Peter Travers

The pleasures of Dark Shadows are frustratingly hit-and-miss. In the end, it all collapses into a spectacularly gorgeous heap.

It's a first-class ride. All aboard.

The modestly perfect antidote to a synthetic, overblown movie summer: a blast of exuberant fun that stays rooted in humanity.

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.

Foster's film doesn't doubt that money rules our lives. But it does wonder, provocatively, why we're dumb enough to let it.

Yesterday has its heart firmly in the right place. It’s the challenge to take it to the next level that’s missing.

If long, loud and ludicrous is your kind of movie escapism, check out director Michael Bay’s latest shot of adrenalized, de-humanized filmmaking as a psycho bank robber (Jake Gyllenhaal) commandeers an ambulance as a getaway car. Entertaining? Exhausting is more like it.

The Daniels and their wow of a star Michelle Yeoh turn this visionary absurdist comedy into a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen

Seven Years in Tibet, however flawed, has feeling and purpose. It bears witness.

The film is rapturously beautiful, enticing us into a lush, aristocratic world.

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 final confrontation between the Hulk and Blonsky, now the roaring Abomination, is like the clash of Downey and Bridges in "Iron Man," only not as exciting.

The power of this Holocaust tale sneaks up and floors you.

The mostly improvised drama about a trans man reuniting with his family can feel clumsy and contrived, but it soars on waves of raw feeling thanks to the deeply felt, deeply moving performance of Elliot Page in a role he wears like a second skin.

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.

Cate Blanchett is the spark that keeps this well-meaning but by-the-numbers biopic going.

P.S., adapted from Helen Schulman's novel, is Linney's show, and she makes it hilarious and haunting.

Hell, I really meant to at least like 2 Guns. But I couldn't. The movie just didn't make the extra effort.

Helgeland's script is hit-and-miss, not on the Oscar-winning level of his L.A. Confidential. Still, Hardy is a show all by himself, an actor flying without a net and having a ball. You will too.

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.

Only Vince Vaughn registers hilariously as John's boss.

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

No spoilers, except to say that cheap thrills can still be a blast. Not enough to make up for Shyamalan's awful "After Earth," but it's a start.

Starting at infantile and regressing hysterically from there, Step Brothers flies on the comic chemistry of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.

With so little to show for its staggering ambition to synthesize modern New York with the fall of the Roman Empire, Francis Ford Coppola's all-star, self-financed passion project is a mess, but the lion who made it is still roaring, even in winter.

The heavy plot sauce weighs down the movie. Director Lasse Hallstrom had similar buoyancy problems in 2000's bewilderingly Oscar-nominated "Chocolat." Here he lucks out big time with Mirren and Puri, two pros who know how to lift an audience over plot hurdles and turn a merely digestable diversion into a treat.

You long for things to go bump in the night, but the movie muffles every risk in a blanket of bland.

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.

What does matter, besides the collection of deranged characters who can’t escape their limitations, is the southern-fried atmosphere so resonantly captured by DP Steven Meizler (Contagion).

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

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.

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.

The film feels more like a thesis than vivid drama.

Were detective Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) and his partner, Ken Hutchinson (David Soul), hot for each other when they started working undercover in Bay City?... you can watch Starsky and Hutch on the big screen and see subtext stiffen into hard and hilarious evidence.

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

Director Gus Van Sant finds the human side of a knotty issue. No polemics. Just the face of a new America in crisis.

In these times of pandemic isolation it’s no crime to look for the film equivalent of comfort food. Military Wives, though deeply reliant on formula and wrapped in a blanket of bland, fits the bill.

Best of all is Mark Wahlberg as Tommy, an angry post-9/11 firefighter so against Big Oil that he rides to fire scenes on his bike.

What a cast, indeed. And what a bust as persuasive drama.

Sergio is not a film about a saint or a sinner, but an attempt that succeeds more often than not to create a portrait of a man in full. Yes, it also occasionally puts him on a pedestal — but in these dark days, advocating for hope and idealism feels exactly right.

You always know where it's going even as it meanders for two and a half hours getting there.

Moralists, beware. Hobo looks like a garish cartoon puked up by a filmmaker overstuffed with cheap thrills and celluloid scuzz. What's not to like?

You don't have to be in vogue to enjoy this stylish ride through Bergdorf's. It's a surprise package to die for. Miele and his virtuoso cinematographer, Justin Bare, show how fashion can be aspiration, a model for dreaming the impossible.

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.

Inspired by a true story (translation: a lot of it is made up), the movie shucks its corn straight from the cob. But it's no less engaging for that, thanks to the enthusiasm of the young cast and the fusion of classic dance with hip-hop moves courtesy of Rich and Tone Talauega.

What makes it delicious fun is Posey, a party girl for the ages.

Unhappy with what Oliver Stone did to Jim Morrison and the Doors in his 1991 biopic? Here’s the doc for you.

Lightweight but utterly beguiling.

The film pivots on McAvoy's powerfully implosive performance as a man trying to grow beyond his own prejudices. His scenes with Wright, under Redford's nuanced guidance, give this film its timely resonance and its grieving heart.

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

Are you ready to party? Here's the musical blast we need right now to cure our pandemic blues. Corny? You bet. But an all-star cast, led by Streep, Kidman and Corden, wears its unruly heart on its sleeve as Ryan’s Murphy’s plea for tolerance sings, dances and laughs our troubles away.

What’s missing? Let’s start with intangibles such as heart, soul and the faintest hint of originality.

Sad to say, the bloom is off the rose.

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.

Tusk is a mesmerizing mess that will make Joe Popcorn yak. Jay and Silent Bob will love it.

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.

It doesn't help that Damon and Cruz fail to generate sparks or that the second half of the film, in which John and Lacey face hell in a Mexican prison, feels bluntly edited to fit a two-hour running time.

What a shame, though, that the movie isn't a livelier business.

Ritchie's got something all his own: a go-for-broke energy that cuts through the cliches of the crime genre.

What we have left in Godard Mon Amour, after the laughs dry up, is a thin sketch of a filmmaker who inspired a hero worship in his young bride that dissolved in squabbling, as had Godard's first marriage to another of his leading ladies, actress Anna Karina.

Even Cate Blanchett can't save this misbegotten horse opera.

Radnor and Olsen are so funny and touching you want to say happythankyoumoreplease. What you get is frustratingly less. Still, to the movie's refreshingly uncynical credit, you feel for them.

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.

This movie hits all the wrong notes.

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.

Firing up the Oscar race for Best Actress, a virtuoso Jessica Chastain raises up this formula biopic about televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker by redeeming her reputation as a cultural joke in clown makeup and finding the soul beneath the sparkle.

Screenwriters Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel, in an auspicious directing debut, are attempting to tackle emotional areas that can't be glibly resolved. Sure, they trip up a few times. But it's exhilarating watching them aim high.

Lacks the cumulative impact of "Boyz," since Singleton allows repetition and sermonizing to dull his theme about the infantilization of black males. But Baby Boy leaves you shaken.

As long as Green is onscreen, which is not nearly enough, Road Trip is easy to get revved up about.

Despite melodramatic lapses -- the gripping action recalls Walter Hill's 1981 "Southern Comfort" -- this is Schumacher's most ambitions film since "Falling Down" in 1993, and it plays to his strengths with young actors.

Ryan Reynolds leads an A-list cast in this ‘Back to the Future’ nostalgia trip that coasts down well-worn roads instead of paving new ones with fresh imagination. But there are still laughs and tears to be had this cynicism-free throwback to ‘80s family entertainment.

This oddball mix of "The Cotton Club" and "Six Feet Under" is a big, beautiful mess. But it offers the not-uninstructive spectacle of talented people stumbling over large and unwieldy ambitions.

Inspiration is what The 33 is selling. And it's hard not to get caught up in the rescue. You forgive the movie its faults, or most of them, because its heart is firmly in the right place.

Not even the haunting images and Garfield’s haggard intensity can disguise the gaping void where the film’s soul should be. There’s no there there.

There may be worse movies this summer than The Great Gatsby, but there won't be a more crushing disappointment.

Gadgets abound, especially a Lotus sports car that transforms into a submarine. But the scene-stealer is 7'2" Richard Kiel as Jaws, a shark-eating man with steel teeth.

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.

Green has created a work of startling originality that will haunt you for a good, long time.

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

The go-for-broke performances help make all this paranormal activity too much fun to care.

Higher Learning is seriously intended and seriously flawed. Singleton tends to shout his objectives. But in an era of cop-out escapism, it is gratifying to find a filmmaker who is spoiling to be heard.

Is a Brian DePalma movie that laughs at Brian De Palma movies still worth your time?

Melancholy and doubt may seem like gloomy qualities to blend into an amorous romp. But that shot of gravity is what makes Magic in the Moonlight memorable and distinctively Woody Allen.

Lee's technique is impeccable, but he's chasing more inner demons than one creature feature can handle. No wonder the audience cheers when TV Hulk Lou Ferrigno shows up for a cameo. It's a reminder of a time when it was easier being green and a Hulk could just get pissed off and bust shit up.

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.

This is the vital city that inspired Fellini – alive and lived in. When an actor falters or a joke falls flat, Roma stays fresh and dynamic. You can't take your eyes off it.

Blending humor and heartbreak in a performance that makes a small movie a richly satisfying one, Caine truly is magic.

For the 148 minutes it takes "The Messenger" to deliver its message, being John Malkovich or Milla Jovovich is really no fun at all.

In his uniquely funny and unexpectedly tender movie, Stiller takes us on a personal journey of lingering resonance.

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.

Fine directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel take a detour into mumbo jumbo.

Let's hope that Ridley Scott follows his own blueprint better in the upcoming "Alien: Covenant." The dull and derivative Life is no competition. It's DOA.

This Thor sequel is way funnier than any movie subtitled The Dark World has a right to be (thanks, Hiddleston). And the blowout climax pitting Thor against Malekith and the elves is excitingly staged. It's just that waiting for the good stuff can be a real mood-killer.

Think of it as Jaws on Safari and you'll have some idea what to expect from this generic thrill machine that requires Idris Elba to look great (he does) while doing battle with a digital lion.

Buscemi does not act in Lonesome Jim, but his sly humor and keen eye for nuance resonate in every frame. I can't recall having a better time at a movie about depression.

Thanks for Sharing is all over the place trying to find a tone, but it knows where its heart is.

The dark fantasist in Lucas makes a comeback after years of once-over-lightly.

It's the Mob connection that allows Eastwood to add shading and a sharper edge.

Any doubts about three Chinese actresses speaking English with Japanese accents vanish in the face of their deeply felt performances and the world Marshall conjures with magical finesse.

An adventure that never met a cliche it couldn't saddle, mount and ride for a butt-numbing two hours and sixteen minutes.

LaBute achieves a bracing originality by observing human folly as a means to understand rather than condemn. Love or hate his films, LaBute is one of the most challenging filmmakers to emerge in years.

Schumacher's method is to use a lighter touch, to stay closer to the cartoon that Bob Kane created for DC Comics in 1939 and to temper Burton's nightmare world with an accessible, brightly colored TV palette.

It helps that Kevin Kline excels as Ricki's ex, and Mamie Gummer, Streep's real-life daughter, imbues the fictional version with rare grit and grace. Otherwise, too many wrong notes.

Credit writer Robbie Fox for the fertile comic premise of equating marriage and death in the male mind. But the story, involving Charlie’s cop buddy (Anthony LaPaglia) and Harriet’s artist sister (Amanda Plummer), is too convoluted. Juggling mirth, romance and murder requires a deft touch — think of Hitchcock’s Trouble With Harry. Axe is a blunt instrument.

Whitney Houston deserved better than to go out onscreen with this botch job remake of a 1976 soap opera that never deserved another thought.

Indefensible on a moral level, Rob Zombie's perversely watchable follow-up to his much-reviled cult hit "House of 1000 Corpses" is loaded with filmmaking energy.

Is Knoxville going soft on us? Nah. Bad Grandpa is still the f***ed-up family movie of choice, especially if your family has done jail time.

The Venezuelan-born writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz (Secuestro Express) knows how to muscle up momentum and bring the best out of actors.

Take this walk for the appetizing scenery, which includes Reeves and Sanchez-Gijon. The rest deserves squashing.

What 12 Strong does deliver, however, is a rousing tribute to the bravery of soldiers whose contributions went unheralded for years. That impact cannot be denied.

With Melinda and Melinda he's (Allen) not just going through the motions. He's saying the game isn't over before you laugh till it hurts.

Hotly hilarious.

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.

It's Coogan's breakthrough star performance that holds it all together. He's sensational.

You'll hoot and holler as it strips down its targets and sticks it to them, hardcore. Baron Cohen is the pure, untamed id of movie comedy.

The fourth round for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence isn’t a bad movie, really, just another mediocrity trying to cash in on what came before, the kind of money grab that’s killing movies by serving leftovers as the main course. Resist, people, before it's too late.

Director Peter Segal ups the ante on the action, aiming for Bourne more than Bond, but the stunts grow frenzied and increasingly flat.

A top cast, guided by actress Bonnie Hunt in her directing debut, mixes comedy and corn with savvy.

The Hughes boys blow it by burying a fine cast -- Robbie Coltrane as a cop and Ian Holm as a royal sawbones are standouts -- in stock scares, sappy romance and cliches that really are from hell.

The filmmakers don't trust us to understand what Eddie is feeling about the Olympics without blaring a musical message from Hall and Oates on the soundtrack, "you make my dreams come true."

Estevez means well. But having your heart in the right place is no excuse for insipid ineptitude.

In Seberg, Kristen Stewart gives a fully-inhabited, body-and-soul performance as a Hollywood casualty pushed beyond the limit. It’s such a stellar turn that she almost redeems this well-meaning but wobbly biopic — which earns points for trying to do her justice.

Nothing new here except model-turned-actress Bellucci. To call her noteworthy would be an understatement.

As ever with Park Chan-wook, there are tasty bits of bright and bleak to noodle on in this stinging satire of AI and capitalism, but with a rigorous fix on the growing dehumanization infecting our world. One of the year’s best.

Enjoying this wondrous wisp of a something is easy, describing it is hard. Luckily, Charlyne Yi is an enchantress.

For all the bells and whistles – an electronic score by M83, a screen-busting Imax presentation and Cruise going full throttle – Oblivion feels arid and antiseptic, untouched by human hands. Bummer.

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.

Jordan, working from a script he conjured up with Ray Wright, is in it for suspense tinged with laughs. But with these two dynamo actresses front and center, this nail-biter keeps you riveted.

Though this horror sequel about a coven of teen witches wastes time on delivering scares instead of developing character, the feminist fire of filmmaker Zoe Lister-Jones sees to it that there’s more here than a Halloween throwaway.

To call the animation crude would be high praise. But they succeed enough of the time to make a perversely entertaining movie.

This ultra-violent, ultra-stupid smarm-bomb deserves to take a few lumps before shuffling off to the digital boneyard.

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.

Strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (both named Gerry) in a desert with little to say and do except lose themselves in an existential wasteland of doomed beauty.

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.

A bear does cocaine and kills people. That’s it. Director Elizabeth Banks revels in deliciously cheap thrills, but then treats her overqualified actors (Keri Russell, the late Ray Liotta) like bear chewtoys while the overcrowded script drifts into hibernation.

Funny as hell.

The new Seven isn't aiming for cinema immortality. It's two hours of hardcore, shoot-em-up pow and it's entertaining as hell.

It’s a risk doing a prequel to this hit film franchise without the power surge of star Jennifer Lawrence and the safe and sorry result, set 64 years before Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen ever drew breath, is seriously overlong and underwhelming.

Despite widening gaps of logic in its slow-burn mystery plot, this twisty, killer-on-the-loose, dark-night-of-the-soul thriller features top turns from Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as L.A. cops chasing a psycho, played by a scary and diabolically funny Jared Leto.

At its relaxed best, when it's about, well, nothing, the slyly comic Bee Movie is truly beguiling.

Launches the fall season with a crashing thud.

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.

By playing it safe, the new Precinct leaves the audience sorry and restores thirteen to its place as the unluckiest number.

Black and Blue, hyped by Geoff Zanelli’s pumping score, moves along without actually getting anywhere. Harris deserves better. So do audiences.

I have the same allergic reaction to this open faucet of tear-jerking swill as I do to the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel that inspired it.

This is the kind of movie that they show on planes -- white noise that lulls you to sleep.

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.

If you're looking for wicked fun this Halloween, Paranormal Activity 2 is the best goosebump game in town.

(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.

Still, even Disney and a PG rating can't bury Burton's subversive wit. Like Carroll, he's a master at dressing up psychic wounds in fantasy.

Fighting their way out of the flowery tearjerking in the film version of Colleen Hoover’s mega-bestseller are a timely movie and a stellar Blake Lively performance that both take measure of domestic violence and the women who get to decide when enough is enough.

Some may feel like this smirking sex farce goes down easy. Others may choke on it – or worse, feel like they've wandered into the cinematic equivalent of Christian Grey's Red Room of Pain?

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

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

Forget anything new. Director Renny Harlin is merely spitpolishing his same old bag of shark tricks. But the dude knows how to deliver assembly line product like nobody’s business.

Now, after a deluge of comic book epics and other CGI-filled sci-fi fantasies, the movie feels like it’s way past its sell-by date. Alita: Battle Angel looks ready to rock, but time has sucked the life out of the party.

The simplicity of Michael Petroni’s script seems a drawback at first. But skilled director Brian Percival (Downton Abbey) slowly, effectively tightens the vise as evil intrudes into the life of this child.

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.

The Siege is not a documentary but a glossy Hollywood entertainment that is prey to all the exaggerations, simplifications and acting histrionics that come with the genre.

Must all films about alienation be themselves alienating? Take a walk on the beach and ponder that one. There's a line between artful and arty, and Malick has crossed it.

Allen has crafted a suspenseful mind-teaser that might feel too much like an intellectual exercise if Phoenix and Stone didn't infuse it with raw humanity. The conceptual bubble Allen creates in Irrational Man is potent provocation built to keep you up nights.

Writer-director Michael Patrick King, the creative force behind the show's later seasons, can't disguise the fact that the movie is basically five TV episodes strung together (only three hit the mark). But his script is more honest about aging than anything in "Indy 4."

The result is often chaos, but it’s also a euphoric blast of pulse-quickening adventure, laced with humor and heart.

Hollywood has again turned a challenging book into negligible cinema. Forget the $13 million budget and the reputations involved. This Handmaid’s Tale is merely a piss-poor rehash of The Stepford Wives with delusions of grandeur.

This Brooks is a comedian who forgets the golden rule of "know your audience." He thinks he'll get his laughs if he keeps doing the same act with better lighting.

Here, you can feel De Niro's full engagement in a character that echoes his roles in "Taxi Driver" and "Awakenings." It's a great wreck of a performance that feels bruisingly true. At its best, when it keeps sentimentality at bay, so does Being Flynn.

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.

Stylish entertainment and smartass fun when director John Dahl ("The Last Seduction") plays his strong suit (a gifted cast) instead of his weakest (a derivative plot).

Suspended over a deep gully of disbelief, where logic takes more bullets than the bad guys, Shooter still makes the grade as hard-ass action escapism.

What this Robin Hood lacks in fun it makes up for in epic sweep.

RocknRolla is a kickass crime drama that just doesn't know to quit while it's ahead.

What the movie damagingly lacks is a personality of its own.

By the fourth clone, played as a babbling simpleton, Keaton has exhausted the gimmick and the audience. I’d trade a dozen Dougs for one Beetlejuice.

That the movie itself is a treat, beyond its good intentions, is icing on the cake, though clichés and ethnic stereotyping still sneak in.

Piranha 3D ends the summer on a note of shamelessly entertaining B movie bottomfeeding.

Coscarelli junkies won't be bothered by the film's herky-jerky rhythms. Go for the freaky fun of it, though a little soy sauce on the side sure wouldn't hurt.

After the infamous slap that sidelined his career, Will Smith returns as a runaway slave in a sorry but noble misfire that offers the disgraced actor pitifully few chances to bring dimension to a real-life character the script traps in a swamp of misery-porn cliches.

So it’s a kick to see Spencer dig into the title role in Ma, a Blumhouse scarefest that tries but rarely lives up to the irresistible dynamo at its center.

In an effort to blend Thackeray and "Sex and the City," Vanity Fair ends up nowhere.

At its best, De-Lovely evokes a time, a place and a sound with stylish wit and sophistication.

There's no denying the kick of Pitt's memorably offbeat performance and writer-director Tom DiCillo's stylish debut.

How do you rate a cinematic black hole that doesn’t deserve a single star? Do you simply give it five eyerolls? Better question: How does a movie, with all the talent in the world going for it, become a such a blithering botch job?

In a shameless weeper that plays it strictly by the cliché book, compensation comes from the rugged sincerity of Justin Timberlake as an ex-con who becomes a surrogate dad to a gender-nonconformist seven-year-old boy, wonderfully acted by Ryder Allen.

Solondz likes to put the screws to moral hypocrisy. As always, he goes too far. As always, you don't want to look away.

This is vintage B-movie material, and if you really want to catch a vintage B movie that uses the material effectively, try the original 1952 version of the same name.

Amateur is Hartley heaven, a sharp-witted thriller that takes off into dark and uncharted territory.

This big-screen Hamlet, pumped up to operatic scale by overkill director Franco Zeffirelli, exposes Gibson's shortcomings.

No go. Marshall deserved better than this misbegotten tribute.

Zane, a good actor in the right circumstances (Orlando, Dead Calm), is trapped by screenwriter Jeffrey Boam (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and Australian director Simon Wincer (Free Willy), who don’t give him anything to act.

Enough Burns pungency remains for She’s the One to qualify as a setback, not a drop into quicksand.

Edgy comic Kevin Hart smooths out his rough edges to play a widower trying to raise his daughter alone. Hart can act, but he can’t act his way out of a sappy script that too often mistakes manipulative laughs and tears for genuine emotion.

Things go wrong quickly with Amazing 2. Am I the only one who hates the word Amazing to describe a movie that isn't? Just asking. If I had to pinpoint where this epic goes south, I'd start with the tonal shifts.

No denying the relevance of the tale.

In this funny, touching and haunting film, Patel cuts through stereotypes to show the hard truths of straddling two cultures.

Any flaws in execution pale against those moments when the film brings history to vital life.

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.

Like the worst civics lesson, this movie bores away at you till your reactions are dulled.

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

The movie does Thompson proud. It's a scorcher.

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.

There’s nothing fresh or surprising about a boy coming of age with the help of his bartender uncle (Ben Affleck reminding us what a terrific actor he can be), but director George Clooney’s affection for the characters serves up a winning blend of laughs and tears.

Headland can write zingers that would make the cruelest bridezilla blush. And Caplan's treatise on the art of the blow job is time-capsule worthy. Sadly, Bachelorette is a comic cocktail that goes heavy on the bitters. That's no way to end a wedding.

Do Hollywood suits think we want nothing more from a Christmas movie than to feed on the dead carcass of an undeserving horror franchise? The scary part is they may be right.

The third and weakest chapter in the hit "Conjuring" series messes with the facts about a real-life case of demonic possession as a legal defense, but Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as married demonologists know how to rally nerve-rattling chills to scare us senseless.

When the script sags, Wain and producer Judd Apatow rely on a top team of actors to keep you laughing.

Props to Charli xcx for grabbing her brat moment at Sundance. The dance-pop princess shows real acting potential, even though this misbegotten mockumentary gives her few chances to show her range.

You won't feel too much like a jerk watching this rock & roll hostage comedy. There are laugh licks and spirited performances. It's fluff done with flair

There are glimmers of the perversely fascinating murder mystery of the classic 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel, but this misguided update suffers from a lack of suspense, wit and undetectable sexual chemistry between Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. Read the book, skip the movie.

The Book of Eli isn't as exciting or funny or inspiring as it wants and needs to be, and its preachy ending is an ordeal. But Washington, a movie star who can act, is one cool dude who is worth following anywhere.

If looks were everything, director Baz Luhrmann's epic salute to his native land would be the movie of the year. But, crikey, a padded script bloated with subplots and shameless sentimentality can wear you down.

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.

For a while, The Dark Half is a compelling study, in chiller guise, of an artist wrestling with his creative demons. But Stark is a real terror only in the shadows. When he emerges, all we see is Hutton — in a showy makeup job — struggling to change his wimp image.

It would have been nice if filmmaker Sam Levinson had provided a real script instead of a thin outline, but John David Washington and an incandescent Zendaya are thrilling to watch as lovers at war in a millennial ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.’

Amid the action heroics of White Squall, Bridges creates a character of consequence.

Lively is an odd word for something called Dead Man's Chest, but lively it is. You won't find hotter action, wilder thrills or loopier laughs this summer.

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.

The film's technical achievements are indisputable (a military salute to camera wiz John Toll). But Billy Lynn comes off as artificial when we most need it to be natural, organic and whisper-close. Maybe there's a future film that will use size and sharpness to express an epic and intimate truth. Not this time.

There's heart but not much heat in this film version of "The Echoing Grove."

Irresistibly silly.

In this romcom that evaporates while you’re watching it, a mismatched Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page fight a losing battle to outshine the scenery.

The impossibly magnetic Idris Elba brings his iconic series TV character, London copper John Luther, to thunderous life on the big screen and suddenly all is right with the world. So what if the serial-killer plot can’t get a grip, Elba is pure pow.

Watching the stars try to out-cutesy the mutt is one for the puke bucket.

John Krasinski, as actor and director, tackles the most clichéd genre in the movie business — the dysfunctional family dramedy. The big difference is he pulls it off with uncommon humor and compassion.

Ariana DeBose and Chris Messina excel in this space thriller that sizzles with Russia vs America tension but all too predictably fizzles into a mild ride that is better than you might expect while falling way short of the wonder it so wants to inspire.

A punishingly long (133 minutes), shamelessly shallow downer that makes the mistake of taking itself oh-so-seriously. Big mistake.

Forget the biopic imitations, the found concert footage in this music doc soars with 100 essential minutes of The King back on his throne and thrillingly alive on stage and off. I’d call that a must-see.

Pretty cast. Potent premise. Piss-poor execution. And so dies In Time.

Director David Gordon Green and screenwriter Peter Straughan sometimes stumble over this vast terrain of self-serving scoundrels (Trump trumps anything they can make up), but the laughs keep firing.

These kickass Barbies bring heart to a machine tooled genre.

There's Theron, like a force of nature, compelling us to go beyond TV-movie supposition and look Wuornos straight in the eye. Her raw and riveting performance makes Monster an experience you won't forget.

You can see most of the plugs in the trailer. As most fans of the early, better Bond films know, the only life left in the series is in the gadgets....As for humor, Brosnan can deaden a double-entendre faster than he can change outfits.

Submission – despite valiant performances from Stanley Tucci and Addison Timlin as the parties involved – lacks the spark it needs to spring to life.

The poster for this movie should read: Hello, Suckers!

It's good fun for a while, especially the therapy sessions that feature Luis Guzman as a gay hood with a paunch he covers in Day-Glo spandex and John Turturro as Dave's "anger buddy." John C. Reilly also scores as a bully turned Buddhist monk.

Pitt and Ford try to dig deeper, but the script undercuts them with preachy dialogue that might as well read, "Insert stereotype 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.

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.

It's a real charmer from a director who feels that a knockabout romantic farce doesn't have to be mindless -- take that, "America's Sweethearts."

What starts as freshly spun cotton candy ends as something pink, sticky and indigestible. You leave the theater wanting to puke it up.

Offensive on multiple levels -- if only the plot had any levels at all -- Black Snake Moan leaves no "Tobacco Road" cliche unsmoked. Ricci gives it her all, and then some, but even her body and Jackson's blues can't heal a movie that rockets plum off its nut.

Love Is Strange is, above all, a triumph for Lithgow and Molina, two consummate actors who bring decades of experience to artful performances that are as emotionally expressive in silence as they are in words. Acting doesn’t get better than this. Want to know what love is? Watch Lithgow and Molina and learn.

The complex movie that might have been is still on the drawing board, teasing us with a deeper story that's disappointingly out of reach.

Glen Powell runs for his life to win a reality TV jackpot in a remake of a dystopian Stephen King thriller that comes on like gangbusters—until it loses steam.

Best of all is the excitement of watching Mann use his kinetic powers as a filmmaker to tackle the new face of 21st-century warfare.

This mumbo-jumbo plays like The X Files on Prozac. No wonder the actors look narcotized.

Pointed and hilarious.

It’s good to see Eddie Murphy again as Zumundan royalty, but the laughs in this tame, PG-13 sequel to the raucous, R-rated 1988 original feel predictable and played out as they strain to slide by on nostalgia. Your call.

It's subpar sitcom.

Con Air has all the signs of a hit. That's depressing.

I can't believe that even the most rabid chick-flick masochists wouldn't gag on it.

Josh Hartnett does his best playing a serial killer and devoted dad living in the same body. But you don’t need a sixth sense to know that director M. Knight Shyamalan is running on empty as his patchwork thriller slips from disappointment to disaster.

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.

A Marvel epic that values personal connections over spectacle? Sorry adrenaline junkies, but that’s what Oscar-winning, indie director Chloe Zhao brings to her first superhero blockbuster. The slow-paced result is uneven, but memorably inclusive and unique.

Singer Andra Day’s breakout star performance as jazz legend Billie Holiday raises this chaotic film above its faults by showing how Holiday used her voice as a starting gun for the civil-rights movement despite a relentless FBI campaign to destroy her.

It's damn hard to enjoy a thriller when you don't, won't, can't believe a word of it.

Gore is kept to a minimum, a fact likely to disappoint audiences out for blood. It's a changed Schwarzenegger on view in Maggie, and the change becomes him.

What good is a wallow in sicko sadism if you take all the fun out of it?

Murder on the Orient Express offers audiences a deluxe journey to the past, but this pokey train goes off the rails about the time all the characters, except for Poirot, cease to matter.

Though saddled with hoary jokes, Goldberg at least pumps some funky life into the bland proceedings.

Maud and Roland's search for an unknowable past makes for a haunting literary detective story, but LaBute pulls off a neater trick in Possession: He makes language sexy.

The cliched script by Carol Heikkinen plays like "Dawson's Creek" in toeshoes.

Does romantic comedy have to come off as sugared stupidity? It does here.

Luckily, Stewart, Balinska, and Scott are just the angels you need when a movie needs rescuing. They make the salvage operation that is Charlie’s Angels go down easy.

It’s a promising premise—a nerdy CIA decoder (Rami Malek) turns unlikely action hero when his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered by terrorists—but the movie promises more than it delivers in terms of suspense, escalating tension and a reason for being.

At least it looks super fly. It's too bad that Director X (born Julien Christian Lutz), the Canadian short-form film master for the likes of Rihanna, Drake and Nicki Minaj, stumbles when he has to stretch a scene past video length.

In a movie with more subtext than "Rosemary's Baby," nearly everyone, including Tim Roth as Dahlia's lawyer, harbors secrets. Salles unleashes a torrent of suspense for one purpose: to plumb the violence of the mind.

Despite the lusty efforts of Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek Pinault, stripper Mike’s final whirl is a pale, generic copy of the wow that was. The new focus on female empowerment is admirable, but gender politics are no substitute for naked, guiltless bliss.

Adrien Brody deserves superlatives for his acting in the alternately mesmerizing and maddening Detachment.

Too much manic energy runs the movie off the rails.

Central Intelligence always takes the lazy way out. You go along for the ride because Hart and Johnson promise something they can't deliver: a movie as funny as they are.

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

Here's a better than average spook-house movie, mostly because Insidious decides it can haunt an audience without spraying it with blood.

The sharp economy of Lloyd's direction allows the incontestably great Streep to take impressionistic snatches of a life and build a woman in full. This is acting of the highest order.

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.

Exodus is a biblical epic that comes at you at maximum velocity but stays stirringly, inspiringly human.

This is a breakthrough star performance from a terrific actor getting a chance to let it rip.

At 134 minutes, Grindelwald can feel like an overload of homework on which we’ll we tested later. Fine for Pottermores, but a trial for us Muggles.

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 desert outpost, mostly shot in Morocco by the gifted cinematographer Chris Menges (a two-time Oscar winner for his camera work on The Killing Fields and The Mission), becomes a powerful symbol of human decency trying to hold out under the brutal siege of alleged law and order. It’s thuddingly obvious who the real barbarians are.

Light-hearted is the sweet spot for this would-be romp, yet the filmmakers keep trapping its stars in stunts that don’t play to their strengths and the dead weight that McKinnon has to lift in this lumbering spy farce would sink a lesser talent.

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.

Gondry and the gifted indie cinematographer Ellen Kuras have fun with the amateur versions of the likes of "RoboCop," "Rush Hour," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "King Kong" and "Driving Miss Daisy." These snippets are fun but frustratingly brief.

Starting with the outrageous and building from there, he ignites a slight love-on-the-run novel, creating a bonfire of a movie that confirms his reputation as the most exciting and innovative filmmaker of his generation.

Luckily, Ferrell is at his funniest being serious. Casa de Mi Padre, shot in 24 days for $6 million, is really an SNL-ish sketch stretched to feature length. But Ferrell is an hombre loco. Mi gusta.

300 is a movie blood-drunk on its own artful excess. Guys of all ages and sexes won't be able to resist it.

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.

It's all in the telling. Gruen provided grit and pungent detail. The movie settles for gloss.

Director Bryan Singer, who started the whole thing in high style with 2000's "X-Men," returns for a fourth time. Singer shows a lot of energy, but he and screenwriter Simon Kinberg (Fantastic Four, yuck) let the movie get way overcrowded.

Sure it repeats everything it did the last three times, but thanks to Steve Carell’s lovable grump of a Gru and those wild and crazy Minions, the random lunacy remains hard to resist.

Who knew? The work of the Monuments Men is fresh territory for film, and Clooney builds the story with intriguing detail and scope.

A decent thriller that should have been dazzling, is nothing if not topical.

Stroman should have studied the original Producers that Brooks directed in 1968, with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. It answers the question "Where did they go right?"

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

Triple 9 is no "Reservoir Dogs," but it is a twisty, terrific ride.

Who needs iambic pentameter when you have Jet Li around?

Overheated, underdone farce. Race for the exit.

The actors, especially Grace, fight hard against a schizoid script (the kids are rubes one sec, hipsters the next) and cotton-candy direction from Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde). It's a losing battle.

Scorches the screen with a badass bravado all its own. Smart, sexy, funny and dangerous this high-wire act is a movie and a half.