Pete Vonder Haar

Fails to satisfy.

If Cars is indicative of the kind of movie we can expect from Pixar post-Disney merger, well, there's always Miyazaki.

First-time director James Gartner has managed to whittle away whatever was compelling about the 1966 Miners championship run.

Vaxxed is, in the words of Sheriff Bart, the last act of a desperate man. It’s Andrew Wakefield’s Hail Mary, thrown — I hope — as his time in the public arena finally runs out.

Two things come to mind as you watch the first act of Street Kings, the first is how fresh and exciting the movie would’ve been if it was released in 1984, the second is the question, “James Ellroy wrote that?”

Fred Claus is belligerently unfunny.

Absent the actual music, Notorious would be a lot worse.

What starts out as a moderately interesting thriller in the vein of Blue Velvet and Angel Heart ends up less than the sum of its portentous parts.

Convergence ends up squandering too much of its setup time and rushing to a largely unsatisfying conclusion instead of actually coming together in a meaningful way.

Wolf Creek 2 merely offers more of the same casual brutality. The only shocking (and depressing) part is how inured to it moviegoers have become.

Edward and Carter are like the original Odd Couple, except nobody’s laughing.

The rape scene is, admittedly, as brutal as any I've seen in recent memory, but much of what Iliadis shows us is a direct riff on the original.

It looks stylish, sure, but the script is laughable and the acting is ridiculous.

As it is, you'd get the same level of excitement watching "T.J. Hooker" reruns.

In truth, there's not much point to reviewing Adam Sandler comedies. They're almost always widely panned, and yet still manage to earn well over $100 million domestically. Don’' Mess with the Zohan looks to continue both trends, even if exaggerated Yiddish accents and sex with the elderly only take one so far.

Fool's Gold could easily have been released in 1977, and there's a sort of laid-back, timeless, Gerald Ford feel to the movie: the resolution is never in doubt, the villains are comedic rather than menacing, and no one involved seems to care one way or the other that their names are attached to this indifferent mess.

Just make sure you exit the theater before Simpson's god-awful version of "These Boots Are Made for Walking" starts playing during the end credits, or you may find yourself taking the straw from your drink and puncturing your own eardrums in self defense.

Better than I expected, but since I expected it to be a horrific failure, that isn’t saying much.

The Reaping isn't a total failure. Swank is never less than competent.

Ferrara, best known as "Turtle" on HBO's Entourage, plays what is essentially a muted version of that character. Abeckaser is more believable, which is unsurprising, since the movie is loosely based on his own experiences.

Lackluster dialogue, ludicrously unbelievable storyline, and the fact that the entire film looks and sounds like it was shot on a camcorder mean nobody outside of the studio’s target demographic is likely to check this out.

The most interesting aspects of the film — the real pressures felt by caregivers; popular perception of the severely disabled — are obliterated by the heavy-handed script and Swank’s inspirational bromides.

Let's start with the obvious: Olyphant just isn't that intimidating an assassin. Think of some of cinema's more memorable button men: Léon, Luca Brasi, Frank Nitti...that's right, not a pretty boy in the bunch.

70 odd minutes of medical tragedy and cops matching wits with criminals devolves into incongruously balletic gunplay accentuated with CGI blood effects so terrible Sam Peckinpah is doing cocaine in his grave. It’s a weirdly calamitous tonal shift, erasing the scant goodwill we’d felt to this point and putting Three down for the count once and for all.

The endless hidden connections and coincidences eventually become ridiculous.

The whole thing feels like a continuation of Lucas' experiments to see how much sh-- his dwindling supporters will take before finally saying "enough" and moving on to adult pursuits.

Scoop is about 50 minutes of plot padded with 40 minutes of Woody being Woody.

Q: When is a vampire not a vampire? A: When it goes out in daylight, sees itself in a mirror, doesn’t drink human blood, and still manages to suck.