Michael Phillips

In code, Wonder Wheel dances along the edge of the writer-director’s off-screen life, namely the allegations by Dylan Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter, of sexual molestation, and Allen’s controversial marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Allen’s then-partner Mia Farrow.

Now You See Me 2 is more fun than "Now You See Me," which says something, I guess. It fits snugly in the long list of easygoing nothings, the narrative equivalent of a Fruit Roll-Up, designed to be forgotten in as many minutes as they took to watch.

Red Tails squanders a great subject, reducing the real-life struggles and fierce heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen to rickety cliche.

Linda Cardellini can play just about anything, with honesty and delicacy, so it's no surprise she makes even a semi-sweet nothing like Austin Found worth a look.

They should've thrown everything away except the title and the outline. That's what the "Devil Wears Prada" creative team did, and that film turned out a lot richer than this one.

The best efforts of the performers cannot authenticate a plot that no longer feels inevitable. It feels contrived. And the audience stays at a remove instead of entering someone else’s nightmare.

You couldn't accuse the film of practicing what it preaches: careful stewardship of a precious resource.

The result is a placid tale of impulses running wild. Farino is a smooth operator, but he puts little on screen that feels like life, as opposed to a middle-of-the-road indie.

If actors this good cannot overcome their material, then we can only say: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock … Max von Sydow, Zoe Caldwell, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman… thanks for your honest efforts in the service of a fundamentally dishonest weepie.

The CGI is relentless and what you might call reverse-magical: The more we're hit with stuff, the less wondrous it becomes.

Next Day Air is sort of bracing, though it isn't very good: Its total lack of dramatic and comic bearings, to say nothing of a point, keeps you wondering about the next fatality, in a half-interested way.

The pretty, empty, emotionally frictionless and touch-free new Rebecca adaptation may suit the pandemic dictates for social distancing, but the drama fails to spark.

Just about everybody on screen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire lightens the load. But sometime around the eighth or ninth round of expository mumbo jumbo concerning the ectoplasmic nightmare about to happen, the movie starts moving sideways, not forward.

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.”

I laughed here and there at She's Out of My League, but I sort of hated everything it had to say about nerds and babes and the sliding scale of self-image.

If Rodriguez had any selectivity as an action director and a purveyor of garish thrills, the violence might have an impact beyond benumbing the spectator. "Sin City 2" keeps piling on, flipping the visual pages and selling the same ancient lessons in misogyny that real noir, or neo-noir, exploited yet transcended.

If it weren't for Kate Lyn Sheil, who has a couple of scenes as a blase Brooklyn waitress inexplicably ending up in the protagonist's bed, 'The Comedy' might well have qualified as the worst film of 2012.

It's relaxed without being sloppy, or patronizing, and in particular Witherspoon and Lemmon - sorry, make that Rudd - bring charm to burn.

You live in a free country, you put up with crud like Hostel Part II. It truly is crud, though.

Cutler is selling a certain kind of product with If I Stay, but he sells it honestly and well.

Settles for being simple, familiar and ineffective, though I suspect it'll warm a few hearts.

The surprise, if there is a surprise here, is that the film has found a slyly humorous tone for much of the running time.

CJ7 is roughly as grating as that “Flubber” remake.

A lot of the rougher stuff, depicting Ig's late-inning vengeance, is sadistically misjudged. It's hard to jerk tears a beat or two after gleeful rounds of brutality, even if it happens to, or because of, dear wee Daniel Radcliffe.

Forgettably entertaining/entertainingly forgettable.

Knight and Day may well suffice for audiences desperate for the bankable paradox known as the predictable surprise, and willing to overlook a galumphing mediocrity in order to concentrate on matters of dentistry.

IF reminds us how certain key ingredients — charm, wit, clarity, emotional tact and resonance — cannot be willed into narrative existence, or fixed in post.

It’s a movie about a movie star taking out the trash, leaving behind a lower body count than usual, but executing his duties faithfully, and with a predictable dash — the right kind of predictable — of world-weary charisma.

Even with its drawbacks, I found “The Watchers” worth watching, even with its odd (and perhaps too faithful to the book) final 15 minutes. The director works well with cinematographer Eli Arenson to envelop the chamber-sized ensemble in various shades of dread, or comfort.

Good cast, nearly hopeless script.

Turns out to be nothing special. Well, the music is. The storytelling is not.

Starts out wobbly but ends up quite nicely, primarily because Carrey has a wonderful acting partner in Zooey Deschanel.

Monaghan’s comic timing saves this go-nowhere affair from 100 percent lousiness.

The movie’s not as slapstick-dependent as advertised. It’s a less coarse and more heartfelt project than McCarthy’s disappointing headliner gigs, such as “Tammy” and “The Boss.” (The Paul Feig-directed comedies “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and “Spy” are far better.) The new movie renders matters of directorial finesse and comic technique essentially irrelevant.

Kline took on Douglas Fairbanks in Richard Attenborough's "Chaplin" and Cole Porter in Irwin Winkler's "De-Lovely"; he's the go-to biopic ace for roles requiring some fizz, a certain droll elevation and hair parted and slicked-back just so.

The story should have made for charming results on screen. Instead - and I truly don't enjoy saying so - co-adapter and director Rob Reiner's picture lands somewhere between synthetic nostalgia and the texture of real life.

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

It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….

Black or White may not be racist, exactly, but it patronizes its African-American characters up, down and sideways, and audiences of every ethnicity, background, hue and predilection can find something to dislike.

Despite the actors hired to deliver the story, the superassassin of American Assassin isn’t quite human. He’s just revenge in a henley T.

Noisy, unsubtle, but it gets the job done.

Still Life is a very different story, small and quiet and, unfortunately, airless.

The cast is not the limitation here. The limitation, and I found it to be a drag on this aggressively audience-pleasing indie, relates directly to its premise.

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

The results feel a little harried, as if the focus issues were never really solved.

This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: It’s fun.

Enough with the snatching, already.

Keener alone finds the truth between the lines of this routine affair. She can't do much about the lines she has to say out loud, but as all first-rate screen performers realize, words are only part of the story.

It is passable comic book stuff, dumb and loud. Loud. LOUD.

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.

To say The Paperboy doesn't work is one thing; to say it's dull is a lie. This movie is berserk, which is more interesting than "eh."

So who’s up for a strange, disarming musical? As much as I hated the first one, this one works for me.

This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.

It is a silly film about serious matters.

Full of interesting little grace notes, and the cast is excellent, yet it grows more and more frustrating.

Without a strong narrative engine, Upside Down ends up exactly where it shouldn't go: sideways.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, as some Albanian dramatist once said, but Taken 2 isn't good-cold, as in steely and purposeful; it's cold as in "lost the scent."

It boasts a generous exuberance and, as entertainment products go, it's surprisingly sweet.

It's secondhand, vaguely resigned material. And while Sudeikis has some talent, he's not yet ready to co-anchor a feature comedy. He's no Ed Helms, in other words.

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

For all the splurch and head-lopping, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is monotonal. It turns its action sequences into a noisy blur.

A genial, sloppy, minor affair, offering a smidgen of inside baseball, which includes a gag at the expense of the forgotten, late '80s Lucas-produced epic "Willow."

The movie is made well, if you’re buying what it’s selling, and if you don’t consider a story or a script as crucial to the quality of a thriller.

Snatched, more about victimhood than women running their own show, is funny here and there, but in ways that make the bulk of the formulaic material all the more frustrating.

This film was not based on a video game, but that's the vibe and the aesthetic at work here: YEAH! KILL!, followed by a few muttered expressions of the horror, the horror.

Writer-director Billy Ray's Americanized redux isn't a disaster, exactly; it keeps its head down and does its job. But nothing quite gels, or clicks, or makes itself at home in its adopted setting.

The second half of The Mother settles for the usual. But getting there makes for a fairly diverting series of melees in the name of child protection, with services rendered by a tough-love mom who does it all.

My God is this script predictable. Each relapse and betrayal shows up announced, and then announced again, a little louder, by the dialogue equivalent of an aggravating doorman.

The strongest minutes in The Good Mother belongs to Chicago-trained Karen Aldridge. She takes care of business so well in her monologue about her character’s grief and loss, her exit from the narrative becomes just one more oh-well factor in an indifferent Albany noir.

Rampage is a drag.

At one point Rourke delivers a monologue about his time in Bosnia, and the conviction the actor brings to the occasion throws the movie completely out of whack. What's actual acting doing in a movie like this?

Gordon, she of the Selma Diamond voice and mournful glare, is by far the most interesting aspect in a picture that might be termed unreleasably dull, if it weren't in fact in release at the moment en route to DVD.

As a sort-of-true-crime comedy, spinning a yarn of middle-class larceny and extreme, deeply unlawful couponing, it’s likely to offend no one but the most grimly law-abiding consumers among us. But like the people it’s about, you want more.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone serves as a reminder that everything in a film has a chance to go wrong before a film begins filming. In other words: It's the script, stupid.

All the astute acting in the world can’t bring such a preposterous story into the station on time and intact.

As a series of sights, which movies like these are, Oz the Great and Powerful is more like "Oz the Digital and Relentless." Certainly this is true in its final half-hour, which seemed to me to be all explosions.

The movie's all right, if you can take its rampant artificiality - and I'm not even talking about Parton's face yet.

Plenty of comedies aren't funny, but this one is more than that. It's wholeheartedly narcissistic in its portrait of male petulance and self-pity.

The performances and Marcos Siega’s direction put a pleasing sheen on the material.

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.

Why does “New Moon” basically work, even with its grave self-seriousness? A few reasons. Weitz lets the material breathe, and his actors interact. The film does not try to eat you alive.

The results are corny beyond measure. Yet there's something sweet about them, in part because there's something sweet about hearing the line "Congratulations! Why didn't you tell me you pledged?" outside the realm of comedy.

Kidnap probably could’ve played into its feverish, violent, trashy side more aggressively. As is, something seems to be holding it back from its own monstrously exploitative premise.

Unfortunately it’s all a bit dull.

Pacific Rim: Uprising may be not be much, but in the spirit of the film itself, let’s be realistic. It’s better than any of the “Transformers” movies, and shorter.

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 Good Old-Fashioned Orgy isn't just not funny, it's totally just not funny.

The film isn't terrible; Vaughn, Pratt and, as David's frustrated girlfriend, Cobie Smulders know what they're doing in terms of finessing the material for laughs as well as the h-word. But it's all sort of unseemly.

Dwayne Johnson leaves his lovable self behind in the violent but bland Faster.

Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.

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.

The Raven squanders a promising scenario while half-burying Cusack's mercurial skills as a leading man with the wiles of a character actor.

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.

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.

While Brand manages a couple of effectively brutal bits of violence, Matthew Waynee's gassy screenplay is all premise and no propulsion.

Snyder is not without skills, or ideas, but when a critic finds himself at odds with almost every aspect of a director’s visual approach to material like this, material like this becomes pretty joyless.

Thing is, Levy is a hard-sell man. He pushes the material so hard, it's as if he were working on commission.

A massive and rather tiring showcase for Bollywood action hero Akshay Kumar.

The dialogue comes straight out of "The Benny Goodman Story." That look, someone says to a staring, pausing Kutcher, "tells me you're on to something big." Nobody talks in this movie; everyone speechifies or take turns sloganing one another to death.

The movie is ALL revenge, all the time

To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better” is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.

The script is a mess. It's an object lesson in taking a nonfiction book ("The Feather Men," about a cadre of ex-British Special Air Service operatives) and making a hash of it.

Routine cinema but rich history.

Night Swim comes from a crafty 2014 short directed by Blackhurst and McGuire, not quite three minutes in length minus end credits. Apples and oranges, I suppose, but the short gets more done in terms of atmosphere and rhythmic wiles than the full-length version. Still: These filmmakers have both a past and a future in evocative horror.

A surprisingly heartfelt father/son relationship, handled with restraint by director Todd Holland.

The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.

Though Ball's workmanlike handling of the second in the trilogy, "The Scorch Trials," proves mainly that he can keep a franchise from running completely off the rails when the tracks have been laid perilously near a swamp of "dys-lit" cliches.

I enjoyed large chunks of San Andreas, largely because the actors give it a full load of sincerity, and there's some bizarrely effective comic relief thanks to Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson as Brits who picked the wrong week to visit the Bay Area.

Making her feature-film directorial debut, Grant is going for an everyday conversational texture and a sense of life's curveballs. But the results wander and you never really believe them.

She tackled "The Tempest" on stage, years ago. On screen I wish she'd (Taymor) adapted it with a freer hand, and then directed it with a more considered one.

The Vow is agreeable enough. It may be puddin'-headed but it's not soul-crushing.

All worldwide musical phenomena carry with them some enigmatic quality that encourages, deliberately or not, a kind of adoring guesswork on behalf of fans. In Bob Marley: One Love, both as written and acted, Marley himself remains more cipher than enigma.

Uruguayan-born Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe,” the recent “Evil Dead” reboot) handles the action breathlessly and well enough. The movie’s acted with serious conviction. But I kind of hate it.

The actors aren’t the problem with Night School; the material is.

The movie marches in predictable formations as well. But when Biel's rebel pulls over in her hover car and asks Farrell if he'd like a ride, your heart may sing as mine did.

Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax.

I truly wish Dear John were a better, less shamelessly manipulative movie, but a couple of the actors got me through it alive. One is Amanda Seyfried.

Too much of the film is a muddle, and it feels like work, not play.

A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.

The heartbreaking thing about Meet Dave...is its occasional funniness amid a sea of pablum. If it were completely rank, it'd be less frustrating.

Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” but in “Cholera” he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.

The film moves along, in its paradoxically static way, at a pretty fair clip. I look forward to Green's follow-up.

The actors are strong, however, and Banks in particular shows some skill and wiles in keeping her rascally stepmother stereotype lively.

Director James Kent’s pretty, frustrating picture has atmosphere in spades, and a diamond-like sheen, but its tale of hearts aflame is slowly clubbed into submission by an excess of taste.

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.

Nothing in director Paul W.S. Anderson's schlock drawer--prepares you for the peppy, good-time nastiness that is Death Race.

The film is likable. Its messages, many of them Lord-oriented, are all equally heartfelt.

The events of the movie may be a little bit true, or a lot, but hardly any of it plays that way.

Unlike a few other well-drilled young actress-singers we could name, such as the one whose name rhymes with "Riley Myrus," Gomez knows how to relax on camera.

Tommy Lee Jones is marvelous in the film. He has one scene in particular, a simple two-person encounter, that's as good as it gets in the realm of American screen acting.

I mean, whatever with the “X-Men” movies. It’s hard to even rent an opinion on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of a franchise that has devolved to the point of Dark Phoenix, a lavishly brutal chore nearly as violent as the Wolverine movie “Logan,” and a movie featuring more death by impalement and whirling metal than all the “Saw” movies put together.

Good actors and a talented director doing what they can to bring the truth to a script that's mostly bogus.

Way back in “Unbreakable,” Jackson’s Mr. Glass bemoaned how comics superheroes “got chewed up in the commercial machine.” Glass proves it.

As corporate directives go, Scoob! has a lighter spirit (until the obligatory protracted action climax) and swifter throwaway gags than either of the live-action “Scooby-Doo” remakes offered. (Thank God for Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini, though. I start each day with that prayer.) The animated “Scoob!” aims younger, and mostly is better for it.

The gentle erotic undertow in the friendship of Snow Flower and Lily has been toned down, and replaced by … niceness.

Jackson has not cast himself well, though. He has slathered the imagery in the wrong kind of wonderment and hyperbole, both on Earth and in heaven.

The actors are more or less saving this franchise's bacon. Insurgent is a tick or two livelier than the first one.

Here and there an image of spectral beauty, assisted by the 3-D technology, floats into view and captures our imagination. But the script, which really should've been called "Sanctimonium," has a serious case of the bends.

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.

You know what’s not bad? Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Dumber than a box of lugnuts, but superior to the Michael Bay-directed schlocktaculars that ran as long as 165 minutes. The new “Transformers” movie clocks in at 117 minutes, a lot of them pretty zippy.

After an intriguing start, Transcendence — aka "The Computer Wore Johnny Depp's Tennis Shoes" — offers roughly the same level of excitement as listening to hold music during a call to tech support.

Levy surely knew that the script at hand didn't warrant a full two-hour running time; even if you enjoy The Internship, as my son did, it feels 20 minutes over-full at least. Cut out half of the "Flashdance" and "X-Men" references, and you're halfway there.

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

The movie wouldn’t feel human at all, really, if not for the convincing emotion bond established between Mackie and Carl Lumbly as Isaiah.

Director John Wells dices the action, even the simplest conversation, into five harried shots when one would suffice. The many food-prep montages are cut and paced to the same numbing rhythm.

The music is drippy and constant, the wobble from comedy to drama feels off, and the dialects have been reamed in the Irish press. Charm resists calculation; even if actors get some going, even if a writer creates an approximation in or between the lines, deliberately manufactured charm curdles so easily. The one success story of Wild Mountain Thyme belongs to Blunt, who has yet to give a poor or lazily considered performance.

Opus has its moments. But even the surprises aren’t especially surprising.

Stoopid fun, From Paris With Love doesn't do much for Paris or love, or your brain cells, but it flies like a crazed eagle on uppers and comes from the talented, propulsive schlocketeer Pierre Morel.

A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy.

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

Nothing elegant about Adams here, but she's terrific -- a sparkling screen presence. Her Earhart hoists this big-budget sequel above the routine.

It sounds fun. It's a little fun. For a while. But Bekmanbetov shoots every killing spree like an addled gamer, working that slow-down-speed-up kill-shot cliche like a maniac.

Assuming your psycho-pigtailed-killer memories extend back as far as "The Bad Seed," Maxwell Anderson's play filmed by director Mervyn LeRoy in 1956, Orphan may remind you of the icon made famous by Patty McCormack.

Hinges on humiliation and vengeance, which makes it like most other modern horror titles. Its focus on sexual assault, however, puts it in a different, more primal league.

A tedious picture about a remorseless serial killer, played by Matt Dillon.

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

A movie can be unreasonably formulaic and still be reasonably diverting, and A Bad Moms Christmas is the proof.

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.

Much as I enjoy the actors I didn't buy a word or frame of Arthur Newman.

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."

Hutcherson spits his lines out as quickly as possible, which you appreciate, because the way the likable Johnson wrestles with his lines ("It looks like the liquefaction has tripled overnight!") you think, well, it's a living.

It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.

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.

The directive behind this sequel, clearly, was non-stop action. Let's think about that phrase a second. Do we really want our action movies to deliver action that does not stop? Ever? I get a little tired of action sequences that won't stop.

Without the brute vigilante junk, this 82-minute picture would be approximately 2 minutes long.

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

The drug humor in 21 Jump Street carries its own distinction, in that it's actually humor.

Arkin in particular can barely hide his lack of enthusiasm for the material. Some of the looks he shoots his co-stars appear to contain a secret code of some kind, deciphered as: 'Well, at least I'm in 'Argo.'"

Thanks to the director, what they do makes for painless “avoidance viewing” — something to kill 100 minutes or so while you’re avoiding something else, delivered in an impersonal but not unskillful manner.

First hour: pretty lousy and not much fun. Second hour: pretty lousy but more fun, and the movie has the benefit of getting stranger and stranger as it gyrates.

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

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.

"Superbad” got a deserved R rating for its unmitigated and gleeful raunch. Drillbit Taylor is cleaner in mouth but far uglier in spirit. Wilson and Mann do what they can to tone it up, but their scenes belong to a different film, and a fresher one.

The movie wants it both ways: bloodthirsty revenge and some finger-wagging about the tactics.

Toward the end, G-Force starts making no sense at all, neither tonally or narratively. It may not matter to the target audience, though the look on my son's face when it was over was pure Buster Keaton. He says he liked it well enough. Me, a little less.

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 folks on the screen are the whole show, and this genial showcase for standup comic Jo Koy has the advantage of showing off a wealth of Asian/Pacific American talent, pretty badly undervalued by establishment Hollywood.

A misjudgment from metallic head to titanium toe.

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

The nuttiest hunk of junk in many months.

A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise.

With a less pedigreed international cast the whole thing would be a disaster, as opposed to a chilly new kind of disaster film.

The action beats come straight out of the video game "Call of Duty." And when you have real SEALs placed in a picture that lives and dies on the same old first-person-shooter aesthetic, you have a film divided against itself.

The Boss has zero finesse as a comedy.

In the sadistic yet middling road-rage thriller Unhinged, Crowe literally steers the vehicle delivering the big box of acting, over- and under-. While there’s barely a movie there, a year from now, when the multiplexes of the world will either largely be back, be gone or be something in between, we’ll have forgotten Unhinged.

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.

With an uneven and overstuffed script you appreciate the corner-of-the-mouth comments as delivered by Steve Buscemi.

Once it gets going and commits to its time-worn inspirational formula, it's not half-bad.

But folks, this is a lousy script, blobby like the endlessly beheaded minions of the squad's chief adversary. It's not satisfying storytelling; the flashbacks roll in and out, explaining either too much or too little, and the action may be violent but it's not interesting.

I wish the results were better, and a lot stranger. Cahill’s world-building has its moments, though. And the filmmaker did determine — correctly — that it’d be fun to have Bill Nye, the science guy, in a bow tie, portraying a sniffy scientific researcher.

Welcome to Marwen is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make.

The dialogue can drive you crazy with its self-consciousness.

Robinson is undone partly by his own workmanlike touch as a writer, and partly by matters of casting. I like Harris, and he's quite moving here, but every time Duchovny reappears the overall energy level sinks to crush depth.

Half the time, Deliver Us From Evil is genuinely interested in Sarchie's all-too-human demons, and half the time we're marking time until the big exorcism and an ending that keeps the door open for a sequel, should the market demand it.

Everyone in The Comedian deserves a better movie than The Comedian.

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.

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

The script of Shrink, written by Thomas Moffett, plays like "Crash" without the angst or the perpetual racial conflagrations.

Despite a blue-chip cast, Aloha is just frustrating. It can barely tell its story straight, and Crowe's attempt to get back to the days of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" is bittersweet in ways unrelated to the narrative's seriocomic vein.

The sequel's not bad; it's not slovenly. Some of the jolts are effectively staged and filmed, and Wan is getting better and better at figuring out what to do with the camera, and maneuvering actors within a shot for maximum suspense, while letting his design collaborators do the rest. But Leigh Whannell's script is a bit of a jumble.

The movie doesn't really work, but the jet boots would be the envy of Iron Man, and they allow our hero, unwisely named Caine Wise, to speedskate through the air, leaving pretty little trails of light over downtown Chicago.

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

Now and then The 355 sticks a landing.

The supporting players in Man on a Ledge bring more to the party than the leads, and my suspension of disbelief seems to have gotten hung up in traffic while attempting to cross the suspension-of-disbelief bridge from the Brooklyn side.

Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu, confining his usual two-and-a-half-note vocal range to half that.

A chaotic headbanger, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is saved from pure flat-footed blockbuster franchise adequacy by six things, three of them on Hugh Jackman's left hand, three on his right.

Green just isn't the superhero color this year.

Some comedies have the knack for affrontery and shock value; The Change-Up, written by the "Hangover" team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, merely has the will to offend.

Since I sort of liked “Step Up 2: The Streets,” I’m not surprised I sort of liked the remake of Fame.

Sloppy, grimy but quick on its feet, which puts it ahead of certain other (“The Hangover”) R-rated comedies (“The Hangover”) we’ve seen this summer (“The Hangover”).

Too much. Too numbing. Too coy. And ultimately too violent.

Too much of Nobody’s Fool makes do with well-worn exchanges and contrived, overheard conversations.

When the actors are in cars, the movie's fun. When they get out to argue, or seethe, it's uh-oh time. Happily, director Scott Waugh comes out of the stunt world himself, and there's a refreshing emphasis on actual, theoretically dangerous stunt driving over digital absurdities.

As skillful and charismatic as Gere is, I never get the sense he's really in there, conversing with his fellow actor.

The movie begins with a tragedy and eases into a more interesting blend of drama and comedy than we've gotten in this genre lately.

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

So it’s one of those Hip, Now updates, albeit with jokes riffing on pop-cult artifacts that are already Then. I mean: “Jerry Maguire”? Moratorium!

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

The book’s melancholy spareness has been replaced by a “Here” existing somewhere in a pristine, remote suburb we’ll call Uncanny Valley Falls, a few miles away from real life.

It’s a little “Karate Kid,” a smidge of “Fight Club” (with none of the ironic ambivalence toward violence that David Fincher brought to that story), a lot of “The O.C.” (evil boy Gigandet played an evil boy on that series), and presto: probable hit.

The Exorcist: Believer has its moments, but we’ve had a half-century of this stuff. And the filmmaker in charge has to show us something new; there’s more to life, and moviegoing, than coasting on cherished memories of projectile vomiting and head-swiveling.

Director Morel brings some style and speed to the proceedings, though I found The Gunman increasingly numbing in the carnage department. Compared with someone like Neeson, Penn's avenging angel is a less relatable fellow.

Legendary is so intent on paying heartfelt tribute to dogged young athletes that it neglects basic story needs.

Written by newcomer Melissa K. Stack, The Other Woman offers roughly equal parts wit and witlessness, casual smarts and jokes, lingering and detailed, regarding explosive bowel movements. Based on that ratio, I'd say the screenwriter's future in Hollywood looks pretty good.

I hope Green one day finds a way to bridge the style and rhythm of his early pictures (the ones that didn't make money) and the bumper-car approach of The Sitter.

The movie shoves McCarthy and Sarandon in a car together quickly, without much in the way of expository set-up.

Mainly, the movie we have here reminds us that what works on a stage, within the non-realistic world and performance momentum of stage musicals, lessens a lot of story problems that movies tend to heighten.

"The Misadventurer" is more like it.

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.

Planes has practically no visual distinction, it's a complete knockoff, but I think it'll get by with the kids.

The leads' chemistry in The Lucky One is more theoretical than actual. Still, the sunsets and sunrises and sunbeams through the windowpanes fall easily on the eyes.

Clean enough to fly the Walt Disney Pictures flag, yet it's full of bimbos and cleavage and shots of Adam Sandler getting kicked in the shins by a dwarf.

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

Piven's performance basically made the series, and to the degree the new film works, which is a little, he makes that too.

Everything's at stake yet nothing comes to much in Terminator Genisys.

Gemini Man isn’t bad, but two Will Smiths — when one of them’s computer-animated — somehow feels like 66-75 percent of a real movie.

Eragon is a bit cheesy, but I rather liked it. It's sincere cheese... The special effects -- which include glowing-eyed heroes and villains, and flights over the mythical land of Alagaesia depicted in "dragon vision" -- are refreshing in their slightly out-of-date air.

Early in the movie, Hal Holbrook (as the paranoid NASA administrator who sets the fake-out in motion) unloads an expository speech on Brolin (as one of the astronauts the administrator needs to convince to go along with his insane ruse). Is it a long speech? Dear reader, “long” doesn’t quite measure it. It’s endless. It’s an event horizon of a monologue and by the time it’s over, you can’t believe the coronavirus hasn’t left yet.

Men in Black: International isn’t bad; it’s an improvement over “Men in Black II” (2002) and “Men in Black 3” (2012), sequels that even its makers may have forgotten.

For an hour The Rite, as scripted by Michael Petroni, delivers the expected, but with panache.

The sequel is a disappointing step down, and backward.

Girl Most Likely goes a little bit wrong in nearly every scene, its stridently quirky characters never quite making sense together in the same universe, let alone the same movie.

Doesn't know how to do what I think it's trying to do.

The slapstick is awful; the pathos isn't much better, though it's far more plentiful.

How much of what we see in Third Person is the novelist's invention is part of the guessing game that goes on and on. And. On.

All of it is plausible, if one were to break the narrative into its component parts; together, though, those parts resemble "Babel" or "Crash" or other determinedly topical mosaics that end up falsifying their own concerns.

The movie expresses honest concern for the plight of so many newcomers to America, legal or illegal. What it lacks is moment-to-moment credibility.

The leading actors labor valiantly and to little effect.

The action is perpetual, and perpetually in need of a better director, and editing that heightens and sharpens our pleasurable excitement instead of dulling it. The appeal, I suppose, of the far-flung, constantly roving storyline this time around is its latitude for different sorts of mayhem and different genre shout-outs. But all too soon Jurassic World: Dominion made me long for the best bits of Spielberg’s “Lost World” or J.A. Bayona’s “Fallen Kingdom.” Those folks know how to set up a shot, vary the rhythm and deliver the payoff.

It's more or less a grown-up picture, and not bad at that, though its muted and patient style has both its merits and its drawbacks. Still, as I say: not bad.

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

Distressingly ordinary for such an extraordinary subject.

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.

Gimme Shelter suffers from an acute case of the fakes. The speeches sound like speeches, and not good ones.

The atmosphere in Serenity, by design, imparts a slightly uneasy and hermetic feeling. In Baker Dill, who sounds like a line of gourmet pickles, Knight has the makings of a compellingly messed-up antihero. That’s a start. If movies were all start, then this one might’ve worked.

A facsimile of a masquerade of a gloss on "Charade," and on all the lesser cinematic charades that followed in the wake of director Stanley Donen's 1963 picture.

In scenes such as hundreds of Natives being slaughtered by U.S. troops behind Gatling guns, we have Tonto and the Lone Ranger acting like a couple of comic-relief ninnies, screwing around aimlessly for laughs on a handcar. It's as if the movie were having a nervous breakdown. At one point the masked man gets his head dragged through horse manure. Watching The Lone Ranger, you know the feeling.

Carell's pal and "Daily Show" colleague Jon Stewart has a cameo as himself, one of a chorus of godless media star non-believers who do not see God's larger plan for Evan. Yes, well. At least "The Daily Show" is funny.

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.

Each time a character gets tossed in the air by some manifestation or another, the effect is cheesy. Still, I've seen worse. For the record, the violence in Annabelle is far less copious and sadistic than the stuff in the Denzel Washington movie everybody's going to.

Half the time I wasn't sure what Lee was going for in terms of tone, or style, or focus. It was a tricky assignment to begin with, because McBride's novel, and his screenplay, is part socio-historical corrective, part magical-realist folklore, part wartime procedural.

The film is half rutting goat, half preacher.

Kathy Baker, as Burden's elegantly sodden mother, shows the only sign of interpretive life in this stiff-jointed enterprise. She has about five minutes on screen; she's lucky that way.

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.

This script bumps along, good ideas jostling with weak, derivative ones, and Seftel doesn't seem to know which way he wants to handle the material. Also, with Cusack playing yet another soul-fried wiseacre running on emotional autopilot, the piece doesn't have much of an engine.

It's a soul-crusher, and when I say it may be the most dehumanizing experience since "Hostel: Part II" the comparison is not an idle one.

What could have been a juicy, pulpy noir, based loosely on the real-life 1976 Mustang Ranch love triangle involving Joe and Sally Conforte and Sally's boxer paramour, instead has the dramatic consistency of rice milk.

Big problem straight off: tone. The violence isn't slapsticky; it's just violent.

Original, it's not. Exciting, it is. This jacked-up B-movie hybrid of "Black Hawk Down" and "War of the Worlds" is a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche.

This is the worst, least, dumbest picture made by people of talent this year.

The Cloverfield Paradox is “Lost” in space — a faint, well-acted blip on the radar of your viewing life.

At its best, it's buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.

Madonna stayed married to director Guy Ritchie just long enough to absorb his most grating cinematic instincts - shooting in every style, in an addled, shuffle-mode, falsely glamorizing way until all is chaos. And, astonishingly, boredom.

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

Clean, precise and terribly sullen, After.Life is like its female protagonist. It feels stuck between worlds, or genres.

The poster’s the funniest thing about the project: Johnson, sporting a pair of fairy wings larger than his forearms, glaring at the camera.

Are the results funny? In the margins, yes.

The most vivid aspect of The Eye is its poster image, that of a huge female eye with a human hand gripping the lower lid from the inside. The least vivid aspect is the way Jessica Alba delivers a simple line of expository dialogue.

The Canyons may not work, and the sex (as well as the synthesized glop on the soundtrack) may be tragically unhip, but it was made by a director who still cares.

On the whole, I’d go with the 2018 basketball comedy “Uncle Drew” over either “Jams.” One-joke movies, all three. But it helps when the gags don’t stop at the reference point and dribble in place while the clock runs out.

Shottas exists purely in the realm of rasta-music-video fakery.

Calling a sequel Are We Done Yet? is like calling it "Enough Already."

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.

The glibness of Wiesen's freshman effort wouldn't be a problem if the wit was there.

Sex Tape settles for violence when violent slapstick, a lot harder to finesse, was the implicit goal of the picture.

The most joyless revisionism since Disney's "The Lone Ranger.

The pathos: considerable. The sight gags, involving Crystal puking chili dog on a kid's face, or the grandson with an imaginary friend peeing and causing an X Games skateboarder to wipe out: artless. The results: tolerably amusing.

The vocal characterizations aren't the problem here; the script and the animation are the problems, and in feature animation, you can't arrange more significant problems than those.

It's just a mediocre action movie, poorly edited and larded with a terrible musical score, based on a video game. Nothing new there.

It's mostly noise and splurch and, as I mentioned, aaaaarrrrggggghhhhh!

It's nice to see a movie in love with New York City, but That Awkward Moment sets such a low bar for Jason's redemption it becomes a drag.

The storytelling proceeds in such a halting manner, with De Niro's speeches going on and on and on, that before long you'd kill for an easy scare.

It sticks in the craw. The whole movie does.

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.