Manohla Dargis

Unfortunately, Ms. Faucher's screenplay, written with Gaëlle Macé, never finds its focus or reason for being, and Ms. Naymark just doesn't have enough screen presence to make up for the lack of a story or to justify all those tenderly attentive close-ups.

Live by Night is a messy, unfocused movie about ambition, lost ideals, corrupt men and a thief whose idea of life on his own terms means pulling the trigger.

There's something unsettling when fiction exploits this history to such puny, self-interested ends.

There's never been a movie director like Catherine Breillat, a fearless visionary and one hell of a woman.

It’s the sort of well-intentioned independent effort that can make criticism feel like overkill. There’s nothing to hate, nothing to love. The movie’s greatest virtue is that it gives Ms. Aniston a little room to play against the somewhat sardonic tough-cookie type that she deploys in vulgar comedies.

Mr. Allen's invocation of the "Thin Man" films in an interview makes sense, even if he’s no William Powell and Ms. Johansson is certainly no Myrna Loy. Scoop was made by someone who understands that what makes the "Thin Man" series enduring isn't whodunit and why, but the way Nick and Nora look at each other as they sip their martinis, Asta nipping at their heels.

The movie is a pummeling slog — 45 minutes of setup and an eternity of relentless combat.

Isn't half bad and every so often is pretty good, filled with real sentiment, worked-through performances and a story textured enough to sometimes feel a lot like life.

It's a demented kitsch mess (although the smeary digital video does match the muddled narrative), but it's savvy about celebrity and has more guts and energy than much of what will open this year.

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.

Cute and smarmy are nothing new for writer-director Tom DiCillo; what is new is the crushingly unfunny fusion of the two he's hit upon for this film.

Ms. Clarkson and Mr. Speedman do what they can with their underwritten and overly contrived roles... Late in the game, Tim Roth boats in as Tom, a local with a grudge, and shocks the movie to life by throwing some lightning bolts of his own.

Mr. MacFarlane can be funny, but Ted 2 is insultingly lazy hack work that is worth discussing primarily because of how he tries and fails to turn race, and specifically black men, into comedy fodder.

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.

While it can be seen as an environmental horror movie (if you must), Rubber doesn't dig down but instead merrily rolls on, as Mr. Dupieux plays with narrative and form. In one wonderful cinematic coup the tire spots a crow and shifts toward the bird so that it's framed in the tire hole, an angle that turns the tire into a camera. Point. Click. Explode.

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.

Mr. Scott’s seriousness isn’t always well served by the scripts he films, but in Mr. McCarthy he has found a partner with convictions about good and evil rather than canned formula.

Mr. Basset is too enamored of the usual action film clichés, down to some Hollywood-gangsta gun play. But he has a graphic visual style that suits the simplistic material and he keeps you watching even as the wet, sucking sounds of skewered flesh grow tedious.

Minor whimsy of a film.

Some of what happens feels real, a lot doesn't, but even when the screenplay groans with clichés, the four lead actresses play their parts with truckloads of heart.

Some of the funny stuff is actually funny, some of it is funny and yucky, but most of it is just stupid.

There are many ways for a movie to go wrong, and Tomb Raider goes wrong in many of the most obvious: It has a generic story, bad writing, a miscast lead, the wrong director and no fun.

Becomes guilty of the very prejudice that his film has so obviously tried to subvert. It's too bad -- the rest of it is hilarious.

Greed is good and comes without a hint of conscience in 21, a feature-length bore about some smarty-pants who take Vegas for a ride.

This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.

Lockout, is as dopey an entertainment as imaginable, but it's also a reminder that the film's star, Guy Pearce, has always had great screen magnetism, to which he has now added a bedrock of muscle. Also: he can act.

While the veteran action director Walter Hill hasn't done much to enliven this dull, unmemorable material, with its mechanically moving parts and popping gunfire, its dull-red splatter and spray, he has brought a spark of wit to the proceedings, starting with the figure of Sylvester Stallone.

My guess is that after years of being the trick pony, he wanted to see what it was like to be the ringmaster.

The Girl on the Train is a preposterous movie but not an unenjoyable one. If that sounds like faint praise, well, it is and it isn’t. There’s always something to be said for an entertainment that sustains its nuttiness all the way to its twisty finish.

While its blowout finale is telegraphed long before the first act ends, and too much else is just as obvious and bland, Judd, Freeman and Franklin never stop adding filigree. The big picture isn't much to look at, but the detailing isn't bad.

Softer, louder and cleaner than the 1974 version, the new film sentimentalizes the prisoners and the game, filing down their sharpest edges so that winning becomes a matter of triumph rather than resistance.

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

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.

Wilde does some fine work here, despite hammering the same notes early and often . . . But she isn’t a strong enough filmmaker at this point to navigate around the story’s weaknesses, much less transcend them. That’s especially tough on the actors.

100 percent goo.

Amy Schumer puts out so much energy in I Feel Pretty that it’s hard not to feel charged up, too. The movie is seriously suboptimal, but she is such a force for good — for comedy, for women — and the laughs land often enough that you can go, if somewhat begrudgingly, with the messy flow.

It's disconcerting to watch Sweetness, tiny and light-skinned, assaulting Latonya, large and dark-skinned, partly because it bluntly if inconclusively underscores a crucial color divide that runs through this film like a throbbing vein.

Ms. Lemmons has a tough time finding her tone. From scene to scene, the actors are good and then less so, while the direction wavers from assured to unsteady.

The director, Burr Steers, whose other credits include “Igby Goes Down” and stints directing TV shows, keeps people and things moving fast enough so that you don’t have time to worry about the details, like the inanity of the story.

Ms. Bullock, who excels at playing spunky, is as appealing as usual, but the role proves as awkward as those heels.

Akerlund, a veteran music-video director who intersperses Lords of Chaos with mildly surrealistic bursts, never establishes a coherent or interesting point of view. The tone unproductively veers from the goofy to the creepy, which creates a sense that he was still figuring it out in the editing.

[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.

Mr. Carrey is such an attention hog that most actresses have a hard time holding on to their corner of the screen when he's onboard, especially in broader comedies. But Ms. Leoni never cedes her ground. Both performers exude such acute neediness - there's a touch of Jerry Lewis and Lucille Ball in their mutual frenzy - that not to love them even a little would seem cruel.

The Guru turns out to be just a flirtation with the musical rather than a full-on embrace. That's a shame because the musical interludes are where the film wears its heart and finds its soul.

Brother is a solid return to gangster form for Kitano, who knows how to transcend the most overly familiar genre clichés without betraying the rules of engagement.

Jane Campion's astonishingly beautiful new film may be the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year.

Sincere and sinister and inevitably ambitious, a serious work that insists on its own seriousness even when it edges toward the preposterous.

Even in Boarding Gate, a modestly scaled, self-consciously tawdry exercise in genre appropriation, Mr. Assayas manages to say more about what it is to be human -- to desire, to fear, to be alone -- than most filmmakers say in a lifetime.

Figgis certainly was after something different, but like "Timecode," in which four linked stories unwind in separate panels, Hotel proves to be a fundamentally insipid bid at experimental narrative.

Whenever faced with another puerile movie ostensibly about women, I play a little game called What Would Thelma and Louise Do?

How did something that started out so cool get so dorky?

As the movie lurches along by fits and starts, toggling between the little Nantucket room and the great watery world, it becomes apparent that the filmmakers have no idea how to reconcile not just two parallel stories but also the past and our contemporary age.

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.

Ms. Diaz has found her down-and-dirty element in the kind of broad comedy that threatens to get ugly and more or less succeeds on that threat.

It tells us everything most of us know already, including the fact that politicians lie, journalists fail and youth flounders. Mostly it tells us that Mr. Redford feels really bad about the state of things. Welcome to the club.

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.

Elle dresses in shades of sorbet and dolls up her Chihuahua like a bantamweight drag queen, but by fighting the good fight she's also giving alpha girls and women their due, rescuing them from the magazine horror stories and the taint of Hillary.

What makes this nonsense more galling than usual is that while Ladder 49 might have started out as a heartfelt attempt to honor those in the line of literal fire, it weighs in as an attempt to exploit their post-Sept. 11 symbolism.

Once again, Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" haunts the stage with derbies and splayed legs, but with results that are strictly Sally Bowdlerized.

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.

A mainstream, eager-to-please, relatively generic endeavor, not an auteurist showcase.

In the end, it is Mr. Egoyan's fealty to the novel, its feints and dodges, that proves the film's undoing.

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.

Part of what defeats Mr. Abraham and may help explain why Mr. Hiddleston’s performance, however appealing, never gets below the surface, is that Williams is one of those artists whose eloquence is expressed through his work.

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

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.

Often ridiculous, awkward, unsatisfying and dour melodramatic adaptation.

A sui generis excursion into sex and race that is by turns terrible...and close to divine.

A blandly diverting, chastely conceived and grammatically challenged fairy tale for our bland, chaste and grammatically challenged age.

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

With modest resources, some nice digital camerawork and an appealing cast - the likable Ms. Jones draws you in easily - Mr. Shapiro keeps you engaged even when his story falters.

One of the most enjoyably inane movies of the season, this faux Southern Gothic offers an embarrassment of geek pleasures.

It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical, with all the power belting and jazz-hand choreography that implies.

Long on atmosphere and short on believability.

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."

No one comes out of Hollywood Homicide looking good, but the film fades fast.

It's impossible to find an iota of aesthetic worth or an ounce of pleasure in this sludge.

Lazy, infinitely silly cartoon.

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.

Zemeckis improves on the first film adaptation, a 1990 oddity directed by Nicolas Roeg. There’s more heart in the new version and more emotion, qualities which can go missing in those Zemeckis movies that get lost in his technical whiz-bangery.

A sly conceptual coup d’art and a deeply sincere exploration of masculinity and its discontents, with a little hot sex thrown in.

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.

In essence, this is a string of intermittently interesting, occasionally funny, periodically wacky if rarely disturbing, sometimes touching though fairly boring and poorly shot human-interest stories.

Ms. Olsen and the more persuasive Mr. Isaac may generate heat, but their performances and the filmmaking lack the frenzy that might explain how these two crazy kids turned into murderous fiends.

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

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

This is one of those sadistic exercises that puts its characters through the wringer without saying anything true or meaningful.

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.

Irons' doleful lassitude sucks the energy right out of the story and makes this listlessly directed adaptation droop all the more.

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

Consistently watchable, even when it drifts into dullness because Mr. Singh always gives you something to look at,

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 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.

The movie is glorious pulp pastiche without the smirks, which is fitting given the author's ironic humanism.

Highfalutin, lightly enjoyable mush, Reminiscence is one of those speculative fictions that are at once undernourished and overcooked. It makes no sense (despite all the explaining), but it draws you in with genre beats, pretty people and the professional polish of its machined parts.

An airless, sometimes distressingly mirthless comedy.

A nutty, often enjoyable farrago of craft and cinematic sampling, King Arthur moves fast and loose, and is almost aggressive in its absence of an original idea, in and of itself a Bruckheimer trademark.

Brilliantly edited and gorgeously shot, Esther Kahn is a dream to look at and, courtesy of Howard Shore's minor chords and high-strung strings, definitely something to hear.

Unsteadily pitched between horror and comedy, Secret Window turns out to be neither terribly scary nor especially funny.

It isn't only that there is a dearth of ideas in Hollywood Ending -- however hateful, "Deconstructing Harry" was at least about something -- it's that the whole thing is almost entirely devoid of pleasure.

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

Apparently started out as just another soft-core item, or what the Japanese call a pink film, but evolved into something more ambitious, sort of. Certainly it doesn’t look or play out like the typical American pay-TV fodder.

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

What is undeniable is that because Rust looks as good as it does, every time riders on horseback appear against a florid sky, it isn’t the characters you think about — it’s Halyna Hutchins.

The great, and given Costa-Gavras' previous m.o., inevitable irony of Mad City is that even as it condemns the media for exploiting the situation, it's busy doing the very same.

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

The film's start-and-go rhythm can be as maddening as the characters' amorality and sheer wallowing stupidity, but Clark has an uncanny talent for putting atmosphere on celluloid.

For all its flaws, its obvious if irrelevant similarity to "Dead Poets Society," it lets us spend some quality time with some of the finest actresses in American film as they give energetic life to one of the most radically underrepresented minorities in Hollywood: the intelligent woman.

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

Sometimes a movie's charm materializes where you least expect it and in this particular case it emerges in the unlikely form of Henderson's character, Scotland Yard detective Janet Losey.

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.

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.

As a director, Bigelow knows how to get out of the house, but she can be impatient when it comes to humdrum reality. That may account for her interest in Shreve's novel, with its epic tragedies, and it may help to explain the misguided casting of Penn and Hurley, each of whom comes equipped with an oversized personality.

Parigi -- who's clearly made a close study of Alfred Hitchcock's obsessions and has watched a fair share of intelligent horror perched between cheekiness and Grand Guignol (think "Re-Animator") -- succeeds nicely.

Exactly the sort of good bad movie that Hollywood does best -- it's big, worthless fun.

Whatever the case, The Invasion lurches and drags and teeters on the brink of death from scene to scene; it plays as if it had been made by someone in a trance, though not a cool one.

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.

This existentially and aesthetically unnecessary sequel to the equally irrelevant if depressingly successful "Fantastic Four."

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

The latest and best of the movies about a girl, her vampire and their impossible, ridiculously appealing - yes, I surrendered - love story.

Manages to entertain mildly only because it traffics in all the familiar action-movie clichés, giving moviegoers ample opportunity to test their action-movie I.Q.

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

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

As saccharine as it is disposable.

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

At first luxurious blush it’s a jet-setting marital melodrama, one of those he-said, she-said (and wept) encounter sessions decked with designer shades, to-die-for digs and millionaire tears. More interestingly, the movie, which Ms. Jolie Pitt wrote and directed, is a knowing or at least a ticklishly amusing demonstration of celebrity and its relay of gazes from one of the most looked-at women in the world.

Following the lead tendered by the credited screenwriters, Steve Koren and Mark O'Keefe, the director Frank Coraci struggles to push the character toward the kind of age-appropriate complexity lost on Mr. Sandler, forgetting that his star only works when, as all those ponderous bosoms suggest, he's un-weaned.

It’s intentionally playful and an inadvertent giggle, an overripe melodrama that’s by turns a bodice-ripper, a cloak-and-dagger thriller and a serious-minded historical drama with dubious contemporary overtones.

The South takes another beating in Sweet Home Alabama, but that's nothing compared with the one conferred on the sweetheart personality of its pint-sized Gen. Sherman.

It's a colorful patchwork of family high and low points, schoolboy days, professional triumphs and assorted epiphanies (including sex with women followed by sex with men).

The monster that creeps into the satisfyingly shivery horror film Intruders doesn't just hide under the bed, it also lurks in dark corners, including those dimmed by your own imagination.

The carnage pushes you away (and wears you down), even as the genre, industrious cast, beautiful landscapes and stark, often striking visuals pull you in.

Whatever the case, it's dispiriting that the draggiest, soppiest scenes in Hall Pass, as well as the most disgusting gag, involve women.

Written by Vince Gilligan and directed by newcomer Dean Parisot, Home Fries is far too cute and eager to please, but Barrymore and Wilson are charming, and O'Hara is a blast.

In "Pretty Woman" Roberts played a tough whore with a soft heart. Here, she's a business owner whose sense of self is so tenuous she doesn't even know how she likes her eggs done.

Exploitation cinema of the most narcoleptic kind.

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

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.

Bridges turns a two-dimensional image into a presence so vital, so filled with breath and blood, that you uneasily fall in love with his character and abandon all thought of the artifice that's brought it to life.

Though seriously miscast as an unreformed alcoholic, the bronzed Ms. Paltrow gets by with a thin, serviceable voice (she sings her own songs) and an actor's confidence.

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.

When the movie works, its buoyancy can be infectious and persuasive.

Everything looks professional if undistinguished.

Although at times Mr. Gens veers dangerously close to the unpardonable, with images that evoke the Holocaust too strongly, Frontier(s) finally works because its shivers are as plausible as they are outrageous.

Billy Bob Thornton's leer is much in evidence in the shoddy comedy School for Scoundrels, though the tackiness of the film, its lazy direction and its self-satisfied stupidity may mean that Mr. Thornton curled his lip about the production rather than for it.

Can the major studios still make magic? From the looks of Oz the Great and Powerful, a dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals, the answer seems to be no — unless, perhaps, the man behind the curtain is Martin Scorsese or James Cameron.

The junky, clunky, grimly unfunny follow-up to the marginally better “Rush Hour 2” and the significantly finer “Rush Hour,” isn’t the worst movie of the summer. But it’s an enervating bummer nonetheless, largely because it shows so little respect for its two likable stars and its audience.

Like oversolicitous lovers, the filmmakers are hung up on foreplay -- and not enough old-fashioned teenage raunch.

An exploitation flick, but without the thrills or cleavage.

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

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

The Legend of Tarzan has a whole lot of fun, big-screen things going for it — adventure, romance, natural landscapes, digital animals and oceans of rippling handsome man-muscle. Its sweep and easy pleasures come from its old-fashioned escapades — it’s one long dash through the jungle by foot, train, boat and swinging vine — but what makes it more enjoyable than other recycled stories of this type is that the filmmakers have given Tarzan a thoughtful, imperfect makeover.

Mr. Cohen just seems off his game in “Grimsby,” and it may be that the movie’s high concept proved too constricting for someone who has done some of his best work (as in the “Borat” film) with a looser, more episodic format.

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.

(Duffy's) assembled a fine cast -- it's hard to take your eyes off the two young leads -- but he's given them little to do but squeeze triggers and mouth platitudes.

Although the presence of Mr. Sheen is initially distracting, it soon becomes the movie's greatest asset. There is, as it turns out, some benefit to having a real performance even in a formulaic entertainment like this.

Rock can't set up a decent-looking shot, and he doesn't care about niceties such as character development and all that narrative downtime in between jokes. But he nonetheless wrings biting humor from serious issues with the sort of ferocity that made Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce men of respect as well as comedy.

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.

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

Trying to parse meaning in "Mia" is secondary to its main point, which is its look, created with 500,000 hand-drawn frames. That's impressive in an age in which most mainstream animation is done with computers.

Man, does this one make the first movie look like a masterpiece. What was Renée Zellweger thinking? It can't have been fun to put on all that weight, especially for a film as ghastly as this.

The Great Man theory of history that’s recycled in this movie is inevitably unsatisfying, but never more so when the figure at the center remains as opaque as Jobs does here.

The rhythms of the dialogue move to the same beat as steadily as a metronome ticks and tocks, while every sentence is polished like stone, absent the jaggedness of real breath and life. You can hear the play in this thing without even knowing it was based on a theatrical production.

About the only thing that distinguishes this iteration from those of yore is that the violence is more explicit, the edits are faster, and no one has a stogie stuck in his kisser.

Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.

The film isn't just banal, it's aggressively, arrogantly banal.

Whatever the case, Mr. Owen and Mr. Statham (who provides a nice duet with a chair) make a prettily matched pair amid the pileup of sub-Bourne action set pieces, sad laughs and clichés.

Mr. Miller and his co-writer, Tom Phelan, manage to get under your skin largely with borrowed implements, though they receive solid support from Willem Dafoe and the resourceful veteran cinematographer Fred Murphy.

Alvarez tries to pep things up with chases, near escapes, dramatic rescues, fetish wear and female nudity. But the whole thing is a bummer, at times risible.

You don’t wait long to be disappointed.

Feels newly hatched. Some of the laugh lines creak as loudly as grandma's rocker and the cultural references send up billows of dust.

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

This is the latest addition to a new type of drug movie -- one that exploits addiction for a lot of self-adoring showboating.

In this film Mr. Coppola blurs dreams and everyday life and suggests that through visual and narrative experimentation he has begun the search for new ways of making meaning, new holy places for him and for us. He may not have found them yet, but, then, he’s just waking up.

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.

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

An early candidate for worst film of the year is Freedomland, an inept, lethally dull drama.

Too bad that by the time the volcano shoots its wad, the movie has already died a thousand deaths, ground to a halt by the interminable waiting for the damn thing to blow.

Though mildly amusing, Murphy's two characters in Meet Dave -- a wee captain and a humanoid spaceship -- neither tax nor stretch him.

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.

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.

In the preposterous thriller The Forgotten, a pseudospiritual, mumbo-jumbo, science-fiction inflected mess, the director Joseph Ruben does not just fail to tap into Ms. Moore's talent; he barely gets her attention.

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.

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.

Kinberg does better when he goes big, which suits this franchise delivery system. For the most part he just moves characters from point A to B, pausing for face-to-face heart to hearts before the next blowout. But the mayhem is generally coherent and executed with clean, crisp special effects, even if Kinberg settles for slo-mo clichés.

Shyamalan’s talent for primitive scares remains intact in Glass, as does his love for cramming a whole lot of story in one feature.

However caricatured a vision of female empowerment, Lara Croft exercises an irresistible tug not just on the adolescent male imagination but the 12-year-old female imagination as well.

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.

There are enough decent moments in "Snow Flower" that you can at times see the remains of a better movie amid the jolting transitions between past and present, but these eras never really speak to each other, much less to you.

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

In the new film, it's personal tragedy that provokes the journey, not social upheaval or even scientific curiosity -- which, predictably, makes for a story that's at once more familiar and less interesting.

Like, you know, genius. But, like, you know, why?

It’s one of those dumb movies that are so gleeful about their own idiocy that taking it seriously may seem pointless, which is always a good reason to take a movie seriously.

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.

Tighter, tougher and every bit as witless as its predecessor, The Divergent Series: Insurgent — the second segment in the cycle — arrives with a yawn and ends with a bang.

The director Alister Grierson, not grasping that bad dialogue is sometimes best delivered quietly, encourages his actors to shout and thrash about, and so they do, like fish out of water and performers out of their depth.

It's too little Grier too late, but it's also fairly satisfying to watch.

Transcendence is a dark, lurchingly entertaining pastiche of age-old worries, future-shock jolts, hot-button topics and old-fashioned genre thrills.

Ironclad alternately feels, plays and sounds like an abridged television mini-series and a feature-length video game.

Written by Mr. Vaughn and Jared Stern, The Internship spreads the corporate gospel with sporadic jokes, the usual buddy-film shenanigans (a visit to a strip club, a teasingly shared bed) and a lot of motivational cant.

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.

The movie should be manna for anyone who likes animated fantasias without wisecracks, commercials and overwrought warbling about self-actualization, meaning that it's suitable for those who will grow up either to be the next Tim Burton or simply to enjoy his movies.

Part of the draw of these movies is that they don’t create beauty, but instead borrow the emotions of the beauty they depict. (This, more or less, is one definition of kitsch, courtesy of the philosopher Tomas Kulka.) That makes the movies easy to watch and easy to forget.

At their best, they're closer to the Three Stooges; at their most banal, they're as original as the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing nude with socks on their penises -- It's a hoot.

There's a surprising amount to relish about this gleefully self-conscious, disposable romp through horror's sexiest subgenre, mainly the film's grasp of its own terms.

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.

The movie is ridiculous, but since the special effects are really quite impressive, that seems a small point.

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.

Neither here nor there, the film is “Elf” without the goofy jokes, Will Ferrell or heart, “Bad Santa” without the smut, Billy Bob Thornton or spleen.

Alas, as is often the case with lower-end genre movies, the story cooked up by Wiseman and his friends, actor Kevin Grevioux and the film's screenwriter, Danny McBride, is decidedly less important than the look of the film and its influences.

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.

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

In Next, a crummy action and speculative-fiction hybrid, Nicolas Cage plays a guy who can see into the future two minutes at a time. It's too bad that Mr. Cage couldn't tap into those same powers of divination to save himself from making yet another inexplicably bad choice in roles.

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

By turns unnerving and numbing.

Sander has turned mediocrity into the triumph of the smug.

Pure junk.

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

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.

Arthur and Vortigern mix it up amid a lot of shenanigans, detours and filler, some bad, some good and all of it disposable.

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

In the end, neither the appealing cast -- nor the force of Scott's stunning imagery is enough to make us understand why these men died.

For her directorial debut, Home Again, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, Nancy Meyers’s daughter, has made a shabby copy of a Nancy Meyers romantic comedy.

The message just gets louder and louder, cruder and cruder, which is too bad because Mr. DeMonaco knows how to set a stage.

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.

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

Ms. Streisand hasn't been called on to deliver an immortal or even interesting performance, but she is a pip to watch.

The writer and director, Jeff Wadlow, can’t obscure the movie’s misogyny, and he also has a tough time staging a scene and selling a joke. His worst offense is that he has no understanding of the power, gravity and terrible beauty of violent imagery, which means he has no grasp of cinema.

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.

The scares are plentiful and sometimes ticklishly funny in The Curse of La Llorona, an enjoyably old-fashioned ghost story.

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.

There are modest pleasures in a familiar story told differently enough that you're happy to keep guessing and watching.

A nondramatic work best appreciated as a pure image-and-sound event.

Shandling comes off as a sleazebag -- all that's missing are the gold chains, tufted chest hair and English Leather.

The Salton Sea isn't without interest or ideas, though some of the better ones are cribbed from David Fincher and, especially, Martin Scorsese.

Even a talented lead couldn't save Mr. Kramer from himself. As a writer, he may have fashioned a genre-busting screenplay, one that has its postmodern cake and eats it, too, but as a director he proves himself as blood simple, if generally less adept, as any Hollywood hire.

Sabotage isn’t any good, even if its jagged, jolting visual excesses and frenzied energy keep you awake, gasping and guffawing by turns.

Does it add up? Not really, but it passes the time nicely, working best when Mr. Monahan keeps it vague and off-kilter as his characters roam among the Hollywood ghosts.

Even at his shakiest, Mr. Blomkamp holds your attention with stories about characters banding together to emerge from a hell not of their own making, a liberation journey that just isn’t the same old, same old when a director was born in South Africa.

A sufficiently entertaining, adamantly old-fashioned adaptation that follows the play’s general outline without ever rising to the passionate intensity of its star-cross’d crazy kids.

There are nice touches... Yet many of the movie’s more nominally horrific elements are too familiar.

What keeps you watching isn't the story or the actors, none of whom are at the top of their form, but the relentlessness of Friedkin's vision. The film has great forward thrust -- Friedkin's a full-throttle guy -- and the director knows where to put the camera.

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

Sincere and grindingly predictable, this particular journey mixes tears and reams of dialogue, accusations and confessions with the usual roadside attractions, including a convenience store, a quirky motel and some lightly offbeat American types.

This is competent if completely impersonal filmmaking of a familiar type that finds the usual allotment of famous, or at least famous enough, actors.

Amiably goofy, but it isn't especially funny.

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.

The movie is funny without being much good; mostly, it’s another rung on Ms. McCarthy’s big ladder up. It’s a fitful amalgam of bouncy and slack laughs mixed in with some blasts of pure physical comedy and loads of yammering heads. There isn’t much filmmaking in it, outside of Ms. McCarthy’s precision comedic timing and natural screen presence.

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.

Ms. MacLaine, 82, holds the screen effortlessly. Too bad she has to share it.

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.

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

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.

With its nods to the original “Star Trek” and David Lynch’s proto-steampunk hallucination “Dune,” it seduces the eye with filigreed flourishes even as the mind reels from some of the mildewy storytelling.

The movie is as blunt an instrument as the poster, but it’s also crammed with enough moving parts and unexpected distractions (Winona Ryder as a “meth whore”) to make it an indefensibly enjoyable piece of exploitation hackwork.

Mimi Leder shows none of the vigor she exhibited when directing for E.R., and screenwriters Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin betray a real aptitude for hack work.

The film's gadgetry is pricier, but the leering is strictly the Playboy joke page circa 1967.

Jennifer Lopez's butt? Alas, the moment is over all too soon; the movie, sadly, is not.

This is the kind of cornball entertainment that rainy afternoons were made for. Throw in a cozy sofa too. Beastly will size down well on your television.

Green Lantern is bad. This despite Mr. Reynolds's dazzling dentistry, hard-body physique and earnest efforts.

Dead Man Down, unfortunately, turns out to be too innocuous to qualify as either actually good or delectably bad.

The remake doesn’t as much improve on the original as match it goofily amusing moment for moment.

A comedy without a shred of obvious filmmaking and an endless stream of good, bad, sometimes terrible, often absurd jokes.

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 no wonder the faithful continue to forsake the movies, given junky embarrassments like Nights in Rodanthe.

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

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.

I laughed a couple of times, but mostly I was bored out of my mind and not a little depressed.

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.

Writer and director Gilfillan has an estimable biography, having studied at the Beijing Film Academy and worked as an assistant to John Woo, but there's nothing in her prosaic feature debut that suggests this means a thing.

Some of it, though, is absurdly comic, like the shot of a guy on a Segway that exists for no reason other than that someone here thought the movie could use a small laugh right then. It did. It could use more.

Tammy’s journey, as they like to say in movieland, is into self-worth. Yet the far more interesting trip here, at least until her self-actualization kicks in, is through an America of lousy jobs, tyrannical bosses, nickel-and-diming poverty and real-looking women.

The film is not a beautiful object or a memorable cultural one, and yet it charms, however awkwardly. Ms. Swank’s ardent sincerity and naked emotionalism dovetail nicely with Mr. LaGravenese’s melodramatic excesses.

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

Kept in check by his character's neuroses, Pearce holds our attention throughout, but it isn't until near the end that he manages to break free of his character's and his director's inhibitions.

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

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.

Not since John Travolta sprouted a head of dreadlocks and strapped on platform boots for "Battlefield Earth" has cinematic science fiction been such good-bad fun as in The Chronicles of Riddick.

It’s amusing to see identical Arnolds clash like titans, but nobody here seems to have fully grasped that they had another heavyweight in Mr. Clarke.

With a body built for action and a smile made for comedy, Smith eases through his scenes -- cool but never scary, a touch hip-hop and thoroughly audience-friendly. And unlike Lawrence, he can act. Smith's ability to put over a scene, combined with his matinee charm, goes a long way to making the film's violence palatable.

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.

Played by DMX in a gravel-pit monotone and a near-total lack of affect, King David cuts an unremittingly tedious swath through Never Die Alone.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

How anyone in the cast manages to keep a straight face is one of the film's innumerable mysteries.

Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production.

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.

Jolie never ignites, and neither does the movie. Mr. Depp doesn't fare better with a role that forces him to play meek and disappointingly mild, despite a few screenwriter-supplied tics.