Nathan Rabin

It plays like unwitting art-house self-parody from a narcissist who takes himself, and his brooding subject matter, way too seriously.

The film is too violent and dark for kids but too juvenile and bland for grown-ups.

Before Cooties is a zombie movie, it is an earnest-young-teacher movie that diligently subscribes to every cliché of the form.

At an egregious 106 minutes, Joe Dirt 2 feels like a director’s cut where every single moment of footage was carefully preserved, no matter how pointless or unfunny or digressive it might be.

It’s about just about everything, so while the subject might seem niche it’s actually so broad and expansive the film strains to cover it properly in a trim 82 minutes.

It does not seem like too much of a stretch to call Kroll a comic genius, but this kind of low-key sincerity does not suit his particular gifts.

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.

In the past, James at least had likability on his side. He was a big, lumbering oaf, the ideal drinking buddy. But there’s an arrogance to the way he treats people here, particularly a gorgeous hotel employee he’s convinced is in love with him, that renders him strangely unsympathetic.

Desert Dancer is blessed by a powerful sincerity. The filmmakers clearly believe the bromides offered about the life-affirming power of dance and artistic expression. The conviction that this story matters and deserves to be taken seriously gets the film over its occasional rough patches.

this old-school international hodgepodge production is weighed down by a lumbering humorlessness and a glacial pace that makes it seem far longer than its 115 minutes.

The deathly silence doomed to haunt theaters during Get Hard allows audiences far too much time to think about its problematic attitudes toward race, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as its borderline-nonsensical plot.

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.

The Cobbler is such a weirdly somber comedy that it would almost be in poor taste to laugh during it, though there’s not much danger of that happening.

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.

Unfinished Business aspires to high-spirited antics, but it feels defeated and exhausted from the very start.

The humor is seldom character-based: It’s more a matter of actors saying whatever outrageous thing springs to mind at that moment.

Unless this is an unusually great year for comedy, there will be few funnier or more quotable movies than What We Do In The Shadows.

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.

Luke Matheny’s perversely milquetoast romantic comedy seems to have escaped from the afternoon schedule of the Lifetime network and secured a VOD and theatrical release it patently does not deserve.

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 film’s lazy reliance on distraction extends to keeping its female lead underwritten and unsympathetic.

Perversely low-budget and oddly devoid of imagination, Vice seems less like a proper film than a bargain-basement SyFy pilot, shot on the cheap and drafting off Willis and Jane’s star power. It’s about androids aching to be real, but it doesn’t have an ounce of genuine humanity in its tin heart.

As well-intentioned as it is thoroughly inept, Black November would be a serious contender for year-end worst lists if it weren’t so painfully noble and sincere.

The film is an appropriately dour and intense indictment of a law-enforcement community that did not value the lives of some victims enough to devote anything but the slimmest of resources to tracking their killer down.

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.

It’s a big leap forward for Rock as both an actor and a filmmaker, written and directed with the nervous, live-wire energy that has eluded his on-screen work for so long.

Ribald yet frantically unfunny, it wears out its welcome within the first five minutes, and never comes close to gaining it back. It feels like an alternately flat and flailing television pilot for a bro-comedy no one in their right mind would ever pick up.

It feels like the series has run its course, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history alongside the hardware it so lovingly pays tribute to.

A Yuletide comedy so slight, it sometimes feels like a bonus-sized Christmas episode for a sitcom that never should have been green-lit in the first place.

Sex Ed takes a lot of glee in subjecting its timid hero to a rancid sewer of sexual excess early on, but the film’s apparently strong belief that it deserves to be taken seriously—despite its title, premise, and utter worthlessness—both as a comedy and as social advocacy might just be the most offensive thing about it.

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 aversion toward clichés and hitting expected beats lends it a rare, welcome edge of danger.

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

Time Is Illmatic is a documentary worthy of its subject. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s a strong, substantive look at an album whose greatness was apparent immediately, but that’s still grown in stature since its release.

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.

Dolphin Tale 2 makes audiences wade through endless oceans of tedium for those scattered, fleeting moments of grace.

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 film’s constant nods to the artificiality of its narrative highlight its precious, cloying phoniness rather than subvert it.

Despite the abbreviated ending, No No: A Dockumentary is nevertheless a compelling, deeply moving, fun look at the highs and lows of a bygone era.

As Above/So Below purposefully generates a certain air of mystery by keeping the exact nature of its protagonists’ experience enigmatic, but for a film that takes place underground in tightly enclosed spaces, it’s surprisingly thin on suspense and palpable physical danger.

It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core.

Kink sometimes feels like a promotional film not just for the website it empathetically chronicles, but also for the sex-positive ethos it embodies. But it’s also unexpectedly convincing, and at times even moving in its paradoxical conception of liberation through degradation, and empowerment through submission.

The film lets audiences be third parties in Coogan and Brydon’s dinner conversation. For lovers of words, comedy, and conversation, that’s an awfully hard proposition to pass up.

Let’s Be Cops takes its premise in the dullest, most predictable direction imaginable, as a wacky mismatched-buddy-cop movie pitched to the lowest common denominator.

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.

TMNT confuses “dimly lit” for “gritty” and humorless for substantive. It’s afraid of being too fun or too light, and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a Nolan film or a 21 Jump Street-style spoof.

Title aside, what distinguishes The Fluffy Movie from a standard stand-up special is its willingness, even eagerness, to dive into some seriously heavy shit. It’s funny, to be sure, but also unexpectedly substantive.

The Kill Team tells a compelling story, but the 79-minute runtime leaves that story feeling incomplete.

A Most Wanted Man is a cold film that examines its characters from a clinical distance, but its iciness gives way to raw emotion in a powerful final sequence.

Gondry’s latest demands a high tolerance for whimsy, and will undoubtedly prove anathema to his skeptics. Yet for those willing to abandon logic, suspend disbelief, and give themselves over to Gondry’s crazy, deeply immersive world of play, the result is a wildly inventive head film that’s mood-altering and mind-expanding in its own right.

Made In America is a puff piece, a shallow, insufferable exercise in hagiography that seems to operate under the delusion that a festival bill combining rock, pop, and rap acts represents a dazzling innovation, not the status quo for festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo, and countless others.

Swanberg isn’t doing anything new with Happy Christmas, but sticking to the same non-formula formula this time around yields unprecedentedly inspired results.

Cannon is a big believer in the power of repetition. He apparently nurses a strong belief that if a gag isn’t funny the first time around, it will somehow become hilarious the eighth or ninth time it’s repeated.

A crowd-pleasing, proudly working-class celebration of large women, old women, broke women, and women who love women, Tammy isn’t just consistently funny and unexpectedly touching and tender, it’s also genuinely subversive.

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.

Think Like A Man Too isn’t a movie, or even an arbitrary sequel to an arbitrary adaptation of a novelty book, so much as an extended victory lap from filmmakers and actors convinced that all they have to do is show up to equal or top the first film’s success. The sad thing is that they’re probably right.

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

The Signal would desperately like to be a film of ideas, but the few it presents are vapid and secondhand. Eubank’s overachieving work on the film suggests he’s destined for bigger and better things, though given the airy nothingness of the film’s mind games, that’s setting the bar awfully low.

The filmmakers behind Our Vinyl Weighs A Ton benefit and suffer from an excess of fascinating subject material.

The film’s reliance on formula and stereotypes wouldn’t be so frustrating if that formula worked and provided the glib pleasures the filmmakers are going for; instead, Ping Pong Summer feels stilted, undernourished, and oddly sour.

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.

It’s simply tacky consumer product that dishonors the famous name in its title—the same one that’s keeping this film from the direct-to-video burial it deserves.

Along with producer Laurie David (who was also behind Inconvenient Truth) and director Stephanie Soechtig, Couric has made an unabashed muckraking documentary that ends with a call to action that’s half inspirational, half grating. It’s propaganda, to be sure, but effective propaganda.

Beneath all The Double’s cynicism, misanthropy, intense stylization, and distance lies a core of genuine tragedy, and that’s what gives the film an emotional resonance beyond its aesthetic achievements.

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.

The bigness of Mann’s performance can’t help but set the film’s tone, which goes manic and high-strung to the point of hysteria before settling down and becoming really stupid and gross.

Joe’s brilliance doesn’t lie in its destination, but in the gripping, intense, surprisingly joyous and funny journey it takes to get there.

Frankie & Alice gives her the rare opportunity to play a film’s hero and its villain inside the same body, and she does a memorably dreadful job in both capacities. That trainwreck fascination is about the only redeeming facet of a prestige picture gone terribly, though not entertainingly, awry.

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.

Even Tyler Perry seems bored and exhausted by his own shtick. To its credit or detriment, Single Moms Club cannot muster up the energy to be as insulting and offensive as Perry’s previous two films.

Better Living Through Chemistry suggests a new cinematic rule: the more impressed a movie is with itself, the less likely it is to impress a discriminating audience liable to have seen all its silly little tricks before.

Thankfully, Big Men doesn’t have heroes or villains. It’s a deep dive into an endless pool of moral and political ambiguity in which very little is clear-cut, except that the desire for wealth and power.

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.

Film doesn’t suit Alan Partridge as well as other media, but Coogan and company have nevertheless delivered a consistently lively satirical comedy that would stand on its own merits, even if it wasn’t weighed down by expectations more than 20 years in the making.

Repentance lurches unsteadily to a foregone conclusion that isn’t the riveting twist the filmmakers imagined: It’s the final, predictable disappointment in a film full of them.

It’s many different films at once—all muddled, all unsatisfying, and all crying out for Liam Neeson’s participation.

In the insufferable, secondhand tradition of countless other regrettable genre films, Black Out is so impressed by itself, it doesn’t even need an audience.

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.

More than anything, though, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World embodies comic hugeness, for better or for worse. It isn’t the best comedy of all time, but it’s one of the largest and broadest.

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.

47 Ronin is elephantine and lumbering, a wobbly, would-be epic that aspires to the scope and majesty of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, but comes up woefully short.

The film aspires to educate as well as entertain, rattling off the names and relevant distinctions of various dinosaurs as they appear onscreen for the first time. But the overwhelming impression the film leaves is that dinosaur poop was enormous.

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.

A Madea Christmas belongs to a rancid strain of Yuletide trifles that feature awful people being terrible to each other for 90 minutes under the sway of insulting plot contrivances before the awfulness is climactically washed away in an avalanche of holiday sentimentality.

Out Of The Furnace is a defiantly old-fashioned, well-crafted piece of storytelling whose power lies in its unadorned simplicity.

The film executes its bad-taste gags with such delicacy and unexpected emotional truth that they don’t even seem like jokes. This is attributable largely to Hollyman’s fearless, convincing lead performance, which grounds the movie in a believable reality, no matter how crazy things become.

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.

Weekend Of A Champion is an immersive chronicle of a specific time and place in racing, but it’s also a film in a familiar Polanski mode, exploring a strong man at war with forces that could destroy him.

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.

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.

Fischer at least has personal and romantic reasons to be involved with this film, but audiences are unencumbered by such obligations, and should heed the title's warning sign and opt out of Kirk, Fischer, and Messina's fruitless little circle of pain.

A lovely, sweet, funny, romantic, and supremely worthwhile endeavor that unfortunately takes longer to wrap up than it should.

An insanely overlong infomercial for the book.

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.

For all its low-key charms, the coming-of-age story risks being too Christian for secular audiences and too secular and colorful for Christian audiences: Like its spiritual seeker of a protagonist, it's caught between worlds.

For a documentary supposedly focused on fans-it's right there in the title-Comic-Con Episode IV gets awfully distracted by the star power of professional smartasses like Smith and industry titans like Lee.

Wrath Of The Titans is shopworn and derivative even by the degraded standards of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking.

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.

To paraphrase a famous Mae West wisecrack, when Cage is good, he's very good, and when he's bad, he's better. Here, however, he's just plain lousy, and like the film he so passively carries, that's no fun at all.

Jeff begins with its protagonist discussing a Hollywood movie and ends by embracing the worst excesses of commercial American filmmaking, but there are enough moments of magic and wonder in the interim to make it worthwhile.

As with "Black Dynamite," many of Casa De Mi Padre's sharpest, most inspired gags riff on the source material's ingratiatingly amateurish production values and exuberantly incompetent stylistic choices.

It's more consistently amusing and inspired than an adaptation of an '80s TV show has any right to be.

In its third act, this funny, bittersweet, tonally assured coming-of-age story grows unexpectedly poignant as Rolleston comes to realize he doesn't need a super-cool buddy or co-conspirator in his misadventures. He needs a father, and Waititi's stunted man-child is fatally unsuited and unqualified for that role.

In a timid comic world, Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie feels genuinely dangerous and transgressive: it makes a virtue of going way too far because other comedies don't go far enough.

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.

The charismatic Idris Elba debuts in a key role as an alcoholic priest who recruits Cage's unique services. Yet instead of elevating the franchise, Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance ends up squandering even more potential.

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.

This adventure strands Johnson's famously animated features in eyebrow jail, and squanders his outsized charisma and gift for winking self-deprecation in a thankless worried-stepfather role. It doesn't call for much, beyond a lot of muscles and an ever-present look of concern for his whiny stepson.

Kwapis fills small roles with great character actors like Stephen Root, Andrew Daly, Kathy Baker, Tim Blake Nelson, John Michael Higgins, Rob Riggle, and James LeGros, all skilled at making a lot out of a little.

For the scandal-prone icon behind the camera - who glibly writes off all that talk about her subjects' Nazi sympathies as slanderous nonsense from a jealous, hateful press and gossipy busybodies - the film might as well be called ME.

Kormákur and his collaborators want to tell a simple story cleanly, efficiently, and with a refreshing dearth of frills. They more or less realize their aspirations because they aim so low.

The hilariously convoluted thriller contains all the elements for a wacky parody of exorcism movies, except a sense of humor about itself: The Devil Inside never acknowledges its innate ridiculousness, so the laughs are unintentional.

Not since Mark Wahlberg trembled in fear beside a menacing houseplant in "The Happening" has a film tried to provoke terror with such an unlikely object of menace.

It's a film of shuddering earnestness and fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it.

By the time everyone in Carnage has revealed themselves, we're left not with flawed human beings, but with monsters of banality whose company represents a brutal form of punishment in itself.

With its wall-to-wall pop covers, Chipwrecked isn't a kids' movie so much as a brightly animated, instantly forgettable animated feature-length advertisement for the NOW That's What I Call Music! compilation series of contemporary pop hits.

It's safe to say to no idea was nixed on the set of New Year's Eve for being too cheesy or sentimental; if anything, ideas were nixed for not being sentimental or cheesy enough.

Films like these have taught us that suffering is the incontrovertible existential fate of attractive Los Angeles residents. Must these dour exercises in alienation make audiences suffer as well?

Arthur Christmas gets a little sappy toward the end - it is a Christmas movie, after all - but it otherwise strikes just the right combination of naughty and nice, reverent and irrelevant, holiday-sweet and Aardman dry.

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.

The filmmakers throw everything at the audience, literally and metaphorically, and the results are exhilarating rather than exhausting.

For a film about a "sport" where every competition is literally a matter of life and death, the oddly inert, suspense-free 13 is strangely lacking in urgency.

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.

Brewer's Footloose has sex, swagger, and even an edge of danger, but in the end, he's hamstrung by the project's innate ridiculousness.

Courageous literally preaches to the converted, delivering ham-fisted messages of responsibility to the most receptive audience possible.

Everything here is pitched relentlessly toward uplift, but at least that uplift is genuine, the product of one visionary's indomitable will and a musical universe he brought into existence through vision, dedication, and plenty of stubborn hard work.

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

As usual, Corben's style is caffeinated and a little rough around the edges, but he's a tenacious journalist, and his yen for sensationalism gives Limelight an irresistible tabloid pop.

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

Red State is gloriously unencumbered by fidelity to genre conventions, which lends it a thrilling element of unpredictability even when the action frequently grows shrill and heavy-handed.

This clumsy action movie feels too generic to be real. The film attempts to add an element of sophisticated sociopolitical commentary to the typical Jason Statham head-busting shoot-'em-up, but only ends up draining it of visceral thrills.

The Weird World Of Blowfly at times recalls "The Wrestler," only instead of schlepping his aging body from city to city to don outrageous costumes and wrestle, 69-year-old soul-music legend Clarence Reid schleps his hunched-over frame to gigs where he performs X-rated parodies and scatological ditties as incorrigible proto-hip-hopper Blowfly.

Apparently no one told Ricci she was acting in a comedy, not a touching drama about a young woman overcoming a formative trauma to achieve her dreams.

The new Burke & Hare offers many pleasures, chief among them the return of the Landis of old.

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.

Madden's dark, moody, complex exploration of guilt and identity taps into a rich vein of moral ambiguity, but the filmmakers should know that in the face of unspeakable Nazi evil, the romantic problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans.

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.

The Spy Kids series once seemed charmingly homemade. These days, it feels less charmingly homemade than maddeningly amateurish.

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.

David Dobkin's film has the faults of raucous recent scatological comedies like "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses," and "The Hangover Part II" with none of their redeeming facets. It's scattershot, sexist, and vulgar without being funny.

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

Attack The Block turns its modest budget into a virtue by focusing on character, especially the surprisingly charged, complicated dynamic between enemies-turned-allies Whittaker and Boyega.

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.

Winnie The Pooh is a storybook brought to life with intelligence, wit, and palpable affection; where so many kids' films try desperately to come off as hip and timely that they often feel tacky and instantly dated, Winnie The Pooh is bravely quiet, old-fashioned, and wry.

Poignant and powerful, complex and melancholy, the film ends with rehearsals for yet another money-grubbing comeback tour.

In the film's funniest scene, a coked-up Day rocks out to The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" in a car in a state of ecstatic frenzy.

Teacher underutilizes a smartly cast-against-type Timberlake and the perpetually winning Segel, but Diaz ultimately earns a rooting interest in the unlikely redemption of her scheming opportunist.

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.

Submarine is the film "Youth In Revolt" should have been, an achingly sad yet ribald account of a hyper-verbal oddball's ascent/descent into manhood.

Like its fellow crowd-depressor "Blue Valentine," Beautiful Boy offers the antithesis of escapism: a claustrophobic, punishingly intense, beautifully measured exploration of the depths of human despair.