Peter Travers

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.

Harmless girlie trifle. Or at least it means to be.

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.

The result, sadly, is a mess.

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.

What's lacking is emotional weight. It's sad to watch a talented cast, including Bill Nunn as Henry's physical therapist and Donald Moffat, Rebecca Miller and Kirby Mitchell as co-workers, selling bromides.

The scenery is glorious; you can almost feel the sunshine and smell the wine. But Crowe and Scott are bulls in Mayle's china shop. Like an assertive Burgundy served with a delicate fish, they're a classic wrong pairing.

What a shame that Kelly's pacing doesn't run as fast as his imagination. Instead of sweeping you along, The Box just sits there like something unclaimed at lost and found. Damaged goods.

The film falls short; only Peet goes the whole nine yards.

Director Luke Greenfield, the auteur behind "The Animal," starring Rob Schneider, wants to pass off this limp-dick farce as social satire. Ha!

Here's a true S&M date movie. Only sadistic men and masochistic women could love it.

At the risk of understatement, The Matrix Revolutions sucks.

Only landlubbers would resist the rousing action of man versus leviathan. Sure it's old-school. So what. Howard puts heart, soul and every computerized whale trick in the book into crafting a seafaring adventure to rock your boat.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

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

This movie, with its flashbacks to past sins and traumas, rests squarely on Berry, a mesmerizer who makes every moment count.

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

It's not a pretty picture, but it is a pretty funny one when Gene Hackman shows up as William B. Tensy, a Palm Beach tobacco tycoon.

It could have been the 21st-century Showgirls. I wouldn't have missed that for the world. Instead, Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguilera playing drag queen versions of themselves with all the vitality of Madame Tussauds wax dolls, is a bust that lacks the pizzaz and bugfuck nuttiness of Paul Verhoeven's 1995 trash epic.

Wasikowska, from "Alice in Wonderland" to "Jane Eyre," is an actress of translucent expressiveness. And Hopper has his father's brooding intensity and a quicksilver humor all his own. They are both so good, I suggest you dive into the story unfolding in their eyes rather than the banal one in the script.

Cruise finds the core of Reacher in his eyes, with a haunted gaze that says this lone wolf is still on a mission and still a long way from home. That's the Reacher Lee Child created in his books. And Cruise does him proud.

Kate Winslet can do anything ... except save this movie from quirky overkill.

Another Frankenstein throwback (“Poor Things” has nothing to fear) dressed up as a 1980’s teen sex comedy about a goth girl (Kathryn Newton) with the hots for an undead Victorian pianist (Cole Sprouse). Diablo Cody’s devilish script is sadly tamed by a PG-13 rating.

After 44 years Jamie Lee Curtis bows out of her iconic role with slashing feminist fire, but if you believe blood-lusting Michael Myers is really hanging up his mask in this divisive scam of a Halloween ending then you don’t know how greed powers Hollywood’s gift for resurrection.

Langella delivers a master class in acting. He's playing Leonard Schiller, an aging author aching from the loss of his wife, a weak heart and literary neglect.

This movie isn't over-the-top -- it doesn't know where the top is. Trash addicts will eat up every graphic minute, even if they prefer to wait for the DVD.

The language is leaden, the pace glacial and the characters indecipherable. It's easier to read the actors -- they all seem eager to win an Oscar. Fat chance.

Redford plays the game of filmmaking to reveal what he holds sacred: story, character, feeling, thoughtful pacing, and an alertness of nuances of honor and shame that most movies skip in the rush to the rush.

Never achieves liftoff.

What's left is a lot of strenuous playacting when what's called for is the finesse of the Japanese original. Skip this stub-toed substitute.

Emmerich can crack the whip on computer pixels like nobody’s business. But in sacrificing a reckoning on the human toll of war for cardboard characterization and showoff fx, he’s left an empty space where the soul of the film should be.

The first Young Guns, in 1988, was an endurance test for all but those who think ogling young actors in tight britches is a fascinating way to spend two hours. Though it seems impossible, the sequel is even more excruciating.

Hiddleston is not what's wrong with this movie. But damn near everything else is.

Reynolds and Jackson make this summer lunacy go down easy with their banter and bullet-dodging skills. They're the only reason that The Hitman’s Bodyguard doesn't completely sink into the generic quicksand from whence it came.

You'd get more of a jolt from Angela Lansbury on "Murder, She Wrote" and more intellectual stimulation from a cozy game of Clue.

Don't ask whether or not you should take The Day After Tomorrow seriously. Don't take it at all.

Director Brett Ratner could boast solid source material in the five-issue Radical Comics series Hercules: The Thracian Wars by the late Steve Moore. They had a shot at something here, and they blew it.

Jokester Karl Urban leads a cast of battling gamer brawlers against a plot that doesn’t exist. No matter. All you need to love it is blind devotion

In a twist ending, Stewart leaves us wondering if gaming the system is preferable to changing it. Can a political satire that dances on the border between silly and profound really make us take off the blinders, even for a few hours?

So flimsy it gives froth a bad name.

The movie has been on ice awaiting release for over a year, owing to the bankruptcy of its studio, Relativity. But some of the jokes were moldy long before that happened. Masterminds owes us our two hours back.

I'd watch the vibrant Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana in anything, but The Time Traveler's Wife is pushing it.

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

The real action in Silver City happens on the fringes, where the mischief is. Daryl Hannah is spice incarnate as Dickie's sexy screw-up sister. Billy Zane plays a lobbyist with insinuating soullessness. And Dreyfuss feasts on the snappiest lines.

Watching John Travolta ease into a role is always a pleasure, but this film version of Nelson DeMille's 1992 best-selling mystery novel is a lurid mess.

Lowry took chances with her novel. The movie of The Giver takes none. It's safe, sorry and a crashing bore.

Even a double dose of the great Robert De Niro taking on the grandpa roles of feuding mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, can’t lift this gimmicky, grating, draggy attempt to join the pantheon of classic gangster cinema. It’s a losing battle.

Every attempt at fright lands with a deadening thud. For shock value, Wingard and cowriter Simon Barrett simply repeat stuff from the original film, only this time louder, lamer, duller and stupider. Scarier? That got lost in the woods with whatever you spent for a movie ticket.

The hugely enjoyable Rock of Ages is saved by its music, a tasty brew drawn from Def Leppard, Journey, Foreigner, Bon Jovi, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison and Whitesnake. It's near impossible not to rock along.

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

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

The big problem with Big Trouble, despite a fine cast and director (Sonnenfeld made "Get Shorty" and "Men in Black"), is that the damn thing isn't funny.

Critics will score Semi-Pro on its missed shots. My guess is that audiences will do what they always do with Ferrell: remember when he killed them laughing.

The British author's wickedly twisted children's book is transferred to the Deep South in the 1960s to provide a racial diversity meant to speak to a 2020 audience with a pertinent understatement that is otherwise in short supply.

The main problem with this treatise on racial politics undercover as an exercise in suspense is that the director, Neil LaBute, didn't write the script.

No trite, tear-jerking cliché goes undrooled in the script by director Kirk Jones.

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.

There's a difference between exposing misogyny and crassly exploiting it.

It's big, loud, ludicrous and edited into visual incomprehension. But pity the fool who lets that stand in the way of enjoying The A-Team.

Powerfully moving and fanatically obtuse in equal doses. The typical star rating doesn't apply, because scenes range from classic to poor and all stops in between.

Irresistibly silly.

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

Miles below the Woodman's class. It's possible that a more astringent script could have provided fuel for the actors and A-list director Ron Howard.

There are valid criticisms of Wonder Wheel as a film that feels more like a stage play – its claustrophobic atmosphere can be stifling. But even covering familiar ground, Allen finds the blunt truth at its core. As Ginny is stripped of her fantasies and exposed to the harsh glare of reality, Winslet stands her ground, as if to say attention must be paid. It should be. Her performance is absolutely astounding.

If you fell for the 2013 original — and surprisingly, many did — then Now You See Me 2 has got your number. For the rest of us, however, this longer, louder sequel adds up to what one character calls "a sack of nada."

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

An opportunity missed.

You leave Red Tails thinking of what might have been instead of what is – a missed opportunity.

Colin Farrell rolls the dice that maybe he can save this mess of an Edward Berger movie about a gambler’s addiction. Not this time

Even the best actors -- and I'd rank Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo among their generation's finest -- can't save a movie that aims for tragedy but stalls at soap opera.

Jennifer Aniston is a friend in need of a movie script that will really let her talent blossom. Picture Perfect is too TV-ish and timid a romantic farce to do the trick.

Yikes! Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda direct strictly for short-attention spans on a fruit-loopy palette that made me want to puke. Had Dr. Seuss lived (he died in 1991), I'm confident he would have puked as well.

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.

What hurts is that filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love did it better just a few months ago in "Eden," about the French house movement since the 1990s. In this movie, James tells Cole the ideal EDM track would work up the heart-rate of the crowd to 128 beats-per-minute. We Are Your Friends never even gets us to break a sweat.

Solidly crafted, impeccably acted and self-important in the way that Oscar loves, Extremely Loud is also incredibly close to exploitation.

I've been told the movie plays best with very young girls. That's an insult very young girls should not be forced to endure.

Count this rehab a success.

Doing his own singing (an uncanny imitation), Spacey is a marvel.

It's getting harder to sustain a rooting interest in the career of Johnny Knoxville.

Cage and Baruchel work hard to stay accessible, but the computer-generated effects come on like heavy artillery blowing away any hint of flesh and blood. The Sorcerer's Apprentice should be rated U for Untouched by Human Hands.

Howard struggles with the role Kidman nailed. And the graphic nude scene in which "proudy slave" Timothy (Isaach De Bankole) puts a towel over Grace's head before ravishing her pale body is as rugged on the audience as it is on the actors.

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

Even Hugh Jackman's indisputable star power can't light up the pretentious, pseudo-poetic, sci-fi murk of this thundering misfire, which will only make you remember other, better movie mindbenders. ‘Blade Runner’ anyone?

A rowdy blast because the spiky young cast treats the played-out script like virgin territory. That's acting!

Critics and audiences should unite to KO this loser.

Miller's monochrome palette, splashed with color that shines like a whore's lip gloss, doesn't startle as it once did. It's like running into an ex-love and realizing that, damn, the thrill is gone.

Strains credulity at every turn.

As I write these words, I feel myself experiencing a loss of consciousness, wondering how this recipe for sugar shock could interest any sentient being over the age of nine.

Tyler, a true beauty, gives the role a valiant try, but her range is too limited to play this amalgam of female perfection.

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.

Millie Bobby Brown fights a heroic battle as a princess bride up against a digital dragon, but it’s not the damsel but the audience that will suffer distress from the nonstop, numbing repetition that turns this Netflix movie dull and dreary way too fast.

And Pfeiffer gives a funny, scrappy performance that makes you feel a committed teacher's fire to make a difference.

The true audiences for Fifty Shades of Grey are gluttons for punishment — by boredom.

The script by William Goldman (Misery) is based on fact, and when the movie sticks to fact (in an unprecedented bout of man-eating, the lions took just a few months to slaughter 130 bridge builders), the result is a hypnotic spectacle. The natives fear that the lions are unkillable demons. The hunters — Douglas and Kilmer spar splendidly in their roles — aim to prove them wrong. Hopkins, unfortunately, won’t leave well enough alone.

Aside from Hardy’s full-on commitment, Capone seems too dramatically dull and laborious to support its ambition as a subversive biopic or a deeply personal take on public vilification.

There's no code to decipher. Da Vinci is a dud -- a dreary, droning, dull-witted adaptation of Dan Brown's religioso detective story.

[Kalvert] best serves the movie by simply focusing on DiCaprio, who communicates the spirit and blunt truth of the diaries even when the movie keeps trying to soften the blow.

Nothing the skunk does can begin to match the stench of this movie.

Funny but perilously slight.

It's gross as hell.

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

Most teen flicks just fake being fueled by anarchy. But the gut-bustingly funny Project X is the real deal. It's raunchy, reckless and ready to party. What's not to like?

Vaughn and Favreau are so money, just like they were in "Swingers."

It strikes me that their teasing and one-upmanship are more brother and sister at play than lovers in heat. Cruise and Diaz are in it for the action rush.

Oh, how good actors can trap themselves in drivel.

It's a frisky romantic comedy with a great title and wonderfully appealing performances.

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.

Based on William Boyd's 1981 novel, the film has a touch of Evelyn Waugh — though the satire is served dry, it has still got a kick.

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

It’s slog, slog, slog, all the way.

Which one of these women is the most irredeemable? Coming to grips with that question is what gives the flawed but fascinating Every Secret Thing its power to haunt.

You wouldn’t be wrong if you’re thinking this wish-fulfillment tale of a working-class woman bum-rushing the corporate world is trying to be a "Working Girl" for millennials. And while it can’t deliver the boundary-pushing kick of that seminal 1988 Melanie Griffith-vs.-the glass ceiling smash, the charms this movie does possess — its star being chief among them — will get you over the gaping plot holes and lackluster dialogue.

If you're thinking "yuck," you're right. I added the extra star for Zooey Deschanel, who is so delicious as his honey that you want not to say no to Yes Man.

There’s a simple reason why it’s hard to imagine why anyone, much less everybody, would willingly spend time with Frank and Lindsay in this agonizing endurance test of a movie. They’re no damn fun.

From the Emeralds doing "Acapella" to Davi himself taking the lead on "So Much in Love," The Dukes is damn near impossible to resist.

Karmel delivers feminist fun even a guy can get.

Lacks the active verb it promises. It defines blah.

After a lively start -- the sorority sisters, shaken by the slightest imperfection in themselves, cannot cope with handicapped athletes -- the film smooths its rough edges and reduces complex characters to sitcom stooges. Call it an opportunity missed.

McCarthy falls into the same trap she did in "Tammy" and "The Boss," the two other movies she wrote with her husband/director Ben Falcone. By that we mean she allows her laugh instincts to get buried in a blanket of bland.

There I sit, suffering total numbness of body and brain, no longer having to wonder what it might be like to be buried alive in gooey marshmallow.

In between scenes of the muscleheads torturing their victim, Bay indulges his taste for treating women as sluts and grisly brutality as a nifty excuse for a cheap laugh. Pain and Gain is personal all right. You leave these characters with the distinct impression that they're Bay's kind of people.

Peckinpah rubbed our noses in the bloodlust. Lurie invites objectivity. He gets strong, complex performances from actors who won't be painted into corners.

Writer-director Mike Binder, who worked beautifully with Costner on 2005's "The Upside of Anger," finds himself on the downside of juggling stereotypes.

Somewhere along the line, Shanley let his gentle fable about the fear of love, responsibility and commitment degenerate into crude farce. And he has only himself to blame.

Somehow, Lucille's plight is meant to comment astutely on the civil-rights movement. Now that IS crazy.

There's nothing ‘tomorrow’ about a recycled sci-fi jumble that places all its bets on yesterday.

Abandon all hope of logic, you who enter here.

"Irritating" doesn't begin to describe Julia Roberts as Katherine, an art-history prof who arrives at Wellesley in 1953.

Gorgeously shot by Enrique Chediak, American Assassin may be too slick for its own good, but O'Brien cuts deep enough to make you root for a Rapp franchise. That's saying something.

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.

Susan Minot’s resplendent novel of a dying woman…stumbles on its way to the screen.

Hugh Jackman acts his heart out as a parent unable to cope with his clinically depressed son, but even he can’t save this poor relation to The Father from descending into two hours of misery porn.

Whatever Works feels like something out of time and, worse, out of step. Hell, Allen wrote the script back in the 1970s for Zero Mostel.

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.

The film's major sin of omission: the music.

How the hell did Ben Affleck, 29, wind up replacing Harrison Ford, 59, as our hero? Who's next as Ryan -- Ozzy Osbourne's guppy son, Jack? Chronology hasn't been this royally fucked with since Memento.

The pop diva goes down with the bubbles in this hopelessly shallow soap opera.

Slim pickings.

What Murphy's doing isn't acting; it's masturbation.

Brosnan, on a roll with this film and "The Ghost Writer," vividly etches the emotional fissures in a man coming apart. The Greatest takes a piece out of you.

The perfect summer movie, that is if you're eight years old or under. For the rest of us, the sequel to the first "Fantastic Four" that miraculously amassed more than $150 million in 2005, is a plotless, brainless, witless bore.

Justice League is a decent crowdpleaser, preferable in every way to the candy-assed cynicism of Suicide Squad. But sometimes shadows need to fall to show us what to be scared of. In the end, this all-star team-up is too afraid of the dark to work its way into our dreams.

Start hating me now, Twihards, but the sexless, bloodless, padded and plodding Breaking Dawn, Part 1 is the worst Twilight movie to date. (I don't get it either.)

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

As a thriller, Firewall is flabby and familiar.

Listen to me: trash can surprise you. So don't get all elitist about the so-called cheap thrills in Mr. Brooks.

The film ultimately gives in to a case of TV-movie blahs.

Christensen is the only jolt of excitement in this turgid soap opera.

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

You'll notice that the actors are way overqualified for this nonsense. But the kick they get out of one another is what pulls you in. Traeger's script does more than strain credulity, it administers multiple fractures.

Writer-director Angelina Jolie's attempt to emulate European art cinema is a slow, sodden, stupefyingly dull take on a 1970s marriage gone bad.

The comic pairing of Jack Black and Jason Momoa makes this video game-turned-PG-movie pablum seem better than the cash grab it is. But not by much. Still, there’s no shame in being strictly kids’ stuff that knows how to serve and entertain its audience.

This hot mess got booed by the snobs at Cannes, but there's no denying its profane energy.

Unforgettable is definitely the wrong title for a movie you want to erase from your memory the second it ends.

Here’s a sequel we did not need, trapping stars Joaquin Phoenix and the glorious Lady Gaga in a joyless musical retread of moldy ideas. Talk about sucking the life out of a party. Says she to Joker during a fantasy scene, "Come on, baby, let's give the people what they want." I'm still waiting.

It's a perversely comic movie ride into the wild blue of crime and punishment.

Can no one save the talented Sandler from himself? I hate this movie. Click. I hate this movie. Click. I hate this movie. Click.

Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland can do anything – except, perhaps, save this sentimental drool bucket of senior cinema.

Cate Blanchett can do anything, even play Bob Dylan, but she can't save this creaky sequel to her star-making 1998 biopic of Elizabeth I.

Its value is unquestionable as drama and moral provocation.

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.

The team of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala drops the ball with this droopy, snail-paced prigs-in-wigs movie.

Lee offers no reassurance, no uplift, no call for all races to join hands and spout liberal platitudes. What he does offer is a devastating portrait of black America pushed to the limit, with the outcome still to be written. There’s only one way to do the wrong thing about Do the Right Thing: that would be to ignore it.

It's a lame trailer, but the movie itself is much, much worse.

The F&F franchise ran out of gas half way into the 2001 original.

Kasdan has inexplicably reduced flesh-and-blood characters to cartoons.

The film's problems lie with the lack of spark between a wired Dunst and a bland Bloom, and the meltdown of Drew's mother (Susan Sarandon), who grieves by tap-dancing.

Jewison dodges the issues in the script by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) to focus on cat-and-mouse chases that kill interest.

Crowe's tantalizing film sticks with you.

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.

Funny? Sometimes. Scary? Almost never. PP&Z spins merrily and menacingly along for about half an hour. Bad luck that the movie's running time is 107 minutes.

You can't shut the door on this spellbinder. It gets into your head.

You can feel the desperation of the filmmakers as they throw in fist fights, car chases, and, yes, more wig changes to give an illusion of momentum to a grab bag of botched ideas. No sale.

Director Susan Seidelman takes aim at the box office with the team of movie queen Meryl Streep and TV slob queen Roseanne Barr. She misfires. Streep gets all the jokes, and Barr, looking stranded, plays it straight. Worse, nobody’s bothered to write them a big scene together. But for a while you can see the possibilities.

The pleasures here come almost exclusively from Schumer and Hawn playing off each other like the rock stars of comedy they are.

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

Slack direction fails to touch a nerve. Martin was scarier and funnier extracting Bill Murray's molars without Novocaine in "Little Shop of Horrors." Now that was one crazy dentist.

It's all part of the joke. Soderbergh may have created a bit of a mess with Full Frontal, but it's a playful and scrappy mess.

It's too bad. Jones deserved better than a biopic with a TV-movie heart.

As played by the spectacular Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hesher is the id run rampant.

Best consumed with pizza and lots of brewskis, Joe Carnahan's Smokin' Aces is shamelessly and unapologetically a guy movie. It's lewd, crude and loaded with shootouts and hot lesbo action.

As sexist propaganda, the film is shameless.

The Americanized version is miscast, misguided and misbegotten.

Though the movie ups the TV ante on nudity, language and violence, Lynch's control falters. But if inspiration is lacking, talent is not.

Jennifer Lopez and all the mothers out there deserve better than this gross, cringey gorefest about a military-trained assassin (JLo) who makes up to the pre-teen daughter she gave up at birth by instructing her in the fine art of killing bad guys. Happy Mother’s Day, indeed.

This lame-ass chick-flick sampling of "Crazy Heart" is more like country Kryptonite.

Hilary Swank looks like she’d rather be anywhere else than starring as a journalist and grief-stricken mother in this overblown, undercooked drug drama about America’s opioid crisis that makes its scant running time of 89 minutes feel like a torturous eternity.

It's easy to root for George. The movie deserves the finger.

Francis Coppola's revision of his 1983 film of S.E. Hinton's best seller The Outsiders is funny, touching and revelatory, with twenty-two minutes of added footage and a new soundtrack featuring Elvis Presley. [Review of re-release]

So why oh why is The Expendables such a limp-dick bust? Because Stallone forgets to include non-spazzy direction, a coherent plot, dialogue that actors can speak without cringing, stunts that don't fizzle, blood that isn't digital and an animating spirit that might convince us to give a damn.

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.

When a chick flick goes wrong -- and this one hits a dead end in hell -- it's a wipeout.

The comic screenplay...pivots on a toothless premise: Russ needs to get in touch with his inner child.

It's no mystery that the target audience for this G-rated bubblegum fantasy is tweens, parents of tweens and the occasional pervert. They'll be so pleased. Anything for the rest of humanity? Not so much.

Friedkin turns on the juice and Jones and Jackson let it rip.

A dreary film that's damn near torture to sit through.

What makes Legends such an entertaining male weepie is the star shine. Though the admirable Quinn has the toughest role, Pitt carries the picture.

Magicians have been pulling rabbits out of hats for ages. And yet, with all this talent, no one can make a decent script materialize.

Tom Holland, of Spider-man fame, breathes dramatic fire as a PTSD-afflicted Army medic in Iraq who returns home as a bank robber to feed his opiod and heroin habit, but his glossy, overlong film is failed Oscar bait that drowns him in addiction cliches.

Uproarious and unexpectedly biting.

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

What’s missing are the moments in between that actually make up a life and give it emotional resonance.

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

Lots of talented young singers decorate the scenery, notably Jeremy Jordan (late of Broadway's failed Bonnie & Clyde but soon-to-open in Newsies)who has vocal and acting chops that shine even in this bucket of Glee Goes Gospel cornpone.

Call this cowpoke comedy "Blazing Saddles" for millennials. Or just call it icky.

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

The film has no soul. An epic about this day of infamy should shake you to the core. But the real infamy about Pearl Harbor is that when you exit, you don't feel a thing.

Though shot for maximum moodiness by the gifted Peter Deming ("Mulholland Drive"), the movie straps you in for a head trip that promises hallucinatory wonders but delivers the same old Hollywood formula with sugar on top.

True Kingsman fans will appreciate that director Matthew Vaughn reacted to digs at "The Secret Service" for being gratuitously violent, sexually adolescent and politically reactionary by laying all of it on three times thicker.

Patrick Lussier is listed as The Director, though I saw no evidence of anyone in control.

Ever since "True Blood" glamoured me, Twilight seems even more sexless and toothless. I prefer my undead with a little life in them.

It's a heavy thematic load for a single movie to handle — especially this one, which nearly collapses from its burden. But it's hard to fault director David Yates, who captained the last four Harry Potter movies, for having ambition.

This putrid dish marks a new low for director Roland Joffe.

Ever since Knives Out snapped the whodunit back to wicked life, it’s harder to accept a lazy, dim-witted mystery that wastes the starshine of Sandler and Aniston on 89 minutes of sequel piffle. One of those new AI bots could have coughed up a script with more personality.

It's the strafing satire that's MIA.

It’s “The Bad Seed meets The Omen,” and it’s predictable, plodding and dim-witted every step of the way. To be fair, if you like watching someone pull a shard of glass out of her eyeball, you won’t be disappointed. But there’s a difference between gory and scary that this movie doesn’t seem to grasp.

You can certainly argue just how speculative this film version of Churchill is as history. But Cox's performance cannot be faulted. It's a master class in acting.

Take a tired formula...Stir with a director, Florent Siri, who has no shame about stealing every sadistic suspense trick from the Die Hard series. Serve to a gullible audience willing to pay top dollar for secondhand goods.

There was a time when guys would grab a six-pack and watch this kind of flick at a drive-in. I mean that as a compliment.

A lighter-than-air comedy than runs on pure fizz.

This Minions prequel would have to go some to make it as flimsy, but Steve Carell is pricelessly funny doing the voice of a pre-teen wannabe villain wrangling an army of goggle-wearing little buggers and you could do worse in a search for animated family fun

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.

With everything going for this dystopian thriller about humans being replaced by replicants, including two hottie Irish Oscar nominees in Saorise Ronan and Paul Mescal as young marrieds in crisis, this stifling sci-fi misfire hits theaters as an epic botch job.

Delivery Man is one joke stretched to the breaking point. Mine was reached.

Despite an intriguing premise that suggests a ‘Lord of the Flies’ in space, Neil Burger’s fun-free thriller about young hotties playing astronauts quickly devolves into is a dud that never makes sense of its borrowed convictions or any sense at all.

The bloodsucking Count is back again, but this time in a strangely bloodless love story that even wickedly seductive fangboy Caleb Landry Jones can’t save from the cliché stockpile.

Doesn't seem directed at all; you half expect the actors to crash into each other. Still, give me the attempted satire of Head of State over the racial stereotyping of "Bringing Down the House" anyday. You can feel a mind at work when you watch Rock.

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

Girl 6 is shameless stuff -- pompous, sentimental and attitudinizing. To swat the Spikeman with his own symbol, the film feels like he phoned it in.

How could a 2009 raunchfest that slapped a grin on my face I couldn't unglue degenerate into a cold dish of sloppy seconds?

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

Queen Latifah and Ludacris drive right into a brick wall of action cliches.

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.

You have to admire Nakata's skill at letting the dead run free while hinting that we may have more to fear from the living. With a braver step in that direction, this middling movie would ring more than box-office bells.

How can a film look so radiant and be so hollow?

Better than Man of Steel but below the high bar set by Nolan's Dark Knight, Dawn of Justice is still a colossus, the stuff that DC Comics dreams are made of for that kid in all of us who yearns to see Batman and Superman suit up and go in for the kill.

This comedy about a death is a funeral for the audience.

The Village, even when its step falters, is on to something more provocative than seeing dead people. Its power, unrelated to digital monsters, comes from the tension building inside the characters.

Is it the clumsy script or the switch in directors -- Beeban Kidron in for Sharon Maguire -- that has sucked out the charm of the original and replaced it with crude pratfalls and enough shag gags to stuff the next three Austin Powers movies?

Martin Sheen makes his directing debut with this military drama mixed with laughs. It isn’t awful — just bland, which is worse.

Jobs is a one-man show that needed to go for broke and doesn't. My guess is that Jobs would give it a swat.

This one-of-a-kind spellbinder from first-time director Laurence Dunmore is not afraid to shock. Depp is a raunchy wonder, especially in a time-capsule-worthy opening monologue.

As an action fix to hold you before the summer explosions start, you could do worse than The Losers. It’s no more than an efficient time-killer.

Chockablock with things we're not supposed to notice: that Roberts is wasted; that she and Cusack have no characters to play, so it's virtually impossible to understand why she loves him or vice versa; that the script provides comedy without bite and romance without resonance.

Killer Elite pretends to be fact-based and true to its 1980s period. Just know it's all baloney.

Questions: Did everyone involved in this botched thriller OD on speed? Does jimmy-legs director D.J. Caruso think if he slowed down the action we'd figure out how stupid the plot is?

Hackman and Freeman will pin you to your seat.

This lumbering retread, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, is mostly old ground slavishly covered. There are wider gaps between the jokes this time, and the slick style of British director Paul Weiland, best known for commercials (Schweppes, Heineken), can't disguise the fact that he's selling stale goods.

There's nothing to keep the pulse alive after the first quake. Peyton throws in a second quake and a tsunami, but after a while buildings tumbling into the ocean are just a bunch of pixels turning everything into visual mush and leaving audiences in a digital stupor.

American Pastoral, Roth's magnum opus, needed a film revolutionary on the order of Paul Thomas Anderson, Alejandro González Iñárritu or the Coen brothers to re-imagine it for the screen. McGregor's timid approach does no one any favors, including Roth – and especially the audience.

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

I found myself wishing that Taymor would turn off the sound and fury and let The Tempest speak for itself. My wish wasn't granted.

Not since Gus Van Sant inexplicably directed a shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock's "Psycho" has a thriller been copied with so little point or impact.

Promises a road movie of blissful comic romance and delivers a series of dramatic dead ends.

Reeks like something produced from a squatting position.

Affleck is modest and engaging, which keeps the movie out of "Gigli" territory. But it's close.

The Vow is a sopping hankie of a romance for women who love to suffer and the men who love them.

The great Kingsley Ben-Adir catches the spirit of the Jamaican legend who became the face and voice of reggae and the Rastafarian conscience of his people. But this safe, shallow, family-sanctioned biopic only gives us snippets of songs and scraps of a life.

I laughed, then I wished it was funnier, then I just wished it would end.

This socially-conscious horror film keeps tripping over its big ideas, but Janelle Monae—in her first starring film role—blazes with ferocity and feeling.

There's no denying the movie's high spirits or its irresistible invitation to shake your sillies out.

Equals is really about possibility in a world gone cold from insisting that things can't change. Sound like any place you know?

The Girl in the Spider’s Web, directed with gun-to-the-head urgency by Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe), settles for being a tension-packed, go-go-go thriller that will pump adrenaline into your nervous system for nearly all of its suspenseful if implausible 117 minutes.

How the hell can you take an SNL skit that runs 90 seconds and stretch it to a 90-minute feature? Sounds excruciating. But MacGruber breaks the jinx by putting the skit in the context of a 1980s action movie and creating its own brand of explosive lunacy.

This misbegotten sequel to 2014’s not-so-hot Maleficent is a torturous exercise in brightly-colored monotony that chokes on repetitive screenwriting, amateurish directing, paycheck performances and digital hardware for a heart. Kids under five (months) might be fooled, but sentient filmgoers know a scam when they see one.

A slipshod sequel that looks tossed together over a weekend by people who couldn't care less.

Because Allen hasn't lost his knack for slapstick with a sting, Anything Else hits its mark more often than not.

Colorful and exciting, as far as it goes. But Boyle and Hodge pull back on their usual wit and grit.

Geena Davis and her director and husband, Renny Harlin, recover from their "Cutthroat Island" fiasco in grand style, and screenwriter Shane Black ("The Last Boy Scout") juggles jolts and jokes with a mad fervor that almost earns him his $4 million salary.

No matter how much money this clunker makes, this is a movie that never should have happened.

Since the new Recall is totally witless, don't expect laughs. Originality and coherence are also notably MIA.

The title of this limp retread of "Minority Report" -- both films are based on stories by Philip K. Dick -- presumably refers to the reason the big names involved did this movie.

Character gets sacrificed for just another true-crime drama.

What have you done to The Wolfman, Hollywood? It’s got no kick to it. No fun either. And no real scares, which is more unforgivable.

As for the ladies who think any kind of chick flick is preferable to football, be careful what you wish for.

This is the safe and sorry Disney version, suitable for anyone under 10 or gullible to the point of idiocy.

Roth takes three powerhouse actors -- Julianne Moore as the mother, Samuel L. Jackson as the cop who interrogates her and Edie Falco as another woman who lost her son -- and reduces their talents to rubble and their characters to screeching cliches.

The Delia Owens bestseller about sex and murder in the Carolinas comes to the screen as an antiseptic, airbrushed, miscast misfire that takes so few risks with the publishing phenom that it feels more embalmed than a freshly imagined version of the book.

Murphy, teaming again with his "Norbit" director Brian Robbins, is assuming we'll all line up for lazyass toilet jokes and pay for the privilege. Prove him wrong, people, please.

A movie about death that stubbornly refuses to come to life.

Plays like an unholy union of "The Natural" and "The Prince of Tides." Too bad...Build a movie as a shrine to baseball and they will come. Suckers!

This third hunk of Pie is a worn-out gross-out, a remnant of a genre that now seems so five minutes ago.

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.

Jammed with story threads that don’t cohere, Cirque commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It’s bloodless.

The film is for horny pups of all ages who relish the memory of reading stroke books under the covers with a flashlight. Verhoeven has spent $49 million to reproduce that dirty little thrill on the big screen.

A stuffy, soggy slog of a movie that fails to generate sparks or a lick of dramatic sense.

While this sanitized and superficial Amy Winehouse biopic flounders around in search of focus, new star Marisa Abela gives her blazing all to capturing the late singer’s short, turbulent life and lasting art with stunning ferocity and feeling.

I wanted Paquin, who deserves better than this, to call on her vampire pals from "True Blood" and yell, "sic em!" Oh wait, they're already bloodless.

The haunting, heart-piercing Elah isn't perfect. It's something better: essential.

Dark Phoenix doesn’t just suck big time. It’s the worst movie ever in the X-Men series.

Props to Kutcher for going to surprising, painful places. There's something haunted in his portrayal that hits hard and sticks.

A manipulative script about dog reincarnation that whacks your emotions like a piñata – that's forgivable. Not this. It shouldn't happen to a dog.

I'd rather be buried in a mound of Floridian chad than watch director Donald Petrie force Bullock to jump through another desperately unfunny comic hoop.

Simultaneously full of itself and full of sh--, Brooklyn's Finest is a cop movie so shallow, dumb, derivative and infuriating that it feels like a parody of bad cop movies.

It's a paranoid thriller without suspense, urgency or a single new thing to say.

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

When the movie stalls, it’s Enzo to the rescue. Since the film covers a decade in the lives of its characters, two dogs take turns playing Enzo, at age 2 and 9. They’re both picks of the litters. And Ventimiglia contributes an emotional honesty that serves him well even when the plot sinks into marshmallow.