Michael Phillips

As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.

The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over.

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.

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

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.

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

It's Bay World. And after an hour of Pain & Gain, it felt more like "Pain & Pain."

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.

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

A half-silly, half-earnest indie with the soul of a John Hughes-era sex comedy.

To become a true screen action hero outside the “Wonder Woman” realm, Gadot needs better material than this, and only when she gets to square off with Bhatt’s increasingly conflicted superhacker does Heart of Stone suggest a human pulse.

A sleek, tight, fastidiously executed nothing.

The film may as well be titled "Stephenie Meyer's Waiting Around."

Most of the ingredients for a strong, tough film are there, and they have been sadly botched by a few key collaborators.

A misjudgment from metallic head to titanium toe.

The screenplay by Dana Fox (she was one of the rewriters of "27 Dresses") devolves into a series of humiliating pranks that always give the upper narrative hand to the male lead. Talk about depressing. I mean, that's what male screenwriters are for--to unfairly stack the deck against the female leads.

In A Thousand Words the camera stays about two inches from Murphy's hyperactive face, and you start to see the strain and desperation in the actor's eyes.

I find Lars and the Real Girl adorable in the worst way, bailed out only by most every member of its excellent cast.

Stranded in this charmless fantasy, Stiller is reduced to his old halting, squirming tricks.

Staggers and wanders and feels far longer than its 85 minutes, and it's best considered a calling card for better things to come.

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.

Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.

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

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.

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.

The film is a fancy-pants muddle in terms of technique. And if Bloom doesn't do something about his smirky tendency to troll for audience approval, his career may be severely limited.

It may well be a hit, but me, I'm waiting for "Iron Man 2."

Pure, witless discombobulation.

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.

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.

Maybe this review is more about me than about Conan O'Brien, but I really couldn't get past the odor of self-congratulation emanating from nearly every scene in Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.

The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.

Not so much character-driven as character-dragged--against its will.

It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything.

It wanders and putters and follows its main characters around.

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.

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

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.

Hit & Run is pretty rancid as comedy. Worse, the chases are strictly amateur hour, all shortcut editing and no gut satisfaction.

Aiming for a piece with the raw impact of "Precious," on which he served as executive producer, he (Perry) ends up with 134 minutes of misjudged intensity.

It's passable.

The line between cool and cold is a thin one, however. Cool isn't the word for "Thirteen"; it's just smug.

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.

This movie also offers less: less wit, less charm, and only a few scraps of the old movie’s crucial songs (though “Baby Mine” receives its moment, in a campfire rendition).

For me, the mechanics or even the (excellent) designs are not enough. Jeunet's archness keeps conventional empathy or engagement at bay, and by design maintains a tone of artificiality.

This one's a certifiable soul-sucker, dining out on its characters' venalities while wagging a finger at the horror, the horror.

The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.

Silly, sadistic and finally a little galling, Kingsman: The Secret Service answers the question: What would Colin Firth have been like if he'd played James Bond?

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.

In a year of mass culture that gave us HBO’s excellent “Chernobyl,” Joker can claim the grimmest depiction of a meltdown.

None of it is funny. It’s all pain and no funny.

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

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.

Compared to so many varied and skillful female-driven hits such as "Bridesmaids," or this summer's "Trainwreck" and "Spy," Sisters isn't worth talking about.

Easy Virtue may be a bauble, as Larita's described at one point, but Coward's examination of hypocrisy demands real skill. The style should suggest "whipped cream with knives," as Stephen Sondheim once described "A Little Night Music." Elliott's film is more like curdled milk with a spork.

The exhausting slapstick violence is the film's chief variation, and it's no fun at all.

Dominated by Adam Sandler's D-minus Bela Lugosi impression, the 3-D animated feature Hotel Transylvania illustrates the difference between engaging a young movie audience and agitating it, with snark and noise and everything but the funny.

The movie delivers, in its chosen way. But it’s a soulless way. The violence may be for laughs, and many Neeson fans will likely respond to the larky brutality of Cold Pursuit, which is very different from the star’s previous mid-winter vehicles (“The Grey” is my favorite). But I don’t get much psychic recreation from this sort of action movie.

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

I kind of hate the movie’s mixture of bro comedy, sadistic practical jokes (don’t call it slapstick) and last-ditch pull for the heartstrings.

It's reductive, insanely violent slapstick, but that's the phenomenon in a nutshell.

The appeal of the film version, such as it is, relates almost entirely to eye-for-an-eye, severed-limb-for-a-limb vengeance, two hours and 41 minutes of it, with just enough solemnity to make anyone who thought "The Dark Knight" was a little gassy think twice about which superhero myth THEY'RE calling gassy.

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.

It's tough to get on board with these monsters. They don't get the banter they--or we--deserve, and the screenwriters lean on wearying stereotypes.

Watching this movie is like spending two hours and 27 minutes staring at a gigantic aquarium full of digital sea creatures and actors on wires, pretending to swim.

I found Violent Night to be a joyless slay ride, not to mention verbally witless. There’s not much kick in seeing an R-rated version of “Home Alone,” and even that owed its home-invasion nastiness to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs.”

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.

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

Sucks a whole lot of talented people into a wormhole of lousy. The film either needed to be a lot wittier to make up for the way it looks, or a lot better-looking to compensate for the funny it isn't.

Here and there, in the father/son scenes, you see a glimmer of an honest interaction. All in all, I'd rather watch a "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" rerun.

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.

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

Ultraviolence is a funny thing, unless it’s not: Here, watching Martindale’s ranger character getting her face ripped off while being dragged along a gravel road isn’t a sight gag, and it isn’t an effective shock bit. It’s just sour. Composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s consciously ‘80s-vibe score has more personality than what’s on screen.

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.

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

This is a fantasy grab bag in which nearly anything can happen.

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

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.

Black Snake Moan strikes me as hogwash. It fundamentally does not work; its consciously far-fetched, out-there notions of the things damaged people do in the name of love are reductive and go only so far. It's as if the premise were tethered to a radiator or something.

It’s the last thing he wanted, I’m sure, but Eastwood’s latest ends up feeling like a stunt.

Laughing at the freaks and then feeling bad about it is the sole reason for the existence of this pale little film.

Boasts one moment, perhaps three or four seconds in length, so delightfully intense and uncharacteristically juicy that the rest of the film - most of the rest of the whole series, in fact - looks pretty pale by comparison. Not vampire pale. Paler.

Lapica isn't yet enough of a writer or director (or an actor) to make the dramatic arc unpredictable in any way. It may be effective for some as therapy. It is far less so as cinematic storytelling.

The pathos really are shameless, arriving with killing regularity and false humility.

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.

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

Blunt’s derring-do has its stray moments, and her comic wiles are most welcome. But this is blockbustering from a talented director whose talent has been pounded flat by the dictates of a script in the quality range of Disney’s “Lone Ranger.”

Because The Campaign tries to say something about truth vs. hogwash in election season, it's doubly sad the efforts of screenwriters Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell come to so little.

Dominik drains the complication and, saddest of all, the screen wiles, from a plainly complicated legend.

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.

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

It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.

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

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

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?

What's remarkable about the remake is its nastiness.

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