Melissa Anderson

Despite the nonstop banality, Johnson remains the sole source of allure: Her sleepy eyes suggest nights devoted to pleasure inconceivable to James.

Glatze's blog entries are read aloud by Franco, an infamous graduate-degree collector not so long ago, in a voice that suggests poetry-MFA earnestness, horrible acting, or both.

As dull and impersonal as a sheaf of open-enrollment insurance forms, Office Christmas Party brings together — and underutilizes — several funny performers from TV shows (Silicon Valley, Veep, SNL) that pinpoint what this dim comedy does not: the specifics of workplace environments and their particular pathologies and joys.

The tears and recriminations, eruptions and reconciliations hold a begrudging fascination for about an hour.... After that, though, the volume is never turned down and these characters are never less than the most unendurable company.

As generic and impersonal as a new credit card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality.

Binoche's hushed histrionics, though, are of a piece with the fruity portentousness of L'Attesa.

Isabelle and Gérard's regrets and laments about their parenting skills betray no bone-deep rue or shame but are delivered with all the conviction of two luminaries merely running their lines.

This toothless, silken-looking satire takes aim at easy targets: white Williamsburg ennui, technology, yoga.

The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting abbreviations, namely AYFKMWTS and GTFOOH. In the end, though, it's an armed-forces acronym dating back to World War II that best describes this dismal project: FUBAR.

Wiig's cheering presence in an otherwise depleting project/cross-promoted product highlights the fact that Zoolander 2 is a referendum on dying industries: not just the portfolio of Condé Nast titles that Wintour oversees as artistic director, but also the Frat Pack.

McKay's bumptious movie awkwardly combines fourth-wall-breaking gimmickry and flaccid indignation with the goofball energy that defines his comedies.

Its characters are all too easily determined but never specific—or memorable.

Though Snitch loudly announces itself as a social-issues movie, its nominal outrage over the severity of our nation's sentencing laws for first-time drug offenders is quickly subsumed by a jacked-up narrative of a father going to extremes to save his son.

Hough emits all the charisma of a personal assistant.

Yet it's not entirely forgettable. I'll long be haunted by Dennis Quaid's manic performance as a palm-greasing dad who seems to be under the influence of bath salts-tweaked-out acting that matches the camera movements.

Screeches and scrambles from scene to scene with manic sitcom energy, much like the cherished pet hamster of one of its characters.

Fifty years after her death, the actress's corpse is still being picked over with ever-diminishing returns, as evidenced in Liz Garbus's garish, misguided documentary.

Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.

Hoariest of all are the exhortations to make distinctions between "fiction" and "life."

Of sole interest is Benoît Magimel's Vincent, who sheepishly confesses a same-sex attraction to one in the cabal; his moments on-screen provide the only break from this slog.

A sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which all the angles are obtuse.

Proceeds as a tedious, clumsy diddle, constantly reminding viewers how much progress has been made since the Victorian era.

"There's a midget in the oven!" is about as inspired as the dialogue and set pieces get in this queasy-making entertainment.

Making even more appearances than the rodent is the Big Gulp; the lady bounty hunter is constantly consuming junk - though at least when Heigl is snacking, she isn't talking.

Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.

A movie so excruciating that it makes its predecessor, "Valentine's Day," seem like "Nashville" in comparison.

Hoping to distract us from the zero ideas found in his film, Levinson demands that his cast act loudly and unbearably, a task for which Demi Moore, as the second wife of Ellen's first husband, is perfectly suited.

She is also played by Sarah Jessica Parker, a performer so aggressively determined to make us like her that no work-life conflicts in the film ever gain any traction; we're too distracted by the actress's manic tics (the head tilts, the popping of the wounded-deer eyes) to notice any real adversity.

What's most crushing is witnessing what should have been the dream pairing of Kunis and Timberlake - both foxy, loose, confident performers - here generating zero chemistry.

Though lazily mocking hyper-vigilant parenting, the film treats the moldiest clichés - as gospel.

Though its structure may be whittled down in comparison with the earlier works, Biutiful is even more morbidly obese than "Babel" in terms of soggy ideas, elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber.

The greatest frustration-not just in For Colored Girls, but in Perry's entire oeuvre-is witnessing talented (and often criminally underemployed) actresses struggle with the material they've been given.

It's uncertain whether or not Taranto and debuting helmer Anders Anderson looked at the "Law & Order: SVU" and "Cold Case" episodes that also used the crime as a plot thread; the sub-televisual incompetence of their film suggests not.

Greenspan and Harmon's paltry song of themselves concludes with five minutes of outtakes, capping the self-love.

Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.

If Markell's instincts for script exhumation are questionable, she's the victim of even worse timing: Who thought releasing her film 10 days after Liv Ullmann and Cate Blanchett's praised-to-the-high-heavens "A Streetcar Named Desire" closed was a good idea?

Grossly exaggerating his characters' either/or constructions, Moodysson forgoes any real ideas about the world's vast inequities, content to pummel his audience with portentous global guilt-tripping.

A sloppy, desultory, depressive buddy comedy the color of beer-infused pee.

Misery pile-up.

Spread becomes a sloggy, tepid comeuppance tale.

Outrageously sentimental and retrograde.

Plays like both a supremely outmoded chick-lit adaptation and an outrageously obscene gesture as the economy continues to swallow up livelihoods, homes, and hope.

To Save a Life wants to rescue kids from the Satanic messages of "Gossip Girl"--a benign, even worthy enough objective, but must alternatives to empty, materialistic adolescence require baptism in the Pacific?

With all due respect to Leo Tolstoy, all unhappy film families in which someone ascends those "12 steps" are exactly alike.

Another movie, not as awful as this one, might one day find better use for the easygoing vibe between Queen Latifah and Common, the stars of Just Wright.

Continuing both his bad filmmaking and obsession with lethal orifices, Mitchell Lichtenstein follows up "Teeth," his clumsy debut about a dismembering vagina, with a voluminous explosion of poop.

Sheridan, repeatedly drawn to family sagas, including his own (2002's In America), aims for Greek tragedy but ends up with a PTSD melodrama, with Maguire able to produce slobber almost as effortlessly as Portman can summon up tears--essentially all her role calls for.

It's heartbreaking to see Lathan, an underemployed actress whose talents were last put to good use in 2006's "Something Else," in such a ridiculous, impossible role.

Hackford's pacing throughout is continuously off, with scenes extending several beats too long, his two leads adrift and bored.

Curiously, Blackmail Boy's alternate title is "Oxygen"--and by film's end, you'll be gasping for it.

Like Amélie's scrubbed-up "City of Lights," Paris 36 is an antiseptic arthouse trifle, so eager to soothe that it only numbs.

A misguided tale of sentimental education.