Peter Keough

A mawkish, preposterous melodrama riddled with clichés, stereotypes, bad dialogue, and inept emotional manipulation.

Though Zefferelli’s version was trashy and downright nuts, at least it made you feel the love. This pallid replay just seems endless.

Power Rangers might be the only movie that directly pays homage to “Transformers.” Sadly, it suffers by the comparison.

There’s no end in sight, and that’s what’s really insidious.

Godard Mon Amour is very much like a Woody Allen film, with Godard embodying Allen’s negative traits of pretentiousness, neurosis, and misogyny without the redeeming virtue of humor.

Though not everyone agrees, Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” came close to finding the secret for making a movie about the secret of happiness. Peter Chelsom’s Hector and the Search for Happiness tries hard, but fails. Miserably.

Shot in a rich palette, the film does provide diversion with some of its funkily detailed sets and supporting actors.... Otherwise, the film distinguishes itself for its miscasting and misuse of its cast.

It’s a Christmas nightmare, stuck with two obnoxious relatives who think they’re funny, and won’t shut up.

One hopes that, for their own good, when any of these actors are offered a script like this again, they’ll have the sense to just say no.

The fundamental value put forth in Brown’s “Sunday” sequel is not fearlessness but “family.”

It’s just like the Kenny Rogers song says: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” It’s time for this Gambler to walk away.

Maybe if the filmmakers suggested that these villains were once children with mothers themselves, it might have made their crime, and the chase that ensues, less one-dimensional.

The young cast comes through with appealing, naturalistic performances. But Weber’s programmatic, preachy story and emotional manipulation is so blatant that it verges on the fatuous.

It is a contrived, bombastic, well-intended failure.

Aside from the clever punning of the title, Spare Parts ends up as jury-rigged and programmatic as Stinky, the robot in the movie. And, unlike Stinky, it is dead in the water.

Thunder falls into the common mistake of many children’s films — it underestimates its audience.

It tries to bridge the gap between pop culture and cultural elitism, between high art and the common commodity that everyone else buys tickets to see. A worthy goal, but it results in a movie that has none of the virtues of either.

Almost all mainstream movies steal from other movies, but the better ones get away with it because they possess some distinctive identity. The best that Ken Scott’s Unfinished Business can come up with is Vince Vaughn — as the straight man.

Starting with a premise that a smart-aleck high school sophomore might take pride in, the film rallies late to make some points about patriarchy and female empowerment, but not before a barrage of clichés, tweeness, and inanity.

Field next tries to touch our hearts with her pitifulness. Stay away, crazy woman! At times she seems about to turn into Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”

Unfortunately, though, Rossato-Bennett and Cohen seem to think that the technique is a panacea. In fact, it is not even original, as music therapy in nursing homes has been around for some time.

Puzzle is neither puzzling nor much fun. It reminds you how much better Julie Delpy told the same story in “2 Days in New York.”

For the most part, Fluffy’s material is just that — fluff, with a touch now and then of bile and bad taste.

More disappointing than the film’s inertia and amorphousness is its sacrifice of the real-world themes of class, money, corruption, and power. Unable to decide what story he wanted to tell, Téchiné hedges his bets and loses everything.

Perhaps that is Roskam’s ultimate point: volition and individuality are illusory; only love and death matter. That truth comes through with somber clarity in the film’s eloquent coda, which almost makes up for the silliness that precedes it.

The film is so bizarre, contrived, manipulative, and meretricious that anything is possible.

Here Aniston suffers every manipulative cliché and contrivance in the tearjerker playbook. She works hard, and it’s painful to watch.

If nothing else, Beloved Sisters is one of the most visually striking biopics around. Too bad you have to wade through so much verbiage in order to enjoy it.