Peter Debruge

Decently acted despite screenplay shortcomings.

A devastating disappointment. Badly acted, amateurishly directed and woefully unfunny.

Given the escalating ambition of Noe’s oeuvre and the pornographic promo materials teased in advance of the pic’s Cannes premiere, who would have thought that Love would ultimately prove to be Noe’s tamest film?

I suspect Scott sees Domino as the ultimate provocation, his way of grabbing Hollywood by the throat and shouting, "You want reality??! I'll give you REALITY!!!" Sort of.

Basically the first movie all over again, with plenty more of the bridge-jumping, rocket-launching action that audiences loved about the original.

Extravagant but exhausting...this over-the-top oater delivers all the energy and spectacle audiences have come to expect from a Jerry Bruckheimer production, but sucks out the fun in the process,

With an exciting way out, the audience would have gladly overlooked all the loose ends from earlier in the movie. But the way Hall plays it, he undermines the early style and intelligence of his all-black action movie, taking audiences for the wrong kind of ride in the end.

Visually, “Walking With Dinosaurs” dazzles with its combination of Animal Logic-animated CG creatures...and beautiful practical backgrounds... Less dazzling is the constant stream of jokey banter, which thwarts the pic’s educational potential and caps its target age awfully low.

Absence of motive makes the movie provocative; the explanation renders it irrelevant and defuses any interesting debate the film might have inspired.

One dead giveaway that the comedy isn’t working is the film’s score, which overcompensates throughout by attempting to bolster every second with bouncy energy.

A risible excuse for comedy that treats compulsory education as a joke and violence as a reasonable way to solve problems.

Flowers' ''style'' suffers from attention deficit disorder, leaving just enough vital information for you to follow the convoluted plot. But just when one story gets rolling, he's off and chasing another.

Something about the sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, doesn't seem nearly as obnoxious as the original.

The critters look cute, but behave less so, while the competing-heists concept never quite takes off.

A fun, fast-paced and frequently amusing divertissement.

In its native France, “Dilili” was released in stereoscopic 3D, which may have helped things look less wooden, but it feels as if the director stuck to a style that works well in silhouette — where characters typically appeal in profile, and bend only at elbow, knee and waist. In any case, it hurts the brain, which is clearly the opposite of what Ocelot intended.

The wallpaper emotes more than Ryan Gosling does in Only God Forgives, an exercise in supreme style and minimal substance.

Filho obviously wants to convey the naive outlook an impressionable young girl would have on her own situation, but there’s far too much manipulation involved to take her selection of scenes seriously.

The beauty of You Got Served is that it delivers the moves from every vantage point.

Though little more than a gimmick, the baby angle gives Korine a hook for an experiment that’s only intermittently engaging for much of its running time.

Coolidge knows he's not making "Death of a Salesman" here (he names the store managers Glen Gary and Glen Ross in tribute to David Mamet's elegy to the American Dream), but he's got the same eye for detail that made "Office Space" great. What he lacks is Arthur Miller's (or even Mike Judge's) sense for character.

Downright awful.

At no point in the entire film is any character allowed to have any fun at all, which is a rather devastating flaw for a movie that’s supposed to be set in an eternal wonderland of play and arrested childhood innocence.

Whether dangling characters off the edge of a cliff or zooming around Crusoe’s rickety wooden waterslide, the story is constantly on the go, launching objects and characters along the Z axis — and out over the audiences’ heads.

Brazilian director Afonso Poyart (“Two Rabbits”) proves quite effective at building and sustaining a grim sense of suspense throughout.

Death Sentence would be right at home as one half of "Grindhouse"'s B-movie double bill.

Distractingly over-directed ... [Hawley] triple-knots his own shoelaces here, stumbling over cumbersome metaphors (butterflies, floating) and high-concept solutions to straightforward dramatic problems when he should have just entrusted his leading lady to carry the narrative.

The trouble is, presenting all of this mayhem within the framework of a by-the-numbers father-daughter bonding story saps the stunts of their usual appeal.

In her capacity as a film critic — and the sort of populist who was allergic to snobs like Morf — Pauline Kael famously quipped, “Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.” Gilroy doesn’t even aspire to making great art, but he’s getting better at delivering the latter.

There’s plenty of fan service (including a whole new list for Elle and Lee to exhaust), but also a late-arriving sense of identity that gives this junk-food sequel just enough nutritional value to help its young audiences reconsider how to determine their own post-high school priorities.

Shane Mack’s screenplay is not without laughs, but it is certainly lacking in prudence.

This been-there-done-that story marks a pretty banal debut for writer-director Alain Marie, who seems far more interested in aping Refn and early-career Michael Mann than in finding his own style.

Even the hackiest of Hollywood writers would have known how to fix its considerable script problems.

What is Jones trying to say with Mute? One would hardly guess this over-congested generic exercise came from the same mind as the elegant, almost minimalistic “Moon,” which made far better use of all that went unsaid.

Awake is bonkers in a fun way from time to time . . . but gives the distinct impression that the most interesting crises are happening off screen.

Stealth is basically the kind of movie a 13-year-old boy given an infinite budget and creative freedom might cook up between Xbox games.

While common sense and good taste may be inclined to resist Vaughn’s garishly over-the-top style at first, the movie eventually finds its groove.

With Identity Thief, Melissa McCarthy proves she's got what it takes to carry a feature, however meager the underlying material.

This Is Your Death deeply misunderstands depression, treating suicide as a convenient device for its pea-brained premise.

The movie itself frustrates by guarding the secret of Walsch's newfound spirituality.

Cody shows promise as a director, paving over the bumpy patches with clever song choices, but needs to mix things up if she hopes to continue.

If the premise sounds more fun than the execution, that’s because The Binge doesn’t seem to recognize how or why people indulge in such substances to begin with, treating intoxication as the punchline rather than the setup for what should have been a more subversive satire.

As endearing as Ferrell and Kidman are on their own, there's just no chemistry between them onscreen.

It’s worse than tacky, trivializing depression for a handful of easy laughs and pop-psychology platitudes.

While Bitter Harvest will undoubtedly serve to raise awareness, there can be no doubt that the events deserve a more compelling and responsible treatment than this.

In the end, everything fits together rather ingeniously, though it’s clear that in orchestrating her needlessly complicated nonlinear narrative, Llosa has mistaken confusion for suspense.

By and large, the film feels aimless and uninspired.

This embarrassingly earnest film — produced by Charlize Theron — argues for the importance of doctors going the extra mile, when textbook diagnoses won’t do.

Chemistry you can fake, but charm is far harder to pull off, and Baggage Claim never quite succeeds on that front.

By second-guessing what audiences want, Murakami falls into the same trap studios do when trying to appease mass tastes, delivering a film that features many of his familiar designs and characters but precious little in the way of personal vision.

Kings is a tangle of conflicting moods and emotions.

Promising crude straight-boy humor, but delivering sensitive buddy moments and tons of male nudity, this by-the-numbers gut-buster looks slick, moves fast and packs enough laughs to enliven spring-break receipts and earn its helmers more work.

Most audiences want action to feel like action, whereas Eusebio makes it look too much like choreography: No matter how dynamic, every fight scene seems rehearsed to within an inch of its life.

Lambert brings a forlorn dimension to his seductive young role, but Bell never really convinces as the older woman. Despite flirting with controversy, the actress seems reluctant to plunge fully into potential unlikability, nor does the film quite give her the chance.

Judd Apatow made a movie. A very bad movie.

Plop plop. Fizz fizz. Oh, what a missed opportunity it is! In the well-cast but seldom funny satire And Now a Word From Our Sponsor.

Although “Allegiant” does recapture the original film’s sense of constantly discovering and adapting to fresh information, audiences no longer identify with anyone in particular.

Duchovny bookends his story with a modern-day framing device that takes all that has gone so well until this point and turns it cloyingly sentimental.

Offers a charming distraction from the current campaign season by sidestepping real issues and making light of the process.

While this Kid isn't up to "Spy Kids" standards, the good news is the film hews closer to the high-concept kids' movies of the 1980s than to all that Disney Channel goo that's been repackaged for the big screen lately.

If romance-seeking audiences know what’s best for them, they’ll put some space between themselves and this movie.

Skillfully manage to adapt some key details of the show -- namely, the high-flying car chases and hillbilly narration.

A relatively harmless (and thankfully, not entirely laughless) trifle.

Tom Hooper’s outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors (poor Idris Elba, already scarred enough as the villainous Macavity) and trips up the careers of promising newcomers (like ballerina Francesca Hayward, whose wide-eyed, mouth-agape Victoria displays one expression for the entire movie).

No, Tom & Jerry won’t be winning any Oscars, even if Hanna-Barbera shorts in which they starred racked up seven during the series’ 1940-58 run. But it’s good enough to go down easy.

An old-school, straight-faced studio romance featuring five new songs from Ms. Dion, writer-director Jim Strouse’s Love Again is all about such healing — to the extent that if it were a book instead of a movie, it would be filed in the self-help section.

It was on this film that Scodelario met Walker. The couple are now married, which suggests there’s a “happily ever after” to be found somewhere in this froufrou film maudit.

What's missing is some faith in the audience's intelligence and, more importantly, the jokes.

Zombie's film plays more like an experimental pastiche than an outright homage to those classic road-trip-gone-wrong movies.

For all of 10 minutes, Gray Matters looks like it might have accomplished the impossible: uncovering a romantic-comedy scenario audiences haven't seen a million times before.

Imagine what someone like Danny DeVito might have done with the material, taking it in that darker "War of the Roses" direction instead of languishing in this sunny, not-nearly-sinister-enough "Legally Blonde" territory.

It’s devastating to think how far Jones has fallen in the four decades since “Holy Grail,” in which he got more laughs banging a few coconuts together than he musters from his entire movie.

What a waste. Screenwriters Conor McPherson and Hamish McColl have taken a not-very-good book and turned it into a downright awful movie.

Given the fine past work of its many parents, there was clearly potential here, but as delivered, Seventh Son amounts to nothing short of a creative miscarriage.

Have you ever noticed how it's always the worst horror movies that go really far out of their way to lay the groundwork for a sequel?

The cross-dressing "Madea" star seems out of his depth playing the hard-boiled detective made famous by Morgan Freeman in "Along Came a Spider" and "Kiss the Girls." Even action helmer Rob Cohen ("The Fast and the Furious," "XXX") seems to be off his game here.

Diesel valiantly but unsuccessfully tries to raise this inane bit of Mr. Mommery above its afternoon-special standing.

Despite its preposterous leaps of logic, it somehow still emerges a reasonably entertaining summer blockbuster.

The movie is a clumsy and uninspired mess, which is not to say that it's not funny.

Liebesman hews close to the 2003 pic’s bile-tinged snuff-film aesthetic. His approach falls somewhere between the overwrought sadism of the “Saw” series and the giddy gore-for-gore’s-sake energy of “The Devil’s Rejects,” sharing those films’ twisted notion that today’s auds are willing to embrace such homicidal maniacs as heroes.

There are no billionaires here, just a lot of testosterone where the movie’s brains ought to be.

Stonewall is no disaster, and to all those waiting to tear it apart, perhaps the best that can be said is that Emmerich’s film is neither as bad nor as insensitive as predicted, though it’s politics certainly are problematic.

Sure, it’s a “Harry Potter” rip-off, but had Feig taken the time to let the film breathe, it might have stood on its own. Unlike Hogwarts, where fresh surprises lay waiting around every corner, this school seems to exist in concept only — and not a particularly good one at that.

There's no question that Civil Brand has an ambitious premise, but it feels boxed in by the standard prison-movie formula.

American audiences typically adore “white savior movies,” but this one pushes the stereotype to such an extreme ... it’s impossible to ignore how badly the film marginalizes the courageous Ethiopian refugees about whom it purports to care so deeply.

Generally speaking, Goodwill doesn’t seem to know how to direct his cast, focusing more on big-picture details like the look and feel of the film. That makes for a frightfully uneven mix of acting styles, many of which are all too obviously from first-timers.

This ambitious, yet astonishingly well-executed Netflix tentpole directly benefits from the way Ayer’s gritty, streetwise sensibility grounds Landis’ gift for creating an elaborate comic-book mythology.

The message feels muddled amid all the pratfalls and fart jokes.

The more you start to nitpick this movie, the more innumerable its plot holes appear, until the whole thing collapses in on itself.

Franco has a truly radical streak in him, and considering how poorly the movie functions as a traditional crowdpleaser, he might as well have gone all out and pushed Zeroville to whatever event horizon the deranged project called for. His mistake wasn’t trying to adapt Erickson’s novel at all, but attempting to turn it into a tragic romance between Vikar and Soledad.

Willis still packs that rapscallion charm, balancing his wisecracking, reluctant-hero shtick with the unstoppable, all-American quality that earned the original film its title. But the chemistry between him and Courtney is nonexistent, with the younger thesp, who makes co-star Cole Hauser look expressive, adding so little to the equation, one can only hope the studio doesn't plan to pass the franchise on to him.

What could have been a powerful ode to the impact that movies have in shaping our identities — and by extension, the reason broken people are drawn to the profession, through which they hope to reach others like themselves — becomes an over-the-top celebration of Dolan himself.

As impressive as these visual elements prove to be, the film struggles to grab and maintain audiences’ interest, whether or not they know the underlying legend by heart.

The film isn’t so much funny as it is merely amusing — a laundry list of inappropriate and potentially embarrassing moments that strive mightily, but never quite manage to land the laugh.

Unfortunately, this dimwit concept barely has enough spark to power a single strand of Christmas lights, much less rival the classic-by-comparison "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" in side-splitting Yuletide snafus.

Berry is giving a performance much too earnest to have been intentionally campy, setting herself up as a veritable shoo-in for this year's "Worst Actress" Razzie. Me-ouch!

It takes a certain esprit to pull off this kind of bombastic yet larky star vehicle. Joe Carnahan’s film provides passable diversion for a couple hours, but the fun to be had is limited by uninspired action staging, less-than-sparkling dialogue and a maudlin streak of the “It’s about family!!” type.

Scott Speer’s direction and the script (by Andre Case and Oneil Sharma) assures there are no baddies here. Although it shamelessly nods to the popcorn classic “Ghost,” it doesn’t rely on a culturally vexing villain to score points. This is one of the movie’s charms — and truths.

Marketed to look like a cross between “Suicide Squad” and a Zack Snyder movie, director Eli Roth’s tamer-than-expected take on “Borderlands” doesn’t have half the attitude or style its cyberpunk ad campaign might suggest.

Madame Web feels like a cross between an extended soda commercial and a teaser trailer for still more spinoffs.

Isabelle is curiously old-fashioned and not at all original enough to distinguish itself in American release.

For anyone who digs hardcore motorcycle racing, Supercross delivers enough engine-revving, dirt-spewing motorcross action to satisfy even the most intense adrenaline craving.

Here, it’s the screenwriters, not the cartel, who should be held accountable for conjuring a virginal relative only to violate and degrade her.

The movie feels like both an advertisement for this posh, ultra-modern oasis and a late-20th-century smear of the people and culture one might expect to find there.

A toothless ode to a still-living celebrity, it’s a film that may appeal to very young children and very old ladies, but seems sure to bore everyone in between.

[Travolta's] performance ain’t lousy, but the movie that surrounds it is, and it’s almost laughable to see this iconic star trying so hard on behalf of a project that is so compromised in its intentions.

The trouble is, Sherlock Holmes exists so large in audiences’ minds already that the pair’s uninspired take feels neither definitive nor an especially fresh take, but just an off-brand, garden-variety parody.

Hopkins isn’t awful in The Virtuoso, but the movie that surrounds him is.

The way I see it, anyone who's made up his mind to see Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo deserves everything they've got coming to them, and with any luck, they might even enjoy the movie's willfully offensive gutter humor.

In spite of its tweaks to gender roles, the duo’s sexcapades and Snow’s spirited performance, Hooking Up doesn’t offer much by way of surprise, which doesn’t mean that as the odd, amiable couple head toward their personal reckonings, you won’t find yourself rooting for them. Separately and together.

Bloody, barely coherent and about as fun as having your face dragged across asphalt from a moving SUV.

Kranks is the type of grim holiday movie that reminds you of all that is noxious and insincere about the Christmas season and then chases it down with a sickly-sweet reversal

The finished film plays at times like an out-of-control pitch meeting, lurching from one ostensibly clever idea to the next without having taken the trouble to connect the dots, or even to remain consistent with the two simple rules it sets out for itself.

Though much of the script borders on unbearable, compounded by “Juno” composer Mateo Messina’s tell-you-how-to-feel score, writer Daniel Taplitz manages to sneak in some poignant self-help aphorisms here and there.

What was novel when Eddie Murphy did it for “The Nutty Professor,” however, feels lazy by comparison here, with hardly enough story to support them, and even though the transformations are impressive, there’s an alarming clumsiness when it comes to Wayans acting against himself.

The only thing more reliable than bad weather is bad movies, and in that respect, Geostorm is right on forecast.

With its ho-hum hero and lackluster love story, The Order would likely be one big implausible bore if it wasn't for production designer Miljen Kreka Kljakovic.

The movie is not entirely without charm — although it’s safe to say, it’s mostly without charm. In fact, the movie has so little charm to offer that it borders on insipid.

At the very least, Kite could have given Jackson some scenery to chew.

The trouble is, apart from Glover’s unforgettably weird contribution, Lucky Day isn’t a particularly memorable offering. It’s enough to get Avary back in the game, one hopes, but considering his talent, this is hardly the film his fans have been waiting for.

Sir Billi lacks the looks or charm of even the most rudimentary CG offerings being made today, as if not only the animation but also the plot and characters were spat out by off-the-shelf software.

It’s an offensive eyesore in which looting and anarchy are treated as window dressing, law and order come in the form of mind control, and police brutality is so pervasive as to warrant a trigger warning.

When it comes to customer satisfaction, does Amazon’s refund policy apply to stuff like this?

For all the effort put into recreating the era in question — supported here by awe-inspiring visual effects work by Pixomondo — Jan Berger’s script still relies on simplistic emotional ploys and reductive characterizations... But then, such tactics proved perfectly acceptable in such hefty period offerings as “Braveheart” and “Gladiator,” and The Physician truly is a comparable achievement.

With its sultry two-tone, blue-and-bronze design, Sfar’s version certainly looks stunning, but it’s remarkably empty-headed.

What the movie lacks in originality it makes up for in personality, as Kosturos brings the kind of rare alchemy to the role of Ali that makes all present feel as if they’re watching the birth of a movie star.

The movie’s one recurring joke stems from watching Shaina catch strangers off-guard, and it starts to wear thin by around the one-hour mark, when things start to turn dark.

Slee’s film boasts such a high level of writing, acting, and overall production polish that youngsters may be fooled into thinking they’re watching a mindless blockbuster, when in fact, they’ve actually been fooled into thinking.

Writer-director Colin McIvor adapts the true-ish story of how a handful of citizens came to the rescue of a baby elephant into an unlikely family film, one that will delight the kids (who see themselves portrayed as heroes) while leaving parents with a lot of explaining to do.

Gordon uses blockbuster tools — pairing bold visuals with the kind of thundering sound design that makes your joints rattle — to turn his well-organized sociology lesson into a more visceral cinematic experience. More than just a compelling TED Talk, it’s an urgent and engaging call to action.

They’re also among the most visible contemporary Chicano artists Los Angeles has to offer, and better a self-serving documentary than none at all.

For French and art-house audiences, there’s no denying the pleasure of a sapiosexual romance such as this, where the turn-on is to be found in the characters’ intelligence.

Although Caviezel’s character is meant to stand in for all Americans unjustly imprisoned by Iran, it would be irresponsible to take the film’s “inspired by true events” claim too seriously. That doesn’t mean it’s not satisfying to watch Liz and several co-conspirators raid the facility in an attempt to liberate Doug and all those unjustly detained political prisoners. In this fantasy telling, at least, God is on his side.

So many movies seek to distract, whereas this one creates a space — like Eva, left behind in a near-empty city — to reflect and reevaluate.

The Ride doesn’t break new ground, but its likable cast delivers some nuanced even touching twists.

There’s a deep well of truth in “Parking” helmer Chung’s fifth narrative feature, and this unforgettable family drama promises both to devastate and to uplift audiences in virtually any country where a Mandarin-language masterpiece stands a chance at being released.

In the end, this is the movie — not “The Closer” — that deserves the widest possible audience.

The result — a stunning Iranian-style riff on “The French Connection” — is a run-and-gun, Hollywood-caliber cop movie grounded by a clear-eyed assessment of how Tehran’s system works, and all the ways in which it doesn’t.

Journey to Bethlehem is first and foremost a family movie, and though its music sounds a little too early-aughts to become a classic, it fills a crèche-shaped niche in the current theatrical landscape, with nearly six weeks to clean up before Christmas.

Kanagaraj hails from the Michael Bay school of excess, using dramatic camera moves (like the oft-repeated trick where he pushes in on a character’s back as that person turns to glower toward the audience) and clever cutting to give the entire feature the energy typically reserved for a 2½-minute trailer.

It takes its time to get there, but in the end, The Sales Girl is about taking charge of one’s own life, where sex is just one dimension of a well-rounded process of self-discovery.

It’s not as inspired as grown-ups might want, but innocuous enough for the kids.

The movie looks sharp enough, but lands like a rapier with a cork on it.