Owen Gleiberman

The film comes off as an elaborately didactic and overheated lecture.

He squeezes a bit of suspenseful juice out of the old plot, and Douglas makes smarm a chewy pleasure, but this is a noir in search of a hero we can root for because we actually buy what he’s doing.

The only fun is in watching Stallone square off against Alan Cumming and Mickey Rourke.

It’s Dead Poets Society meets Die Hard. The movie is competent, smoothly photographed, and pretty much free of false, baby-Rambo heroics. It’s so inoffensive that you can almost overlook its central drawback — that the students don’t have much personality.

Serial Mom has traces of Waters’ acid wit, but most of the movie is tame and overly conscious of its naughty felicities.

A thriller primarily about the movement of Cindy Crawford's breasts beneath a succession of ever-smaller T-shirts.

Walker is supposed to be lured by the buried treasure, but the actor, wearing Brad Pitt's bristle cut, is like Pitt with his sexy appetite sucked out.

But the Lethal Weapon films, with their hyperbolic explosiveness, lurid repartee, and quasi-loco Mel Gibson hero, are already winking at the audience. (Last year’s spoofy, ragtag Lethal Weapon 3 practically turned its own slovenliness into a running gag.) The only way to make light of them is to exaggerate the cartoon funkiness that’s already at the center of their appeal. It’s no wonder this Weapon ends up shooting blanks.

Bride Wars pretends to be a satire of wedding mania, but since there's virtually nothing else to the movie, the satire comes depressingly close to endorsement.

Its tone is stilted and mannered -- and most of it seems a bit loony.

Writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, a former BBC documentarian, fills the film with arid pauses, creating a claustrophobic study in ''repression.''

In its top-heavy image-driven way, The Secret Garden is trying for some of the atmospheric poetry that was missing from Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 version. Yet if anything, that just makes it fall further away from the novel’s essence. The garden isn’t a supernatural place, but it’s supposed to be a mystical place. In this movie, it comes closer to being a special effect.

Mostly an epic rehash of the tale Larsson has already told, and that makes it, at two hours and 28 minutes, the first movie in the series that never catches fire.

Like a naive modernist hymn made by someone who doesn't, deep down, believe in hymns.

It's too bad that the film was directed by the Norwegian minimalist Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories), who makes a fetish of building scenes around silence.

A premise masquerading as a movie.

Bacon instinctively pushes Loverboy toward surreal domestic satire. It's fascinating to watch Sedgwick try to make Emily into a luminous wack job.

Becoming Madonna, in other words, does not live up to the basic concept that it’s about Madonna becoming Madonna. Yet the strange thing about the movie is that it convinces itself it is about that by treating the glory days of her career as if she were still “becoming” who she was.

For 92 minutes, it more or less succeeds in sawing through your boredom, slicing and dicing with a glum explicitness that raises the occasional tingle of gross-out suspense but no longer carries any kick of true shock value.

The movie, a wayward portrait with surrealist touches, is trying for something genuine. Yet despite some good scenes, some tart lines...and an atmosphere of saintly desperation that suggests “Trainspotting” redone as a darkened YA fable, the movie is wispy and meandering; it doesn’t gather power as it goes along.

Lawrence Kasdan's comedy strikes a note of rib-nudging blah coyness that feels very 1987.

Second Best might have made a good stage monologue, but as a film it's overstated and barely baked.

It would be hard to imagine a filmmaking style as serious yet lazy as the earnest vérité bobbing and weaving employed by La Petite Jérusalem.

Amiably silly.

The movie’s mother-daughter jokes are like firecrackers with damp fuses.

The film is Arnold trying to have the integrity of her severity and eat it too. Bird is a feel-bad movie that turns into a feel-good movie. What it never feels like is a totally authentic movie.

Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.

Is it possible for an actor to go through the motions even as he's going over the top? In Being Flynn, Robert De Niro does phoned-in scenery chewing.

It's not enough for the film to show us a child's corpse wrapped in cardboard; we've got to step back to see Kiarostami himself shooting the sad sight, so that it becomes a Godardian ironic statement.

The upshot is that those who appear to be guilty may not be -- a muddled message for our time.

He leaps so quickly into exaggeration that he bypasses reality, and the result isn’t very funny.

Never lets Grant develop his pidgin-Italian nice-guy-gone-sociopath routine.

When you see No Hard Feelings, you realize that the film’s promise of risky business is little more than a big tease.

The movie is so busy turning the Sioux characters into photogenic saints that it never quite allows them the complications of human beings.

The trouble with Guillaume Canet's French gloss on "The Big Chill" is that it has no underlying chill.

The trouble is, it's all too exhibitionistic to ring true. The impotent folly of Antichrist is that von Trier has made it his mission to shock the bourgeoisie in an era when they can no longer be shocked.

The film is Moore's story, and she acts the hell out of one sexy scene, but most of Chloe is plodding and drab.

One of Dafoe's deadbeat friends observes, ''The world's been ending ever since it started, man,'' and you may think the same thing about this movie.

It longs to be a close-to-the-bone lampoon in the scathing spirit of Christopher Guest, and it has a few amusing moments, but it’s really a predigested one-joke comedy. It’s less an honest satire than an overscaled satirical package.

On Stranger Tides isn't nearly strange enough. Its one real act of piracy is stealing away your excitement.

Wearing a brush cut that never fits the role, Carrey doesn't do a lot here besides flash those vampire-nerd teeth, and I grew weary of seeing them.

The trouble with Changeling is that it plays less like reality than like a bare-bones, moralistic rehash of other, better movies, such as "L.A. Confidential" or "Frances."

On its own unvarnished, metaphoric, diary-of-destruction-and-renewal terms, The Outrun is competent and even stylishly made, yet I have to confess: I found the movie overwhelmingly drab.

The movie gives us only a small taste of it, but it’s enough to whet your appetite: for a Bowie biopic that captures this cracked actor in all his funhouse-mirror rock ‘n’ roll glory.

It’s a functional piece of exploitation — an efficient little crime-porn snuff-thriller potboiler. It’s like a fast-food meal that makes you think, “Okay, that wasn’t good for me, but I got what I paid for.” A film like this one is a junk-franchise burger: tasty, processed, and basically fake.

With its lightweight hero and its random spray of ''high-powered'' action, Broken Arrow is like an underpopulated version of The A-Team. It's not just John Woo who gets swallowed up by the impersonal mechanics of big-budget mayhem. It's the audience, which pays for a sleek, dark thriller and gets recycled pulp instead.

Is it any wonder this Nightmare never coalesces? He couldn’t make up his mind about whether to be naughty or nice.

Unfortunately, most of the two-hour documentary is devoted to annotating what the Nazis stole for both their state and personal collections. The movie doesn't dramatize this crime -- it catalogs it. With deadening monotony.

Voyagers is a dutiful thriller about the beast within, but there’s not a lot of surprise to it. Even when the characters let themselves go, the drama remains in lockdown.

For all of Stone’s skill, there’s something naggingly remote about her. She has the beauty and confidence of Grace Kelly without the warmth that made Kelly’s sexiness seem at once playful and glamorous.

The Dead Don’t Die fancies itself a cutting-edge macabre comedy, but the truth is that it’s behind the curve of pop culture. That’s why it’s a disappointing trifle.

The director, Nia DaCosta (who made the intriguing remake of “Candyman”), stages the action efficiently, but she doesn’t center the narrative; the film is a series of goals in search of a higher mission.

The strangest thing about The Shack, and the reason it’s finally a so-so movie, is that all the rage and terror and dark-side vengeance that Mack has to learn to transcend is something we’re told about, but we never actually see him mired in it.

The Chaperone leaves you wanting to see a movie about the star Louise Brooks became, on camera and off. It could be the great movie that has yet to be made about the silent era, and about the things that women in Hollywood have always faced. Especially one who was unlike any woman the world had seen.

The film has the same moral design as "Dead Man Walking," but since it never gets inside the darkness of the killers' minds, it's really just a rambling episode of "A Current Affair."

Passion turns into vintage De Palma — which is to say, the film seems almost engineered to get you giggling at the extravagance of its absurdity. Any enthusiasm in the viewer is bound to be a shadow of the film's passion for itself.

Far too cloyingly pleased with its own humanity.

The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad.

The Comfort of Strangers is luridly silly, yet it isn’t quite dull. Walken takes his usual glassy-eyed menace to new levels of high-camp refinement — he manages to be over the top and minimal at the same time — and the film has an extravagantly lush atmosphere, due in large part to the music of Twin Peaks‘ Angelo Badalamenti.

What’s depressing about the current Hollywood mania to literalize old cartoon series isn’t that a show like Casper is such bad source material. It’s that the movie version is like the cartoon without innocence — a fairy tale with the soul of a rerun.

The Bounce Back was co-written, directed, and edited by Youseff Delara, and for a while he creates some lively screwball tension.

If there’s a disappointment to The Meg, it’s not just that the movie isn’t good enough. It’s that it’s not bad enough.

Neat as Joe looks, you do wish that someone had bothered to give him a personality.

The movie is being marketed as a “psychological” thriller, but psychology is what it doesn’t have. It’s more like “Cape Fear” reduced to a “Predator” sequel.

Puss in Boots is beautifully animated (with 3-D that adds nothing), but the film is so mindlessly busy that it seems to be trying to distract you from the likable, one-note feline swashbuckler at its center.

To the audience, this stuff seems like awfully old news. We're supposed to be witnessing the birth of a great journalist, but Hunter S. Thompson, as his career went on, got swallowed up by his mystique as an outlaw of excess. In The Rum Diary, that myth becomes an excuse for a movie to go slumming.

What's really needed is a story with some sizzle, but Bigelow, in K-19, can't seem to decide whether she's making a shoot-the-works underwater rouser, like ''U-571'' or ''Crimson Tide,'' or a lofty historical message movie that hits us with the breaking news that the arms race was, in every sense, a poisonous game.

Rails & Ties is like one bad TV movie that slammed into another.

Mr. Brooks begins promisingly, but it grows steadily more preposterous as it goes along, becoming the first feel-good serial-killer movie.

It’s good to see Shyamalan back (to a degree) in form, to the extent that he’s recovered his basic mojo as a yarn spinner. But Glass occupies us without haunting us; it’s more busy than it is stirring or exciting.

A Dirty Shame isn't dirty fun. It's the perv "Footloose."

"Mark Felt,” despite bits of bureaucratic cloak-and-dagger intrigue and a commanding lead performance by Liam Neeson, is a film that pings off relevance more than it feels charged with it.

Welcome to the brave new world of slut-chic cosmetic feminism.

The History of Sound is a movie that never fully finds a life beyond what it is on paper.

It is also glib, shallow, and monotonous, a movie that spends so much time sanctifying its hero that, despite his "innocence," he ends up seeming about as vulnerable as Superman.

The difference between The Prince of Tides and a movie like Ordinary People is that Streisand isn’t content with exploring human pain. She had to make it glamorous, too.

For all the powerful relevance of its subject, Denial, directed by Mick Jackson from a script by David Hare, never finds its grip. It’s a curiously awkward and slipshod movie that winds up being about nothing so much as the perverse, confounding eccentricities of the British legal system.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum.

Too often, The Fourth Kind makes the paranormal look disappointingly normal.

“Kampai!” is scattered and rudderless, though the film’s biggest letdown is that it barely whets your whistle for a taste of sake. It might have been made “for the love,” but by the end the movie has squandered it.

When the film version isn't assaulting you with gizmos, it's an awkward, depersonalized piece of hackwork.

Even a filmmaker as dazzling as Steven Spielberg has to create characters who lure us into their point of view, and the trouble with Tintin is that we're always on the outside, looking in. What all that motion can't capture is our hearts.

The film has gruesomely effective moments, and one at times gets caught up in the gears of its big interlocked narrative, but it also has serious longueurs.

The Chamber goes so far toward humanizing bigotry it ends up sentimentalizing it.

Jolie, drawing on a family history of cancer for which she herself underwent preventative surgeries, gives a vivid performance, endowing Maxine with cool-director verve and then a fear and sorrow we can’t help but respond to. Yet it never feels like the health-crisis movie and the portrait-of-the-fashion-world movie entirely go together.

I’d love to see Affleck star in a film about an addict with nothing to explain his addiction but his own flawed, desperate, hungry soul. That’s a movie that could speak to us — the way that Ben Affleck’s real story already does — far more than this modestly well-made Sunday-school lesson.

Lee Marvin, it must be said, is terrific as the platoon commander, and Fuller deserves props for the film's one sustained sequence: the D-Day attack, in which the platoon gets pinned on the beach for a hellish eternity.

Falls short of its source.

This strenuously dark biographical Western plays more like a choppy, self-important miniseries.

Regrettably, the film's story is so busy yet flat that the effect isn't magical -- it's more like watching the tale of some very enchanted wallpaper.

Shot in a functional, slammed-together manner that’s less sensually stylish than you’d expect from a music-video auteur, the film is a competent yet glossy and hermetic street-hustle drug thriller, less a new urban myth than a lavishly concocted episode. It holds your attention yet leaves you with nothing.

Each of these improv farceurs wins a few laughs. But not enough.

Chabrol has fashioned a mystery that caves in on itself, but unfortunately, it caves in on the audience, too.

Stone's latest penance is Gloria, the Sidney Lumet-directed dud that sprung from the singularly bad idea of remaking John Cassavetes' oddball 1980 character study. I mean, really, did anyone even like the original?

You may wish that you were reading about these events in The New Yorker, because the movie is so choked with neutral detail that it’s a little bloodless. It lacks fire.

When you watch a documentary, some talking heads are more arresting than others, and Joanna Harcourt-Smith, seated before Morris’ camera, seems like a supporting player who’s been elevated to the lead.

To see this much austere vérité atmosphere propping up this much schlock romanticism is like biting into a blue-cheese canapé that turns out to be a fluffernutter.

The opening title says “Based on an absurd but true story,” yet there’s nothing absurd about the facts. Improbable? Yes. Hapless and desperate? Most definitely. But the absurdity — the impulse to giggle — is mostly there in the eye of the writer-director, Robert Budreau, who collaborated with Hawke two years ago on the entrancing Chet Baker biopic “Born to Be Blue” but here comes off as a far less sure-handed filmmaker.

By the end, I was starting to ponder questions like, If a vampire mates with a lycan-vamp hybrid, which parent will have to convert?

The Mummy is a literal-minded, bumptious monster mash of a movie. It keeps throwing things at you, and the more you learn about the ersatz intricacy of its “universe,” the less compelling it becomes.

Ends up about as exotic as a straight-to-cable potboiler.

The Tourist isn't a debacle, but it's a caper that's fatally low on carbonation.

You'd have to be a stone not to be affected by My Flesh and Blood, but the director, Jonathan Karsh, merges compassion with voyeurism until you can't tell the difference.

Will Smith, taking a break from summer sci-fi smashfests, certainly shows a gift for modulation. Far from coasting, he plays a world expert at romance by ratcheting his charm up and down in supple, exacting degrees.

Just about the only way to make sense of the film is to view its Christian family the way that the director, James Marsh, does -- with a contempt masquerading as social criticism. William Hurt, for one, deserves better.

It's a schlockier ''Armageddon'' crossed with ''Fantastic Voyage,'' minus the fun.

Life desperately wants to let Murphy and Lawrence be actors, but it can't imagine them as anything more than rowdy showmen. That's a kind of prison as well.

It’s not necessary, of course, for The Phenom to be an all-out sports drama, but writer-director Noah Buschel sets up the rare opportunity to explore what makes a jock tick, then doesn’t follow through.

Zoe, like Cole, ties itself up in a lot of high-minded hand-wringing, and the result is that the movie, though it’s not badly told, fails to grip you.

You could dismiss this swankily shot Latin American trifle as an upscale soap opera, but that would be an insult to soap operas.

The aerial-dogfight scenes, which are beautiful and shot through with jittery panic, are notable for not being staged for videogame kicks.

The plot is more confusing than clever, and the only actor who seems to be having any fun is Silver, who's at his best throwing masochistic hissy fits at his younger, not-quite-so-evil self.

One of those terminally annoying, depressive-yet-coy Sundance faves in which the tale of a mopey teen misfit unfolds behind a hard candy shell of irony.

Demagogic shallowness has its appeal, and Falling Down could turn out to be the Network of the '90s. By the end, you may wish he'd just gone home and popped a couple of Excedrin instead.

This is a movie so devoted to metal that it couldn't care less about the flesh it destroys.

The first “Jurassic World” was, quite simply, not a good ride. “Fallen Kingdom” is an improvement, but it’s the first “Jurassic” film to come close to pretending it isn’t a ride at all, and as a result it ends up being just a passable ride.

The characters twirl around like mini tornadoes, but between random brash moments of technological eye-tickling, Son of the Mask sags more than it spins.

An unabashed descendant of "Bring Me the Head." This time, though, it's an entire corpse that gets hauled through the desert, and that's not all that's being toted. So is a hefty parcel of racial correctness.

Takes a misguided swerve into the current downtown New York rock scene, so that it can spend more time preaching about the anarchy of the good old days than it does revealing them.

Best to experience Shaker Heights for what it is: not a movie, exactly, but the true season capper of ''Project Greenlight,'' a series that finds its very drama on the road to mediocrity.

The strange thing about Kindergarten Cop is how quickly it abandons its own concept. No sooner has Arnold gotten into class than he's yanked back into the mechanics of the movie's generic thriller plot. Perhaps this wouldn't be as noticeable if there were a few more sparks between Schwarzenegger and the kids.

Cotillard, with stringy long hair and a coal fire of severity in her eyes, has what it takes to play a woman who feels that she's lost everything. But she's forced to flail and mood-swing from scene to scene. In an insult to the disabled, there is never much to her but her hellacious injury.

An act of nose-thumbing that never quite figures out how, or even where, to position its thumb.

A feel-good movie that doesn't give you enough to feel good about.

If you think it all adds up to a bald-faced rip off of ''The Shining,'' you'd be right, with a crucial difference: Wendigo trades the puffed-up metaphysics of middle-class murder for the no-budget spectacle of...an incredibly fake-looking monster deer.

Hill wants to “do justice” to each of these people, but the result is that Dead for a Dollar doesn’t have a dramatic core. It has actors we like to watch, doing what they do well (like Waltz playing a civilized badass), but it isn’t structured so that any of their fates gets a rise out of us.

The numbers, while lively, remain cluttered and stage-bound. The women, however, are spirited and sexy.

The soundtrack, overseen by Sergio Mendes, has a few lively bossa nova moments, but not nearly enough.

It's been a while since we saw a bad John Hughes comedy, and Are We There Yet? more than fits the bill (even though Hughes had absolutely nothing to do with it).

In its relatively small-scale, often rather plodding B-movie way, it wants to do for apocalypse thrillers what “Contagion” did for outbreak movies. And there are moments when it does.

Has none of the crisp passion or suspense of the 1957 Sidney Lumet version; it's bloated, heavy-handed, and lugubrious.

A derisively vicious show-off satire, a plastic exercise in authority bashing.

The movie is short on wisdom, but it might have gotten by if it had had better filth.

The quaint racial blinders are really on the eyes of the filmmaker, Peter Hedges, who shoves his characters into the narrowest of sitcom slots and seals them there.

For all the ravaged surface appeal of McConaughey’s performance, the character is a little too good to be true, but then, that’s just the sort of movie Free State of Jones is. It’s a tale of racial liberation and heroic bloodshed that is designed, at almost every turn, to lift us up to that special place where we can all feel moved by what good liberals we are.

The movie, while elegantly photographed, is mostly a shambles. It keeps throwing things at you in an oblique and random way, and it’s constructed like a puzzle with no solution.

For This Boy's Life to work as ominous domestic drama, it's essential that we see Dwight as a flesh-and-blood monster. De Niro, unfortunately, just seems to be reveling in the chance to play another viciously demented freak, like Cape Fear's Max Cady.

After ''Seven'' and three ''Hannibal'' hits, the audience tolerance for baroque serial-killer flourishes has been duly amped. We require sustained creativity in our sick violence, and Taking Lives, after a token bit of ghastly foreplay, loses its life.

May find an audience, but I found it to be a leftover John Hughes triangle.

The movie is trying so hard to be a crowd-pleaser, in its reach-for-the-synthetic, sitcom-meets-Hallmark heart, that it will likely end up pleasing very few. It’s the definition of a movie that Tom Hanks deserved better than.

As long as Close is acting up an award-worthy storm (her performance is actually quite meticulous), Hillbilly Elegy is never less than alive. Adams does some showpiece acting of her own, but as skillful as her performance is, she never gets us to look at Bev with pity and terror.

As drama, the movie is sustained yet hopeless — it coasts along on the kind of schoolbook-simple, this-is-good-and-this-is-bad pieties Vietnam made obsolete.

If random arty blood thrills are your cup of fear, perhaps you'll enjoy Let the Right One In, a Swedish head-scratcher that has a few creepy images but very little holding them together.

If you're hungry to see a romantic comedy about a genetically and culturally imbalanced geek-meets-babe relationship that makes the one in Knocked Up look like the quintessence of plausible human mating, then by all means subject yourself to the one-joke sub–Judd Apatow snark-athon that is She's Out of My League.

Designed to be "inspirational," yet it shortchanges the complex reality of the lives it makes such a show of saving.

Cage’s Dracula, sipping blood out of a martini glass, is so quick, so in thrall to his legend, that he’ll slice you with sarcasm. It’s a witty and luscious performance, unhinged but never out of control, and it deserved a movie that could serve as a pedestal for the actor’s seasoned flamboyance.

By the end of Collateral Beauty, you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played.

Rory O'Shea Was Here gazes at the physically afflicted and just about begs for our sympathy long after we've grown restless and eager to feel something else.

Bobcat Goldthwait's new movie is a burlesque that turns into a harangue that turns into a rampage.

Lifting a concept isn't exactly foreign to the world of animation (what's "The Lion King" if not "Bambi" with manes?), but it isn't often a rip-off gets as blatant as The Wild, a flat-out regurgitation of "Madagascar."

The movie is diverting enough when it flirts with clerical politics, and that made me think it might be cool to make an exorcist film that dramatized the true-life ins and outs of the Catholic Church’s relationship to exorcism. There’s a major story there, and it could fuel a heady thriller. But The Seventh Day, having established Father Peter as a new kind of exorcist renegade, soon gets down to business as usual.

The way a movie like “Goosebumps 2” works, even a weary adult will be grateful, by the time it finally kicks in, for all the brainless whirling distraction. I almost wrote fun, but that would be pushing it. To achieve that F-word, the film would have to ground its amusing effects in a story that was less skittery yet leaden.

It arrives at a moment when the crackling voltage of the culture wars — blue state vs. red state, Trump haters vs. Trump lovers — is coursing through every fiber of the nation. This means that a film like Daddy’s Home 2, in its stupido-on-purpose way, can seem almost relevant in its trivial hit-or-miss yocks.

Old, like most Shyamalan movies, has a catchy hook along with some elegant filmmaking gambits. But instead of developing his premise in an insidious and powerful way, the writer-director just keeps throwing a lot of things at you.

Director John Singleton offers bits of suspense, but Abduction is less a movie than a piece of engineering, a glumly ludicrous cat-and-mouse blowout designed to win Lautner male fans along with his girl demo.

McGowan knows how to invest ire with intelligence, and he has mastered the art of making riding a horse look like a form of strutting. When he’s onscreen, the film vibrates. When you’re watching MacFadyen’s Robert, it swells with nobility and deflates at the same time.

It's all very sincere, but watching a dweebish depressive learn that Life Is Good is a lesson of diminishing returns.

The film has flashes of psychedelic visual energy, but its story is limp.

It doesn’t help that the special effects are second-rate; the squishy primal horror of Alien has been replaced by a kind of mechanized yuckiness. The team of B-movie scientists tracking the monster includes Ben Kingsley doing his over-deliberate American accent, Alfred Molina sporting a haircut that’s scarier than the creature, and Forest Whitaker as an empath so sensitive he can’t let anyone sneeze without making a dewy-eyed psychic pronouncement.

A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is suffused with a rarefied emotional glow, and that's something contemporary audiences may be almost desperate to respond to. Yet the movie is also tentative, rambling, and maddeningly shapeless.

Higher Learning starts out as a liberal message movie, but it turns into a demagogic rabble-rouser, a shrewdly incendiary exploitation of these wayward days of rage.

Watching the movie, it's hard to imagine why anyone would dream of going back there.

Halftime justly salutes Lopez’s pride in her achievements, but it’s every bit as much a salute to her brand management.

The performers keep you watching (Candy, I’m convinced, could be a fine dramatic actor), yet the movie itself is a thin procession of clichés.

Between Two Ferns: The Movie has some laughs, but it’s essentially the tossed-together version of a hangout movie. It’s a roast served at room temperature.

Indecent Proposal starts out kinky and turns into a languid-and shockingly banal- domestic soap opera.

Teen Spirit is too tidy, concocted, and safe. It longs to channel the high of great pop, but as a movie it lacks the ecstatic imagination to do what great pop does. It never soars.

We’re now so awash in superhero culture that kids no longer need the safe, lame, pandering junior-league version of it. They can just watch “Ant-Man” or the PG-13 “Suicide Squad.” Safe, lame, and pandering have all grown up.

Thérese unfolds with the sunlight-and-daffodils piety of a Sunday school slide show.

This rusted-future comic strip comes at you in shards -- exhaustingly derivative images of mayhem and titillation, with Lee, in her bad-girl bondage gear, as its blank vixen. If you didn't call her babe, she wouldn't exist.

The film is so self-conscious it seems to be dictating your every reaction.

Sharp Stick, in its quick verbal exchanges, its naked sexuality, its general air of busting taboos as if they were oversize balloons, is recognizably a Lena Dunham movie. But it’s the first one of her projects in which the parts don’t quite add up, because it seems as if what we’re watching hasn’t been so much created as contrived.

I'm disappointed to report that Hudson and Watts have no chemistry as sisters, perhaps because Watts never seems like the expatriate artiste she's supposed to be playing.

It's every bit as nonsensical and overitalicized a mess as ''The Whole Nine Yards.''

You can’t take Ma seriously. It’s a squalid formula picture that’s too busy connecting dots, hitting beats, engineering situations designed to make you squirm. But you will squirm.

Madame X, on the joy scale, feels drained. The show is a concert that plays, at times, like a lecture — or maybe the world’s most extended Oscar/Grammy star-makes-a-statement speech. But I don’t say that because I begrudge Madonna’s message. It’s just that she didn’t use to be so deadly serious and, at times, almost punitive about it.

The Comedy pretends to be a satire of entitlement, but it's made in a style so indulgent that the whole film feels entitled in the extreme.

The real crime is the way that the movie turns Gael García Bernal, the hot-tempered, Roman-lipped costar of ''Y Tu Mamá También, into a backwater Freddie Prinze Jr.

It’s a handsome and watchable indie art Western, set in 1882, that turns into a sentimental cross-generational buddy film. Yet I can’t say that the movie, in the end, is especially good. It’s got a bare-bones plot, it lopes along more than it takes wing, and for no good reason it’s two hours and 19 minutes long.

Has no pretentions to be anything more than a goose-bumpy fantasy theme-park ride for kids, but it's such a routine ride.

The new film lacks that kinetic haunted-house element. It’s the most somber and meditative and least aggressive of the “Conjuring” films. It’s out to deepen the series’ portrait of the Warrens, and damned if Patrick Wilson, with his gentle tenacity and Pat Boone grin, and Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine the psychic in high Victorian collars and embodies her gift with a feverish purity, don’t succeed in making Ed and Lorraine the coziest fighters of evil the movies have ever seen.

On a Magical Night is whimsically cute, provocative in a coy way, and more than a little in love with itself.

The central reason that Last Flag Flying fails to take wing is that its characters don’t ring true. Not really. You never feel, in your bones, that you’re watching battle-scarred veterans.

Bereft of any flesh-and-blood honesty, the last half of the movie plays like a ludicrous PBS version of "Mandingo."

Imaginary, despite a few creepy moments, is starved for scenes that make the fear it’s showing you relatable.

This very Canadian thriller (i.e., no humor, lots of literal-minded future-shock portentousness) certainly does a number on you, though not necessarily a pleasurable one.

Works hard to be exciting, but the movie scarcely lives up to its title. It could have used a bit of a fuel injection itself.

There’s a hallowed place in cinema for multi-character dramas. But “Horizon,” simply put, doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like the seedbed for a miniseries. Much of what happens is wispy and not very forceful; the film doesn’t build in impact, and it seldom seems to aim in a clear direction.

By the end, every child in the audience will want his or her own monster-minion toy. Adults will just regret the way that Despicable Me 2 betrays the original film’s devotion to bad-guy gaiety.

One more case of a winning ''SNL'' character tamed by the wan, fizzled farce around him.

It's set at a beach house, but we see only gray skies, and though Efron has a wary and cutting intelligence (it matches that of the fine actor Ricardo Darin, who plays her father), the effect is tepid and damp.

Fourteen years after "Happiness," why is director Todd Solondz still mucking around with the sort of idiot neurotic dweeb who makes George Costanza look like George Clooney?

Night School has a handful of laughs, but it’s a bloated trifle that, at 111 minutes, overstays its welcome.

Ends up blowing its own joke. Instead of making Joe blissfully arrogant in his Southern rock dude myopia, it turns him into a shuffling masochistic loser.

It hangs together and mostly obeys the rules of mainstream commercial cinema. Yet it’s clear that what drew Wright to the project was his infatuation with the sci-fi sociology of a retro-future USA.

Not until the last 20 minutes does Gozu come fully alive. A man has sex with a seductive beauty, who then gives birth to...well, let's just say it's a sight that may take time to fight its way out of your head.

The film is far from incompetent, and it brims with ambition, but too much of the time what’s happening just sits there. It’s a lavishly odd concoction, like a feel-good movie for OCD miniature-world Barbie-doll fetishists.

Even when it seems to be making things up as it goes along, its slapdash hallucinatory quality is a token gesture toward placing you inside the characters’ heads.

This clumsy, cheesy, chintzy adaptation, with its F/X that look dated the moment you see them, is like something left over from the '60s.

You can’t make a good thriller when the most pressing issue is whether the protagonists will have to default on their mortgage payments.

A trashy, frenetic remake of Fred Zinnemann's 1973 The Day of the Jackal, The Jackal is mired in blood, cheap shocks, and a random network of improbability.

Dudsville.

About the only thing the movie kills with any decisiveness is your time.

The new Hellraiser works as metaphor, as flesh-annihilating spectacle. Yet it doesn’t work as a story.

Constructing Albert remains an oddly unsatisfying movie about food that’s so tasteful you can barely imagine what it tastes like.

After an hour of inert exposition, a race through Shanghai gooses the movie alive. Then it plunges back into torpor.

Daniels plays Arlen with a kind of cuddly crankiness; he makes him a jerk who just needs a hug.

The Rocketeer is mostly an example of pop moviemaking at its most derivative.

Most of the numbers in Rock of Ages are flatly shot and choreographed, and they look as if they'd been edited together with a meat cleaver. With rare exceptions, they don't channel the excitement of the music - they stultify it.

If Take My Eyes explored how a woman could still feel for a man who abused her, it might have gripped us with its difficult truths. But the movie presents Pilar and Antonio's marriage as a stale, neurotic dead end.

Slipshod rather than sly. There's no fury to the movie, repressed or otherwise, which may be why when the Revolution arrives, it has all the impact of a guillotine with a deadly dull blade.

It’s a scrappy punk feminist tragicomedy of l’amour fou, a renegade take-off on the “Frankenstein” myth. And while the movie doesn’t quite work — it lumbers along and blows fuses; it has lots of flesh and blood but not enough storytelling spine — there’s a spark of audacity to it.

For a first movie, Old Dads shows promise. Bill Burr is onto something about how the new culture of control messes with the heads of ordinary people. Next time, though, he should channel the rage instead of flaunting it.

Reminiscence plays like a perfectly calibrated two-hour mirage of things we’ve seen before.

What is doesn’t have, oddly, is any sort of bone-deep reality factor. Almost nothing that happens in Funny Pages is particularly believable.

Feels cramped and underimagined. I think Judge is capable of making an inspired live-action comedy, but next time he'll have to remember to do what he does in his animated ones--keep the madness popping.

It's a tale soggy with the kind of race/class lessons that Madea, the director-star's battle-ax alter ego, doles out far more handily (and entertainingly) in a single church-lady-from-hell zinger.

This, in other words, is not your father’s grungy one-joke yuletide action comedy. It’s “The Santa Clause” meets “Magnum Claus,” and it’s pitched to the Gibson faithful with the idea that they’ll follow him anywhere (which they probably will).

It has been put together with just enough efficiency to qualify as an oddball labor of love.

The funny moments in Genie, and there are a handful of them, emerge mostly from McCarthy just tossing off lines with her dislocating insouciance.

Privacy issues aside (and I’m second to none in my concern about them), the movie, in its ham-fisted fashion, is trying to come up with some way to regulate what it despises.

Fuqua is trying for John Ford meets Sergio Leone: a funky classical sweep, with room for delirious shootouts. The trouble is that he mimics the trademarks of those directors without their élan, and the plot that was once catchy is now rote.

Godard, as always, sounds full of insight, yet he uses the past to damn the present in a way that may be reflexively self-serving. In Praise of Love leaves a taste as bitter as poison ash.

The director, Paul Schrader, tries for cleansing audacity, but ends up too close to farce.

There are moments when the film has the ability to absorb us, however fleetingly.

The Simple Favor films fill a niche, one that they helped create: the knowing synthetic thriller rooted in the angst of contempo motherhood. But this one both diverts and drags on.

Pictorial but oddly muffled three-hour saga of romance and capitalism, not necessarily in that order.

Liman, for all his craft, doesn't have enough FUN with the premise.

Just when you thought you’d erased the memory of Adam Sandler in Billy Madison playing a slobbo idiot who must prove he’s worthy of taking over his father’s business, along comes Chris Farley playing a slobbo ; idiot who must prove he’s worthy of taking over his father’s business. Yet this movie, unlike Sandler’s fiasco, does at least have a few scuzzy laughs.

I actually think The Moment should have pushed further into crackpot satirical extremes. In that case, it wouldn’t have been a movie that featured a “real” version of Charli xcx. But it might have made you laugh more, because it would have been genuinely outlandish rather than just unconvincing.

"Amundsen” is a visually stately yet naggingly underscripted movie that never quite finds its dramatic center.

The director, Adam Wingard (who made “Godzilla vs. Kong”), knows how to choreograph a beastie battle so that it does maximum damage in a way that appeals to your inner toy-smashing seven-year-old.

The director's famously over-deliberate, pause-laden style verges, for the first time, on amateurville, and that gives us too much time to linger on the movie's more bizarre details.

Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.

As a fantasy, Orlando has been spun out of a rather glib idea: that the mere assertion of Androgyny As Destiny is automatically a brave, emotionally triumphant stance for our time. The truth is, when androgyny is shrouded in this much deadening ”art,” it becomes little more than a haughty exercise in academic chic.

Soul Men could have done with less amped-up abrasiveness and more soft-shoe charm.

The movie carries you along, and it’s got some high-tension moments, but there are one too many coincidental running-into-each-other-in-town close encounters.

There's only one performer in the movie who looks completely at ease with what he's doing: the horse.

By the end, the main thing that's been abused is the audience's intelligence.

We see, in Melissa McCarthy’s increasingly fierce performance, a hint of what the movie might have been: the tale of a new kind of feminine mystique — a methodical fury that weds the imperatives of a mother to the style of a gangster. But that movie needed a better script.

The Muppets were once devilish and sly, but this ploddingly whimsical musical caper, which uses too many ’70s soul songs to signify its rainbow-demographic cred, is enough to make you want to see them get slapped around by the Teletubbies (at this point, a far funkier crew).

Thorogood allegedly confessed on his deathbed (in 1993) that he killed Jones, and while the movie convinces us that this might have happened, it never truly reveals who Brian Jones was before he fell apart. His indulgence, and his demise, play out in a void.

The trouble with this stunted sequel is that the doughy, blobby-hatted Smurfs are mostly window dressing for an abrasive slapstick bash built around a tiresome kidnap plot, pancake-flat gags about Facebook and ''Smurf-holm Syndrome,'' and Neil Patrick Harris mugging his way through the role of a daddy with daddy issues who once again helps out our heroes.

for all the talk of centuries gone by, “The Old Guard 2” feels like a time-tripping action fantasy made on the cheap.

The darker the movie gets, the less there is at stake, and the more that Crowe seems to be going through the motions of trying to save not his soul but his career.

The Farrellys may well be the new kingpins of adolescent slob comedy, but There's Something About Mary doesn't approach the witty anarchy of movies like "Animal House," "The Naked Gun," or "Hairspray."

This rotely cheeky, Anglo-plastic adultery comedy is set in the golden-green English countryside, and it makes a few quirky nods toward artistry, but it's really just a glib concoction.

Sound of Metal is two hours and 10 minutes long, and it moves at a snail’s pace, not because “nothing happens,” but because Marder hasn’t filled in the dramatic interior of what does happen. He has made a movie about deafness that’s at once experiential and too muffled to hear.

“Search for SquarePants,” while it has amusing moments, is mostly SpongeBob treading water.

In a strange way, the movie, as doggedly made as it is, remains stubbornly uncompelling. That, I think, is because Gibney’s own connection to the subject, while it charges him with righteous passion, has resulted in a rare loss of perspective.

The Secret Life of Bees is a lesson -- or, rather, a whole series of them -- we no longer need to learn. Of course, it's also a divine-sisterhood-defeats-all chick flick, and on that score there's no denying that its clichés are rousingly up to date.

The movie is so prefab, so plastically aware of being ''corny,'' ''romantic,'' and ''old-fashioned,'' that it feels programmed to make you fall in love with it.

Maddin chops it up into a feature-length antique-bloodsucker video, and the result takes hold neither as dance nor as silent horror dream.

Created Equal is structured as a monologue of self-justification, a two-hour infomercial for the decency, the competence, and the conservative role-model aspirationalism of Clarence Thomas.

The trouble is that the movie plays it boringly straight.

It’s a trifle, and not even fully successful on its own small-bauble terms. But oh, is it ever meant to bathe you in a warm retro glow.

The film should have been called ''Lock, Stock and Two Wilting Barrels.''

For a first-time director, Patrick Wilson doesn’t do a bad job, but he’s working with tropes that have already been worked to death. It’s time to close this carnival of souls down.

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is a ride, a head trip, a CGI horror jam, a what-is-reality Marvel brainteaser and, at moments, a bit of an ordeal. It’s a somewhat engaging mess, but a mess all the same.

Foe wants to end with a big “Whoa.” Instead, it leaves us going “Huh, interesting” and “Whuuut?” at the same time.

As a fairy-tale confection, a kind of West Side Story in Jamestown, Pocahontas is pleasant to look at, and it will probably satisfy very small kiddies, but it's the first of the new-era Disney cartoons that feels less than animated.

An idiot variation on Frank Capra's ''Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,'' might have been thrown together in even less time than it takes Sandler to get dressed in the morning; it feels sort of like the dumbest corporate comedy of 1987.

It turns out that speeding along dirt roads isn't nearly as photogenic - or as varied - as surfing is.

The routinely scripted but kinetic Stone Cold is a throwback to Roger Corman’s Hell’s Angels flicks, in which beer-swilling denim-and-leather-clad freedom riders straddled their Harleys to terrorize the American heartland.

What’s strange about Together 99 is that it looks like a Lukas Moodysson film (natural light), it moves like a Lukas Moodysson film (the documentary-like flow), but it’s blanketed with a sodden forlorn Swedish bourgeois cynicism that makes you think Moodysson needs to get out more.

The movie is too cute to lose its head in the music. It never generates its own ecstasy.

Foster, working from a patchy, meandering script by W.D. Richter, produces scene after scene of rudderless banter. The movie is all asides, all nattering; the actors seem lost in their busy, fractious shticks.