Michael Phillips

I found the mythology of I Am Number Four vague and sloppy.

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.

Nothing is harder and more elusive than successful slapstick onscreen. Nothing.

The way My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 has been staged, filmed and edited, every new scene and each exchange has a way of being undermined by the filmmaking choices.

At what point might animators be arrested for doing work so ugly it causes aesthetic blindness in millions of younglings?

Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.

It’s lousy, and a frantic bore, squandering its on-screen talent and making bland visual hash of its preening, recreational slaughter.

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

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

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

This material, though, is damn thin. Like so many films derived from the pictures and words of a graphic novel, The Kitchen feels perfunctory and sterile and under-detailed.

The material may be formulaic, but the spirit of the piece is friendly.

Gordon is lost, and his style of shooting - telescopic close-ups, which never give us enough space to appreciate the performers - feels wrong for comedy.

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

In “Morbius” the actor’s willful disinterest in figuring out the rhythm of a scene, what’s important in it and how to bounce off his scene partners — well, it’s acting in a vacuum. What he needs is a director who can steer him away from his favorite scene partner, i.e., Jared Leto, long enough to activate the material at hand, even if it’s just a third-tier Marvel franchise hopeful.

The best thing about this self-mocking affair, which runs a leisurely two-plus hours and affords plenty of time for an insane body count, is Antonio Banderas' manic gusto in the role of a gabby mercenary.

By today's standards, it is only medium-bloody, though it's more than usually grim, its young protagonists sullen enough to qualify for the "Twilight" movies. Yet it affords precious little sadistic pleasure, partly because it "dares" to lay out more directly the pedophiliac demons plaguing Freddy the serial killer.

Despite valiant efforts from Czerny and from the fine stage actress Vilma Silva, who plays one of Walsch's many saviors, the result would qualify as a blandly inspirational amateur hour if the running time weren't closer to two.

Taylor-Johnson is a solid actor, but on the page and in performance, Kraven’s barely there and too cool to care about what’s happening. Which makes it hard for moviegoers to care.

Dumb film; smart comedienne.

The acting's not the problem, and it's a nice thing to find Moore playing a human-scaled human being, with a recognizable human touch. The material has a hint of it too. But only a hint.

Yogi Bear gives cheap hackwork a bad name. Which is a shame, because hackwork made this industry.

This latest version is le pits.

Self/less hews closely enough to the premise of the 1966 John Frankenheimer thriller "Seconds" to qualify as an unofficial remake. Then again, anyone who remembers that one is not in the target audience for this one.

A weak romantic comedy.

For the record, Gus Van Sant recently made "The Sea of Trees," set in the same infamous suicide forest, starring Matthew McConaughey and Ken Watanabe. In its contrived sentimentality that film is twice as frightening as this one.

Despite my McConaughey resistance I got more guilty chuckles from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past than "Failure to Launch" or "Four Christmases."

My Life in Ruins will neither ruin nor change nor significantly impact your life.

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.

Is the movie good enough to do what it’s designed to do? Not really. It’s designed as a launching pad for a “Dark Tower” television series, scheduled to star Elba and Taylor. So this is an hour-and-a-half TV pilot; it just happens to be a big summer movie too.

It's a mystery why two bona fide comic stars, working very, very hard to keep this thing from tanking, couldn't pressure their collaborators for another rewrite or three.

It's the knockabout biblical lark Mel Brooks never got around to making.

Red One is the holiday fantasy built on retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now.

Numbingly gory when it isn’t just plain numbing.

Emmerich has no time for poetry or magic, even when the director and his digital wizards (here doing wildly variable work) are trying to dazzle. He’s a taskmaster and a field marshall, not a visionary. But I enjoyed 10,000 B.C. more and more, and more than just about anything Emmerich’s done before.

In sum it plays like 12 landlocked episodes of "The Love Boat" rammed together, though without the same rate of intercourse.

I like Duhamel, and in her first straight-up dramatic role Hough does well enough, though her singing and/dancing career thus far has trained her to oversell, as opposed to sell, as opposed to act naturally.

The mayhem in The Mummy feels desperate, mistimed, grueling in the wrong way (the film's violence is infinitely less appropriate for preteens than that of "Wonder Woman").

If any of this was surprising or cleverly timed, you'd laugh and then cringe. In Vacation you cringe first and ask questions later.

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.

Everything happens quickly in Fatal Affair, since it’s all plot and no character. These movies are what they are: disposable; full of shiny, unstained, high-end kitchen countertops.

Here's how you know Josh Brolin has become a movie star: Jonah Hex may not be much with him, but without him? Perish the thought. Perish it, throw an ax in its heart, then burn it to a crisp.

A welcome surprise: a supernatural romantic comedy that works, graced with a cast just off-center enough to make it distinctive.

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.

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.

It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions.

The cast is enjoyable, with Jason Segel (as Gulliver's lil' pal, Horatio) and Emily Blunt (the local princess) a witty cut above for this sort of thing.

Snyder must have known in preproduction that his greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale wasn't going to satisfy anyone but himself.

I wish the movie made emotional sense, because it’s all about getting in touch with whatever’s holding you back, but it doesn’t.

The Last Song is primarily for teenagers looking for something disposable to cry about for a couple of hours, though I did find it a tad easier to take than "Dear John."

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.

Offers only one point of interest beyond the breasts of its second female lead: Aniston's barely disguised disdain for her material.

Won't change your world, but it's attractive and Smith the Elder, lowering his voice to subterranean James Earl Jones levels, delivers a shrewd minimalist performance. His son may get there yet.

The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it's not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so.

Even when Eastwood and Robertson, pleasant enough company, threaten to float off the screen, The Longest Ride glides along and delivers its reheated comfort food by the ton.

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.

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

Not-funniest comedy of the year so far.

If you want a relationship comedy that feels like last year's stuff, doesn't go far enough in any direction and is made watchable only by an overqualified ensemble, there's The Ex.

The script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi gives you next to nothing for narrative complication and surprise, and a meager amount of verbal jokes.

By the end of this modest, strange venture, Leto made me believe it was worth being forced to hang out on the sidewalk with this man, if only to get a creeping sense of what that might’ve been like.

A funny thing happened to Larry Doyle's 2007 debut novel on the way to the multiplex. It turned into its own ring of coming-of-age comedy hell.

There's nothing wrong with Paranoia that a stronger director, livelier leading actors and several hundred fewer narrative conveniences wouldn't cure.

I saw Resurgence an hour and a half ago, and I feel like an alien wiped my memory clean already.

G.I. Joe may not be beefier, but it’s cheesier and less aggravating than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," the summer ’09 headbanger it most resembles.

The movie, a formidable technical and design achievement, has everything going for it except a sense of Jobs' inner life.

Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction.

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 film's tone is utterly indistinct, beyond fatuous adoration of its subject.

Strives to be nothing more than easygoing and heartwarming.

I like its devotion to the drab outskirts of Sin City, and Buscemi's performance is right up his alley without being entirely predictable.

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.

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 generates the goodwill. Madison and Quinn bring heart and some shrewd dramatic instincts, while Cook and Sterling settle comfortably into a sincere comic key.

I didn't half-mind Fired Up, but half a mind is more than it deserves.

Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster--it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie--is the presence of Mark Wahlberg.

It lacks the rutting nuttiness of "Basic Instinct," even as it recycles much of that film's kiss-or-kill premise.

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

Pure, witless discombobulation.

Even with 87.5 years to go, the 21st century may never see a stupider comedy than That's My Boy.

Watching Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh and a stridently adorable Alan Cumming do their wide-eyed, moony thing in the romantic comedy Gray Matters raises the question: Is it possible for a filmgoer to be twinkled to death?

For a while, director Roth plays this stuff relatively straight, and Willis periodically reminds us he can act (the grieving Kersey cries a fair bit here).

The film is responsible, earnest, well-intentioned and, as it was in Sundance, maddeningly inconsistent.

Many of the original film's booby-trap scenarios are repeated here, but without Milius' grandiosity and nihilism. There's less of both in the new Red Dawn. It's not a disaster. It's just drab.

With her arresting, off-kilter look of bruised desire, Michelle Williams ends up being the most interesting aspect of this somber corn.

The best thing about the film is Viggo Mortensen’s performance. A stealth talent of many shadings, Mortensen has a way of fitting easily into nearly any period, any milieu.

A buddy cop film in which one of the cops continually quotes dialogue espoused by fictional cops, in everything from "Heat" to "RoboCop," and not once is it funny.

The film is not badly made. It is, however, weirdly flat, given the stakes and the wild screaming matches.

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

Despite the actors, who at least get some swell clothes to wear, Winter's Tale is a bit of a soul-crusher itself.

The sharpest five minutes in Alex Cross, by a considerable margin, belong to Giancarlo Esposito.

The film works a bit better than the 2004 "Punisher" installment, the one starring surly, dislikable Thomas Jane as Frank Castle.

Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.

The slapstick is crudely executed. And the movie never makes up its mind regarding how nasty the ghost of Kate is going to play her revenge tactics.

Director Monteverde, whose previous feature, "Bella," came out nine years ago, clearly meant his film to lift up everyone and condescend to no one, least of all Pepper and Hashimoto. But Little Boy comes off as a picture-postcard fake.

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.

The only people humiliated, really, are older people and heavy people and nerds and vegans and black people and mothers who breast-feed their 4-year-olds. Everybody else gets a pass.

This material is offensive. The film may end with a straight-faced reassurance that "no actual Torah scrolls were destroyed or damaged in the making of this motion picture," but it's perfectly willing to exploit the Holocaust for cheap, weak thrills.

Because Stonewall turns everyone into a sentimental or suffocating "type" instead of a dimensional character, the results are sheer noise.

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

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

Lofing and Cluff certainly know the found-footage ropes, and the tropes; we'll see if their next project reveals a little more imagination.

As Premonition zigzags toward its solution it loses its head completely, packing a risible final reel with left-field religious disquisitions and heartfelt warnings against infidelity.

New in Town is "The Pajama Game" without the songs, the laughs or the bare-knuckled realism.

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

Seyfried's a good actress, but all the art direction in the world can't make this version of events the stuff either of dreams or of nightmares.

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

It’s tolerable, I suppose, if you don’t have to listen to it. Unfortunately it’s a musical so you have to listen to it.

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?

Isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms.

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.

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

As a period ghost story, it’s pretty pallid.

The movie's own brand of charm has its subset of smarm.

LaBeouf's quivering instability creates the impression that his performance is constantly buffering on us. He's never dull — he is, in fact, a compelling actor in any circumstance — but the material ends up cheapening the experiences of so many real-life veterans, which surely was not the filmmakers' intention.

This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.

Feels about 150 years out of date.

Rosenbush strives for a difficult blend of spoof and sincerity with Zen Noir. In the spirit of rebirth, let's assume that the next time he makes it, it'll turn out fine.

The Happytime Murders is a one-joke movie, minus one joke. The year may cough up a worse film, but probably not a more joyless, witless one, raunchy or otherwise.

I enjoyed these characters more when they were rich, rather than obscenely rich, when their self-involvement and life crises had one foot on planet Earth -- and when they weren't all gussied up like Mae West in "Sextette."

It's not just the sound of crickets you hear watching this movie. It's the sound of dead crickets.

Macy's character finds romance with the Madrid, N. M., diner owner played by Marisa Tomei. They're the only two people on screen who relate in any way. But there's no movie here. There is only a tired "City Slickers"-inspired idea for a movie.

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.

This is “True Lies” without the striptease or the Arab-maiming.

Only Biel and Greer lift it above the level of bleh.

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.

From Miles Teller to Kate Mara to Reg E. Cathey, everyone on screen in Fantastic Four speaks in a flat, earnest monotone with a determinedly low-keyed air bordering on openly not giving a rip.

Formulaic romantic junk.

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.

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.

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.

The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell in hell.

It's rather sweet to think of Filth and Wisdom as Madonna's reconnection to her own boho Manhattan striver self a generation ago, and I did enjoy the last five minutes or so, when the movie essentially stopped and Hutz's band, Gogol Bordello, took over.

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

A whopper this isn't. It's not even a Whopper Junior. It's the paper the Whopper Junior came in.

Williams' grimace is starting to look desperate. Then again, no one comes off well in director Ken Kwapis' handling of this greasy screenplay.

Playing the title role as well as the Dream role, real-life Elvis tribute artist Blake Rayne is more convincing when he's singing than when he isn't. But he has little to explore beyond bashful smiles.

Certain scenes in When in Rome signify nothing less than the death of screen slapstick, but I’m hoping it’s one of those fake-out movie deaths where it’s not really dead, not forever.

Call it "Clash of the Whitans," and call it a folly that doesn't have the energy or delirium to qualify as entertaining crap. It's just crap.

Many will find Apollo 18 silly and derivative. It is. Yet it's also a break from the usual hyperbolic, down-your-throat brand of silly and derivative scare movies.

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

The Love Guru”does not bring out Myer's best, and aside from a deft early Bollywood parody, there’s nothing visually to help the fun along.

Just the same auld same auld.

It's not much to hijack. But playing a lovelorn version of himself, in love with Adam Sandler in a dress, a lisp and breasts, Al Pacino holds a gun to the head of the comedy Jack and Jill and says: I now pronounce you mine.

The results are boring boring.

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

There are comedies that make you double over in laughter, and there are comedies that are eerily unfunny to the point where you start thinking about a class-action suit.

I always enjoy Elizondo; he has a way of elevating some pretty lame banter, and thanks to New Year's Eve he has his way all over again.

Nothing in this movie is properly focused; everyone keeps talking about a character whom we never meet and does not matter; the tone keeps slipping around from indolent satire to thudding sincerity, and the Challenger shuttle disaster backdrop is queasy-making at best, offensive at worst.

Terrible but, in its squealing way, sporadically fun-terrible.

Seriously, the running time of Fantasy Island should be listed as “sometime tomorrow."

Haven't we seen the oh-my-gosh-my-spouse-is-secretly-an-assassin-but-you-know-a-nice-one routine once too often?

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

The most horrifying film of 2007, Bratz is based on the popular line of collagen-lipped, doe-eyed slut-ette dolls and their male companions, "the boys with a passion for fashion ... and the Bratz!" (In other words, they're bi-curious.)

As if by deliberate and vaguely sadistic design, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil leeches the fun clean out of the first "Hoodwinked" (2005).

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

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.

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

Good Luck Chuck is this year’s low-ender to beat.

The Devil Inside joins a long, woozy-camera parade of found-footage scare pictures, among them "The Blair Witch Project," the "Paranormal Activity" films and certain wedding videos that won't go away.

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 preposterous 88 Minutes is a serial killer movie starring Al Pacino's festival of hair.

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 film suggests Lohan probably (allegedly) should've gone after her agent the other night, not the mother of an ex-personal assistant.

Cage is going for manly, if conflicted, family-guy confidence in this role, but somehow it comes off as nuttier than the events surrounding him.

It’s a pity Grizzly II: Revenge isn’t giddy-bad, the way Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” delights so many. But it’s here, it’s seriously disoriented and disorienting.

With most stories, even most documentaries, survival is the happy ending — the reward for one's luck, or skill, or exceptional circumstances. Sole Survivor, Ky Dickens' nonfiction account of four sole survivors of commercial plane crashes, turns that notion on its head, exploring the depths of survivor guilt and the post-accident lives of these living exceptions to a terrible, fatal rule.

Like the great, bittersweet Thomas Dyja account of Chicago's 20th century, "The Third Coast," Hogtown is hip to both the glories and the disgraces any great city can claim.

It’s a choppy, frustrating affair, periodically bailed out by some very good actors.

The stage version, the one recorded for posterity here, succeeds primarily as a performance showcase for Waller-Bridge. She’s a fabulous actor and a true stage animal, with a wonderfully expressive voice.