Neil Genzlinger

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.