Michael O'Sullivan

It's just that, in this world of clanking, hissing machines, even the people seem like robots.

Plays more like a philosophical debate than a war drama.

This Window ultimately feels like one most of us have climbed through before.

There just aren't many laughs in this slack dramedy, and what yuks there are are fairly low-wattage.

If a movie can be said to suffer from low-grade depression, this one certainly seems to be, shuffling in its socks and bathrobe through a not-quite-two-hour running time with an attitude that is closer to grudging obligation than enthusiastic commitment.

Emphasizes action and eye-popping visuals over emotion.

A startlingly inappropriate tragedy in the final act drives home the film’s pacifist message, while virtually ensuring that the youngest and most sensitive viewers will be left in a puddle of tears.

Rollicks and rolls, thanks mainly to Roth's over-the-top depravity and Xiong's swingin', "Crouching Tiger"-style choreography.

For all its well-drawn lines between good and evil, Four Brothers is ultimately passive entertainment.

Derivative dumpling of a romantic comedy about Irish sexuality.

Entertaining enough for the trick-or-treat crowd, but a bit more bite wouldn't kill it.

A fun if dumb movie.

Ultimately, the problem with this Red Dawn is the same problem with the first one. Despite the more realistic battle scenes, nothing in it feels more fateful than a football game.

Wants to be about life, death and the red liquid that flows beneath our skin. It ends up being more about stage blood and stupid plot tricks.

The relationship is the best thing about the film, which otherwise feels hopelessly sad and tawdry.

It becomes clear that the situation is exactly as we imagine it to be, and that the sense of mystery that Shoaf has spent so much energy weaving is a red herring.

Unfortunately, Nair's film doesn't so much end as fall off a cliff, the ultimate victim of viewers' heightened expectations that this briskly paced story will take them someplace -- other than around the block in a horse-drawn carriage.

The movie Vulgaria is not one for the kiddies. Then again, the description "for mature audiences" doesn't seem right either. The Hong Kong comedy, a broad, cartoonish -- and decidedly filthy -- satire of moviemaking is as sophomoric as they come. It's also pretty funny, in an unapologetically over-the-top way.

Telegraphs its every move. There are simply no surprises.

Still, what separates Walking With Destiny from a run-of-the-mill war documentary isn't necessarily its insights into its main subject but its tangential stories about fascinating nobodies.

There remains a maddening emptiness where the film's ostensible subject should be.

The power of the story, such as it is, is not enhanced by the nonlinear narrative structure. In fact, it makes it needlessly confusing.

At times, the movie has the look and feel of the cheaply made late-night commercials that it mercilessly, and occasionally hilariously, mocks.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

This fairy-tale shtick, even when dressed up with a little class-war garnish, is hard to swallow.

There’s the potential for some real emotion here, as well as a touch of real-world commentary about a woman with 21st-century sensibilities trapped in a 19th-century world that feels, at times, medieval. But we can only catch glimpses of it beneath all the flickering layers of paint.

The movie by Jean-Pierre Améris milks the tears in the home stretch, making little effort to hold the melodrama at bay. The result is a story that everyone can feel great about feeling terrible about.

The lens through which the The Intouchables was filmed may be too rose-colored for some people's taste, but the window that these talented performers throw open -- a window onto the strange and touching friendship between two very different men -- is crystal clear.

The main problem, despite committed and at times vivid performances by the three main actors — and a mostly perfunctory supporting appearance by Tom Holland as Edison’s loyal assistant Samuel Insull — is the sheer amount of information that the movie tries to convey.

Nina filters the singer’s voice — and her life — through tinny-sounding speakers and an out-of-focus lens.

It’s a sterling cast, capably guided through the motions by director Thaddeus O’Sullivan — no relation to the author of this review, at least none that I know of — in this at times gently amusing and at other times modestly touching dramedy.

Plays less like a conventional medical thriller - think "Outbreak" - than like a dramatic reading of a "Nova" episode, performed by Hollywood's elite.

My Zoe is well acted and well filmed, yes, but the storytelling, in which Delpy stitches together mismatched parts like a Dr. Frankenstein, is its weak suit.

At heart, “Eurovison” seems content to be more dumb rom-com than sharp music satire.

Despicable Me 3 disappoints, if only mildly, not because it’s bad, but because it only aspires to be good enough.

Preaches most effectively to the converted.

Crafted by writer-director Jill Sprecher and co-writer sister Karen - a filmmaking duo who are sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Coen sisters" - it will erase any lingering memories of "Fargo."

It’s not a bad movie. It’s like several pretty good ones.

Maybe it’s true that it’s never too late to find a new home. But in some ways, it feels like “Cry Macho” has missed the bus. Perhaps Eastwood should have kept his hand on the reins of this pet project while letting someone else sit in the saddle.

Don’t Let Go manages, at times, to generate a nicely weird “Twilight Zone” vibe, but fails to sustain it, as it also runs into some of the same problems that plague movies of this ilk: If you tear the fabric of time by altering what has already happened, it can be difficult to sew it back up straight.

Alex Cross isn't meant to be analyzed too deeply. The title character probably sums up the best strategy for appreciating the film's modest pleasures when he says, "Don't overthink it; I'm just looking for a bad guy."

Its one-sidedness flirts with propaganda.

It never really feels like we've gotten to know the man himself, leaving the figure at the heart of I'll Sing for You a cipher.

Strikes several beautiful and lingering chords about the human condition, but the notes of the music ultimately never come together to form a coherent song.

My All American plays like an extended highlights reel, not a movie.

It’s a movie about exploring the vast, “dark continent” of the ocean’s deepest places (to quote Cameron, who produced and narrates the film) that ends up feeling claustrophobic. Much of it was shot inside a metal sphere the size of a fitness ball.

The film’s inertness is unexpected, and a tad disappointing, considering that first-time screenwriter Joshua Rollins has unearthed some genuinely fascinating details about Bales’s backstory that were not in either published account of the rescue.

None of this is by way of saying that Cats is bad, per se. In fact, some of the songs are pretty toe-tapping at times.

Being oneself is (or, again, seems to be) the theme of Wolf, which at times plays like a clumsy allegory about, say, the challenges faced by trans youth — there’s a poster on the wall of the clinic about “species dysphoria” — yet most of the time is simply a more generalized fable about finding your groove, your bliss, your true, inner self — and running with it (naked, if need be, and on all fours). If it’s an allegory, it trivializes whatever it’s allegorizing.

Overlong, unnecessarily sex-obsessed and downright nasty at times, This Is 40 feels haphazard and unfinished, despite a few moments of laugh-out-loud humor.

There's plenty to scratch your head about here. Is it a drama? A comedy? And if it's a farce, what's it making fun of?

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

Those who are only mildly curious, I fear, will be put to sleep or bewildered by the artsy and often pointless visuals.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away has plenty of eye candy... What the movie lacks, unfortunately, is coherence.

That existential paradox — are we all in this thing called life together, or is it every man for himself? — gives the film and its protagonists something meaty to chew on as it, and they, progress. But “The Long Walk” doesn’t dig into it in any deeply satisfying way.

It's not brilliant by any means, but bright enough to light up an overly familiar feel-good story.

There is still a self-consciousness and a forced quality to much of the humor that this TPT redux just can't shake.

It’s a sweet and savory morsel of storytelling, drowning in a puddle of special-effects sauce.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who co-wrote the screenplay with Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers and Zach Baylin, has constructed a work that suffers from the same tunnel vision as other movies of this ilk.

As a fairly soggy, two-hankie melodrama, “Swan Song” is effective. But I wouldn’t recommend thinking about it for too long.

Just when you’re about to write off your investment in Criminal Activities, the third-act dividend pays off, in spades.

There are worse things than being trapped inside a computer game with Olivia Wilde. In Tron: Legacy, the loud, long and less than wholly satisfying sequel to "Tron," that's the bittersweet fate of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the computer-nerd hero of both the 1982 sci-fi cult classic and its high-tech, 3-D update.

For fans of Neeson as action hero, “Blacklight” may be something of a disappointment, at least measuring it against the yardstick of previous thrillers in this particular branch of the actor’s body of work.

An energetic if empty-headed adventure based on the popular video game.

There’s an air of “High Noon” to Török’s drama, which features an intrusive sound design, including Tibor Szemzö’s jarringly contemporary score and sound effects that include the ringing of a clock tower, buzzing flies, rumbling thunder and noisy birds — which transition from pleasant tweets to ominous caws of crows by the climax.

There’s something admirable about the fact that Being Charlie exists at all. It’s a testament to Nick Reiner’s survival. That doesn’t mean it’s a great movie.

The people of 2022 may “release the beast” by slaughtering their fellow Americans. In 2013, that’s still what we go to the movies for.

It's hard not to feel a certain affection for a tale that is so unapologetic about just that: affection.

The insecurities that seem to feed Rivers's often angry humor -- and that have left her face looking like a mask frozen in horror -- are left unexamined.

Morning Light, sailor's delight. All others be forewarned.

Smurfs may be all over the multiverse, but it doesn’t land anywhere worth writing home about.

Guaranteed-to-bum-you-out conclusion.

Don’t think about it too hard. Freaky isn’t AP Bio. It’s a shop class project: a couple of mismatched planks cobbled together well enough to get a passing grade.

Alice, Darling deserves praise for emotional verisimilitude and shading. It’s just a shame that, in some of its packaging, it oversells a story worth hearing.

A meticulously balanced if oddly inert film.

It takes every resource available to a recently minted Oscar nominee — but does almost nothing with it.

Concussion suffers from a chilly detachment that feels all too clinical, when all we want, like Abby, is connection.

It’s a slight and simplistic family dramedy: vividly rendered if vaguely cartoonish in its depiction of a parent and adolescent, once close, who find themselves unable to connect.

The jump scares are genuinely jumpy, but the film plays out more like a theme park ride than a family drama with teeth. It’s pulse-pounding, in other words, from a cardiac perspective, but not especially engaging as a narrative, despite the earnest efforts of the cast to breathe life into a personal story arc that feels pasted onto another one.

Full disclosure: I am so not the target demographic for Five Feet Apart, a mushy, three-hankie weeper that is aimed squarely between the eyes of every 15-year-old girl.

There are few surprises delivered in Skyscraper, an entertaining if middlebrow thriller whose very name — blandly descriptive, generic — seems to advertise its fungibility.

Heroism, however real, doesn’t, by definition, make The Last Full Measure a great movie. Juicing up a fine story, and then hammering away at its point makes it one that doesn’t appear to trust either its source material or its audience.

Watching Tea with Mussolini is probably a lot like having tea with Mussolini would be: never dull but neither, I imagine, an entirely pleasant experience.

Introduces us to many who have known, worked and tangled with the man some call Bush's "co-president" during his multi-decade involvement in Republican politics.

Ultimately one flat-footed beast.

Really nothing more than "Clueless" redux but without the edgy, knowing wit.

Benign but forgettable sci-fi diversion.

Quest for Camelot, the first feature-length, fully animated film from the Warner Bros. studio, is a quasi-feminist Arthurian adventure about a young woman who wants to become a knight of the Round Table. It is also, unfortunately, a derivative rip-off.

When the danger subsides and the sparkless romance returns to the foreground, the vehicle comes sputtering back to earth with a thud, weighed down by the inertia of its leaden leading lady.

Cedric the Entertainer is the best (and probably only) reason to take this "Vacation."

Cumming manages to keep the film's pandering in check with every wicked raised eyebrow.

My only question is this: In the context of these by-the-book pratfalls, is it funny enough?

All foreplay and no climax.

Pretty slight, but for a campaign commercial -- which is what it feels like -- it's pretty long.

Wastes no time getting very loud and very silly and never really lets up.

What little grace there is in Living Out Loud (and there isn't much) is all in LaGravenese's script, not on the screen.

A dramatization of the life of Christ that takes as its script a word-for-word translation of the Gospel according to John, the adaptation is not so much tedious as pointless.

Another film about . . . a cretinous, grating loser.

Lee's understated performance is a small treat.

Cletis Tout is both in love with and able to laugh at the conventions it adopts, which is exactly where it goes wrong. It's just a little too self-satisfied.

Never asks its target audience of self-referential baby boomers and their littles bundles of joy to take it more seriously than it takes itself.

Scrat's annoying ubiquity -- is just one piece of evidence that Dawn of the Dinosaurs has been focus-grouped and is now trying to please its presumed young audience a little more than is healthy.

I remained strangely dry-eyed up to the final shot.

Think of Phoebe in Wonderland as "A Beautiful Mind," only for kids. And with Elle Fanning, Dakota's little sister, in the Russell Crowe role of the gifted outsider, tormented by demons within.

Unfortunately, the actors seem overqualified for their parts, delivering earnest monologues that come across as clumsy transplants from the proscenium stage.

The movie's half over before it really starts to whack at the funny bone.

As filmmaking, it's a bravura performance, but as a film, it falls flat.

The bad news? The story, which rumbles along like an unattended wheelchair on a gently sloping sidewalk.

A little more literary than lifelike, House of D is a story that feels too pat, and too perfect, for its own good.

A fairly straightforward, if preachy, tale about environmentalism.

Misbegotten buddy-bonding comedy of errors.

There's something dead and rotting at the center of Mama, and it isn't the ghost of the woman who lends the horror film its title.

A blandly middling crowd pleaser.

Dull and repetitive, even by the standards of an already repetitive genre.

If it's art, it's only mildly interesting.

It's a performance in search of a movie.

There's no sense of perspective here.

This "Holmes" is just about as silly as it awesome. At times, Ritchie and company try so hard to make sure this isn't your father's "Sherlock Holmes" that it comes across as, well, cartoonish.

Enjoy it, in moderation. It's your recommended weekly allowance of schlock.

When all is said and done, Mike proves to be not only peripheral to the main thrust of the movie, but a drag on its momentum.

So light and airy, it almost floats away on its own breeziness.

There Be Dragons is like fine wine, served in a Big Gulp cup. A little is very nice. A lot is way too much.

It's just that Pattinson's performance is so enervated that his Georges Duroy comes across as something of a cipher. He's not quite alive, yet also clearly not dead, given the amount of sex he has. He's undead, or at least uninteresting.

It's like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Catskills.

Blackthorn feels less like a proper sequel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which it purports to be, than a coattail rider.

It's heartwarming. But the film never really takes fire.

In the end, Daybreakers doesn't really want to make anyone think too hard. If that were to happen, they might stop to wonder why all the human survivors out there hiding in fear of their lives don't just become garlic farmers and call it a day.

Planet 51 is cute, but it's no "Shrek."

The swells of inspirational storytelling sometimes threaten to swamp the underlying inspirational story.

It's a highbrow romantic farce, without the laughs.

The problem is, the movie doesn't really care if we are laughing with it or at it.

There's a nagging question at the heart of Chernobyl Diaries. It isn't what, or who, is stalking these kids. After awhile, the answer becomes apparent, leading to a denouement that, while mildly exciting, feels like a ride you've been on before.

For those with no vested interest in this protracted and supernatural soap opera, but who do care about cinema, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 2 will be, unsurprisingly, a silly and somewhat cheesily made waste of time.

The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.

The film's real problem is that it can't seem to make up its mind about whether it wants to frighten us or make us laugh.

The argument in Amigo is so heavy-handed - and its execution so crude - that by the time the movie winds its way to a predictable but uninvolving conclusion, nobody will be listening anymore.

There's so much pluck and gumption on the screen you can smell it. Flesh and blood? Not so much.

Here's a better title for Griff the Invisible, a well-meaning but unengaging love story about two 20-something misfits: "Griff the Implausible."

Worse yet is the insincerity of the film's central performances. Too cool by half, Glodell, Wiseman and Dawson speak every line as if it had air quotes around it. In fact, the entire movie feels as though it has air quotes around it.

Jonah Hex may not be the longest 81 minutes you ever spend, but it might well be the most tedious.

I've got another portmanteau word for the movie: unbelievaballistic.

The story is maddeningly oblique and incomplete, despite paying what at times feels like excruciating attention to the minutiae of a dying love affair's final hours.

A cautionary environmental tale with a thin veneer of entertainment on top. With its cotton-candy-colored palette of orange, pink and purple truffula trees, it looks like a bowl of fuzzy Froot Loops. But it goes down like an order of oatmeal. Sure, it's good for you. It's just not terribly good.

As Balthazar, Cage doesn't disappoint. He's just manic enough to keep the character from becoming too predictable.

An aggressively crass - and not especially funny - trip down memory lane, an attempt to recapture the sweetly ribald magic of the earlier film. As anyone who's ever attended a class reunion can tell you, it almost never works.

A giant disappointment. It's as bustling as its titular city's piazzas, but it goes nowhere.

You can't criticize it for false advertising.

Charlie St. Cloud, like its star Zac Efron, is a gorgeous, unblemished thing. Both would be much improved with a tiny flaw or two.

Boasting a plot that's heavy on the magical shenanigans, this pretty and poetic adaptation of Shakespeare's play is a fantasia for the smart set, a literary novelty for anyone who wants to have fun without giving up food for thought. On that score, at least, it delivers, in spades.

The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. They bring a rich expressiveness and sense of complex inner life to their characters. It's the movie - and its placard-sized message - that is more two-dimensional.

No ordinary horror film. If it were, it might be a bit better than it is. As the movie stands, it's a less-than-compelling relationship drama, with aliens.

This third outing climaxes with a dark and melodramatic twist that, while adding a layer of nuance and back story that the previous two films never had, also feels wildly out of sync with its audience's expectations.

You can't fault the filmmakers for reshaping a diary into a cohesive film. You can however, fault them for taking one of the great antiheroes in preteen literature and turning him into, well, an even wimpier kid.

In attitude, if not aptitude, Robert Pattinson in Remember Me comes across like a latter-day James Dean.

The air inside the pyramid isn’t the only thing that’s stale in this ludicrous yet mildly likable horror film.

Still, there’s something about Screenlife that’s not just gimmicky — like the found-footage craze that preceded it — but numbing. All this technological terrorism should be terrifying, but it mostly just feels like eyestrain.

Ozon has created a monster that he can’t seem to let go of. Isabelle doesn’t just frighten her mother (and us). She seems to terrify Ozon, and I’m not sure I want to know why.

There are certain pleasures here, mostly in the cast of characters. Malkovich’s misanthropic egoist is chief among them. And Bullock makes for a fierce and relatable Mama Bear. But as for tension, there’s precious little.

The real problem, when all is said and done, isn’t the movie but the man with the microphone in its spotlight. Despite two comedy consultants who worked on the film, De Niro’s Jackie never comes across as especially funny on stage (or especially likable off).

Although the performances are strong and committed — especially Qualley’s — the movie is little more than a conversation between two people who are constantly, maybe even constitutionally, full of it.

On the plus side is the eye-popping production design, although that is also, like the plot, too, too much, dazzling the eye with more fantastical Atlantean technology and — inexplicably — underwater fire than a Las Vegas edition of Cirque du Soleil. Like the frequently shirtless Momoa, it’s pretty at first, then it just hurts.

It’s just a giant missed opportunity to be something more.

The question at the heart of Deliver Us From Evil, a garden-variety serial-killer thriller tarted up as an exorcism drama, is not whether good will triumph over evil. Rather, it’s this: What in God’s name possesses good actors to make dreck like this?

This is a small film with some big-ish names in it: Jeffrey Wright plays Stuart’s boss; Taylor Schilling is his love interest; and Gabrielle Union is a TV reporter. But it topples under the weight of its unwieldy themes.

3 Days to Kill feels like two very different movies, neither of which is particularly good.

Victoria and Abdul might have aimed for poignancy — and at times it almost strikes that tone — but for the most part, it plays like broadly clownish comedy, treating crusty British prejudice with all the subtlety of “The Benny Hill Show.”

The film is so thick with Jobs’s career highlights and lowlights that there’s little room for insights.

Weber’s main point — that bullies are often victims of bullying themselves — gets lost in a tsunami of sorrow and sadism.

The comedian’s wryly clownish antics as the preening, not-especially bright owner of several fast-fashion stores are in service of a story that feels sloppy and overly broad.

What’s missing here is something, or rather, someone, to care about.

If “Parthenope” is a love letter to his hometown and its subject an embodiment of the city’s idiosyncrasies and contradictions — beauty and decay, religion and hypocrisy — the whole thing comes across like a deranged mash note, more off-putting than seductive.

You’ve got to give Wheatley credit: In the Earth is like nothing else you’ve seen — although some might wish it were a little less, er, original.

Vita & Virginia may be about two fascinating characters, but it’s also case of words, paradoxically, obscuring the real people who wrote them.

So maybe some of this is hilarious. Heck, maybe all of it is. It will not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was not mine.

Think twice about taking very young children — or even some susceptible adults — to this at-times shocking, if less than graphic, gloom-and-doom fest. But the worse sin is: It’s boring.

It’s not the familiarity of this setup that irks, but its silliness.

Visually, Brick Mansions is a duller and more conventional film than “District B13,“ which was, if nothing else, a sourball-flavored form of eye candy.

It’s exhausting. It’s also not particularly funny or engaging.

Ironically, When the Game Stands Tall isn’t about keeping gridiron glory in perspective, but about blowing it out of proportion.

In the end this “Song” — whose payoff may leave you thinking, “Are you kidding me?” — doesn’t so much crescendo as collapse in on itself, an orchestral work that peters out in a trickle of silly, sour notes.

There’s some fun to be had, as long as your idea of fun includes being grossed out.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a mostly flat, flavorless cocktail of a sequel that tries to replicate the fizz of the 2012 original by stirring together elements of a getting-her-groove-back love story with music-video-style production numbers, lessons in female empowerment delivered with all the subtlety of a TED Talk and the kind of let’s-put-on-a-show energy that went out of style in 1940, has — despite those flaws — its moments.

Despite the hot-button subject matter, there is no sense of currency, or even controversy, here. The drama seems less personal or political than one calculated for shock value. One late, violent plot twist is so preposterous as to defy the level of credulity one normally reserves for a horror film.

What Polar Bear really lacks is hindsight. It is a little girl’s valentine to her father, without the benefit of bittersweet wisdom that comes with age.

Here, Willy's pure spun sugar, with none of the complex ingredients that make a movie soar: relatability, humanity, foibles.

There’s a lot of baloney — along with bodies — sliced up by the end, with Laurie bloviating about how Michael has come to “transcend” something or other. But there’s nothing transcendent, let alone new in Halloween Kills.

Stoker plays out like a Kabuki “Macbeth”: gallons of style slathered on a story you already know by heart.

The story is bloated and, despite flashes of imagination, overly familiar. And the dialogue, peppered with well-worn catchphrases.

Heedless of purpose, Horns charges full speed ahead anyway, ramming its high-concept hooey down your throat until the only heat you feel is from indigestion.

Though Kidman delivers a workmanlike performance, the story manages to be soppy and ploddingly dull, told via a screenplay that drives home the fact that it’s not really about momentous events, but momentous feelings.

It’s a lazy piece of work, even by the low standards of Hollywood horror movies.

The route of the film, like Lucy’s drive home, is preordained — a Google Maps version of a plot, with absolutely no surprises.

Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.

Despite what the singer/actress says, there’s not much to scream, let alone clap, about here.

Bekmambetov and Co. have created a redesigned product that is at once inferior to the original and a slavish imitation.

None of which would be a problem, if “Gucci” were half as much fun as I’m afraid about to make it sound. After all, who doesn’t love a good, tawdry scandal?

Sadly, Suicide Squad feels like a watered-down version of what could have been a stiff drink.

Although Kill Me Three Times includes a few murders, it does nothing to justify its title. Mostly, it just shoots itself in the foot, over and over.

Monday at 11:01 a.m. would probably work well as a half-hour television episode or a short story. As a feature film, unfortunately, it feels a bit like clock watching.

Despite a solid central performance by film veteran Lynn Cohen and a Detroit setting that will please expats and current residents of the Motor City, there is little here to lift this film beyond its regional appeal.

Luck takes things that are intangible — in this case, random felicity and affliction — and imagines them as palpable. It doesn’t quite work.

Too clever for its own good.

Clocks in at close to two hours. It feels much longer. By comparison, Malick’s World War II epic “The Thin Red Line” tipped the scales at a whopping 170 minutes. But at least that 1998 film had people shooting at each other. There’s no such excitement here.

Sabotage doesn’t exactly glorify violence, but it certainly does get off on it.

The film, whose title may or may not refer to a slang term for a dog’s erection, often teeters between compassion and something that feels perilously close to cultural voyeurism.

Bening and Harris are great actors, and they fill their roles as completely as they can, given the limitations of the soggy and implausible script by Matthew McDuffie and director Arie Posin.

There are goofy, primal pleasures to be had in the first two-thirds of the film. But Beyond the Reach exceeds even its humble grasp in the final act, collapsing in a clatter of blockheaded manhunter-movie cliches. Crazy is one thing, but dumb is unforgivable.

The scenery of wind-and water-eroded mesas and stone archways is lovely, but the voice performances are largely inert and unremarkable. Other than the risky shenanigans of the PALs, which ought to give any parent pause, so is the film.

The Signal has visual style to burn. And it takes good advantage of the current state of paranoia arising from our surveillance culture and the pervasive mistrust in government. On paper, this sounds like a good formula. If handled well, it could really pay off.

Much of Greenland features chaotic crowd scenes. The real disaster is how quickly mankind descends into dismaying depravity.

The way that conflict plays out is also surprisingly plodding.

This sharp left turn takes the films’ mythology in strange and not entirely satisfying new directions, including a crazy time-travel element.

There’s a story here, all right, but it’s a heartless and bitter one.

The director Alexander Sokurov is a visual virtuoso. So it’s odd, not to mention a bit disappointing, to find that the Russian filmmaker’s latest project, Francofonia, is so talky and, with rare exceptions, visually dull.

The story (by Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle) does not exist to serve the needs of logic, but those of Neeson, who, as has become his habit in this sort of thing, delivers, at minimum, a modicum of guilty pleasure as the middle-aged, tender-but-tough Everyman in a tight spot.

The movie is presented as the story of a man who hasn’t figured out who he is yet. But that’s not quite right. Instead, it’s a movie that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be when it grows up.

A slow, talky and only faintly moving meditation on mortality and memory.

If the formulaic film ever finds its audience — and it’s all too clear that there’s a market for this kind of slickly produced, hindbrain pulp — the best that can be said for it is that the ending (devised by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer) is perfectly poised for The Beekeeper 2.

Little Boy is a as phony as a game of three-card monte.

"Valerian” is an expensive, handsome but dozy invalid of a movie.

Studio 666 is either a delightful lark or a mystifying waste of time: Your pleasure will probably depend entirely on how you feel about Grohl.

The film is probably of interest only to those viewers who, like Gondry himself apparently, already have an obsession with Chomsky.

This interpretation is overly reductive, I’ll admit. But once the thought had implanted itself in my brain, I could not shake it: These ladies are going to war over a couple of bangles (Kamala’s word, not mine). There’s a lot of fighting, and the fate of the world is said to hang in the balance. But when you look at the screen, all you see is a bunch of people trying to grab some shiny things from one another.

The aptly subtitled Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is a blast of dead air and mummified humor.

The real trouble with Transcendence is that it just isn’t all that scary — at least not in the way that it wants to be.

See You in Valhalla, which is being released simultaneously in select theaters and on demand, is as deadly as its funereal subject matter.

Everything is needlessly tangled and bewildering.

Capital is too cynical to ever really suggest that redemption is possible. Not that anyone watching will even care.

In the final scenes of Scream VI, there are a lot of deaths unfolding, including, arguably, the demise of a once-vital film franchise.

It’s all played for laughs, which fail to materialize in a story that milks easy cliches and stereotypes about Italians, pasta and sexual double-entendres, with icky dialogue about “spicy sausage” and the like.

If for some reason you find yourself in a theater watching the martial arts adventure Man of Tai Chi...feel free to take a nap during the non-fight sequences.

During the lulls in which characters are talking (which happens with surprising frequency considering the film’s title), Cocaine Bear goes into snoring hibernation.

Tusk seems to harbor no grander ambitions than to create a gross-out gag.

Stenberg and Robinson are enormously appealing young actors, but charisma only goes so far in a story that manages to be, as directed by Stella Meghie (“Jean of the Joneses”), sterile and wildly far-fetched.

The only real crime here is the debasement of a great film’s name.

The real problem isn’t an overabundance of potential killers. Rather, it’s the fact that the film, from writer-director Aaron Katz (“Land Ho!”), does so little to make you care about the crime, or its victim, that the whole thing feels like an academic exercise.

Its clumsy, inert storytelling seems less interested in converting nonbelievers than in convincing us of Wahlberg’s piety.

Like a Boss is the perfect airplane movie: something that won’t distract you terribly much while you work the New York Times crossword puzzle during a long flight, periodically looking up at the screen when the 2-year-old in the seat behind you kicks the back of your chair. Oh well. At least that way you won’t fall asleep.

Despite such flashes of originality, the whole thing has the air of a cynical, low-quality knockoff of something that wasn’t very good to begin with.

The film by the stylish fantasist Guillermo del Toro looks marvelous, but has a vein of narrative muck at its core.

Watching Addicted is like eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar. There’s no nutritional value. It’s kind of embarrassing. But it does satisfy a base craving for cheap, immediate sensation.

Wilson’s portrayal of Nargle/Ross isn’t so much a performance as an impersonation. It’s a thin coat of paint, in other words, covering up some serious cracks in the storytelling.

Fans of Greenaway’s work — a mix of the brainy, the controversial and the grotesque — won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this. They may, however, be disappointed at how little of it actually works.

Say what you will about Dan Brown’s books. They may be, as some have noted, poorly written, formulaic and pretentious. But at least they hold a reader’s attention, in ways that this excursion — as sleep-inducing and rigidly predictable as a train ride — does not.

Too scary for very young children, yet too silly for most older fans of director Bryan Singer’s earlier forays into the Superman and X-Men franchises, “Jack” seems designed to appeal to a very narrow, and possibly illusory, demographic: the mature moppet.

There’s a whiff of autoerotic indulgence that carries over to the entire film, which despite its handsome black-and-white aesthetic and gloss of social critique seems a bit too smugly self-satisfied for its own good.

It’s the filmmaking equivalent of a monkey with the head of a goat, the tail of a fish, wings and teeny-tiny rat claws.

There are no surprises here, only blandly reassuring homilies.

Does not live up to the extravagantly wounded ferocity with which Travolta attacks his part.

It’s wholesome but starchy fare: a story of sacrifice and good fortune that feels less like a movie than a marketing vehicle for the power of divine providence.

Rudderless is a competent, well-acted melodrama, yet in scope and ambition it has the modest and serviceable scale of the small, not silver, screen.

A bustling, overly busy mess.

The Dark Tower isn’t frightening, or even, despite some serviceable action and special effects, very interesting, except perhaps for viewers too young to know better, or for Stephen King fans especially susceptible to outright pandering.

The Eyes of My Mother looks marvelous.... But that’s about all this absurd, illogical and underwhelming thriller has going for it.

D'Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you're predisposed to believe that Obama hates America. It's bashing, all right, but with a velvet-gloved fist.

In lieu of genuine high jinks, a series of escalating slapstick pranks ensues between Peter and Ed, including mishaps with a drone, a snake and a human corpse. None of them is especially amusing.

Redmayne ultimately fails to crack the secret of what made this man — er, this monster — tick. But that’s not really the biggest mystery that hangs over “Nurse.” Rather, it is the question of why all these power players thought something this slight, this weightless, this forgettable was ever worth their time.

This cinematic triple-decker sandwich is so overstuffed with baloney and cheese it ought to come with a pickle on the side.

The film isn’t awful. There are moments of handsome cinematography and occasional effects that both frighten and impress.

I Saw the Light isn’t just incohesive, but ultimately — and far more frustratingly — incoherent.

The Boy Next Door plays best as unintentional comedy.

Mrazek, who certainly knows the workings of this city from his 10 years in office, has written a script that feels accurate in its depiction of the mudslinging, lobbying chicanery and constituent grumbling that come with the job of politician. It’s just that little of it is terribly fresh or funny, and it draws no blood.

I mean, homage is one thing, but this reeks less of nostalgia than sweat. There is so little tolerance for spontaneity, in a film that feels calibrated to the millimeter to be magical, that reactions like delight and surprise — when they occur at all — feel manufactured.