Todd McCarthy

Takes itself so seriously that it never has fun with its shopworn genre elements.

Ultimately, frustration and fatigue prevail over the film’s intellectual acuity and political insight; neither is any true emotion ever forthcoming. This is odd and disappointing.

Goes down like stiff medicine, leaving one feeling exhausted relief when it's finally over.

Valerie Breiman’s exceedingly slick feature is one of those cutesy items in which the characters talk about nothing but relationships and themselves.

Taymor makes the action clear and easy to follow with her bold physicalization of the story and forceful direction of an astutely chosen cast.

In essence, every dramatic goal is achieved far too easily, every opponent is ultimately made of straw. The characters are never truly challenged, as if the filmmakers are afraid that any credible peril might prove too frightening for some little kid.

As impressive as the industrial-style special effects may be, they're both too much and not enough for this mild mild West.

There is amusement to be had, engaging actors to admire and beautiful craftsmanship to behold, but the entertainment quotient is below their usual standard when it comes to the films they target for a mass audience, of which this is one.

Falls somewhere in between standing on its own feet as a real movie worth the price of a ticket and merely being a glorified TV episode refitted for theaters.

Some mordant comic touches would have been welcome throughout the picture, which has a somber tone that suffers a bit from lack of modulation and nuance.

River of Grass works much better as a jokey , theoretical piece of genre revisionism than as a real movie.

Created as a comic vehicle for the lead actor, pic depends entirely too much on Wayans to carry the day, but at this point he is far more eager and willing than he is funny.

Like a light buffet of tasty morsels rather than a full and satisfying meal; all the episodes are more or less agreeable, but as a whole it lacks a knockout punch, one dynamite sequence that will galvanize viewers.

By underplaying the melodrama in the presumed hope of seeming subtle when Kelley Sane’s script is so baldly melodramatic, the “Tsotsi” helmer drains the life out of an obviously explosive subject.

Individual scenes are charged with energy, tense confrontations are numerous, and Hillcoat and Cook's intentions were undoubtedly partly to tease and taunt viewers with uncertainly about where they, and the characters, stand, to figure out who's got the power and who doesn't. If it was possible to give a damn about any of them, it would help.

This isn't the Star Wars we've always known and at least sometimes loved.

One imagines Godard spending whole days playing with dials, switches and buttons to discover the very moments he wishes to emphasize in his clips, and a good many of them are passingly arresting.

Stylistically audacious in the way it employs six different actors and assorted visual styles to depict various aspects of the troubadour's life and career, the film nevertheless lacks a narrative and a center, much like the "ghost" at its core.

Oddly, too, the film is somewhat shortchanged by its great star, Johnny Depp, who disappointingly has chosen to play Dillinger as self-consciously cool rather than earthy and gregarious.

Writers and directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have crafted a solid script... Holding the enterprise back, however, is a terribly restrained directorial approach and academic visual style that prevent the lubricious story from truly coming to life.

Unfortunately, the operative word is bland, as the newcomers don't add much to the formula, leaving it to their nemeses to enliven the proceedings. Narrative drive and humor are also in short supply, which creates a serious sagsag in the middle when the novelty of the fresh components has mostly worn off.

Artistically pretentious, thematically fuzzy and almost sinister in its deterministic view of the human condition, this unusually ambitious and serious-minded major studio release is simply too negative in every possible way to find a receptive audience.

The dark and sometimes funny The D Train is a feel-bad comedy, in that one feels bad for what happens to every character in the film and bad for sometimes being taken to places that feel more implausible than just transgressive.

Has moments of power and imagination, but the overworked style and heavy socially conscious bent exude an off-putting sense of self-importance, making for a picture that's more of a chore than a pleasure to sit through.

The repetitive storyline about successive heists during a Muppets European tour grows tiresome and the fun is intermittent.

The film is ice cold, never finding a way to invite the viewer into the story, and Richard Gere doesn't convince as a Jewish biblical scholar.

A handsome but pallid affair aimed squarely at a young Disney audience. Those who have never seen a previous "Musketeers" adaptation or a truly exciting Hollywood adventure in the grand style may be swept along, but the mechanical feel of this outing is too evident to ignore.

Eccentric, misguided and occasionally charming and sweet, this curiosity item with Sean Penn in one of his nuttier performances is unlikely to be embraced critically or commercially.

From one moment to the next, it's possible to on some level enjoy the shaking up of tired conventions in a swordplay fantasy such as this and then to be dismayed by the lowbrow vulgarity of what's ended up onscreen. The film gives with one hand and takes away with the other, which can be frustrating in what's meant to be an entertainment.

It is nonetheless imaginative in a highly familiar and ultimately tedious way.

Unfortunately, story's tension climaxes a half-hour before the film is over, and thereafter dissipates much of the charge and good will generated up to that point.

Arguably the most critic-proof picture of the decade, Barney's Great Adventure will delight everyone who can't wait to see it and be a grin-and-bear-it experience for those who must accompany members of the former group.

Amiable but no more, Bee Movie puts a hiveful of potent talent at the service of a zig-zigging, back-of-an-envelope story that's short on surprise and originality.

Stephen Daldry's film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact.

Played at an unmodulated level of subdued excitement that never quickens the pulse, longtime series producer Simon Kinberg's directorial debut lacks the exclamation point fans have justifiably been hoping for at the end of a road.

Such heart-tuggers have their appeal to some people in any era, but earnest hokum of this nature has become increasingly rare. And for a reason.

Other than for the pleasure of watching Green try to conquer ancient Greece dressed as a distant forebearer of Catwoman, more is less and a little late in this long-aborning sequel.

Notable for Kimberly Elise's ferocious lead performance and for the bigscreen exposure pic affords the charismatic Bishop T.D. Jakes, who plays himself and upon whose works the film is based.

An agreeable Middle American comedy intent upon reviving oldfashioned virtues, George Gallo's second feature doesn't serve up the big yocks needed to make it a breakout sleeper.

An overly abstract mystery about the difficulty of really knowing another person, "Dream Lover" is too rarefied for a popular thriller and too hokey for an art film. Directorial debut of notable screenwriter Nicholas Kazan displays more of an awareness of film's visual possibilities than a flair for them, and while there are any number of interesting ideas bouncing around here, pic falls between stools both artistically and commercially.

As gooey and lacking in protein as a chocolate holiday bonbon, Valentine's Day plays like a feature-length commercial produced by the Friends of the Valentine Promotional Society.

The gradual dilution of fresh humor is further undercut by a queasy sense that the picture, in the end, is quietly endorsing all the psychoanalytical mumbo jumbo that it has been poking fun at all along.

A lightweight, modestly engaging yarn sporting reductive mystical and philosophical elements that are both valid and borderline silly.

This handsome, not unappealing look at a Scottish legend of nearly 300 years ago is too solemn, wooden and dour for its own good, and feels oddly of another era.

A strange international odyssey that becomes more complicated and loony by the moment. Some viewers will undoubtedly tune out early, others will follow as far as they can -- and a privileged few might make it all the way.

The slapstick and action comedy interludes are haphazardly executed at best, and matters aren't helped by the film's incredibly ugly look.

Memories of dreary Sunday school classes come flooding back courtesy of The Nativity Story.

What starts as potentially interesting apocalyptic speculative fiction devolves into dreary sub-Hunger Games survivalism and banal teen romance.

A great title in search of a movie to live up to it, this startlingly uneventful compendium of thick-headed boy-talk and female tolerance squanders a fine cast on incredibly ordinary characters and situations.

Carlos Lopez Estrada’s debut feature brandishes brash exuberance and stilted storytelling tropes in roughly equal measure, yielding a result that stimulates just as it cheapens itself dramatically.

Heijningen doesn't display the instinct of the best Hollywood action directors to give the audience what it craves at the big moments, except for a few gory in-your-face shots.

The cutting-edge perfection of effects in Cameron and Spielberg films is replaced here by work that looks more homemade, particularly toward the end in some faintly cheesy composite shots.

Richard Shepard’s film is far from dull, but it just doesn’t feel like the real thing, more like an artificial construct inspired by pumped-up crime favorites from a couple of decades ago.

A sense of strain envelops the proceedings this time around. One can feel the effort required to suit up one more time, come up with fresh variations on a winning formula and inject urgency into a format that basically needs to be repeated and, due to audience expectations, can't be toyed with or deepened very much.

Pretty when it should be gritty and grandiosely noble instead of just telling it like it was, 42 needlessly trumps up but still can't entirely spoil one of the great American 20th century true-life stories, the breaking of major league baseball's color line by Jackie Robinson.

Staggeringly cornball and squeaky-clean even when flirting with such issues as interracial sexual rivalries.

A high-energy performance by Richard Gere and an intensely brooding one from Lena Olin engage attentive viewer interest, but the stars are forced to overcompensate for a rather slow pace and lack of plot.

The dramatic approach here is clear, efficient and entirely on-the-nose, with little time for anything that might distract from the hagiographic effort in play. Its sole purpose is to ennoble and proclaim a hero, which its subject almost certainly is. But it makes for notably simplified drama.

Well-crafted but thoroughly unsuspenseful.

A wannabe horror classic that turns deadly dull once the sense of anxious expectation wears off.

Beautiful to look at, this is nothing more than a Little Engine That Could story refitted to accommodate aerial action and therefore unlikely to engage the active interest of anyone above the age of about 8, or 10 at the most.

Disappointingly, Death of a President shrinks from its promise as a piece of genuinely radical or adventurous speculative fiction.

Staccato, Mamet-style dialogue exchanges, breathless pacing and remarkably healthy, well-fed-looking actors create a cumulative sense of artificiality that seriously undercuts the devastating effect clearly being sought.

Pushes its dark, smart, clever, cynical, satirical, nasty, provocative and sarcastic instincts to the point of heavily diminished returns -- to the point where the very amusing premise just isn't funny anymore.

Handsome, respectable and well cast, elaborate production lacks the excitement and magic that would elevate the film to beloved status, and sheer abundance of CGI work weighs on it too heavily.

Cage supplies beaucoup energy, but his highly compromised hustler cop character provides little else in which he can invest his talent. Sinise wears an increasingly grim demeanor in a part that comes to make no sense, and John Heard's role as a local power broker gets lost in the shuffle.

Unfortunately, after a relatively promising warmup, pic actually proceeds to flatten out the characters in the latter sections and to make them less dimensional and interesting than they initially seemed.

While one can admire the commitment, technique, concentration and stamina required to keep the pressure cooker at maximum temperature, it still feels like an exercise, one so dramatically monotonous and tonally high-pitched that you want to escape almost as much as the characters do.

Visually resplendent but dramatically uneven.

A potentially fun premise soon turns into no fun at all in Cop Car, a seriously imagination-challenged low-end action thriller.

The fact that the three actors who do most of the fooling around — Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon — have a combined age of 202 pegs this as a sex romp for the Viagra crowd.

A half-broken adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's great modern Western novel. Neither dull nor exciting.

An intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target.

You can virtually see the mystique peeling away while beholding the turgid melodrama, patchy plotting, windy dialogue and, yes, spectacular combat effects of this grand finale.

Towelhead is transgressive without being effectively subversive, gutsy to no particular end. It simply lacks style, which counts for so much in this sort of thing.

Will please fans of Sara Gruen's best seller, but it lacks the vital spark that would have made the drama truly compelling on the screen.

The new film may also serve a purpose by showcasing a dynamic and attractive new actor, Kenny Wormald but, otherwise, this is a by-the-numbers affair.

Graced with well-chosen location eye candy, Tom Tykwer's biggest production to date is proficient but lacks the added tension and characterization to put it anywhere near the top tier of contempo action suspensers.

A simple repast consisting of sometimes strained slapsticky comedy, a sweet romance and a life lesson learned, this little picnic doesn't amount to much but goes down easily enough.

Only the faintest glimmers of genuine, earned emotion pierce through the layers of intense calculation that encumber Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time.

A film that should but doesn't get under your skin and give you the creeps.

Overall, the filmmakers’ take on the subject is highly esoteric and fails to suggest either why Wild Bill has remained such a famous figure, or the irony in the fact that he has done so.

Terse and understated, this is a spy vs. spy tale designed to minimize talk and maximize action, not at all a bad thing in movies but over-worked to near-exhaustion here.

Beautifully made production lacks the emotional depth and dramatic tension needed to command audience attention beyond the level of a talented curiosity.

Christopher's lengthy two-hander scenes with Pooh quickly wear out their welcome; what at first is agreeably amusing shortly becomes grating, then just tedious.

An unsuccessful attempt to get inside the head, under the skin or through the looking glass of Bush administration Secretary of Defense and Iraq War proponent Donald Rumsfeld.

In its animated work, DreamWorks has repeatedly flip-flopped between the hip and the square. This time out, it's as if the company tried to apply a hip approach to a square subject, with unresolved results.

One is grateful to have Momoa for company. Unlike some strutters who can't hide how delighted they are to show off their trainer-honed bods, Momoa wears his superb physique casually and his take-it-or-leave-it, devil-may-care attitude makes the narrative's long haul much easier to bear than would otherwise have been the case.

Unfortunately, the diverse elements introduced here don’t coalesce into a comfortable package, with much of the background action proving notably listless and unconvincing.

Dark Shadows sinks its teeth half-way into its potentially meaty material but hesitates to go all the way.

A genre mash that's mildly amusing until it can't think of anything else to do besides flop around in the deep end of conspicuous gore.

Adds relatively little insight to the public understanding of wayward military behavior more incisively analyzed in "Taxi to the Dark Side."

A constant low-boil of ridiculousness both mocks and sustains Non-Stop, a jerry-rigged terror-on-a-plane thriller with a premise so far-fetched as to create a degree of suspense over how the writers will wriggle out of the knot of their own making.

What starts as a bright look at the dim lives of temps in a large company slides into unfortunate digressions and drabness in Clockwatchers.

Attractively designed, energetically performed and, above all, blessedly concise, this adaptation of one of the most popular American kids' books of all time walks the safe side of surrealism with its fur-flying shenanigans. The younger the viewers, the better reactions are bound to be.

Charlie Kaufman's clever screenplay bears many traces of the same brand of originality and eccentric imagination that graced his work on "Being John Malkovich," although even at an hour-and-a-half the conceit is stretched almost too thin for audience sustenance.

The picture is not dull, exactly, just mundane, marked by unimaginative plotting, cut-rate villains, a bland visual style and a lack of elan in every department.

Malick's most distinctive ambition here is his attempt to create an almost pointilistic portrait of a man by evoking acute moments of his past and present, and this sustains real interest for a while, as you wait to see how it all might come together. But as the film just keeps offering more of the same...it doesn't build or pay off with what it seems designed to do, which is to provide either a dramatic or philosophical apotheosis.

A below-par star vehicle for Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, Conspiracy Theory is a sporadically amusing but listless thriller that wears its humorous, romantic and political components like mismatched articles of clothing.

Had the young Jack Nicholson played such a character during the height of the Vietnam War, it would have been easy to go along for the ride. But skilled as Phoenix is at pulling off the individual scenes of Elwood's shenanigans, the actor doesn't come across as embodying rebellion to the marrow of his bones, which renders his scams arbitrary and disagreeably irresponsible.

Mix Brigitte Bardot in "And God Created Woman" with Carroll Baker in "Baby Doll," sex it up times 10 and you have a notion of the effect of Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan.

The Judge is well served by intense performances from stars Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall, but is undercut by obvious note-hitting in the writing and a deliberate pace that drags things out about twenty minutes past their due date.

A game, disarming lead performance from Jess Weixler, who won a jury acting prize at Sundance, goes some way toward making palatable this mish-mash, whose provocative nature could carve out a certain commercial niche.

A mostly formulaic approach that becomes more disappointing as the yarn unwinds.

This ultra-slick, fantasy-inducing visit to an international wonder world of wealth and deception plays more like an inventory of thieving and gambling techniques than a captivating diversion, even if it's hard not to be voyeuristically pulled in by some of its ruses.

Never less than watchable and loaded with trademark negativity so extreme it's sometimes funny, the new film is nonetheless saddled with a protagonist so narrowly and unlikably presented that, in the end, he doesn't seem worth the time devoted to him.

Good for a few lascivious titters but quite lacking in the sort of comic bite and social satire one hopes for in the work of Mike Nichols.

Can be taken to task for its overt point-making, lackluster style and some late-on dramatic contrivances seemingly dragged in to provide a little violence.

Despite the filmmaker's obvious smarts and oft-proven skills, there's a kind of off-putting effrontery about Soderbergh's approach here that rather sours the whole experience. The tone is brittle, the attitude arch, the performances by a savvy and diverse cast uneven.

This punishingly predictable tale will test whether sci-fi action fanboys can stomach having their cherished genre infiltrated by sentimental hokum about a down-on-his-luck dad and his spunky long-lost son.

Like an athlete who leaves it all on the field, the film leaves it all in the moment and on the screen, and there's really nothing to take away afterwards. There is nothing to think about, no nuances to contemplate, no connection with these characters who exist only in moments of hyper-tension and crisis, no greater truths to consider other than to prevail.

The yarn's emotional undercurrents never take hold, resulting in a picture that leaves one thinking less about the fates of the characters than about how the actors had to spend most of their working days soaking wet.

The Old West is portrayed as a venal loony bin in Sweetwater, a handsomely designed, occasionally funny but ultimately empty female vengeance yarn.

Lack of much substance or dramatic payoff makes the whole significantly less than sum of its parts.

A potentially exceptional story is told in a flatly unexceptional manner.

The overall enterprise, for all its intrigue and visceral impact, feels overly thought out, affected and forced in its stylization.

Some privileged nature footage from the African rain forest is dishonored by deeply silly narration in Chimpanzee.

Yes, it's a cartoon, but it's conspicuously unmodulated, with the volume set on high and the pacing all but pushed to fast-forward.

Except for the fact that virtually every shot, chop or stab the good guys make hits its mark to make the bad guys quickly drop like toy soldiers, the climactic showdown delivers what it needs to action-wise, leading to a satisfactory wrap-up.

It feels much more like a shameless reshuffle of "The Princess Diaries."

The film only intermittently displays the snap, precision and stylistic smarts a mixed-tone project like this requires; a half-good effort is not enough where buoyancy and a sly-to-mean spiritedness are required at all times.

A half-absorbing, half-ridiculous techno-thriller that often goes too far in search of audience-rousing effects.

A humans vs. robots saga that feels machine-made, I, Robot looks to have been assembled from the spare parts of dozens of previous sci-fi pictures.

A certain integrity and seriousness of intent gleams through, but Nina is just too big a subject, and talent, to be compressed into such a small package.

As rich in period and historical background as it is deficient in fresh dramatic and thematic ideas.

Deftly playing Tina Fey's feminist-icon mother, Lily Tomlin all but steals Admission, a knowing but uneven comedy about the neuroticism of the college-admission process on both sides of the equation.

Physicality of the second half, then, will keep the audience going, but it is not quite sufficient to camouflage the elemental silliness of storyline.

As novel and absorbing as In Time is in several respects, however, Andrew Niccol's latest conception of an altered but still recognizable future feels undernourished in other ways that are not as salutary, preventing the film from fulfilling its strong inherent promise.

For a film that could have been either a scorching satire or an outright tragedy, W. is, if anything, overly conventional, especially stylistically.

A less raucous and more serious-minded neighborhood comedy than its entertaining predecessor.

A bold rethinking of a familiar old story and striking design elements are undercut by a draggy midsection and undeveloped characters in Snow White and the Huntsman.

The flip-flops, coincidences, surprising disclosures, far-fetched happenings, TV-style chases and illogically protracted confrontations come flying virtually all at once, obliterating the plausible character work and making the film feel like a hundred others.

Whereas Peckinpah managed not only to raise hackles but to get under the skin, Lurie manages only the former, which reduces the material to the level of sensation-mongering.

The picture is stronger the closer it sticks to the streets and raw emotions and the more it avoids routine dramatic crutches and forced comedy.

This comically intended battle of the species is family entertainment for families that will buy anything.

The audaciousness that marked Todd Haynes’ earlier work has been supplanted by self-important preachiness in Safe.

Brightly drawn, fast-moving and mercifully short, efficient effort is a male bonding saga that hinges upon the fears of teenage pooch Max that he’ll grow up to be just as goofy as Dad.

Once Damon's one-man truth squad goes off the reservation and starts behaving too much like Jason Bourne for comfort, the film begins not only spilling more blood but also leaking crucial credibility.

Despite all its agreeable revisionism and breezy bonhomie, Posse has the feel of a mish-mash of elements all thrown into a big pot and stirred. Lacking dramatic grounding and structuring, even the pertinent revelations that will be most surprising and interesting to modern audiences carry more intellectual than emotional resonance.

Would have made for a fine film noir 60 years ago but feels rather contrived and unbelievable in the setting of contemporary New York.

The modestly scaled film delivers some moving and affecting moments amid a preponderance of scenes of frequently annoying people behaving badly.

The same tone and look are maintained, but the visceral excitement is muffled by familiarity, an insufficiently conceived lead character and the sheer weight of backstory and multiple layers of deception.

Yields up plenty of opportunities for heated confrontations, wild and woolly dialogue and startling violence, which prove diverting in a shallow way.

The film's slender conceit is given some weight by its 11-year-old leading lady Sydney Aguirre, whose portrait of a flinty, instinctively mischievous tomboy growing up without benefit of parental guidance provides gratification even when there's not much going on.

Every character here is so squeaky-clean, and the prejudice as depicted is so toothless and easily overcome, that the film feels like a gingerly fantasy version of what, in real life, was an exceptional example of resilient trail-blazing.

Chris Gorak grabs the viewer by the throat in the first few minutes, but quickly fritters away involvement by concentrating almost exclusively on two characters who are both annoying and boring.

In the end, given how little goes on in Breaking Dawn - Part 1 despite the major plot points, what you're left with is to gaze at the three leads, all of whom have their constituencies and reasons for being eminently watchable. The only hope is they'll have more to do next time around.

First-time director McMurray, who worked as an associate producer on Fruitvale Station, does a decent job of staging the action and maintaining viewer attention on the straight-line story. But there’s no subtext, investigation of his characters’ various stories or motivations for doing what they’re doing. It’s a very shallow film.

A waterlogged would-be thriller deep-sixed by its misguided notion of high concept. [12 January 1998, p. 63]

With Gere’s character so lacking in memory and mental clarity, the film provides very little for an audience to latch on to. Tedium quickly sets in and is only sporadically relieved in this labor of love that simply doesn’t reward even the patient attention of sympathetic viewers.

Te laughs "Fockers" generates are the type you feel embarrassed about almost immediately afterward.

For actor and director, the project seems like trying on a new coat, and it doesn't fit either of them.

Arch and funny in equal measure, this looks like a theatrical non-starter that Clooney fans and football devotees might be tempted to check out down the line on DVD or on the tube.

A quiet work with Ozu-like structure and concerns, but remains more an intellectual exercise than one from the heart.

Efficient, if ultimately rote, political thriller.

Mostly clunky and vaguely unsavory.

The significant potential of its premise is squandered by an increasing reliance on teen movie cliches, silly plotting and the urge to be upbeat rather than to communicate life lessons.

Todd Phillips' follow-up to the most successful R-rated comedy of all time serves up its share of laughs while not actually providing a terribly enjoyable time because of a queasy undercurrent that never goes away.

As eye and ear candy, pic has its modest pleasures, beginning with the attractive Diggs and Lathan.

This trifle about a dizzy downtown New York scenester who gets a grip on her life is energized by several attractive characters and enough youthful pep to put it over as an upbeat diversion for teens and twentysomethings, though it has no more substance than bubblegum music.

As the enduring success of this property has shown, there are large, emotionally susceptible segments of the population ready to swallow this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean it's good.

The result is vivid when focusing on those directly involved in the war but laborious when devoted to the fretful hand-wringing of do-gooder outsider characters, which is a lot of the time.

A superficial look at the '50s sex icon, picture feels like it was researched via press clippings rather than attempting a fresh rethinking of its era and provocative subject.

You almost feel sorry for Tyler Perry, stepping out of his own universe for the first time to try to expand his range and finding himself in something as thoroughly dismal as Alex Cross.

Mulholland Falls is a "Chinatown" wannabe that comes up short in every department. Although loaded with talent on both sides of the camera, this sex-and-corruption-drenched mystery meller about a big official cover-up in postwar L.A. simply feels underachieved, as it lacks the heady atmosphere, tasty intrigue and dramatic punch the alluring premise would seem to promise.

Over-produced and under-thought-out, this unconscionably elaborate attempt at an old-fashioned Gothic thriller looks great but is beyond silly.

A coming-of-age piece that is slight to the point of anemia, Unstrung Heroes sports a willful eccentricity that almost immediately becomes annoying.

Certain to create a gaping divide between generational and aesthetic camps, Sucker Punch is a largely grim and unpleasant display of technical wizardry wrapped around a story that purports to be inspirational.

The deadening and sometimes laughable litany of shouted military-style dialogue eventually pummels into submission any hope for fresh creative angles on this well-worn format.

Impeccably crafted but dramatically dull.

Too familiar in its basic trajectory to be fresh or compelling.

Lahti's feature directorial debut walks an innocuous middle line between the story's maudlin possibilities and its meaningful potential.

Breaks down when it gets to the distant future, which in this case isn't a good place to be stranded.

This Vietnam War-themed drama is one of the dullest films made about that oft-dramatized conflict.

Little Buddha is a visually stunning but dramatically underwhelming attempt to forge a bridge between the ancient Eastern religion and modern Western life. Bernardo Bertolucci's second foray into remote Asian territory is considerably less successful than his first, "The Last Emperor," as the double narrative is awkwardly structured and never comes into sharp focus.

An annoying example of self-therapy posing as art.

If auds swallow this odoriferous exercise in calculated career repositioning, they'll swallow anything.

The visuals are undeniably dreamy, but they mostly seem borrowed from other filmmakers’ dreams.

The puzzle of how the various personal and narrative pieces will eventually fit together exerts a smidgen of interest, but the characters are so dour and un-dimensional as to invite no curiosity about them.

Worst of all, it just feels tired and recycled.

The problem with the script by Susser and David Michod, working from a story by Brian Charles Frank, is that Hesher's uncouth behavior is so aggressively pushed to single-minded, crudely exploitative effect.

Overstuffed and fatally miscast, All the King's Men never comes to life.

An ultra-arty "The Sixth Sense" that deliberately inhibits comprehension of the story until the very end -- and arguably continues to inhibit it even then -- pic features certifiably talented people on both sides of the camera collaborating on a project that probably shouldn't have been undertaken in the first place.

Unfortunately, almost everything about the film is so unbelievable and misjudged that only the most gullible audiences will feel any transporting thrill at the end other than from the movie finally being over.

The leading man aside, a fine cast is thoroughly wasted in a tale that centers on old-fashioned Cold War-style conflict rather than the sort of terrorist drama that's more pertinent today.

The gambits in Ghost Dog seem simply like literary and cinematic games devoid of any larger meaning.

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber adequately manages the mechanics demanded here but adds no finesse or grace notes.

A ranting, claustrophobic drama that trades in shopworn paranoid notions, William Friedkin's overwrought screen version of Tracy Letts' play assaults the viewer with aggressive thesping and over-the-top notions of shocking incident, all to intensely alienating effect.

After slipping badly with the second installment two years ago, the Narnia franchise does a full-on belly flop with this third.

Scarcely more amusing than spending 90 minutes in a pre-K classroom.

A female solidarity adultery comedy that's three parts embarrassing farce to one part genuinely comic discharge.

Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front.

Largely listless and witless, this extensive reworking of the 1968 sci-fi favorite simply isn't very exciting or imaginative; most surprisingly, given the material, it's also Burton's most conventional and literal-minded film, the one most lacking in his trademark poetic weirdness and bracing flights of fancy.

A Steve Martin vehicle that's not prankish or weird enough by half.

Revives the format but not the fun of classic Hollywood screwball comedies about rediscovering the virtues of a former mate.

The mash-up of elements combine with a singularly unpleasant roster of characters to create a work of genuinely off-putting quirkiness.

Represents a passable follow-up to the venerable Peter Pan story and mercifully, at 72 minutes, is exactly half the length of the last attempt at same, Steven Spielberg's lamentable "Hook."

A small, sympathetic story of a teenage girl’s rough coming out is smothered by a pile of far-fetched melodrama, a loathsomely obnoxious male lead character and far too much unsteadicam visual randomness in First Girl I Loved.

Unfortunately, instead of embracing the weighty moral, religious and political components of the story, Malick has alternately deflected and minimized them.

Satisfying neither as character study nor as straight-ahead actioner.

Possessed of another outstanding wall-to-wall score by Philip Glass but rather fuzzy in its message, entry differs from its predecessors in that roughly 80% of its images are derived from existing sources and have been "tortured and recontextualized" to unusual and sometimes extreme effect.

Gareth Dunnet Alcocer's script has a tidy, programmed feel that results in a feel-good version of a grim and sordid modern yarn.

Like "Waiting to Exhale" except more so, film jerks from scene to scene with little sense of rhythm, continuity or dramatic shaping.

A picture too simplistic and sentimental for art seekers and too rough for general audiences.

So second-hand and disposable is it in every respect.

This middle portion of an intended trilogy will only play to the converted who have already seen Part I, and then only to the most gullible among them who will swallow mediocre filmmaking for the sake of ideology.

An empty shell.

Although there’s talent on display in all aspects of this time-jumping, visually distinctive independent that rests its commercial hopes on the names of leads Justin Long and Emmy Rossum, Esmail strenuously overplays his hand with the torrent of obnoxious dialogue he asks his male lead to deliver, which is enough to make one want to run out several times for a breather.

The comedy just isn't that funny and the enterprise never finds an exact tone.

With "Shampoo" and "American Gigolo" now distant memories, the time evidently seemed ripe for another Hollywood stud movie. Despite Ashton Kutcher’s believability as an older woman’s kept boy, Spread isn’t a patch on those previous films.

If drive-ins still existed, this film would rule there for weeks.

As detrimental as anything to the film’s effectiveness are the visuals, which are murky, lack compositional interest and do the actors no favors.

Director Renny Harlin has unfortunately adopted a let's-try-anything attitude that translates into a chaotic and unattractive visual style.

This aggravatingly empty would-be suspense piece puts all its trust in its star to save the day, but even this compulsively watchable performer can’t elevate such a vapid, undeveloped screenplay.

The story is undoubtedly weird, but perhaps more so on paper than on the screen, since Russell and his actors have played it mostly straight in attempting to confer psychological validity on all the untoward developments.

Writer David Hare and director Ralph Fiennes have a good feel for the artistic world the story inhabits and professional dancer Oleg Ivenko does a more than creditable job in personifying one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artistic figures, but the narrative bounces all over the place trying to cover too much ground when concentrating on the core drama would have far better served the desired end.

There's nothing funny, provocative or involving about what "Shrek" co-writer Joe Stillman and the team from Madrid-based Ilion Animation Studios do with the notion here.

A demolition derby starring some of the most expensive cars on Earth, Redline portrays a world so drenched in wealth it gives off a stench.

The Hudsucker Proxy is no doubt one of the most inspired and technically stunning pastiches of old Hollywood pictures ever to come out of the New Hollywood. But a pastiche it remains, as nearly everything in the Coen brothers' latest and biggest film seems like a wizardly but artificial synthesis, leaving a hole in the middle where some emotion and humanity should be.

Our Day Will Come speeds along for a while on the fumes of its own audacity until it can no longer hide the lack of coherent ideas in the tank.

Singleton's action thriller has a decent sense of propulsion but, after a faintly intriguing start, the convoluted plot mechanics overwhelm everything else, making you feel you're watching a detailed blueprint for a movie, and an increasingly far-fetched one in the bargain.

It's a quick trip from whimsy to silliness in Be Kind Rewind, a notably ephemeral work by Michel Gondry, whose flights of fancy can't overcome the egregious illogic of the premise.

A deeply metaphysical film by contempo Hollywood standards, this middlebrow trifle may engage the emotions of a certain tier of young professional women.

Lacks the antic energy and inspired imagination that might have put this over as a sharp-witted community comedy in the Preston Sturges vein.

Jackson undermines solid work from a good cast with show-offy celestial evocations that severely disrupt the emotional connections with the characters.

The story keeps everyone in motion all night long, and frantically so, to the point that it could easily have been titled Non-Stop 2.

This is one of those films that, if shown overseas, could potentially make people think that the U.S. is going down the tubes even faster than imagined. Everyone in it — adolescents and grown-ups, too — is beyond stupid and content to remain that way.

Schneider hams it up as a paunchy middle-aged Hawaiian stoner in an eyebrow-raising ethnic caricature that more than once calls to mind Mickey Rooney's unfortunate Japanese turn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

It's hard to find the genuine heartfelt moments in The Lucky Ones.

Allen the writer-director has gone tone-deaf this time around, somehow not realizing that the nonstop prattling of the less-than-scintillating characters almost never rings true.

All the interest and good will built up by the sharply conceived preliminaries is washed away in a succession of scenes that feel crushingly routine and generic, not to mentioned guided by ideological urges.

Ultimately a mess of diverse ingredients that sorely could have used a rigorous screening process to eliminate all the chaff.

Magic in the Moonlight does have a not-disagreeable expensive-vacation vibe to it. But the one-dimensional characters are mostly ones you’d want to avoid rather than spend a holiday with.

Bloody but anemic story.

Engagingly intriguing throughout most of its slightly overlong running time, and perhaps the strangely mesmerizing mood Lynch has orchestrated for the entire "Twin Peaks" undertaking should not be underestimated at this juncture. But the feeling persists that, to a considerable degree, Lynch is marking time with this project, creating new riffs and variations on themes he had already largely worked out.

A bland and dour screen version of Sebastian Faulks' highly engrossing bestseller.

By far the least ambitious, and certainly the least interesting, animated feature to come out of Disney in quite some time.

Seems bent on creating equal-opportunity offense to many groups, but more often than not is appalling simply for its silliness and lack of comedic control.

An artistically experimental, ideologically apocalyptic blast at American values that is as obvious in intent as it is murky in aesthetic achievement.

The spectacle of a dissolute hedonist suddenly acquiring a heart and a conscience late in life is shamelessly, and shamefully, contrived in its emotional trajectory.

Overstays its welcome by at least a half-hour after never getting very high off the ground in the first place.

Saddled with a sentimentally "sincere" subject and lacking the stylistic and humorous cachet of the recent computer-animated smashes.

A disappointingly routine thriller that prefers to lean on tired Hollywood conventions rather than to explore fresh dramatic and stylistic territory.

Instead, director Jon Turteltaub has taken the easiest road, emerging with a soppy, soft-headed disease-of-the-week-style piece that sentimentalizes or opts out of every interesting issue the script raises.

Del Toro clearly knows his way around the camera, but the shadowy eeriness that saturates the early going slowly becomes monotonous and winds up being just dull, and even partially obscures the action in the long underground finale.

What seemed like a dubious proposition on paper plays even more dubiously onscreen, as Cutthroat Island strenuously but vainly attempts to revive the thrills of old-fashioned pirate pictures. Giving most of the swashbuckling opportunities to star Geena Davis, pic does little with its reversal of gender expectations and features a seriously mismatched romantic duo in Davis and Matthew Modine.

Even as she is the center of attention here in a double role, the jury is still out on Gomez's bigscreen potential; she's not very appealing or magnetic here, nor does she display any particular comic gifts for this sort of broad fare.

In what does have to be perversely honored as some kind of special accomplishment for Moss as a performer, Becky sustains such an abusive, mad, pathetic and immature display for well over an hour that you just want to bolt. What edification can possibly be gotten from such a grotesque form of exhibitionism?

Immortals is not only entirely without humor, but is dominated by a lot of huffing and puffing, thunderous self-importance and windy Socratic quotations about the immortality and divinity of men's souls. You just have to roll your eyes after a while.

Teasingly enjoyable rubbish through the first hour, Orphan becomes genuine trash during its protracted second half.

Cute and clever though the plot may be, everything is played out in the broadest possible terms without an iota of nuance or subtlety.

The villain here, Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor, is so intensely annoying that, very early on, you wish Batman and Superman would just patch up their differences and join forces to put the squirrely rascal out of his, and our, misery.

This botched remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" seriously dishonors the seriously fine 1951 sci-fi landmark on which it's based.

There's no catharsis at the end from the journey taken, just relief that it's over.

Brandishing impressively packed abs and enough upper body strength to pull herself out of countless jams, Alicia Vikander gamely steps into the kick-ass role twice played by Angelina Jolie, but the derivative story and cardboard supporting characters are straight out of 1930s movie serials.

A certain staleness hangs over the proceedings despite the best efforts of the cast and the fun-minded creative team.

Slack and unexciting compared to Ryan Coogler's blisteringly good 2015 reconception of a 1970s icon for modern audiences, this follow-up is an undeniable disappointment in nearly every way, from its dreary homefront interludes to a climactic boxing match that feels far-fetched in the extreme.

The subject being race relations, Manderlay is bound to stir considerable debate in intellectual circles, but given the director's abstract style and use of characters to enact an agenda, it's a discussion that will exclude the general public, who will ignore it as they did "Dogville."

Despite the undeniable presence of a huge amount of action, X-Men: Apocalypse is decidedly a case of more is less, especially when compared with the surprising action and more interesting personal interactions (including the temporary subtraction of some characters) in other big Marvel franchises.

Perhaps if it had assumed the point of view of one character, such as a longtime teacher at the school, the film might have been invested with some weight and insight. Instead, it just sort of sits there onscreen, provoking no special reaction one way or the other.