Marc Savlov

As far as pronoun horrors go, They can't hold a candle to Them or It, but as an anti-tourism ad for Seattle, it's right up there with The Ring in terms of overcast, glistening panache.

The heist itself is a charm with the kids zipping about in go-karts and eluding klutzy security guards, but the film seems trapped in a strange Twilight Zone somewhere between comedy and drama.

Deep Impact takes the high road and offers up more tearful reunions than actual fireballs and more egregious, sappy dialogue than you can shake a tsunami at.

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.

Who knew reincarnation could be such a lovely snooze?

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.

Widen gets an “A” for ambition here, but by the end of the whole shebang, you really couldn't care less.

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.

Devil's Advocate is such a bloated, gargantuan, and ultimately tasteless juggernaut of a film that it manages to achieve a righteously cheesy splendor.

It’s a fun and mostly effective ride while it lasts, part Slenderman creepypasta weird and part full-on, nerve-jangling horror, but it’s ultimately, perhaps unavoidably, unsatisfying.

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.

It's nobody’s idea of a classic comedy, but in its own inoffensive and eager-to-please way it's a pleasant enough way to spend 90 minutes ogling the lustrous Ms. Union and Mr. Foxx's equally and endlessly fascinating volcanic coif.

Honestly, at this point in time there's no legitimate reason to confuse “bad ass” filmmaking with just plain bad. Nice GTO, though.

Where else are you going to get a chance to see the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy drift down the side of a mile-high tsunami and take out the White House? Big. Dumb. Fun.

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

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.

James Gandolfini’s wintery silences and bitter outbursts are enough on their own to merit seeing this otherwise frustratingly vague slice of low-end Crooklyn crime life, but just barely.

It's not "Sixteen Candles," but it's not "Road Trip," either. Instead, this comedic car-trip riff on the teen-male libido and the lengths to which it will go to satisfy itself falls somewhere in between part endearing emo love story, part gross-out semen gag-fest, and, very occasionally, a smart, inspired, non-sequitur-laden hoot.

Although a slow-burn approach to this sort of creepfest is generally a smart move, Devil’s Due peters out of outright suspense midway through and never fully recovers, despite (or possibly because of) a final reel that may shock some viewers but will leave die-hard genre fans gnashing their teeth and rending their clothes in dismay.

Wan does manage to infuse his film with some of the subtle unsubtleties of classic Euro-horror outings, chief among them the palpable, dreamlike sense of dislocation and the abiding severance from reality that tends to make nongenre fans wonder if someone spiked their popcorn with LSD.

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

Oh, the ennui. In Somewhere, it's so thick you could cut it with Stephen Dorff's chiseled cheekbones.

Not as yummy as it sounds, true, but nowhere near as godawful as "Van Helsing," a small mercy but very much appreciated.

Serrano's frequently mystifying device of having Lucía's cardboard psyche mess with the audience's minds is ultimately a confusing bore that detracts from what might have been a more eloquent (and interesting) take on middle-class midlife crises, telenovela-style.

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

More fun than Peter Hyams' "The Musketeer," and somewhat less so than "The Man in the Iron Mask," this is middling Dumas all the way.

Now it's just another romantic comedy, neither terribly bad nor truly great, buoyed along on currents of hope and post-traumatic good cheer.

In the end, Devil feels like an ingenious short film pumped up for theatrical release. Shyamalan's story is sound, but the execution dragged me to hell and left me there wondering if his much-rumored sequel to "Unbreakable" was ever going to arrive.

For all its noble intent, Hopkins' film falls flat halfway through, mired in bad philosophizing and too-beautiful killing fields, neither bark nor bite mean much here.

There’s a surprising lack of surprises in DreamWorks’ answer to Disney/Pixar’s runaway smash "Finding Nemo."

The film's two saving graces are the time machine itself -- a gorgeous, whirling array of burnished copper and blazing light -- and the CGI-created rise and fall of New York City.

Black Sea is cluttered and claustrophobic in all the right ways, and it doubles as a watery jeremiad against global corporate malfeasance. Still, you walk away from the film with the niggling sense that the story never quite holds your attention the way it should.

By turns sweet, sadistic, and silly, American Ultra will probably make a stronger impression if you watch it while high.

Torque knows it’s one big joke, dusty chaps, heaving bosoms, and all, which makes it all that much easier to swallow. And forget.

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

Feels like a been-here-done-that dud.

Jovovich's physicality and chilly mien (she was originally a "project" of the Umbrella Corp.) carry the series from start to … whenever it finishes, which might not be for quite a while yet.

The wraparound storyline is unnecessary and continually interrupts the vastly more interesting story of Khayyam's history.

Oculus never quite resolves into the image of horror it clearly wishes to be. Kudos, though, to cinematographer Michael Fimognari and score composers, the Newton Brothers – all of whom provide a fertile audiovisual background for Flanagan’s film.

The end result is overkill en extremis. There is such a thing as too much. And 3KMTG is much too much.

Honestly, if it weren't for Denis' striking visual sense, the producers could make a small fortune marketing Nénette and Boni as a sleep aid. Granted, Colin and Houri are both delightful actors. The bond they create between these onscreen siblings is terrifically realized and fully developed, but it's far too little to sustain a film in which virtually nothing happens, despite the fact that it all looks so very good.

While its heart is in the right place, Aeon Flux's head is just a little too high to make much sense.

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.

Broad across and rippling with muscle, 50 Cent mumbles his way through his hits.

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.

Ultimately, it's 79 minutes of footage of a pair of petty, pretty people freaking out over having to go to the bathroom in their wetsuits, and in the end you find yourself rooting for the sharks.

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.

It fails to rise above the inherent limitations of the traditional Hollywood biopic and it's about as insanely great as a Mac "low cost" LC model – which was, to be fair, pretty cool.

A nifty idea that goes everywhere (and nowhere).

Neither all that scary nor all that hilarious, Vampire in Brooklyn falls directly between the two, into the valley of mediocrity.

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

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.

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.

This is a scattershot affair, though fans of Reno should find it engagingly loopy.

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

It's a mess alright, but it's easy on the eyes. Like phone sex is for the ears. Only not as much fun.

As a take on contemporary television culture, Stay Tuned has a lot to say, but much of it is presented in such a broad comedic format that it passes by unnoticed. This is a comedy, after all; politics aside, though, it never really rises above the level of mediocrity, and never actually descends to the level of television itself.

At its best, Dr. Dolittle 2 is an inoffensive mish-mash of cute talking animals and their somewhat less-than-cute human buddies.

Not half as terrifying as Norwegian black metal, but still one of the better found footage-gimmicked sequels in recent memory.

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.

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

This new chronicle of the adventures of the king's musketeers, as directed by Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace, suffers from a severe case of over-earnestness and star-power overkill.

There’s not a whole lot of heft to von Scherler Mayer’s romantic comedy with ethnic Indian entanglements; it’s like overdone naan, too flaky and ephemeral for its own good, but still somehow appetizing.

"Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" meets a considerably tamed Van Wilder for a mediocre romp in the Hamptons.

Part metaphysical treatise, part educational primer, and part dangerously goofy self-help manual for the New Age set, this bizarre and not unentertaining documentary strives mightily to teach the lay audience everything there is to know about quantum physics in 108 minutes.

The laugh-out-loud jokery is in short supply, and Reynolds and Reid's kicky charm only goes so far. Bluto Blutarsky, we miss you.

Can this be the end of Death? If only.

Drained of much of its presumed power by a distinct "been there, seen that" vibe.

As a character-driven narrative, it's a hollow beast, too often pedantic, that smacks of good-guy agitprop, shrill when it should be subtle and shrieking when a whisper would be far more unnerving.

August Rush is a rather prosaic, oddly anxious, contemporary take on Dickens' Oliver Twist, with Williams – in nasty-man twee mode, a newish one for him – thrown in for bad measure.

Bottom line: costumed Goku and Chi Chi cosplayers may argue the finer points of this adaptation, but it is fairly dazzling it its own overextended, futurist-teenpulp fashion, and Chow makes a vastly more entertaining Roshi than he did a King.

Dobkin, in his directorial debut, seems ready and willing to ply the conventions of film noir in the harsh Montana daylight, but Clay Pigeons never manages to reach the crucial suspense plateaus that noir demands.

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.

It’s hardly the most original teen comedy we’ve seen, but, again, Schaffer, working from a script by himself, Alec Berg, and David Mandel keeps things borderline sweet throughout.

Submergence – despite much lovesick gravitas from its two leads – never quite coalesces into the epic romance that it should. It fizzles when it should ignite, leaving the viewer with a palpable yearning for something other than a shrug.

Stylistically thrilling but ultimately tedious French import.

Just doesn't have it.

Narnia is nearly saved by those immensely likable and altogether stiff-upper-lippy Pevensie kids.

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

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.

Where has all the fun science-fiction filmmaking gone?

While nowhere near as mawkish at the abysmal "Pay It Forward," K-PAX nevertheless seems somehow unfocused and meandering; it's Spacey-light.

This is, disappointingly, a long way from being a Studio Ghibli classic. The essential plot may be archetypal, but it’s no "Kiki’s Delivery Service."

You could do worse.

While director Bill nails the sheer spectacle of squads of SPADs dovetailing in flames into the wide blue yonder, the earthbound action (much as it was in another sputtering epic, Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor") is strictly laissez faire.

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

Snail-paced and ultimately dull creepy-crawl.

Suffers from a persistent case of narrative backsliding that only serves to make older members of the audience long for the days of the dwarves, beauties, and poisoned apples of Disney-yore, and younger ones squirm in their seats.

Rollicking is the term that best sums up Plunkett and Macleane, not in itself a bad thing, just, I think, not a very good thing.

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.

Director Rose seems not to know what to show next, and whether this is in an effort to keep his audience guessing or not, it only ends up making what could have been an exceptionally disturbing film exceptionally annoying.

Suffers from a lack of good gags. That’s not to say there aren’t scads of chuckles scattered throughout – Dylan and his cast are nothing if not gluttons for the fast and cheap yuk (not to mention yuck) – but the howls of laughter that arose from Paul and Chris Weitz’s original slice of Pie just aren’t there.

For Sandler's core audience of developmentally arrested males, it may all be a little too cute.

Feels overlong and underscripted.

It’s fun, but it’s no "Class of Nuke ’Em High."

I, Frankenstein is nowhere near as garishly, ghoulishly awful as "Van Helsing," Universal’s last attempt to resurrect its classic monsters. It’s a grimly fiendish slog nonetheless, and hardly worth getting up out of the grave for.

A lean, mean chase movie that plays like equal parts Donald Trump’s immigration policy, Steven Spielberg’s "Duel," and Wes Craven’s "The Hills Have Eyes," Cuarón’s desert-based take on "The Most Dangerous Game" is very much of the moment. It’s also, unfortunately, a one-note story populated with a handful of semi-anonymous archetypal characters.

Like the Flying Dutchman, this third Pirates outing is an empty vessel haunted by the ghosts of its sabre-rattling betters.

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

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.

No groundbreaking cinemagic there, but Out of the Shadows’ oddball moments keep things weirdly surreal throughout.

If you were one of the many who thought the original film was brilliant, you'll undoubtedly laugh yourself stupid over this one, too. Me, I think I'll go turn on the VCR and watch the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. Again.

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.

Falls short of both the social history lesson it so pointedly strives to impart and the sport it so roughly embraces.

The Boy’s overriding concern is telegraphed enough in advance that fans of Gothic suspense will almost certainly have guessed it 45 minutes in.

Theroux (who co-wrote with director Dower) manages to dredge up some new, albeit not particularly revelatory, intel on the litigation-happy group, and the tack they take to get there is interesting in and of itself.

Reminiscent of the opening moments of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," actually, only without the clever wit.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but you can bet your life there's absolutely nothing new about Rush Hour at all.

By the end, though, it's all too much what it seems, a literalist adventure with a socko "Twilight Zone" twist that's finally too little, too late.

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

Why remake Norman Jewison's staunchly cool 1968 heist film in such a lackadaisical, uninspired manner?

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

Just don't go expecting complex moral and ethical quandaries and you'll likely never think of "Ishtar" even once.

Valiantly tries to recapture the spit and polish indie feel of the original, and comes up looking more like something Franklin might have directed on a Bad Day.

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

You can barely tell what's going on half the time, but what you do see is effective.

At the very least, Hoodlum might have been better off had it been filmed in monochromatic black-and-white instead of the garish color palette (and plenty of gore) that Duke opted for because they, unfortunately, only reinforce the hamminess of the picture.

It's a real gone flick, daddy-o.

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.

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.

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

Refreshingly, there’s nary a cheap scare manifested in this Conjuring, although the unspoken corollary to that is that The Conjuring 2 just isn’t very scary, or even unnerving.

As always, there's the combustible band of mismatched survivors.

In a word, it’s soulless.

Hell, even Heston's performance elicited cheers back in the day. Franco, in a totally, tonally different role, but still the prime human here, is a pale shadow of the ruined future to come.

Pompeii delivers the goods – well, at least during its final 20 minutes.

Viewed as a war film, it's strictly standard run 'n' gun fare.

When she's (Dunst) off the screen, Elizabethtown goes dark and broody, stranding us with the morose Bloom during a third-act road trip that goes everywhere and nowhere at once.

So bereft of hope... that it's a chore to withstand.

Two-and-a-half hour slice of unmitigated depression.

It’s still a hellish glimpse into one of climbing’s worst days ever, and there’s no way to resolve the unresolvable, but as it is The Summit, like K2 itself, remains an icily beautiful and altogether deadly mystery.

An unpredictably bizarre and tonally askew Hong Kong freak show.

It’s a worthy effort, and Webb’s story is important. Nevertheless, Kill the Messenger feels extremely dated: In these cynical times, it’s too little, too late, which is too bad.

A confused, unfunny film with a few guns and some decent tunes. As CB4 (the CB stands for Cell Block), Saturday Night Live's Chris Rock and company are the hottest rap group in the world, an NWA gangsta rap rip-off oozing the prerequisite amounts of street tough sass, misogyny, and devil-may-care, screw-the-police attitude.

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

The film itself is a muddle, all rapid-fire step-edits and grainy, blue-filtered hokum. What is good is Stallone.

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.

The appearance of Richard Gere as a new guest whom everybody assumes is a plant from the multinational hotel chain that Muriel and Sonny have been wooing is straight out of the “Hotel Inspectors” episode of Fawlty Towers. Where’s John Cleese when you really need him?

The chickiest flick you're likely to see this season. Depending on your taste in romantic fare, you'll either find it toe-curlingly dreamy or ploddingly predictable.

uUltimately Better Luck Tomorrow feels nearly as hollow and unknowable as its characters’ hearts.

Van Helsing is simply far too much of a good thing, and although Hensley's Frankenstein Monster comes off better than anyone else, the film suffers from some truly inane dialogue and pacing that will likely cause tachycardia in members of the audience old enough to recall who Dwight Frye was.

I'm certainly not asking for car chases and explosions here, but this is a suspense film that's too "adult" for its own good, despite the fact that Redford, Dafoe, and Mirren (in particular) have rarely been more mature in their performances.

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

Toei Animation has done their usual bang-up job on the 2-D animation, filling nearly the entire running time with skirmishes, melees, and battles royal beyond compare.

Onward is neither terrible nor great; it simply is.

As an ensemble comedy that at best is only firing on four cylinders at any given moment, Mr. Jealousy is a slight contrivance, one that dawdles around in your head for a brief while before vacating the area to make room for more pressing issues.

It's the kind of film you feel like watching twice -- not because you found it that engaging to begin with, but because you didn't, and everyone else did.

From Lee’s point of view, I can understand the enticing challenge of taking on a revered cult film Oldboy. But a pair of ill-conceived casting choices can jolt you out of the film, or worse, elicit the rolling of eyes and barely stifled giggle.

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.

Julia, Huston, Ricci, and Workman are all excellent in their roles (Carol Kane as Granny Addams seems little more than an afterthought), but they're unfortunately not enough to save this elongated mess. If you haven't yet seen the first film, rent that instead, or, better yet, go pick up a volume of the original Addams cartoons.

Let's just say if you liked the last one, you'll like this one, too. Otherwise, you'll discover that it's time for Drebin, Nordberg, Capt. Hocken, and the rest to finally retire their badges.

Zombie continues to have a true, unflinching artist's eye for the sublimely horrific (a woodsy murder sequence is pregnant with disturbing, painterly compositions), that eye is wasted here on an unnecessarily moribund history of sociopathy as it relates to Halloween in Haddonfield, Illinois.

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

But instead of being the hippest kid on the block, this plays like some ranty, paranoid comic thriller. It'd be more fun watching Jimmy Stewart get the beat-down from Claude Rains on the Senate floor; when Mr. Williams goes to Washington, the result is a total snooze.

While this is no "Clueless," to be sure, it's also, thankfully, no "Born in East L.A."

A gorgeous-looking but ill-conceived mash note to the city of Paris that riffs on its better, wiser, glaringly obvious cinematic predecessors.

Transformers is about as clever as an unplugged blender.

Utterly pointless remake.

A poor man's "Excalibur," but the fact of the matter is that the film displays far too little of the incisor-sharp wit and out-of-control mayhem readily available in the other two films. It just doesn't work.

Inoffensive and sporadically engrossing.

Color of Night is yet another in a string of vapid, low-tension headaches passing for suspense thrillers (Fatal Attraction, Jennifer 8, Single White Female) that tries to go everywhere and, instead, goes nowhere. At all.

Seems as though its reach is always exceeding its grasp...partly because Kasdan spreads himself a bit thin amongst the nine major characters he's working with.

Hollow, predictable, and too glitzy for its own good, The Fan never even makes it to first base.

Its vague stabs at moralizing and goofball shenanigans are an odd mix. It's not the high school experience I had, nor is it probably like yours.

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.

A muddled, gimpy mess, filled with the worst sort of Trek clichés and ill-timed humorous outbursts.

Iwish I could say 99 Homes delivers a shockingly good sucker punch to the American electorate and a stand-up-and-cheer piece of socially conscious filmmaking, but it’s not. It lacks the satisfactory denouement of, for instance, Michael Mann’s The Insider (and Garfield is no Russell Crowe), in part because the events it depicts are still happening across the country (albeit to a lesser extent).

Paxton, as always, is thoroughly engaging, and Theron is coming into her own as an actress, but the bottom line here is that the film lacks the original's goofy good humor. Less effects and more humanity are in order before this remake can even get within spitting distance of the original.

It’s not a complete disaster, but even the appearance of Gabriel Byrne, as Lissa’s uncle Victor, fails to make much of a dent in the slapdash proceedings.

Walk on Water makes you wonder what the Mossad is teaching its field agents these days.

By the time Foot Fist limps to its ultimate fighting climax, you'll likely wish you had double-teamed "Game of Death" and "Waiting for Guffman" instead.

This is a film that can’t decide if it wants to be a war movie or a rescue dog melodrama and therefore falls into cinematic no-man’s/woman’s-land.

Sweet enough but in the end a bit of a corny-syrupy wipeout, this is middling family-night fare, but it never even comes close to the emotional or technical wizardry of Pixar's finest moments.

One of the dullest films of the sextet thus far.

There's the shell of not one but two excellent films in Pumpkin, but as it is the one we have here is just too bewildering to puzzle out.

A bizarre mélange of earnest and romantic road movie, high-octane chase picture reminiscent of everything the mustachioed version of Burt Reynolds ever did, and a slapsticky comedy that gives Tom Arnold considerably more screen time than actually necessary.

A gothic little slip of a film, beautiful to behold but with less substance than the shadowy tendrils of fog that blanket nearly every scene.

This rambunctious swords ’n’ sorcerers fantasy flick has grubby, pseudo-medieval CGI style to burn, but precious little in the way of anything new to add to this sort of genre storytelling.

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).

What if the filmmaker had found a way to reconcile his two storylines into a cohesive whole? Wouldn’t that have made a wonderfully affecting film? Why yes, it would have.

Hit-or-miss comedy at its best and worst: When it connects, the belly laughs are long and loud, but when it misses, the groans you'll be hearing are your own.

Why make a new mediocrity when the old ones are still so much more fun to watch?

The outcome is no great surprise, and plenty of the gags feel as though they were meant to be throwaways, but Ted 2, exactly like its predecessor, has plenty of heart, which makes all the rest of the black-dick jokes marginally more tolerable.

Proving once again that no matter how many times you remake a film it's tough to top the original.

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.

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.

Is this the start of a new subgenre? Probably not – 2009's "The Unborn" traded in Jewish mysticism, too – but it's considerably creepier than it has any right to be and, to be sure, righteous rabbis can be pretty terrifying in and of themselves.

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.

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.

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

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."

This is a strange movie (it feels like a lost episode of the old Leonard Nimoy chestnut In Search of …) about strange people doing strange things.

Aside from the ridiculous dialogue, of which there is much, and truly crappy CGI gore, of which there is even more, Survival of the Dead feels like the single weakest link in what is otherwise the strongest, smartest, and most transgressively revolutionary horror series in cinema history.

All things considered, Sgt. Bilko is little more than a lengthy episode of the original show. Only less creepy.

I like my shockers to be anything but predictable, and Saw is the very definition of predictability and, ultimately, tedium. That horse corpse has been flogged and flayed enough, already.

Fascinating, no? Of course, that's just one (obvious) reading of Fast Five. You could also say it's a kickass demolition derby – pure dumb summer fun – and often easy on the (hetero) eyes thanks to the inclusion of Brewster and Mendes.

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.

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.

It’s just not quite bad enough to be considered good, although Stanley Tucci’s hairpiece comes awfully close.

It's not quite quick enough to be anywhere near as gloomily engaging as the cast's original outing.

It's a shame that the subjects of Gazecki's film come off as so many quasi-mystical loonies.

Ultimately, though, and despite an enormously creepy turn from Bentley (American Beauty), the story has nowhere else to go but into the standard (albeit judiciously-used) stalk-and-slash territory.

Inoffensive and sporadically funny, its chief charm is Arnold's ridiculous noggin, and that's not saying much.

Suicide Kings' morbid sense of humor does nothing but muddle the film's overall tone. Comedy? Caper flick? It's all too much, and simultaneously not enough by a long shot.

Will make monster fans ache for what might have been.

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.

Tyler Perry has already been here and done that to such a degree that this particular cinematic field should now be plowed under and salted so that nothing might grow thereupon forevermore. Amen.

In the end it's all much ado about not so much, a semifunctional thriller that tingles but never terrifies. Ledge schmedge.

When you've got Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson in the kitchen, laying on the sophomoric laughs is just plain stupid.

Unfriended provides a modicum of chills and more gore than you’d expect.

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

Feels awfully rushed, as Ryan flies from the Ukraine to Moscow to the Russian hinterlands and back to Baltimore to make sweet, sophomore agent love to his physician girlfriend (Moynahan). It has the feel of one of 007's globe-hopping adventures, but without any of that franchise's giddy sense of fun.

The film's very title is a tease, however: It never gets all that loud, and you might doze off after 30 minutes of watching this unwieldy power trio recount their formative years and visit old haunts before heading on to a soundstage for their minimum rock & roll "summit."

Hardly a comic masterpiece -- the jokes are awfully broad and obvious -- but I couldn't help feeling relieved at the film's absence of malice.

It's dumb, to be sure, but then again, so were most of the old movie cliffhangers, from which Timecop is obviously derived.

All I can seem to muster, post-screening, is a modicum of fondness and a probably impermanent relief that the film isn't anywhere near as awful as it might have been in less capable hands.

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."

The script fires off clunker after clunker so fast you don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I chose to laugh as I'd already done enough crying at The English Patient.) Vintage bad Stallone, this lost-in-the-shuffle Summer of '96 blockbuster is just what you thought it would be: loud, boisterous, and without a single original line of dialogue. It's enough to make you miss Judge Dredd.

There's plenty of doom, gloom, and outright despair on hand here but very little genuine human emotion.

A far more profound and moving film about this particularly Aussie/Kiwi campaign (and one that will probably never be topped) is Peter Weir’s devastating Gallipoli, starring a very young Mel Gibson. Given the choice, I’ll take that over Crowe’s earnest bombast any day.

Retelling of White's classic children's book is a spun-sugar treacle-bomb, though a darn good-looking one.

The first impression is definitely one of all style, and precious little substance.

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.

It's all one big blur: sound, fury, and Martin Sheen devouring scenery as if it were going out of style (and in Spawn, it's definitely not).

Ultimately, the remake is, at best, rote and, at worst, totally unnecessary.

Highwaymen is an also-ran. It lacks the sprawling, Westernized mythos of The Hitcher and feels, in the end, like a previously owned nightmare sorely in need of a new universal hell joint.

The result is a vacuous feel-good movie that leaves you feeling nothing at all.

Even Cathy Moriarty-Gentile's role as a rival mob boss (with a nod to "Raging Bull") can't save this DOA affair.

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

A bold (and lovely) experiment that will almost certainly bore most audiences into their own brightly colored dreams.

Nemesis, by comparison, is about as exciting as a Tribble on Vicodin.

Contagion is certainly the most realistic portrayal of a global pandemic I've seen, but that doesn't make it the most entertaining, or even all that intellectually interesting.

Bad Boys for Life – while not as combustibly fun as the second installment – is fine, cheesy, Saturday afternoon mayhem, smoothly served with a heaping helping of “We’re all getting older.”

Laughably and knowingly preposterous, cheerfully un-PC, and violent in a way that makes the myriad slaphappy deaths of Wile E. Coyote seem downright dull in comparison.

The Watch is awfully lightweight, and while it earns its R rating via some comic gore and a whole lot of hyper-sexualized tomfoolery, it's hardly the best work of anyone involved.

Gere is excellent as this disturbed fellow; his twitches and too-happy smile are right on the money, but this only serves to illuminate the ramshackle state of the rest of the film, which is a shame: good, honest films dealing with mental illness are exceedingly few and far between. This, however, is not one of them.

Comes close to overdosing on bone-pulverizing kickassery at the expense of a plot that ricochets from the nationalistically fatuous to the lovestruck, farcical before shutting down completely in favor of punch-drunk loveliness.

Cloyingly melodramatic film.

But Pine playing 1960s-era Shatner – sometimes subtly, sometimes not? That's a terrific gag. Really, it is. Totally inspired. It's just not enough to save this otherwise cookie-cutter bromantic comedy from being anything other than what it is: an inoffensive yawn.

Mansome is mostly miss, and pretty thin as well.

It's a strictly date-night-rental affair, and if you still get Ryan Reynolds and Dane Cook confused, this will do little to help sort things out.

Not nearly as clever at taxing the audience's knuckles as its forerunner, Speed 2 still manages to stay above board long enough to merit a look-see, if only to relish the once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of Mr. Dafoe and his pet leeches.

Amibitiously mediocre.

It's hobbled by odd plot contrivances and some less-than-stellar acting from DiCaprio.

About as pedestrian as you can get.

It's not atrocious, but it borders on it, thanks to Dennis Quaid's annoying narration and his even more irritating portrait of the self-loathing writer whose presence bookends the two main storylines.

Bruce Willis shows up, in full Bruce “yippee-ki-yay, mofo” Willis mode, to little effect, and while Hudson’s sassy camp follower is a hoot, there are just too many narratively bizarre subplots falling out all over the place.

Come What May over-romanticizes the horrific, forced French exodus.

Unfortunately for a film that has so much to say about a topic of great import, Unplugging is hamstrung by its ricocheting tone and undercut by sequences that probably provoked chuckles during the initial read-through but too often fall flat in the finished product.

The film falls just shy of both Diesel and Gray's mark.

Least Among Saints is a heartfelt if not exactly heartwarming story of two wounded males, but despite top-notch performances from all the leads, it never really brings anything new to a story that's already overly familiar.

It's just not all that interesting to watch two pretty young things go through the muddled rituals of the pas de duh when I can, you know, do it just as poorly myself.

A mess, albeit one with occasional flashes of brilliance.

It's an existential, Kafka-esque nightmare with no real resolution, although if you've been biding your time waiting to see some high-strung, ham-handed bickering on-screen, this is your A-ticket.

Still, every generation deserves its own coming-of-age cinematic snapshot; if this is that, though, things are tougher than I thought.

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.

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."

Notably, Phantom Boy treads territory that’s similar to much of Hayao Miyazaki’s work, with a main character seeking the otherworldly in the face of a terrible reality. Missing, though, is the narrative and emotional cohesiveness that would likely have led to Felicioli and Gagnol’s film being a more engaging and memorable work

If nothing else, this adaptation of Peter Mayle's umpteenth ode to livin' la vie en Provence will make you wonder about Ridley Scott and the directorial aging process.

What we're left with -- Kubrick or no -- is a muddled, messy disaster of a film, something that seems more like a drastically edited miniseries, cut down to incomprehensible levels with whole sections missing.

It's big, it's loud, it's dumb, and all things considered, it's not completely un-fun.

Williamson's directorial debut is a sad affair, devoid of shocks, surprises, or even his clever trademark diologue.

It all adds up to a peculiar whole; fun I suppose, but not what you'd call a picnic.

Sure, Double Team is a mind-numbingly silly outing, full of gratuitous violence, testosterone-fueled goonishness, and acting turns that make TV's Van Patten family look positively Emmy-bound, but lest we forget, it's also pulse-pounding, often hilarious fun.

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

As an extended metaphor on the perils of imperialism and the colonization of both land and heart, Before the Rains works just fine, but as a love story run afoul of the times, it's a soggy affair.

Feels like the little animated adventure nobody loved.

Its ultimate message is as French as they come: The family that lays together, stays together. What the hell, it's more fun than a riot.

Friedkin, to his credit, gives us a nicely compelling car chase through the near-vertical hills of San Francisco, but it's only five minutes long, and this is a 105-minute film. What to do with the other 100 minutes? No one seems to know.

Stupid, yes, but fun nonetheless.

The whole film suffers from a serious case of overplotting, perhaps inevitable when trying to cram two largish novels into one smallish film.

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.