Neil Genzlinger

The whole film seems to have a vague heaviness to it. The best Muppet movies have been great because they had charm. There’s no charm here, really; just self-referential jokes, decent but not memorable songs, and lots and lots of cameos.

A lot of intriguing ideas are floated in Teenage... But the film takes a point of view that leaves all of them underdeveloped.

Matt Dillon and Kurt Russell may not make the most convincing half-brothers, but The Art of the Steal is a fairly amusing heist film with some sibling tension helping the story along.

Considering that the fate of humankind is at stake, War of the Worlds: Goliath is remarkably uninvolving.

It’s a stretch to call Mr. Everson’s film a documentary.

Ms. Riggs gives each actor a story arc of sorts, and all three are personable guides to this backstage world, explaining the process and terminology and talking openly about their lives and jobs.

Angels in Stardust ends up being too tidy to be a great coming-of-age movie, but it’s a decent one.

It’s all light as a feather, with Jeremy Leven, the writer and director, landing some good multinational jokes along the way.

There’s nothing sophisticated or groundbreaking here, but the movie is a moderately good entry in the bro-grows-up genre.

A terrible movie about a bland, morose young man’s search for love.

Nurse 3D isn’t nearly as fun as a movie about a homicidal, sex-obsessed, clothing-averse health care provider ought to be.

Allegories involving astronomy, baseball and sandwiches are hinted at but are no better developed than the characters.

Yes, it’s full of droll humor, but it’s also a bittersweet portrait of two people, who, in the process of helping their children choose a college, confront the emptiness of their respective marriages.

With a manic performance by Jean-Claude Van Damme and an improbable but intriguing plot variation, Enemies Closer is an improvement over most hunt-or-be-hunted fare. A small improvement, but still.

There are a lot of odious movies yet to come in 2014, no doubt, but they’ll have to work to beat Back in the Day for awfulness.

The plot twists are easily guessed, and the film goes on for one predicament too long, but there are some good laughs.

If you can stand to watch this movie — a big if — there is food for thought here about the subjugation and exploitation of women, the limits of psychological and physical endurance, and more.

A striking experiment in music and moviemaking.

The changes — goodbye, white suburbia; hello, gritty diversity — recharge the batteries somewhat. But there’s no escaping that the found-footage phenomenon has gone from fresh and original to just plain annoying.

The movie looks great, the writing is peppered with moments of wit, and there’s even an educational component built in as dinosaur facts are displayed on the screen.

Mr. Walker is convincing as a man battling grief, exhaustion and, occasionally, an intruding outside world where lawlessness has taken hold.

One of those who’s-the-murderer parlor games is a plot pillar of Merry Christmas, an experiment in filmmaking by Anna Condo that itself feels like a parlor game, and not a particularly entertaining one.

A slight movie that could have been significantly better with a little story doctoring.

It’s as thinly written and unoriginal as made-for-television seasonal filler, and why it isn’t on the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime is a mystery, but fans of the singers in it might get a kick out of seeing them.

The problems are clearly explained, though the film doesn’t have solutions any more than public officials do, since shoreline development is already a fact of life.

The purpose was no doubt more spiritual than the film conveys; if so, the execution doesn’t do the effort justice.

Cold Turkey has some fine actors who put effort into their roles, but it’s getting harder and harder to care about or laugh at adult characters who have botched up their affluent lives and are still obsessed with events from childhood.

Detroit Unleaded is about as gentle as comedies come these days, commendably so.

The film is at its strongest when Russell and Kevin face tests of their character brought on by their interactions with homophobic students.

After a promising start, it degenerates into unconvincing ticking-clock melodrama.

The film, a comedy without much comedy in it... clumsily tries to merge road trip humor and beauty pageant parody.

It’s hard to score big laughs with hidden-camera material these days because there has been so much of it since the “Jackass” TV show, but Mr. Knoxville and his young sidekick still land a few jaw-droppers.

The director, Mike Mendez, shows no signs of knowing how to make campy horror work the way that the creators of similar movies on Syfy do. It has to be either subtle or over the top. This is neither.

The script never gives them the kind of memorable exchange that makes fans howl with delight. But all in all, Escape Plan does what it sets out to do.

As a chronicle of how one rock star slowly fell victim to the Broadway bug, it’s kind of amusing.

When insects are the best thing in your movie, it’s probably time to retire.

The film over all is a pulse-pounding success.

There’s no way to prepare yourself for how awful The Secret Lives of Dorks is.

A heartfelt documentary about a subject that inflames cat lovers everywhere: declawing.

My Lucky Star, a spy-caper romance from China, is sweet and harmless, but it’s also a little disorienting.

The Colony is two-thirds of a pretty good sci-fi suspense movie. But it eventually takes a disappointing turn and becomes yet another run-from-the-ghouls exercise, cheapening decent work by a good cast.

The film doesn’t really live up to its subtitle. There is little sense of what kinds of debates take place at board meetings or how pressure is applied behind closed doors.

The film, written and directed by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, rarely dares to be smart, settling instead for familiar gags that would have the Devil himself yawning.

American Made Movie ends up feeling as if it were built from well-known facts and wishful thinking.

The film’s tale ends up being less rich than its lovely Georgia settings.

An engrossing, unsettling documentary.

Planes is for the most part content to imitate rather than innovate, presumably hoping to reap a respectable fraction of the box office numbers of “Cars” and “Cars 2,” which together made hundreds of millions of dollars (not to mention the ubiquitous product tie-ins).

The film is, if nothing else, an interesting meditation on how a child who grows up without guidance might react to a situation that requires judgment.

Everything goes pretty much as you guess it’s going to, but the conceit of seeing the whole story through the eyes of the videographer adds a dimension to the familiar goings-on.

A new, not very engaging movie featuring a lot of blue skin and household-name voices.

The actors work hard to make us feel their fear of a creature that, for much of the movie, we don’t get to see. We don’t really need to see it, because we’ve seen it or something like it before.

This movie is smarter and better acted and just plain funnier than most of its predecessors in the my-first-time genre, no matter which sex is losing what.

Though the tale, based on a novel by Harold Frederic, remains relevant to our time, the film is too self-conscious and tedious for the message it delivers.

Though the young actors...are appealing enough, you keep waiting for a boatful of humor to come along and rescue them. The whole film is a campy put-on, right? Apparently not.

Fans will love it; their main complaint may be that it ends too soon. Amateur psychologists in the audience, meanwhile, may be asking why such a successful guy seems so defensive.

It’s possible to make a great movie out of family dysfunction, but this one is too short on insight to rank with the best of the genre.

If you’re watching this film and waiting for something funny or insightful to come along to assuage your annoyance, you’ll wait a long time.

When it comes to film plotting, too many twists just result in an annoying tangle. And there are too many twists in Antoni Stutz’s uninvolving Rushlights.

This one is well photographed, yet it’s still just a lot of cars and noise.

Too busy with limb-severings and gunfire to bother being intelligent.

Free Samples is a modest but pleasant small-budget movie with two bits of laziness in the script, but one particularly sweet performance that makes up for them.

Rapture-Palooza has a promising setup and a cast with a good track record of bringing the funny, yet it never does live up to its potential.

The photography is often lovely, and Ms. Gedeck convincingly portrays a woman who as the ordeal stretches on month after month seems to be gradually losing her individuality and blending into the landscape.

It may not make much sense in a brief plot summary, but it makes perfect, daffy sense on the screen.

A satisfying thrill ride, at least on a par with the earlier installments.

This is one terrible movie.

The male characters here are too thinly developed for this to be a top-notch survival thriller, but Ms. Aselton knows how to get the pulse pounding.

[A] sweet if not very credible film.

The film, directed by Conor Allyn, is rarely more than a few minutes away from a gun battle or a tedious chase, and soon you cease to care who is shooting at, or running from, whom or why.

Despite the preachiness, however, they have still made a moderately enjoyable film, thanks to some engaging performances.

The film, a sleepy, low-budget affair, merely enacts a series of horror movie clichés, as if that were enough. Its bland actors and wit-free script do nothing with the familiar elements but present them.

Considerable care goes into establishing the premise, but the film eventually abandons psychological subtlety for hallucinatory garishness, which is too bad.

A sobering study in how individual human beings can become afterthoughts in the face of broad movements like nationalism, a phenomenon that is still much in evidence almost a century later.

The director, Harold Guskin, and writer, Sandra Jennings, show admirable patience in letting the story unspool, and the actors reward them.

It’s all kind of cute. Maybe a little too cute, but it does have a nice circle-of-life ending. And along the way, Mr. Byington shows a knack for observational humor, slipping in sly jokes that force you to keep paying attention despite the slim plot. Droll and interesting; just not very substantial.

The film’s director, Jon M. Chu, executes a pretty good high-altitude fight scene. Still, there should be a “Fans Only” sign at the door of every theater.

Sometimes a movie is so awful that the word awful is not up to the task of conveying its awfulness. The awful InAPPropriate Comedy is such a movie. It is memorably awful. It is stunningly awful. It is so awful that we are fortunate that “awful” has an adverbial use that means “very” or “extremely.” This movie is awfully awful.

The movie is at its most interesting and amusing when riffing on how cavemen might have reacted to new experiences and ideas, like fire and shoes. Whether the kiddies will appreciate that is unclear, but they’ll certainly like the voice work done by Emma Stone as Eep.

These days, when paranormal-themed shows are all over television, Mr. Lutz sounds like just another guy peddling an unverifiable spooky story.

The film grasps for credibility with scenes of a support group (featuring some real veterans) and cryptic voice-overs that strive for profundity but achieve only pretentiousness.

This is not an easy documentary to watch, in the sense that the filmmakers let the story tell itself, without narration or expert commentary. That ultimately makes it all the more touching.

Although Language of a Broken Heart, a romantic comedy written by and starring Juddy Talt, eventually drowns in clichés and predictability, it has a few decent moments of humor and some appealing performances that make it marginally better than most vanity projects.

This distillation of Philip Shabecoff’s book doesn’t really capture the urgency and militancy promised in the title.

Northeast is as tedious as the life of the film’s central character.

Escape From Planet Earth makes a tolerable diversion for a winter’s day or evening, just not a memorable one.

The whole affair has an artificial look reminiscent of a community theater production on a cardboard set. The vintage images don’t add enough to make up for the visual distraction. The story, though, is of moderate interest.

The samples of Mr. Abu-Jamal's writings aren't generous enough to establish whether his is a singular voice or just a prolific one, with Mr. Vittoria instead letting the film wander considerably.

[Grohl] shows a decent grasp of how to pace a documentary and how to push nostalgia buttons, avoiding the marsh of smarminess most - though not quite all - of the time.

There isn't much swashbuckling chemistry between Mr. Renner and Ms. Arterton, and the script doesn't give them enough of the witty lines that can elevate these types of movies to must-see status.

The South Korean director Kim Jee-woon fails to dazzle with the endless speeding-car sequences, but that 60-second flourish during a lengthy firefight is almost worth the tedium.

If the opening gag in your R-rated movie is an extended flatulence joke you should reconsider whether you're qualified to make such a movie. Not that flatulence jokes aren't funny; 8-year-olds love them. The thing is, not many 8-year-olds go to R-rated movies.

If the intent was to keep the characters here just as anonymous as most migrant workers are to prosperous people in the United States, it succeeds: Pedro and his family remain mere sketches. If, however, the aim was a more meaningful portrait of hardship and aspiration, the film is merely underdone. It's no secret that life in many places is hard.

This heartfelt documentary is also, more subtly, a tribute to the squadron of caregivers that has enabled Mr. Becker not only to survive for an extraordinarily long time but also to continue to compose music, using virtually the only part of him that still moves, his eyes.

The film might have made a decent end-of-broadcast segment on a newscast. But inflated to feature length and devoid of nuance or fresh insights, it just seems self-congratulatory - aren't we great for having done this for these old guys? - and exploitive.

The worst thing about the animated film Delhi Safari isn't that it's awful. It's that it shamelessly rips off much better animated movies.

New Jerusalem feeling like an acting exercise in search of a theater class.

It catalogs agony without making you feel it.

Ms. Blecher draws fine performances out of the young actors and, to her credit, sugarcoats nothing.