Owen Gleiberman

Cyrus, as always, is a professional charmer (it's hard to resist when she leads a hip-hop hoedown), and the crusty folkiness of Billy Ray Cyrus as her real-life dad is as welcome as ever.

Bryan Bertino, stages The Strangers' early scenes with spooky panache...But then comes the blood, the shrieking midnight chase scenes, the anything-goes over-the-top-ness. In other words, everything that we liked the movie for not being.

In Pink Flamingos, Waters did something subversive and, in its gross way, quite spectacular: He created his own hell-bent, sick-joke Oz, with Divine as its wicked-witch queen.

At once a punchy celebration of Swift’s artistry and a piece of promotion that just exposes aspects of the album that may not wear so well over time.

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.

Bilko is a weightless comic creation, and Steve Martin, perhaps sensing this, drifts through the movie with a misplaced balletic goofiness.

The movie's got bounce. Spanked along by a soundtrack that has a surprising punky bite for something aimed at 13-year-olds.

Gibson, in a disarmingly nimble, fast break performance, makes Nick's new hyperempathy look like the essence of virile panache.

Critics tend to fawn over the Japanese director-star Takeshi Kitano (a.k.a. Beat Takeshi), but am I the only one who finds his films impossible to make heads or tails of?

A massive Hollywood biopic about a man who never quite seems there.

Ryan radiates neither desire nor terror. She's freeze-dried in a world of lifelessly abstract feminine fear, and so is the movie.

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.

We all know that your average Hollywood comedy tends to include some on-set improvisation, but in this case the contrast between the leaden pseudo-brashness of the rest of the movie and the ping! of Carrey’s dialogue is so marked that it almost feels like he made up his entire character on the spot. (I’m not declaring that he actually did. I’m just sayin’.)

The movie has a few jokes, but it could have used some of the canny, real-world logic that made Rain Man so convincing (and funny).

It's no coincidence that The Box plays like the world's murkiest Twilight Zone episode. It's loosely based on ''Button, Button,'' a short story by Richard Matheson, who wrote some of the series' greatest scripts.

The best thing about RED 2, like its predecessor, is its lightness of tone. Too many movies with comic-book roots come on too seriously, even when the comics themselves have a loose, fast, jocular wit about them.

A convoluted ''dweeb meets the Mob'' farce in which everyone is trying to kill everyone else, but it's the movie that's the real corpse -- albeit a busy, twitching one.

This one is just murk.

"Risky Business" had a great opening act and then descended into contrivances. This genial cardboard knockoff is contrived from the start but gets better as it goes along.

He does an okay imitation of his father's languidly matter-of-fact dreamscapes, but it's hard to deny that a certain vitality is missing in Tales From Earthsea.

He's Just Not That Into You turns romantic sanity into something so sanitized that it starts to make delusion look good.

Combines hugs and ''pain'' and dialogue so fakey-cute it makes your ears hurt.

Presents undercover law enforcement less as a profession than as an accessory, an excuse to pout and glower chicly, to stand around in nightclubs acting like a sullen version of the Last American Rebel.

We're just watching a film try to pass off misanthropic blunt-wittedness as "edge."

The tiny scale and armchair talkiness mark the movie as a bit of a folly, an act of idealistic hubris in today's commercial marketplace, yet that's its (minor) fascination too.

“Bombshell” aside, Tape is one of the very first dramas of the #MeToo era to confront, head-on, what harassment looks like and how it really works. Yet even as the film feels up-to-the-minute, it’s been made with a certain threadbare, streets-of-New-York punk feminist mythologizing that may remind you, at times, of the films of Beth B.

Someone has finally done it -- made a sexually explicit feature that is also a genuine and harrowing work of erotic drama.

It's like Woodstock without the mud, and it leaves you feeling clean.

At once brasher and more frivolous, she's a lot less compelling fighting for the welfare of lab-test animals than she was crusading for her own dignity.

Never tickles your nasty bone, perhaps because, in an era when the gossip pages are dotted with news of celebrity prenups, the prospect of marriage as a route to instant fortune seems less scandalous than it does like business as usual.

Makes you wish that Newell and company had had the gumption to finish what they so enticingly started.

It's an indelibly warped cartoon of lust and despair.

Lisa Frankenstein, while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources.

Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.

Wish self-consciously packs 85 years of animated magic into a portable Disney fable. Does that make it a summation or a pastiche? A movie marbled with pop history or overstuffed with Easter eggs? One that launches the next Disney century or is stuck in the last one? Maybe all of the above.

At 2.5 hours, 1492 is even harder to sit through than last month’s schlock extravaganza Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. In each case the filmmakers have fallen into a similar trap. Out of some vague mixture of historical ”duty” and commercial myopia, they’ve presented Columbus as the same cardboard visionary we learned about in school.

The flamboyantly heavy, life’s-a-bitch-and-then-it-ends drama of Black Flies isn’t much fun to sit through, but I think that’s ultimately because the movie, for all its grungy surface authenticity, is a bit of a fake.

Andrew Wagner has made a lovely comedy of death and rebirth.

A mood of lush romantic decadence -- sleaze made enigmatic -- hovers over Where the Truth Lies, which has a score that works so hard to evoke "Vertigo" that it may leave you dizzy.

A limp and sodden downer.

This Myers is more problem child than bogeyman.

The film’s drama is B-movie basic. But the destructive colliding metal-on-metal inferno of what war is makes Midway a picture worth seeing.

Whenever a few of the Young Guns get together and have to behave like soulful cowboys, the movie stops dead in its tracks. The trouble with so many of today’s young actors is that there’s no deep-seated yearning or fury in their performances. They just seem like well-adjusted California kids putting on a show for a few hours.

Though the filmmaker's feel for his Cuban heritage is bone-deep, it's a glazed and dolorous movie - a depressed epic.

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."

What the movie needed was the kind of dark explosion of star temperament that Sean Penn brought to 1983’s Bad Boys. Still, give Hackford this: He does a vivid job of taking you places you may not think you’d want to go.

It's no insult to Melville to say that he wrote, in effect, the original ''Dilbert.'' This movie, unfortunately, makes ''Dilbert'' look like Melville.

If there were a scale for measuring how much of a movie’s substance was pure plastic, Nine Months, the new maternity comedy directed by Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire), would surely register dangerously high polymer levels.

Every chuckle feels engineered. Stallone is reduced to playing straight man to a gaggle of stock Damon Runyon hoods, though Tim Curry, looking like a stuffed cod, brings a prissy, nerdish glee to the role of a madly obsequious linguistics professor.

Irresistible scores points yet feels behind the curve. You wish it were a bold satirical bulletin, or maybe just Stewart’s pricelessly amusing version of a Christopher Guest movie. Instead, the film is a lot like a politician: It makes a big show of leading the viewer, but without rocking the boat.

27 Dresses is a movie geared to a pitch of high matrimonial-princess fever.

Bana and McAdams are sweet together, with matching dimples and starry eyes, and we grow eager to see them remain in the same place. In the end, that's all there is to the movie, really. It's a time-travel fantasy in search of a cozy love seat.

Pathaan has a stop-and-go rhythm, and a strung-together structure, that grows wearying. (Two-and-a-half hours of frenetic derivative pulp is a lot of pulp.)

A witch comedy so slapdash, plodding, and muddled it seems to have had a hex put on it.

A pulsating snapshot of America caught in a mad, liberating identity crisis.

Silver City may be the mustiest political-conspiracy tale ever filmed; it's like "Chinatown" rewritten by Ralph Nader.

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.

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

This is a subject that deserves a rigorous documentary exploration, like Alison Klayman’s must-see psychotropic exposé “Take Your Pills.” But Dosed isn’t that kind of movie.

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.

Men have been gorging on righteous, blood-splattering pulp action rides like this one for decades, and if women are now looking for the equivalent, Gunpowder Milkshake fits the bill. Its message is that there are a lot of Bills to kill.

Like Mike has the synthetically wrapped pseudo-charm of a perfunctory ''Flubber'' sequel.

Is it, you know, fun? At times. Yet there's a rote quality to the way this half-dumb, half-sly movie resolves itself into an intentional debauch, a pileup of villainy and heavy metal. The only California dream it leaves you with is one of wretched excess.

Efficient, uninspired sequel.

The movie should have been called Diary of a Wimpy Forrest Gump. It's genuinely soft-hearted (you're all but guaranteed to cry) but mush-brained, too.

Anne Hathaway’s performance provides the film with a sick-joke center of gravity, and Zemeckis, sticking to Dahl’s elemental storyline, stages it all with a prankish flair that leaves you buzzed.

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.

The origin story was the charm, but the sequel is hobbled by a less buoyant hero and bland villains.

It’s monotonous and derivative and numbing. It’s a grab bag that traps you in a version of hell, though the problem isn’t that the movie is like a video game. It’s that it’s like a video game that’s got no game.

The whole movie is a diversionary activity. It's trash so compacted it glows.

Tempting as it may be to dismiss Mel Gibson as a glorified pain freak, dressing up a martyrdom fantasy in Aramaic and Latin, it would be more accurate, I think, to say that the filmmaker, a Catholic fundamentalist, presents his torture-racked vision of Jesus' last 12 hours on earth as a sacred form of shock therapy.

The whole noisy movie is really just a setup for the climactic duel between renegade cop Danny Glover and the monster. By that point, you’re pathetically grateful for a few stomach-churning special effects.

The movie has the structure of a madcap romantic chase without the wiggy, busting-out freedom.

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

It’s got movement and flow, it’s got a vibrant sunset look of honky-tonk nostalgia, and it’s got a bittersweet mood of lyrical despair that the film stays true to right up until the final note. It’s also strikingly acted.

Now You See Me 2 is more like a giddy piece of cheese from the ’80s, a chance to spend two more hours with characters we like, doing variations on the things that made us like them in the first place. The revisit, in this case, is well-earned.

Payback is a thriller so mean and degraded it carries a low-down, vicious charge. Sadism is its only real subject, and its only real life as well.

As long as it stays in the air, Red Tails is a compelling sky-war pageant of a movie. On the ground, it's a far shakier experience: dutiful and prosaic, with thinly scripted episodes that don't add up to a satisfying story.

It’s a pensive and heartfelt movie, assuming that you let yourself get caught up in its moody-minimalist, more-visual-than-verbal style.

What you don’t feel, ever, in this fundamentalist weeper is a sense of drama rising out of feelings that are less than absolute.

For a light comedy, The Nanny Diaries turns out to have an off-putting theme. It glorifies the romance of slumming.

The movie is like a less original "WALL•E," but it's still vibrant and touching.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds.

What starts off as a neighborhood scandal becomes a liberating thing for everyone involved - an attitude that seems as if it's trying to be oh so European, and might have been had the director, Julian Farino, not been working so hard to convince us of the Deep Inner Goodness of everyone involved.

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.

Petty, though, is the only reason to see this coy and scrappy comic-book adventure-a trash bin of sci-fi detritus.

The rules of good screenwriting are mostly broken, though Jamie Foxx's smash-and-grab charisma remains intact.

Bullock gives it her all; she's bristling and alive on screen in a way that she hasn't been since ''Speed.''

The surprise of The Ringer is that the movie is pretty damn funny.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is too long, and it's ersatz magic, but at least it casts an ersatz spell.

The Addams Family has an overly processed outré harmlessness. It’s so busy treating its famous domesticated ghouls as icons that it forgets to rediscover what’s memorable about them.

The movie is MTV Kafka: Instead of dialogue, character, behavior, it has a look and a mood. And that's all it has.

Isn't a very funny movie (it preaches nonconformity in the rote style of an overlit sitcom), but Wilson, at least, keeps it afloat.

The movie won’t disturb your dreams, but it grabs hold of you and keeps tugging.

Ebla Mari, the actor who plays Yara, makes Yara’s despair over her missing and possibly murdered father, and her agony at having had to abandon her country, incredibly layered and precise. Her performance doesn’t allow us to phone in our empathy.

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.

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.

Manderlay is turgid and hollow.

The film’s most distinctive, if obnoxious, feature is the coy, look-at-what- an-adorable-doofus-I-am clowning of Adam Sandler, who here, as on Saturday Night Live, parades his ironic infantilism.

It’s all quite wispy and anecdotal, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if Bill Holderman, the director of these films, and Erin Simms, his co-screenwriter and producer, had squeezed more texture into the anecdotes.

It's a dismal mess...What's most grating about Hackers, however, is the guileless way the movie buys in to the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like Wired.

Yes Day strings together a series of just-say-yes set pieces that don’t play out the central premise so much as they turn it into an extended kiddie-action-movie burlesque.

Honey Don’t! is a deliberate throwaway — a knowingly light and funny mock escapist thriller, one that’s just trying to show you a flaky good time.

You might say that “Frozen Empire” has to work even harder to invent a reason for itself to exist. Yet it’s a livelier movie than “Afterlife.”

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

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.

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.

An authentic real-world creep show -- better, if anything, than its predecessor.

In the case of Don’t Breathe 2, one reason the movie, for all the operatic (and often absurd) grisliness of its second half, isn’t quite as good as the original is that the original didn’t have a trace of that franchise self-consciousness.

White Sands, on the other hand, is a dud, the sort of movie that swathes its emptiness in layers of chic, swirling ”visuals.”

Yet despite its promising pedigree, Dangerous Minds has a slick, syrupy fraudulence -- it's like an Afterschool Special made for MTV.

Don't let the Carl Hiaasen pedigree fool you: Hoot is an Afterschool Special too crummy to give a hoot about.

The film completely misses what should have been its real target -- the filming of Game of Death, a martial-arts campfest worthy of Edward D. Wood Jr.

Handsomely shot and small of scale, Capone ambles along without catching fire. That’s because the movie, at heart, is shaped as a pedestal for Hardy’s prankish mumbly Method showboating.

The surprise, and disappointment, of The Da Vinci Code is how slipshod and hokey the religious detective story now seems.

It's an energetic, watchable mess.

Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot, is still an old-school video-game trash extravaganza: all sound and fury and flying bodies and jargony world-building, propped up by a sludgy excuse for a story.

For Woody, it's looking more and more like the end of his days of whine and neurosis.

Carrey isn't afraid to go happily psycho, like Peter Sellers or Eminem on his funniest tracks, and that's his edge.

Saw is a gristle-cut B psycho thriller that would like to tap the sickest corners of your imagination. It has a few moments of nightmare creepiness, but it's also derivative and messy and too nonsensical for its own good.

If anything, the real surprise here is how affecting he makes the Grinch's ultimate big hearted turnaround, as Carrey the actor sneaks up on Carrey the wild man dervish. In whichever mode, he carreys the movie.

Trivial and charmless.

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.

Generation Startup is too blurry about the grass-roots wheeling and dealing it shows.

Joker: Folie à Deux may be ambitious and superficially outrageous, but in a basic way it’s an overly cautious sequel.

The movie, make no mistake, is a genial throwaway that skitters through incidents with a G-rated innocuousness that makes it perfect for a very pint-sized demo. Yet the design of it is captivating, and so, in a minor way, is the affection with which the film’s director, Ryan Crego, embraces childhood things.

Project X, likewise, serves up the frat house/Spring Break/Snooki-and-Sitch-on-a-bender antics that many in the audience will have been staring at for years, and implies that it's breaking down bold new barriers of misbehavior. In the end, though, it ain't nothin' but a party.

As a rom-com, Irish Wish is more than willing to kiss the Blarney Stone. Yet the chemistry of Lohan and Speleers makes it watchable enough to get by.

The best bits are incidental: Vaughn's chats with Jon Favreau as his bartender buddy, which are delightful interludes of jostling ego, and Judy Davis, looking like Anna Wintour redesigned by Tim Burton as an undead marionette, laying down the law as Aniston's boss.

This is a movie of fake conflict, fake heart, even fake doggy love.

The two actors are appealing; they’ve got marriage-as-domestic-fight-club chemistry. And when Glenn Close shows up as Emily’s British mother, a former superspy herself, the film calms down for a bit ­— and perks up.

The Crossing Guard is a work of talent and, on occasion, raw passion, but it's also a willed exercise in purgative alienation (imagine "Death Wish" remade by Michelangelo Antonioni).

It’s a serviceably energized and routine action crime movie, with a few slammin’ fistfights and gun battles, and it proves once again that Liam Neeson is an actor who will take a paycheck gig without treating it like one.

Smith has every right to be older and wiser here, and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, with its gentle anarchy and not-quite-mock nostalgia, is a time-machine sequel that passes the time amiably enough. But if Jay and Silent Bob get any older or wiser than this, they’re going to stop being who they are.

Kiss the Girls is a fake psychological thriller that turns into a garishly schlocky and implausible bogeyman hunt.

In an age of Simpson-mania, George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy seem blander than ever.

For a while, The Watchers is a reasonably well-made lost-in-the-woods horror movie, one that draws you in like a puzzle whose rules you need to learn (just as the characters do).

Even though Second Act shouldn’t work, it does (sort of). It’s got flow, a certain knowing ticky-tackiness about its own contrivances. You know you’re watching a connect-the-dots comedy, but the dots sparkle. And Lopez gives her first star performance in a while. Age has enriched her talent; she brings curlicues of experience to every scene.

This is basically a nerd-loosening-his-tie romantic comedy done in the manic-compulsive mode of "Liar Liar."

The movie has every right to be fiction, but the heart of its drama lies in its patina of plausibility.

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.

Grodin always seems like a real guy, whereas Stiller, even working it, is just the designated loser-clown of the megaplex era. He's too harmless to break any hearts.

How lame have high-concept, no-brain comedies gotten?

It is often an oddly compelling tabloid foray, since it winds up shedding a crucial ray of light on the mad moment we’re in now. Whether or not you believe in the Devil, the film helps to color in how our culture got possessed.

Samaritan is basic enough that it often plays like a video-game film in which someone forgot to add the CGI. But the movie builds to a very good twist, and Stallone, in his way, brings a vibe to it, complete with an ’80s kiss-off line (“Have a blast!”) delivered in a growl so deliberate it practically etches itself into the scenery.

As an actress, Bynes is wholesome to a fault. She impersonates a teenage boy yet never gives him one good dirty thought.

The original "Straw Dogs," at least to me, isn't close to being one of Peckinpah's masterpieces, but it's a movie that the people who first saw it still remember 40 years later. I doubt that anyone will remember the new one by next month.

There’s something weirdly innocent about Shanley’s ineptitude: He seems to be inventing the oldest cliches for the very first time. The movie doesn’t really hit bottom, though, until he has Ryan deliver an ickily earnest monologue about how her character is ”soul-sick.” I think she means, ”Pass the Pepto-Bismol.

The Tomorrow War is a big, dumb, sometimes tedious, sometimes fun civilization-vs.-aliens showdown.

With its smooth skinned cast and demonized adults, doesn't feel very authentic.

Technically, Madonna's singing is beautiful -- elegant, silky, refined. Yet there's no fire, no twinkle of ambitious joy, to her performance. Her face is fixed, almost tranquilized -- a porcelain mask.

A cheaply made piece of ''psychological'' occult schlock, subjects you to that depressing stop-and-go rhythm that defines inept fantasy thrillers.

Colorful and exciting, yet unless you're a young moviegoer, nothing in it takes you by complete surprise. (It's less a nail-biter than a chin-stroker.)

As Factory Girl more than acknowledges, Edie Sedgwick's downward spiral was ultimately her own doing. Yet even as the film captures the silk-screen outline of her rise and fall, it never quite colors in who she was.

Atrociously scripted and edited.

The result is a wacked kiddie Rashomon in which the different versions dovetail with a logic as impeccable as it is flat-out buggy. So who do we root for? Everyone and no one. Hoodwinked's most radical feature is that it's a ride without heroes.

Uncharted is a lively but thinly scripted and overlong mad-dash caper movie, propelled by actors you wish, after a while, had more interesting things to say and do.

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

“Paws of Fury” is an efficient yet underimagined animated fable that barely musters the flavor of a cliché Western comedy.

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.

Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was.

A world-detonation thriller, at once urgent and lazy, that benefits from its connection to current events and also, by the end, suffers from it.

Moore makes Halley's awakening organic and touching. In an age when most teenagers are up to their eyeballs in postmodern consumer glitz, her movies seem radical not just in their retro squareness but in their unfashionable embrace of faith over ironic flippancy.

The movie isn't terrible; it's just low-rent and reductive.

A primer no one needed, Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? should have been called "The Post-9/11 World for Dummies."

The movie is no cheat. It’s a tasty franchise delivery system that kicks a certain series back into gear.

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

While I was watching Madea's Big Happy Family, I couldn't deny that it PLAYS. Madea, as always, is a figure of towering low-down wit.

Would like to be a Halloween treat, but it's more like a nightmare of blandness.

The award for the most annoying character to appear in a movie so far this year turns out to be a tie: It goes to both of the oh-so-swankly tormented romantic mischief makers of Love Me if You Dare.

A blithe, funny, and engaging movie.

Confused? So is Miral, a film that makes bits and pieces of the Palestinian experience come alive without assembling them into a coherent vision.

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

A Minecraft Movie never stops goofing on itself, and that’s appealing.

Much of what happens in The Paperboy is so luridly bizarre you can't quite believe what you're seeing.

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

It's like watching "Yellow Submarine" laid over a celebrity-therapy episode of Dr. Phil.

Upside Down is a very fancy piece of junk.

The notion of a larger-than-life theme-park world as a projection of what June is going through comes directly out of “Inside Out,” but the comparison does Wonder Park no favors, because the earlier film was a masterpiece of bursting ingenuity, leaving this one to play like the scaled-down toddler version. On that score, it must be said that little kids will like Wonder Park just fine. But there’s a difference between a great escape and a winsomely crafted pacifier.

It seemed like an entertainment that might have something for everyone. But The Electric Kiss is so overcalculated, so stuffy and labored, so infatuated with its own conceits that I suspect it will end up satisfying virtually no one.

All The Distinguished Gentleman has is Eddie Murphy doing his best to be the life of the party. By the end of the movie you wish he would just go to another party.

Step Up 3D isn't, in dramatic terms, a very good movie, but it's the first film in a while to use 3-D as more than a marketing ploy; it points toward an original way of making a musical.

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 Lie is far from a total success, but it has enough tension and talent to make you hope that Blumhouse keeps aiming a quiet thriller or two at adults.

Hall Pass would like to be as dunked in reality as Judd Apatow's best comedies, but the movie is thin. The Farrellys can't quite nudge the characters from two dimensions to three.

It’s prosaic and conventional and a touch stolid, but it stays true to the facts and the spirit of the man (he’s both sinner and saint), and the saga they add up to is singular in the history of sports.

I Love You to Death is strenuously unclever.

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

If any actor could reveal the squirmy soul of a war criminal, it's Caine, so it feels like a cheat when The Statement gives him nothing to portray but self-condemnation.

The difference between "Pretty Woman" and Runaway Bride is that we can no longer buy Roberts in her tearful romantic-melancholy mode. It seems vaguely patronizing now.

If Crowe's eyes are open, he seems to have directed most of Vanilla Sky with his mind wide shut.

The oddity of the movie — and this is baked into the way Eastwood conceived it, sticking to the facts and not over-hyping anything — is that this vision of real-life heroism is so much less charged than the Hollywood version might be that it often feels as if a dramatic spark plug is missing.

Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too.

Yes, Stone gets cozy with Hugo Chávez, soft-pedaling the Venezuelan president's crackdown tendencies, but he also captures South America in a paradigm shift, wrenching itself free of centuries of colonial control. The film is rose-colored agitprop, but it catches a current of history.

England Is Mine is fussy and prudish — about erotic longing, and about the rock ‘n’ roll that gives form to it.

These people all look and sound so important that the message that blankets every moment of The Age of Disclosure is: They’re official. And what they have to say is official.

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

There are many things wrong with Novocaine, but the film's most gnawing pain is its clodhopper farfetchedness.

In the world according to Eurotrip, the Europeans may be a twisted, outdated, ridiculous lot, but what defines them is that unlike the Americans, they've never quite evolved to irony: They treat even the scuzziest habits with dire sincerity.

In its dry deliberate way, Paint skewers something all too real: a certain kind of toxic self-deluding male myopia.

Kicking & Screaming may be a prefab cartoon out of the "Bad News Bears" cookie cutter, but Ferrell doesn't just save this junk -- he rules it.

As the checkout girl everyone's got a crush on, Natalie Portman makes a winsome return to her "Garden State" gawkiness.

Let's not sell Tyler Perry short. As the vinegar-witted Madea, he's a drag performer of testy charm, but in his overlit patchwork way he's also making the most primal women's pictures since Joan Crawford flexed her shoulder pads.

It's been a while since we saw a demagogic feminist exploitation revenge drama, and Descent, while top-heavy with ''agenda,'' is shrewdly done.

A cheerfully disposable gangland freak-show thrill ride that's been directed by the gifted Joe Carnahan (Narc) as if he were trying to give the audience a seizure.

After too many ''Full Monty''s, it has come to look like nothing so much as a coy ritual of emasculation.

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

Sleeping Dogs, starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a half-rusted scrap heap of a detective mystery. It’s patchy, it’s badly lit, it’s glum, it’s overloaded with suspects, and it’s almost proud of its contrivances. Yet in its logy, booby-trapped way, it keeps you watching.

At once hypnotic and baffling, filled with surreal motifs and symbols, Fire Walk With Me could be the most rarefied teen horror film ever made: It's like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

The plot — which is to say, the plot against the president — is, once again, a violently overwrought confection of “topical” comic-strip ludicrousness; that’s the DNA of the “Fallen” series. Yet when you’re watching a big-budget B-movie, there’s good preposterous and there’s bad preposterous.

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.

Stella is never dull, but by the time it replays the famous Barbara Stanwyck-in-the-rain scene, it’s jerking camp laughter instead of tears.

The film keeps throwing things at you: drunk scenes, adultery scenes, "All About Eve" rise-of-the-young-rival scenes. Yet despite the presence of some appealing actors, none of it quite adds up.

The way that Stallone directs, though, every machete thrust and relentless round of bullet spray is staged with a certain undeniable...conviction.

With its ungainly double-deception premise, How to Lose a Guy feels like it was made out of two connect-the-dots drawings laid haphazardly on top of one another.

Isn't incompetent; it's just plodding and obvious. If anything holds it together, it's The Rock's ironic ability to tread lightly, which the movie is neither fast nor inventive enough to recognize as different from the spirit of Arnold.

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.

The movie itself is too cautious and unimaginative to bring off what a great magic trick — or comedy — should do: make us laugh out loud with surprise.

Willy’s Wonderland has the garish stop-and-go rhythm of an ’80s slasher film, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a gorefest to relax into with a can of Punch (or something stronger).

There’s hardly a moment in Cherry that’s believable, but the film’s true crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s enjoyable either. The only emotion the movie conveys is being full of itself.

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

At times, the movie could have been called "Me and You and Every One of the Bastards We Know," but Krasinski preserves Wallace's whooshing roller coasters of words, powered by the fuel of confession.

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.

The movie's musical numbers are catchy and rollicking and, in their bright sunshiny way, rather soulful.

It's a jerry-built kick-ass insult machine assembled entirely out of secondhand parts.

Warlock is an occult schlock-o-rama, with special effects so low-budget they might have come out of a joke shop.

An inert screwball cartoon, a celebration of monogamy as fashion statement.

The picture is nearly painstaking in its traditionalism, a tale of love, war, and valor in which nostalgia for ''simpler times'' gets mashed together, almost fetishistically, with nostalgia for old movies and for the spirit of knightly self sacrifice during World War II.

The director, Robert Lorenz, stages the action with a convincing ebb and flow, but thanks to an undercooked script what happens in between is mostly boilerplate.

Director John Maybury has a feel for shock rhythms, and he's skillful at keeping you guessing, but after a while you want your questions to cohere into compelling answers, and in The Jacket they don't, quite.

Even if you see through the benign (manipulative) strategies of The Miracle Season, which isn’t hard to do, resistance is futile. You will surrender. You’ll feel the tear on your cheek, the lump in your throat, the reverent huggy glory of it all.

Even the film's one "original" twist is just a desperate attempt to link it up to Ghost Rider, the only lousy Nicolas Cage action film that is actually spawning a sequel.

In My Country doesn't so much explore as use the tragedy of black South Africa to give its heroine a righteous slap of nobility.

It's less a tale of religious rebirth than a faith-based Hallmark card.

What makes Heart of Stone such an enervating experience isn’t that it’s incompetent but that nothing in it matters. It’s all bombast and noise, all hollow logistics, all virtual “Minority Report” screens and clattering fury signifying nothing. In other words: Time to start planning the sequel.

Sandler and Aniston mesh; they made you believe in Nick and Audrey’s cantankerous marriage, and in the love percolating just beneath the fighting. If what Nora Ephron devised was a clever Xerox of the rom-com, “Murder Mystery 2” is a Xerox of the Xerox, powered by a whodunit plot that’s a cheesy light parody of itself played just straight enough to work.

Inocent Blood is an unbelievably lethargic horror comedy directed by John Landis (An American Werewolf in London). Anne Parillaud, the French star of La Femme Nikita, is less sexy than morose in the role of a modern-day vampire who preys on mafiosi. Why mafiosi? For no good reason other than that it allows Landis to stage a lot of scenes in which cut-rate Italian hoodlums stand around yelling at each other.

In essence, this is an indie Adam Sandler comedy, and when its heroes are psyching themselves up for the big event, it's kind of funny. But the orgy doesn't make you laugh - it makes you cringe.

Churchill is a small, watchable, rather prosaic backroom docudrama.

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

A premise masquerading as a movie.

The film oscillates, rather awkwardly, between grandiose cartoon heroics and a kind of dutiful flatness.

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

Last Action Hero makes such a strenuous show of winking at the audience (and itself) that it seems to be celebrating nothing so much as its own awfulness. In a sense, the movie's incipient commercial failure completes it aesthetically.

Watchable in a facile, trashy way. Unfortunately, most of the movie is mired in sludge, slime, mud, blood, and studiously dank cinematography.

Too arty by half.

The film isn't just bad; it's a barely coherent, inert mess -- a heart-tugger for voidoids.

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.

Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time? In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch-the-middle-class-writhe-like-stuck-pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too.

Planetarium is an inert and slipshod movie — messy and aimless, a period tale told with zero period atmosphere (you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not taking place in 2016), built around a situation with enough possibilities to make you wish that the director, Rebecca Zlotowski, had taken advantage of at least one of them.

Spinning Man, like a film noir turned into a video game, winds up crafting a rickety atmosphere of deception out of the question of guilt or innocence. The result keeps you guessing, but it forgets to keep you caring.

The Ruins is lumpish, static, and obvious. It's a gringos-go-home cautionary fright flick done in the spirit of a cheap '50s horror movie, except that it leaves you longing for the competence of grade-Z studio-system trash.

It’s not as if we needed to see “Dracula” remade as a blood-soaked Valentine’s Day movie.

There is much to look at--it's like spending two hours in Michael Jackson's Undead Neverland--but not a lot at stake.

Double Team becomes an enjoyably decadent spectacle of gymnastic preposterousness.

The film, devising events that led up to his mysterious death in 1849, is also the most gruesomely literal-minded of period detective stories.

Lee, I'm afraid, hasn't a clue. He has made half a movie, a phone-sex comedy in which the heroine has no real existence apart from the phone.

Here, as in "The Hangover," the laughs aren't just staged, they're superlatively engineered.

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

Along Came Polly is nothing if not a chick flick for guys.

The film's chief novelty turns out to be its drab ''literary'' approach to horror.

So diaphanous it practically dissolves as you watch it.

The writers act shocked at how low they are stooping, but given their desire to write sitcoms, you have to wonder.

It all makes you want to see a Bollywood movie, all right -- a good one.

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

The surprise -- and intermittent delight -- of Connie and Carla is the way that it taps into the everybody-is-a-star passion of the new sing-along culture.

The Prophecy is an occult freakshow so inert it seems to have been pasted together out of stock footage.

Bloodshot is a trash compactor of a comic-book film, but it’s smart trash, an action matrix that’s fun to plug into.

The ironic thrust of the movie is that Jobs' humanity is there in that perfectionistic insanity. He pushes and pushes to make home computers more and more appealing, accessible, and user-friendly, and that's his great gift to the world.

The Libertine is such a torturous mess that it winds up doing something I hadn't thought possible: It renders Johnny Depp charmless.

Basically, it's "The A-Team" meets "Rambo" meets "Mission: Impossible," with a mission that's one part trickiness, four parts blowing stuff up.

Southland Tales has a mood unlike anything I've seen: dread that morphs into kitsch and then back again. It's a film that tried my patience, and one I couldn't shake off.

Feels like an attempt to rebottle the postmodern fizz of Wes Anderson's "Bottle Rocket." I wish instead they'd put a stopper in it.

Everything is at once telegraphed and derivative.

Palmetto has a satisfyingly deceptive plot that ultimately takes one too many turns.

A send-up of rap personality in which no one actually has a personality. The joke, alas, is on the movie.

There have been far shoddier sequels, but City Slickers II remains a good example of why more is sometimes less.

If the characters, apart from Salvatore, had been more developed, there might be more drama to it, but Comandante, in its honorable and slightly gloomy way, has been conceived as the delivery system for a humanitarian message.

Hunter Killer has good enough actors, but it never figures out what to do with them. They’re stuck in an underwater vacuum, a submarine movie that submerges anything of interest.

There's one moment that achieves the camp shiver of the original, when Damien's nanny hangs herself at his birthday party (''Damien, it's all for you!'').

Just when you thought it was safe to go to the movies without sitting through another imitation of early Quentin Tarantino, along comes Suicide Kings.

While a good deal funnier than ''Deuce Bigelow,'' is still destined to get branded, if not condemned, as ''dumb.''

If Fathers’ Day really had been released in the mid-’80s, I’d have said it was so funny I forgot to laugh.

The point of the new biopic mode was to reveal totemic figures in a more complex way. “One Love” flirts with complexity but slides into the banality of hero worship.

Chain Reaction, while crisply shot, unfolds in an action-suspense-thriller void. The movie’s emblem might be the terse, bureaucratically impersonal performance of Morgan Freeman, who, as the energy project’s chief government liaison, manages to play the film’s most ambiguous character without raising its dramatic temperature one degree.

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.

As an actor, Raymond is whiny and annoying, but not nearly so much as the film.

In the end, there’s something opportunistic and glib about the way that Medicine Man yokes together medical wish fulfillment and save-the-rain-forest agitprop into a neat, messagey package. Nothing takes the fun out of romance quite like liberal earnestness.

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

This one is somberly kinetic and joyless.

This is, after all, not just Robert Redford. It's Redford in the nobly burnished self-mythologic perfection of his late-middle-aged golden god-ness.

When we finally do see what happened, it's a genuine shock, a nightmare vision of a hedonist who forged his own hell.

Del Toro, with his melancholy-brute features, endows this raging beast with some of the ''Why me?'' poignance you may remember from Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in the original.

The movie is one soporific, depressed, deadeningly vague scene after another.

Is any of this, you know, fun? Just barely. But I'm sure I would have loved it at 6.

360 has a circular structure that's deftly pleasing, though the human drama is just facile enough to make it seem, in the end, a little too much like connect the dots played with people.

Moore doesn't just act. She goes on the attack, embracing the kind of lower-rung-of-the-middle-class role that actresses from Jodie Foster to Meryl Streep have long savored. Her performance is an achievement of sorts, yet, like the movie itself, it's also strenuous and joyless.

What makes all of this ''fun,'' instead of dark or threatening, is that the victim was an idiot who leered at the class teases with horny glee.