Nathan Rabin

More than anything, Misery Loves Comedy does not need to exist. The niche it aims to fill has already been occupied by people willing to go much deeper than Pollak.

Clark is either doing way too little or way too much here; he rarely hits the right tone.

It goes about its idiotic business swiftly and efficiently, which is about all you can ask for from this manner of silliness. It never goes anywhere worthwhile, but at least it doesn’t take too long to get there.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken isn’t a comedy of incompetence, or the psychological battle of wills its opening scene suggests. It’s hard to see exactly what the filmmakers were going for, beyond bringing a real-life story to the big screen as dutifully and dully as possible.

Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus is the best kind of failure, impassioned and singular, but it’s a failure all the same— glacially paced, stiffly acted, shapeless, and for the most part tremendously boring. It’s an intriguing idea ruined by the execution. There’s a fine line between hypnotic and somnolent.

For those seeking guilty laughs and shameless camp, The Boy Next Door is the exact right kind of bad movie. It’s full of unintentional laughs, and transcendently unselfconscious.

The tone is delicate and vaporous, more attuned to mood and melancholy than anything resembling a conventional narrative. And despite the ambition on display, the film feels awfully slight, like a dream forgotten immediately upon waking. In its admirable but muddled attempt to fuse pure poetry and pure cinema, it ends up doing justice to neither.

Fury lives up to its title with its great ferocity, but at a certain point, it begins to feel like a macho fantasy.

St. Vincent is even sappier and more committed to yanking heartstrings and manipulating emotions than Hyde Park On Hudson or The Monuments Men, and ultimately even more precious and treacly.

The film’s appeal is largely dependent on Cage; Left Behind is a batshit-crazy Cage cult classic of a radically new stripe.

Like earlier Dante classics The Gremlins and The Burbs, The Hole marries the fantastical, the horrific, and the mundane, but in this case, the fantastical isn’t that fantastic, the horrific isn’t scary, and the mundane is way too mundane. All the elements are here, they just don’t add up to a satisfying whole.

The Skeleton Twins has a pair of terrific, sharply etched lead performances, a polished, autumnal look, and some affecting moments where its protagonists bond. But to borrow a water-based metaphor from the film’s overflowing stock of them, The Skeleton Twins just lies there, cold and clammy, like a dead fish.

As Christian knock-offs of secular films go, The Remaining is surprisingly respectable. At the risk of crazily overrating the film, The Remaining has to qualify as one of the most stirringly adequate, totally acceptable explicitly Christian horror movies ever made.

The exuberant dance sequences have long been the series’ saving grace, but even those are starting to feel redundant and interchangeable.

Nothing is surprising about The Hundred-Foot Journey. It’s a film that telegraphs all its beats and character arcs, executes them adequately but without passion or personality, then congratulates itself on a job done.

It’s a slick crowd-pleaser, but it’s perversely unrevealing about anything other than Manganiello’s affection for a the stripper experience.

Yves Saint Laurent is the kind of heavy-handed, substance-light, spectacle-driven period film where the set decorator and the costume designer don’t just have the most important jobs on the film, they have the only important jobs.

Ivory Tower asks a lot of provocative, important questions, but it’s decidedly short on answers, and even shorter on satisfying or convincing answers.

Supermensch is a loving tribute to a friend, but in gushing effusively and endlessly over Gordon—who, it should be noted, really does seem like a great guy—Myers shortchanges the audience.

MacFarlane’s follow-up feels less like a film than like an extremely long, fairly inspired live-action episode of Family Guy, one that’s only as strong as the latest gag or riff. And this being a Seth MacFarlane production, those gags and riffs are of varying levels of quality.

Thanks to Sandler, Barrymore, and South Africa’s natural beauty, Blended is far more palatable and bearable than it has any right to be; it’s fluff that rises to the level of innocuous disposability.

It’s a passable knock-off of less-godly but more inspired secular fare, which may not sound like high praise, but is clearly all the filmmakers were aiming for. They set the bar low enough to clear it.

As a period production, Belle is gorgeous, dazzling spectacle, replete with ornate costumes, lovely sets, and in Mbatha-Raw, a striking, charismatic lead. But the film never finds a way to invest its narrative with a sense of urgency.

Chavez was a man of intense, overriding passions, his biopic feels strangely academic and detached, an unimaginative, straightforward catalog of his greatest hits and most historic campaigns that provides precious little insight into his inner life.

The film feels epic in scope, visually at least, but the depth of its deep-focus composition is bitterly at odds with the flimsiness of its characterization and plotting.

To its credit and sometimes detriment, Grand Piano keeps a frothing-at-the-mouth level of insane melodrama going for 75 minutes, aided by Wood’s sweaty, terrified performance, a screenplay rich in ridiculous contrivances, and a swooping camera that never stands still.

While the film is often playful, it never attempts to be particularly funny, perhaps out of a fear that too much levity in a World War II-themed movie would be in poor taste. Instead, it loads on great quantities of tacky crowd-pleasing moments and clichés.

Life Of A King manages to sustain a hilariously over-the-top tone of naked sincerity from start to finish.

This is time-worn, overly familiar material, indifferently directed by journeyman Tim Story, but Hart’s manic comic invention and textured persona elevates it somewhere beyond the level of pleasing mediocrity onto the slightly more distinguished realm of the agreeable-enough time waster.

Interior. Leather Bar.’s intriguing curiosity provides ample food for thought, in part because it’s the rare film that devotes much of its running time to its own principals discussing what, if anything, the film ultimately means.

All The Light In The Sky is a refreshingly grown-up exploration of a woman at a personal and professional crossroads that’s stronger for never pushing its narrative or its finely wrought lead character in the direction of big moments or bullshit epiphanies. It’s casual, but also quietly moving.

At its core, Homefront is thoroughly generic, a grim exercise in formula whose action sequences are edited into a frenetic, incoherent blur, especially the awful opening setpiece.

The screenplay relies far too heavily on coincidences, misunderstandings, and characters purposefully not saying things for reasons rooted in plot contrivances rather than clear motivation.

The Best Man Holiday alternates smoothly between raucous comedy and soap opera for a solid hour... Yet the balance begins to tip toward leaden melodrama in the crazily overloaded third act, which speeds past the line separating crowd-pleasing from crowd-pandering.

It’s the geriatric equivalent of a ramshackle teen sex comedy, only intermittently elevated by the caliber of the talent involved.

Sal is so inconsequential, it barely exists. It seems possible that even Franco has forgotten it, in order to make room in his memory for the 74 similar projects he was pursuing around the same time.

Despite the talent involved and the notoriety of the source material, Carrie feels strangely small, even television-sized.

Parkland finds a new angle on an exhaustively chronicled and debated subject by focussing on the grim practicalities of the situation.

Despite its shortcomings as a narrative, Man Of Tai Chi nevertheless feels like Reeves made exactly the movie he set out to make, assuming he didn’t set out to create a movie that was “good” by any stretch of the imagination so much as intermittently entertaining, albeit probably not for the reasons intended.

Its pleasures are all glib and surface-level, although Luke and Patton have enough chemistry to make their painfully clichéd relationship go down smoothly.

It isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but B-movie lovers who like their dance movies flashy, fun, and spectacularly dumb shouldn’t mind.

Gandolfini delivers a funny, poignant performance befitting a great actor. It’s heartbreaking that the film doesn’t measure up to his exemplary turn.

The film is curiously joyless and inert.

Populaire’s initial appeal comes largely from its airiness, and it simply doesn’t have the heft or gravity to tackle weightier emotions.

Ford and Oldman’s scenes together are Paranoia’s sole redeeming facet.

It’s bloated, overwrought, and nakedly sentimental, a sappy and cliched celebration instead of a searching and incisive exploration.

Instead of committing wholeheartedly to telling the story of a single family, Daniels gets distracted trying to tell the story of our nation’s complicated racial history.

It deserves credit for avoiding the conventions of romantic comedies and defying audience expectations, but only to a degree. Instead of hitting the expected notes and beats, Drinking Buddies instead ambles sideways. It’s headed nowhere in particular, but at least the voyage is pleasant.

A film that grows less compelling and original by the minute, R.I.P.D. serves due notice that the mismatched-buddy-cop movie is wearing out its welcome all over again.

Dealin’ With Idiots is at its strongest when it forgets about plot and character development altogether (which is most of the time) and gives itself over to the laid-back pleasure of improvisation among veteran professionals finding and exploring a good groove together.

White House Down is never more than a sliver away from gleeful self-parody. It’s pure patriotic kitsch, the cinematic equivalent of a black-velvet painting of a bald eagle clutching an American flag in its talons as it soars majestically over Mount Rushmore.

V/H/S/2 is content to recycle the conventions and stylistic restrictions of the original while pursuing the default vision of just about every horror sequel: more of the same, with less inspiration, a bigger budget, and more gore.

The result feels like cinematic health food: vaguely good for you but less than delicious.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its cornball charm, thanks largely to the confident work of old pros Carell, Arkin, and Buscemi, but it’s ultimately a big, gaudy, predictable show, strictly for the rubes and tourists.

21 & Over seems particularly redundant, since a film already exists that’s exactly like "The Hangover," only not as good: It was called "The Hangover Part II." 21 & Over is so slavish in imitating its screenwriters’ big claim to fame that it even ends by teasing a sequel, to which the only sane response is a polite but firm, “Thank you, no.”

In spite of some punchy scenes, crackling dialogue, and fine performances, Broken City is hopelessly overmatched. It has Academy Award dreams, but a detective-show heart.

Hyde Park On Hudson once again finds "Meatballs" star Bill Murray leading a populist, crowd-pleasing slobs-vs.-snobs comedy, but this time, his role as Roosevelt reflects his status as a silver-haired heavyweight thespian.

At best, Lay The Favorite registers as cartoon sociology, but the film's featherweight charms dissipate whenever it moves away from the world of gambling and devotes time to go-nowhere subplots involving Hall's bland romance with Jackson, or Willis' troubled but fundamentally healthy marriage to Zeta-Jones.

Nobody Walks is Mumblecore 2.0: The budget is bigger, the cast is littered with recognizable faces from popular television programs, and the production values are more impressive, but the fixation with the low-key, artsy angst of rudderless twenty- and thirtysomethings remains constant.

The film's clumsy sloganeering, however, largely defeats the leads' fine efforts.

Gyllenhaal and Peña's relationship, a sort of heterosexual love affair, is depicted with a sense of tenderness and care that does not extend to the cartoonish villains that dominate the film's lackluster final act.

Liberal Arts has the tony look and feel of a vintage Woody Allen movie, but the sophistication is all surface-level. Radnor will never ascend to Allen's rarified realm, but judging by his forgettable first two features, he could give Ed Burns competition.

He seems to have given up on making art long ago; these days, all he wants to do is entertain, and with Stolen, he succeeds, albeit only on the guilty-pleasure level. Like seemingly the sum of late-period Cage, Stolen is unashamedly cheese, but at least it's cheese of a pungent, flavorful vintage.

The film's 121-minute running time is similarly cause for concern. Lee can be tight and focused as a gun-for-hire, but he's always viewed personal projects as irresistible invitations to self-indulgence and overreaching. Red Hook Summer is no exception.

The tone is mild, the setting is peaceful to the point of sleepiness, and the stakes are incredibly low, even with the heart-tugging central presence of an adorable animal in danger.

Thile has the charisma, presence, and emotional transparency of a great documentary subject, but How To Grow A Band maintains a respectable distance from its subject that ultimately doesn't work in its favor.

Detention is ballsy, audacious, and uncompromising, but the overall effect of Kahn's Hellzapoppin-meets-Twitter aesthetic is exhausting rather than energizing. It's an ice-cream headache of a movie-movie that's so relentlessly "fun," it's borderline obnoxious.

Musical Chairs wants to speak eloquently and powerfully for the disabled. Instead it speaks down to them in the vernacular of bad television comedies, cheeseball underdog dance movies, and abysmal soap operas.

The effortlessly charming Rudd - who is never funnier here than when trying to psych himself up for a tryst with commune-dweller Malin Akerman with a series of increasingly preposterous voices - and an attractive, game supporting cast nearly sell the warmed-over material.

Safe House does altogether too good a job establishing Washington as a seemingly unbeatable adversary: He brings so much gravity to his role that Reynolds seems hopelessly overmatched.

In the end, Tower Heist isn't a black Ocean's Eleven or a bold leap forward for feature-film distribution, just a passable piece of commercial entertainment that falls closer to product than art.

The film's juxtaposition of punk-rock fashion and cozy domesticity proves neither comic nor revelatory. It is, however, adorable, though not adorable enough to compensate for the film's damnable lack of focus.

Johnny English Reborn's sharpest gags riff on its protagonist's unshakeable Britishness.

Trespass begins loopy and mounts in craziness until it's frothing-at-the-mouth insane. It's hard to sustain that level of inspired lunacy over the course of 90 minutes, but Trespass is up to the challenge. As always, it's foolish to underestimate the appeal of Cage at his most agreeably unhinged.

There's a smart, funny, observant comedy-drama to be made about the role our romantic pasts play in determining our futures, but director Mark Mylod and screenwriters Jennifer Crittenden and Gabrielle Allan are less interested in making that movie than in cycling Faris through a series of non-starting encounters with one-note-joke ex-flings.

Singleton once radiated ambition and vision. These days, he seems to be aiming for mediocrity at best. Even by those extraordinarily lenient standards, the inessential, perfunctory Abduction falls short

Dolphin Tale is as casual as a pleasant afternoon nap and about as substantive.

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy takes its cues from Sudeikis' character and performance: It's randy, good-natured, moderately amusing, and charming in a glib, facile way.

Rudd ably carries the film while retaining a light touch, though even with Rudd in the lead, it's still a featherweight trifle, an afternoon nap of a feel-good comedy.

An egregiously miscast Eisenberg stars as a young man toiling as a pizza boy, even though he displays only slightly less intelligence and savvy than the world-beater Eisenberg played in "The Social Network."

Damn! would be a more insightful condemnation of the exploitation process if it didn't reek so strongly of exploitation itself.

Dominic Cooper is electrifying yet stiff in The Devil's Double; he's simultaneously the film's biggest asset and its greatest flaw.

It's difficult to figure out exactly where the film might be heading at any given point, since it follows the loping, meandering rhythms and casualness of a character study rather than conforming to the conventions of any particular genre.

Cars 2 looks fantastic, but the studio has never given audiences - especially audiences over the age of 10 - less reason to be emotionally invested in the beautiful shiny things flying across the screen.

So sleepy and understated that when John Goodman shows up to yell his way through an angrily sarcastic segment called "Ask A New Orleanian," it's incredibly jarring.

The Conspirator should skip theaters altogether and become the first film released straight to middle-school history classes, where the standards for what can generously be deemed entertainment are much lower.

It's rare for a sequel to extensively acknowledge its own pointlessness, let alone make the unnecessary nature of its existence a recurring theme, the way Scream 4 does. Then again, the Scream franchise has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to deconstructing itself and the rules of the slasher genre.

Like "Man In The Moon," American applies a thick gloss of reverence and sentimentality to the story of a comic pioneer who made his living challenging the kinds of neat, convenient, slickly packaged narratives presented here.

If Your Highness often feels like an inside joke, the principals neglected to let the audience in on the fun.

With a little tweaking, this easily could have veered into grindhouse exploitation or mindless wish-fulfillment, but Schwimmer's detached, theatrical approach to his material makes it is more cerebral than visceral, and more Steppenwolf Theatre than Charles Bronson.

Browning has wildly expressive eyes and body language, but she turns wooden when delivering Snyder and Steve Shibuya's alternately purple and stilted banter. Like the film, she seems to regard plot and dialogue as necessary evils.

It's agreeably mediocre, a cinematic paperback novel transformed into the kind of fare folks mindlessly consume on planes and forget about before touching down.

Shadyac didn't need to channel his angst into narrative fiction: He just needed to look in the mirror to find a symbol of Hollywood's arrogance and misplaced priorities.

Grace and his collaborators set out to make a typical '80s sex comedy and succeeded all too well; most of the movies they're paying homage to weren't very good, either.

An unabashed valentine to Winters, but like an unfortunate number of valentines, it proves a little embarrassing to the giver and recipient alike.

That's How Do You Know in a nutshell: preposterous characters lurching through painfully contrived scenarios.

So relentlessly generic and familiar, it might as well be called Crowd-Pleasing Ethnic-Food-Based Coming-Of-Age Comedy-Drama.

The bluntness wouldn't be so oppressive if the film weren't so austere and glacially paced: Welcome To The Rileys is way too humorless.