Peter Travers

The code talkers deserved better than a hollow tribute.

You leave Lady thinking there are still voices in Shyamalan's head well worth a listen.

Angelina Jolie fires up the best actress Oscar race as opera legend Maria Callas, but director Pablo Larraín's muffled cinematic take on the prima donna’s last days commits the cardinal sin that Callas never did as an artist by leaving us on the outside looking in.

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

I'd see Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in anything, but this is pushing it. Admission is so slight that a breeze could flatten it.

The visuals dazzle, the plotting not so much in this gender-switched take on “Hamlet” as a warrior princess revenge epic from Japanese anime master Mamoru Hosoda.

Sebastian Stan, the Winter Soldier himself, shows he can turn up the heat with costar Denise Gough for a romcom romp in Greece that starts on a sexy, swooshing high before draining out the fun for dramatic insights that never come. Bummer.

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

Like the 2010 original, The Expendables 2 is all sound and fury signifying nothing, when at the very least it should add up to big, dumb fun.

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.

What should have been an affecting film becomes a rank blend of sentiment and sadism in the hands of Bruce Beresford, the Australian writer and director.

Netflix broke the bank on this formula action epic fronted by A-listers Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans as assassins for hire. It’s good enough to rank as watchable. But even in these inflationary times, shouldn't 200 million bucks buy us more than good enough?

Poised between goofy and godawful and plagued by rewrites and reshoots, this 33rd entry in the Marvel cinematic universe is in serious disrepair. The MCU, once the spawner of glories, is stuck in a rut. The time for a rethink is now.

Josh Lucas plays Haskins with a no-bull vigor that comes in handy when the script saddles him with all-bull platitudes.

Paltrow looks glam even in death, which only supports the notion, raised by Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes, that the movie would be about a "Sylvia Suicide Doll." Good call.

Kid'n Play have charm, but it's disturbing to see them settle for the slick. Their rap used to stand for something; now it's just easy listening.

There is one high note. You can approach Speed Racer as the trippiest stonerfest since Stanley Kubrick took his space odyssey.

A sweet, soft-centered pastoral drama that’s never as tough-minded as you want it to be. Thankfully, in her feature debut as a filmmaker, playwright Jessica Swale shows a genuine flair with actors.

Open Range copies the rain and flood of the Clint Eastwood classic but can't match it for dark-night-of-the-soul brilliance.

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

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

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.

A tale of alien abduction, Proxmity serves as an in-and-out impressive calling card for debuting feature writer and director Eric Demeusy.

A bit of a stiff as cinema, rich in atmospherics but starved for the human spark that might uncover the man behind the myth.

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.

Self-importance sinks this one like a stone.

An erotic thriller with flaws.

By the end, when the three Shafts hit the streets in identical long coats like something out of The Matrix, the message is clear. Rough justice is back to stay. Women are out of the picture, except for sex. Dinosaurs again walk the earth with misogynistic and homophobic impunity. These are the laughs, folks. Don’t be surprised if they stick in your throat.

Peet does it with a twinkle, finding class among the crass.

As always, Tom Hanks is in there pitching, but this time it’s mostly softballs. The cliched plot about a reformed grumpy old man is so obvious you can see it from outer space.

The once playful runt of the Marvel litter has come down with a case of bloated excess and despite the ever-likable Paul Rudd as Ant-Man and a pow villain in Jonathan Majors, the third time is not the charm for a sequel that ignores its own cardinal rule -- less is more.

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

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.

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

Director Elie Chouraqui, who co-wrote the script, catches the chaotic horror of war, but why bother if you're going to subjugate truth to the tear-jerking demands of soap opera?

Stuber traps two talented dudes — Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista — in a car that’s going nowhere so fast that Thelma and Louise would hop right on.

Wherever you find yourself in the Perry equation, Medea herself deserves a final high-five. Perry hints that she may come back in a younger version, not played by him. But Medea will never be the same without her creator. In A Medea Family Funeral, she hosts a memorial service that defines the term hellzapoppin. And Perry correctly and adoringly gives her the last word in which she lets all the women have for letting any damn man abuse them. Hallelujah, sister!

No judgments here if you just want to hang back and let nonstop gore, gunfire, and explosions numb you into submission. Take that, COVID-19.

No dice...But no apologies are needed for Shannon--she earns her star spot.

It’s too bad the script never allows their ethical battle over human guinea pigs to rise above the level of plot device. With these actors, the debut film from Grant and Hurley should have soared above TV mediocrity. What the hell were they thinking?

Quite a spectacle, but the movie falls flat.

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.

David O. Russell strands an A-list cast —Bale! Robbie! Washington! De Niro!— in a pokey and problematic mystery romp. You can feel Russell’s cage-rattling intensity, but only in fits and starts as the convoluted conspiracy plot goes out in a fizzle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Henson looks ready to come out firing on all cylinders, but the comic cowardice of What Men Want leaves her shooting blanks.

What started as cute becomes cloying and bloated. Charm should never feel like it weighs a ton.

The Grinch offers a solid service to anyone with kids in need of a nap under a blanket of bland.

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.

The fight scenes grow numbing as the birds take on the goons in melees that add up mostly to noise. All you feel is numb as Yan piles on one brawl after another to give the illusion that something is happening. Nothing really is. Birds of Prey and its ilk are empty calories, not meant to disturb when they dazzle. Joker, whatever its shortcomings, tackled a festering society that created its own monsters. Slapping the topical theme of female empowerment on a story that trucks in business-as-usual violence does not qualify as a game-changer — or a reason to go to the movies.

Alleged family fun.

A product that will delight car junkies and drive cinephiles to swear off film until fall.

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

Funny but perilously slight.

Distressingly shallow.

Hit-and-mostly-miss.

Tries for deadpan laughs but is merely lifeless.

Lawrence forgoes his knack for verbal comedy and replaces it with crude nonstop mugging.

After all the hype, the movie of Dick Tracy turns out to be a great big beautiful bore.

Ephron, try as she might, can't give her codified champagne spin to a Resnick script that all too quickly runs out of fizz.

Barbie fever is everywhere, but this botch job about the Beanie Bables—another doll craze from last century—is no collector’s item as it runs off the rails and wastes a terrific cast led by Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan and Sarah Snook.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd can’t carry the unbearable weight of massive missteps in this comic remake of the 1997 snake movie that was always funnier when it tried to be serious.

This new take on horror is more of the bloody same.

Downhill is sure as hell not the farce it’s been advertised to look like in the trailer. And you’ll search in vain for "Force Majeure’s" grounding in existential crisis. I don’t know what the Swedes would call Downhill. What’s Swedish for an unholy mess?

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.

For those who can push past the sentimental manipulation in these two fact-based love stories there’s an advocacy for selfless generosity that resonates in this pandemic era.

(Shelton) knows how to write pungent dialogue that covers a multitude of sins when the film goes off the rails.

The "Citizen Kane" of flatulence.

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

Offers action in the Arnold Schwarzenegger style. Well, not right away.

In story terms, Dinosaur lays an egg.

Even in these pandemic times, when we all hunger for escapism, this long journey to a lame ending hardly fills the bill.

Though the film has an evocative look reminiscent of Matthew Brady’s period photographs, Zwick has stuffed the actors’ mouths with numbing bombast. Glory is a shame.

Slim pickings.

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.

Costner’s real reverence for the classic western dances with disaster by passing off the first of his four-part saga as epic filmmaking instead of a trio of speechifying, clumsily linked one-hour episodes that play like a TV series with no direction home.

A sappy big-screen version of TV's "CSI."

Shot five years ago by director Michael Ritchie. No release until now. Uh-oh. Disaster? Pretty much.

The gore, which is plentiful, grows repetitive and dull.

Director Gregory Hoblit ("Primal Fear") is merely arranging cliches in new patterns until the surprise ending blows enough pro-military fervor up the audience's ass to make Colin Powell call a halt.

There’s a secondhand feel to the way this gangster movie delivers the goods. Carlito’s Way is haunted by a ghost from De Palma and Pacino’s past — Scarface.

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.

Built on a slender, one-joke whimsy -- and a tough one to buy into, at that.

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.

Director Regis Warginer ("Indochine") lets his film degenerate into a turgid melodrama.

Critics will pick on this overstuffed sequel to the 1996 animated-live-action hoops hit. It’s what we do when an alleged creative enterprise turns into a corporate ad campaign. Expect no grumbles from the under-13 crowd eager to eyeball LeBron James jamming in cyberspace with cartoon royalty.

Despite the efforts of an A-list cast led by Robert De Niro, this so-called family entertainment is barely passable piffle.

Shot with a poet's eye and a tin ear for dialogue, this tricked-up thriller about the horror of getting old too fast brings out the best and worst in M. Knight Shyamalan by throwing a wet beach blanket on a Covid-resonant premise about sudden death and the collapse of time.

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

It’s always a downer when talented artists pour everything they’ve got into a film that stubbornly refuses to come to life. That’s the case with Lucy in the Sky.

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.

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!

Director Mike Barber springs a twist ending that makes you sit up and stifle those yawns.

Alternately smarmy and achingly familiar, Little squeezes "Big" for one more run through the Hollywood grinder.

Dillon is a potent combination of looks, charm and menace, as he proved in Drugstore Cowboy, but Dearden’s script fails to provide the raw material that would let him go beyond the stereotype.

A ham-handed melodrama that trivializes an important topic: the role of the teacher in a violent classroom.

Except for Ashley Judd, who shows true grit as Vivi in her babe days, the effect is like being buried in molasses. For guys whose pain threshold is way low when it comes to the bonding of Steel Magnolias, Ya-Ya is a definite no-no.

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.

There’s no doubting Potter’s laudable ambition to capture the swirling headspace of her brother, who died in 2013. But in trying to restore his dignity in fighting the dying of the light, she’s neglected to portray him in the human terms that would let us share his spirit.

It's refried comic beans that smell stale and smack of desperation.

Even with Spider-man Tom Holland and new Batman Robert Pattinson in the leads, this violent tale of backwoods sin and corruption suffers from a severe case of too-muchness.

This black-comic assault on family entertainment is going to set a lot of teeth on edge -- If only his (De Vito's) material were better this time.

Walken is so funny, he almost makes you forget this flick is one joke stretched thinner than Calista Flockhart.

Kazan’s technique drafts seductive promises that the empty-headed Dream Lover can’t keep.

Abandon all hope of logic, you who enter here.

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.

The motor of the plot, involving nuclear terrorism, not only knocked Bad Company out of last year's release schedule due to 9/11 sensitivity, it stops Rock and Hopkins from sustaining a comic rapport. The waste is criminal.

Just isn't enough.

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

Cringingly earnest, totally unremarkable fable.

Director Gary Fleder ("Don't Say a Word") pushes the same old cliches in "Blade Runner" packaging.

It took four screenwriters to turn a potent premise into mush. There’s some compensation in a solid supporting cast, especially Fyvush Finkel of TV’s Picket Fences as the world’s oldest bellboy. But director Barry Sonnenfeld shows little of the wicked spirit he brought to The Addams Family.

It’s a juicy premise: Eddie Izzard’s British spy vs. a school for daughters of the Nazi high command run by the great Judi Dench. But the crackerjack espionage thriller that might have been, the one filled with ideas and purpose, is defeated by flat execution.

It’s impossible for Ferrell and McAdams to top Stevens for campy pyrotechnics, so they’re left to hard-sell a Lars-Sigrit romance that’s too tepid to strike a jaja ding dong.

Starting to feel sick? Just you wait.

A promise unfulfilled.

It's shocking, considering the talent involved, the The Perfect Storm looks and feels fake.

Branagh's take on the play comes right up to the edge of disaster but stubbornly refuses to leap in.

Craig Lucas’s prince of a play has been turned into a toad of a movie.

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

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.

Does he (Hartley) succeed? Not with a movie this plodding, peevish and gimmicky. Is it fun to watch him try? Me, I'll take failed ambition over hack efficiency any day.

In the end, Shelley and the audience are cheated of a tale truly told. De Niro, on the brink of giving a landmark performance, settles for being a gross special effect. And the promise Branagh once showed as a filmmaker, like the hope of revitalizing Frankenstein, is dead again.

The chance to see giant monsters go apeshit — a few more are added near the end — is almost worth the price of admission. Seeing, however, is part of the problem. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is often so lost in the shadows of digital muck that it makes the squinting chaos of the Battle of Winterfell in "Game of Thrones" look like a lightshow.

Potter gets the period details right, but the film itself has long since flown off the rails, miring good intentions in rank soap opera.

No knock on serving up an action-jacked Michael B. Jordan in an R-rated, red-meat, military thriller. But this clumsy update of Clancy’s 1993 bestseller should have been way better than a generic, one-note, cash grab.

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.

Even Dinklage and Fanning can’t give this failed experiment a heartbeat. You won’t wish for the end of world while watching I Think We’re Alone Now, just the end of the movie.

Verhoeven, who inflicted "Showgirls" on us, skips the provacative questions raised by invisibility and goes straight to rape and murder.

The kid in us knows that even in a pokey, predictable sequel like this one you still stick around for the scary parts with the stampeding dinosaurs. But the wonder and awe of the Spielberg original have gone pfft.

A dementia subplot torpedoes the laughs, leaving Tiffany Haddish and writer-director-star Billy Crystal adrift in a comedy fizzle that forgets to be funny.

Hook may keep the action spinning, but the noise you hear isn’t life. It’s the sound of symbols crashing.

Once again, it’s the script (by newcomer David Rich) that shoots the picture’s promise all to 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.

Propaganda is a bitch to act. And this misguided movie leaves Hudgens buried in it.

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

It's the Bay touch you feel in the way actors register as body count, characters go undeveloped, and sensation trumps feeling. A nightmare, indeed.

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

The infuriating cop–out ending reduces the premise to mush. I wanted to scream. Here goes: Arghh!

The bad news isn’t that Carrey and Daniels got old, it's that the jokes did. The spirit is still willing in Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the original writer-directors, but the sagging flesh is weak from prolonged repetition.

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.

Even the best actors – and this coming-of-age movie boasts a handful of them – can't fight this much tin-eared dialogue.

Morning sickness afflicts most of the potential mommies. For me, the movie itself triggered the vomiting.

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.

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

I'm convinced there is a good movie trying to punch itself out of The Greatest Showman. What a shame that Gracey buried Jackman and company in a pile of marshmallow.

Me, I just think it blows. What does it matter if you spend millions on a movie - love the talking, battling bears! - if the effects are cheesy, the story runs off on tangents and after watching the movie fail utterly to be the next Lord of the Rings, you just want to go home.

Will Ferrell and Danny McBride can find the dumb fun in anything. Too bad that Land of the Lost is so much less than anything.

The Americanized version is miscast, misguided and misbegotten.

Blomkamp and his wife and co-writer, Terri Tatchell, stack the deck. Instead of awe, we get "E.T." - aww.

If you laughed at Tim Story's first "Think," based on Steve Harvey's bestselling advice book for women, you'll probably ride along for this jacked-up, Vegas-set sequel in which dudes and dolls offer sexist approaches to throwing a bachelor party.

Overthought, overwrought and thuddingly underwhelming, this high-profile misfire makes a congealed gumbo out of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winning 1946 novel and the Oscar-winning 1949 movie that followed it, sinking a classy cast in the goo.

Even director Carl Franklin, an artful purveyor of sterner stuff in "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress," can't prevent One True Thing from descending into chick-movie hell.

There's nothing to distract you from a plot so tired there are tire tracks from other racing movies all over it.

I left this movie feeling I’d been had. And not in a good way.

Veering between sentimentality and exploitation with a few misguided stops at raunchy sex farce, Reign Over Me never finds a tone to suit its purpose.

How did talent like this conspire to pump out such bilge? I mean, really.

It's not so bad that it's good. It's so bland that it's boring. Not even worth a hissss.

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.

Leslie Mann and wild-card Chris Hemsworth, as her cock-flashing hubby, get the heartiest hoots. The rest is comic history warmed over.

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

Independence Day: Resurgence pretends there's fresh ground to cover. There isn't, but director Roland Emmerich makes a good show of faking it.

Don't hammer this film for trying to get inside the head of Mark David Chapman before he shot John Lennon outside the rock legend's New York apartment on December 8th, 1980. Hammer it instead for failing to do so with any depth or insight.

Penelope is dead on arrival.

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?

Except for Kate Winslet's fearsome turn as a villain, the only terror Divergent roused in me was that the drag-ass thing would never end. Sorry, I'm a Candor.

The Host basically comes down to a vote for Team Jared or Team Ian. I voted myself into oblivion about half an hour in. Niccol, who once added mystery and suspense to the sci-fi of 1997's "Gattaca," is no match for the giant marshmallow that is The Host.

Political satire is so rare that it's a shame to watch the reliable Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland lend their talents to one that is blind to its own incompetence.

What's good? A mesmeric, bottle-blond Christopher Walken as Max Zorin, hellbent on global domination as a product of Nazi experiments, Grace Jones' zowie star at his henchman, and Duran Duran's title song. Otherwise, I'm out.

Looks aren't everything. Case in point: Sucker Punch, a dazzling visual design that goes tone-deaf every time it opens its dumb mouth or makes claims to profundity.

Buffy isn't heinous, just disposable. As a friend tells Buffy while she eyes a fashion purchase, "It's so five minutes ago."

Whatever qualms you might have about romanticizing mental illness, the misguided Benny and Joon thinks it's just darling.

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.

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

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

Sadly, what Parkland becomes is a crying shame.

Every paying audience member deserves their 12 bucks back.

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.

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

A sappy-sweet romcom that seems to have been invaded by a screenwriter - one Geoff LaTulippe - with delusions that he's David Mamet.

What's onscreen feels squeezed, truncated and curiously embalmed. It's got no kick to it.

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

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.

It's not easy hanging talents like Ferrell and Hart out to dry. But Get Hard gets the job done. It's one limp noodle.

Director Sydney Pollack zapped out a taut thriller in "Three Days of the Condor". But The Firm is mostly flab, in the manner of Pollack's elephantine Havana.

A borrowed idea -- hello, "Blade Runner," hi there, "Matrix" -- but an idea nonetheless.

Even the stalwart Nolte drowns in the laughable idiocy of the Wingo-Lowenstein love affair, which lifts Tides to the fiasco class.

The movie deserves a stake through the heart.

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.

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.

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

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?

It's not just that Jennifer Lopez looks lost and out of her league acting with Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman. That's to be expected. It's the drag-ass solemnity of this turgid family drama that makes you crazy.

Drab in the extreme. Timothy Dalton's second and wheezing, final turn as 007 was barely recognizable as a Bond film.

The compensation comes in the three lead actors, all way too good for the material dished out by writer-director Tom Gormican.

Another January dud. Broken City drops hot-shot actors in a quicksand of clichés and watches them sink.

Regrettably, Bergman can't do much with a one-note script by Jane Anderson that reduces Perez to a grating cliché, Cage and Fonda to a parody of Ken and Barbie and our interest in what could happen to them to dry ash.

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.

For stranding these talents in a one-gag movie that wears thin somewhere between the first choir practice and the second chase, the filmmakers should say a sincere Act of Contrition.

The money shots of the living tableau are padded with jokes that feel embalmed before the actors get them out of their mouths.

What the film lacks is suspense, surprise (the new ending is a dud) and passion.

If you don't see where this is going, you've never seen a movie. Sorry it had to be this one.

By the end, Vantage Point is such a unholy mess of drooling sentiment and sloppy loose ends that you’ll hate yourself for being suckered in.

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.

A patently bogus romcom in which every note rings false.

Jolie comes to this party ready to bite, but the movie muzzles her. Even at 97 minutes, Maleficent is still one long, laborious slog.

What happened, bitches? Didn't the letdown of The Hangover Part II – basically Part I set in Thailand but minus the laughs – teach you anything? Guess not.

Then there's the movie itself, which should be crazy, stupid fun but settles for just stupid.

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.

Williams is an actor of protean gifts, a super pitchman when it comes to putting across flimsy material (Dead Poets Society). But even he can't palm off this lemon as a peach. When it's not being offensive, Ken Friedman's screenplay is merely oafish.

With that cast, we rightfully expect fireworks. What we get is the film equivalent of a wet blanket.

The film wants to make a case for Parker as the first modern woman. It gets the look and the attitude right, but it can't find her heart.

First-time filmmaker Kate Barker-Froyland trusts the silences that occur when two people aren't talking. That's a good thing. What's not so good is when the talk grows enervating.

Working from a script by the gifted Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement), who seems to have traded his wit for a paycheck, Fontaine manages the trick of making sex joyless. Like porn. Then she tops that by draining her film of variety, longing and feminist insight. Like farce. Ouch.

What Dick rendered potent, Nolfi renders preposterous.

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

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

Hanks is one of the most likable actors on the planet. But Inferno just lays there onscreen, pancake-flat and with no animating spark to make us give a damn.

The Book of Henry starts well, begins flirting with absurdity in the middle – and ends in crashing disaster. But the feeling persists that director Colin Treverrow believes every word in the shambles of a 20-year-old screenplay by crime novelist Gregg Hurwitz.

It plays like like a video game in which the goal is to kill as many of these green-blooded monsters as you can before time's up. It's fun for about 10 minutes, and then the tedium seeps in.

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.

Shopworn propaganda.

This Endless Love is a photo shoot, not a movie. It'd play better as a slideshow of jpgs. Even nine-year-old girls ought to cry foul on this movie's endless blandness.

All cast members seem willing to make total fools of themselves for our delectation. A fine but futile gesture. The bad news is that even with such yeoman efforts, it's still impossible to drag one tired joke around for nearly two hours. Like Bernie, the movie ends up dead on its feet.

This afternoon-TV special trying to pass as a real movie earns an extra half star solely for Samuel L. Jackson, who brings his usual fire to the role.

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.

First-time director and screenwriter Hue Rhodes shows no discernible talent for dialogue, humor and, especially, pacing.

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.

Jeez, did the "surprise" climax have to be this eye-rollingly stupid?

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

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

So Risen joins the swelling ranks of faith-based films that pander to audiences instead of serving them.

The spectacle feels lifeless and what could have been a challenging moral provocation dissolves into sappy, feel-good pandering. Lawrence and Pratt deserve better. So do audiences.

There's no thrill in Gone because you can see every surprise coming. It lies there flapping like a dying fish. Skip it.

What I can't buy is that Refn has made a movie this lifeless and devoid of human interest.

And just when you think this movie cannot get more unendurable ... it does. And then some. You can see every twist telegraphed from miles away even in a driving blizzard. The Mountain Between Us is epic all right – an epic waste of talent and your time.

Though Wilson is always reason enough to see a movie, she’s stuck here in a fluffball that plays like warmed-over subplots from "Sex and the City."

A trio of appealing actors is trapped in an action-spiked romcom death-sentenced by a lack of humor, heart and a coherent reason for being.

The movie, however, is a crock.

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

Mostly, it's a collection of spare suspense parts that someone ransacked at the movie dump and is trying to resell as fresh product. Good luck with that.

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

Satire in a blanket of bland.

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

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

All the drama seems to have happened off camera for director Olivia Wilde and stars Harry Styles and Florence Pugh. What's on screen is a glossy, repetitive retread of The Stepford Wives with a dash of The Truman Show and no discernible personality of its own.

Lee Cronin makes two hours of borrowed horror inspiration—The Exorcist should sue—feel like an eternity.

Director Kenya Barris disastrously trades cutting social satire for romcom pablum when a Jewish podcaster (Jonah Hill) and his a Black fiancé (Lauren London) find their love imploding after her dad (Eddie Murphy) and his mom (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) plan a wedding across racial battle lines

Director Jonah Hill’s satire of Hollywood cancel culture in the age of TMZ leaves out all the laughs that define character and sinks Keanu Reeves and an all-star cast in a muddle of jokes creaky enough to qualify for assisted living.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Oh, What. Crap. This lump of coal in our holiday stocking entraps Michelle Pfeiffer and is flat, stilted, lazy and so stretched out with Xmas clichés that you want to scream, bah-humbug.

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.

Off the shelf after two years to capitalize on the popularity of Vin Diesel, Seth Green and Barry Pepper. It should have stayed there.

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.

What DePalma has never made is a dull movie. Until now.

Judd is slumming again in ths lame suspense yarn that could barely pass as a TV quickie without the bankable names of Judd, Tommy Lee Jones and director Bruce Beresford.

Crossing "A Beautiful Mind" with "Sex Kittens Go to College," first-time director Stephen Gaghan (he wrote Traffic) causes a head-on collision.