Peter Travers

What these guys do for revenge during one hellish day in the Big Apple makes the panic room look like Barney's toy box. The film itself goes off the deep end way before the end credits.

There's nothing ground-breaking about this backstage murder mystery in 1953 London. Dig under the froth and you'll only find more froth. But thanks to the inspired lunacy of Rockwell and Ronan, it's a wicked fun whodunit that goes down easy.

Brought to the screen awkwardly but ardently by Mamet-actor supreme Joe Mantegna in his feature-directing debut.

Until predictability seeps in from the edges, first-time director James McEvoy offers an invitation to a rap party that’s hard to resist as two Scottish MCs fake their way to the hip-hop top as Americans.

With the Bard’s words, Henry roused his soldiers to action: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” With this mediocrity, it’s more a case of how the war was wan.

Director Brian Robbins ("Good Burger") and screenwriter W. Peter Iliff ("Prayer of the Rollerboys") have wrapped their moral fable in a glossy package of hard football action and towel-slapping, hard-body fun that might seem exciting if you've never seen a movie before.

Even when the laughs evaporate in the final stretch, Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone know how to breathe comic life into a stoner buddy comedy that’s high on its own shitfaced supply.

Veering on the maudlin, the film ultimately succeeds by striking a universal chord on the subject of inconsolable loss. It's a stirring, humane testament from a surprising source.

Mad trippy or catastrophic? This DC superhero epic is actually a mix of both, dragged down by exhausting multiverse hopping but flashy fun on the wings of captivating star Ezra Miller and the grumpy comic perfection of Michael Keaton as a Batman on the ropes.

Compared with ("The Sixth Sense"), there's no contest. Stir of Echoes has been outrun and outclassed.

There's not that much that's new in screenwriter Marshall Karp's sitcom-ish memoir, but Alexander keeps the laughs coming.

Velvet Buzzsaw is never less than a feast for the eyes even when it reduces the plot to B-level butchery. What’s missing is the potent provocation that Gilroy seemed to be developing at the start.

But just watch Hanks, with the effortless grace of a Jimmy Stewart, turn the loony into something sweetly logical. Now that is magic.

Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst find the heart but not the soul in a true-life crime drama that should have cut deeper and hurt more.

This lively mess proves that when Toback loses his head, he does it with style.

Juliet, Naked is annoyingly hit and miss. But when Annie and Tucker connect with the gob-smacked Duncan, the movie substitutes the hard sell for grace notes and wins us over.

Mean tweets 1920 version: The incomparable Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley turn a flimsy script about poison pen letters that turn friends against each other into irresistible fun. Any resemblance to today’s internet trolling is purely intentional.

Leigh’s visceral staging, especially in the climactic moments — brilliantly shot by his longtime collaborator/cinematographer Dick Pope — brings home the significance of a 200-year-old bloodbath that still speaks urgently to the disenfranchised.

The tightly-focused origin story of Ruth, played with ferocity and feeling by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is still one hell of a heroic odyssey.

Ethan Coen’s lesbian road movie, cowritten with his wife Tricia Cooke who identifies as queer, is raucously funny when it doesn’t go slack and make you wish he’d reunite soonest with his sibling Joel for a bit of the old Coen brothers magic that fails to materialize here.

Carter can't sidestep the script's cliches, so he wisely cuts to the fancy footwork whenever possible.

Whatever this is, it’s not a movie — it’s a product more deserving of a road test than a review.

It’s not that Robert Getchell’s script is any less crackbrained than Besson’s. This kind of kink just works better with a French accent.

Here’s the thing about Bad Times at the El Royale: When it’s good, it’s very, very good — and when it’s bad, this retro whatsit is a whole lot of awful.

The trouble does not emerge from the movie’s noble intentions, but from the stodgy manner in which they play out.

Estevez leans toward sacrificing dramatic power for blatant crowdpleasing. Still, his intent is refreshingly uncynical. Clearly, the quadruple threat doesn’t think audiences will sit still for his message without sugarcoating and a feelgood ending. At worst, you can dismiss him as a naïve do-gooder. At best, you can commend him for actually believing a movie might raise public consciousness and maybe even change things. Your call.

But the film exerts a hold. The crux is: for how long?

In this slow but touching biopic, Claire Foy excels as an academic who buries her grief about her father’s death by caring for a predator goshawk, so both can relearn to fly.

You won't forget the way Carrey transcends mere impersonation to find the roots of Andy's torment.

Even a lackluster script and dodgy computer effects can’t screw up the retro bliss doled out by director and star Kenneth Branagh as he sets sail for Egypt with an all-star cast of suspects who keep you guessing whodunit.

This lively computer-animated take on the video game just opened and it’s already the biggest box-office smash of 2023. Despite lapses into dull and disposable, it’s also a gift for parents seeking family entertainment for the 5-year-old in all of us. Game on.

Yup, director Michael Lehmann, far from the glory days of "Heathers," has made a movie about a hard-on, in which he relentlessly pounds a flaccid premise.

Hope Gap is a deeply personal project for Nicholson, who is performing an autopsy on the marriage of his own parents, with him as the son trying to be faithful and fair to both combatants.

Until The Contender slips into partisan politics and platitudinous piety, it's a lively, entertaining ride.

A meditation on the racial and class conflicts at the heart of the American character.

Brendan Fraser excels as a failed American actor adrift in Japan. Is his film a shameless soap opera or a far flintier look at human frailty? It’s more like both.

The haunting, hypnotic, palm-sweating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross promises way more than the film delivers. By the way, the birds in the box are meant to set off alarms when the monsters approach. They see way more than we do, which is part of the problem. Why should birds have all the fun?

Theo James plays twin brothers on the run from a toy monkey with blood-splattering murder on its mind. Director Oz Perkins doesn’t disappoint with his ferociously funny take on Stephen King’s short story even if he never reaches the horror heights.

The humor is slight, but the actors make the blarney go down easy.

Jakubowicz achieves maximum impact by keeping our eyes on the man in the invisible box, one trying to teach children that the power of art can literally be a saving grace.

Turns out a double dip of Zombieland goes down easy when you see it for the irresistible escapism it is.

For all its imperfections and borrowed horror inspirations, this cheeky romcom scarefest is still one movie Valentine that delivers the goods for shudders and cuddles.

Michael Keaton’s second go as star and director stumbles but rises again on the strength of Keaton’s ability to bring his bristling intelligence as an actor to his work behind camera in this darkly comic film noir about an L.A. hitman losing a fraught battle with dementia.

Maika Monroe brings battered heart and soul to a Colleen Hoover soap opera that renders “big” emotions with the small details that make them count.

Jason Reitman energetically tracks the lead-up to the first episode of SNL in 1975, but the result is only fitfully funny, leaving the cast struggling to register. Best in show are Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase and Nicholas Braun in a surprise dual role.

Even when the acting is hammy, notably Wilford Brimley’s turn as Chance’s Cajun uncle, Woo stages every fight with hypnotic grace.

Is it a great movie? Nah. It's too slick a Marvel package for that, with surprisingly meh special effects and an energy that’s more desperation than inspiration. But stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are willing to bust a gut to make you laugh. So there’s that.

As Van Peebles turns the western into an equal-opportunity genre, his voice occasionally fades in the din. But be assured: It’s a voice spoiling to be heard.

Modestly made and modestly charming.

Director and co-writer James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted) is supplying comfort food for bruised romantics.

What we're watching, however charming, is a fancifully costumed theater piece that cuts off the oxygen needed to make a play breathe onscreen.

This meandering neo-western is far from classic Eastwood. But Eastwood, at 91, is still classic in every sense of the word.

What a shame that this well-meaning look at the absurdity of gay conversion camps — it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year — lacks the teeth to make its points stick.

In this sadly stunted comic thriller, a delightfully depraved Glen Powell must kill seven of his family members to inherit $28 billion. Would you? By the end, the film’s lockstep quality commits the worst crime of all by killing our interest.

Thompson never disappoints, nailing every nuance of a judge who lets the world in at the cost of losing her own judgment. This is acting of the highest order.

The film stubbornly resists coming together as more than a series of hit-and-miss vignettes. Only near the end, in a stunning tableau that illustrates how individual desire laughs at the plans of God — and the ringmaster Frankie — does Sachs turn his wisp of film into something funny, touching and vital.

Thornton plays this low-ball farce with deceptive, masterful ease. Appreciate it.

If "Mr. Holland's Opus" made you puke, you'd better bring a bucket to this true-life weepie about the importance of teaching music in schools.

The second film continuation of the Brit series knows it’s old-hat and out of touch. But it’s also comforting fan service and if you can shut out the real world in favor of a fantasy remembrance of things past, you’re in for a treat.

Despite a sappy ending that surprises in all the wrong ways, Daniel Craig’s fifth and final go-round as 007 cements his reputation as the gold-standard James Bond of the 21st century and lays down a challenge for anyone—he or she—who dares to follow him.

Beauty can be an ugly business so it’s too bad this tense, fitfully funny satire about vanity scammers only goes skin deep. But it’s all flowers for Elizabeth Banks who is sheer bonkers perfection as a cosmetics control freak losing control.

See this romcom for the soft side of Kevin James as a jilted groom in Roma and Italian scenery that’s gorgeous in any language. That’s the only way to come out ahead.

Inside this manic jumble about a family of prehistoric ‘Flintstones’ knockoffs lies a brightly animated bauble that speaks to the power of staying connected even when forced apart. Pretty good for a cartoon, especially during a pandemic.

Shaft scores by lacing ba-da-boom action with social pertinence.

This animated tale of a grumpy fish is as bland as blueberries, yet some wonder if sad Mr. Fish can inspire suicidal thoughts. Nah. Positive messaging swims will all these fishes.

Before this frightfest chokes on its own relentlessly repetitive blood-splatter, Nicolas Cage proves fiercely funny as a modern-age Dracula whose malignant narcissism sends his errand boy Renfield (a soulful Nicholas Hoult) into therapy for co-dependency.

In a valiant effort to bring back the romcom, George Clooney and Julia Roberts sprinkle their stardust on a stale storyline that Rock Hudson and Doris Day might have found retro in the last century. Their hearts are in it, though, and that’s something.

Two Oscar-winning Emmas—Stone and Thompson—are dressed to wow and deliver much to enjoy in this beautifully crafted fluffball, but the end result is a decorative distraction that never runs the risks it promises.

A stirring true story about the triumph of an eight-man rowing crew at the 1936 Olympics fits right into director George Clooney’s old-fashioned love for underdogs, but the exciting races are muted by thinly developed personal dramas that feel pokey and predictable.

It sounds pretty cheesy and sometimes it’s a whole cheese wheel, but Hugh Jackman and especially Kate Hudson sing and act their hearts out.

This R-rated sex farce only plays at being dirty. Behind the carnal jokes lurks a Hallmark heart. But a never-friskier or funnier Lawrence, as a 30-ish Uber driver hired to seduce a college-bound kid (terrific newcomer Feldman) is well worth the price of admission. The rest gets a hard pass.

If you need to spot the narcissist lurking behind a friend or lover, this Maria Tomei bonbon may be just instructional romcom you’re looking for. Or maybe not.

The carny scenes of freaks and geeks are undeniably creepy, but director Guillermo del Toro’s hallucinatory brilliance only comes in flashes as Bradley Cooper and a dynamite cast struggle to build a mesmerizing misfire into the classic it might have been.

Enchantment still beckons in the third of J.K. Rowling’s planned five film prequel to Harry Potter, but this flagging franchise—beset with controversies among its creative team—slogs when it most needs to soar.

There’s good reason to throw stones at Luca Gaudagnino’s teasing provocation about cancel culture. So have at its dawdling, blowhard, philosophical pretensions, but the film—riding on the power source that is Julia Roberts—stubbornly lingers in the memory.

In his final film, James Van der Beek raises the bar on a standard-issue thriller through the sheer force of his talent and magnetism.

Ethan Hawke brings back the mask that launched a thousand screams in a tricky treat of a horror sequel that’s perfect for Halloween

Keanu Reeves is an angel of fun in this bright but tonally broken Aziz Ansari comedy about the hell of living in a gig economy.

Sally Field mothers a talking octopus in a shameless tearjerker that doesn’t shy away from eye-rolling cliches but may just be the empathy booster we all need right now.

Jason Segel and Samara Weaving get laughs, but their murder comedy is total tonal chaos.

If you cherrypick the good stuff from a sea of unfocused choices, McKay’s all-star comedy (Leo! JLaw! Meryl!) about impending doom has its playful and provocative pleasures. But the laughs don’t stick in the throat the way they must in a screwball farce that ends in utter hopelessness.

Hunt's flat delivery is mercilessly cruel to Wilde's delicious epigrams. That sound you hear is Oscar spinning madly in his grave.

Winkler's script creaks with melodrama, especially in the scenes with Merrill and his ex-wife, Ruth (Annette Bening), though Bening gives the role spine. Director Winkler fails to modulate the performances.

The problem for Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who also co-directed Beauty and the Beast, is turning a tale of violent love and death into a family film with a happy ending.

Turns into a bogus drivel courtesy of a sitcom monster.

Charm magnets Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd do their best to lift this horror comedy out of the quicksand of cliches that surround it but it’s a losing proposition.

Madden directed Paltrow in the play on the London stage, but he does his "Shakespeare in Love" goddess no favors by filling the screen with big close-ups that betray the theatrical origins of the piece and drain the movie of life and urgency. Proof hasn't been filmed at all -- it's been embalmed.

Horns has style to burn, but there's no there there.

Ferrell makes the damn thing work. Even though he can't get naked or use naughty words, there's a devil of comedy in Ferrell, and he lets it out to play. Director Jon Favreau has the good sense to just stand out of his way.

A cheerless exercise.

It's all a blur, except for the music. That's workin'.

Screenwriter Robert Towne has certainly not challenged his gifts -- the script is loaded with stock cars and stock characters -- but he does deliver what's necessary: a workable setup for exciting NASCAR racing footage shot on sixteen Winston Cup tracks from Daytona to Watkins Glen.

Dalton has training in classical theater; he has pedigree, looks, class. But as Bond he is – face it – dull as dirt. Too much spoofing is bad (see Moore), none is deadly (see Dalton).

Only Vince Vaughn registers hilariously as John's boss.

I fully expect Paranormal Activity 3 to be box office gold. But it's barely worth two stars, let alone two cents. As for future followups, I offer this plea: STOP!

Tepid.

Ana de Armas is raw and riveting as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s surreal journey through a star’s subconscious that leaves out the fun parts to cloak her life in abject misery. The nearly three hour result is hard to watch, but oddly impossible to forget.

Say this for Emmerich, he's not stuffy. And he lucks out big-time with his cast.

It's stale, like something you wrap in yesterday's newspaper.

There's not enough here to sustain a half-hour sitcom, but Reese Witherspoon shoulders the burden with star shine to spare.

A shock ending may be the best hope for this film, a convoluted mystery that thinks it's way smarter than it is.

In not knowing who it needs to please, I Want to Believe pleases no one.

If you're like me, diluted Smith is still better than no Smith at all.

It's a one-joke premise that ultimately wears thin, but Krueger works some playful variations on a theme.

The action and jokes pile up with exhausting repetitiveness. But Theroux and Franco make a truly hilarious team.

In his screenwriting debut, Glee's gifted Chris Colfer, 22, proves he can lace a line with sass and soul. The downside of Struck by Lightning, besides the fact that Colfer's character, Carson Phillips, is struck dead in the first scene, is that Colfer hands himself all the best lines.

When the script, by Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz and John Logan, doesn't sabotage the images, and the great cinematographer John Toll turns action into poetry, The Last Samurai emerges as a haunting silent movie.

Aussie singer Natalie Imbruglia gets to play the babe, nothing more, but she does that brightly. The rest of the movie is a dim bulb.

The too-blunt comedy defangs the film. As does the irritating voiceover from the Rolling Stone reporter, played Scoot McNary, which breaks a cardinal rule of filmmaking: show, don't tell.

Oddly, the published screenplay – while far from McCarthy's top-drawer – reads better than it plays. What's onscreen recalls a line from No Country: "It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?"

Hungarian director Istvan Szabo (Sunshine) overplays his hand and traps Bening in a role that's all emoting, no emotion.

Hemsworth and Thompson, who has the makings of a major star, do the heavy lifting. And, miraculously, they keep it light, breezy and watchable. Memorable? That’s asking too much.

(It) feels like a pale facsimile of Jarmusch. There are a few lovely, random laughs and a resonant political subtext, but the tone is off.

There's no denying the ambition in A Hologram for the King, but a struggle does not add up to a satisfying movie — or even a reasonable facsimile of the beauty and terror Eggers evokes on the page.

Robert De Niro – wait for it – in the role of a mobster. Now there's an original idea.

With the exception of a battle scene with apes on all fours charging the humans, the film is monumentally silly.

Bad Teacher keeps running away from its combustibly nasty premise. Damn shame.

Nolte brings a raspy authority to the role, and director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) surrounds him with colorful characters.

A long sit in the shallows, the equivalent of five half-hour episodes strung together.

Short review of three little words: Way. Too. Long.

Clooney and company work it too hard this time. You can tell they're huffing and puffing to stay afloat. But all I hear is: glug glug glug.

The script by Linda Woolverton stays surface faithful to the characters created by Lewis Carroll, but the film has lost its soul.

The Zeitlins have dreamed since childhood of bringing their version of "Peter Pan" to the screen. Their collective imaginative powers are indisputable. But what started as a visually gripping, fiercely funny, and emotionally centered take on Wendy’s mission statement (“The more you grow up, the less things you get to do that you wanna”) ends in a chaotic clutter that deserves, well, the hook.

The only way to react is by bringing a barf bag or a strong sense of gallows humor.

What a handsome empty shell of a movie Allied is.

Escapism with a human touch -- it feels lived-in.

It's tough to imagine a guy who won't squirm through this tale of 1950s housewife Evelyn Ryan.

Reiner gets lucky with his two stars. Wilson has charm to spare, and Hudson brings humor and sexiness to playing Emma and four au pair girls from different countries. But even they can't float a balloon with lead in it.

Aquaman is a mess of clashing tones and shameless silliness, but a relief after all the franchise’s recent superhero gloom. Any budget-busting epic that finds time to show us an octopus playing bongos gets a pass in our book.

Marshall deserves props for putting the "show" back into the Pirates business. But face it, he's polishing a giant turd.

The new Body Snatchers is the most graphic of all, featuring more overt violence and decomposing flesh than the other two films combined. But it sorely lacks the focus and resonance of its predecessors.

It's hard to hate a movie, even one this droolingly crass, that knows how to laugh at itself.

What we have here is a model for the paint-by-numbers, perfectly generic, proudly soulless summer action flick. An original idea would die for lack of oxygen in S.W.A.T.

The acting? Common and the Game score as baddies, but Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp.

Ritchie is all about the whooshing and headbanging, leaving no space between Holmes' words to savor their meaning. Downey is irresistible. The movie, not so much.

Hollywood has a knack for sanitizing books that deserve better. In the case of The Glass Castle, it's a damn shame.

It plays like an opportunity missed.

Character gets sacrificed for just another true-crime drama.

It's unlikely audiences will be echoing a starving Oliver's most famous line: "Please, sir, I want some more."

A dynamite Naomi Ackie acts and lip-synchs her heart out as the legendary songbird, but Whitney deserved a much better movie than this patchwork, cobbled-together biopic that barely skims the professional highs and personal lows that made up her tragically short life.

Better lower your expectations about this video game turned movie. But Tom Holland, teaming up with Mark Wahlberg, proves his Spider Man success is no fluke, which makes this Indiana Jones knockoff more watchable than it has any right to be.

Like a doggie in a window, this romcom relentlessly wags its tail so you'll fall in love and take it home. Not this time, puppy.

The actors and admirably sensitive director Jake Scott (son of Ridley) can't compensate for Ken Hixon's long slog of a script.

Alex Cross has been neutered on film, deprived of his sexuality, his family, his friends.

Perhaps director Harold Becker thought flashy acting could distract us from the gaping plot holes. Becker gets so intent on confusing us, he forgets to give us characters to care about, the way he did in Sea of Love with Al Pacino. Malice is way out of that classy league. It’s got suspense but no staying power.

Even the great ones hit snags. With The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmsuch gets tangled up in his own deadpan.

Gray says she hates fishermen who catch and release: Getting jerked around hurts the jaw. See this movie and you'll know the feeling.

Ledger's comic flair is a big plus in a film that is fanatically busy and fatally sexless.

Mixing Rock with ooh-la-la turns out to be as appetizing as chalk and cheese.

The result, sadly, is a mess.

Our Idiot Brother comes off as a blueprint for a smart script no one really made. Now that's what I call dumb.

Hamstrung by a script that seems determined to stop at all the big moments in Frida's life (she died in 1954 at age forty-seven) without giving anything time to resonate.

With Del Toro's name in the credits, standard chills aren't enough. We want imagination to run riot.

The scares are Hichcock hand-me-downs.

The actors can't perform miracles. Hot dogs are served in the final scene, but trust me, Hyde Park on Hudson is no picnic.

The result is just good enough to pass as an action flick you watch with the forgiving gaze that comes from too many beers and too little sleep.

Magic Mike slowly degenerates into a simplistic cautionary fable. I didn't see that coming from a sharp observer like Soderbergh.

Amy Adams excels as a stay-at-home mom going so crazy in confinement that she turns into a feral dog in protest. It’s a daring idea until the script chickens out as a ferocious feminist fable and sinks into cotton-candy quicksand. Bummer

Carrey knocks himself out trying to make The Cable Guy different, then neglects the quiet, telling moments that would make it real.

ignore the pileup of implausibilities and Unknown becomes a diabolically entertaining con game. Does it jerk you around? Yes. Suck it up. The ride's worth it.

Working in Spanish for the first time, the filmmaker somehow allows the interweaving threads of his plot to get tangled into a jumble even he can’t satisfactorily unravel. It’s a damn shame.

Formula mother-brat stuff...It's only the deft teamwork of Portman and Sarandon that keeps the triteness at bay.

Even a nice chianti couldn't help you wash down this lump of tear-jerking twaddle.

The villains, an incestuous brother and sister played by real-life marrieds Amy Poehler and Will Arnett are a hoot. And "Office" honey Jenna Fischer is welcome as Jimmy’s love.

Everything sly and low-key about The In-Laws, a 1979 comedy...is supersized and coarsened in Andrew Fleming's remake.

The result is chaotic, but never lacking in energy – and the cast is up for anything.

Audiences expecting more Bullock or more weighty import from A Time to Kill will have to adjust expectations and settle for the kick of a good yarn.

Any similarities between Josey and Lois Jenson, the real woman who made Eveleth Mines pay for their sins in a landmark 1988 class-action suit, are purely coincidental. Instead, we get a TV-movie fantasy of female empowerment glazed with soap-opera theatrics.

For now, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is just one more walk on the mild sides for tweens who dream of being penetrated by cold flesh that will keep them young and cute forever.

Talk about beating a dead orc. In dutifully completing his prequel trilogy to his three-part Lord of the Rings triumph, director Peter Jackson has sadly saved the worst for last.

Nguyen can stir up all the sturm and drang he wants, but Hummingbird feels as humdrum and impersonal as a blueprint.

The actors do what they can to keep their heads above the sudsy script. No go. It’s distressing to see a great subject go wrong in the right hands.

The mutual grief and abiding love felt by the Irish actor, 68, and his son, 25, cuts close to home and brings the film a touching honesty it otherwise sorely lacks.

Witherspoon has the class, the sass and the full-out talent to sustain a major career. Who else could turn the wimpy Sweet Home Alabama into a date-movie winner? She's one of that select group who is worth watching in anything. Even in this less-than-magic kingdom, Reese rules.

We pity Linda, but it's no substitute for understanding her.

Timberlake walks off with the movie. Too bad it's not worth stealing.

This live-action re-imagining of Disney’s 1941 animated classic may be the sweetest film Tim Burton has ever made. It’s also the safest.

Anselmo, basing his script on a true story, juggles more plots than a full season of "The O.C.," setting his cast adrift in a sea of soap-opera bubbles.

Suffers from franchise fatigue. Its rote suspense is strictly a business proposition.

It's as if the brothers admired the Swiss-watch precision of the original and wanted to take it apart to see how the pieces would work in a new setting. As an experiment, it's fascinating. But damn if the fiddling doesn't suck the life out of the laughs.

Playwright Stephen Belber (Match), in his directing debut, comes close to the sweet spot. He's not there yet. But he'll be worth watching next time.

This one means well, a kiss-of-death review if there ever was one.

I don't like this movie. I don't like how it walks, talks, struts and sells itself. I find it contrived, tortured, humorless, infuriating and interminable. And yet if you care anything about film and the creative drive that still exists in the people who make them, then Third Person needs to be seen.

The tossed-off charm of the original suffers from bloated sequelitis. Still, star Zachary Levi’s comic-book invitation to shake your sillies out will be hard to resist for underserved family audiences.

If the script for this comic spin on Fatal Attraction were only a tenth as hot as Uma Thurman, director Ivan Reitman might have had something here.

In his second film as a feature director, following the mess that was "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," Berlinger loses his way in a game of let’s pretend that ends in a tangle of tonal shifts and missed opportunities.

Contact aims to be a film of ideas but serves too many of them half-baked.

Less like "Shrek," meaning hilarious and heartfelt, and more like "Shark Tale," meaning manic and exhausting, Madagascar will keep kids distracted without transporting them to wonderland.

The film is shockingly light on music and heavy on crime scenes that play as bogus.

Demme can't sustain the fizz, but seeing a real filmmaker try and fall short is still more fun than watching a hack hit the mark.

Technically amazing but conceptually old-hat, this sci-fi epic from Gareth Edwards makes a case for artificial intelligence through a bond between a protective human (John David Washington) and a dangerous human simulant packaged as an insanely adorable six-year-old girl. Discuss

What we do see is mom, dad, Braun, Usher, vocal coach Mama Jan Smith and the burgeoning Team Bieber claiming they only want the best for the boy as he goes through a punishing 84-date concert tour. Group hug.

Eddie Murphy is 63 now and sometimes the jokes seem just as retirement ready, but seeing the this comic legend return to the cop role he created four decades ago—along with many of the old gang— at least squeaks by as primo fan service.

Eisenberg and Stewart stay appealing to the last. The movie, not so much.

Trolls World Tour hits the home market at exactly the right time, celebrating music as a joyful, community experience that excludes no one. Nothing wrong with a movie, even this kiddie piffle, that steps up and does that.

There are funny scenes, nicely directed by Barry Levinson. Other stuff, involving De Niro's ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn) and their daughter (Kristen Stewart), are not much of anything. It's a tossup. Your call.

The strapping Owen as a guy who can't handle himself and cutie-pie Aniston as a witchy woman? I don't think so. Talk about derailed.

No cliché is left unturned, and Gordon compensates with slick action.

It’s the human devastation that gets short shrift in a movie that turns the hot, hilarious, out-for-blood Bernadette into the thing she hates most: conventional.

Just a "Rambo" rehash.

Only fitfully funny, except when Ferrell is onscreen -- then you won't stop laughing.

Sad to say, the bloom is off the rose.

Statham is still playing it safe in Safe, but vulnerability is showing through the cracks.

Gorden teases out some affecting scenes, but not enough to carry a film that promises more than it delivers.

Cage works hard to find traces of humanity in a man that God forgot, as do screenwriter Steven Conrad and director Gore Verbinski. But in the face of a character no one cares about, can audiences be faulted for asking: Why should we?

Cusack captures that desperation vividly enough to make you wish this was the real Poe story, which The Raven onscreen leaves buried alive.

It's gross as hell.

The movie is such a chore because watching actors strain to wrap their mouths around prerecorded songs for 134 minutes is irritating and, worse, alienating.

Spade goes sweet and gooey. This is nucking futs.

The good news first: Keith Richards totally rocks it playing pirate daddy to Johnny Depp's Capt. Jack Sparrow. The deep rumble of his voice and those hooded eyes that narrowly open like the creaky gates of hell make him what the rest of this three-peat is not: authentically scary...So what's the bad news? Richards is onscreen for barely two minutes.

I can see why Fast and Furious might be a smash as audiences look for escape from a broken economy. All those wheelies and power slides are designed to obliterate thought, not provoke it. Talk about a movie for its time.

Curtis ladles sugar over the eager-to-please Love Actually to make it go down easy, forgetting that sometimes it just makes you gag.

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal are hotties with talent. And they maneuver through the daunting maze of shifting tones and intersecting plots of Love and Other Drugs like the pros they are.

Good Boys rides highest on the teamwork of its three young stars.

This sequel has the perfunctory vibe that comes from filmmakers who cynically believe the public will buy anything T. Rex-related, no matter how shoddy the goods or warmed-over the plot.

It gives me no pleasure to report that Aloha is still a mess, a handful of stories struggling for a unifying tone.

The chance for delicious satire melts away quickly in Butter, a spoof without oomph.

Even sex can't save a film that produces instant narcolepsy.

Hoff-man and Broderick manage an affecting reconciliation, and Connery remains a peerless charmer. Still, there’s no telling what drew these three to such trite material. It’s like hiring the Rolling Stones and forcing them to sing Barry Manilow.

Between a diabolically funny start and a surprise climax, Scream 4 offers nothing more than a series of gory deaths that grow tiresome with repetition. The rating is a hard R, but Craven and Williamson keep it soft at its core. "Scream 1" is still the only keeper.

Graham, back in the porn territory she aced in “Boogie Nights,” steals the show. In the winter doldrums, you don't kick at a movie that puts a smile on your face.

It's Dead! It's Dead! By which I mean, It's Finished! It's Finished! Five movies have been squeezed out of four Stephenie Meyer Twilight books. All of them redefining cinematic tedium for a new century. And now, It's Over! It's Over! No more Twilight movies EVER! I'm so joyful that I might be overrating The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 by saying it's not half bad.

The snotty rich bastard? That role goes to Eugenio Derbez, Mexico's biggest star, who's allowed to speak a big chunk of his dialogue in Spanish, complete with subtitles. It's the one original idea that this retrofitted Overboard has to offer. The rest of the movie wears out its welcome muy rapido.

There's a killer idea circling this tricked-up teen thriller, which is more than you can say for most summer movies. But the idea never lands because Nerve lacks the, well, nerve to follow through on its convictions.

If "Pulp Fiction" impregnated "The Usual Suspects," the spawn would look a lot like Lucky Number Slevin. Great genes, but you keep wondering when the kid is going to grow up and find an identity of his own.

The movie dulls the social edge of J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir about the Rust Belt’s white working class, but the performances of Glenn Close and Amy Adams make up the difference. As Mamaw, the chain-smoking matriarch of the clan, Close is simply sensational.

By the end of the film, the cliché of everybody getting along is reduced to both sides working together in the ultimate monument to capitalism: a mall. Some message.

It's wickedly amusing for a little bit -- Robbins and Hurt really get into it -- but ultimately the film becomes what it's fighting: just noise.

Looks and flows great, dripping with the 1940s crime-thriller atmosphere that James Ellroy described in his 1987 novel. On other levels -- plot (overstuffed), suspense (muted), acting (Hilary Swank as a femme fatale? Please!), posing (Scarlett Johansson plays dress-up as a mini Lana Turner), sex (it's all before and after) -- the movie is a bust.

Despite Christian Bale and a wow Jessie Buckley as Frankenstein and his missus, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s big swing at remaking a horror classic is a hot, unholy mess. One caveat: no one who still values artistic risk should dream of missing it.

Quick and the Dead plays like a crazed compilation of highlights from famous westerns. Raimi finds the right look but misses the heartbeat. You leave the film dazed instead of dazzled, as if an expert marksman had drawn his gun only to shoot himself in the foot.

It's the stunning location photography of camera ace Elliot Davis that provides what the movie itself lacks: authenticity.

It’s the sort true-story premise would be a fascinating starting point for a movie … if said film had more than a nodding acquaintance with the truth.

Wyatt keeps the action coming at a fast clip, but watching Jim repeatedly pursue a path of self-destruction for reasons never made clear grows wearying.

Missing is a sense of the interior life behind the smiling face that Selena showed the world.

No denying the relevance of the tale.

The gifted Myers lets his once and (I hope) future shag king get lost in an elephantine Hollywood franchise. The first time was the charm, baby.

No. 10 in the series proves there’s still life, artful cosplay and action monkeyshines in the ape-verse that began in 1968, but a worrying case of franchise fatigue is sneaking in. Whatever happened to quitting while you're ahead?

Downey makes something lively, sexy and moving out of a role that's just a thin concept. But the movie feels like it's still in the darkroom.

Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck as star-crossed lovers, is the cinematic equivalent of Styrofoam: a weightless romantic comedy of synthetic feelings.

Too limp to deliver.

As the film stopped counting back in years and switched to months, I panicked that it would slog on to weeks, hours and seconds before reaching its inevitable end. I was wrong. About A Lot Like Love leaving you wanting a lot less, I am right.

This Nacho leaves your palate longing for more spice and less rancid cheese.

It could have been worse, but that’s no excuse for turning an exciting nine-minute theme-park ride into an overlong, star-stuffed 122 minute feature that is only fitfully funny and scary and soon wears out its welcome.

There's no Judy Garland songs, no Scarecrow, no Tin Man, no Cowardly Lion. There's also no simplicity, no magic, no truth.

Roger Moore already seems winded in his second outing as Bond. And the film's comedic approach to martial arts justly rankles true 007 afficionados. Compensation comes in the form of Christopher Lee's delicious take on evil as Scaramanga and Herve Villechaize's verve as Nick Nack, Scaramanga's dwarf manservant.

It's only when the film attempts to express its ideas in spoken English that logic dissolves into a muddle that would test the most rabid Dylanologist.

The climax, in which all the characters link arms in a dance and sing, could serve as a textbook illustration of forced gaiety. Much Ado is much askew.

Malick keeps pushing Affleck to the corner of the frame, as if he's more interested in the women. I found it difficult to maintain interest in anyone. If there's such a thing as a feather that weighs a ton, it's To the Wonder.

It's "The Exorcist" warmed over.

One gut-busting death after another, terror giving way to tedium. Your call.

Depp swans through this swashbuckler with a scene-stealing gusto unseen since Marlon Brando in "Mutiny on the Bounty." He's comic dynamite, but this plodding, repetitive bore should walk the plank for timidly refusing to light his fuse.

Then the aliens show up, chased by Morgan Freeman as a nut-job Army colonel, and the movie degenerates into a sorry, silly, gory, punishingly overlong creature feature.

Footloose 2011 is harmless as far as it goes, but on the dance floor and off it never goes nearly far enough.

By any fair standard, this lushly produced film is a long, bumpy ride to a major letdown.

There's about an hour of terrific movie in this love-hate look at lurid Old Hollywood. Too bad it’s trapped in three hours plus of self-indulgent bloat. Even the starshine of Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt dims as director Damien Chazelle rabidly bites the hand that feeds him.

There are times when Braff and Melfi hint at the darkness of a world that ignores seniors by making them invisible. But this new version of Going in Style sells uplift so hard it loses touch with reality – and any genuine reason for being.

The last part of the movie, which brings the whole cast together on “Super Trouper,” is almost worth the price of admission. Millions will happily get drunk on the film’s infectious high spirits. For the rest of us, who can’t get with the program, Here We Go Again will go down as more of a threat than a promise.

Kate Winslet makes her directing debut with a script written by her 22-year-old son and acted by A-listers who, try as they might, can’t save it from dying-at-Christmas clichés.

Christian Bale tries to solve a murder at West Point, circa 1830, with the help of young cadet Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). But what should be a gothic mesmerizer ends up a dreary exercise to doom and gloom that’s an endurance test for audiences.

It's love with tragic complications, and director Luis Mandoki drags the torture out for two-plus hours.

Payback is a brutally entertaining crime drama that should have been a little more brutal and a little less entertaining.

Meryl Streep can do anything: sing, dance, do splits, act her heart out. She (almost) saves this clumsy, overwrought film version of the Abba musical that's been running on stages from Broadway to Barcelona since 1999.

It's a bigger yawn than it sounds.

How do you screw this up? You've got three leading actresses – Susan Sarandon, Naomi Watts and Elle Fanning – who are usually worth watching in anything. But 3 Generations is pushing it. Even nurturing talent can't breathe life into a script that is completely D.O.A.

In "Gran Torino," Eastwood took on the moral issues that screenwriter Gary Young and first-time director Daniel Barber studiously avoid. It's the difference between riveting and repellent.

Director Vadim Jean is lucky that his low-octane comedy is long on Short.