Scott Foundas

Outside of Sylvia, none of the characters has any real presence or personality in a movie that takes greater interest in shots of pretty flowers than in the human beings onscreen, and in which nearly every major plot turn is the result of blind chance.

Even the resourceful, likable Reynolds is at a loss to elevate this rather dreary piece of would-be escapism, which calls out for the wry, pulpy touch of a John Carpenter (or his acolyte David Twohy) and instead gets the strained self-seriousness of director Tarsem Singh.

Queen Latifah gives a spectacular performance in this hugely enjoyable wish-fulfillment fantasy.

This feels like a movie that was grown in a petri dish -- poked and prodded with all manner of overcooked symbolism and thesis statements, but fatally absent the genuine human emotions about which it incessantly prattles on.

Despite the considerable imagination that has gone into realizing period scenes on a modest budget, all the episodes (past and present) feel hurried and clipped, like they've been passed through too many impatient editing-room hands, and the picture never fully absorbs you.

Far from an embarrassment and a generally fine piece of work.

What you end up with are a bunch of kids acting not like kids, but how adults who've lost all sense of what it was like to be a kid think kids behave.

It's not that Noya is bad as kid actors go, but a pair of dewy, crossed eyes and a beyond-his-years melancholy do not an entire movie make.

Clooney has transformed a fascinating true-life tale into an exceedingly dull and dreary caper pic cum art-appreciation seminar — a museum-piece movie about museum people.

The musical film version of The Producers is, for better or worse, a faithful record of the stage production, adhering to the same if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it philosophy that informed the recent "Rent."

Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.

What keeps One Chance plugging along almost in spite of itself are the warmly engaging performances of Corden and Alexandra Roach.

An alleged satire that’s about as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted.

Begins as a refreshingly subversive departure from the Hollywood studios' cookie-cutter romances, but the thin script can't sustain that initial charge, and it soon flattens out, like a punctured comic balloon.

Skillfully made first feature by writer-director Katrin Gebbe has some undeniably striking passages and performances, but ultimately spirals toward a gruesome third act that is no less monotonous for supposedly being based on true events.

"The Blues Brothers" it is not, but in its best moments, the movie feels like a comic exaggeration of the real hardships that a couple of average, decidedly unhip guys went through on their unlikely way to the top.

This is one of the most visually off-putting films ever made by a director who supposedly makes beautiful pictures.

Some will see this as a movie about how we're all God’s children. I saw only the misanthropic fulminations of Jensen's runaway ego.

By the standards of today's bombastic "event" movies, this is a refreshingly modest endeavor—one in which the main event is the skillful holding of our attention, all the way from "Once upon a time" to "Happily ever after."

In fairness, the movie isn't the absolute worst of its kind and there's a certain charm to Butcher's amiable, puppy-eyed performance. But Michael McGowan's direction is as flat as an asphalt road, and his script is gasping for air long before it enters the final stretch.

The attempt to draw certain connections between Griffin's material and its autobiographical origins feels slapped together, shortchanging both aspects of the film.

Part dewey-eyed paperback romance, part acid-trip planetarium show, this extravagantly silly movie comes on like the second coming of "2001."

This represents at least as much of an artistic setback for Smith as "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma" were advances.

Despite the intriguing set-up, there's something unambitious and scaled-back about Star Trek Nemesis, so that most of the time it feels like a slightly suped-up episode of the "Next Generation" TV series.

After a lively first half-hour, the scenes start to feel heavy, as though Serrano suddenly decided he was actually making a meaningful drama, and the ensuing, halfhearted political satire is like an extra weight on top of that.

Made up largely of vivid aerial shots of those folks doing the things they do, the film is a less philosophical, introspective look at contemporary surfing than Dana Brown's recent "Step Into Liquid," and is pitched at a smaller, niche audience.

Gets an ambitious, sometimes inspired but ultimately less than satisfying screen treatment from Roger Avary.

Anchored by Keener’s understated, psychologically acute performance, director Mark Jackson’s spare, quietly powerful sophomore feature demonstrates an impressive control of mood and tone and the ability to tell a story largely without words.

Could have used two rangier lead players than Stiller (doing his patented aggrieved-yuppie shtick) and Barrymore (who's so perky you want to slap her); the 81-year-old Essell, however, is a wicked pleasure throughout.

Much of the film is as strange and oddly beautiful as one of Arbus' own photographs, bold in its attempt to find new ways of cracking the biopic chestnut and sensitive in its portrayal of a 1950s woman who, like so many of her contemporaries, finds herself imprisoned in a "Good Housekeeping" nightmare.

Dazzling imagery and a grab bag of wry jokes, no matter how lively, can take a movie only so far when there's no emotional ballast attached.

Nary an original idea abounds in The Island.

A one-joke movie if ever there was, but the joke happens to be a good one -- a Tracy-and-Hepburn-style battle of the sexes in which Kate can fly and blast through walls -- and director Ivan Reitman (who made Ghostbusters) feels at home with the mix of screwball and supernatural.

The film skews young, to be sure, and it isn't as memorable as the new Disney classics of the early 1990s, but there's still plenty here to hold the interest of viewers of all ages: delightful performances (particularly by Dench, plowing Angela Lansbury terrain), zinging comic dialogue and a soundtrack that's a wealth of sonorous riches.

Thanks to some accomplished hocus pocus and an appealing cast, this would-be “Ocean’s Eleven” of the magic world remains watchable throughout, even as it plods along without ever quite fulfilling its potential.

Attempts to delve beneath the surface of Hollywood's rampant narcissism and fascination with technology, but ultimately feels like just one more in the long line of films this year about the business of making movies.

Always good with actors, Hanson brings out a beaten-down charm in Bana that works nicely against the hotheaded authority the actor shows in the gambling scenes, while Duvall is, like the veteran card shark he plays, a master of subtle gestures. The low card here is Barrymore, somewhat awkwardly shoehorned into this boys' club to provide some romantic relief.

An unremarkable but entirely serviceable action quickie.

Begins as a serious, straightforward account of the origins of the cocaine trade and "gangsta" culture in 1980s Harlem, but then downward spirals due to a weak plot and gratuitous violence.

The Reckoning proceeds with such leaden literal-mindedness that it never seems more than a stodgy (and, at times, blatantly silly) paperback affair.

Like this summer's other slapstick cause célèbre, "Pineapple Express," it's a comedy with as high or higher a body count as the movies it purports to be parodying, and the problem isn't the violence per se but rather the fact that neither movie ever finds a satisfactory balance between tongue-in-cheek and guts-in-hand.

Not just instantly forgettable, but beginning to fade from memory even as its images still play across the screen.

Lounguine’s biopic is chilly and convoluted, too eventful to be boring, but never taking the time to immerse us emotionally in Makovski's world.

Desert Dancer traffics in the kind of spirited rebel-youth archetypes who’ve been endemic to dance movies for decades.

Sentinel works overtime to suggest what a thrill-a-minute world its characters inhabit; but only during the last 20 minutes does the movie's pulse (or ours) raise above a flatline. The actors look uniformly unhappy to be there - except for Basinger, who seems lost in a lithium haze.

Viewers of this Sam Raimi-produced, sub-"Amityville" scarefest are likely to hold the real grudge.

It's a finely tuned Motor City engine: The action, including a nighttime car chase through a blinding snowstorm, is fast, brutal and efficient; the Motown soundtrack never cuts out; and as a gangster called Sweet, the British-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor gives an electrifying performance.

The results are far from perfect: For one thing, Lipsky is so far from being a fluid visual storyteller that the garishly lit, appallingly composed Flannel Pajamas makes another two-hander talkfest Lipsky famously distributed -- "My Dinner With Andre" -- seem like "Lawrence of Arabia" by comparison.

Pic’s monotone edges towards monotony by the end of the third act, but as no-budget calling-card features go, Frankenstein’s Army remains a grisly cut above.

Both the words and the pictures are surprisingly flaccid, largely due to Gerald DiPego’s literate but hopelessly contrived screenplay and direction that lacks Schepisi’s usual snap.

The film's one indisputably great performance comes from Sewell, whose Marke is no mere cuckold, but a good, honorable man caught up in circumstances beyond his ken, and ultimately this Tristan & Isolde's most tragic figure.

An improbable but very enjoyable sequel that recaptures much of the stripped-down intensity of Diesel and director David Twohy’s franchise starter "Pitch Black."

It has a terminal case of the cutes crossed with the labored earnestness of a disease-of-the-week melodrama.

Swank's character and her performance are good enough to merit a movie of their own, instead of serving as fourth wheel to this lifeless ménage à trois.

The 68-year-old actor (Redford) segues into full-blown irascible-old-man mode, and though the transformation isn't quite as compelling as it sounds, it's easily the best thing going for this Lasse Hallstrom–directed, Wyoming-set weepie.

Less compelling than all the behind-the-scenes Sturm und Drang. Even Baldwin, who waived his directing credit in favor of the pseudonymous Harry Kirkpatrick, has warned fans to stay away.

Emerges as the most conventional and least imaginative of the recent crop of high-class fright movies that includes "The Others," "Session 9" and "Wendigo."

As in the late-period works of Mel Brooks, the very structure of the film feels irreparably fatigued.

It’s cheesy enough fun while it lasts, but in the Harlin pantheon, it isn’t a patch on “Deep Blue Sea.” Then again, few things are.

The direction is lazy and the script thoroughly witless, from its token Bergman references to dialogue that suggests a night in borscht-belt hell.

Peet is triumphant as the beguiling object of desire with wounded-bird eyes and devilish smile -- sexy and tart, then, in the space of a breath, totally, tenderly tragic. Like Oliver, we'd happily follow her anywhere.

Too often, though, Jakubowicz falls back on his relentlessly pirouetting DV camera, attention-deficient editing and ear-splitting sound effects as a substitute for real tension, or a more piercing inquiry into the bubbling tension between South America's haves and its poverty-stricken have-nots.

This won't be remembered as one of the prodigiously talented Armstrong's great films (My Brilliant Career, High Tide, Little Women), but it's still 90 percent better than everything else out there.

That may not exactly thrill those who admire the Saw films only for their splatter quotient, but all told, this is a more affecting study in grief, guilt and human frailty than "Babel."

Both “Ted” movies are, ultimately, one-joke affairs rooted in the idea of taking some emblem of childhood innocence and vulgarizing it.... That joke, though, turns out to be a resilient one, and the chemistry between Wahlberg and MacFarlane is infectiously puerile.

A smattering of funny gags and the nostalgia value of the cast — none of whom, curiously, have ever shared the screen before — keeps the whole thing more watchable than it has any right to be.

Festooned with cute, mugging kids; lots of jazzy redos of beloved Christmas tunes on the soundtrack; and enough tug-at-your-heartstrings moments to make an entire theater feel warm on a blustery winter afternoon.

Anchored by Eva Green’s fearsome performance as a Persian naval commander whose vengeful bloodlust makes glowering King Xerxes seem a mere poseur, this highly entertaining time-filler lacks the mythic resonances that made “300” feel like an instant classic, but works surprisingly well on its own terms.

The resulting film is one of too much reverence and not enough satire.

There may, somewhere in the premise of Incantato, lie the inspiration for a fine farce, but under Avati's shaky stewardship, the picture is leaden and charmless.

This is "Crash" with gun violence substituted for racism, although the tone of director–co-writer Aric Avelino's debut feature may be closer to one of those pious public-safety films that used to be shown to schoolchildren in order to frighten them out of potential bad behavior.

The Great Raid cries out for the kind of B-movie industriousness that Dahl brought to his early, low-budget films noirs (Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction), but instead it has dreams of sugarplum Oscars dancing in its head, and never stops mistaking spectacle for the truly spectacular.

This is satire made from the inside of the ivory tower, and when, late in the third act, Fun With Dick and Jane decides to come on strong with platitudes about how the petit bourgeois really can stick it to the haute bourgeois, it goes from bad to worse.

Even by the low standards of high-concept Hollywood rom-coms, this charmless, prophetically titled stinker stands apart, suggesting that the recent mass firings at studio Paramount may not have been such a bad idea after all.

Surprisingly enjoyable, even if you'd hesitate to call it a complete success. Indeed, Figgis expects you to sit back and roll with the pleasurable moments.

A most enjoyable capper to director Shawn Levy and producer Chris Columbus’ cheerfully silly and sneakily smart family-entertainment juggernaut.

Nearly wall-to-wall climax -- an unwieldy, two-plus-hours third act of a movie, guided by the principle (incubated by "Reloaded" and fully grown here) that too much is never too much.

The lively but wildly erratic result will surely please Jaglom’s winnowing fan base, while baffling most others and doing little to deter Jaglom himself.

A highly enjoyable programmer about those brave young men and their rickety flying machines.

The longer Swing Vote hangs around, the more engaging it becomes. It's twice as smart as you have any reason to expect but still only half as smart as you wish it were.

Director Andrew Wagner draws topnotch work from a pro cast in Starting Out in the Evening, a wise, carefully observed chamber drama.

British director Eric Till’s ghastly Euro-pudding co-production (with all the international accents and badly post-synchronized dialogue that implies) manages to make a travesty of its title subject.

A handsomely produced, deeply passionate, but seriously flawed historical epic whose reach far exceeds its grasp. Somewhere inside this overlong, sometimes engaging, often tedious affair, there may be a solid, 100-minute movie.

It’s a grandly staged, solidly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure movie that does something no other Hercules movie has quite done before: it cuts the mythical son of Zeus down to human size (or as human as you can get while still being played by Dwayne Johnson).

The Legend of Zorro is a Saturday matinee entirely lacking in Saturday-matinee thrills or brevity -- what's passable for the first 80 minutes or so becomes intolerable as the movie ticks past the two-hour mark.

Totally cliched and nearly two hours long, pic takes forever to get to hopelessly obvious places.

The Giver reaches the screen in a version that captures the essence of Lowry’s affecting allegory but little of its mythic pull.

The Skeleton Key takes its time making a slow, creeping ascent, but once it starts plummeting downward, Softley keeps things moving at a furious pace, and both Hudson and Rowlands enjoy surrendering themselves to the grandiloquent lunacy of it all.

The truth is still out there, like an unsold lawn chair at a garage sale, in this just plain lousy second big-screen outing for erstwhile FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

The usually zippy and subversive director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) plays things straight and suffocatingly sentimental - which actually makes the whole movie seem that much creepier.

The infectious high spirits of the performers help to carry the day.

Has surprising hipness and good humor to spare, all put across with a funky, low-tech vibe.

The dancing is dazzling in director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro's The Other Side of the Bed, but the movie itself is a dud.

The movie's chief liability, though, is Rose herself, who also co-scripted with first-time director Robert Cary and who registers several notches below Nia Vardalos on the totem of unlikely double-threats.

Jaglom's quickest and funniest picture in years and the most accessible.

Put simply, the film is a dazzling and fearless piece of showmanship.

It's true, of course, that Trier still hasn't set foot on U.S. soil, but it may be that he sees us, in all our virtue and victimhood, that much more clearly for it.

The ultimate test of one's tolerance for King's self-aggrandizing postulations about writer's block, obsessive fans and the potentially frightening manifestations of the writer's id...It's just plain lousy.

Hoot is flatly directed by talk-show-host-turned-sitcom-director Wil Shriner, but the young actors are spirited and appealing, and the movie's low-key anti-establishment posture is vastly preferable to the knee-jerk fulminations of a Michael Moore.

Beerfest bubbles with the cheeky irreverence of early John Landis and David Zucker. Yet, like just about every other American screen comedy of the moment, it's far too long in the tooth, with a scattershot final half-hour that seems the work of an editor battling a bad hangover.

Touch of Pink is really a big glob of "The Wedding Banquet," with some "Will & Grace" mixed in to remind us that gay people are actually quaintly neurotic and funny once you get to know them.

The movie rarely overcomes its terminal Scorsese- and Ferrara-isms, or fulfills the promise, evident in the film's early passages, that Montias might be a fine observer of local color with his own unique stories to tell.

Inoffensive adolescent escapism laced with surprising amounts of genuine charm.

She’s the Man amounts to little more than softcore porn for the tween set, with aesthetics ripped from the pages of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and virtually every scene revolving around Viola/Sebastian’s crafty escape from some impromptu disrobing.

Bay can be a master of exuberant chaos, but here the violence mostly lands with a sickening thud, which is fitting, one supposes, but also ultimately numbing.

The good news is that Kevin Costner does some of the finest, most deeply felt work of his career as a widower lawyer fighting for custody of his biracial granddaughter in Mike Binder’s Black and White. The bad news is that this well-intentioned family drama never quite shakes free from its didactic, movie-of-the-week dramaturgy and a hand-holding approach to race-relations.

Chandrasekhar is a master forger of images and situations from horror movies past, but unlike Wes Craven did in "Scream," he doesn't build on them in any way, and the result is the opposite of what's intended; the movie is stultifying.

What makes the movie seem crass is its refusal to present (or even to see) more than one side of any given issue. In the logic of Konner and Rosenthal, here abetted by director Mike Newell, you're either a Jackson Pollock or a Norman Rockwell.

This is exceedingly earnest stuff, dolloped with Christian goodness and solid production values.

Is there a Razzie Award for worst casting? If so, it’s one of several that can be reserved early for this fourth, spectacularly lousy screen version of Jack Finney’s 1954 novella "The Body Snatchers," which some bright light envisioned as the ideal starring vehicle for the Cold Mountain herself, Nicole Kidman, and for Daniel Craig, last seen as the most poker-faced James Bond on record.

The script, credited to "Twin Peaks" co-creator Mark Frost and longtime "Simpsons" writer Don Payne, unsuccessfully strives for hipster irreverence.

Monumentally terrible but far too bizarre to be boring.

Falls back on the broad characterizations and stereotypical situations that typified the earliest gay-themed movies, while preaching a familiar (though not entirely ingenuous) message of tolerance.

As in his previous "In Good Company," Weitz wants too much to like all of his characters, and he wants us to like them too. The result is a movie devoid of any threat, or many laughs, with barn door–broad performances.

After an hour of predictably sophomoric antics involving foulmouthed kids, compulsively self-pleasuring canines and the rampant objectification of women, Click turns into a surrealist death dream in which Sandler's masochistic impulses flower onscreen as never before.

The tension rarely rises above a low boil.

Manna from gearhead heaven, the third and most guiltily pleasurable Furious emits the crude thrills of a 1950s drag-racing cheapie, only with souped-up Toyotas and Nissans in place of gas-guzzling hot rods, and slinky Asian temptresses substituted for poodle-skirted teenyboppers.

Lackluster pic fails both as suspense and as character study.

Promising young cast flounders amid comic material that's staler than week-old bread.

An immensely likable, funny comedy that finds a novel approach to that familiar combo of kids and sports.

Serviceable, wholly uninspired.

Hendrickson shot “Colossus” from a partial script, leaving room for improvisation, and the movie’s loose, shapeless feel and scenes that go on far too long are the telltale signs of a filmmaker who fell so in love with his own material that he couldn’t bring himself to kill his darlings.

Oz tilts towards the mawkish, as the sham wizard learns the value of selflessness and an incessant Danny Elfman score tugs so shamelessly at your tear ducts that it would make the Tin Man surrender his heart on the spot.

Seth MacFarlane has delivered a flaccid all-star farce that’s handsomely dressed up with nowhere to go for most of its padded two-hour running time.

A movie as lacking in personality as its amnesiac protagonist.

Newcomer Short has charisma, charm and athleticism to burn, but it's mostly for naught in a movie that spends two tedious hours pulling out every stop in the gold-hearted-kid-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks- meets-gold-hearted-girl-who-values-true-love-above-privilege playbook.

Shakily cobbled together from stock footage and new interviews with authors and family, Stalin’s Wife is nearly barbarous in its denial of aesthetic pleasure. The whole thing looks like a late-night-TV infomercial.

Zombeavers is not a total wash, and seen at night, under the right combination of low expectations and controlled substances, it may even seem better than it really is.

The movie isn't particularly tasteful or finely crafted -- but it grabs you by the jugular, and only during an overcooked climax does it finally relax its grip.

Moves along at a clip and provides a terrific action lead for Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson.

Even by the standards of the genre, the characters behave with astonishing stupidity, while Makinov tries repeatedly to mine suspense from slowly creeping up on his actors with the camera.

So beneath the considerable talents of its star, Chris Rock, it's dismaying to note Rock is also the movie's director, producer and co-scenarist. Not unlike Richard Pryor a generation ago, Rock has yet to land a movie vehicle that captures the sparky energy and subversive bent of his excellent stand-up performances.

Into the Storm can make it rain like nobody’s business, but when it tries to be smart, it comes out all wet.

If the movie never quite masters the feel of messy, grown-up life, it at least makes a few promising salvos in that direction... The actors help a lot.

The picture is an enormous disappointment... The result is one of the most self-consciously grimy movies on record - it looks as if the negative were developed in a mud bath.

Southland Tales pilfers large chunks of its plot and visual style from Alex Cox’s "Repo Man," Kathryn Bigelow’s "Strange Days" and Shane Carruth’s Sundance-winning "Primer," and unlike the makers of those films, Kelly hasn’t digested his influences and made them his own -- he’s more like the slacker college kid who’s just enough of an intellectual poseur to bluff his way to an A. That said, Southland Tales isn’t entirely without its pleasures, chiefly The Rock.

The actors sleepwalk through their roles (save for Rosemary herself, Mia Farrow, chewing the scenery with termitelike gusto as the boy's satanic protector), while Moore, who previously directed "Behind Enemy Lines" and the "Flight of the Phoenix" remake, seems completely at a loss without any planes to crash.

Both stars are atrocious -- but the real blame for this cosmically self-indulgent disaster lies with Kevin Smith, who directs like a proud father who can't stop showing you pictures of his kids. And here's the thing: The brats are ugly.

The result is unquestionably an auteur film, but one festooned with so many bad and unnecessary ideas that one can’t help wondering if a more modest, hemmed-in version of the same project might not have proved more effective.

The vaporous Wonderland never moves beyond its grungily romanticized view of the past.

There are moments of real power here -- mostly courtesy of Phillips ("Dawson's Creek"), who does a remarkable job of turning her caricature into a character -- but even more of astounding naiveté.

The movie is enormously, convulsively funny, and it never lets up -- it has no shame.

Though the story hardly lacks for event as it traces Khayyam's ascension from the peasantry to the royal court, the period costumes and sets look to be on loan from Medieval Times, as do most of the actors, and the boxy, harshly lit compositions make everything feel even more cardboard.

These resourceful actors -- to say nothing of the audience -- deserve better.

With her bulging blue eyes, elaborately braided hair and slinky spandex costumes, she's an indelible icon of action-heroine chic, and, quite frankly, the films don't deserve her.

A handsome, compelling drama, about the African-American elite settling in the Hamptons, that more than stands on its own.

Pretty formulaic stuff: bland self-empowerment tinged with warm fuzzies in all the right places. But what makes this "Somebody" something is Pasquin's deft touch and understanding with the material.

There are intriguing, half-formed ideas afoot in Transcendence, but the script and Pfister’s heavy, humorless direction tend to reduce everything to simplistic standoffs between good and evil.

This big-hearted underdog comedy from director Shawn Levy is, much like its two leads, exceedingly affable and good-natured despite being undeniably long in the tooth.

The Intended is unintentionally risible from frame one to last. But don't just blame Levring: The script was co-authored by none other than McTeer herself, and the result suggests the sort of self-flagellating, anti-vanity project that can occur when perfectly capable actors start taking themselves way too seriously.

Pic's quirky-for-quirky's-sake antics are neither particularly coherent nor enjoyably incoherent.

Director Rob Reiner’s atrocious cancer “comedy” marks a new low in Hollywood’s self-flagellating “things to be thankful for” tradition.

Devil’s Knot only occasionally feels weightier than a high-end Lifetime original or “Law & Order” episode.

A handsomely made but dramatically inert and not very scary sequel.

It's a fantastic-looking picture in search of a decent script.

The performers are a bright bunch, especially Snow (even if she's no sane person’s idea of a wallflower), Metcalfe, who has the cocksure swagger of a young Travolta, and McCarthy, who infuses her few scenes with a haggard dignity masquerading as optimism.

Bruni Tedeschi holds all of pic’s myriad tangents in a delicate balance, no single one ever rising to the fore, no pressure felt to wrap everything — or anything — up in a tidy package at the end.

A lazy and listless buddy-cop action-comedy that fades from memory as quickly as its generic title.

As a spy pic, it has more pizzazz than the last few Bond adventures, "The Sum of All Fears" or "The Recruit."

A Red Dawn for the Tea Party era, Olympus Has Fallen is pretty ridiculously entertaining—or at least entertainingly ridiculous—for long stretches, dulled only by the realization that there are many parts of the country where this will play as less than total farce.

A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis that almost makes you sorry Nicolas Roeg isn't making pictures anymore.

An inspirational sports drama that goes long on rectitudinous sermonizing but comes up short on gridiron thrills or genuine love for the game.

If Blake Edwards wrote a script and then Abel Ferrara directed it, it might look something like Nowhere Man.

The rest of Sabotage rarely rises to Schwarzenegger’s level, in large measure because the other characters (of which there are far too many) aren’t nearly as sharply drawn by Ayer and co-writer Skip Woods.

Shrill, smug would-be satire.

Only Williams makes any real emotional connection: I'm not sure I'd call his performance good, but there's something fascinating about seeing the man once heralded as "the black Clark Gable" three decades removed from heartthrob status, heavy and sullen-looking, weighed down by the burdens of time and age.

Direly predictable, with candle-drip pacing and a pervasive unpleasantness.

Lipsky is clearly reaching for something grand and cosmic here, but the results are mostly just confounding.

A limp facsimile of a Woody Allen ensembler set in a familiar world of New York Jewish intellectuals — minus only the wit, and the intellect.

Watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.

That sly toying with audience sympathies is, alas, all that’s notable about this otherwise poverty-row quickie produced for the Chiller cable network.

All of this was more enjoyable when Bellucci, Cassel and Bohringer were the stars. Hartnett is overly methodical here as Matthew, and Kruger, as in "Troy," is beautiful but lacking in dramatic intensity.

Directing seems an unduly elegant term for what Hollywood hack du jour Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) does here -- the action scenes are so choppily constructed that their excitement disappears faster than the Invisible Woman.

Tries to combine the suspense of old Saturday morning serials with the gusto of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's action pics. Falling short on both counts, this long, and long-winded, series of middling cliffhangers won't pump the adrenaline of action aficionados or -- the family crowd.

A modestly scaled and highly pleasurable sequel to Wan’s low-budget 2011 smash that should have genre fans begging for thirds.

As usual, Statham gets a lot of mileage out of his droll, ever-present scowl, but as in “Heat,” the movie’s disparate narrative strands never really come together, and the climactic showdown feels pretty anticlimactic.

What sounds like a veritable B-movie wet dream — with that master of the subzero scowl, Jason Statham, starring in a screenplay written by Sylvester Stallone — turns out to be considerably less than the sum of its parts.

Sublimely trashy, this conceptual sequel to 1997's surprise hit, "Anaconda," doesn't expect to be taken any more seriously than its schlock predecessor, and keeps its tongue-in-cheek thrills flowing rapidly.

Burns' films are invariably better directed and scripted than they are performed, and Ash Wednesday is no exception. Pic's biggest drawback is that the helmer has again cast himself in the leading role.

Dracula Untold opts for the stately, staid approach, and even at a mere 85 minutes (sans credits) it’s something of a bore — neither scary nor romantic nor exciting in any of the ways it seems to intend.

Surprisingly unsexy, uninvolving affair.

The dance sequences might have saved it, were it not for the fact that director Guy Ferland seems to have learned everything he knows about (over) shooting and (blindly) cutting such scenes from watching "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago."

Never less than pleasant and genteel, but rarely more.

Moments of genuine insight alternate freely with those of banal psychologizing, but even then there can be no denying that the filmmaker has an ear for a certain brand of self-absorbed discourse often overheard in restaurants and bars in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. And given the choice, I’ll take Henry’s home movies over Jonathan Demme’s any day of the week.

Paul plays the part with the flinty, tightly wound charisma of a small man who makes up in moxie what he lacks in stature. There’s something of the young James Cagney in him, and he’s by far the best thing Need for Speed has going for it.

No doubt, Levinson thought he was making this generation's "Dr. Strangelove." What he's actually made is a desperate, ponderous sop to progressives that caters to all of the left's worst fears about voter fraud, corporate malfeasance and the impossibility of effecting real change.

Far from a complete success: It takes too long to get to its central premise and, once there, too often meanders away from it. But Campbell is close to astonishing whenever she's onscreen.

Pic has a stagy, boxed-in feel. Both visually and energetically, it suggests something that has been done onstage to the point of mechanized repetition. And even though Whaley is supposed to be playing a disillusioned character, it's the actor himself who seems fatigued and over-rehearsed.

The Runner doesn’t lack for drama, but the characters are so thinly and predictably drawn, and the movie’s supposed insights into the art of political compromise so banal, that nothing catches fire.

Initially promising, but quickly disappointing.

The script (by Matthew Perniciaro and Timm Sharp) is trite, and the direction so flat that every scene looks like it was shot in a broom closet, but the bright young cast makes things more bearable than they should be.

The bigger-than-big, rambunctious spectacle is way too much of a questionably good thing.

Harris tries his best to make something more out of his one-dimensional white-knight character, while Gooding plays his vaudeville Rainman routine to the rafters.

An electrifying modern-dress noir, directed by Ernest Dickerson with a tough, terse, unapologetically brutal attitude that evokes the heyday of Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich.

While slight comic concoction is so airy it seems in danger of floating right off the screen, the pleasant retro vibe and a handful of effervescent moments carry this film no self-respecting heterosexual male would dare see except on a date.

Rousing, family-friendly item has a big, epic look and state-of-the-art visual effects, which help to make pic -- a high-profile example of the mainstreaming of Christian entertainment.

Audiences won't show much clemency toward Death & Texas, an uneasy (and very unfunny) marriage of sports culture satire and death penalty polemic.

Those viewers who found anti-Semitism lurking under every stone in The Passion of the Christ may rejoice in this celebration of Jewish heroism; all others should rest assured that falling asleep in the cinema is not a mortal sin.

For all of its 93 minutes, you never feel anything significant is at stake for anyone — save for a paycheck.

While the premise does lead to a few moments of inspired physical comedy -- the movie repeatedly falls back on poorly staged, choppily edited fight scenes between Chan and a gloomy, power-mad villain.

By and large, the jokes fall flat, and the entire film often seems as fatigued as its star.

Given her (Halle Berry) biggest part since winning Oscar, she responds with a zeal that's more than the movie deserves.

Like the best pulp, though, it gets its hooks into you faster than you can start to wonder why you should possibly care about what happens to any of its despicable characters, and, before you know it, you’ve been pulled deep into its Dantean vision.

The sentimental novelty of watching two childhood antiheroes have at it dissipates once you realize the lugubrious lengths to which the screenplay must go in order to make that happen.

What makes the film transcend its limitations is Carell, whose square, "Father Knows Best" demeanor belies a supreme comic self-confidence and whose implacability in the face of the movie's CGI-intensive animal antics can be marvelous to behold.

When it comes to Annabelle’s five or six big stinger moments, Leonetti manages to deliver the jolts, and if audiences are sure to head home complaining about how dumb and predictable it all was, many may also find themselves nursing their significant others’ lightly bruised forearms.

It's a rich idea for a comedy, even if the filmmakers seem timid about making the pic the full-on satire it might have been.

Cold Creek Manor's prime reason for being seems to be a set piece involving poisonous snakes, directed by Figgis with a drunken gusto the rest of the film could use, and as a comeback vehicle for Stone, who tries hard at motherly warmth, but can't quite wash the Catherine Tramell out of her hair.

Lacks so much as a single fresh idea; it lacks an entertaining way of presenting its stale ideas, too.

Rebound is a sports comedy so by-the-numbers that you don't really have to watch it -- you can just check in on it every once in a while between trips to the concession stand and the bathroom.

There's greater consistency to it, and considerably more humor, with macabre slapstick and fun-house ghoulishness that, at their best, recall early Tim Burton.

Last Love sticks to a flaccid middle ground lacking any real drama or pathos.

Life goes far past the boiling point for most of the characters in this hilariously overwrought ghetto soap opera from cult writer-director Buddy Giovinazzo.

The major exception is Lohan, who gives one of those performances, like Marlon Brando’s in “Last Tango in Paris,” that comes across as some uncanny conflagration of drama and autobiography. Lohan may not go as deep or as far as Brando, but with her puffy skin, gaudy hoop earrings and thick eye makeup, there’s a little-girl-lost quality to the onetime Disney teen princess that’s very affecting.

Calamitously uninspired and borderline incoherent, new pic lacks even those fleeting pleasures (namely, a sense of humor) that made the first film a passable popcorn attraction.

This Thing of Ours is infatuated with the romance of gangsterism -- with an absurdly straight face, it asks us to feel mournful for the loss of “respect” and “integrity” in the mob community.

Lady in the Water feels very much like something its author made up as he went along; and, if it weren't so damn weird, it would most certainly put you right to sleep.

The pic falls well short of its efforts to combine the raucous vulgarity of the “Hangover” movies with Cameron Crowe-ish depth of feeling.

A convoluted comic caper that labors to affect a lighthearted, off-the-cuff feel, and winds up being a copy of a copy of a bad Tarantino-Elmore Leonard forgery, with Tim Allen as a glib cinephile hitman.

The Anarchist Cookbook drops a few scant sparks onto a torch that, hopefully, some other filmmaker will come along and run with.

Like the movie’s mysterious Jigsaw doppelgänger, Saw IV is itself a poor substitute for the original.

Despite a promising setup, pic never really goes anywhere, instead immersing viewers in a kinetic onslaught of flesh (namely, that of Milla Jovovich) and flesh-eaters (most of the rest of the cast).

Even Cohen can't dull the loony romanticism of the movie’s finale and, to his credit, stages one truly spectacular bit of action midway through, when Biel bails out behind enemy lines and narrates each harrowing moment of her earthward plummet.

It's a feature-length teaser for a never-to-be sci-fi franchise.

Manages to get a fair bit right about early 1970s surf culture when it isn’t trafficking in the hoariest of David-vs.-Goliath cliches.

Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.

It's all cliffhangers, with no downtime in between.

Apocalyptic gobbledygook.

While Gens can splatter gore with the best of them -- early in the film, a human body packed with C4 goes off in graphic detail -- he fails to stage so much as a single rousing action scene, even when he has four double-fisted swordsmen facing off inside an abandoned subway car. Game over. The audience loses.

iInstead of a buoyant, imaginative superhero movie on the order of Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" films or Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns," we get a lumbering, paint-by-numbers origin story.

This Hannibal is a stick-in-the-mud altogether lacking in the wit, gourmet appetites and romantic flair required of any surrogate for Sir Anthony Hopkins. By the end of two full hours, it's only Harris' head you long to see on a plate.

A preposterously bad, grade-Z adventure yarn.

The genially goofy shenanigans, incredibly corny punchlines and Hank Azaria’s go-for-broke performance as the incompetent wizard Gargamel are very much the same ― an entirely welcome thing in a summer movie season full of so much apocalyptic Sturm und Drang.

An anemic sitcom pilot dragged out to an excruciating 108-minute running time.

Unabashedly tasteless, wholly trashy and, also, hugely entertaining.

Key to the success of the Vacation movies was their underlying sweetness — the sense that, for all their foibles, the Griswolds were a surprisingly functional lot. Families looked up at the screen and saw a version of themselves reflected back. Look at the new Vacation and all that stares back is a great comic void.

About as appealing as day-old beer littered with cigarette butts, the abysmal caper drama Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is one of those international co-productions produced for all the right tax-credit reasons and none of the right artistic ones.

This thoroughly unhip, unfunny political comedy is the kind of movie TV actors like Ray Romano make on hiatus from their successful series, and movie actors like Gene Hackman and Marcia Gay Harden make on hiatus from taking their careers seriously.

An erratic, psychobabbling jumble of scenes that never builds to any discernible point.

Begins slavishly faithful to its low-key 1970s predecessor then sledgehammers auds with a numbing succession of shock edits and over-the-top horror effects.

Starts out as an inspired test case for the continued necessity of the Second Amendment, and only near the end does it lose some of its tightly concentrated focus.

Shyamalan is clearly a director-for-hire here, his disinterest palpable from first frame to last. Nowhere in evidence is the gifted "Sixth Sense" director who once brought intricately crafted setpieces and cinematic sleight-of-hand to even the least of his own movies.

Director Jessy Terrero's spasmodically funny air-travel parody unfailingly counters every one of its genuinely uproarious gags with at least two or three others rooted in retrograde racial panic.

Welsh director Sara Sugarman and the great cinematographer Stephen Burum (Hoffa, The Untouchables) keep the visuals bouncing along in bright, primary-color-intensive fashion, but the movie has no real heart and even less soul.

Reverts to a fire-sale slapstick scenario that includes multiple tumbles into toilets/sewers/ dumpsters; a visit to a Harlem beauty shop that's all homily-spouting mammies and swishy, finger-snapping dandies; and the attempted inducement of a constipated dog's bowel movement.

Appealing performances by a trio of second- and third-generation Hollywood kids keep this three-hankie twaddle more bearable than it deserves.

It all rings particularly hollow in light of several recent pics ("Last Orders" and "The Barbarian Invasions" chief among them) that have explored similar terrain with much greater emotion and intelligence.

As bad as the movie is, when it tries to be funny -- a hired killer who sings to his victims, a fat man named Bumpo, and an interminable fight scene choreographed to “La donna è mobile” -- it somehow manages to get several degrees worse.

Despite its intelligence and a great, funny concept for a movie, this "Picnic" never gets past the appetizers; pic lacks the development needed for a full-length feature and, following a hilarious opening sequence, it becomes tiresomely one-note.

An ultra-touchy-feely race-relations, civil-rights drama as imagined by theme-park organizers, with every character painted in broad strokes in a story that eagerly tugs at every available heartstring -- and rings false at every turn.

Mildly diverting caper.

As kitsch, however, it's pretty enjoyable. Jolie and Owen perform with such conviction, and the film -- blissfully unaware of its own badness -- takes its paperback-romance shenanigans with such goofy gravity, that it's easy to get caught up in the whole, soap-opera thrust of the thing.

Winning performances by a number of fresh-faced newcomers are almost but not quite enough to recommend The Secret Lives of Dorks, a fitfully amusing, more often shrill and overstated teen comedy that, like its dweeby protagonist, tries too hard to impress.

You'll be begging for mercy well before the end of this self-righteous, thoroughly unsavory "farce" about a lonely gay man who - gosh darn it - can't seem to stop getting mistaken for a pedophile.

One of the best products to roll off the prolific multihyphenate’s Atlanta-based assembly line, largely absent the pandering humor and finger-wagging moralism that have bedeviled many of Perry’s earlier (if undeniably popular) efforts.

[A] talky, contrived and ultimately tedious actors’ exercise.

This appalling multiculti upgrade of the ’50s sitcom is about as funny as a bus accident.

A cobwebbed, mummified horror entry that makes obvious, cartoonishly grotesque demands for attention.

They ought to be a whole lot scarier than they are in this tepid genre offering from director Robert Harmon, whose debut film "The Hitcher" set a high bar for screen terror in the 1980s. Pic looks like a holiday gobbler.

It's a timely, noble undertaking ill-served by a dry, history-textbook style that is at once too much and not enough.

Not quite aptly titled, but close, writer-director Ryan Schifrin's cheapo horror opus pits everyone's favorite hirsute hominoid against the denizens of a remote town nestled at the base of a mountain called Suicide Peak. It's not much of a contest.

It's one of those rare movie failures that truly warrants being called ambitious.

Ellis and screenwriter Eric Bress even go all meta on us with an "Inglourious Basterds"–esque finale set inside a 3D cinema, though their set pieces never quite muster the giddy brio of "Final Destination 1" and "3" auteur James Wong at his best.

Rich in its love of surfing but curiously short on such footage, well-meaning directorial debut by producer Robert Mickelson is boosted by winning performances, but ultimately about as memorable as a day of 3-4 foot swells.

Transforms the glory days of Hilly Kristal’s Bowery punk/No Wave club into exactly the sort of moldy sitcom one might expect from writer-director Randall Miller.

Handsomely mounted, this direly conventional bit of vampire business is enlivened by flashes of humor and game performances. It isn't great entertainment or camp, but pic sets its ambitions so low, it can't help partially delivering on them.

Few surprises lie in store for connoisseurs of torture cinema, though unlike its 2003 predecessor, this Massacre owes less to Bay’s attention-deficient aesthetics than to the measured, Georgia O’Keefe-on-acid sensibility that guided Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s much-cannibalized original.

A crass, condescending piece of corporate bamboozling, Grind plays like a movie conceived by monkey-suited honchos who regard their targeted audience as impressionable nincompoops susceptible to every new trend in sports, clothing and music that comes down the pike.

Fittingly, though, given the uniformly regurgitated feel, the projectile-vomit effects are superb.

A scabrous, provocative and often funny social satire about the American dream, Spike Lee's flawed but fascinating She Hate Me addresses everything from corporate malfeasance to the African AIDS epidemic, barely catching its breath in-between.

They only want us to play that tiresome guessing game: Is it all a dream or is it really happening? Instead, you may find yourself asking: Is this cinema or merely Cinemax?

The picture shows vital signs only in a few scenes where Cedric takes on the additional role of his own lecherous uncle, but it's too little too late.

Lacks sufficient appeal beyond niche aficionados of its featured performers.

Neither particularly fast nor furious.

A chiller resolutely without chills, in which even the pool water always seems heated. And inasmuch as the pic never owns up to its own trashiness, it's not even enjoyable camp.

Bearing a distinctly musty odor confirmed by its 2011 copyright date, this day-and-date Lionsgate pickup never achieves dramatic liftoff.

No mere crime drama, but rather the latest in the recent resurgence of independently financed, spiritually themed pics that seek to couch religious dogma within the shells of B-grade genre entertainment.

Torpid, academic vanity project for helmer-thesp Rodolphe Marconi.

A schlock supernatural shocker.

It’s only the Brazilian-born Da Costa who seems to be trying to create a real character.

Like "Life Is Beautiful" before it, Imagining Argentina juxtaposes horrific images of torture and humiliation against gooey optimism and thinks it's saying something profound about human resilience in the process.

Are We There Yet? traps the affable Ice Cube in a dismal kiddy slapstick saga that even his considerable charisma can do little to enhance.

What the movie needs is a director, and what it gets instead is Pitof, a French visual-effects maestro so much fonder of technological wizardry than of human flesh that he manages to turn even his slinky, sinuous star attraction into a digitized synthespian frolicking about endless CGI cityscapes.

A case of means exceeded by ambition.

A dreary, weary psychosexual thriller that's neither sexy nor thrilling.

The rotting corpses, projectile insect vomit, and creepy geezers in black arrive pretty much on cue, as does the great Cicely Tyson as the obligatory old blind woman who "sees" more than most people with two good eyes. It's her upper bridge, though, that's truly the scariest thing in the whole movie.

There's no question, though, that the Wayanses have dialed down the outrageousness to nearly sub-PG-13 levels.

There is something sweetly naive about pic's astonished contention that this is because morals were taught in a nonreligious context. But it's not a compelling argument for the Apocalypse.

There's nary a comic idea in Van Wilder that isn't ripped off from a recent Farrelly brothers movie. But that doesn't stop Van Wilder from being very funny, provided you're not easily offended.

Depressingly thin and exhaustingly contrived. Only masochistic moviegoers need apply.

Thank heavens — or at least the “Department of Eternal Affairs” — for Jeff Bridges, whose hilariously free-associative performance as a 19th-century frontier marshal-turned-21st-century undead lawman is like an adrenaline shot to the heart of R.I.P.D.