Nathan Rabin

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.

Charlie Countryman feels like the cinematic equivalent of a dodgy first novel, the kind authors write when they’re young and full of romance, hubris, and pretension—then look back on later in life with something approaching mortification.

Despite the parade of pretty images and lovely scenery, Big Sur stubbornly fails to cohere into a real movie; instead, it feels like an illustrated novel full of words, ideas, and images, but devoid of structure or characterization.

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.

As a film, it’s sappy, preachy, and sleepily paced, but it also makes walking in faith seem about as flavorful and appealing as a lettuce sandwich on white bread, slathered in mayo.

Strongman is a heartrending character study of a man blessed with superhuman strength, but defeated and overwhelmed by the everyday bullshit of life.

It’s compelling throughout, and profoundly moving at times, even when it rings false, which is often. It’s a divisive, shadowy conversation-starter of a movie that’s as much fun to talk and think about as it is to watch.

The Inevitable Defeat Of Mister & Pete is a raw, often moving coming-of-age story.

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.

Salinger thinks it’s big, important news, but it’s barely a footnote.

Bad Milo! gets nasty laughs out of putting its overmatched hero through a gauntlet of comic humiliations, but it works just as well as a dark allegory about the way we handle our demons.

It isn’t a terribly intimate portrait of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Chapin, or Nixon, but it is revealing in its own right, as a fascinatingly warped and aged Polaroid of an epic life that’s grown more compelling with the passage of time.

The film overflows with inspired comic ideas that fizzle and die in execution like a marathon fireworks display of nothing but duds.

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.

Lovelace finds a fresh take on familiar material, but the film is also distinguished by its focus and intensity.

It’s modest, scrappy, and resourceful, a low-budget comedy that makes the most of a central setting and a cast packed with gifted improvisers.

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.

After an unpromising beginning, Iceberg Slim develops into a thorny, engaging exploration of the strange twilight and late-in-life fame of a bona fide American outlaw.

The film is so slight that it feels less like a proper sequel to Grown Ups than a failed television spin-off that inexplicably cast Sandler and the gang in the lead roles instead of their low-budget television equivalents.

It’s a soul-stirring tribute to a man whose vision was too bold and revolutionary for his lifetime, or the convention-bound ways of the music industry, but was ultimately too powerful to be denied.

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.

The film doesn’t feel like a fresh riff on familiar tropes so much as a bad cover of Pulp Fiction.

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.

It’s almost impressive how the moronic new ensemble comedy The Big Wedding manages to cram three hours’ worth of nonsensical subplots, extraneous characters, and implausible plot points into 90 minutes of streamlined idiocy.

Like "Upstream Color," Sun Don’t Shine owes a sizable debt to the philosophical lyricism of Terrence Malick. Working wonders on a tight budget, Seimetz uses handheld cameras and tight compositions to create an air of claustrophobic intensity interspersed with moments of ragged beauty.

Any pretensions of satire, moral ambiguity, or social commentary get lost in a hurricane of empty, mindless spectacle.

The film never even attempts to peer behind the curtain of Jay’s colorful existence; it’s content that the show in front of it is spectacle enough. But Deceptive Practices would be a richer, deeper experience if the filmmakers had penetrated Jay’s fierce boundaries even a little.

Scary Movie 5 aspires to timeliness, but its comic sensibility is so groaningly retro that the film features a series of tributes to The Benny Hill Show and its signature ditty, “Yakety Sax.”

It’s A Disaster is lively and assured before a third-act twist takes the film in an even more bracingly bleak direction. The twist is one tonal shift too many, but the film otherwise manages to find the levity, as well as the pathos, in the prospect of total annihilation.

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

It isn’t until Temptation grows flamboyantly bad in its final act that it rises to the level of good dumb fun in the trashy tradition of Perry’s most entertainingly awful films.

Few actors are as riveting doing absolutely nothing, and The Place Beyond The Pines perfectly typecasts Gosling as a noir staple: the decent but rudderless drifter driven to violent and desperate action.

Admission ultimately can’t quite figure out what kind of a film it wants to be, so like a lot of promising but unfocused contenders, it never quite lives up to its potential. But there’s value to be found in its meandering.

The emotions of soul music are irresistibly universal. The same is true of soul-music clichés. Based on a true story, The Sapphires tells the tale of four ambitious young Aboriginal girls from Australia who come of age performing before American serviceman in 1968 Vietnam. And yet the film is afflicted by a curious lack of cultural specificity.

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.

Dead Man Down exerts an unconscionable level of effort for minimal reward: It aspires to exquisite world-weariness, but just ends up feeling exhausted by its frenzied yet fruitless exertions.

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.”

Snitch toys with moral ambiguity and fatalism before losing its nerve and delivering the action-movie goods in a climax that hews closer to fantasy than the keenly observed realism of the film’s solid center.

The Bitter Buddha closes with Pepitone pondering whether he’s wasted his life by focusing on comedy rather than family, but everything that’s come before suggests that decision has led to a life that’s a triumph rather than a tragedy.

Would You Rather has one major asset in an appropriately gothic, larger-than-life performance by Jeffrey Combs, the great, chameleon-like character actor best known for playing a mad scientist in "Re-Animator."

It isn’t a movie so much as a feature-length perfume commercial for a Charlie Sheen signature cologne with gorgeous packaging and absolutely nothing inside.

The leads here aren't the only element of the film that's past its prime.

The sketches aren't united by a half-ignored framing device, so much as by an enduring fascination with bodily functions. Movie 43 is the most star-studded collection of jokes involving menstruation, flatulence, incest, bestiality, Snooki, and nutsacks ever assembled, but the stars don't elevate the material-they just descend to its level.

In its superior first half, Yossi sustains a mood of wistful longing and inexorable loneliness as its directionless protagonist lumbers through a grey, joyless existence, but the film threatens to turn into a gay Israeli version of "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" once Knoller finds his impossibly gorgeous, persistent dream man.

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.

If the sluggishly paced, virtually laugh-free Haunted House is Wayans' conception of a passion-fueled labor of love, it's horrifying to ponder what he'd consider a mercenary cash-grab.

Gangster Squad aims for the pop-operatic intensity of "The Untouchables," but ends up feeling like a savage, simple-minded comic strip.

It's a mess, but its best moments are exhilarating, getting hopelessly lost in Pargin's surreal, completely disorienting world.

It succeeds at times in spite of itself, though it ultimately adds up to less than the sum of its sometimes impressive, sometimes insufferable parts.

Parental Guidance is the abysmal grandpa/grandkids bonding comedy he's (Crystal) been destined to make since he first started creating new comedy with an unmistakable old-person smell.

Tarantino simply isn't a good enough performer for his presence to be anything but a distraction in a rip-roaring crowd-pleaser this consistently great.

Though intermittently bathed in a halo of golden light and desired by at least one handsome, distinguished older man with a thing for mature women with healthy appetites, Streisand in The Guilt Trip is largely devoid of her famous vanity and narcissism.

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.

Just like "Illegal Aliens," Addicted To Love is an exploitation movie, albeit one without even the science-fiction spoof's sunny, dumbass innocence.

Starlet is an unusually subtle, quiet character study - especially given the potentially salacious subject matter - that builds to a quietly powerful climax.

The Man With The Iron Fists has the same advantages of many musical debuts. It's the product of a man who has been storing up ideas, setpieces, characters, and gags for a lifetime, in preparation for the magic moment when he'd be able to unleash his full vision on the big screen.

Stiff, episodic, and disjointed, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D replicates its source material all too faithfully.

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.

It might just be the most poignant, moving film ever made about one man's surprisingly noble efforts to get laid.

In spite of the out-of-place pregnancy subplot, Smashed is a film of pummeling intensity and bruised emotions.

Here Comes The Boom seems to have made it from the pitch stage - Kevin James does MMA to save his school or something! - to the big screen without an iota of inspiration, ambition, or personality seeping in at any juncture.

So why is The Paperboy so bizarrely dull? It's as if the filmmakers combined 18 different kinds of scalding-hot peppers, yet inexplicably emerged with oatmeal.

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

Director Peter Nicks puts faces, names, and heartbreakingly relatable stories to a social problem that can all too often feel abstract and academic.

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 Cold Light Of Day is the antithesis of a labor of love; it's a cold, mercenary endeavor that, like the thematically similar Taylor Lautner vehicle "Abduction," diligently ignores the potentially intriguing issues of family and identity its plot raises.

The film plays like a strenuous tug of war between the inhuman machinery of a wildly misguided plot and the low-key humanism of Melanie Lynskey's warm yet unsentimental performance.

The idiotic melodrama The Words is a maddening contradiction: a film about the publishing industry and a great literary fraud that doesn't have a literary bone in its body or a thought in its pretty, empty little head.

The Possession attempts to breathe new life into a creaky old subgenre by taking its exorcist and demon from Jewish mythology, but even this backfires: The casting of Jewish reggae star Matisyahu would be distracting even if he weren't introduced singing softly to himself.

As charming as it is winningly modest, but it's so incredibly slight a stiff wind would knock it into a different hemisphere.

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.

Genial and pleasant to a fault, the film could benefit from a little more personality.

The subject matter is unrelentingly sordid yet the storytelling is so deadpan and understated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss it as exploitation or sexist provocation.

Though unabashedly manipulative in its storytelling and structure, Searching For Sugar Man ultimately earns its happy ending and buzzy, crowd-pleasing populist appeal by alchemizing trembling inner-city pain into transcendent international beauty.

Ted is never stronger than when Wahlberg and MacFarlane's Ted hang out, riff, and luxuriate in an easy friendship, but as it lurches to a conclusion, Ted unwisely devotes far too much of its time to a plot it would be better off ignoring.

The film is such a barren comic wasteland of scatology and misogyny that Vanilla Ice steals the film with a good-natured, self-deprecating portrayal of himself as Sandler's sleazy party buddy.

This glossy musical, from "Hairspray" director Adam Shankman, is a shameless crowd-pleaser where cardboard characters use the most overplayed and ubiquitous hits of the 1980s to express the aching banality of their souls.

With its shameless melodrama, ghoulish violence, and scenes of Christians being slaughtered en masse in holy places for the crime of publicly being Christians, the religious drama For Greater Glory feels an awful lot like evangelical Tribulation dramas such as "Left Behind: The Movie" and "The Omega Code."

The film is largely redeemed by an unexpected emotional resonance befitting a Steven Spielberg production.

If Spurlock had simply followed Waters around for 80 minutes, the result would be more entertaining than Mansome. Hell, 80 minutes of John Waters sleeping would be more fun than Mansome.

Girl In Progress is ultimately less interested in subverting the clichés of the genre than in recycling them. It wants audiences to know it's in on the joke though it's not always apparent that there even is a joke in the first place.