Marc Savlov

It takes creepy, spooky, and altogether ooky to a hideous new level.

The twist – and it’s a smart, effective one to be sure – is that this time it’s not a bunch of beergasming dudebros making life hell for the Radners, but an off-campus sorority led by Moretz’s feminist-slash-party powerhouse blonde, Shelby.

The Rocketeer is a gung-ho all-American summer flick with the guts not to try and be anything else.

It’s so amiably predictable that you end up wanting to throw some Motörhead at it, just to see what happens.

For a first-time director like Barinholtz, The Oath is more than impressive. Tonally, it goes all over the place, but that only serves to keep the audience as off-balance as the characters onscreen. No matter what your political affiliation may be, this Orwellian farce is a candidate for President Trump’s least favorite film of the year.

Unleashed suffers from a surfeit of sentimentality at times (blame Besson for that), but it's Li's first major Western role of any depth and he acquits himself admirably as both mad dog and melancholy master.

It's a grim, dark, and relentlessly violent film throughout; James Bond as Terminator rather than Templar – but it delivers the goods in bloody high style: explosively, sexily, and with 007 shaken (not stirred) to his icy core.

A courtroom drama with a twist, this second feature from "Nightcrawler" writer/director Dan Gilroy features one of the best performances of Washington’s career.

An excellently cast biopic about yet another self-destructive genius who burnt out but will never fade away – at least not in France, or wherever cigarettes, alcohol, and sex are still allowed.

To be fair, there are some genuinely funny bits here, but the film's aim is so scattershot that it never really comes together like it should, and, as a result, it rarely rises above the level of Mel Brooks on a bad day.

To be sure, Snakes on a Plane is going to inspire some highly readable graduate-school film theses. You may even want to re-enroll to pen one yourself.

While Ferdinand isn’t a train wreck by any means, it does come off as an also-ran in a year now dominated by the truly marvelous "Coco."

Remains an above-average and affecting descent into both heretofore unknown Soviet naval history and the always popular submarine-in-peril genre.

Greenwald's doc is pure partisan warfare of the liberal stripe, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing.

13 Minutes, which was released in Germany two years ago, is an earnest examination of personal conscience and the frequent necessity of the individual to monkey wrench the state. Or at least to try.

Absurdist humor abounds throughout a story whose underlying themes echo Elvis Costello’s eternal question, “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?” even as corpses dangle from a foregrounded gallows.

McTiernan is an old hand at actioners and, like the pro he is, keeps the film rushing along from fiery stunt to stunt.

Not likely to win any hearts or minds this holiday season, La Bûche finally scores points by virtue of its inoffensiveness: Relax, pour a cuppa nog, and watch somebody else muck up the holidays for once.

You come away from Splinter feeling it would have made a far more effective short than the feature-length drag it is.

Bottom line: Jonah is strictly for kids suffering from rescinded television privileges or adults seeking a nap in a cool, dark environment that reeks of stale popcorn.

Miike's film is a cunning little comedy of manners gone mad. Even when you feel you have to turn away from the screen or lose your lunch, Miike has something interesting to say. I'm not entirely sure what it is but his lips are moving and something horrific is definitely coming out.

Less extraordinary and considerably more banal, given the sci-fi/comedy subject matter, is Men in Black 3's story, which jumps the ectomorphic shark in high style but with a deficit of actual belly laughs.

Tim Burton is all grown up and getting serious with this wildly scattershot tale.

Gordon-Levitt, however, nails the part completely, physically hunching down into himself and getting Snowden’s halting, thoughtful speech patterns just right, while Stone, working with screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald, creates a whirlwind ride nearly but not quite worthy of The Parallax View-era conspiracy thrillers.

You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy this light romantic comedy, but it helps.

The Guy Movie to end all Guy Movies, a ridiculously overblown summer testosterone blowout right down to the Wagnerian strains of the soundtrack and its stunningly high body count. It's also a hell of a lot of fun.

Shrek, DreamWorks' big green cash machine, has finally run dry, perhaps not of box office power, but most assuredly of the caustic, fractured fairy tale-isms and the wry, snarky wit that made the first film, and to a lesser degree, the first sequel, so winning.

Carter Burwell’s score is particularly thunderous, mirroring the onscreen action, and the 3-D really is – for once – superb, making for a rather breathtaking two hours. Well done.

Ultimately, it's undone by the overfamiliar nature of Doon and Lina's quest, the outcome of which, while breathlessly paced, is never really in question.

This is a garish, rocket-fueled slice of popcorn mayhem, and the perfect antidote to this summer's limp action lineup.

A go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator grab bag of raunchy sex gags and freakish outbursts. The cool thing is that it works.

Let’s be honest: With a cast like this, it doesn't matter too much what the characters are doing onscreen, or if it makes about as much sense as a monochrome rainbow.

Granted, the lavish set pieces are beautiful, and there really is quite a bit of amusingly acrobatic coupling going on, but in the end, it's extremely hard to fight down the giggles you'll find swelling inside you. It's all so relentlessly goofy, it makes you long for the early Eighties antics of Traci Lords, or The Dark Bros.

As a surrealistic depiction of the mental disintegration of Jim (Abramsohn), a seemingly ordinary family guy, while visiting “the happiest place on Earth,” it’s a prank and a spit in the eye of Disney’s relentless cheerfulness. But director Randy Moore’s pièce de résistance goes far beyond flipping the bird to the mouse that roars.

Surprisingly well-done nearly all the way around, this neither plays down to its target audience, nor fumbles the inherent childhood fantasy of the story.

Gray's direction is a languid thing, moving at roughly the speed of a maimed snail, and the cast never really gels.

I could go on and on about Zombie’s style-over-substance direction, but why bother? The Lords of Salem is so clearly a project that Zombie has had stewing in his blood-and-black-lace heart for, I assume, ever, that the fact that it’s not a masterpiece seems almost moot. It’s a head trip, to be sure, but it’s Zombie’s electric, haunted head, so my advice is just sit back and goggle.

It's a sympathomimetic monoamine that stimulates the central nervous system! Hooray epinephrine! And that's all I'm going to say about Crank.

It just devolves into the limp sort of schmaltzy conclusion you keep hoping it will avoid.

Heady stuff, indeed, but perfect midnight-date movie fare if you’re, uh, in the mood.

A forgivable error, but an error nonetheless.

The less said about The Ring, the better for you, the sooner-to-be-freaked-out.

In the end, Ip Man 3 doesn’t quite rise to the dizzying heights of the first two films, but then again, this will almost certainly be your only chance to see Mike Tyson go up against Donnie Yen.

Small Engine Repair is a real American horror story, skillfully shot, perfectly cast and acted, and carrying a sorrowful message that resonates with brutal truth.

Interestingly, Coppola has eschewed state-of-the-art special effects in favor of a panoply of archaic film-school tricks -- reversing the film, multiple exposures, playing with the shutter speed -- that give his Dracula a stylized, almost hyper-real clarity and a wonderfully singular weirdness.

Take from the film's racial commingling what you want. Much of this may be old hat, even corny, and potentially offensive, but I haven't laughed out loud this often at a movie in ages.

All told, though, Thor suffers from "Iron Man 2" syndrome: too much backstory, too many subplots and character introductions, and not nearly enough full-frontal nudity from Natalie Portman, who frankly is given very little to work with here.

Turnabout is fair play, to be sure, but ultimately virtually everyone in Teeth ends up using sex as a weapon, edged or otherwise, to the detriment of all concerned. Just say "Ow."

There's no denying the fact that Jackson is woefully miscast here, and as a result spends much of his time struggling to define his role as a “serious” collector of objets d'art in this muddled-though-gorgeous omnibus film.

It's a feast of inconsequentiality, though, a love affair-lite that looks great but is ultimately less filling than a sunny summer Sunday's creampuff dream.

Trite? Sure. Obvious? And then some. But a lesson to be taken to heart nonetheless.

It's neither utterly real nor utterly romantic (heroin, like alcohol, manages to be awfully and unremittingly both).

If you have an 8- to 16-year-old underfoot in the house, there are worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.

The plot is negligible, but that's fine since it's really only a way to get from one set-piece to another.

Albert Nobbs is the furthest thing from a comedy, although as a character study of cultural mores and stations and the lengths human beings will go to to circumvent them, it's fascinating stuff.

It’s a phantasmagorical chase movie that rarely takes a breather long enough for you to enjoy the sights along the way.

Coixet’s film begins with the quiet patter of rain on skin and holds that somehow sweetly sorrowful tone throughout.

The straight dope for speed junkies and fans of the art of flinging one’s well-padded frame through the contortions enabled only by disastrously catapulting oneself off a slippery asphalt track at speeds even Dale Earnhardt would have dismissed as lunacy.

Cyberpunk meets renegade romance, à la Orwell.

As for Hotel Transylvania,, no need to put a stake in it, it's deadly dull already.

It plays very much like it advertises itself: a mixtape – Fear of a Black Planet, then and now.

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate isn't as much fun as the director's previous film – the wondrous "Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame."

Despite its high tech sheen and overstuffed cast of characters, played by some of the best actors in the land, this mega-mecha melee manages to give short shrift to both the airborne action set-pieces that define Iron Man's zoomy panache and incoming supervillain Whiplash, aka Ivan Vanko (Rourke).

One of the more intelligent comedies out there this summer -- it's not Brooks' best.

Director and writer Charles Dorfman’s debut feature is a corker of a good time to watch and rife with some juicy subtext regarding class, British colonialism, and toxic (read: douchebag) masculinity.

Both the yuks and the yucks are plentiful, but by the time the film reaches a montage sequence of these two boneheads (well, one bonehead, one dope) laying waste to Los Angeles gang members and other wastrels in an attempt to satiate Bart's thirst for the red stuff, you're more than likely wishing you were watching Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in something else entirely. The similarities between the two horror comedy pairings are just too obvious to be ruled out as coincidence.

No other film in recent memory has featured such a terrifically retro maniac or revisited the heyday of Eighties gore films with such gleeful, moist abandon.

This is frightening stuff, ably helmed (by writer/director Gorak, art director on the nerve janglers Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), viciously acted, and altogether horrific in ways George A. Romero could imagine only through the lens of the darkest sort of fantasy.

It's not the greatest movie about baseball ever made (and I'll keep my mouth shut on that one if I know what's good for me), but it's not the worst, either. Like the game itself, it's pretty darn fun.

Cold Pursuit very nearly brings Neeson full circle, imbued as it is with a lower-rent version of the patented Raimi gallows humor.

It’s the sort of cat-and-mouse game that recalls certain elements of such disparate films as John Boorman’s "Hell in the Pacific," Larry Cohen’s screenplay for "Phone Booth," and, one key line in Dan O’Bannon’s "Return of the Living Dead," believe it or not.

Truthfully, it's hard to imagine a better screen adaptation of this queer household. Addams would have been proud.

With A Walk Among the Tombstones, the names have been changed but the story’s all too familiar. Speaking of which, "Taken 3" is on its way.

Iranian-American director Keshavarz utilizes the always reliable Sarandon to fine effect, but the final takeaway is less than riveting.

Thanks to Haggis and the cast, who are convincing, often bitingly so, in their willingness to dive into the dark and unknowable depths of the modern American romantic relationship, The Last Kiss mirrors reality with remarkable faithfulness.

Is it just me or is Mick Jagger turning into John Hurt?

Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I've seen Morrissey videos that are more life-changing than this well-intentioned but ultimately yawn-inducing barrage of factoids.

Ultimately, Dark Blue feels roughly a decade too late with its back story of the Los Angeles riots. Gates’ department had its share of dirty blues, to be sure, but that hasn’t been notable since the smoke cleared back in 1992.

Henderson's warm and toasty little gem of a film, slight though it may be, reminds you that the Greatest Generation, full of vim, vigor, and – most important – an indefatigable sense of purpose, grew up on both sides of the Big Pond.

It's not the most flattering depiction of Jews I've seen. Still, The Passion of the Christ is something of a masterpiece, terrible to behold, unfit for children, certainly, but very much the work of a director in the throes of his own distinct passion.

Here's hoping that younger members of the audience will seek out Conan Doyle's original stories to further explore Holmes' official amanuensis, Dr. John Watson, whose brilliant case studies regarding his friend, roommate, and fellow rationalist are the stuff dreams are made of.

Despite an overlong running time and a punishing amount of violence and gore, it's a deeply ambitious picture, one of the most expensive and original to come out of France in many years.

Ghosts of Mississippi isn’t a bad film by any means; it’s just not a very good film.

It's almost dreamlike in its weird little tone, a Manischewitz hangover of a nightmare that's giddy enough to usher chuckles and is thoroughly unique.

Hideously directed with all the comic subtlety of Oliver Stone on speed, A Very Brady Sequel misses almost every single mark it sets for itself, from the disastrously ill-conceived animation that marks Roy's hallucinogenic mushroom trip at the family dinner table to the persistent background hiss on the film's soundtrack. Even Sherwood Schwartz would've hated this dog.

You’ve heard of guerrilla warfare? Buffalo Soldiers is all about guerilla capitalism.

Tykwer's camera can assault the audience with the rankest of imagery, but not even once does it come close to distilling the actual aroma of the abattoir that was 18th-century France. And for that, I suppose, we should all be thankful.

Though Foley is adept at handling the action, the film is a grim washout peppered with too many earnest, good-cop/bad-cop conundrums and not enough solid police work.

Just doesn't have it.

Where Scream 3 triumphs is in its wacky, take-no-prisoners, I am a Juggernaut of Terror, Hee, Hee attitude, which wisely makes room for some downright surreal moments amongst the carnage.

Ultimately, it's a bore. Don't see the movie – read the book, play the game.

It's a mess, but it's Wenders' mess, and that means that there are any number of salvageable parts to the whole.

Try as they might, the Jackass gang can't quite snatch the year's ultimate 3D gross-out from the pricking jaws of "Pirahna 3-D."

Pure unadulterated animal fun.

A genuine cri de couer in the director’s long-running battle against the forces of censorship and a banal societal (and cinematic) status quo. And for those reasons along it deserves to be seen.

D-FENS is a cut-out, a cartoon Everyman we're supposed to feel sorry for and can't. He's a bad parody in what will doubtless be an over-analyzed film about loss of control. It's just too bad nobody on the creative end seems to have had much control either.

Nowhere near the Hollywood disaster that was foretold, Waterworld is a near-model summer fantasy: two hours and 21 minutes of loud, expansive fun.

There are, of course, the requisite trial sequences, and some mildly horrific shocks along the way, but Ruben and company fail to make any of this very interesting.

The only glimmer of actual characterization in the entire film comes – all too briefly – from Frank's old boss Inspector Tarconi (Berléand).

For all its Del Toro touches (Goodwin as a young autistic boy kidnapped by the bugs), Mimic is a surprisingly hollow thriller.

The actors, particularly the icy Bassett and the fiery Devine, excel in their roles and drive home the film's multifaceted messages.

To call The Crazies the most original horror film in a long while only serves to point out just how lousy mainstream, studio-released horror has become. It's a solid thriller, sure, but there's precious little in it that hasn't been seen countless times before, and in the end it plays it safe … by not playing it safe.

Ultimately, Cabin Fever isn't going to win any awards for originality - it's too busy twisting the conventions of the genre back in on themselves for that - but it does provide a jarring battery of scares (often depressing ones at that) that make it severed-head-and-shoulders above the spate of recent shockers.

Watchmen is worth seeing, fan or no, for Haley's squirmy presence alone, and all the other characters are also well-served.

Works best when it seems like it's not working at all.

Easily the smartest, snarkiest, and most honest depiction of that tweenage wasteland known as the "middle school years" that this former wimpy freak and geek has come across since having survived the daily derision afforded those of us who chose to spend our lunch periods perusing J.R.R. Tolkien, playing Dungeons & Dragons, or just hiding out in the boys' room.

Jim Jarmusch's elegiac, hilarious performance as a man about to smoke his final cigarette is brilliant.

Feels more like Barry Levinson's "Tin Men" on Prozac.

It works only sporadically, and more as a comic outing than as a vicious battle of sexual predation.

Sex, drugs, and rock & roll is a classic formula for disaffected youth, but Danny Perez’s debut feature spins the cliche like some sort of infinitely outrageous horror-show centrifuge.

A smart albeit uneven jab at everything from the clubbing life to the male inclination toward Peter Pan.

A wholly original creation, crossed with shadows and light and the everyday madness of Savannah and its remarkable citizens.

We all know how it ends, and that foreknowledge dooms Singer's hotly anticipated and much troubled account of the attempt on Adolf Hitler's life.

The fact that Troy Nixey's debut feature is one creepyass frightmare is what matters, and boy, does he put the nail in that metaphorical coffin the first time out. It's not perfect, but it's awfully close.

It's a pleasant enough ride, certainly, but in the end it also has all the wicked emotional punch of Bill Cosby on Quaaludes.

Goofy summer fun that makes Earth vs. the Flying Saucers look like Citizen Kane.

What The Rum Diary lacks in narrative astonishment it almost makes up for in boozy charm. Depp, Ribisi, and Rispoli are a sight to behold.

The most lackadaisical thriller I've ever seen, overly infatuated with not only the inexplicability of random evil, but also its mundanity.

It may not be art, but it's vastly more entertaining than anything Coppola senior has done in far too long.

In the end, Meadows' film lacks the bite it needs to make us care about this oddball trio, endearing though they are.

Strives to be an inspirational depth charge, but its power is consistently waylaid by some genuinely hokey dialogue and situations.

The Coen brothers’ newest is an odd amalgam of tics and stutters that plays like something of a greatest-hits reel but never seems to jell into a real comedy.

Petersen, a director who knows his way around a crane shot better than almost anyone, rallies his troops but can't ignite his actors, and the end result is the sound and fury of Homer undone.

Pleasant but pedestrian.

There are inspired gags, to be sure, but they're few and far between.

It's a visually stunning film. For every kid everywhere, and for every adult still a kid at heart, the dinosaurs are the thing, and here, finally, Disney does justice to our dreams.

What Warriors of the Rainbow may have going for it most of all is Chin Ting-Chang's dreamy cinematography, which presents the native Seediq amid the sultry jungle greenery that brings to mind the absurdly lovely flora of James Cameron's Pandora.

The Cable Guy is being marketed as a dark comedy, which I suppose it is, to some extent. Honestly, though, it's just not dark enough.

Alive is no Oscar-challenger, certainly, but it does treat a very dicey incident with the even-keeled direction the story deserves.

Incoherent mashup of previous demonized tyke films and unfailingly inept pseudo-science and the result is about as devoid of suspense, much less genuine horror, as this specific sub-genre can be.

A work of near-existential pointlessness. It's true to the anarchic, silly spirit of the original clowning, but there's very little else to it.

Touchback may accurately be called cornball hokum by some, but it's nevertheless a well-made film filled with heart and soul (and Snake Plissken).

I've had mosquito bites that were more passionate than this undead, unrequited, and altogether unfun pseudo-romantic riff on Romeo and Juliet.

Ultimately, Meyjes focuses too much on Max when he should be filling the screen with this tortured, dull artist and monster-in-the-making.

Van Bebber's film is tough, difficult, sporadically brilliant cinema, to be sure, and I doubt he'd have had it any other way. And as strange as it may sound, neither should the audience.

As we are informed in the film’s prologue, "Cats live in loneliness, then die like falling rain." Sh--, man, whatever. This is so stupid it’s positively genius.

Edge of Darkness has the look and feel of a Brit film shot in America – it's all dark, boxy rooms with powerful white men in impeccable black suits discussing how to tidy up the minor mishaps of their game over brandy and cigars.

It’s a pleasure to watch, if not always to sit through.

Spark, however, is the best of the lot when it comes to attempting to grok the burn and the burners.

At its best when it goes down to the pub and captures, quite flawlessly, the grotty intoxication of these mad, bad, dangerous-to-know Hammers fans hoisting incalculable pints.

This remarkable adaptation of the supposedly "unfilmable" novel by David Mitchell achieves near-perfection on virtually all levels.

Loud, abrasive, and featuring performances seemingly calibrated to be heard over the cacophonous roar of Travolta's mad, bad overacting.

Remarkable and enlightening.

Camp has also been compared to Alan Parker’s "Fame," which operates with a similar love of behind-the-scenes melodrama and youthful idealism, but different in that it doesn’t induce brain-swelling revulsion in the viewer.

Five years after Ang Lee attempted a stylistically and narratively daring reimagining of what a comic-book movie could be (an example that tanked disastrously at the box office), the big green gamma-guy returns to the screen in a purer, more unadulterated, vastly more entertaining form.

It's Teen Witch for the Nineties: dark, brooding, dangerous, and, come to think of it, a lot like high school.

Cobbling together so many different characters (nearly all of them familiar to regular viewers) has left the Kids' feature debut as something of a letdown. We've seen it all before, and better, on HBO and Comedy Central.

While this is hardly "Breaker Morant," it's nowhere near as mawkish or cloying as it could have been.

Enough already with the pointless gun battles that litter Safe like spent syringes in a shooting gallery. No matter how spastically you edit them, you'll never top John Woo's early work, or, for that matter, Sam Peckinpah's. Aim higher, even if it means fewer hits.

Step Brothers has comic fuel to burn, some of it unashamedly non sequitur and stupid-brilliant, but it still feels like a post-"Talladega" flameout.

It's stoner comedy of the most absurd kind, part fryboy mental drizzle, part wink-wink audience baiting, and wholly, utterly funny.

It's not so much the individual storylines that grab you, but Curtis’ unrelenting optimism. In the end, it's nice to know that love, actually, does conquer all.

Wahlberg brings an intense, often internalized performance to a wickedly written role, and while he’s no James Caan, he’s certainly able to infuse this mesmerizing character study with enough rancid brio to make this self-flagellating hustler believably doomstruck.

A mess, albeit one with occasional flashes of brilliance.

The highlight of this satirical remake of ABC's mid-Seventies buddy-cop anomaly is named, unsurprisingly, Will Ferrell.

This time out, Nakashima plays it fast, loose, and seriously fucked-up with a father-daughter tale of Tokyo woe that makes Paul Schrader’s "Hardcore" look like a picnic.

There’s nary a hint of the original Troll dolls' disconcerting unearthliness in this utterly tame although vibrantly animated feature.

It's an ode, of sorts, to Seventies grindhouse cinema, curdled and gooey and tailor-made for midnight showings (preferably with a crowd, preferably intoxicated).

It's Banderas' film all the way, of course: he's one of those genuinely gifted, glowing actors who can nevertheless hold your attention through sheer onscreen charisma.

A character-driven piece with a character who seems somewhat hollow.

Ninjago’s sprawling team of screenwriters – nine credits in all – throw every joke they can at the screen, but few of them stick in your memory for longer than a moment.

If you're not already smitten with all things Gaiman, you may well find yourself, like Helena, a stranger in a strange land.

The ensemble cast is uniformly first-rate, but Sachs' moribund movie is a slog – all those scenes of Frankie’s friends and family wandering through the woods made my feet hurt.

I had looked forward to seeing King's low men and their hideous yellow coats and monstrous high-finned automobiles, but what we've got here is less King than Goldman, and less fun to boot.

Snatch is nothing if not watchable: It has the insane, popcorn rhythms of a Road Runner cartoon, and for that reason alone it's a minor masterpiece.

These scenes of debauchery and lust that make up the film's centerpiece are among some of the most powerful and disturbing ever put to film.

It’s Brisseau's penchant for the flamboyantly perverse and the perversely flamboyant, however, that might have been best left secret.

The Good Liar is a pleasantly playful thriller hiding a seriously shady history close to its benighted heart.

Hostel certainly delivers in the gore department, and Roth, who knows and loves his favorite genre at least as well as the gang over at the Alamo Drafthouse, peppers the proceedings with various witty in-jokes.

All I know is that guys are strongly advised to avoid this on a first date.

There are moments in Idlewild that resonate with the painful "if only" of missed opportunity, and more than a few that just make you scratch your head. It's like some wildly overlong music video, minus the sexy thump 'n' grind. It's all blow, no pop.

No one has ever succeeded with anything approximating the sheer energetic brilliance of what Lee has managed here. For all intents and purposes, this is a comic-book movie in the very truest and most vibrant sense of the phrase.

Crucial to the nature of the disaster film -- and something that Irwin Allen knew so very well -- is that films of this sort depend on an emotional hook, a peg of normalcy to hang the chaos from. Volcano offers no such hook, and as a result it plays like some La Brea dinosaur risen from the tar, all effects and no heart.

North Face is a gripping, at times downright epic, account of men vs. mountain vs. other men (and, what the hell, one woman).

It's like the Sixties never happened, or maybe happened too much.

On the whole, there are precious few life lessons in Is Anybody There? that haven't been noted before.

All told, it’s two-plus hours of trinkets and baubles and clever repartée beneath a perfect summer sun and beside the whitewashed walls of Fez, not inconsequential but as ephemeral as the sky above.

Besson loves his violence almost as much as he loves his leading lady.

A preposterously silly bit of work, chock-full-o' nuts and rife with the kind of plot holes you could drive a submersible ROV through.

All in all, Imagine That is an amiable detour from its star's usual scatological skronk. Kids will empathize, parents will breathe a sigh of relief.

Sandler's first collaboration with co-writer and current Hollywood comedy godhead Judd Apatow, is a crazed, delightfully bizarre return to form for Sandler.

All we're left with is a second-rate J-Horror entry that bores rather scares.

The "Citizen Kane" of Oedipal zombie-cannibal-right to death-comedy-love stories... So gleefully over-the-top that it's decidedly hard not to gag while you're laughing yourself incontinent... Sick. Perverse. Brilliant.

For all its hot button, au courant moral messaging, Joe Bell is preaching to the converted and unlikely to draw in the type of audience that actually needs to hear its pleas for kindness in a mean and wild world.

Attack of the Clones' final 35 minutes very nearly makes up for the preceding 105, featuring as it does the jaw-dropping spectacle of the entire Jedi Council battling it out with not only clones, but also lumbering monsters, space ships of all sorts, and each other.

Battle for Terra boasts impressively executed battle sequences that, frankly, are light-years beyond anything found in the recent Star Wars animated add-ons.

There's so much and so little going on here simultaneously that you're not sure whether to squirm or doze.

Ultimately, it's a very boring ride.

The year's most viciously entertaining psycho-road-movie-revenge-'n'-wreckage-romance.

Who doesn't love an animated, anthropomorphized-chimpanzee-starring, sci-fi romantic comedy?

You may want to bring a handkerchief, so boldly manipulative the movie ends up being, but for fans of Pooh and the power of art as therapy during times of existential crises, the story is never less than interesting and melodramatically well-done.

Rarely have I seen a film so willing to champion the fallibility of the human heart.

Arquette wander in and out of frame, but like everyone else in this film, they're eclipsed by Coogan's gloriously unhinged performance, which has the lunatic, semi-meta tone of a parody within a parody.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days is probably the most inoffensive kid's film you're likely to see this summer. And that's a good thing.

The film may have only the best of intentions, but it tries way too hard and ends up being shallow, superficial, and only sporadically funny.

In the end, it's all la dolce vita no matter how you look at it.

A visual tour-de-force; it's just that there's not much else to sink your teeth into once the pretty colors fade from view.

Loud, rollicking, alternately ultra-violent and hilarious, Escape from L.A. is Snake redux, and what more do you need, really?

The Duke of Burgundy doubles down on the genre conventions and ends up being all the better for it. That’s thanks in large part to the score by the UK group Cat’s Eye, the two flawless lead performances, and cinematographer Nicholas D. Knowland’s keen eye for creating a more-than-acceptable simulacrum of Franco and Rolin’s hallucinatory, dreamlike vibes.

When the film changes gears from light coming-of-age comedy to ex-post-facto war parable midway through, it loses its focus and suddenly becomes a much darker beast.

It's a neat, sweet experiment in meta-documentary filmmaking overall, but like Yi's own heart, it sabotages itself in the process and becomes another casualty of too-close scrutiny.

There’s nothing to fault animation-wise – Blue Sky’s penchant for migraine and/or dopamine-inducing color palettes and headlong pacing are consistently above par – but, for adults at least, the film’s mushy mediocrity can be a real drag.

Staged and stagy, this adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play about family dysfunction and the "anti-Camelot" is a muddled, middling mess, despite a witty, top-drawer performance from Posey and a surprisingly comic turn from Spelling.

Kempner's documentary is a streamlined, gorgeous piece of work, full of revelations of time, place, and person.

Full of nuanced performances (Streep in particular) and wonderfully enveloping music.

Even the should-have-been-triumphant revelation of the Boogeyman arrives as a CGI letdown of epic proportions.

It's never wise to try to one-up a classic.

Wilson and Beckinsale, as the couple on the rocks, do their damnedest to go along for the creepfest, but nothing in Vacancy manages to come anywhere close to the quiet and steadily mounting dread of the real thing, much less the purview of Norman Bates or his beloved mother.

It's a 24-hour-party-people travelogue, entertaining enough to grab your eyes... but less memorable than it may at first appear.

The Dead Don’t Die feels like something of a minor comic note in the director’s curriculum vitae, but it’s not without its pleasures. And like Romero’s genre classic, social commentary, satirical and otherwise, abounds.

Unfortunately, this kind of sledgehammer comedy has worn thin over the many years since Mack Sennett first hit on it.

It's the type of film that begs to be called “charming” and by doing so instead ends up grating.

So silly, so garishly over-the-top, and so bracingly eager to please, that it's hard not to fall under its gleefully gooney spell.

This might not matter so much to the youngest members of the audience, but for anyone over the age of 10, it’s strictly a colorful bore.

Comes across as a particularly unspecial "Very Special Episode" of a television series that never made it past the pilot stage.

Absolutely one-hundred-percent ridiculous, this is comedy of a higher order, and more maniacally inspired than almost anything released in years.

On the not-much-of-a-plus side, at over two hours long, sitting through The Book Thief engenders in the viewer some serious sympathy for the interminable plight of poor, sickly Max, concealed below stairs in a dank, dark corner of the house on Himmelstrasse.

The good news, then, is that The Siege is hardly the ticking time bomb of racial slurs some would have you imagine, and the bad news is that it doesn't matter because it's all too damn pedantically serious to take seriously.

These days, it's dark everywhere. Which makes Slade's wild, often exhilarating neo-Western ride into frostbit vampirism something of a respite, albeit one awash gore.

Director Benny Chan has fashioned a visually sumptuous period wushu film with a strikingly contemplative and pacifist bent.

A riot of colors, Kika is sometimes sick, sometimes playful, but consistently hilarious and entertaining in ways that few films have been lately.

An essentially toothless affair, poking fun at American imperialism and its attendant cluelessness while never illuminating much beyond the obvious.

Quarantine is a one-note nightmare, nicely pitched to the high-C howls of the bitten and the biters but offering considerably less froth than last year's "The Signal," which mined similar nightmares with far more fulsome results.

Neither the worst nor the best of the Conjuring franchise, Annabelle Comes Home is only as creepy as it needs to be and no more. Keep your expectations low and you might just enjoy it.

It's a great set-up, and for the first two-thirds or so of the film it works exceptionally well as a jaundiced satire on the world of gay porn.

A warm, comfortable, thoroughly inoffensive kidfilm.

Too sloppy, pinning psychological crime dramatics to good old-fashioned gunplay.

Weaver and Hirsch's flawless performances elevate the film above and beyond the ranks of "Ordinary People" pastiches, and in the end it stands on its own merits.

Smith is excellent as the potty Grace, with both Atkinson and Thomas equally fine in their roles. But the fact is plainly seen: The Ealing of yore is gone.

Gratuitous in every sense of the word, this second remake of 1978's Joe Dante-directed/Roger Corman-produced "Jaws" knockoff is ridiculous summertime drive-in fun.

It all feels like a poorly constructed and overwrought Lifetime drama from a decade ago, albeit one featuring a shaggy dog dubbed “Fuckface.”

Lynch, who penned the screenplay with novelist Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart), seems to be attempting to capture not just a sense of place and time (it never works -- Lost Highway is wholly, irrevocably, out of place and without any linear time or time line to speak of), but also a sense of madness.

The Nintendo generation may not “get” The Phantom any more than those original Thirties fans would have understood Bruce Wayne's tortured psyche, but that aside, Wincer's updating of an old warhorse is lovingly done. It's a Saturday afternoon matinee for the Nineties, 60 years old and totally new.

It takes great skill to make something so ponderously stultifying as this third film entry in the ongoing adaptation of C.S. Lewis' series of splendidly imagined children's books.

Spall and Meaney are mesmerizingly watchable in a film that’s 40% gruff dialogue and 60% seething silences.

Despite the grating, workmanlike direction of Chris Columbus (he's no Robert Wise, and Rent is nobody's idea of "West Side Story"), this boisterous adaptation is both a vivacious, wiseacre musical and an inarguable morality lesson: Love is all you need. Oh, and rent, of course.

Like last year's "Lethal Weapon 3" -- another ridiculously uninspired sequel -- Another Stakeout starts with a terrific bang and goes nowhere fast.

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween knows what its target demographic wants but also resonates with adult audiences, thanks to the zippy plot and across-the-board excellent performances from the totally game cast.

Wilson is buoyed by a sporadically witty script, and while there are no surprises whatsoever in the story, his goofy, puppylike charm renders what could have been a disaster merely an unfortunate event.

A fairly uninspired, albeit entertaining, Muppet movie that falls short of the original outing from Jim Henson's creature shop while still managing to bring in a few lesser chuckles.

Feels overlong and underscripted.

Lehmann has dropped the ball -- or the pick, whichever the case may be -- again. Instead of playing up the inherently silly, goofy nature of heavy metal, he sinks to its level, offering nothing more than the occasional chuckle and some ratty old combat boots.

Much has been made of the film's ending, vis-à-vis whether or not it's a pro- or anti-organized religion commentary of some sort. The Hughes Brothers, for two, say they just wanted to make a kickass piece of contemporary entertainment, and I, for one, believe them.

The Dark Half never really comes to life, even in Romero's capable hands, this seemingly surefire story ends up stillborn.

It's a totally serviceable reboot for young people who are just discovering the joys of manga, but I can't help but miss the raw animation and even rawer emotional aesthetics of Tezuka's original televised animé series.

It's all a bit much, yes, a bit exhausting, that's true, but then why on earth would anyone expect otherwise?

Badham, however, keeps the whole thing up and running expertly -- it's interesting to note, also, that this Americanized version contains far more big-bang explosions and an elevated body-count than the French source material. Big deal. In a story as well done as this, a few extra bullet-hits only add to the delightful mayhem.

An occasionally charming mix of campy fun and dodgy computer-generated effects.

The result is a riveting, eco-wise epic that'll do fans of both Ralph Nader and Katsuhiro Otomo proud.

Sweet and wise and often laugh-out-loud funny (just like Grogan's book), Marley & Me isn't just for dog people; it's just not for Cruella De Vil.

The film feels like a truly awful "Saturday Night Live" sketch padded out to such unholy lengths as to make "It's Pat" seems like a comic masterstroke.

Nobody's going to give this one an Oscar, sure, but as far as the venerable teen sex comedy goes, this one actually makes it to third base.

It's not perfect King, but it is jarringly close, which these days remains pretty much all one could hope for.

Green and screenwriter Peter Straughan never completely go as far as they might have, satirically speaking.

It's the opposite of "The Opposite of Sex," a meditation on multiple truths, and the lies that sometimes lie in between.

A simply flat-out fun film.

It’s all very nice to look at, sure, but pretty colors and molten intercoolers aside, 2 Fast 2 Furious is about as exciting as a Yugo in quicksand.

Suffice to realize that Reeves’ opening salvo is an ambitious and heady mix of the glorious (if overtold) past, the tense present, and the imperfectly perfect realm of Chen’s fighter, his conscience, and blow upon blow upon blow. The concoction works, despite – or maybe because of – its unjaded, fantastical familiarity

It takes so long to get going and fails to generate the necessary suspense to keep viewers engaged, that the horrific final act is too little, too late, while at the same time nearly being much too much.

Scorpion fails to connect on anything but the most basic comic level. Despite Allen's usual excellent direction, it all plays like a TV-movie version of something else, Allen-lite.

Equal parts French sex farce, Mai-Decembre romance, middle-aged white male fantasy, and wannabe Hitchcockian intrigue, Fontaine's film can be a chore to sit through, but not for any of the obvious reasons.

There are many questions raised and answered in this film, but one that isn’t is why on Earth it’s garnered an R rating. Love Is Strange is anything but. It’s a seriocomic romance of the most genteel sort, full of heartfelt “I love yous,” brief (and definitely unerotic) snuggling, and a wealth of tremendously fine acting from all involved.

There's no other woman acting today that even remotely resembles Parker Posey. For that matter, there's never been anyone quite like her that I can think of. She has the dynamite improvisational instincts of a born grifter who wandered too far from one con and ended up in another – acting – and her tricky-risky game of onscreen three-card monte is, again and again, a jewel in indie filmmaking's oft-tattered crown.

Snail-paced and ultimately dull creepy-crawl.

It bears noting that Greendale is an awful lot like the town of Mayberry R.F.D. in that paragon of homespun virtue, "The Andy Griffith Show," but then again, it's probably equally wise to bear in mind that before Griffith was the sheriff of that hamlet, he was in "A Face in the Crowd" playing a character who, with his conniving, manipulative, black-at-heart ways, might well represent Greendale's dark and awful future.

Amiable fluff that takes its time learning how to walk, talk, and generally act like the kid-centric rom-com that it is.

There's nary a hint of suspense in West's film, though, mainly because he loudly trumpets the upcoming disasters so early in the film.

There are only so many pratfalls you can string together sans storyline and keep a ball like this rolling, and unfortunately, too many of Bean's schticks were old news by the time they first aired on PBS.

A wistful, humorous, but ultimately fluffy look at those halcyon days, before punk, junk, and the onslaught of the Eighties.

Can barely limp to its final CinemaScope sunset shot.

Television is reality, and reality is less than television. And that is, by the end of the 72-minute-long VHYes’ gleefully immersive, intermittently profound “found footage,” a lesson Ralph osmotically absorbs through the VHS viewfinder of his life.

Aja's version, while a killer ride in its own right, never manages the nagging subtexts Craven so handily injected into the proceedings. It's a topnotch nightmare, but this time you wake up.

Miner strives to imbue the film with the requisite autumnal haze of the original but then gives up midway through and instead resorts to the standard stalk 'n' slash formulas.

Despite an inordinately complicated third-act resolution, it's head-and-shoulders above most so-called suspense films.

The overall emotion the film generates is one of moist, enervated ennui. Who cares if the apartment is haunted when the best the ghost can do is get things a bit damp and run laps on the floor above?

Although the film tends to suffer from a severe case of overt preachiness in the third reel (shades of James Cameron's "The Abyss"), it's still a wonderfully visual, exciting ride.

Certain touches resonate and remain memorable long after the film’s conclusion – I’m talking to you, creepy robo-geishas – but for all its CGI bells, whistles, and Johansson, this simply can’t compare to its (highly recommended) Japanese forebears.

I'm not entirely sure, but near as I can tell, this adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' memoir of family dysfunction finally and irrevocably lost me right about where the cat ended up in the stew pot, stirred with maniacally morose glee by Paltrow.

The only remotely entertaining aspects of Insidious come from Whannell and Sampson as a comic pair of hypercompetitive hipster ghost hunters, and even that schtick is repeated ad nauseam.

Exodus is an entertainment of the first order. I’m not so sure about the filmmaker’s decision to render the Metatron archangel as a 9-year-old boy, but what the hell? You get hit on the head with a boulder, who knows what you’ll see?

It's not perfect - infrequently the comedy and drama rub up against each other too much - but it is the genuine article: a wholly unique family film that can moisten your eyes even while it quickens your pulse.

Fallen's pretentious vision of a demonic force out to shatter the life of one lowly homicide detective is, ultimately, a pretty silly ride despite the film's obvious strengths and some genuinely eerie scenes.

As YA adaptations go, this isn’t quite "The Notebook," but its core demographic of teen girls will likely be more than satisfied.

Not since Mario Bava's "Hercules in the Haunted World" has Greco-Roman movie-house mythmaking been so thoroughly well-conceived and executed.

Fans of the original films will dig Richards and Eisenmann's cameo appearances.

Just watching the trailer for Oliver Stone's new football epic a few weeks back left me with a grating headache; watching the whole sweaty film practically put me in the ICU.

There's a genuine, sparky chemistry between the three (and later, a fourth), and Robertson, particularly, is luminous in her role.

The character of Valentin is immediately recognizable to anyone who's gone to more than 20 films in their lives -- charming, cuddly, hellbent on making his world tolerable -- but to his credit both Noya and Agresti don't overplay their hand.

Too self-referential for its own good by half.

The East is an unrelenting condemnation of the Netherlands’ misguided attempt to return its colonial outreach to a time long gone while hitting most (if not all) of the “doomed war” niche genre movie tropes without ever actually teetering into cliche. That’s an ever-tricky move that Taihuttu aces.

Infinitely more entertaining than anything the WWE has done recently, this sophomore outing from "Napoleon Dynamite" director Hess is full of cheesy goodness, but it's Velveeta.

The fight scenes are splendidly choreographed...but they're shot in that grating, thoroughly American flashcut style that leaves you wondering just who the hell is hitting who.

We've just been to this party before and we know how it ends, again and again and again.

The Nines is the feature-film-directing debut from screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish), but it feels much more like some Bizarro World collaboration between Jean-Paul Sartre and Charlie Kaufman, and not in a good way, either.

Director Espinosa stages the endless action with a tremendous flair that recalls John Woo's grittier moments, and cinematographer Oliver Wood, who shot Woo's finest Hollywood moment, "Face/Off," gives the whole violent show a downright brackish look that borders on the sublime.

Certainly lead adult actor Arnezeder has panache to spare, as does Bousinna, but the muddled storyline defeats them time and time again, no matter how perfectly angry/hopeful their lines are.