Michael Phillips

It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.

A movie just begging to go up in the flames of camp. If only somebody had brought a match.

Broken Horses raises the question of what is cockamamie, and what is cockamamie and outlandish and ridiculous yet a perfectly swell time for those very reasons. This one's just cockamamie without the swell part.

Only the architecturally refined bone structure of Kristin Scott Thomas' face rescues Keeping Mum from full-on tedium.

The film doesn’t begin to know what to do with the reincarnation idea beyond a few sharply edited micro-flashbacks. Is the look on Wahlberg’s face the character thinking What is going on? Or is it the actor thinking Am I in the next ‘Matrix’ or the silliest movie of 2021?

The Last Airbender (they couldn't use the series' "Avatar" title because another film got there first, without all the bending) is more about marshaling extras and interpolating tons of computer-generated effects and keeping the factions straight. It's a tough sit.

In a funnier world, Zoë Chao and Tig Notaro are starring in their own romantic comedy together.

While there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.

Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.

There’s nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn’t fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story.

The Good German is just stiff. When Soderbergh tries one of those patented swoop-in-on-the-diagonal moves at a key dramatic moment, the effect is comic. And at that precise moment, the story starts dying a slow, oxygen-deprived death.

Strange as it seems, if you choose to set aside the female roles in The Ridiculous 6 reducing women to cleavage or to mute humiliation, the movie is a long, long way from the worst Sandler movie ever made.

The Boss has zero finesse as a comedy.

Reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness.

The wastrel Sparrow ends up both overexploited and underpowered in this fourth outing.

The film is perfectly mediocre, which is heartbreaking, not heartwarming.

It’s such a drag to see Ke Huy Quan undermined so persistently by the script and the role handing him his first lead in a movie.

The film, with its wearying gamer-style rounds of death, is routine at best.

The choicest dialogue in Burlesque provokes the sort of laughter that other, intentionally funny films only dream of generating.

Despite honorable work from Theron, Robb and Stahl, Sleepwalking makes good on its title in a not-so-good way.

How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big.

Conceived and developed shortly after Haddish scored, deservedly, with “Girls Trip,”” the movie is a mechanical series of witless yeast infection jokes, or thereabouts. While director Miguel Arteta has made some interesting work in the past, including “The Good Girl” and “Beatriz at Dinner,” his way with low physical comedy here is pretty artless.

A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy.

It's a serious drag to see how Ritchie has turned Holmes and Dr. Watson into a couple of garden-variety thugs.

Optimism is nowhere to be found in Ritchie's movie itself. It is a grim and stupid thing, from one of the world's most successful mediocre filmmakers, and if Shakespeare's King Lear were blogging today, he'd supply the blurb quote: "Nothing will come of nothing."

The movie is all preening and very few laughs, though Daddario and Efron have a few moments, and Johnson remains a supremely likable slab of movie star.

Now and then the Mulleavys capture a moment or glimmer of true mystery; more often, and certainly in dramatic terms, Woodshock feels like a movie that never stops buffering.

Ferrell may well shoulder the blame for Land of the Lost, even if he doesn't deserve it. He did, however, willingly participate in this coarse, sloppy big-screen version of the old Saturday-morning time-warp adventure.

The rhythmic assurance of truly bracing screen action, even if it's just a bunch of metal beating up a bunch of other metal, or clobbering humans, never gains traction. The cross-cutting suggests the editors took care of things via group text.

It's all very "Scarface"--the De Palma remake of "Scarface," not the Hawks original. In other words, it doesn't feel modern at all. It feels about a generation late and 400 years short.

Well, it’s a dud. Nothing quite clicks.

Hangover II is more like a spitball meeting, a series of ideas that might, in theory, be good enough for a sequel, than it is an actual movie.

Doesn't provoke bittersweet inquiries regarding one poor actress' grisly fate. Nor does it stir up much provocation on the matter of why, as a popular audience, we're still taken with this lurid symbol of sex and dread and desire. Rather, the movie raises a much simpler question: Huh?

Star vehicles this rickety have a way of making the world unsafe for comic democracy.

Diane Keaton--now there’s a trouper for you. She will not be caught giving less than 110 percent, even in a drab little heist comedy.

I enjoyed Eliza Dushku's mad poetess, probably for the wrong reasons, but with a project this meager, you take your artful sneers and scenic diversions where you can get them.

It's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because it's my duty to say it. And it's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because something about its particular grade of dullness may cause memory loss.

Their (The Brothers Strause) effects are pretty good, on a fairly limited budget. And that's about all you can say for Skyline.

Fox's cleavage is the only camera object that catches Bay's attention for more than a millisecond.

The stalwart American hero of Turistas comes off as a dislikable blank in the hands of Josh Duhamel, of the TV series "Las Vegas." More relaxed is Melissa George, who co-stars as the Aussie.

The overall vibe of this folly is curdled and utterly blase; it's a 118-minute foregone conclusion, finesse-free and perilously low on the simple performance pleasures we look for in any musical, of any period.

As robust and clever an actor as Cox is, he can't make Jacques any less of a blowhard; Kari's wit simply doesn't come through in English, at least with this script.

The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.

Instead of dramatizing this subject’s life, it dramatizes the extravagance of moviemaking. The script shoves the dicey stuff off to the side: race, infidelity, a complicated figure’s inner demons.

Raiff most likely wanted to make a movie about a well-intentioned guy in his early 20s who gradually finds his way to a better life. What undermines his efforts is a creeping smugness and self-regard, positioning every side character as an intern in the Andrew Improvement Program.

The movie coasts on a blase, easygoing highway of cynicism regarding how America conducts its business of war. Despite all the Martifications and Scorsese-ing, we're left with virtually nothing, except the feeling that a pretty good anecdote has been inflated into a bubble-headed American Dream morality tale.

It's no better, no worse and essentially no different from the jocular, clodhopping brutality of the first one.

I wish The Boy Next Door were a different, zingier sort of mediocrity, but whenever it threatens to go the full Zalman King "Two Moon Junction" route, it pulls back and behaves itself and settles for a grindingly predictable series of escalations.

This one is strictly a welding job, grabbing parts of “Blade Runner,” a bolt and a nut or two from “Vertigo” (though not as much as “Phoenix” did) and notions of commercially desired fantasies of pasts real and imagined, straight from “Westworld.”

The sole memorable scene involving a little Focker in Little Fockers, though memorable doesn't mean amusing, involves Ben Stiller's male-nurse character administering a needle full of adrenaline to his dyspeptic and unhappily aroused father-in-law Jack Byrnes, played by Robert De Niro.

It plays like a bland, third-season Marvel series as watched on a 12-year-old TV set playing in the wrong dramatic aspect ratio, which I realize isn’t a real thing. But now it is.

All you want from a movie like this, really, is a little brainless fun, and it keeps holding out on you. Everyone looks fatigued. Even Cage’s toupee seems ambivalent about having signed on for a sequel.

The problems begin and end with the script, credited to three writers. “Dolittle” turns its title character into an eccentric and wearying blur of tics, tacked onto a character who comports himself like a bullying, egocentric A-lister rather than someone who, you know, actually enjoys the company of animals.

The tragedy is that the performance comes to nothing. Nearly everything else in the film is vile.

Nobody watches a disaster movie starring digital tornadoes expecting Oscar Wilde. But Into the Storm, directed with bland efficiency by Steven Quayle of "Final Destination 5," reminds us that unless a movie establishes certain base-line levels of human interest, it runs the not-unentertaining risk of coming out squarely in favor of its own bad weather.

Line to line, Stallone has a particularly numbing penchant for the f-word. But the key f-word in Homefront is "familiar."

An exhaustingly pushy, phallocentric and witlessly smutty spoof of early '80s medieval fantasies such as "Krull" and "The Beastmaster."

Green has made so many interesting movies, from “George Washington” to “Snow Angels” to the best bits in “Pineapple Express” and more recent genre exercises. Halloween Kills settles for the reductive, distressingly anonymous hackwork of its title.

If the writers had the guts (and the jokes) to fashion a bittersweet comedy with a fully earned happy ending, Unaccompanied Minors probably wouldn't have been made. As is, it's a prefab slapstick-'n'-pathos stew that doesn't taste like anything.

Numbingly gory when it isn’t just plain numbing.

We have to take the sexual tension on faith, as with everything in this formulaic glob of a script.

Hanna presents the problem of the well-made diversion that is, at its core, repellent.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle offers everything — several bored Oscar winners, two scenes featuring death by meat grinder, Elton John mugging in close-up — except a good time.

It’s a lame and weaselly thing, made strangely more frustrating by some excellent performers.

The scenery's nice. But once you've said the scenery's nice, you're no longer talking about a movie worth talking about.

On the whole, I'd rather be on Pluto, which isn't even a planet.

The actors take your mind off things when they can: I like the way Hathaway jabs her elbow at the elevator buttons for punctuation, and the ardent commitment to language Ejiofor brings to his character’s public poetry readings. But a movie shouldn’t rely on Hathaway and Ejiofor to shell-game your attention away from the movie itself.

Davis, in particular, manages to create a fully dimensional character in the midst of a highly polemical screenplay.

This is a franchise with lead weights tied around its ankles.

After the insufferably dense mermaid mythology of "Lady in the Water," Shyamalan clearly wanted to keep things simple. He whizzed straight past "simple" to simplistic.

Seven Pounds has a heart as big as all outdoors. Unfortunately it's made out of high-fructose bull.

The most excellent and lamentable tragedy Romeo and Juliet has been turned into a film that is lamentable without the "excellent" part.

Not even Smith's charisma can mitigate the chaos that is Hancock.

Freshman Orientation is not incompetently made. Nor is it badly acted. But there’s not a fresh idea in it, and everyone on screen seems to be in a different comedy.

The revenge in Oldboy is neither sweet nor sour; it's just drab.

When Jason Sudeikis and Ed Helms appear in the same movie there's a significant threat of clean-cut sameness. Mediocre material makes them like two halves of the same comic actor: Ed Jason Helms-Sudeikis.

Dempsey's pleasant enough, but he hasn't yet learned how to play against a mediocre script's obviousness. Monaghan has, which is gratifying.

A coming-of-ager that nearly slaughters you by minute 30 with the relentlessness of its protagonist's voiceovers.

If a movie doesn’t care enough about its selling points, aka the stars, to give them decent lines more than twice per hour, the “bad” in “Bad Boys” ends up being the wrong kind of bad. And, in a truly sad way, its own review.

Calling Dredd 3D a movie is sort of a lie. It's a premise, and there are levels to reach, and always there's another grimy hallway to stalk, and then you turn right or left, and then kill some more.

Knock at the Cabin is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.

Levinson has written and directed in many genres. But rarely has he made a film as indecisive and diffident as Man of the Year.

It brings me no joy to relay this: From an irresistible “tell me more!” of a true story, Eastwood and his “Gran Torino” screenwriter Nick Schenk have made a movie that feels dodgy and false at every turn.

The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.

The cast excels at transcending its material. The script by Justin Haythe matches Francis Lawrence’s direction; it’s workmanlike and steady and pretty flat.

The new music helps, a little. But the movie is a karaoke act, re-creating the original movie’s story beats beat-by-beat-by-beat.

It is, for what it is, a work of considerable care and craft. And it's completely soulless.

Salerno blows little more than smoke in this one, especially near the end, when we get to the maybe-probably-sort-ofs regarding the maybe-probably-possibly full vault of unpublished work.

Take Me Home Tonight, believe me, you've already seen.

The camera bobs and weaves like a drunk, frantically. So you have hammering close-ups, combined with woozy insecurity each time more than two people are in the frame. Twenty minutes into the retelling of fugitive Valjean, his monomaniacal pursuer Javert, the torch singers Fantine and Eponine and the rest, I wanted somebody to just nail the damn camera to the ground.

Astonishingly, Angels & Demons IS the same sort of lumbering mediocrity.

Bride Wars really does not capture the mood of the moment. It comes from a different time, a different planet.

A remake for schlemiels, or at least easy marks when it comes to formulaic Hollywood comedy. But the film's peculiar sluggishness and nagging hypocrisy probably won't get in the way of its popularity.

Ludicrous and overstuffed, it plows through the Big 10 of Biblical plagues.

Moving slowly these days, Reynolds does less than no acting in this role, and he’s still the best thing in Deal.

Director Burr Steers milks them dry, like an overeager farmer at milking time, which is a paradox since this is the wettest picture of 2010, what with the sea spray and Efron's tear ducts and the general metaphysical mist.

Wasikowska struggles to activate a vague notion of female disenfranchisement and victimhood, triumphant. She and Pattinson fill in as many blanks as they can, where they can.

The court scenes are rarely funny, either in the trash talk or the slapstick.