Nick Pinkerton

The villains come across as individuals rather more compellingly than do the film's ostensible heroes, mostly mouthpieces for warrior credo recited in voiceover.

Boom was produced under the auspices of pal Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, which has a tendency toward broad-comic morality tales and multiplex populism that often shades into remedial-level pandering.

It's impossible to imagine how anything this convoluted could have already earned a sequel, but it has.

Ceremony is a callow movie: Winkler exhibits no comprehension of the class anxieties he addresses, and extends precocity into adulthood. That callowness is Ceremony's subject scarcely makes it funnier.

In every swelling musical cue, Billion Dollar Movie displays open contempt for friendship, family, love, sex, heroism, and everything lofty and beautiful that multiplex movies have reduced to cant.

Every gag is smothered by the prevailing tone of labored zaniness and generic, plucky "mischief music" alerting discerning viewers to abandon all hope of laughter.

Scaling new heights of inessentiality is The Beat Hotel, which chronicles the period, roughly 1958–63.

Anderson['s] lavish visual imagination is matched to a placeholder idea of character that's almost avant-garde in its generic stylization, dialogue buffed of personality by passing through 10,000 previous movies.

The entire production is single-mindedly, earnestly devoted to serving up feats of BADASS, and it succeeds in this devotion to the exclusion of everything else. Allegedly in 3-D, though I didn't notice at the time.

Luxuriantly-lashed Dekker leads the most attractive cast of small-towners this side of "Twin Peaks" but, though the setting is nearly as artificial as Lynch's, the melodrama is played quite straightforwardly here, even as the dialogue frequently borders on parody.

Michael's motivations remain arbitrary and inscrutable, right down to his entry into the seminary. This is brought up by a number of characters, who interpret his implausible career decision as A Sign. It is-of bad writing.

Seeking Justice is the kind of effective middle-range pulp thriller that has lately become an endangered species.

The Collection doesn't have much to recommend it beyond a first-reel bloodbath rivaling "Blade" and "Death Ship."

If the success of epic storytelling were determined by the sheer number of unnecessary on-screen name tags, 1911 would be a masterpiece. But the small matters of characterization, audience identification, and scene-making are entirely absent here.

Much as I want to believe in Cortés, who is clearly talented and ambitious, there is just too much in Red Lights that encourages agnosticism.

It's clear that Something Borrowed finds it easier to tell us about relationships than to show us them under way.

The rather unappealing character of Axel is indulged with every opportunity for redemption, as Spacey is indulged with every opportunity to showboat.

While making a priority of squeezing in every usable bit of celebrity face-time, Mansome passes by potentially interesting digressions without more than a wayward glance.

An unnecessary retelling of rock's dingiest "legend"--ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Cage-ophiles will find some delectable freakouts in Blaze's transformation - or near transformation - scenes. Otherwise, the committee-penned script combines yokel-friendly haw-haw irreverence (non-sequitur cutaways to the Rider pissing in a flamethrower pattern) and sweaty monologues about "controlling the Rider" (the character is basically a mean drunk's superhero).

Mother's Day is distinguished, at least, by De Mornay's porcelain-smile lampoon of castigating matriarchy.

Bracingly inept.

This is intended as one of those kid's comeuppance stories, in which a new maturity is won through contact with salt-of-the-earth types and honest labor but is done with an almost total lack of charm.

Black, looking like an unwashed clothes pile and capering in familiar "Uncle Jack" style, is a good babysitter, his cross-dressing turn in a doll's house a highlight.

His (Snyder) mash-up set pieces ("Call of Duty" meets "Castlevania," etc.) blend into so-awesome-they're-awful slo-mo monotony, and the awful sisterhood stuff in between makes you anticipate the action as though waiting for the bus.

It's an overloaded, overwrought, profligate production inclined to hysteria and, in cumulative effect, something like being pelted with scenes until buried alive - but it helps keep it from being boring.