Michael O'Sullivan

Bliss isn’t really all that interested in trafficking in the stuff of mass-market science fiction: the bells and whistles, in the form of nifty hardware, special effects and the like. Rather, Cahill’s latest film is an exercise in existential inquiry.

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

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

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

Hogancamp was a talented illustrator before the attack rendered him unable to draw. In retreating to a world of his imagination as a way to exorcise the demons that tormented him, he ended up creating real art. I’m not sure Zemeckis’s achievement rises to the same level, but this cinematic excursion to Marwen is almost certainly a trip to someplace you haven’t been before.

A limp and exceedingly uninvolving melodrama.

Director Mark Pellington (“I Melt With You”) at least recognizes that the setup is little more than a freakish showcase for Mac­Laine do her blunt-spoken-battle-ax thing.

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

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?

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).

Much of the film's humor hovers around crotch level. If jokes about mental illness, terminal disease and sex with orangutans sound funny to you, go for it.

Benign but forgettable sci-fi diversion.

Rated PG, which must stand for "particularly gullible," it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for people who slept through American history class.

A bustling, overly busy mess.

"Out of the Shadows” isn’t going to win any awards, good or bad. Neither an embarrassment nor a triumph, it is nevertheless an improvement over the last film.

Wonderfully empowering to watch Petula and Dorothy turn the tables on their testosterone-crazed tormentors.

Isn’t Statham’s best — or most brutal — work, but it’s not bad.

For a suspense drama, Impact is a slack, oddly enervated and mawkish soup of largely lethargic performances.

Wild Wild Waste is more like it. Waste of time, waste of money and colossal waste of talent.

Spiral, which involves the hunt for a serial killer by the police force of a nameless metropolis, is a thriller, a mystery, a police drama, but it hews closely to “Saw’s” grisly curriculum.

A fun if dumb movie.

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.

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

The film does not jerk tears as much as it knocks you down and runs away with them.

A stupid and violent delicacy, congealed nachos and Mountain Dew for the Beavis-and-Butt-head set.

This a sweet, mostly cute story about the importance of the people we’re related to, peppered with some fairly broad and not especially hilarious yuks.

In the end, “Nutcracker” is a delightfully old-school diversion. The plot may not always hum with the clockwork precision of one of Drosselmeyer’s mechanical toys, but like a music box, it nevertheless plays a sweet tune.

What really sells this three-hanky tear-jerker -- and there were a lot of women buying it during a recent screening -- is Lane's steely and vulnerable performance. Like Tinker Bell, she almost made me believe in fairies. Almost.

At nearly two hours, the movie feels bloated. It could easily lose 30 minutes, give or take, and live. It would still not, however, live up to its title.

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.

If The Exorcist: Believer is all about devotion to spiritual (or at least cinematic) faith, its failure to live up to the power of the first film, which made zealots of even the most cynical moviegoers, borders on sacrilege.

Neither Grint nor the hoax subplot are compelling enough to hold our attention. Perlman, on the other hand, is a commanding, if peripheral, presence, diverting the focus of the film from silly historical speculation to the tale of a damaged psyche.

Satisfies and disturbs in just about equal measure.

Yes, UglyDolls is a musical, and the peppy songs, while devoid of any subtlety, help tell the story, and are delivered with sincerity. Such ditties as Clarkson’s “Broken and Beautiful” celebrate body positivity and self-acceptance.

Collapses under the weight of its own pretension, a victim of misogyny trying to pass itself off as female sexual empowerment.

Loud, overstimulating and hard to take in all in one sitting, it feels like the vacation that you’ll need a vacation from.

There is a faintly greenish fuzz of bread mold at the edges of every frame of this stale exercise in psychological horror (subgroup: homeowner hell).

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

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.

Nosedive it does, abandoning all pretense of style and eccentricity for at-times laughable predictability and a parade of unconvincing red herrings straight out of Murder Mystery 101.

Genisys goes back to what made the franchise work in the first place: not the machine inside the man, but vice versa.

Although filled with fey, flamboyant characters, the stereotype of the gay hairdresser seems to have been meticulously expunged.

The franchise is cheapened by Disney's crass commercialism in releasing material that, by rights, should have gone straight to video.

One half of a very funny movie, and half a funny movie is better than none.

Kumail Nanjiani is the best thing about Men in Black: International. That’s saying something, considering that the actor never appears on camera and that the character he lends his expressively plaintive voice to is a CGI alien the size of a gerbil.

If you saw the French version, well, here it is, in Disney language, with John-Hughes-style slapstick.

Beyond mawkish, Radio would be harmless twaddle were it not for the offensive depiction of its hero, the real-life James Robert Kennedy.

Though Ouija starts off evoking a nicely eerie atmosphere of dread, it ultimately goes too far, making the liminal space between the spirit world and this one all too eye-rollingly literal.

A tad preachy and more than a little bit sanctimonious.

It's a question of tone, which jumps back and forth between airy-fairy romantic comedy and leaden family drama with the alacrity of a manic-depressive.

Too frequently and too loudly, the sci-fi bells and whistles of Chaos Walking overwhelm its quieter, more engrossing elements, making it hard to hear what the film really seems to be saying.

Jokes about race, women’s anatomy and little people are sprinkled, like rancid pepper, over a script that depends on the inherent humor of cuss words. Not that coarse language can’t be funny, but here it appears to be evidence of a toxic mix of laziness and sociopathy, not defiance of seasonal propriety.

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

On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes.

The film degenerates into sophomoric name calling and a brand of insult humor that would embarrass Don Rickles.

Insipid, unfunny and cliche-ridden.

It's so over the top, the top isn't even visible in the rear-view mirror.

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

A sprawling yet engrossing documentary.

The movie leaves us, like J.D.’s family, with only a mounting pile of baloney excuses for bad behavior.

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

Despite the marquee names and their obvious talent, the film feels like a made-for-TV movie. It’s slight and episodic, with a weirdly scrupulous ambivalence about its subject, whom it seems torn between loving and loathing.

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.

Gimme Shelter has a lighter touch than you might think. Yet there are times when its attempts at wringing drama out of real life are more strenuous than is strictly necessary.

The twist is, yes, audacious, even daring. It’s full of risk and defiance of expectation. So half a star for that. Steven Knight, you’ve got some nerve. But none of those things mean that the movie works.

This latest, utterly gratuitous chapter in the saga of the wisecracking reptile hunter will add nothing to the ever-dimming reputation of the Subaru pitchman.

Loud, dumb and obnoxious.

The only reason you'll feel any wrath is because you shelled out 12 bucks for this steaming bucket of half-baked plot, cliched dialogue and disappointing 3-D special effects.

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

Despite its deficiencies, Annabelle is not without a modicum of verve. It has its unnerving moments, but they’re outweighed by the sheer stupidity and predictability of the story.

A compelling, exquisitely acted drama about the shock waves emanating from -- and toward -- a single act of almost inexplicable violence.

The slapsticky, sight-gag-heavy yukfest, which is filled with the kind of phallic humor you may have sniggered at when you were 16, floats like a dead butterfly and stings like a B-movie.

But the real treat is seeing Big Daddy Bruce playing the papa bear part to the little lost boy. Sure, he loves his handgun, but for once Willis seems to enjoy his nurturing side as much as his Glock 19. [3 Apr 1998, p.N53]

There's nothing terribly surprising about Special Forces, a moderately gripping action flick about a group of commandos on a mission to rescue a pretty blonde who has been abducted by the Taliban. Nothing, that is, except that it's French.

With its spooky atmosphere to spare and a riveting central performance by Kingsley, an actor who manages to elicit both terror and sympathy, I was able to forget all those things, basking in the pleasure of my own goose bumps. So, for an hour and a half, will you.

Even if you’ve never heard any of this back story — let alone anything about Mine That Bird — the outcome of the film is never seriously in doubt. That leaves filmmaker Jim Wilson in the predicament of having to entertain us by showing how the horse and his handlers get their act together. Unfortunately, 50 to 1 never really does that.

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

Oddly off-balance, estrogen-powered dramedy.

The movie is pretty unabashed about the all-but-corny sentiment: Each of us has something to give.

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

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.

I would call the movie a trainwreck, except it’s really four or five separate trainwrecks.

The movie and its star just aren't that funny.

Tooth Fairy is cute. Which is to say that Dwayne Johnson is cute. How could anybody with the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger (circa 1984) and the smile of Cameron Diaz not be, especially when dressed -- albeit briefly -- in a pink tutu?

This Arthur is an exercise in time-travel tedium, a trip to the Land That Funny Forgot.

The film is so anemic you should probably order iron supplements with your popcorn, its plot so predictable it makes falling dominoes seem like a white-knuckle thrill ride.

Functional but tiresome.

An innocent comedic revenge fantasy that somehow manages to be sweet and wickedly satisfying at the same time.

Like its brain-damaged protagonist, Criminal just shouts and shoots its way into, not out of, an oblivion of illogic, plot holes and emotionally unengaging scenery-chewing.

Sure, I laughed. Yes, I cried. But mostly I just wanted to throw up.

There's no sense of perspective here.

Segel and Diaz are gifted and game comedians, with a lot of audience appeal. But Lowe clearly upstages them, consummating their Sex Tape — and making you want to roll over and have a cigarette — while there’s still one reel to go.

It's hard to know who exactly Parental Guidance was made for.

Despite some Cold War humor, the formulaic film is aimed squarely at the youngest of young children.

It’s incrementally more fun than it is silly.

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.

The real problem is not the maudlin script or Madden's travelogue touch. It's Cage as Corelli, a miscasting that turns the normally volatile, edgy performer into little more than a spokesman for the Olive Garden.

The psychologizing in Party Monster never goes deeper than what you might get out of Dr. Phil on a bad day.

It is the story itself that never achieves liftoff.

The littlest children in your house may find something to titter at from time to time, but based on the reaction of a young screening audience, it won't be often.

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.

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

The movie based on Young's 2002 memoir is a good bit blunter. One early laugh comes at the expense of a pig urinating on a woman's feet at the BAFTA awards, the British equivalent of the Oscars. And it doesn't get much better, or much smarter, than that.

The dialogue is often drowned out by engine noise.

The gratuitous vulgarity is just one more reason that Scooby-Doo should never have left the pound.

Audiences who have avoided the multiplex these last few years because of the garbage peddled there are the only ones for whom this overly familiar "Walk" will be memorable.

It’s a mushy and unsuspenseful melodrama.

Involves such a disturbing blend of unhealthy mother-son affection and physical pain that it gives new meaning to the term child -- not to mention audience -- abuse.

For those so inclined, it's nice to see the girl and the gangsta -- not the gunslinger -- save the day.

It's no worse than any number of other cookie-cutter slasher flicks geared for the slightly post-pubescent market.

Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality... is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

The comedy about a coterie of high school seniors plotting to steal the answers to the dreaded standardized test talks a pretty good game, but in the end the numbers just don't add up to much.

It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.

What's Your Number? ups the vulgarity, ladling it on top of a rom-com base so insipid and predictable that the only thing to keep you awake is counting the number of times that the script drops the word "vagina."

An unoriginal warming over of a skimpy Japanese production that has been re-edited, rescored and rewritten for American tots and padded out to feature length with a plotless short called "Pikachu's Vacation."

Moves at a glacial pace.

I'm not sure if it was that or the cloying script, but after a couple of hours of spinning around listening to this drivel I felt like I was going to barf.

There ought to be no lack of firepower in telling this shameful tale. Too often, however, Bitter Harvest is guilty of overkill.

The characters in Aloft seem to float over their strong passions, like birds riding on columns of air, without ever alighting. I kept waiting for the sharp sting of a talon to take hold of my heart, but it never came.

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.

As Kaulder, Diesel does what he does, rumbling out lines of silly dialogue in his subwoofer of a voice. As far as acting goes, there’s not much.

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.

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.

A lowbrow, only fitfully amusing comedy.

But seriously, folks, if you're going to make a scary movie, shouldn't you be able to do it without resorting to both "Blair Witch"-style found footage and movie stars? (Will Patton and Elias Koteas also show up as, respectively, an angry sheriff and a psychologist friend of Abbey's.)

It's laughably stupid, only fitfully scary and relatively harmless summer fun – if you're 12 years old, in which case you probably aren't supposed to be going to movies like this anyway.

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

It’s more silly than scary.

Where Town and Country gets really good and weird – and I do mean good – is only after about an hour into it in deepest, darkest Idaho.

What it suffers from most is the sense of offhand storytelling that lies halfway between creative laziness and cost-cutting sloppiness.

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

Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it's easy to do well. Screenwriter-turned-director Kurt Wimmer has a hard time keeping his actors from, well, acting a lot of the time.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist will likely make some people mad because of the way it holds the United States responsible for the repercussions of its actions in the world. Like Changez himself, the film has a complicated relationship with the superpower.

Everything is needlessly tangled and bewildering.

How ironic then, in a movie about wordsmithing, that The Only Living Boy in New York is tripped up not by tawdry behavior, but by terrible writing.

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

Set against "Mooseport's" backdrop of ramped-up whimsy -- and not the kind that charms, either, but the kind that gets old faster than uncovered cheese -- Romano just kind of disappears.

Unnecessary and unfunny re-imagining of the classic satire by Jonathan Swift.

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

Although genuinely gripping — at times, uncomfortably so — the tale of Lena and Daniel’s efforts to escape from Colonia and expose its abuses suffers from a heavy-handed telling.

Offers little in the way of originality, real excitement or even genuinely transgressive behavior.

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

I got exactly what I expected: Scared and tickled, within an inch of my life.

It's all too, too cute and too, too forced for words -- not to mention too, too dark.

Corny? Oh, yeah. But it's also reasonably good fun.

You can’t blame Will Smith for wanting to give his son a leg up in the business. Maybe one day Jaden will have his father’s career — and his ability to carry a movie. For now, it’s a little premature to ask him to bear the weight of this soggy, waterlogged “Earth” on his skinny shoulders.

There was absolutely no reason to make a new version of the 1970 comedy.

When it is good, the film by "Chicago Hope" actor Peter Berg is very, very good, but when it is bad it is horrid.

An entertaining and surprisingly serious look at the infamous New York discotheque, with a genuine nostalgia for the late '70s and early '80s.

It's a silly, giggly piece of pink-colored fluff, as hyperactive as its heroine and as redolent of bubble gum and Love's Baby Soft cologne as Lola apparently is. Yet the superficial sweetness masks something rotten.

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.

Unlike some of its recent ilk – "Spider-Man," for example – The Punisher is, no disrespect, a thoroughly morose and bilious affair. That is precisely what I like best about it.

Redeeming Love is an incident-rich saga populated by cardboard heroes and villains and outfitted with greeting-card sentiments and cartoon villainy.

For a comedy, there are precious few real laughs. Three to be exact.

Highly watchable stuff (not to mention listenable, with a relentless but not overly obtrusive hip-hop soundtrack propelling the action).

Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle it's trapped in comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing.

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.

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.

The more invested you are in the old-fashioned Robin Hood of legend — the less likely you are to enjoy what amounts to a chilly and flavorless frappé of historical speculation, revisionist folklore and every lazy action-movie cliche ever written.

The makers of Godzilla obviously devoted so much manpower and time and energy and money to the admittedly fabulous special effects that they apparently had no budget left over for actors.

The first “Transporter” delivered an unexpected kick, courtesy of Statham, who made for a brooding, magnetic — and reliably kinetic — action hero. Skrein is an inferior stand-in, scowling like his predecessor, but lacking Statham’s cool, coiled power.

This time-travel scenario is by now shopworn, and the normally riotous Lawrence, a manic and gifted clown, is hamstrung in his efforts to eke humor from the anemic script.

It's a pretty scathing satire of reality TV, including itself, which makes it both what it is, and a critique of what it is.

While by no means a masterpiece, the comedy, by Canadian director Ken Scott, is a careful calibration of crass gags and genuine sentiment that succeeds more often than it fails.

It ain’t worth the price of admission, but it is, in one of the drowsiest, dullest summer movies ever, a bit of an eye-opener.

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.

Despite classy lead performances by Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde, the movie, from horror factory Blumhouse (known for cranking out sequels in the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, among others), relies too heavily on reanimated monster movie cliches and scientific gibberish to keep it alive.

At times, it's downright nasty; and that's when I like it best.

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

That's My Boy is radical only in its extreme laziness.

Ultimately one flat-footed beast.

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.

One hackneyed, inauthentic, predictable scene after another.

It's a performance in search of a movie.

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.

Not quite documentary, yet by no means drama, Inside the Mind of Leonardo is what might be called poetic biography: maddeningly fragmentary and idiosyncratic, but 100 percent true.

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."

Anyone with a modicum of good sense -- or a weak stomach -- will take it as a warning to stay the heck away from this literally and figuratively deadly "War Zone."

Blind faith, I’d say, is beside the point here. As with all the films in the Conjuring universe, — really exorcism films in general — sitting back and enjoying the ride, to whatever bowels of heck it might take you, is enough.

To make matters worse, this third “Hangover” is dull.

Guaranteed-to-bum-you-out conclusion.

Less a movie than a meticulously, tediously accurate Civil War reenactment committed to celluloid.

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.

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

The Boy Next Door plays best as unintentional comedy.

The movie itself is already like one long commercial.

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

Gripping, if manipulative and somewhat preposterous, drama.

Tries to cram too many ingredients into one small pot.

A considerable cut above the crop of recent features by other 'SNL' alums.

With a surprisingly unhappy, anti-Hollywood ending that will appeal to those who like things dark.

If it touches on notions of scientific arrogance and the question of what makes us human, it ultimately does so lightly, and with a mix of eye-popping action and loopy good humor.

Will satisfy only those who can't tell the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly.

Full of the kind of obnoxious chitchat that only self-aware neurotics engage in. Christopher and Grace probably deserve each other, but that doesn't mean that any of us do.

Tries to put your tear ducts in a headlock with a litany of catastrophes.

A field goal, not a touchdown.

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

Seriously, though, watching New in Town left me feeling as pained as Zellweger, playing Lucy Hill, looks.

An appallingly dull film set in the world of professional racing, director Renny Harlin and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone have found a way to drain all the adrenaline out of the sport.

Tailored for the readership of Teen People magazine and about as thought-provoking as the average 500-word celebrity profile.

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.

The film has the whiff of easy paycheck. It looks glossy but is empty. It sheds light without gaining insight.

The film isn’t bad, although it is somewhat repetitive. If it has plot holes, conceptual laziness and an overreliance on dumb-insult humor, the film at least seems to know it. There are lots of self-referential jokes that acknowledge its own stupidity.

The drug-fueled romp turns ugly, sexist and misogynistic, as so many rap-star vehicles do.

It's a lot more tightly focused than the first outing, and for fans of the demented comedy of Elliott and Cross, or the thespian chops of Woods (a last-minute replacement for an ailing Marlon Brando), it's worth putting up with humor that's the filmic equivalent of a big, spit-soaked raspberry.

Sexist, racist, overlong, dull, visually ugly and, worst of all, unfunny, “Kasbah” squanders its cast.

There are no surprises here, only blandly reassuring homilies.

Even the Richard Rich-directed animation -- except for some nice but gratuitous computer-generated walking statues and dramatic ocean waves -- is not appreciably better than Saturday morning cartoons.

Suffers from an increasingly common movie defect: appealing, sharply drawn supporting characters, and a cast of main characters that is as unlikely as it is unlikable.

A sweet and funny take on the crossed-wire romantic couplings of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'

The film is smart, literary, nuanced, slightly stagy — and pedigreed to within an inch of its life. It practically reeks of dusty, yellowed pages and engraved-leather bookbinding.

As it is, The Divide is simply noxious for noxiousness's sake. French director Xavier Gens and writers Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean almost seem to take a kind of perverse pride in seeing how far they can go.

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

The self-conscious affectation of the film would be funny, were it not so smug.

A series of cutesy but flat-footed jokes leading up to a foregone romantic conclusion.

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

I started out this journey actually liking children. By the end of the movie, I wasn't so sure.

Did you hear about the Morgans? Trust me, you don't want to.

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.

Goes nowhere fast.

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

The bad news is that the opening credits, which make sick and darkly comic allusions to suicide, are the best thing about the film.

I’ll say one other nice thing: The film isn’t terribly long. You’ll keep waiting for the suspense to kick in. Spoiler alert: It never really does, except feebly, after about an hour and 15 minutes. And then, unceremoniously, it’s over.

The special effects look cheap, the acting is wooden, and the shouted dialogue consists largely of throwaway action-movie cliches (“Let’s do this”) and B-movie sci-fi jargon (“His bioenergy is off the charts!”).

Gives new meaning to the word "obvious."

Mainly for those who are already infatuated with Cena's stoic, Mount Rushmore-esque countenance and who do not find the idea of the big lug leaping off the edge of a cliff onto an airborne helicopter's landing gear remotely absurd.

Madame Web is no blockbuster, but in its own quiet way, it manages to break down a few barriers.

The movie is really just an elaborate excuse to show repeated close-ups of an elephantine dog scrotum.

I will admit that this TV skit stretched out to a filament-thin 83 minutes is idiotic, but I mean that in a good way.

The story’s message may not be the most original one in the world — put down your device and make eye contact — but it’s fun to watch it unfold in a world that, while far from realistic, feels real enough.

The film dutifully cleaves to the contours of a well-established and viscerally satisfying formula.

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.

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

Really two movies in one, and there's not enough breathing room for both of them.

The problem is not the credulity-stretching script. Or even that much of the movie just isn't all that funny. The problem is that it thinks it's freakin' hilarious.

A fairly straightforward, if preachy, tale about environmentalism.

Lee's understated performance is a small treat.

A protracted and only sporadically imaginative menu of ways to be murdered.

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.

Most of the comedy, such as it is, consists of the uppity Chase acting "street" and the ghetto-fabulous Tiffany putting on moneyed airs. But, if you've seen the trailers, you already know that.

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

As the film's boo! moments get spookier and more frequent, Godsend gets more and more inane.

It’s hard to know which of the film’s many flaws to cite first, so here’s one thing it does fairly well: scare the bejesus out of you. That’s assuming you have read nothing about the subject of vaccines and autism, and are of a generally lax and incurious mind when it comes to the rigors of scientific inquiry.

It's not Deuce's satisfied clientele, but the audience, that gets the shaft.

The unapologetic laziness and ineptitude of Jack's impersonation, which is played for cheap laughs, is just as lazy as Sandler's performance as the real Jill. You don't buy it for a minute.

Hopeless rip-off of Hitchcock's "The Birds."

For da love of God, spare me.

Bizarre yet popular.

Here, common sense flies out the window, along with the hail of bullets.

Salva certainly gets points for creative repurposing. Much of what transpires in Dark House has been seen before, just not all in the same movie.

Confusing as heck.

I can't imagine why anyone would pay money to see this sorry excuse for a film, which plays more like a home movie than something from cinema professionals.

It would be one thing if Christmas With the Kranks were a satire on the assaultive, bullying nature of contemporary Christmas celebration in this country, but it's not. It's an ugly glorification of it.

A parody of B-movies stupid enough -- and yet with just enough brains -- to appeal to the most discriminating fans of the genre.

Cinematic sleeping pill.

Lacks "spark."

Playing a hero who's meant to be something akin to the young Dalai Lama, Ringer brings less than zero gravitas to the role. He makes the kid who plays Gibby on "iCarly" look like Sir Laurence Olivier.

The message of The Ultimate Life could be summed up on a greeting card. Or rather, 12 greeting cards.

A glorified infomercial in defense of the holiday that contains about 15 minutes of actual content padded out with almost an hour of filler.

The story here is just not particularly amusing.

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

Movie 43 is a near masterpiece of tastelessness. The anthology of 12 short, interconnected skits elevates the art form of gross-out comedy to a new height.

If this garbage sounds like your kind of thing, and the folks who jump up and talk back to the screen are your kind of people, then, sweetheart, you and this movie deserve each other.

There really is no other movie on Earth quite like it. And that's including "The Human Centipede: First Sequence," the 2009 horror film on which this dismal, nauseating and yet bizarrely artful sequel is based.

Propelled not by characters but caricatures.

Go expecting the very worst. Just don't expect to laugh.

A turbo-charged remake that should alienate no fans of the adrenalized 1975 original.

Maybe I should let a role of the dice determine whether I use a cudgel or a broadsword to put this puppy out of its misery.

It plays like a soft-core-porn potboiler left over from the 1970s about a hot vampire chick.

The film is amateurish on almost every level.

A workmanlike, if treacly and overblown, piece of propaganda. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the degree to which you already believe its talking points.

So bad that I predict there will be drinking games set around viewing it someday.

The laughs are few, far between and pretty darn faint in this comedy.

A more accurate title would be “Inept, Inadequate and Insipid Comedy.”

The movie is about so much more than politics. Growing up, growing disillusioned, gaining wisdom — these are the themes of Levitt’s slight but eminently watchable film.

Pay 2 Play makes no new revelations... The difference with this movie is that it actually means to inspire hope.

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.

Gift doesn’t really get into such unpleasant details as financing, and that’s okay. The idea that culture has a value beyond cash — that both sides of the equation, both the getters and the givers, are enriched by something that doesn’t have a price tag, or at least not an obvious one — is a beautiful thought.

The screenplay is thoughtful and nuanced, and Epps’s performance anchors the narrative with a solid, unfussy portrayal of ethical indecision, even if the third act detours into more melodramatic territory.

In The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, deeper meaning is left by the wayside, in a tale with way too much story and not nearly enough life.

The Keeper will win no filmmaking prizes. But it doesn’t mean, or need, to. Like an infomercial, its aim is more simple, direct and unapologetic: to call attention to an epidemic hiding in plain sight. By that measure: mission accomplished.