Scott Tobias

The scattered insights in This So-Called Disaster aren't worth the sifting it takes to find them.

Shooting in digital video, director Jeff Renfroe needlessly amps up the proceedings with jittery camerawork, jump cuts, and other technical hiccups meant to disorient the audience.

None of Jack’s relationships are handled with enough conviction to make them stick, and that carries over to a religious message that’s squishy in the extreme. “Agreeable” is a good quality, but it should never be the best quality a film possesses.

The silver lining: Like its predecessor, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 offers its successor another fresh start, since no one will remember what happened in this movie, either.

the film thrums with an urgency that’s both asset and liability, at once invested with deep feeling and undone by a barrage of flashbacks, allusions, and counterintuitive bits of wisdom.

Perhaps the film will connect with those attuned to the Quays' allusive wavelength, much as a dog responds to a whistle. Others won't hear a thing.

Much like Zwick's "Glory" and "The Last Samurai," Blood Diamond strives to be an "important" film while stopping well short of being genuinely provocative and artistically chancy.

Has a clean, antiseptic chilliness reminiscent of a Kubrick film. But too often, the director's stark visuals underline the naked simplicity of his story and make his picture of the suburbs seem hopelessly generic.

Doesn't possess the discipline to peel laughs off its potentially riotous premise. Instead, Segal and company grope desperately for every low gag they can find, whether or not it has anything to do with the story.

Disappointing.

It’s fitfully inspired in stretches, as Jude runs various creative scenarios through a mirthless AI generator, but as a viewer, being inundated with crap still hurts, even when there’s a satirical purpose.

At once too real for escapism and too ridiculous for a credible espionage thriller, The Sum Of All Fears unfolds like a cruel joke and treats imagined human tragedy as the punchline.

Slips into the no-man's land between screwball and melodrama, squandering both the comic opportunities of an irrational search for drugs and the raw desperation of a piano prodigy who's held captive by his mother's dysfunction.

Quartet falls into the common actor-turned-director trap of valuing the performances of fellow actors over all other aesthetic concerns.

An awkward marriage of fairy-tale and social realism.

Casual moviegoers looking for a bubbly romantic comedy with Brittany Murphy will get more than they bargained for in Little Black Book, which builds to a nasty twist that's more Lars von Trier than Meg Ryan.

Nearly everything good about Bad Words plays off the yin-and-yang dynamic between Guy and Chaitanya—one an endless wellspring of belligerence, the other grinning, excitable, and impossible to rattle.

All that unsavory business aside, the biggest problem with the third act is how the film discards the novelty of its own premise in order to bring its star into the action. When Berry trades her headset for a rock, it’s the bluntest metaphor imaginable for a film that’s completely lost its mind.

Playing By Heart covers a broad, multi-generational spectrum of romantic and familial relationships, but Carroll can't resist tying everything together in a shiny red bow. The result is daytime television at its most ambitious, an entire season's worth of flavorless melodrama and placating warmth.

Complain all you want about the affable slobs in Judd Apatow comedies; at least they're not tools.

The film is overstuffed, but it’s swift and unpretentious, barreling through a non-stop series of action setpieces without pausing too long to take a breath. The busyness doesn’t eradicate the clichés, much less enrich the film emotionally or thematically, but there’s no time to think about them when Bodrov and his screenwriters, Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight, are moving along to the next sensation. It’s transporting in that sense, and that sense alone.

As with "Women In Trouble," Gutierrez unveils a series of loosely connected characters and subplots that concern players in and around the porn industry, but the intended colorful irreverence looks a lot like standard indie quirk.

The fact that the story makes sense at all remains Coppola and his butchers' sole achievement.

The remake simply replaces the laughably dated horror tropes of the 1979 version with a commercial-slick J-horror aesthetic that's sure to look just as silly to audiences in another 15 years.

Bier allows her film to be buried by its own overwrought ambition.

When pinned mostly in the man's bedroom, Amenábar's flashier instincts are stifled by a bolted camera and a procession of issue-of-the-week clichés.

With a cast this stacked, the performances are predictably strong (particularly from Sarsgaard, whose slow-burning role recalls his work in Shattered Glass), but the first impression they make is the same as the last.

The big musical setpiece, rife with possibilities for humor and uplift, needed to be funnier and more energetic than the half-hearted lyrics and choreography bother to muster.

It would be a gigantic understatement to say that Barry Levinson's 1984 film version compromises the original ending, given that it concludes with perhaps the most spectacularly triumphant swing in movie history. And yet as much as it betrays the tragic underpinnings of Malamud's story, the phony ending remains the film's most powerful sequence, earning an ironic place in baseball's iconography.

The lone standout is Linney's performance as the deranged neighbor, whose erratic combination of sexual desperation and extreme vulnerability keeps the film on life support.

Fantasy sequences in which Yu and his friends are thrown into the world of a '70s kung-fu film or melodrama seem like a clever way to evoke the period and bring their story to another plane, but they just end up looking cheesy, spoiled by half-executed effects. "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" this ain't.

Rather than cast actors who can't dance or dancers who can't act, Step Up splits the difference with stars Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan, who pull double duty with uninspired competence.

Lawrence is fortunate to have appealing pros like Grant and Bullock around to bail him out with romantic chemistry and enough crisply delivered one-liners to survive the barren stretches of script.

Part of the problem is Mark Ruffalo, whose tortured sensitivity in "You Can Count On Me" and "We Don't Live Here Anymore" made him seem like Marlon Brando's heir apparent, not Will Smith's.

But coming on the heels of "Red Eye," which is nothing if not an efficient thrill machine, Flightplan can only look conspicuously flat by comparison.

Asks for sympathy for deplorable behavior.

Everyone’s there to get the job done, Dolph Lundgren style, meaning Skin Trade is a throwback to the one-man-army actioners of the ’80s, sprinkled with updated stats on human trafficking. If the film happens to raise awareness, then that’s more bonus than objective.

It's a tribute to the film's goofy, inconsequential charm that it's still possible to laugh as someone sneaks a bomb past airport security.

Embers offers a series of compelling premises and never follows through on them, content to drift along on its characters’ dull malaise and allow self-conscious visual poetry to stand in for real emotion.

The film has the visceral kick of brainiacs willing each other into bloody oblivion, but struggles to justify its own stock mayhem, much less plumb Cronenbergian depths.

Madea's Family Reunion represents an advance on Diary, if only because it dials down Madea's shtick (she no longer waves a gun around) and irons out some of those awkward tonal transitions. The chance that Perry's followers will leave disappointed is approximately 0 percent.

Working with non-professional actors, Seidl emphasizes their ordinariness to the point of cartoonish ridicule, putting them in scenarios either banal, perverse, or both at the same time.

Part courtroom drama, part otherworldly shocker, the film basically restages the Scopes Monkey Trial and comes out once more against Mr. Darrow, and it's got the spine-twisting, tongues-speaking, devil-channeling hellion to prove it.

The film is memorable mainly for attractive people sailing and smooching against an attractive backdrop. There's no urgency behind all the preening.

Generally speaking, the more obscure the fetish, the worse the subplot gets, though they all wear out their one-joke welcome before Lawson inevitably turns up the sentiment and makes the film about love and kids and happy unions.

Despite a handsome production and two genuinely brilliant lead performances, The Theory Of Everything stumbles into virtually every pitfall that afflicts biopics about geniuses.

The film suffers for her (Brenda Blethyn) egocentrism.

Easy Virtue needs a strong center to justify its celebration of American effrontery, and Biel lacks that prideful edge.

Without any glimmers of depth or subtext.

Just because the live-action Seusses have dialed down expectations doesn't mean that Horton shouldn't aspire to more than time-wasting mediocrity. There are precious childhoods at stake here.

Though the pacing is lumpy, to say the least, Blackhat occasionally bursts to life when Mann breaks out one of his signature action setpieces, which have the distinct pop of heavy artillery and the immediacy of video.

With her confident second feature, director Sophia Takal (“Green”) takes on Tinseltown misogyny and the toxic rivalry between friends, but that’s mere prelude to a gonzo meta-fiction that deconstructs itself nearly to death.

The entire story hinges on a thinly calibrated twist ending that’s meant to provide emotional weight to Karpovsky’s actions, but instead clarifies them to the point of utter banality. There’s no mystery left to linger.

Covering the emotional spectrum between dog farts on one end and tragedy on the other reps a tonal challenge that Showtime! can’t pull off, despite a gentler touch than most kiddie fare of its kind.

Too often, Saints And Soldiers confuses bravery for faith.

Only Edie Falco, appearing as a bereft mother leading a citizen's group that searches for missing children, suggests the great film that Freedomland might have been.

The satirical promise of Ready or Not 2 leads to few comic payoffs—or even much resembling a joke, despite the film’s irreverent tone—and the snippiness between Grace and Faith seems forced after they’ve been taking fire together for so much of the film. Here’s hoping that Ready or Not 3: Olly Olly Oxen Free better meets the moment.

Though Pieces Of April comes together with improbable grace, Hedges evokes unearned tears from a premise that's already loaded from the start. Like Holmes, he serves up boxed stuffing and canned cranberries, then fishes for compliments to the chef.

Concussion isn't much of a movie, but it's a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players.

With her (Latifah), Just Wright feels hampered by arbitrary contrivances; without her, it wouldn't be enough movie to exist at all.

By the end, even Goodman seems to have lost interest.

In the scope of things, Ohwon's story is a route into the larger story of an uncertain and tumultuous period in Korea, and it's here that Chi-hwa-seon loses its grip.

Craven’s best work resolves the contradictions of his bloodlust and intellect—in that, Deadly Blessing isn’t one of his best.

Martin stays within his comfort zone as a New York-based illustrator still processing his mother’s death, but the tyro helmer struggles to square his distinct minimalist charm with the second-hand influence of standard-bearers like Woody Allen and Wes Anderson.

In Jewison's hands, this cat-and-mouse game plays like third-rate John Le Carré, treading lethargically over high-minded intrigue that mixes fact, fiction, and unlikely speculation in dubious relation to the historical record.

The main problem with “Hong Kong Trilogy” is that it over-promises and under-delivers.

A little focus might have helped. Or not: The Dry Land seems intent to tick off a checklist of PTSD symptoms without animating them with fresh details or creative life. It's cloaked in an earnestness that suffocates.

Roth gets the notes right while missing the music: He studiously replicates Miike's unblinking depiction of torture, but without much reflection or wit. It's merely unpleasant and more than a little dumb.

Broderick’s tendency to hang all his problems on corporate greed and heartless bureaucracy leads to some strange missteps.

Pritzker and Rothschild’s script feels like such a composite of jazz biopics that its only in the performance sequences, parceled out stingily amid the misery, in which Bolden really comes alive.

Its skillful execution of a bad idea doesn’t make the bad idea any better; in fact, the scrupulousness with which West and his crew evoke the past make the film that much more unsavory.

Having a Rutgers psychology professor comment on Fischer's general symptoms is downright amateurish. In a documentary about a living subject, conclusions are better drawn through rigorous observation, not explained away in some tidy pop-psychological portraiture.

Fogel and Lefkowitz go for a loose, funny vibe that allows them the freedom to serve a range of different characters and subplots, but the center of their movie doesn’t hold.

Until he finds a style to better communicate ideas or emotions, Figgis' plans to reinvent cinema will have to go back to the drawing board.

The film is mostly an excuse to do a pregnancy-themed "Love Actually," an overblown symphony of birthing stories that reaches its crescendo in the maternity ward.

Mirren cuts the figure of a bodice-ripping paperback heroine, a withering desert flower who blooms in the arms of a swarthy prizefighter roughly half her age. Mirren embodies the fantasy beautifully -- but Hackford's feature-length valentine to her all but sabotages the rest of the movie.

Cooper leans toward a chronicle of Springsteen’s depression, which makes sense given his emotional state at the time, but too much of the film is explained when it’s better dramatized. The act of turning angst into music is more dynamic than finding every source for it.

The dialogue and the movie seem as canned as a Must-See TV laugh track.

For a movie about identity to have no identity of its own leaves the story doubly adrift, lost amid moody dark-blue imagery, a vacuous lead character, and obscure symbolism, such as the bloody talking fishes.

Any relationship between the world of Because I Said So and actual human behavior is purely coincidental.

The ugliness on display in Running Scared has neither "Sin City's" context nor its wit, and it offers little more than stylish excess for its own sake, with no clear aspirations other than to twist people's arms until they yelp "Uncle."

In the end, 1408 amounts to little more than a radical shock-therapy session for a man still finding his way after the loss of his daughter.

The heroes of Peter Berg's gung-ho retribution tale are fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here, but his film is indulging in a queasy brand of escapism. Winning imaginary wars isn't the same as winning real ones, but The Kingdom nonetheless smells like victory.

Eventually finds its rhythm with late flashes of dark humor and bedroom hijinks, but it takes too much time to get there.

The one appealing aspect of Before The Rains is that there are no villains, just three characters who are driven first by shared desires, then by a natural impulse for self-preservation that brings them into conflict.

For all the film's aggressive crosscutting, the individual stories would work just as well apart as together, because they pack less cumulative power when yoked awkwardly into one sweeping statement.

The Sisters is still somewhat compelling thanks to Bello, whose unguarded, provocative work continually resuscitates this corpse of a melodrama whenever it lays fallow.

From its title on down, Towelhead alarms and manipulates, and succeeds in goading the audience like a schoolyard bully, but apart from Bishil's harrowing attempts to find herself, the strings stay too visible.

Goold, a highly regarded British theater director making his debut feature, lacks the panache to realize this twisted relationship onscreen. Instead he’s made a stolid, well-acted, intelligent drama that respects the complications of Finkel and Longo’s storytelling agendas without bringing them to life.

At the center of the movie, Tsimitselis makes for a disappointing blank, a pretty poster boy who leaves a long trail of emotional wreckage in his wake.

Watching Charlie Bartlett only makes Wes Anderson's work seem more accomplished by comparison, because it underscores that thin line separating the agreeably fanciful from the overbearingly precious.

Harris’ wondrous arrogance as Coupland nearly justifies The Quiet Ones, because he’s so absolutely certain of a methodology that’s so absolutely incoherent.

Madison couldn't be more wholesome if they served it with a tall glass of fresh milk.

If he (The Rock) can keep those wandering eyebrows in check, his future as an action hero appears unlimited--that is, provided he can resist taking roles in movies like this one.

A streamlined script might have helped. Curran and Winterbottom lose themselves in the soupy business of union shenanigans, an internal investigation and Lou's intervention in a troubled boy's life, but the added complications -- and the talk, talk, talk they require -- take away from the disquieting core of Thompson's story.

Though harmless and reasonably good-natured, Where's The Party Yaar? ("yaar" translates as "dude") doesn't add many novel touches to its predictable formula, except for a couple of limp nods to Bollywood song-and-dance numbers.

Only a scene where Helen defends her hunting trips with Mabel as “an honest encounter with death” suggests the tougher, more provocative movie that might have been. This one is mostly a genteel therapy arc.

Though he invests every ounce of his considerable charisma in the lead role, Russell Crowe still comes across as a man unworthy of the paradise offered to him.

What should be a momentous occasion instead gets anonymously processed through the Doc-U-Matic, with exhilarating live material cut into a sloppy assemblage of interviews, archival footage, and awkward reenactments.

Genre clichés catch up with Schultz just as surely as the past catches up with his characters and the sweet, redemptive possibilities of their relationship gets washed away in the tide of gratuitous bloodshed.

The documentary Sushi: The Global Catch tries to be two things at once: an international survey of the way sushi is marketed, prepared, and consumed, and an argument for sustainability, particularly with regard to the bluefin tuna population. These threads are related, but one nonetheless takes away from the other.

It’s a testament to the beauty of Chomet’s visual style that the picture book images of Paris and Marseille in the mid-20th century are transporting enough to make A Magnificent Life a comfortable sit. But Pagnol deserves better than this limp eulogy.

But save for the mesmerizing final tracking shot, Bright Future just mopes around aimlessly, hoping that its vague themes will eventually congeal into something profound.

Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood are both superb in the lead roles, but Rozema’s emphasis on the primacy of family and nature exposes a deficit of visual and narrative imagination.

The lesson at the core of Goethe's poem -- that powerful spirits are not to be taken lightly, and should only be conjured by those who can control them -- goes out the window, and the mentor-student relationship gets swallowed up in the action. Bruckheimer may be the dark lord of Tinseltown, but he's the Mickey Mouse of this scenario, and the mops and brooms get the best of him.

Charlie Kaufman could have made a great movie out of Click, a soupy existential comedy about a "universal remote" that lets a man magically rewind, fast-forward, and pause his life.

Wang loses himself in an old-fashioned script that tries to recall the classic screwball ensembles of Golden Age Hollywood, but lacks the cascading wit to pull it off.

If anything, blame the kids: They’re all adorable, roly-poly delights, but the first year of life has its natural limitations.

Champs dances around the ring when it should be punching.

At times, G.I. Joe: Retaliation has a sense of its own ridiculousness — Pryce seems to be having a good time, anyway — but not enough to soften the mass death, hardware fetishism, and militaristic zeal that gets in the way of its escapist fun.

Though Craven shows flashes of the old magic, Cursed eventually settles into rote, uninspired horror fare, hog-tied to the Williamson formula all the way to arbitrary finish. The film may be one of the best ever not screened in advance for critics, but that still doesn't put it in the finest company.

The racing sequences are the series' meat and potatoes, but in terms of story, Tokyo Drift barely offers a stalk of asparagus.

In trying to make sense of an android’s point-of-view, Sono has sensibly turned repetition and routine into a narrative strategy, but the unrelieved tedium of The Whispering Star takes a toll. If anything, Sono’s past work has suffered from a an overabundance of jokes, digressions, and crazed visual flourishes, but their near-total absence here becomes a problem of another kind.

Though Burmester and Elliott make able sparring partners, Red Betsy literally succumbs to an on-the-nose staging of Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol,” with the old man cast as the model for Scrooge in a school play.

Despite some genuinely arresting imagery—urban decay abstracted as poetic horror—the true narrative of Lost River is its bizarre, haphazard search for its own identity.

The Wackness' main draw is Kingsley's giddily over-the-top performance as a pothead, and the film delights in showing Gandhi sparking a huge bong or making out with Mary-Kate Olsen in a phone booth.

At times approaches the flavor and shapelessness of real life.

There aren't many laughs in this vaudevillian gambit, and fewer still in the fish-out-of-water comedy of Madea hosting a rich white family that's chiefly concerned with yoga, wi-fi, and their carb intakes. Still, Perry remains a true outsider artist-nobody makes movies like his. (And please don't try.)

A sort of retarded "Top Gun," Rob Cohen's Stealth revisits the world of cocky fighter pilots and war games turned real, but it has some serious moral quandaries on the brain, and too much thinking gets it into trouble.

The Messengers, dutifully cobbles together a pastiche of successful horror films past--"The Grudge," "The Sixth Sense," "The Birds," "The Amityville Horror," and "The Shining"--without asserting a single original idea of its own.

By showing up and not embarrassing itself too much, the film far exceeds the standards established by the likes of the Shelley Long/Corbin Bernsen team-up "Frozen Assets" and 2012’s dire sperm-heist comedy "The Babymakers."

Spinning a handsome Disney adventure out of a videogame is a testament to Bruckheimer’s commercial savvy. The fact that it still isn’t particularly good seems beside the point.

Wolf Creek 2 does all it can to paper over the fact that it shouldn’t exist, but the film severely diminishes the integrity of the first Wolf Creek by turning Mick into a cartoon icon, more Outback legend than man.

Von Trotta lingers for so long on the backstory and framing story that the movie's heart never comes to the fore.

The film disappoints on its own terms, failing to drum up any sympathy for a self-pitying rich kid who can't pry his eyes from his navel.

There’s a promotional bent to Mad As Hell that whiffs more of branding than rigorous documentary filmmaking.

With a cast this gifted, some of the throwaway jokes stick, but when Along Came Polly goes for its biggest, grossest laughs, the strings show well in advance.

Borderline-experimental in the way it challenges the limits of perception. It's forward-thinking, visionary, and much of the time unwatchable.

Loach becomes his own pale imitator with Looking For Eric, a wispy little comedy that uses fantasy to gloss over even the darkest and most intractable problems.

The sequel, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, isn't motivated to change the formula in the least, but it's ever-so-slightly more palatable, if only for being less of a total spazz.

The performances, particularly Seyfried’s, keep the film popping, along with some energetic rug-pulling from Feig, who treats the material like a deadly telenovela. But at an exhausting 131 minutes, it’s an indulgent feast on empty calories.

It's just another gangster movie for the pile.

What it lacks is artistry, those small touches of personality that might have distinguished its lugubrious history lesson from a bunch of pretty pictures with captions telling the story.

Working under a limited budget, Catania stirs up a thick gothic atmosphere and delivers the goods with a certain amount of proficiency, but when professionalism is the best thing a film has going for it, there isn't much else to discuss.

The sturdiness of Elphaba and Glinda’s bond throughout these tragic miscues—and Erivo and Grande’s fine dramatic and vocal performances—give this rickety enterprise a solid foundation.

With sumptuous widescreen photography and a pounding world-music score, the film makes for an absorbing travelogue at best, as pretty as a picture book and just as flat on the surface.

In spite of Frieda Hughes' objections, a few snippets of Plath's poetry slip into Sylvia, but they don't do the movie any favors--they just add more weight to a story that already buckles at the knees.

The overall mood of Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is curdled and sour. It leaves the feeling that the next chapter can't come soon enough.

Director Andy Fickman, who previously blanded Johnson up in "The Game Plan," has fashioned the film into a one-size-fits-all, action-packed special-effects extravaganza for the whole family.

The shocks are no less effective than the ones in the other Paranormal Activity movies, but no more original, either, with only the whipping of a handheld camera to set it apart from the offscreen gamesmanship that’s long been the series’ stock in trade.

Could not be more ordinary.

In spite of the title, there's nothing particularly "real" about Lars And The Real Girl, just a couple layers of quirk several stops removed from the world as we know it.

Glory Road treats history as if it were a 7th-grade social-studies text laid out in a 16-point font, getting the basics right without trying to evoke any of the details that would make it memorable. In other words, it gets the Bruckheimer treatment.

The best parts of Runner Runner feel like a Rounders facsimile—right down to the metaphor-heavy narration—and the worst seem like a case of mission drift, as if the filmmakers set out to make a behind-the-curtain thriller about online gambling, but got hung up in paying off the plot.

The farce withers away when it should be expanding.

Pleasing low-key comedy.

By the time the film escalates into a suitably ridiculous Grand Guignol finale, all connection to reality has been severed.

At least Douglas has a good time bringing the smarminess that McConaughey so studiously avoids.

So little has been done to update or refresh “The Intouchables” for American culture or a new audience that The Upside has no integrity as a separate piece of work. The casting alone is all that’s keeping it from sinking into a cynical act of franchise burnishing.

Chong seems to intend for an escalating series of comic events that get more giddily absurd as it approaches the climax, but the film loses its soul in the process. Hoppers longs for the quiet beatitude of nature, but it’s just another noisemaker.

It's mostly boilerplate horror, plucking visual ideas from better sources and relying on the sick novelty of referencing an actual catastrophe.

The big reason Chaos Theory doesn't work is that the gears are visibly grinding away, cranking out neat little ironies and life lessons without any liberating surprises.

Far from a watershed moment for lesbian coming-out films, Gray Matters has a queer sensibility that's several miles south of "Will & Grace."

It would take a heart of stone not to be affected by My Sister’s Keeper, but the film’s unceasing manipulation has a Medusa effect on the organ.

Everything and everyone acts as cogs in a relentless plot machine that keeps twisting and twisting like an annoying little gizmo on Christmas morning.

The key mistake was Ahmed's choice to direct it himself; it's promotional when it might be revealing of impasses (and commonalities) between cultures and the complex tactics comedians use to address it.

Never does [Perkins] project the courage, frailty, or plainspoken depth suggested by Frank’s writing, and the leaden earnestness of George’s direction does Perkins and the film no favors.

While Fraser’s presence doesn’t necessarily elevate Furry Vengeance into something better than the dumb, lowbrow timewaster it aspires to be, Fraser does make it a little easier to digest.

If it doesn't look ridiculous now, try watching it again in a decade or three. Then it'll be funny for all the wrong reasons.

The "What The Bleep Do We Know?" crowd may well receive the film's wisdom like communion, but the rest of us are free to gag when Salva tries to jam it down our throats.

In spite of fine work from Bardem and Álvarez, Biutiful is an irritating, oppressive 150-minute dirge, not the step forward Iñárritu's dissolved partnership with Arriaga seemed to promise.

Until now, the sequels have gotten away with the cynical franchising of John McClane, but A Good Day To Die Hard, the worst entry in the series by far, exposes the hollowness and stupidity of McClane 2.0.

Take Lola Versus, a Greta Gerwig vehicle that feels like a pilot awaiting pick-up from a network that doesn't exist.

A strange, stilted, misbegotten drama, undone by variable performances, awkwardly inserted flashback and fantasy sequences, and a gloppy overlay of voiceover narration.

Short of counting the cards out loud, these geniuses seem to do everything they can to get caught.

Once the torture finally commences, the film attempts to float a political point about the Third World taking back First World health-care privileges, but the chief torturers' sadistic humanitarianism is never seriously considered.

There's hardly a shot in the film where Chase doesn't try to swallow the camera with one broad expression or another, and Vacation follows in turn, laboring too hard to drive every punchline home.

The problems of coming out, intolerance, safe sex, and censorship are ticked off like a checklist in Better Than Chocolate, a well-meaning Canadian slice-of-life comedy that remains firmly planted in the creative rut currently plaguing gay cinema.

What started out as a fleet one-off swashbuckler with novel supernatural elements has become loaded and graceless, with each new entry barreling across the goal line like William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

The Expendables 2 makes a franchise out of a novelty item, and the nostalgic kick is gone: It's a reminder that most of those '80s actioners were xenophobic and dumb, that many of its stars had more muscle mass than charisma, and that the sight of these old fossils referring to themselves as old fossils is more pathetic than cheekily self-referential.

Because Saw does nothing to alter the look, tone, and engineered gimmickry from one movie to the next, it keeps going deeper into backstory and character arcs than horror series past, as if this ugly, cheap-looking schlock were somehow "The Lord Of The Rings."

For his directorial debut, The Collector, Dunstan streamlines the "Saw" concept slightly by silencing the killer and focusing more intently on a house that’s been converted into a jury-rigged deathtrap.

Compared to a recent Argento dud like "The Stendhal Syndrome," Mother Of Tears at least has some of the go-for-broke gothic spirit of his earlier work. He's just lost the ability to shape it into something artful.

The idea of a toy store as a living, responsive being is a good one, but Helm doesn't take that idea to imaginative places.

It's a celebration of libertine sexuality - nothing more, nothing less - and almost remarkably untroubled by any of the dramatic issues it raises. Much of its 79 minutes is spent marveling over how skillfully the actors simulate the real thing.

Adhering to few solid comedic principles, The Comebacks swings wildly between lame movie references and slapstick, slightly less lame funny names (such as Aseel Tare, the running back who couldn't possibly be injured) and Airplane!-style spoof, and a few mildly amusing stabs at irony.

Unlike, say, "Eagle Eye," Echelon Conspiracy doesn't put enough conviction behind its stupidity. It's mostly just bland.

It isn't easy to insult the intelligence of preschoolers, but Chimpanzee's insistence on turning the two gangs into the Sharks and the Jets does the job long before Allen lapses into his Home Improvement grunting.

Judging by the far more interesting adults in the film--Braga, a terrific Laura Linney as Webber's mother, and Hawke as his father--the solution for Webber and Moreno is to grow up and not be so full of themselves. In their current state, they make for unpleasant company, and so does the film.

von Donnersmarck's meat-and-potatoes direction makes The Tourist astonishingly lifeless and awkward, reducing two of the world's biggest movie stars to something akin to shy, pimply teenagers on their first date.

While it's a pleasure to watch the likeable Johnson open up and come out of her shell, Phat Girlz belongs to Mo'Nique, a grating, belligerent woman who alternates self-deprecating fat jokes with drama-queen meltdowns and simpering pleas for acceptance. Save it for the talk-show circuit, please.

Like the worst of late-period Allen, the film recycles character types from his previous work without inventing new reasons to summon them into existence. They're left stranded, seven characters in search of an author.

Gulager shows that he truly is PGL's most gifted alumnus.

It's a personal story that feels like it's been constructed from other movies.

Trust The Man presents itself as a funny, insightful Manhattan relationship comedy in Woody Allen mode, but morphs into the phoniest of Hollywood rom-coms.

For a film about growing up, Illegal Tender loses itself in a lot of silly juvenilia.

The result is two bad movies in one: a gimmicky romantic comedy, and one of those seasonal headaches that submits loud family dysfunction as a vehicle for Christmas cheer.

Taken's subject matter is too serious for an escapist chop-socky movie, and the sleazy, exploitative tone undercuts the thrills.

The film’s biggest problem, beyond the overheated melodrama and paper-thin period trappings, is that the trio's fictionalized dalliances diminish their real art.

Terminally awkward in the way it meshes fake real footage with faker fake footage. It isn’t required to be convincing as fact, but it doesn’t convince as fiction, either.

Better performances might have sold The Divide, but aside from Arquette's fine work as a single mother driven to self-degradation, the cast amplifies the impression of a canned, one-act theater piece.

Craigslist Joe takes Garner on a 21st-century hitchhiking trip that not only didn't end in his gruesome murder, but in a month to remember fondly. It's an inspiring experience. For him.

At the movie's center, Schreiber approaches the role with a seriousness that lacks joy or any other colorful inflection.

With nothing at stake dramatically, much less cinematically, Arcand leans heavily on brow-raising repartee to carry the load, but his naked contempt throws a wet blanket over all the frank sexual anecdotes and observations.

With its minimal settings and focus on the abstract lingo of market transactions, "Margin Call" stands as the new model for how to do Wall Street on a budget, embedding its moral themes in language and complex characters. By comparison, $upercapitalist seems naïve about both the market and the humans who operate in it.

The loaded cast does what it can with the paper-thin characterizations, but Vantage Point gets hijacked early by its high-concept premise, and it quickly devolves into a by-the-numbers thriller with the numbers out of order.

There are many stretches when it's easy to forget that Get Smart is a spoof; it's more like a third-rate James Bond with pratfalls.

Cruise is thrown into many sticky situations, with legions of trained assassins surrounding him on all sides, but he never once suggests that things aren’t entirely under control. It’s profoundly boring to watch a hero without weaknesses; after all, even Superman has Kryptonite.

Recommended to those who feel "The Crucible" doesn't feature enough bodies ripped in half vertically. Others are duly warned.

Ultimately, Lakeview Terrace isn't about race so much as it's about being a man, which has been LaBute's fallback theme from the start.

The rigors of identifying and training companion dogs are fascinating, but they would fit more comfortably in a non-fiction format, where nobody has to play pretend. As it stands, the dog is the only creature who acts naturally.

Despite some promising early goofiness involving full-contact soccer and the quest for a chicken burrito, Battleship plays it regrettably straight most of the time, as if the fate of the world really might rest on how well the Navy can hurtle projectiles at alien warships. With eyes closed, the movie uncannily resembles a giant baby playing with pots and pans.

In short form, Cashback simply dealt with how a quirky group of supermarket employees whiled away the endless hours of a night shift, but the feature version spoils that economy by tacking on a romantic subplot and indulging its hero's precious ruminations on love and art.

Fuqua keeps the action moving efficiently, but he doesn't know when to stop piling it on, and eventually, Wahlberg's army of one becomes more a comic-book vigilante than a righteously disgruntled patriot.

In a post-Matrix, post-John Woo world, a handful of slow-motion shootouts shouldn't be all that's on offer.

A more accurate way to describe it would be "conceptual nightmare"--crass, schizophrenic, culturally insensitive, horribly paced, and shameless in its pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Wiseman's Total Recall isn't intellectualized like "Blade Runner," or even that much more sophisticated than his "Underworld" movies.

Penn, who probably didn't need this shoddy placeholder after the cult success of "Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle's," acquits himself with a gentle charisma that makes the crudity go down easy. Granted, it's still s---, but with a sweeter odor than usual.

It's raunchy/sweet in the "American Pie"/"40-Year-Old Virgin" tradition, and as dynamic as a glob of lazy sperm.

Chan’s anything-goes affability keeps the film from scraping bottom.

All these stereotypes are meant to exalt small-town values, but The Final Season is proof that it's hard to paint masterpiece in broad strokes.

It's said that opposites attract, but for the brief period they're onscreen together in the dire comedy Over Her Dead Body, Eva Longoria Parker and Paul Rudd are one of the more bizarrely mismatched couples in recent memory.

On the shortlist for least essential movie of the decade, a copy of a copy of a copy that's so worn down, it's about as fresh and vital as a fifth-generation dub of "The Star Wars Holiday Special."

It lacks that extra layer or two to make it interesting. The script and direction is all bones, no flesh.

Yes, perhaps the audience will like its favored couple more, but all the engineering that goes into making them sympathetic results in a film that feels agonizingly synthetic and alien.

A few individual performances survive - Liotta finds a little of his old edge, and Pacino briefly revisits Serpico territory - but they're smothered in the slow-burning absurdity.

The photography hook gives Shutter the potential to be a genuinely creepy ghosts-in-the-machine story like the original "Pulse," or better still, a horror twist on "Blowup." But one effective scene lit solely by a camera flash isn't enough to rescue this from the J-horror slushpile.

Every scrap of footage here has been done better somewhere else.

The main pitfall of modern noirs is that filmmakers get so caught up in the chiaroscuro lighting schemes and florid twists of dialogue and voiceover that they forget noir was about expressing more than just attitude and style.

The leads are immensely appealing, but the sum of their experiences equals nothing more profound than two earnest people wrestling with a tough decision.

It's the sort of film Robert Altman might have made if he cut his teeth working for The Disney Channel.

By the time it reaches an action-packed finale that's choreographed like an ancient Keystone Kops short, Kit Kittredge has cornered the market on bland.

At a time when movies, even from Hollywood, are finally turning their eyes to conflicts abroad, Annapolis seems conspicuously myopic and reactionary in its denial of the world outside campus, though a movie this formulaic wouldn't pass muster during peacetime, either.

The major problem with Pattinson’s ascendancy to the Dean throne: His soulfulness is a pose, an effect achieved more by hair and makeup (and yes, genetics) than the scenes where he’s required to emote at high volume.

Caught in a pretentious no-man’s land between horror and melodrama.

The lesson here is that dogs don't need "attitude." They're loveable enough on their own.

One of the problems with We Are The Giant is that not all the stories carry equal weight, both in terms of effectiveness and in the sheer amount of time Barker spends on them.

Constructed out of poorly supported accusations, vague innuendo, and naked emotional appeals, Bush's Brain has a Rove-esque quality of its own.

Though Scarlet Diva contains flashes of pungent black humor and self-deprecation, it's hard to know how seriously Argento takes herself, or how much her real life has been inflated for dramatic effect.

In the end, though, Seeking Justice evokes the post-Watergate paranoia of '70s thrillers like "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor" without having a worthy conspiracy at the bottom.

Careening from bubbly romantic comedy to bitchy melodrama to the darker matters of murder, incest, and suicide, the film possesses the catch-all qualities for which Bollywood cinema is known, but Bose exerts about as much control over them as the conductor of a runaway train.

Botches what could be the most mischievous power since Scott Baio's telekinesis in the 1982 comedy "Zapped!": a wristwatch that speeds up time for the user until the rest of the world seems to be standing still.

Every single joke, character detail, music montage, and pop-culture reference looks extensively market-tested, whether via screenings, focus groups, or other box-office successes.

That’s a lot of concept for a 90-minute horror-comedy, and All Cheerleaders Die handles it with a haphazard, catch-as-catch-can style that matches its tonal schizophrenia.

In Lau and Loo’s telling, the off-the-boat indoctrination of young, undocumented Chinese families into vicious gangsterism is overstated and cartoonish, like The Warriors trying to pass itself off as a docudrama.

Comfortable with the inherent contradictions, Ishii throws all sexual politics to the wind in his highly stylized, fearlessly gratuitous fantasy, an unsettling mix of titillation, morality, victimization, and empowerment.

Once Amoedo lays all the cards out on the table, The Stranger feels like a piece of genre revisionism only in its deliberate, grinding pace, not in any refreshing turns of the plot.

It all works out agreeably enough, albeit in strict adherence to rom-com formula, right down to the obligatory wacky-best-friend roles given to space cadets Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis.

Zelker’s three-ring circus of digital and social-media content needs a compelling main event, and this movie seems unlikely to inspire many to check out the supplementary materials.

While there’s something compelling about an antihero whose obsession is poised on the razor’s edge between love and hate, The World of Kanako buries it in grinding, agitated repetition.

Chrisoulakis and screenwriter Guy J. Jackson attempt a violent, moody neo-noir about Tinseltown fringe-dwellers, but their conceit is flimsy and under-realized, grafting a boilerplate heist story onto a bitter commentary about the corrupting forces of the film industry.

Freely adapted from Goethe’s two-part play, Sokurov’s Faust is a work of crushing tedium, relieved only by the spare moments of beauty that pop out like dandelions in a washed-out landscape of oppression and grotesquerie.

There’s no denying the emotional pull of Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble’s storytelling or the vivid rapture of the images, but “The Elephant Queen” adheres too closely to the parameters of family-friendly nature docs, and the formula doesn’t always serve it well.

Though it's tempting to praise Verete for having the courage to show the worst of both worlds, only a propagandist could get away with being so reductive; an artist should be held to a higher standard.

The film’s sketchy conception is a telling sign that Martin, Godere, and director Adam Rapp have nothing particularly funny or insightful to say about the creative process.

Knockaround Guys proceeds with a gravity that's constantly tripped up by its characters' stupidity.

Miles away from "Farewell, My Concubine" in form and function, with thinly defined characters and unreflective attitudes about urban values vs. country values, the film would be impossible to identify as Chen's if his name weren't in the opening credits.

Natali whips up an atmospheric frenzy in kind, but every new addition is a subtraction. Two characters condemned to an eternal game of “Marco Polo” is scary enough on its own.

It might as well be retitled "Waiting For Antonio," since Sabato's appearances bookend miles of convoluted nonsense. For the prurient, that's probably too much to endure.

What Penguins Of Madagascar needs is a roomful of ruthless editors to take jokes out of the script, particularly the ones aimed at pleasing the grown-ups in the audience.

Perhaps the oddest thing about The In-Laws is that it's aimed at an audience old enough to remember not only the original, but also how much funnier it seemed at the time.

By trying to have it both ways—goosing up black-market trafficking for cheap thrills, while posing as being sincere about a real global scourge—the film winds up stuck in the middle.

The strange thing about Raising Helen is that nothing out of the ordinary ever really happens.

Escapism of the worst sort, a manipulative exercise in style that preys on the passivity of its characters and its audience. In the end, Go offers little more than the sour, impermanent rush of a pixie stick.

As a lesson in how not to make a historical biopic, Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom proves remarkably complete: It’s a dull, glossy, uncomplicated portrait of a man whose personal and political legacy is marked by serene idealism and shrewd calculation.

It’s a fatally old-fashioned and lugubrious historical drama, muting the emotional payoff it labors so hard to deliver.

The film does coast along smoothly to the inevitable, which is a credit to the always-game Reese Witherspoon, who's courteous enough to pretend she doesn't know what's coming, then make it look like a huge surprise.

Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters continues a tradition of adequacy that could be described as “epic-ish” or “majestic-esque.”

The movie and the movie-within-a-movie share a chemistry even more awkward than that of their flat-footed leads.

John Waters covered the same territory in his underrated 1998 comedy "Pecker," but without Waters' colorful mix of outrageousness and affection, Posner can't stir up the rancor to score even a few glancing blows at an easy target.

A hopelessly stolid and distant evocation of Bob Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces."

It’s a case study on how the quality of screen partners is only as good as the quality of the romantic obstacles separating them.

The angrier the film gets, the less funny it becomes, squelched by heavy-handed polemics, a maddeningly repetitive musical score, and a running time that drags its overriding joke into the ground.

Though it sounds like a contradiction, the film could be described as both dull and over the top.

If anything, The Transporter isn't ludicrous enough; only one scene (a hand-to-hand showdown in the middle of an oil slick) reaches the inspired, delirious comic heights of the best Hong Kong movies.

The Fly movies could be a metaphor for sequels: Always go for the real article, not the freakishly mutated copy one telepod over.

Amid all the excess busyness, there are formulas within formulas.

Schumacher choose to start the movie in outer space? The opening shot epitomizes everything wrong with Phone Booth: Given the chance to stage human drama on an intimate, suffocating scale, Schumacher begins in the endless expanse of the void, tricked out with gratuitous CGI effects.

At the most basic level—and this is as basic as movies get—Everly delivers exactly what it promises, though as with most American films with sex and violence, the emphasis is heavily weighted toward the latter.

Perhaps because the present-day characters are such insufferable twits -- especially the brooding Penn, who's given to tossing around stanzas by Yeats and Dylan Thomas -- the modern story feels like a device, a flimsy entrée into events that would be better accessed directly.

Though it isn't explained until the closing minutes, the title Acts Of Worship says a lot about Rodriguez's terminal weakness for the overwrought and faux-poetic.