman"), and tend to have the same flat, presentational visual style that's familiar from most sitcoms.

Enervating trifle.

There's nothing wrong with remakes, but as this movie amply proves, there's often nothing right about them, either

A misfired, misguided would-be satire.

It’s frustrating what weak tea this movie is because the director, Nia DaCosta (“Little Woods,” “Candyman”), has talent, the cast is appealing, and there’s a lightly gonzo scene that shows you what the other 100 minutes could have been. It’s almost as if the suits at Marvel Studios know it doesn’t matter if their movies are any good.

Anna and the Apocalypse is more sketch than developed movie. Directed by John McPhail from a script by McHenry and Alan McDonald, the movie is thinly plotted, its pacing slack, its staging uninspired; Anna remains merely an idea for a plucky heroine, despite Hunt’s smile and sweat.

The Great Wall flirts with romance and bleats out a little propagandistic blather about the benefits of bilateral action, but the focus throughout remains on multitudes of shifting, surging bodies — human and beast, digital and not — that, as they ebb and flow, resemble a Chinese military pageant and a lavish Busby Berkeley number.

Driven by different agendas, history and movies often tell two irreconcilable stories, which is why, despite some glints of talent, Hancock has given us yet another film and another Alamo to forget.

Ms. Roth’s prose style is good enough and Tris appealing enough that, at least in the book, it’s easy to breeze past the plot holes. It’s harder to ignore those flaws in the movie, partly because the director, Neil Burger (“Limitless”), gives you little to hang onto — beauty, thrills, a visual style.

A provocation, a coup de theatre and three hours of tedious experimentation.

As the first hour of Suspiria grinds into the second and beyond (the movie runs 152 minutes), it grows ever more distended and yet more hollow. Unlike Argento, who seemed content to deliver a nastily updated fairy tale in 90 or so minutes, Guadagnino continues casting about for meaning, which perhaps explains why he keeps adding more stuff, more mayhem, more dances.

Mr. Hillcoat wears his nihilism easily and persuasively (his films include “The Road”), so his weird bids at mordant comedy feel as forced as they are ill-considered.

If Gods of Egypt were any worse, it might be a masterpiece.

It isn't that nothing happens in Poolhall Junkies, it's that nothing interesting does.

The story is too silly, too woefully underwritten, to stake a claim on seriousness.

The funniest, most reckless moments in The Hangover Part II, the largely mirthless sequel to the 2009 hit "The Hangover," take place in the final credits.

There are a lot of horses but absolutely no sense in The First Saturday in May, a glib, lazy documentary about six trainers on the proverbial road to the 2006 Kentucky Derby.

This undiluted nonsense is best suited to DVD-rental desperation. Still, aficionados of cheap cinematic thrills involving beautiful and stupid young people will be happy to learn that while the film fizzles far more than it sizzles, its director, John Stockwell, is a connoisseur of the female backside, which he displays to great and frequent advantage.

A dopey if largely painless romantic comedy.

What’s most striking about Extract, beyond the scarcity of jokes and absence of actual filmmaking, is its deep well of sourness, which at times borders on misanthropy.

Every so often there's a suggestion that a police state may actually be a lousy idea, but this thought dies even faster than the disposable characters.

Shooting in unattractive, hard-edge digital, Teller condenses Mr. Jenison’s years-long pursuit into 80 glib, alternately diverting, exasperating and tedious minutes.

Of course it's dumb, but every 10 minutes or so, it's also pretty funny.

The obstacle that the director Joe Carnahan and his colleagues failed to clear was finding the right self-mocking tone for a movie that was, by the looks of it, too expensive to risk real laughs.

Mr. Hunnam isn’t yet a movie star, and given current industry trends (big-studio cartoons, superhero flicks, etc.) might never get that chance. His talent is for quiet, unshowy moments, not leading-man grand gestures and important speeches.

The only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks...is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market.

The big tease turns into the long goodbye in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the juiceless, near bloodless sequel.

Phony choppers and a startling resemblance to Jon Voight aren't enough to transform Theron into Wuornos, and I didn't buy either the performance or the character for a second.

There’s something creepy, and not pleasurably so, about watching children pantomime so much malice and fear.

F. Gary Gray can be a fine action director and sometimes better than fine, but the scenes that should pop and pow — given the squealing tires, bared knuckles and laser beams — consistently fall flat.

The Duel has a few ideas and a glint of politics but is largely characterized by its perplexing shifts in tone and unpersuasive story turns.

A drowsy comedy about a handful of kids grooving and roller-skating, Roll Bounce has heart and good vibes but little else to recommend it.

It’s all blithely formulaic and would be more irritating if the performers — who include Zoë Kravitz and Illana Glazer — weren’t generally so appealing.

The title character is one of those difficult women that the movies just can’t quit and rarely prove as interesting as filmmakers seem to think. Anne obviously has issues — psychological, behavioral, familial — but the movie isn’t big on specifics. It’s a pretty, uninvolving blur.

A cursory, irritatingly facile look at the human cost of globalization.

It’s a nice opening for a movie that spirals into nonsense.

Jones has turned a life into a hackneyed survivor’s story with cartoon villains, cardboard saints, pretty scenery, mewling piano notes and expedient, drama-goosing epiphanies.

Showtime is better than the fourth "Lethal Weapon," which was pretty bad, but not as good as the original "Lethal Weapon" or the superior "48HRS."

Spike Lee lost his nerve -- there are moments here, too, when it also seems like he lost his sense.

With The Canyons, [Mr. Schrader] tries to get at something real under all the hard, glossy surfaces, but ends up caught in the divide between the movie that he seems to have wanted to make and the one he did.

It's never clear how Mr. Lacuesta, whose use of other art-cinema conventions (like nonprofessional performers) risks cliché, sees these parts working together or what he wants you to take from them. He's so committed to non-transparency as a principle that he locks you out.

There's no way to know what went wrong with 360 and whether it was this uninvolving and shallow from the start.

An assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers made with boys and girls who actually fought in that country's recent war, left me wrung out - furious, confused, deep in thought.

The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.

Ms. Moore is nicely lighted, but she too is poorly served by Mr. Freundlich's unfunny, unfocused screenplay, which basically stitches together a series of short scenes of four people whining in various combinations.

The problem is that Mr. Vaughn has no interest in, or perhaps understanding of, violence as a cinematic tool. He doesn’t use violence; he squanders it.

Yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.

Euro-kitsch of the highest order, which doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, just unnecessary.

The story’s lone joke and its grinding literalness grow dull.

Wasabi dawdles and drags when it should pop; it doesn't even have the virtue of enough mindless violence to break up the tedium of all its generational bonding.

Washington is a likable actor and easy on the eyes, but the character is unproductively one-dimensional and so is the performance, which remains reactive and opaque. Here, at least, he can’t turn an underconceptualized character into one whom you either care about or want to watch gasping and grimacing for several hours.

Mr. Lee gathers together a lifetime of hurt without conveying that there's something personal at stake.

The sort of noisy nonsense that Woo's earlier action movies made irrelevant, but alas not extinct.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is the second movie that Tom Cruise has starred in as this title character. Let’s hope it’s the last.

The director, Taylor Hackford, never makes any of this pop, which isn’t a surprise given the material.

This isn't a terrible film by any means, but it's also far from being a realized work. Jaglom has said that he “writes” his films in the editing room, but for Festival in Cannes he must have been using a crayon.

A movie with its heart and head in the right place. Too bad its aesthetic sensibilities and technical coordinates are not as well situated.

Pfeiffer, Majors and Douglas (as Hope’s equally big-brained dad) are the truer stars of this show, and each brings something valuable to the mix.

The fatalities and clichés escalate, as the wife plays the femme fatale, and the men run circles around one another amid the dust, blood and some tonally off, ill-conceived cutesiness.

Cheery, corny and perhaps calculatingly unoriginal, this is packaged entertainment so familiar it feels like a remake and so wholesome you could swear Sandra Dee starred in the 1959 original. Think of it as "No Sex and the City" for tweeners.

[Simien] keeps things moving along, more or less, and the appealing cast hit their marks, but it’s dispiriting to see him directing what is effectively a feature-length Disney promotion. I hope it’s his last big-studio ad.

Despite his access to both No Wave luminaries and atmospherically battered footage of various bands wreaking havoc at various venues, Mr. Crary never figures out what story he wants to tell.

In Fat Albert, that trademark is resurrected to depressingly diminished ends.

It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas.

For whatever reason here, Aronofsky always remains at a frustrating remove from Hank, which flattens the emotional and psychological stakes that Butler works so hard to raise.

It's exasperating -- a near-parody of bad French comedy.

Mr. Hopkins doesn’t have much to do, but it can be amusing to see him upstage everyone else with sonorous murmurings and imperious demands for a robe and Chinese takeout.

If Spawn had anything close to a script, it would be a pretty nifty fantasy about conspiracy, apocalypse and a fat killer clown.

Not too long after the knockout opening, all that's left of Snake Eyes are Cage's wild eyes, the dregs of David Koepp's rotten script, and De Palma's restless, anxious camera, on the prowl for something, anything, to hang on to.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is such a smashing title it's too bad someone had to spoil things by making a movie to go with it.

What feels amusingly anarchic on the small screen feels underdeveloped and disjointed on the big screen, perhaps because instead of commercials gluing the jokes together there’s dead air.

It's a shame no one gave the three voice stars of this appealing animation -- Ray Romano, John Legui zamo and Denis Leary -- a shot at the script.

It’s the sort of performance that announces itself with the subtlety of a lit-up highway construction sign. Caution: Actress at Work.

Director Glenn Gordon Carron's movie is far more bearable when Kate is spinning lies and sticking her tongue in Kevin Bacon's desiccated bad boy.

Mr. Rosenthal puts the story’s parts into play well enough, but once everyone and everything is in position that’s more or less where they stay as this slow story downshifts to a crawl.

It isn't just that there's something unsettling about a film that aestheticizes a crematorium; it's that there's something trivializing about the very effort.

It's no doubt rude, and perhaps irrelevant, to point out that John Waters still doesn't know how to make a movie.

Like the characters, the scenes pile up but go nowhere; the story seems fragmented, the actors unmotivated, unmoored. Mr. Gray has a feel for pulp, but is seriously off his game here.

A plodding bureaucratic procedural that features many, many characters strategizing in various spaces with furrowed brows and clenched jaws, mostly in relentless medium close-up.

Generally, Hooper pulls away from loony-tunes excess, tries for sexy rather than freaky, and plucks at heartstrings, a reflex that pulls the story into mawkishness, particularly when he cuts to Victoria.

All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

It's an overly familiar setup played out by overly familiar types but, curiously, what invests XX/XY with its tension is that there's no sense that Austin Chick, the film's capable young director and writer, knows what he feels about any of this.

It's slick nonsense at best and for the first hour it's watchable. There's cheap entertainment to be had from a thriller in which two detectives are played by beauties as ravishing as Jolie and Martinez.

Mr. Forster, who previously directed “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland,” has been soundly defeated by The Kite Runner. Despite the film’s far-flung locations (it was shot primarily in China), there is remarkably little of visual interest here; the setups are banal, and the scenes lack tension, which no amount of editing can provide.

A forced, laugh-challenged comedy with an appealing if not terribly well-used cast.

Mr. Matsumoto, as if realizing that viewers might need to wake up, stuffs a ball gag in a child’s mouth and throws in some reflexive nonsense involving an old director and some critics who seem to be watching the same movie you are. They think it’s terrible and finally it’s hard to disagree.

When I watched I Love You, Daddy a second time, the jokes no longer landed; its shocks felt uglier, cruder. But for once a filmmaker seemed to be admitting to the misogyny that we know is always there and has often been denied or simply waved off, at times in the name of art.

Working from a script by Ms. Lowe and Mr. Oram, Mr. Wheatley continues in the same bludgeoning, amusingly if dubiously deadpan fashion for what soon feels like an overextended joke.

Ludicrous but not quite the howler it could and should have been.

Chastain reliably holds the screen even if her performance often feels overly studied rather than lived in, never more so than in her scenes with Sarsgaard, whose delicate, quicksilver expressiveness appreciably deepens both the movie and its stakes. You don’t always believe in Sylvia and Saul as a couple, but Sarsgaard makes you want to.

The “Trip” movies have always been self-aware about their own weightlessness, wringing laughs by needling the men and their vanity. That’s as smart as it is convenient; this time, though, it also feels like a cop-out.

A heavily padded, thinly conceived, well-meaning movie.

If Lies were better, the most obvious point of reference would be "In the Realm of the Senses," but the filmmaking isn't good enough to warrant such comparison, and the ideas are half-baked.

A sequel with far less color and cinematic imagination, and many more bells and whistles, including a freakishly special-effected Mr. Bridges going mano a mano in cyberspace with the grizzled real deal. Twice as much Jeff Bridges does not necessarily mean twice as much entertainment - bummer.

Often ridiculous, awkward, unsatisfying and dour melodramatic adaptation.

The whole thing is kitsch of the most pricey sort, and it's a good guess that it will be a smash.

If Mr. Kramer's outrage felt honest, his film would be easier to respect. But time and again, he undermines his own righteousness by pumping up the violence and stripping down his talent.

Director Gary Fleder can only fling the camera about and indulge in some familiar screen sadism (and no wonder -- his last feature was "Kiss the Girls") as he tries to squeeze a few thrills from material as desiccated as his leading man.

The film has been hailed as something of a literary thriller; it's not. The stultifying pace and Moskowitz's filmmaking laziness are forgivable, but it's exasperating and indicative of our low expectations for the documentary form that a film that taps the likes of Leslie Fiedler could be so devoid of ideas. Reading is fundamental; so is thinking.

It was somebody's nitwit idea to rip out the story's guts and brains for a sour sellout of a finale -- which finds the filmmakers behaving exactly like Stepford men and turning an original into a dummy.

Any resemblance to Cassavetes, intentional or not, only makes the film's flaws all the more apparent.

The story is a confusion of noise, visual clutter and murderous digital gnats, but every so often a glimmer of life flickers through.

Drive-Away Dolls only snaps alive when the ever-reliable Domingo is on camera and — with just a few hushed words and his trademark charisma — he inevitably draws you in with the promise of a movie that never materializes.

It's a drag how Nettelbeck sees working women -- or at least this working woman -- for whom she shows little understanding; there's a puritan, even punitive, cast to the way she sees her character, whose pathology she digs at with the tenacity of a truffle hound.

No question, the film's best special effect is Ms. Garner, especially when she's in costume.

For all the director's visual flair, his trademark flashes of gallows humor and his few good moments, there's never a sense that he's made Crash his own.

There are times in The Well-Digger's Daughter, a once-upon-a-time French film about love, family and the seductive beauty of the Provençal countryside, when the story's sweetness nearly makes your teeth ache.

The journey generally drags because the spinning characters, with their tired jokes and familiar melodramas, soon feel so mechanical, like the automated parts in an Almodóvar machine.

The joint doesn't jump in the musical Idlewild; it just twitches and stumbles. As much a missed opportunity as a terrible tease.

The story unwinds with histrionics and homilies, jazz hands and twinkle toes, overly busy camerawork and hookless lung bursters.

A clumsily directed, painstakingly faithful adaptation thats heavy on plot, light on nuance, and features in its title role a young newcomer whose most striking quality is an almost preternatural absence of oomph.

Patty Jenkins is behind the camera again, but this time without the confidence. Certainly some of the problems can be pinned on the uninterestingly janky script, a mess of goofy jokes, storytelling clichés and dubious politics.

More disturbing, yet another robot, or maybe two, seems to have written a Hollywood script and hijacked a major studio production. Given the film's assembly-line screenplay and mechanistic storytelling, no other explanation seems viable. Certainly no one with a heartbeat or taste would blow so much talent, time and resources on such rubbishy writing.

A "slam, bam, thank you, ma'am" trifle of an entertainment.

Spielberg's infidelity to Aldiss (and perhaps to Kubrick, who knows?) would be pardonable if it didn't ruin his movie. In the end, he has failed to make a persuasive, smart movie about robots and people.

Mr. Stone builds his case seamlessly but leaves no room for dissent, much less a drop of doubt.

Sluggishly paced and shot in the sort of grubby digital video that renders even the dewiest skin tone liverwurst gray, the film comes across as little more than a series of acting workshop exercises wrapped in a tissue of cliché.

The violence is the most consistently inventive part of the whole package, though it grows tiresome in its thudding repetition. Like the story’s superficial finger-wagging at American wrongs, the brutality is both decorative and ritualistic.

Working with an uneven cast and an undercooked story, Mr. O’Malley hits the horror beats just fine (slam, creak, squeak) without putting a sinister spin on the assorted strange doings. For all the genre exertions, none of this feels the least bit spooky.

Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.

Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency.

There is no poetry here and little thought.

Mr. Caranfil never manages to negotiate the thickets of ambiguity, tragedy and bleak comedy, although the problem may be that someone behind the scenes just didn’t see the profit in a no-exit narrative.

Slick, noisy thriller.

As to be expected, it's all very beautiful; too bad it's also often annoying, save for a heartbreaking final half-hour.

Like too many animated films aimed at children, Barnyard embraces stereotypes that generally no longer cut it in adult films, and for good reason.

A twitchy Mr. Hawke builds a persuasive portrait of desperation with little help from the script and despite playing a character who makes so many mistakes he might as well be on a suicide mission.

A limp attempt to wed a romantic comedy to a buddy comedy, largely because the filmmakers see women as visitors from another planet, which is more or less what they now are in Hollywood.

In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.

The incrementally served up pieces never satisfactorily cohere. The blades fly as do the heads, but the movie remains disappointingly aground.

Stuff blows up and then more stuff blows up because that’s what happens when diversions like this hit movie screens around this time of year: chaos reigns and then some guy cleans it up.

The Farrellys are still not much interested in film as a visual medium, and when Lloyd and Harry aren’t smacking each other or dropping their pants, you might as well be listening to a radio play. There’s a story, but it doesn’t matter, certainly not to the leads or the good-natured sidekicks like Kathleen Turner and Rob Riggle.

For all the highfalutin dialogue and mysterioso goings-on, the only true mystery Hicks and Goldman conjure up is whether the mellifluously voiced outsider is dangling his new friend a little too closely on his knee.

Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark, The X-Files: I Want to Believe is the generally bad-news follow-up to the show’s first feature-film incarnation, "The X-Files."

Less savvy propagandists than Mr. Moore, the Celsius 41.11 filmmakers apply their thesis with a trowel.

Life is suffering, as the Buddha said (including in Hardy's emotionally grinding novels), but it's more complex and contradictory than the ginned-up realism Mr. Winterbottom delivers here.

Every so often, Mr. Arslan cuts to Kurdistan, where a group of women wander the barren landscape, a Greek chorus gone astray in a film gone amiss.

A slag heap of outrageous coincidence and shimmering be-all-that-you-can-be posturing, the film is for all intents and purposes another Top Gun retread, which is why its lies don't register as deeply or offensively as those put forth by films like "Mississippi Burning" -- it's too silly to take seriously.

Both in its ingratiating vibe and bland execution, Cars is nothing if not totally, disappointingly new-age Disney.

Directed by the young actor Adam Goldberg, best known for playing the Jewish soldier who falls to a Nazi knife in "Saving Private Ryan," I Love Your Work is an attempt to say something interesting about modern celebrity.

Mr. Clooney gets some things right in Suburbicon, including visually and with his two appealing child actors, who together give the movie a heartbeat.... But he skimps on the adult characters’ inner lives, and, once the narrative weight shifts to the Lodges, he never finds the tone that balances the movie’s sincerity with its nihilism.

A movie that desperately wants her (Latifah's) hip, her edge and mostly her blackness but doesn't know what to do with the human being who comes with the package.

It’s hard to know what the director Allen Coulter could have done to improve Will Fetters’s absurdly contrived, yakky script about love and loss, largely set in the summer of 2001. But Mr. Coulter doesn’t help matters by infusing the movie with grave self-importance.

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.

A dud.

Vedette joins a recent roster of documentaries about the uses and abuses of farm animals (others include “Cow” and “Gunda”). It’s disappointing that Bories and Chagnard fail to add anything to this environmentally urgent topic beyond their own surprise that these animals are more than indistinguishable milk factories.

Embedded between all the sex and sunlight are some woefully underdeveloped ideas about American militarism and masculinity. Dumont doesn't bother to develop these ideas, principally because he seems to think it's enough to arrange his characters like puppets and tear off their heads.

Apparently, because all the good jokes were used up in the first two "Fockers" movies, the wisenheimers behind the latest installment in this unnecessary trilogy decided to bring in some spew, opening a sick toddler's mouth like a fire hydrant and letting it rip.

An uncharacteristic if unsurprising dud.

Oblivion never transcends its inspirations to become anything other than a thin copy.

Despite Mr. Nakata's track record and the radiant presence of its star, Naomi Watts, The Ring Two is a dud.

One of the good things about bad movies is that when someone sneers about the unworthiness of a perfectly mediocre film like, say, "Crash," you can turn to a seriously unworthy film like, say, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and laugh. Ho. Ho. Ho.

The movie lurches from the improbably silly to the drearily so, while the characters remain so emotionally and psychologically divorced from life that they might as well be zombies or sitcom stick figures.

An overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different.

Riddled with holes and undeveloped characters, and marred by lurching rhythms that may reflect some triage editing, so it's hard to see what Mr. Hafstrom brings to this film other than a murky palette.

As a film, it essentially bites.

In the end, it taketh — your time, patience and faith in newly imagined dystopias — more than it giveth.

A most unfortunate film that combines standard documentary techniques, including talking-head interviews, with some maladroit dramatizations from Aury's life and her novel.

The movie is apparently the most popular British comedy in history. I guarantee that its success has nothing to do with the quality of the actual movie.

Much like the dress that Mr. Pierre designed for her — a white number whose bold black zigzag obscures all of its seams — Mrs. Trump seems exceptionally good at keeping hidden how everything, her marriage and family included, fits together.

Scott's energy helps keep the movie going during its sluggish moments and animates its few bright spots, including a pleasurably dumb showdown on the dance floor of a gay bar.

For the most part it is an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. Mr. Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness.

About the only thing holding it together is Idris Elba, whose irrepressible magnetism and man-of-stone solidity anchors this mess but can’t redeem it.

Joker: Folie à Deux is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom.

Cast adrift with vague, improbable characters and a plot that's at once under-and overcooked, the actors struggle to find a steady tone, lurching from somber to silly as the director tries to figure out what he's doing.

Far more troubling than the documentary's lack of data and analysis, its refusal to pose even basic questions -- whether, for instance, the so-called war on drugs is a total farce -- is the sense that these seven lost souls are principally on display for our viewing displeasure.

The film means to be a darkly funny look at the perils of winning at all costs, but there's nothing dark and searching about its take.

The mood is hermetic to the point of claustrophobia, embellished with a sense of everyday surrealism indebted to David Lynch.

Unlike Tracy and Hepburn, the loving and loathing here are absent music and wit and tend to imply that what Moore's character really needs is a good frolic.

Long on atmosphere and short on believability.

A grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology.

It’s a bummer to see Ms. Page and especially Ms. Moore — who at this point in her career can usually act her way out of any cliché — so badly stranded by a generic script, credited to Ron Nyswaner, and by a director, Peter Sollett, who can’t figure out how to lift his actors and the material above the bad writing.

Although it's often laugh-out-loud laughably bad, 88 Minutes is mostly just a slog.

At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie Uncharted, an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series.

You don’t wait long to be disappointed.

Bruckheimer's latest is in some crucial respects worse than those earlier blockbuster bids ("Gone in 60 Seconds" and "Coyote Ugly") -- certainly it's more fraudulent -- because unlike those films, which don't claim to be about anything other than thrills and tits, Remember the Titans means to be about race.

If only the whole thing were as funny as an Albert Brooks movie.

Madonna may be better in this film than she's been in some of her recent endeavors, especially when she stops screeching her lines, but she's done herself no favors with her choice of material.

The appealing Mr. Baker never manages to find the right tone for the material, partly because he’s been seriously miscast (he radiates too much decency and intelligence for the role), though more because Mr. Waters never establishes a coherent tone for either the character or his situation.

Maybe it's the sight of Leguizamo running around dressed only in boots and a well-placed sock that does her in, or maybe it's just that she's seen this movie too many times before. She isn't the only one.

The real-life sisters Hilary and Haylie Duff star in this incompetent spin on the poor-little-rich-girl story.

Doesn't have the courage of its conceit, only an abundance of bad ideas and worse taste.

The risible dialogue, the bulging eyeballs, the heaving bosoms, the digitally rendered hyenas and squirming maggots, the movie fails to achieve the status of the instant camp classic. That's partly because the vibe of the film is too torpid.

If nothing else, it’s amusing to imagine what [Mr. Bridges] and Ms. Moore chatted about between takes and how each managed to keep from cracking up, more or less.

Twisted is rubbish, but it looks good enough, moves fast enough and does improve as it progresses, principally because its plot disintegrtes to the point of outright comedy.

The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.

The Benchwarmers is the sort of trash that Hollywood does really well. It is also, to quote Mr. Schneider, "a master's thesis on the form of a quintessential Adam Sandler comedy."

Neither ambitious enough to take seriously nor sleazy enough to enjoy, The Quiet flirts with the trappings of exploitation cinema without going all the way.

The actors don’t just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.

The jokes don't just fizzle into insignificance; they flop about with gaudy ineffectualness, gasping for air like newly landed trout.

This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him.

The film portrays a family undone by grief over the death of a loved one; that, in any event, is its plot synopsis. More accurately, the film is a wallow of authorial narcissism, and a tedious, unrelenting, uninteresting wallow at that.

They drink at the pub, they drink at home. They drink until they pass out and then, after they have had a good vomit, they drink again. If that sounds too disgusting to watch, it almost is.

With so little trust and even less dialogue to back him up, it's no wonder Li rarely takes his left hand out of his pants pocket. His fists aren't furious; they're on strike.

There may once have been a real movie rattling inside the empty studio package known as The Big Bounce, but no longer.

There is little to recommend here, even for Huppert completists who follow her anywhere.

About the only good thing to say about this mess is that it's rotten enough that even Altman cultists may be forced to reconsider their devotion.

Hitman exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull. It’s bang, boom, blah -- action movies for bored dummies.

By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn’t just invest Mr. Hamid’s story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.

The movie’s truth is presumably meant to rest in its emotions, in the spilled tears of its characters, but the only things at stake here are the cozy sniffles of the art-film patron.

The combustible Mr. Ironside vaulted into movie immortality as the antagonist in “Scanners,” David Cronenberg’s down-and-dirty, exploding-head anti-classic. Synchronicity, a low-budget misfire about time and love, could use some exploding heads, dialogue and ideas.

There’s no denying the real Heyerdahl’s bravery, but if this movie is to be believed, his voyage was largely bereft of tension and interesting conversation.

A film worthy neither of Mr. Keaton's talents nor even a desperate horror fan's attention.

The lackluster, at times abysmal writing wouldn’t much matter if Resurgence popped visually or featured a charismatic star who could lift a movie as effortlessly as Will Smith did in the first feature.