Scott Bowles

If you rely on films to keep your kids entertained and distracted for an hour and a half, Meatballs is a masterwork, a visual stunner that manages to break from animation's current 3-D rut.

Inspired and inspiring, this documentary about 7- and 8-year-olds competing for the U.S. Kids Golf World Championship is too fawning to be consistently gifted, but it manages to be occasionally, perhaps accidentally, profound.

Hell Baby is what happens when you try to parody a parody. The result is a film that's less than half as funny as its predecessor, and a sliver as clever as the original.

A car-chase clunker that can't escape its own noxious emissions.

It's no "Taxi Driver" or even "Open Water," but Route has enough attractions to warrant the trip.

An historical opus that is equal parts ballet and biography, though the second component pales in comparison with the first.

A film of repetition, a bloody dance consisting of three steps: stab, scream, repeat.

Though it has flashes of promise, Bones traces the footsteps of its fantasy film predecessors too closely to blaze anything close to an original narrative.

It plays more like a "21 Jump Street," full of pretty people and a thumping soundtrack but offering little in the way of something to say.

Red 2 is one of those sequels that's easier to follow if you've seen the original but more entertaining if you haven't.

This comedy deserves credit for taking a decided viewpoint — and delivering a heartfelt if occasionally misguided message.

It's mostly smoke and mirrors. After Freeman's snooze became a YouTube fixture, the actor jokingly dismissed the nap, saying he was using "Google eyelids" to check his Facebook account. You may find yourself attempting the same feat, because Now has little up its sleeve.

A more sure-footed shoot-'em-up that finds some heart, wit and perhaps enough momentum to spawn a formidable action franchise.

Preposterous, goofy and a clear ripoff of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” Identity still manages to make off with just enough laughs to work, thanks to the wondrous McCarthy, one of the few actresses in Hollywood allowed to showcase her wit and charisma as much as her physique.

Like a lot of meds, it loses its effectiveness over time, and you'll build a resistance to Effects eventually, particularly when it dissolves into a standard crime flick.

Geared for teens who perhaps found the Twilight series too profound, Warm Bodies is an unabashed homage to that wildly successful franchise. One of its stars, Teresa Palmer, is even done up to be a carbon copy of Kristen Stewart, the anchor of the vampire series.

It's been a long time since a movie wasted as much talent as Stand Up Guys, a film that aims to be a geezer "Goodfellas" but whose execution is a misfire.

Alas, shell casings, switchblades and severed limbs are all that's offered in this vile film, whose sole redeeming quality is that it ends. Eventually.

The movie spends too much time wedging the couple into a May-December moment, where Crystal cracks nostalgic about the good old days. It's sweet, but it grows old.

The latest undead-soldier story carries on the franchise tradition of graphic violence and bad acting.

RZA's directorial debut is heavy on bloody kung fu action...and light on just about everything else.

When the comedy connects, it can deliver with funny force

Despite the hype, this horror story can't shake its run-of-the-mill storytelling.

Has a near-impossible mission: its title.

It's been a long time since a movie wasted this much talent.

The first half of Taken 2 is a serviceable action flick, but the second half descends into cliches.

Despite an abrupt ending and the worst title of the year, Arbitrage manages to leverage real tension from its veteran stars in one of Hollywood's first pedigreed films of the fall.

Alas, if you're someone who enjoys movies as, say, a two-hour escape, you may find this documentary on the death of film at digital's hands a bit too inside baseball.