Owen Gleiberman

this unfairly maligned sci-fi comedy testifies that Eddie Murphy still has the gift of surprise.

Sometimes clever and enjoyable, even touching, yet too often the film makes you feel as if you're in Sunday school.

This is one of those films in which the Act of Driving becomes a 10-minute statement of high emptiness; Dumont even manages to make sex in the desert boring.

Beneath its heavy-breathing fripperies, though, Basic Instinct is mechanical and routine, a muddle of Hitchcockian red herrings and standard cop-thriller ballistics.

The film, which has an overly complicated script (by Kevin Wade), is like Wall Street minus Gordon Gekko. It takes the fun out of back-room political sleaziness — and out of political integrity, too.

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

Perry holds back on the finger-wagging, eye-bulging tantrums. There were moments when I was grateful for that. There were others, like the kissy scenes between Perry and Newton, when I began to miss them.

The movie gives us bits and pieces of drama, but in a larger way it doesn’t invite us in.

The title, Machine Gun Preacher, makes it sound like a piece of grindhouse kitsch - and by the time it's over, you'll be thinking, ''If only!''

A thriller of carefully cultivated murk. It's enigmatic in the worst sense, in that every explanation for what's going on holds less water than the last.

The film’s 90 minutes whiz by.

At its best, Back to Black, the forthright and compelling movie that’s been made of Winehouse’s life, takes that light/dark balance and digs into the drama of it, making it sing.

It's the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals.

Turner’s damaged conviction holds Dark Phoenix together, giving it a treacherous life force.

The whole movie is pat -- very pleased with itself for being so up front about the ways of a 21st-century man-whore.

Cronenberg directs this doomed romance in the same flat, claustrophobic, night-of-the-zombies style he employed in ''Naked Lunch''; as a dramatist, he's still stuck in Interzone.

Snake Eyes, as directed by Robert Schwentke (“The Divergent Series: Insurgent”), has style and verve, with a diabolical family plot that creates a reasonable quota of actual drama. The movie is also a synthetic but infectiously skillful big-studio hodgepodge of ninja films, wuxia films, yakuza films, and international revenge films.

You could call The Circle a dystopian thriller, yet it’s not the usual boilerplate sci-fi about grimly abstract oppressors lording it over everyone else. The movie is smarter and creepier than that.

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.

The essential spark of surprise is missing. The mechanics of ''breathless'' suspense are blanketed by an atmosphere of creeping caution.

It takes a lot of chops to shoot the majority of a movie underwater, and Johannes Roberts is a skillful crafter of images ... But he’s a throw-what-he-can-at-the-audience director, and there’s little in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged that really sticks. The shocks, however, are consistently well-timed, and for the audience that seeks out a movie like this one that’s probably enough.

The movie has no wit, no charm, no cleverness, no traction. Simply put, it is no fun.

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.

While broadly based in reality, the entire movie is a put-on, a wackazoid tall tale, a comedy that uses the breakfast wars as the jumping-off point for a high-camp exercise in nostalgic lunacy.

Snoop invests snarling meanness with as much authority as Clint Eastwood used to. As an actor, does this Dogg know any more tricks? At this point, he may not have to.

Deliberately quaint and old-fashioned, a once-over-slightly exercise in nostalgic wonder directed by the British-born great-grandson of H.G. Wells, who treats the spirit of his ancestor's novel with literal-minded fealty.

Schlock weeper.

Amusing in its very shallowness.

The movie is so hilariously sly about something so fetishistically trivial that at times it appears to take in an entire culture through a lens made of cheese.

I appreciated that Robinson was actually trying to make a real movie out of all this. Yet it’s not a real movie. It’s a concoction impersonating one.

In the lurid and gonzo Raising Cain, writer-director Brian De Palma doesn’t just rip off Alfred Hitchcock. He rips off himself ripping off Hitchcock: He rides over the top of self-parody into a kind of loony-tunes reflexivity.

Locked Down, at times, generates an uneasy mixture of intimacy and showiness, yet it’s a kick to watch a couple of actors who are this terrific pull out all the stops.

Won't Back Down says that whatever your feelings about the subject, lack of change cannot be the answer to our public-education crisis. Trying to cram an informational exposé and a vintage inspirational awards-bait weeper into one movie, Won't Back Down is awkward at times, yet it's also passionate in a surprisingly smart way. It makes a genuine drama out of impossible issues.

There’s a bombast built into the material, but let it be said that the “Transformers” movies have been transformed. They’re no longer the kind of fun you have to hate.

Daredevil is the sort of half-assed, visually lackadaisical potboiler that makes you rue the day that comic-book franchises ever took over Hollywood.

The gimmick in The Abandoned is that people battle their zombie doubles, whom they can't kill, since they'd be killing themselves. But the movie sinks so deep into deathly atmosphere that there's no life to it.

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.

The movie gives Jason Sudeikis a chance to act without the safety net of comedy, and he proves that he’s got the right stuff. But next time he needs to do it in a movie that offers the safety net of believability.

As a movie, Trade is so-so, but as an exposé of how the new globalized industry of sex trafficking really works, it's a disquieting, eye-opening bulletin.

There’s a reason that it lacks the highs of "Wedding Crashers": The Internship puts us on the side of those who are trying to hold on to respectability, not tear it down.

The Duel promises a battle of wits and wills, then turns into a violent grab-bag. But it does make you want to see Woody Harrelson get another movie worthy of his leering bald Nietzschean bravura.

Overboard has been made with enough bubbly comic spirit and skill that the gender switch turns out to be a smart move, from both an entertainment and commercial vantage. Like the original, the new version is a snarky situational farce that evolves into a cheese-dog fable of home and hearth, and the role reversal lets it feel halfway fresh.

The movie, with all that combat, is staged on an impressively grand scale by the returning director, James Wan, but at the same time there’s something glumly standard about it.

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.

Total Eclipse is pretty unbearable: The movie is dour and patchy and stilted — it leaves you sitting glumly waiting for the next baroque bout of tormented misbehavior.

It’s superhero meatloaf and potatoes served with just enough competence and dash not to feel like reheated leftovers.

It barely boasts enough funny material to fill four minutes.

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

Provokes a suspense halfway between comedy and horror. I'm not sure if I enjoyed myself, exactly, but I could hardly wait to see what I'd be appalled by next.

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

The plot is déjà vu all over again, another variation on the proletarian-joker-goes-yuppie formula used in Trading Places, The Secret of My Success, and Opportunity Knocks. In Taking Care of Business, the formula gets boiled down to its bare bones. The movie is nothing but a series of executive signifiers — it should have been called The Trappings of My Success.

Emily Bergl plays the misfit heroine -- pale Goth grrrl Rachel Lang -- with a nicely sulky empathy, equal parts hurt and hope.

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.

Austenland is kind of a one-joke movie, and the film's rhythm is a bit flaccid, but the joke, at least, has a twinge of wit.

Bay doesn't stage scenes, exactly -- he stages moments.

By now, I’m not sure even Donald Trump could love a movie that asks us to get misty-eyed over real estate.

The first thing to say about The Bucket List is that Rob Reiner is the rare director who can take all the wonder out of one of the seven wonders of the world.

A ''fun trash'' movie that's more trash than fun.

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 movie wants you to giggle and say, ”Yup, we sure are saps, aren’t we?”

Battle of the Smithsonian has plenty of life. But it's Adams who gives it zing.

Orphan isn't scary -- it's garish and plodding.

This remake is merely vile (and dull).

A concrete slab of science-fiction melodrama that, for all its obvious limitations as a movie, plays on zeitgeist fantasies of an alien visitation as surely as Spielberg’s blissed-out fable did.

The latest reshuffling of "Chainsaw" tropes.

The House That Jack Built, however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive.

It does possess a certain backward-glancing innocent appeal.

It’s the fastest, funniest “Madea” movie in quite some time.

The dark-side-of-the-L.A.-club-scene premise has potential, but the movie turns out to be a cut-and-paste thriller without any night-world bloom to it.

Much of Big Daddy looks like it was made up on the spot, but Sandler, with his bad-dog eagerness to get caught in the act of misbehaving, pulls you through it.

The new film, while just okay enough to get by, takes a step back from the audacity of “Bad Moms” to something more cautiously conventional.

The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel in such a sodden way. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.

A movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it.

Halloween night may be Michael Myers’ masterpiece, but Halloween Kills is no masterpiece. It’s a mess — a slasher movie that‘s almost never scary, slathered with “topical” pablum and with too many parallel plot strands that don’t go anywhere.

It now takes more than it once did to shock us, and Back Roads wants to do just that, but the effect, in this case, is more audacious than it is convincing.

The way Firth embodies the character, with a robot stare and a flat affect that expresses each thought as a kind of minimalist hologram of emotion, he's playing a cipher who pretends to be a different cipher. How indie-ironic!

It's one of those woozy Jungian art jobs, a series of elliptical, nearly wordless vignettes that are meant to strike a universal symbolist chord. Director Mike Figgis frames the movie with his baroquely contemporary documentary-like version of the Fall.

It’s a movie that reels the audience in and keeps it hooked: with smart little kicks of surprise.

If you want to know how inept the movie is...well, it's so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.

While George Lopez, Cheech Marin, and Paul Rodriguez are funny men, it's amazing how boring these Latin-shtick cutups can be when none of them gets a single good line.

Latifah coasts on grit and verve, and Holmes has a goggle-eyed sweetness, but it's Keaton who rules.

Lands on an imaginative fault line somewhere between tackiness and awe.

Starts high, gradually bogs down, then dies.

As sociology, it's skin-deep, but if you're a parent or preparing to be one, you might see yourself in a few of these folks and have a good time doing so.

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.

It's well-executed technocratic action fluff. But it did leave me buzzed rather than drained.

An inept low-budget thriller.

Machete Kills is gruesomely baroque trash staged with a kinetic freedom that is truly eye-popping, so you can forgive its lapses, like how it goes on a little too long. Rodriguez's only real sin as a filmmaker is that he wants to give you way too much of a crazy ultraviolent good time.

In Consecration Jena Malone doesn’t just sport a casually impeccable British accent. She becomes British — her mood and manners, the way she rocks the sweaters and bangs and debonair politeness. She creates a compelling character, only to see the film’s director, Christopher Smith, swallow her up in all the ecclesiastical gothic malarkey.

Had the killer droid been conceived as a charismatic demon, Hardware might have delivered some B-movie kicks. As it is, there’s nothing particularly scary or awesome about this low-tech walking junk pile. It’s as if someone had remade Alien with the monster played by a rusty erector set.

In her sassy but scrubbed way, Bynes is a real charmer, and What a Girl Wants is a likable throwaway.

You watch Our Little Secret, seeing through the paper-thin contrivances, tittering at the imbecilities, and somehow that all becomes part of the experience. It’s mainstream fodder as downgraded camp. It’s pablum so numbing it makes you feel good.

Once Nancy Meyers went out on her own, she became a wittier and more nimble filmmaker. So maybe Hallie Meyers-Shyer will follow in her footsteps and improve. Right now, she’s got nowhere to go but up.

As you watch “The Last Dance,” the film obliterates any distinction between shooting the works and jumping the shark and just saying, “WTF, let’s do it!”

I can't imagine what Dali or Buñuel would have made of such bourgeois sentimentality.

The plot makes almost no sense, and Eastwood directs in his usual toneless fashion. But in this case, the fact that you can’t always tell the intentional comedy from the unintentional isn’t necessarily a drawback.

Stand Up Guys reminds you that these three are still way too good to collapse into shticky self-parody, even when they're in a movie that's practically begging them to.

It unfolds, more or less, in real time, which gives it an existential comedy-of-suspense element that trumps the usual Styrofoam rom-com plotting. The classical music playing in the background doesn’t make the film stodgy; it creates a sustained operatic flow. And the actors are simply terrific.

Jumanji is cardboard Spielberg, a B-movie scrap heap of spare parts lifted from "Jurassic Park" and "Gremlins" and "Back to the Future".

If only for the sake of adults, couldn't the folks behind the Alvin films have had the good grace to turn Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel into a musical?

Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is a lively formulaic action-hero origin story, dunked in combat grunge, that demonstrates how a resourceful lead actor can bend and heighten the meaning of a commercial thriller.

Though a great deal of this material (e.g., Troopergate) seems like old news, Broomfield is so dogged that he makes 
 a case, in a deeper way than we've seen, that there's a 
 terrifying remorselessness to Palin's feuding nature.

Has all the mood enhancing flavor of a tropical cocktail made with watered down rum and fake fruit juice.

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

The countdown-to-Armageddon structure generates almost no tension, but Olympus Has Fallen does have lots of squalidly bloody hand-to-hand action, all of which is so pulpy and standardthat the film actually makes you grateful for the presence of Gerard Butler, gnashing his teeth in the Bruce Willis role.

Spun is accomplished, but it's also numbing. It's hard to have much connection to people who never connect with each other.

When the children in Carpenter’s Village flash their glowing eyes, hypnotizing the hapless grown-ups into committing a series of increasingly lurid suicides, the kids don’t seem much more bizarre — or frightening — than your average 10-year-old Nintendo freak.

In a sense, John Hughes doesn’t produce movies anymore. He produces entertainment machines, and Career Opportunities has been shamelessly patched together — like Frankenstein’s monster — from bits and pieces of Home Alone and The Breakfast Club.

There are limits to how much comic irony can be wrung out of the sight of two grown men acting like complete cretins.

Most of the film is a chintzy but watchable B-movie knockoff of "Gladiator," with Kit Harington, the English actor from "Game of Thrones," mustering very little in the way of facial expressivity in the role of Milo.

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 Woman in the Window would like to be a contempo “Rear Window,” but it’s so riddled with things you can’t buy that it plays like a bad Brian De Palma movie minus the camera movement.

In his curdled-butterball way, Jiminy Glick may be the most acidic showbiz send-up since Andy Kaufman's Tony Clifton. This movie, though it has its moments, is a pedestal he didn't need.

At this point, revenge thrillers have become so standardized that these films are really all the same film — a Mixmaster blend of Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Enter the Dragon, and Rambo. A star with a personality would only gum up the works.

A fervently topical, at times intriguing, but ultimately rather sketchy drama about the online black market.

The Limits of Control, even with its flow of star cameos (Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, a frenetic Bill Murray), is a listless long pause that rarely refreshes.

Nothing more than a sort of dumb, sort of clever fish out of water comedy.

An alienated-teen movie that surfs along on the whims and casual cruelties of its central character runs a risk: It can wind up as random and undisciplined as she is. Instead, Little Birds is a touching and distinctive achievement.

The prospect of a teacher driven to his students’ level of sociopathic vengeance might have packed a ghoulish wallop had the film viewed it as tragic. Reynolds, however, is just grinding out exploitation thrills.

There’s only one place for Passengers to go, and once it gets there, Jon Spaihts’s script runs out of gas. Tyldun handles the dialogue almost as if he were doing a stage play, but he turns out to be a blah director of spectacle; he doesn’t make it dramatic.

A twisty, showy, atmosphere-saturated drama that revels (in a post-post-Tarantino-and-''Trainspotting'' way) in sadism and in-your-face seediness -- and attracts a cast of coolios primed to play extreme.

The film taps into the glitz ethos of the age of social-media envy without necessarily scrutinizing what it all means. Kid ‘n Play had put on a party to remember, but the new movie, much like Kevin and Damon themselves, just goes with the flow of the scam.

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.

Essentially, the movie is Cliffhanger with one third the firepower. Ice-T, looking like a depressed lion in his thick Rasta braids, remains a charismatic camera subject, though he’s too much the snaggletoothed urban runt to make a convincing action dynamo.

The movie is a true folly, yet there's no denying that Gilliam has gotten some of the hallucinogenic madness of Thompson's novel on screen.

It's like a series of cliches exploding in your face.

Crassly enjoyable.

Super Troopers 2 is an aggressively lame and slobby comedy full of cardboard characters and in-your-face naughty jokes that feel about as dangerous as old vaudeville routines.

The Grudge plods on as if it were something more than formula gunk, cutting back and forth among the thinly written unfortunates who’ve been touched by the curse of that house.

The producers of Nowhere to Run simply toss out the mousetrap. They make the dismal mistake of turning Van Damme into a softy, a sensitive lunk who puts up his dukes only because he wants to help his new family. The former kickboxer would do well to remember that the most heartfelt performance he was put on this earth to give revolves around the tender sound of snapping limbs.

A tawdry excuse for a movie, but it has a handful of shameless giggles.

It's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" with only one chipmunk, and (if possible) even less fun.

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

Will take you places you haven't been, and also places you have.

What’s good about the movie is that Crystal, who co-wrote and directed it, has an inside knowledge of the showbiz comedy world (as he demonstrated in 1992 when he directed and starred in the acerbically accomplished “Mr. Saturday Night”), and the prickly vivacity with which he portrays it roots the movie in something real.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is an utterly depersonalized thrill machine, yet it’s exactly the film’s go-go relentlessness that is likely to make boys and girls eat it up.

Brolin and Gosling are both supposed to be playing World War II veterans who bring their knowledge of battle into the tough turf of the streets, but that's just a concept that the sketchy, half-baked script tosses out there.

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).

The movie zips around without any true forward momentum. The stars carry you along, though.

Vantage Point starts to slide off the rails when it tracks a tourist (Forest Whitaker) and his trusty camcorder; instead of Zapruder-like intrigue, the episode has him running around like an agent in a rote thriller.

Filmworker is a brisk, compelling movie that’s pure candy for Kubrick buffs, yet there are oddities about it.

Almost everything that happens in this movie rings cloyingly false. It wants to make you laugh and cry, but you may be too busy cringing.

The Power of One spends so much screen time reveling in the eloquence and bravery of its hero and depicting South Africa’s blacks as an anonymous horde of victims that the film, in effect, becomes their victimizer.

The most gripping performers are on the sidelines: Eric Roberts, a master of hyperbolic sliminess (he’s like Cagney playing a pimp on steroids), and Uma Thurman, who brings her underwritten role a hundred shades of curiosity, brattishness, and hopeless romantic fervor. She couldn’t be a stand-in if she tried.

The movie is product, but by the end you want to see this team again.

At this point, there's something almost masochistic about the way animators in Japan use cheesy ''Westernized'' heroes to fuel their fantasies.

Barker spins grisly fantasy out of sexual obsession, yet his style here couldn’t be less obsessive. It’s cluttered and rather incoherent, as though the trailers to four different horror movies had been spliced together.

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.

Lawrence makes you believe in the character you're watching. He does an amazing little piece of acting.

The result isn't liberated from the stage; it's trapped, with waxworks literalness, onscreen.

Enjoyably dirty-minded sendup of when-ballet-met-hip-hop youth musicals.

What you experience isn’t the book, exactly; it’s the strenuous creative labor that went into adapting it. What cast a winding spell on the page has become an occasionally compelling but mostly labored live-action illustration.

The Meg 2 is numbingly formulaic, promiscuously derivative and, for a few stretches (like the over-the-top third act), diverting in its very shamelessness. It is, in other words, all an August movie really needs to be. But there’s a way that the line between August movies and movies, period, is growing thinner every day.

Works cleverly because it emerges right out of the everyone's-an-exhibitionist YouTube age

On paper, the movie sounds unbearably schlocky, but Costner plays Garret the reluctant backcountry prince as mythic but also foxy and life size.

Father Stu is not your everyday Hollywood religious odyssey — it’s closer to “Diary of a Country Cutup.” It’s a surprisingly sincere movie about religious feeling, but it is also, too often, a dramatically undernourished one.

The movie never finds a way to blend the emotional and the rat-a-tat-tat into one seamless package the way that Besson did in his one and only good movie, The Professional (1994).

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.

It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways.

It's like a pastry that's been sitting on the shelf for 60 years.

Good has a stagy fustiness, but it's worth seeing for Mortensen, who makes this study of a "good German" look creepily contemporary.

Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow.

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.

A soporific dud, which should have been tossed out of Sundance.

An exhausted epic, one that Stone has directed with an almost startling lack of personality or vision.

Branagh shows us the comedy of a man who is too clever to understand that in the guise of dreading fatherhood, he is really at war with how much he longs for it.

Stops time, all right -- it stretches 94 minutes into something that begins to feel like infinity.

The star hasn’t lost his gift for making sadism seem impish. After a while, however, you may notice that the film’s mayhem is accomplished almost entirely through editing.

It wants to be "Good Will Hunting" set in the land of "Entourage," but its bummed-out touchy-feeliness is every bit as concocted as its overly jaded showbiz corruption.

Even those who may agree with Cho's agenda are never allowed to forget that it is an agenda.

It’s not a rousing animated comedy that parents will cherish along with their kids. It’s more like a colorful and diverting pacifier.

To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.

As directed by Trish Sie, the movie is bubbly, it’s fast, it’s hella synthetic-clever, and it’s an avid showcase for the personalities of its stars: the skeptically pert Anna Kendrick, the radiant and vivacious Hailee Steinfeld, and the terrifyingly droll Rebel Wilson.

Stuart Townsend, Theron's reallife boyfriend, may have inner fires as an actor that have yet to be revealed, but in Head in the Clouds he's a somber puppy who looks as if Theron could eat him alive. I wish she had.

The Fabios appear to have some talent, but not a lot of common sense. They’ve made a land-mine suspense thriller with a few heart-in-the-throat, hair-trigger moments, but Mine is so eager to be a “metaphor” (it’s a little Beckett, a little Tarantino, a little Lifetime channel) that it’s the film’s pretension that winds up exploding in your face.

What makes Double Impact, for all its dull-witted theatrics, an energizing experience is the picture’s astonishing level of ballistic mayhem.

The film is a jokey, nattering fiasco, as awful as Hudson Hawk. And yet, like that famous disaster, it never loses its aura of precocious self-satisfaction.

The 355” is a vigorous formula action spy flick with an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire plot that mostly holds your attention, periodically revs the senses, and gives its actors just enough to work with to put a basic feminine spin on the genre. I make a point of that because the film does too.

Fourth of July is a trifle, and a facile, easy-to-watch one. But what it’s offering under the surface feels, in part, like a clandestine defense of Louis C.K.’s transgressions. In about 45 minutes, the family swings from being louts to saints. That’s supposed to be a lesson to us all. It’s not a convincing one.

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

Rigid, airless, and browbeatingly repetitive, Das Experiment is an overly didactic piece of thesis hectoring; it's like ''Lord of the Flies'' set in a Skinner box.

Jack Frost is so treacly and fake it makes you feel like you’re trapped in a winter-wonderland paperweight.

With its waxy color scheme and nonexistent pace, the movie is like an homage to Hitchcock’s worst period.

The fusion of cheekiness and deliberately overscaled fantasy never jells.

The original Day the Earth Stood Still had a paranoid poetry that lifted the audience up even as it warned the world to come together. This one is so dour it just comes off as a scolding.

No, the “Saw” series hasn’t really changed. So depending on whether you’re a fan or not, eat up…or throw up.

Really, about all that unifies the movie is its inclination to turn little people's dreams into limply ''affectionate'' camp.

Reynolds makes Hal a perfectly functional comic-book hero, but there's a big difference between functional and super.

A cumbersome dud, grows draggier with each new revelation.

The movie is a somber, smoothly crafted drama about a wily adolescent who senses there's something rotten going on in his country but can't quite put a finger on it.

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.

There are two sparks of light amid the trifling dialogue and bad faux-'80s love-on-the-beach montages in Havana Nights, and they are the film's costars.

A Madea Family Funeral isn’t good, exactly, but it’s Perry good. It combines weaponized comedy and sexualized soap opera in a way that defuses all shame.

This is the sort of cloddish thriller in which characters keep putting themselves in dangerous situations because…the movie requires them to be in dangerous situations. The one true surprise has nothing at all to do with the plot: It’s Kevin Spacey’s hair. Dyed a glittering blond, it sets off his smirky, come-hither mug with maximum perversity.

As Zeus, Liam Neeson twinkles where Laurence Olivier kvetched, and Ralph Fiennes, as Zeus' dark brother Hades (who has egged on the revolt to challenge Zeus), has a slinky nastiness.

It’s bluntly cheeky, it goes on for too long, but the concept keeps on giving.

Lucas and Moore write some whiplash funny lines, and since the film is just a throwaway, you can enjoy it on a trivial synthetic revenge-of-the-nerd level.

In Nobody’s Fool, Tiffany Haddish is just furious and funny enough to make you wish that the rest of the movie wasn’t a droopy romantic comedy without the comedy.

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.

“The Greatest Beer Run Ever” lumbers and meanders, and not just because the structure isn’t there. What we’re seeing, on a human level, is only half-interesting and rather slipshod. Like “Green Book,” “Greatest Beer Run” is based on a true story, but what Peter Farrelly responded to in that story translates, this time, into a token “relevant” boomer nostalgia that hasn’t been fully thought through.

The Bodyguard is an outrageous piece of saccharine kitsch — or, at least, it might have been had the movie seemed fully awake. Instead, it’s glossy yet slack; it’s like Flashdance without the hyperkinetic musical numbers and with the romance padded out to a disastrously languid 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Fire, as this movie makes clear, is nothing if not photogenic, and Howard has done a beautiful job of conjuring both its danger and its deceptive, primal beauty.

The Exorcist: Believer, in its superficially competent and poshly mounted way, feels about as dangerous as a crucifix dipped in a bottle of designer water.

UglyDolls is “Trolls Lite,” and the way things work I have no doubt we’ll be seeing a movie in the next few years that’s “UglyDolls Lite.” Yet this is still a winsomely appealing and joke-happy bauble for kiddies.

Lazy Eye makes you realize how rare it is to see a movie, even an indie movie, that gives you the privilege of listening to authentically smart conversation. The understated flow of talk makes us feel like we’re eavesdropping.

There are a minor handful of scenes in Johnny English Strikes Again that will make you laugh. A bit.

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.

Poisonously smug, one-joke indie comedy.

It’s disappointingly ho-hum, without the spectacular — and often very funny — special effects that have become the hallmark of this series.

Simply put, this is not a movie about Michael Jackson’s dark side. Yet the surprise of “Michael” is how well it plays, and what an engrossing middle-of-the-road biopic it is. It’s basically an ’80s-TV-movie version of the Michael Jackson story with sharper acting and snazzier photography. It

In its low grade way, this blithely brutal cops and drugs thriller is an efficient hot wire entertainment.

Anyone who thinks that Josh Hartnett isn't a true movie star should see his riveting, high-wire performance in August.

What Planes lacks in novelty, it makes up for with eye-popping aerial sequences and a high-flying comic spirit.

The Lucky One doesn't have the schlock rapture of "The Notebook" (the one Sparks adaptation that has really worked). The trouble with the movie isn't that it's too girly-swoony; it's that it tries to achieve emotion through glowy sunsets and a paint-by-numbers script.

It's a dispirited, galumphing mess.

It’s just a thinly written (by Rich Wilkes and Amanda Adelson), generically staged (by Jeff Tremaine, director of the “Jackass” films) VH1-style sketchbook of a movie — which is to say, it’s a Netflix film, with zero atmosphere, overly blunt lighting, and a threadbare post-psychological telegraphed quality that gives you nothing to read between the lines.

A fun-in-the-sun heist caper that director Brett Ratner stages as if he were the activities director of a cruise ship.

This is dark, squalid, squinting-through-the-keyhole stuff, and it can make a film like The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe sound like a guilty-pleasure piece of true-crime trash, one of those glorified tabloid-TV exposés with a patina of investigative credibility. In fact, it’s a very good film.

A stillborn rendering of Michael Chabon's first novel.

The Flintstones is a big, shiny package of comic nostalgia, as much a theme park as a movie.

Berg, when he wants to be, is a surgical craftsman of chaos. Yet Mile 22 has little weight or resonance.

Her setups here are so witless and pedestrian that there's no imagination to the crude slapstick punchlines; we're just watching a bland jester pantomime sensory overload.

The gruesomely unnecessary remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is such a smorgasbord of slimy grunge that to call the movie gross wouldn't do it justice -- it's downright sticky.

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.

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

The director, Nora Ephron, displays her peerless gift for making everything seem snappy and mushy at the same time, and Travolta's performance has a slovenly, I-can-do-anything-and-you'll-still-love-me obnoxiousness.

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

Bad Boys II proves that it's possible to pack a movie with so much popcorn that it leaves the audience overdosed.

In “Mechanic,” [Statham's] a mechanic of murder, of escape, of ingenuity, of combat. He’s too good (and too badass) to be true, but that’s why we like him. It would be nice to see Statham make a movie one day that’s accomplished enough to raise his game. Until that happens, Mechanic: Resurrection will do.

Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie.... Yet it’s highly worth seeing, because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived.

A joke of a title in search of a movie with a single good joke.

Almost everything that frames the drug dealer's tale is facile and second-rate. Simply put, you don't believe it. What you do believe is DMX's cruel charisma.

Breathless and petite yet powerfully in-your-face, Fisher combines dizzy femininity and no-nonsense verve in the manner of a classic screwball heroine. She's like Carole Lombard reborn as a tiny angel-faced dynamo.

The Rite commits the supreme sin of making the devil dull.

Messy and scattershot, with a plot that's little more than a dirty version of ''Flubber.''

Hudson's sunny, ringlet-tossing appeal fits snugly into the film's happy-homemaker ideology: She makes caring for three kids she barely knows look downright glamorous.

It doesn't take long for the film to devolve into a ludicrously far-fetched Celebrity Death Wish.

The movie is never dull, though, and Cage acts every moment as if he means it. As the cult's leader, Guy Pearce, looking deeply creepy with a shaved head, has a cruel playfulness.

The film treats its audience like fidgety junior-high schoolers, piling on the sub-Koyaanisqatsi cityscapes and cheesy episodes with Marlee Matlin as a lonely photographer, plus bouncy cartoons of human cells who look as if they'd be happier chasing stains in bathroom-cleanser commercials.

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.

At least Carpenter the spook-meister knows how to goose you.

American Hangman belongs to that species of grade-Z movie that’s at once grisly and pretentious. It’s trash with a lot on its mind.

Nothing but mood... it simply has too few surprises to justify its indulgent atmosphere of malignant revelation.

As computer-generated special effects have grown more advanced, they threaten to overwhelm such minor matters as story, character, and emotion. This, however, is not a problem in Flubber (Walt Disney), an agreeably unhinged slapstick jamboree.

Navy SEALs isn’t just the most stupidly didactic action movie since The Green Berets. It’s the dullest action movie since The Green Berets.

The Medallion makes you long for Tucker -- and for Jackie Chan to fly without digital wings.

If you've been longing to see the worst family entertainment of 1966, A Dog of Flanders may be the movie for you.

Tells a moldy-oldie, not-nearly-as-nasty-as-it-thinks-it-is joke. Over and over again.

If there's such a thing as joyless competence, it's exemplified by the grimly sensational kidnap thriller Don't Say a Word.

Set on Halloween, this intentionally cheesy sci-fi parody doesn’t offer much variety among its human characters, but its animatronic aliens — who look like sourpuss versions of Spielberg’s E.T. — are amusingly obnoxious.

Crossing Over is so eager to go for the emotional jugular that it never quite forges an enlightening point of view.

Minus a hero who has the macho charisma to wrap a movie around him like he owned it, the new Ben-Hur is an oddly lackluster affair: sludgy and plodding, photographed (by Oliver Wood) in nondescript medium close-up, an epic that feels like a mini-series served up in bits and pieces.

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.

Samuel L. Jackson, call your agent — and fire him.

Blunt-witted, visually pedestrian, and overly long, with too many scenes of Blade and his cohorts standing around in darkened corridors, waiting for their enemies to show up. The action, however, is as throat-grabbing as you want it to be.

What’s numbing about this sub-Eastwood potboiler isn’t just the grisliness of the violence but the absence of any possibility that Seagal will stumble, or show doubt or pain, or have to challenge himself in order to defeat his enemies.

Might best be described as bereavement porn.

There are laughs to be had, yet the movie is, if anything, more strenuous than it is funny.

Adore has the distinction of featuring some of the most laughable dialogue in any movie this year.

In the case of The Addams Family 2, Tiernan and Vernon have used the sequel as an opportunity for an upgrade. The script is by an entirely new team (Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, Ben Queen, and Susanna Fogel), and in some ineffable bats-in-the-belfry way the jokes now land with a more inspired and spontaneous creepy kookiness.

A nice cookie-cutter comedy, no more and no less, but Dempsey, with his relaxed charm, and Monaghan, with her soft and peachy sensual spark, rise to the challenge of making friendship look like the wellspring of true love.

On some level, every “Paranormal Activity” film is about monsters caught on camera, but in this one the demons remain scariest when they’re sight unseen

Displays no ambition to be anything more than a synthetic sense-jolt conveyor of the week.

Carrey suggests an escaped mental patient impersonating a game-show host-and, what's worse, his hyperbolically obnoxious shtick is the whole damned show.

Striptease lets down its own performers right along with the audience. It’s a Christmas tree someone forgot to string with ornaments.

This digitized update, with Jason Lee as a huskier, more generic Underdog, mostly drops the doggerel, but the endearing airborne-beagle effects help to offset the formula twists.

The trouble is that the movie plays it boringly straight.

Stephens stages Another Gay Movie in a style of low-budget fluorescent overkill, but a handful of the gags are low-down funny.

The lesson is that fun can't be planned, but the film is so airless (think iCarly as a videogame) that there isn't a truly playful moment in it.

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

Falls short of its source.

The movie is trash shot to look like art imitating trash.

This is a B movie rooted in gut-level stirrings of power and retaliation.

For a movie like Wrath of the Titans, which is basically "Gladiator" crossed with "Lord of the Rings" crossed with a special-effects demo reel (call it Lord of the Rinky-Dink), he's (Worthington) the perfect actor.

The action climax just goes on and on, making The Lone Ranger the sort of movie that delivers too much too late and still manages to make it feel like too little.

The surreal thing is, Zac Efron can't do despair.

Miracle isn't powerful, it's muddled and diffuse.

The United States of Leland is tedious yet infuriating, since its characters, all of whom seem to have emerged from a screenwriter's manual, are like exhibits in a thesis meant to indict the middle class for the crime of its collective dysfunction.

The plot, which features Lea Thompson as a gold digger scheming to marry Jed, is like something you’d catch on the USA Network at 4 a.m. But enough of beating a dead possum. After sitting through The Beverly Hillbillies, I now realize that the best tribute anyone can make to the pop detritus of our childhood is to let it rest in peace.

The nuttiest thing about Mercury Rising is that when Alec Baldwin, as the silky-voiced evil defense honcho, explains that he took his cutthroat actions to protect the lives of American undercover agents, he actually sounds quite reasonable. You can just about feel the imbecility rising.

It's not just that Tony Soprano is richer, darker, cooler, and scarier. The dude gets more laughs.

Does all it can not to dehumanize Chong.

The real problem is the movie itself. The plot, with its interlocking contrivances, is like a machine that keeps trapping the actors in its gears. Since they aren't allowed to relate to each other on a simple human level, the spangly back-and-forth chemistry on which a romantic comedy depends is nowhere in sight.

Taylor Hackford, fails to squeeze the tiniest bit of juice, sexy or comic or otherwise, out of the chintzy-libertine locale.

Except for the relentless, jittery way that the film has been photographed, there's nothing of interest going on in it. It's all fractious guerrilla-newsreel "style" masquerading a void.

The journey, however, is a hollow one, since Quaid and Stone, for all their efforts, never really do seem married. Perhaps that's because Stone, with her dry-ice charisma, does everything that an actress should except connect to whomever she happens to be facing on screen.

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.

It's a solemnly preposterous piece of designer revenge pulp, with actors who stand around bathed in red and blue light like David Lynch mannequins in between scenes of torture and murder.

Forget Devo, Nico, Bowie, or Beefheart: The most mesmerizing freak show in the history of rock & roll was Klaus Nomi.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a mind-boggling mish-mosh. It squanders whatever stray crumbs were left of the “Cloverfield” mystique by banging together bits and pieces of what must be a dozen genres. The result is a desperate plunge into the abyss of shoddy sci-fi.

It’s a mad jumble, an eager product-tie-in mess.

Pungent, funny, and surprisingly forceful.

Viewers hooked on the spectacle of demonic possession tend to like their satanic tropes served neat. The Possession of Hannah Grace serves them sloppy, if not without a certain random soupçon of grisly style.

At one point, a character in a coma is referred to as having Locked-In Syndrome, which means that she’s still aware of her surroundings but is totally unable to move. By the end of Demonic, you’ll know just how she feels.

The problem with the movie isn't that it sells out Rocky and Bullwinkle -- it's that it can't keep up with them.

Scrappy and rambling and overly earnest.

A deliriously brain-dead erotic thriller...The patients (played by, among others, Lesley Ann Warren and Brad Dourif) are all nutjob cliches.

Theron is an arresting image, but, like everything else in Aeon Flux, she's stranded in a trashy and derivative glum zone of fashion-runway fascism.