Stephanie Zacharek

If Clooney and Roberts are both wonderful actors, at this point they’re just not that good together, at least not in this setup.

Redgrave puts all she’s got into something other actors might just toss off or throw away. She’s present every moment; this is an actress who doesn’t have a second to waste.

The Island walks a weird, wobbly line between being stupid, falsely fattened-up entertainment and a picture that just might have possibly been made by a person with a brain -- a scrambled one, but a brain nonetheless.

You People stretches hard to make its points, but for the most part it’s terminally safe.

These are all people you feel you've met before in other movies, if not all at once. But the movie's saving grace is that they don't always behave as you expect them to.

An acceptably entertaining picture. At just 100 minutes long, it feels tight and trim, and unlike so many contemporary action pictures, it boasts only one ending, instead of three false ones. What's more, it's just as dumb as the original.

There's enough sweetness, and enough just-under-the-surface intelligence, in The Education of Charlie Banks to suggest that Durst may have a future as a filmmaker.

The most sterile of bodice-rippers, a genteel soap opera in which the sex and intrigue are so muted, so tasteful, that they practically blow off the screen in a scattering of dust.

It deserves to be seen on a hot Saturday afternoon in a theater (preferably an air-conditioned one) peopled with other people, the way many of us used to see movies as kids.

Dark Skies is about the fragility of family, a muted meditation on how precious it is...it does affirm that genre filmmakers who work with their eyes, their hearts and their brains still walk among us.

The difference is that Michael Caine delivered the impossible; Jude Law can't.

Sometimes stylish flashiness can be fun, and the movie does have a terrific, bleached-out, ice-blue look. But anyone who cares about what actors do has a right to be distrustful of a director who puts more emphasis on the look of his movie than on the performances.

Cassandra's Dream, an earnest meditation on greed, desire, murder and class struggle, is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies in years -- except Allen doesn't know it.

The super-duper whiteness of Ashton Kutcher is funny. Just not funny enough.

Even if you think you know where Lucky You is headed, there's something pleasurable about watching it unfold, maybe chiefly because Hanson isn't trying too hard.

With The Good German, Soderbergh -- generally a terrific and creative filmmaker -- apes a style, and a way of seeing, that he clearly doesn't understand. It feels like a hit to the stomach.

Tower Heist is overstuffed with actors, and yet Ratner manages to give each of them one or two good moments.

Vallée, working from a script by Bryan Sipe, packs in too many symbols and potent signifiers – some are harmless, others are literally sledgehammer heavy. The movie doesn’t need all that when it’s got Gyllenhaal.

2012 is totally, certifiably nuts, without being quite as off-the-wall kitschy as Emmerich's last special-effects extravabanzoo, "10,000 BC."

[Fanning] plays Wendy as a person and not a condition.

McKay keeps piling on the sardonic observations, and the outlandishly ill-behaved characters, long after the movie has crumpled under their weight.

An ungodly mess that's great fun to look at for about 15 minutes and exhausting the rest of the time.

An imperfect work of genius, a satire of Hollywood excess and vanity that dares to tread territory laden with minefields.

An offshoot of a popular computer game, is really all about inducing visual awe. And for the first few minutes, it does.

Condon's tone is gentle and lifeless and at times baffling: The picture is a weird cross between clinical and whimsical.

There are some body-horror gross-outs if you're into that sort of thing, but mostly what you get are a bunch of too-obvious leftovers from the "Alien" stockroom, including a selection of moist innards, slimy tendons, dripping fangs and the like.

The picture is devilishly entertaining, not least because it's laced with just the sort of dumb raunchy jokes you hate yourself for laughing at. But it also preserves, to a degree, the elemental sweetness that made the original so distinctive.

Some clever soul might have done something moderately effective with this idea, but Krampus is too dumb to be scary and too listless to be entertaining.

The Gray Man inadvertently pulls off a mission you’d think would be impossible: rendering its stars nearly invisible, or at least just people you can’t wait to get away from.

This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That's more of a rarity on today's landscape than it should be.

Moretz brings some natural gravity to a role that hasn't been adequately fleshed out.

The picture is just a catalog of strained camera moves and preprogrammed gags, with no wit or style.

If Broken City – the first film to be directed solo by Allen Hughes, one-half of the Hughes Brothers directing team – is a little flawed and cracked itself, it still squeaks by as a reasonably thoughtful piece of big-screen entertainment.

It's made with an accurate and loving, but also wary and squinty-eyed, view of the South. If only the movie hung together better overall.

Terminator Salvation has no brains and no soul; it's just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints. Clearly, the machines have won.

In strict filmmaking terms, Bohemian Rhapsody is a bit of a mess. Some of its scenes connect awkwardly, and it hits every beat of disaster and triumph squarely, like a gong. Yet if it has many of the problems we associate with “bad” movies, it has more ragged energy than so many good ones, largely because of Rami Malek’s performance as Mercury, all glitter and muscle and nerve endings.

Hancock is just intriguing enough that I kept wishing it were better. But Berg doesn't have the subtle touch that this material needs.

It’s a shrill, razor-shredded mess, a fringy assemblage of action, cartoony violence, and allegedly snappy dialogue that has the soporific effect of white noise. This is proof that too much lousy action is worse than no action at all.

Gripping: Even when it wobbles off-track, it has some juice to it.

In Downhill, everything is played for blunt laughs. Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus — both gifted performers who have done much better work elsewhere — muddle through, recognizing that they’re making a movie about Trust with a capital T, but failing to get at any real darkness that might lurk beneath the movie’s shiny, slippery surface.

Sure, sex and drugs can take you to a higher plane. But not if a movie crushes your will to live first.

It might not measure up to the 1967 original, but now Satan's got sooty pussycat eyes and a kitten-cruel smile.

Although Little bears some similarities to the 1988 kid fantasy "Big," it’s a thoroughly modern comedy, one that lives comfortably with the idea that women can hold power and authority–though because they’re human, they can misuse it, too.

The movie doesn't for a moment pretend to be subtle, and it has a sprawling, unfocused quality. But it's got some juice, and it's even faithful, in some surprising ways, to the essence of the original.

Never as delightful and silly as it needs to be. The action is often manic, and there's a veneer of unapologetic corniness to it.

It pulls off the tricky feat of being both commanding and subtle, emerging with its dignity intact.

The plot has been greatly streamlined from Ellroy's book, but even so, it isn't any clearer, and the ending, convoluted and barely believable, hits with a thud.

The picture is outrageously predictable and somewhat poky, but there's also something admirably bold about the way it so adamantly demands we swallow its hokum.

Lush with feeling that could easily be mistaken for sentimentality, Stalingrad is more like a 19th-century novel than a 21st-century blockbuster. It's theatrical and intense, sometimes in an overbearing way, but it's never boring.

Leaving the theater, I couldn't quell those waves of disappointment: It just should have been funnier.

A filmmaker can do a lot with this Sliding Doors-style idea; there’s also plenty that could send it careering off the rails. But Look Both Ways has a mild sweetness that makes it go down easy.

All of these women, and Day-Lewis too, sing and dance vigorously and enthusiastically throughout Nine, and the results are spotty, though you can't accuse anyone of not trying.

Not 10 minutes into the smeary mess that is The Man in the Iron Mask, the only sensible question to ask yourself is, "What am I doing here?"

For every line or gag that works, there are three or four more that seem to belong in a different movie altogether, either a darker one or a breezier one.

Couldn't be more unhip -- it just never hits the groove.

This is good-for-you, arthouse-style horror. Which doesn't mean it's necessarily any good.

Mostly, The Mechanic creaks and groans as it goes through the motions, and not even its lavish violence - which includes much smashing of heads and a nasty screwdriver stabbing - is particularly electrifying.

Horizon—while being at least somewhat culturally sensitive, handsome to look at, and reasonably engaging—still comes off as curiously undistinguished. It’s so tasteful, so careful, so eager not to upset or offend, that it reflects little sense of risk.

Colorless and soulless in the extreme, it bears no one's fingerprints at all. There's no reason for this Oldboy to exist. It's so DOA, you stumble out of it wanting to eat something alive.

Graced with so many fanciful touches and features such a marvelous assortment of U.K. and American actors that it seems almost unjust that the final product is so curiously lacking in magic.

Angel-A isn't as nutso as some of Besson's other pictures: It doesn't have the crazy inventiveness of, say, "The Fifth Element." As I watched it, I found myself wishing it were just a little loopier. But the picture is still seductive and pleasing.

If you can get past its toothpick of a premise, Run Fatboy Run is a perfectly enjoyable light comedy. It's also just good enough that I wanted it be better.

It's the kind of small pleasure that can make you feel intensely grateful.

The Judge has its funny moments but is far more serious at heart, and much more of a slog, too.

The big screen doesn't seem to like Kutcher much, or even to GET him, whatever there is to get.

A highly entertaining and refreshingly nonjudgmental movie

Should have been either a whole lot worse or a whole lot better than it is: If it were worse, we could simply toss aside the things that are fun and entertaining about it and not even think twice. And if it were better -- well, we'd have fewer complaints all around.

There's a wry sweetness to this picture.

Six Minutes to Midnight is a tribute to those real-life girls who, as guests from a land that would soon become a vicious enemy, represent a strange little intersection of English and German history—the human element behind symbols clashing on a badge.

MacFarlane's comedy may not be sophisticated on its face, but the mechanisms behind it are delicately calibrated.

Rubber could have been a modest horror novelty, a wicked, malevolent version of "The Red Balloon."

But for sheer, go-for-broke nuttiness, The Greatest Showman stands alone in the landscape of this holiday season’s crop of movies, and I urge you to give it a chance.

Unfortunately, Silver's movie doesn't cut deep enough: It glosses over some thorny questions and hammers too fixedly on others.

Perfectly inoffensive and harmless, but it's also drab and inert.

So unself-conscious and breezy that you find yourself sailing along with it; its flaws become as negligible as harmless barnacles nestled well below the water line.

There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it.

Isn't dubbed. But it sure feels like it. The characters open their mouths and their lips don't seem to be shaping the right words -- you can't believe any human beings would ever utter such ludicrous dialogue, with so little conviction.

I'm not really sure how strong this material is on its own: I kept trying to imagine what The Oh in Ohio would have been like with other actors in the leading roles, and I couldn't -- Rudd, DeVito and especially Posey seem integral to it.

As Stewart plays it, Norah’s charismatic, deadpan insouciance feeds her bravery. And it’s just the thing that might get you through Underwater, too.

Emperor may not be the most dazzling of history lessons, but it never treats the past as a dusty, deserted place.

There's a refreshing surefootedness in the way Amiel, his screenwriters Cooper Layne and John Rogers, and most of his actors recognize how preposterous the idea of traveling to the center of the earth in a souped-up Rototiller really is.

A feebly pleasant surprise: It's not as cheap, loud and sleazy as it might have been, but it's also too eagerly well-meaning and indistinct to really stick. It's a piece of mildly entertaining, inoffensive fluff.

Rise of an Empire might have been essentially more of the same, but for one distinction that makes it 300 times better than its predecessor: Mere mortals of Athens, Sparta, and every city from Mumbai to Minneapolis, behold the magnificent Eva Green, and tremble!

When it comes to dating, there’s no doubt we live in confusing times. But no one needs a confused movie about dating confusion, and Cat Person’s ideas are so blurry it’s impossible to know what its goals are.

The Girl on the Train is less a thriller than a morality tale reminding us never to make snap judgments. No matter how dreadfully some characters behave, we’re not allowed to dislike anyone for long. That kind of catharsis isn’t allowed.

Might have been classy, entertaining junk -- if only it were entertaining.

May be the best Farrellys movie yet, even though it doesn't live up to the pair's usual level of uproarious, crass comic genius. They're learning, movie by movie, to articulate ideas that are more and more sophisticated, without being oppressively heavy-handed.

We need to wait nearly 20 years for the romance in Lone Scherfig's One Day to get cooking, and for long stretches it seems as if we're watching this particular pair of nonstarters hem and haw in real time.

Too heavy on applied charm and too flimsy when it comes to plot. The picture has a hapless, meandering quality that's tolerable at first but ultimately becomes maddening, as if it were a cartoon narrative recounted by a distracted 4-year-old.

Weitz, an openhearted director if not always a precise one, can't bring himself to whet the knives. Only Fey drills to the center of what Admission might have been—her performance has more layers of emotion than the picture does.

Isn't so much a movie as a tract, a parable in which the charred wisdom of its characters is much more significant than the intricacies of their lives.

Don’t Worry Darling makes a better entertainment than it does a serious parable.

Before long, the story's conceit -- a loud-and-clear metaphor for the ways in which we all sometimes feel alien when it comes to human relationships -- just becomes wearying.

It’s not always clear if we’re supposed to think the “new” Renee is basically unbearable, or totally awesome. The movie has many more flaws than Renee does: It isn’t as light on its feet as it should be, and Kohn and Silverstein frame some of the gags too broadly, particularly a boardwalk bikini-contest scene that’s dragged down by some crude gross-outs.

It's often breezily entertaining.

A romantic comedy doesn't need to be original to be enjoyable, and yet The Proposal still falls way too short of the mark.

It may follow a formula, but sometimes formula equals comforting routine. And there are times, in the movies and elsewhere, when routine is exactly what you need.

Brash, chaotic and jostlingly entertaining.

The movie overall is painless if not exactly electrifying.

An absurd little trifle, but it does have a kind of buoyant, punky energy.

Would be more fun if it were either more shameless or more principled in the bad-girl way, taking a stance on the value of artistry and attitude over commerce.

Aggressively offensive.

Isn't just a movie about decapitation; it's a decapitated movie. It has no idea where its head is at.

Ridley Scott's A Good Year is a bonbon made by a mechanic, a well-intentioned diversion put together by someone who clumsily adds the right ingredients in the wrong proportions at the wrong time. But sometimes, if you get the sugar level close to right, you can do OK, and A Good Year offers some pretty basic pleasures that movies often fail to give us these days.

Kelly is devoted to telling his stories visually -- except when he's not. And the second half of The Box, unfortunately, underscores everything Kelly, as a filmmaker, wants to be and just can't.

Red 2, disappointing in so many ways, isn't torture to watch, in part because Mirren has even more to do than she did in the first installment.

Argento always gives us something to watch, and maybe even something to fear. I've never seen her in a movie where I haven't been at least a little bit scared of her.

Deschanel may not be as brilliant as the great comedian Gracie Allen (and, at any rate, it's too soon to tell). But her Rube Goldberg timing (which only seems indirect) and blissfully zonked demeanor suggest the spirit of Allen. She's the only actor in Failure to Launch who isn't earthbound; she leaves everyone else in the dust simply by hanging back.

Everything about Pee-wee's Big Adventure, from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyperanimated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind, Pee-wee Herman, is pure pleasure.

The third installment, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb may be the best, and even the generally wound-too-tight Ben Stiller — once again playing a bemused Museum of Natural History guard — is easy to tolerate.

Boring at best and insidious at worst.

The picture is so gentle, it barely leaves an impression.

The picture is sometimes wayward and unwieldy, its dialogue creaky and awkward, like an amateur’s attempt at scrimshaw.... But in a movie climate rife with superhero reboots and rehashings of childhood favorites, it’s a small marvel that In the Heart of the Sea exists at all.

So contemptuous toward its own characters, and its audience, that it chokes off any visceral thrills it might have offered. The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice.

Bad Teacher is hardly a perfect picture, but in the context of every other comedy on the summer movie landscape - from the faux empowerment of "Bridesmaids" to the neurotic frat-guy heteromania of "The Hangover Part II" - it feels revolutionary.

This is a weird movie hybrid, both a tasteful picture and an angry one.

Might have been an oversized Hollywood dazzler. Phoenix keeps it firmly and modestly on a human scale.

But what makes Burlesque truly delectable - for the first half, at least, before its going-nowhere storyline really heads south - is its less obvious camp value.

Maybe even more surprisingly, about 70% of the crazily imaginative plot hangs together. But the other 30%, sloppily thought out and superfluous, drags the movie down.

The picture is so fluttering and tender, so guileless, that you almost can't believe it was made by an old hand like Van Sant. Then again, maybe you can.

Almost always a pleasure to watch. Pushing Tin is, essentially, a western -- Cusack really is the fastest gun in the West.

A maddeningly indistinct picture.

It's rare to see a movie adaptation in which a filmmaker has taken so much care in translating the odd little qualities that make a particular novel special, to preserve the complex and fragile threads of feeling between characters that are often much easier to grasp on the page.

Redford glances too lightly off the story's racial questions. You could call that approach "eminently tasteful" if you're looking for a nice substitute for "wimpy."

Despite the fact that The Day After Tomorrow is harnessed to the very real threat of global warming, it's still just a big, dumb movie, another Hollywood entertainment that, instead of tweaking and teasing our brains for fun, leaves us feeling thick and stupid.

Feels like three-quarters of a movie. It leaves you wanting some elusive soupçon of comedy or drama or romance that it just doesn’t deliver. Yet even within those parameters, there’s something appealingly human about it: It has the warmth of a tiny beach fire on a cool night, casting a soft glow that makes you want to creep closer; there’s wistfulness, at least, in its low-key quietude.

The picture is almost shamefully entertaining, bold and self-effacing at once: Its intelligence reveals itself as a devilish gleam, not a pompous layer of shellac. Why can't more Hollywood movies be like this one?

It’s perfectly entertaining as you’re watching, but when it’s over, you might not feel any smarter—or humbler—than you did going in.

Although it's supposed to be supremely romantic, there's no daring in it, no go-for-broke passion. It's a nice little movie about romantic compulsion, just big enough to fit in a teacup.

It's dispiriting to see good actors doing smart, solid work with so much unadulterated garbage swirling around them. Scott's art is also death, and we, the audience, are the ones he's jabbing at with his ruthless paintbrush. It's about time someone told him where to stick it.

No director yet has found the best use for Hudson, the role that will tap those terrifying and thrilling reserves that are just lying in wait. But Softley comes closer than anybody has.

Seeing Tom Cruise swathed in leather pants and fake tattoos, as Axl Rose-style metal god Stacee Jaxx, is supposedly Rock of Ages' big draw. But the movie is much more fun when he's not around.

Duchovny gives a nicely shaped performance here -- he still has the ability to suggest the boyish eagerness beneath Fox's blasé demeanor. But the movie really belongs to Anderson.

A definite improvement on the recent spate of dull action movies, if only because it has such a marked sense of humor about itself and the genre it belongs to. But somehow it never quite finds its center.

An hour and a half of giddy, ridiculous fun.

This may be one of the most sluggish sports comedies ever made -- even the supposedly rousing final sequence feels belabored and chubby.

This is the kind of work a great actor does when he's not preoccupied with giving a great performance. Its very casualness is its big selling point.

It's desperately lifeless.

Big-name star Liam Neeson looks on, trying to add some class to the joint, though even he seems to know it's a losing battle.

Mel Gibson may have changed the face of cinema forever. I think he has: He's made the first true Jesusploitation flick, a picture that, despite its self-righteous air of grave religiosity, is barely spiritual at all.

Sabotages itself by trying too hard. The worst of it is that Maybe Baby feels very much like an Englishman's attempt to make a Nora Ephron movie, all warm and squishy in a decidedly American way.

A weird delight.

In the end Red Tails is mostly about the coolness of flying. Its heart is in the clouds, instead of with the men at the controls.

Ballad of a Small Player is only modestly entertaining, its allure as false as the neon promise of the high-rolling city it’s set in.

An adamantly unterrible picture, a reasonably enjoyable diversion.

Dour, ponderous picture.

The Lorax is so big, flashy and redundant that it courts precisely the kind of blind consumerism it's supposed to be condemning. It doesn't trust kids to sit still and pay attention for even a minute.

The only bright spot in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Max von Sydow, as a mysterious, and mysteriously mute.

Mirror Mirror has a great deal of energy and wit and color, so much that it sometimes threatens to go right over the top. Somehow, though, it always stops short of being just too much.

You can't BECOME a character if you want to BE that character: Desperation isn't the same thing as acting. Spacey's mimicry is so precise, it's exhausting.

An odd and not wholly successful little comedy. Its pacing is slack, and although it has a gentle heart, it treads so gingerly across the minefield of potential offensiveness that it sometimes snuffs out its sparks of life as quickly as it throws them off.

Turteltaub strives to show us realistic-looking magic, without realizing he'd be better off if he acknowledged that there's no such thing. Instead, we get human figures that emerge "magically" from swarms of cockroaches and sorceresses who dissolve into dust particles right before our eyes. It's the best CGI money can buy, and who cares?

Johnny English Reborn never quite ignites, even though it starts out promisingly enough.

Everything about You, Me and Dupree, even the toilet humor, is tepid and rigorously inoffensive

Wheatley — who specializes in thrillers with a macabre vibe, like "Kill List" (2011) and "High-Rise" (2015) — overhandles and overworks the dough of Du Maurier’s basic story. His movie is sometimes dumb, sometimes dull and sometimes entertaining; it just doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that lack of vision drains its potential power.

Despite its problems, the picture still satisfies -- more than a lot of allegedly worthy "A list" movies do. In a movie world where heavyweight often means top-heavy, Against the Ropes shows some pretty fleet footwork.

It's hard to care about a valiant groping for accuracy when a story is so badly told you can't tell what the devil is going on.

[Cutler] approaches all these teenage hyperfeelings with respect and sensitivity. It doesn’t hurt that he has Moretz in his corner.

Instead of taking us someplace we fear to go, Secret Window leads us to a place we've already been -- we know it so well, we could write the book on it ourselves.

Spends a lot of time advertising how exciting it is, without actually being exciting.

Capone is an odd little film, at times weirdly engaging but often so bizarrely muddled that you might identify a little too closely with its perpetually unglued protagonist. But Hardy is always worth watching.

Disappointingly tame.

No director in the history of moviemaking has expended so much effort in the service of drying up and blowing off the landscape.

You will not like it on the screen, you will not like it -- not one scene!

Statham is the real thing, and he’s key to the effectiveness of this good-natured and often highly ridiculous adaptation of Steve Alten’s 1997 sci-fi potboiler.

Intentions don’t equal fully fledged works, and Folie à Deux stumbles on nearly all fronts. Even if the movie’s ambitions are admirable, you might end up too bored to care.

All this magical switcheroo plot nonsense is just a formality anyway: everyone who comes to Irish Wish—friend, foe or neutral observer—will have come for Lohan.

The movie is neither cathartic nor entertaining. The action scenes (and there are many of them) feel mechanized and calculated.

The Break-Up doesn't know whether it wants to be a facile, enjoyable date movie or an unnerving examination of the dark, pockmarked underbelly of everything we expect out of romantic relationships, and it settles for a deeply unsatisfying nowheresville.

Nothing Cruise does seems to come from the inside -- every eye crinkle, every grimace, every brow furrow seems plucked from the air, collected from the universe around him and bent to do his bidding. Maybe that’s one kind of acting. But it’s not cool. Never will be.

Neither great nor terrible. It quavers in that middle ground of pictures you think you might watch on a plane someday, and you could make a worse choice.

It's ostensibly about adults, but there's nothing remotely adult about it.

Before long, El Cantante disintegrates into a stylized jumble -- even a straightforward jumble would have been preferable.

With Yes Man, Carrey has bled the well dry, doing everything he knows how to do, over and over again, just to prove that he still knows how to do it. It's exhilarating to see brilliance in a comic; but by the time you start smelling it, the game is over.

Ben Stiller, the movie's star, pretty much sinks the whole enterprise.

It's Kline who anchors the movie, swan-diving into Flynn's complexities without making excuses for him.

There's only one good reason to see The Bone Collector, and her name is Angelina Jolie.

In terms of the gap between the movie it's trying to be and the movie it actually is, Mona Lisa Smile is in many ways indefensible. Yet for all its problems, it's satisfyingly movielike. The minutes drift by pleasurably and mindlessly.

It comes to the party overdressed and still fails to make an impression.

If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.

A belabored trifle that's occasionally amusing but often just bewildering.

Isn't emotionally manipulative but simply dull.

So gentle it barely has enough vitality to stick to the screen.

It's an intelligently made (and beautifully edited) picture that at the very least has a spark of life to it -- more than you can say for plenty of movies that flow through the Hollywood pipeline without a hitch.

Janney's role is smaller than Moore's, but it's hardly insignificant. Moore has youth on her side, and youth is timelessly appealing. But Janney is the bigger, more memorable presence, and she's much more fun to watch.

None of it quite works, but it seems Beresford did his damnedest to try to pull it off.

More ambitious than its predecessor. It's also more cluttered and less fleet: The light, pleasingly casual quality of the first picture has evolved into something forced and metallic.

Where to lay the blame for Justice League’s just OK-ness? The movie is a jumbo-sized blur — not terrible, just underwhelming even amid its desperation to impress us.

It's the most imaginative picture in the franchise.

This isn't Sheridan's most complex or richest picture, but there's lots of life to it: This is an unapologetically glossy pop product, powered by a strong, old-fashioned sense of B-movie melodrama.

There's just not enough of Forster, who has a small role as Ford's work colleague and confidant. ..Sometimes star quality shines out from the corners of a movie, and not from the center.

Beneath its drab veil of self-seriousness, Mr. Brooks is nothing but just plain silly.

Everything about it, except the valiantly lifelike Lopez, feels stiff and robotic and mindlessly crowd-pleasing, as if it were a comedy made by a committee instead of a human being.

Forget about cancer -- it's weepy movies like this that are the real scourge.

The jokes in American Dreamz whiz by with speed and grace, and Weitz maintains control of the material every minute.

So much of Abbas' dialogue consists of stiff platitudes (the script is by journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her novel of the same name); the character she's playing has been reduced to a dull, saintly figure, and not even Abbas can find a way out of that miniature prison.

The picture is cluttered and convoluted and big, and Marshall - taking over the reins from Gore Verbinski - doesn't seem to grasp how exhausting nonstop action can be.

An extended metaphor for the condition of man, and boy is it extended. In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half.

Might have been a lavish, silly entertainment. In places it comes close, but no sheaf of tobacco.

A good-natured but massively flawed little comedy.

The problem with contemporary Hollywood isn't that so many of the movies it's churning out are based on formula; it's that so many directors take perfectly good formulas and wreck them with bad filmmaking.

Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart.

Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.

The sections detailing the men’s childhood in Sacramento, with Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer playing beleaguered moms? Not so exciting. But then, the very averageness of these conscientious, gutsy guys is precisely the point.

The novelty of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies wears thin in the last third: How is it that the threat of a zombie apocalypse is always more thrilling than the event itself? But Riley and James help carry the picture to the finish line.

Surrogates stays afloat by not taking itself too seriously, but also by recognizing that a movie about robots shouldn't look as if it were made by one.

Meet the Browns, like the rest of Tyler Perry's movies and plays, will find its audience. His talent lies in knowing what people will buy. He's a marketer, not a filmmaker.

Aside from a few well-shaped moments from some of the actors, the editing is about the only thing that keeps your mind occupied in Full Frontal -- and any good editor will tell you that's a problem.

Works if you just give yourself over to its exuberant silliness.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is less about zapping ghoulies than it is about Family, Reconnection and Forgiveness, which by now should be trademarked entities like Pepsi, Saran Wrap and Legos. Never funny or disreputable, Ghostbusters: Afterlife feels fully parent-approved—and where’s the fun in that?

The Mother would be more effective if she could wink at the audacity of the material instead of just playing it all straight. But then, Lopez can get away with things that other mere mortals can’t, and if you approach it in the right spirit, The Mother could be ridiculously good fun.

The movie is at its best when it’s sopping with sentimentality and when it goes right over the top in its depiction of dorky destruction. Everything in between is a drag.

The whole exercise has the trying-too-hard vibe of a bad toupee.

There's a pleasantly malevolent ridiculousness hovering around How to Lose a Guy. But the movie would have been so much better if it had jumped into its mean-spiritedness with gusto and passion, instead of just splashing around in it halfheartedly.

There are some modest pleasures to be mined from Peter Bogdanovich's romantic caper She's Funny That Way, which at least strives for buoyancy.

The Scorpion King, so far from perfect it isn't funny, is nevertheless one of those movies that catches you up in something bigger than yourself, namely, an archetypal desire to enjoy good trash every now and then.

Cherry feels like a movie made by a teenager, a bright kid who doesn’t leave his room much but still has plenty of thoughts about, you know, experiences and stuff.

The problem with Kate & Leopold is that although this is supposed to be a romantic comedy, the best scenes are the ones in which there's no Ryan.

A well-intentioned, pleasant-enough picture that shoots off in too many directions to ever ignite.

Crass, stupid and crudely made. It's also, in places, weirdly brilliant, a picture that plays to the largest possible audience with mechanical efficiency but also, here and there, betrays glimmers of self-deprecating cleverness, as if it were striving, perhaps even unconsciously, to transcend its own dumbness.

The penalties for drug trafficking in Thailand are very, very stiff. If there were any justice in the world, the penalties for saddling fine actors with terrible dialogue would be even stiffer.

It's sharply chiseled but not cynical, and that's a delicate line to walk.

"Pearl Harbor" is exactly the kind of prestige project you'd expect from a director like Bay, hitting all its targets with plodding precision and never once achieving surprise.

There's even a shootout sequence that plays out, from start to finish, while our hero is in flagrante. That's something I don't believe I've ever seen in a movie.

A disappointingly blunt, monochrome work.

New Moon, on the other hand, merely follows a dictated formula. It's a cheap, shoddy piece of work, one that banks on moviegoers' anticipation without even bothering to craft a satisfying experience for them. Its pandering is an insult.

Heart of Stone is quite glossy and beautiful to look at, and though there’s not much that’s dynamic about her, Gadot at least has a charming insouciance. Even if you’ll be hard-pressed to remember any of it three hours later, the runtime of Heart of Stone flies by quickly enough.

As a kooky fantasy, it’s all fine, if just fine is what you’re after. But at what point does just fine become soul killing, or at least just soul numbing?

Nine out of ten gags in this crude pub crawl of a comedy are indefensible. Maybe ten out of ten. Tragically, perhaps, I laughed anyway: It’s so hard to know what to laugh at anymore, and what it’s OK to laugh at.

Minions: The Rise of Gru is hardly the best of the Despicable Me movies or spinoffs...But the ridiculousness quotient of The Rise of Gru—directed by Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val—is still high enough to spark at least mild rejuvenation. And whether you have one eye or two, six hairs sprouting from your pate or none at all, you could probably use a little of that right now.

Visually, Made in Italy is reminiscent of another escape-to-Italy romance, Audrey Wells’ 2003 "Under the Tuscan Sun," starring Diane Lane (and also featuring Duncan). As these types of fantasies go, that movie was as satisfying as a deep sigh. Made in Italy is less so. But remember — we came for the scenery! And on that score, Made in Italy is a low-cost souvenir of the Tuscan-villa dream so many of us harbor, without the headaches of rewiring old electrical systems or fixing broken shutters.

The picture never quite finds its footing.

The air leaks out of Gaudí Afternoon gradually but steadily, until all we're left with is a limp rag of a balloon.

A handsome-looking thing, with fairly grand period costumes and reasonably lavish sets. So much for production values: In every other way the picture is stiff and unyielding, hampered by a clumsy plot and diorama performances. The whole thing has the feel of a second-rate living-history exhibit.

It follows the same essential pattern as its predecessor, but the ingenious loopiness is gone; the mechanism behind it grinds instead of whirrs.

Isn't a great work of horror, but it's admirable simply because it serves the genre so serviceably. It's nicely constructed, and it doesn't have one of those ridiculous extended endings.

It hovers somewhere in that never-never land of movies that try to do too much and don't quite live up to any of their ambitions.

Batman v Superman lunges for greatness instead of building toward it: It’s so topheavy with false portent that it buckles under its own weight.

Isn't really a movie but a blatant girls' night out vehicle.

The real mystery at the heart of M. Night Shyamalan's latest: How does he persuade actors like Sigourney Weaver and Adrien Brody to act in his supremely lame movies?

Kutcher finds compassion without going for anything so cheap as an explanation for Jobs's bad behavior; it's a wily, understated performance.

The picture, the debut feature of Irish director Gary McKendry, is rote and joyless, an exercise in disposability.

LaBeouf shambles through the movie with an endearingly lost quality -- his savoir faire is of the hangdog kind, but it pretty much works. And Monaghan, with that upturned nose and those mischievous eyes, always looks like a woman in search of trouble.

One of those movies where the small pleasures stack up high enough to dwarf the disappointments.

If The Animal -- co-written by Schneider and Tom Brady -- never quite gets fired up, at least it chugs along efficiently on its mildly inspired ridiculousness.

As an ode to fatherhood, Jersey Girl is sweet without being particularly deep; but Smith is really onto something when he nudges against the ways in which the geographic landscape of a life merges with the genetic one.

While 9 Songs is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its DIRECTNESS is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it.

Bush and Renz keep careful control over the tone: this is a tense, thoughtful picture that seeks both to entertain and provoke, rather than to simply punish its audience. It’s also very clearly a work of cathartic fantasy-horror with an underpinning in history, not a historical document, and it leans hard into its pulp sensibilities.

MacGruber never gathers any momentum. Once in a while a funny line or absurd sight gag will amble into the foreground, only to recede immediately in the rear-view mirror of memory.

See it for the inventive, elaborate costumes (designed by Ellen Mirojnick), for the tiny — albeit slightly creepy — mushroom people and the miniature fairies wearing dandelion tutus, and for Jolie.

Of all the characters in American Pie 2, male or female, Michelle is the only one who feels completely rounded and whole. She moves with unerring grace and subtlety through this feeble minefield of a movie, unharmed by the tepid jokes that flop and fizzle around her.

Anything Else isn't just the latest Woody Allen movie; it's also the smallest. His pictures seem to be getting tinier and tinier, and after you've seen them they leave nothing but a tinny echo and a bad taste. Anything Else is misanthropy writ small. Allen is too stingy to be generous even with his contempt.

Boyle's Beach lacks imagination and energy, two things that might have distracted us, at least occasionally, from the material's tepidness.

When it sparkles, which is often, it’s perfectly enjoyable.

A movie featuring Kevin Hart is going to be a Kevin Hart movie: at this point, his personality is too big to fold up; his jackrabbit energy dominates. That doesn’t leave much oxygen for Haddish, whose loopy, billowing spirit needs lots of airspace. And still, somehow, she’s the movie’s guiding presence.

Wish I Was Here is at least stretching toward something, and even if its reach exceeds its grasp, Braff's earnest determination as a filmmaker and performer helps smooth out some of the awkward bumps.

Every scene is coated with Marshall's thumbprints, ultimately connecting into a manhandled, mangled, misshapen whole, its themes written out in thunderously obvious cues.

Deadly dull.

It's not much fun, and it's not particularly edifying. Even people who are curious about Holmes (he was better known by his screen name, Johnny Wadd; here, he's played by Val Kilmer) won't find out much about him.

The Wolfman isn't crazy enough to be fun or multilayered enough to be touching. It's impossible to have any real feeling for this anguished beastie.

I'm fully prepared to hear people write off Dear John as corny, sappy, a movie for chicks. But I'd counter that Hallström's old-fashioned idealism about art and emotion is the more important quality shining through Dear John.

It's merely nutty, a picture that appears to have been made by an individual who has fallen off the edge of reason. Watching it was misery.

Freedomland, overall, could have been so much better. But Moore, even in a performance as patchy as this one, is something to watch. She's an echo of the movie that might have been.

This is a movie that seems to be striving to please a crowd, but its cornpone humility only becomes wearying.

It's a good-natured if flimsy comedy that, at the very least, suggests that Murphy hasn't completely lost whatever made him funny in the first place.

Forget the heat of passion: The movie never breaks a sweat.

For sheer ineptitude, crassness and unwatchability, American Wedding takes the cake.

Disjointed and disorganized, and it meanders when it needs to gallop.

As is generally the case with Hollywood movies that use Asian horror films as their inspiration, the Guard brothers seem to have glanced at the original, borrowed a few images and then made the movie according to some preconceived template of what makes audiences jump -- instead of burrowing into the stuff that haunts our dreams.

Kogonada’s spiky-sweet romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a case in point: perched halfway between crowd-pleasing Hallmark romance—not a pejorative, by the way—and loo-loo surrealist experiment, it’s not quite enough of either, a movie reaching for something beyond its grasp.

Statham moves with such easy grace that you don't have to work hard to believe him. And if he can stand up to Joan Allen, melting her predatory stare with his own molten gaze, then it's clear he's not just the prettiest guy on the prison block, but also the toughest.

Begins as a perfectly reasonable thriller and ends up rather an inane one.

The movie chickens out. In the Valley of Elah could have been really interesting -- and really daring -- if it had focused on Hank's realization that his own child, supposedly a good kid, had perhaps committed the kinds of atrocities that would make any decent human being recoil. The movie (which Haggis also wrote) dances around that territory, but doesn't dare to march straight into its terrifying maw.

As the film's producers investigate the circumstances of that leaked video, at least there's also evidence of canine joy in A Dog's Purpose, in the form of movie-star mutts chasing their tails and fetching semideflated footballs. That part looks like fun--and when fun is involved, a dog's face doesn't lie.

The story condescends to Mae, and, by extension, to smart, ambitious millennials everywhere — I’m not a millennial, but I felt offended on their behalf.

The mythology he tries to build in Glass is rushed and sloppy; the surprise twist at the end is really just more of a damp wrinkle. Shyamalan believes so strongly in the dramatic impact of this trilogy that he almost makes you believe in it too — that’s his secret superpower. But the illusion is fragile. You don’t need a sixth sense to know you’re in for a letdown. The five you’ve got should be plenty.

It’s nearly impossible to care about any of the humans. For a guy with a job that almost no one on the planet has, Denny is shockingly dull, and Ventimiglia fails to vest him with even an iota of personality. The generally charming Seyfried is saddled with a bum role that mostly requires her to suffer beatifically, and Donovan and Baker, both marvelously subtle actors, are badly suited to playing monsters-in-law.

To invoke Pauline Kael's review of Diane Kurys's "Entre Nous," it's about two women not having a lesbian affair.

A perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material.

The supposition, maybe, is that in an alleged thrill ride of a movie like this one, the words aren't supposed to matter.

Bad Education is a story of small-town villains who just can’t help themselves, and it’s fun to see how their own carelessness trips them up. These are people we can’t trust, played by actors we trust implicitly. Why not be flimflammed by the best?

Transcendence, written by Jack Paglen, is just more business as usual, one of those "control technology or it will control you" sermons that nonetheless enlists the usual heap of technically advanced special effects.

For those of you on a really tight entertainment budget, you'll be paying at least 8 cents per minute not to laugh. Your money is better spent on beans and rice.

Even after The Ice Road overcomplicates itself, there’s enough gas here to keep the thing going, including some nicely sustained bridge-crossing suspense and several fine demonstrations of stunt dangling.

The movie gets duller and less focused as it wears on.

Grant takes every stupid line and makes it funny, just by underplaying.

Fast and funny and brings back some of the wonder to the series.

Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald -- his previous feature was "The Hanging Garden" -- has managed to make a comedy about assisted suicide that hardly feels black at all.

The picture is mildly entertaining and stringently unoffensive (provided you're not a supersensitive upper-crusty type from Connecticut). Yet it has problems from the start.

It sure is handsome-looking, throwing off a majestic gleam. But that’s not the same as possessing actual majesty. There’s barely a minute when The Great Wall doesn’t veer into the trying-too-hard zone, and to watch all that striving is simply exhausting.

If The Marked Ones is mildly brilliant in the first half, it stumbles witlessly into its own dumb pentagram in the second.

Any moron can make a bad movie. But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.

Fred Claus does feature some very nicely groomed reindeer, a far cry from those patchy, depressed-looking creatures you see every holiday season at the petting zoo. They're prancing and dancing as fast as they can, but they can't pull Fred Claus from the rut it's in.

Both mean-spirited and self-conscious. It's all style and no soul, which wouldn't be a problem if its style at least gave us something to look at, or to laugh at. But From Paris With Love, filmed on location in Paris, has a raggedy, greasy, dingy look: It's the movie equivalent of an unbathed, unshaven French boyfriend (the bad kind). It thinks it's suave, but it just smells bad.

Bay doesn't care about your soul, he just wants your money - but he at least makes sure you go home feeling exhausted and spent rather than vaguely dissatisfied. It's a fair exchange.