Todd McCarthy

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.

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.

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.

This butterfly just doesn't fly. Icy, surprisingly conventional and never truly convincing.

An uncommonly dour and even grim action thriller that globetrots as diversely as a James Bond film but offers a very limited view politically, emotionally and dramatically.

Animation is dull and characterless, and vocal talent has evidently received blanket direction to, when in doubt, shout.

Shows the sort of edge in places that will be appreciated by horror fanboys of all ages, but is mostly too overwrought and over-the-top.

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

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

This franchise-hungry champion of the underdog brings no sense of fun to his pursuit of bad guys; it's just the fate he's stuck with.

Pfister, who, like his mentor Nolan, adamantly continues to shoot on film (not digital), shows a sure hand at staging scenes, creating visuals and setting a tone -- if only all the diverse elements here fit comfortably under the same tent.

A good biographical film about artists should, at the very least, inspire the viewer to learn more about its subjects and the work they created. Total Eclipse has totally the opposite effect, of making one never want to hear about its protagonists again. This misbegotten look at the mutually destructive relationship between the 19th century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaineis a complete botch in all respects.

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.

Bloody but anemic story.

The spectacle of Kenneth Branagh and Judy Davis doing over-the-top Woody Allen impersonations creates a neurotic energy meltdown in Celebrity, a once-over-lightly rehash of mostly stale Allen themes and motifs.

Columbus' approach is intended to cloak such topics as mortality and human identity in the warm glow of greeting card sentiment, which renders the prescription palatable for mass consumption but hopelessly diluted.

A staggeringly misguided stab at making the past come alive by people who have absolutely no feel for period filmmaking. Banal at best and laughable at worst.

Much of the confusion, as well as the lack of dramatic rhythm or character development, results directly from Bay's cutting style, which resembles a machine gun stuck in the firing position for 2 and a half hours.

A feel-good film about death, a sitcom about mortality, "Ikiru" for meatheads. It's also a picture about two cancer patients confronting reality, and deciding how they want to spend their presumed last days, that has not an ounce of reality about it.

A pretty skillfully handled domestic thriller about a criminal activity that, while always upsetting, is especially noxious now due to the too many recent tragic and highly publicized instances of it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Genre fans always looking for something new and awesome may feel like they've seen most of this before, but the conceptual and emotional strength of Summit's Nicolas Cage starrer largely carries the day.

So fetishistic about high-powered weapons that it qualifies as an NRA wet dream, G.I. Joe: Retaliation pretty accurately reflects the franchise's comic book and cartoon origins, which is both a good and a bad thing: good if you're a 12- to 15-year-old boy, bad if you're just about anyone else.

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

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

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

Generates a fair amount of tension and produces the kind of nationalistic outrage that rock-ribbed Americans will feel in their guts.

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.

Outrageously grungy and whacked-out walk on the wild side.

Awful scripting and an unimaginative approach to re-imagining material's potential have left Universal with a theatrical in-and-outer on its hands.

A junior-league "Superbad" with an aftertaste of "The Pacifier," Drillbit Taylor is a just passable pubescent comedy with a modest laugh count by Apatow factory standards.

Worst of all, it just feels tired and recycled.

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.

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.

An exercise in improv-derived filmmaking that simply proves once again that there's no substitute for a good script.

Johnny Depp's impersonation of the Thompson figure is effective up to a point, but it's hard to imagine any segment of the public embracing this off-putting, unrewarding slog through the depths of the drug culture.

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

Crucially, the teaming of standup favorite and "Martin" star Lawrence and "Fresh Prince" Smith clicks from the outset, with both right at home handling action and comedy on the bigscreen. Even when it's not particularly funny, their interplay is engaging, and their lively, raucous personalities keep the proceedings punchy and watchable for the slightly overlong running time.

Oddly misanthropic, occasionally amusing but thoroughly cheerless holiday attraction that is in no way a family film.

With unappealing one-note characters, retread concepts and implausible motivations, Chappie is a further downward step for director Neill Blomkamp.

The older the actors here the better they are, as pros like Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis have it all over low-voltage young leads Douglas Booth and Hailee Steinfeld. Relativity will be lucky to milk anything more than a moderate take from this pretty but unexciting enactment.

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.

A markedly better picture than Roberto Benigni's far more sentimental Oscar collector.

Routine, superficial manhunt stuff.

Made up of synthetics rather than whole cloth, this lurid concoction superficially gets by thanks to a strong cast and jazzy period detail, but its cartoonish contrivances fail to convince and lack any of the depth, feeling or atmosphere of genre stand-bearers like "L.A. Confidential."

A consistently amusing action romp.

To listen to Jackson doing street talk is akin to reveling in Olivier reciting Shakespeare — in other words, it's one of the great pleasures of the language. Edit the film down to his dialogue and you have a wonderful greatest hits collection.

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

A puzzlingly confused undertaking that never becomes as cool as it thinks it is, Suicide Squad assembles an all-star team of supervillains and then doesn’t know what to do with them.

In the end, there’s too much good stuff missing and yet not enough to serve as a satisfying meal.

Dreary, lachrymose and incredibly poky tear-jerker that makes its audience wait and wait and wait until nearly the last second for its jerking.

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

At best an honorable failure, an intelligent and ambitious picture that crucially lacks dramatic flair and emotional involvement.

An unusual film that intelligently avoids numerous potential pitfalls even if its central earnestness is ultimately inescapable.

Even with all its familiar action tropes, less-than-fresh special effects and loopy plotting, the most depressing element in the Wachowski siblings' latest sci-fi mash is that, as they conceive it, human society has been around for more than a billion years but is still presided over by a rivalrous British-style royal family that treacherously behaves as if it were the 1550s.

Homefront is sufficiently silly and low-down to be entertaining on a certain marginal level, but it wouldn't appear that those involved, with the possible exception of Franco, approached this with the idea that they might be making good trash; it looks too elaborate and costly for that and the script exhibits no self-aware humor.

The season's first comet-targets-Earth special effects extravaganza is spectacular enough in its cataclysmic scenes of the planet being devastated by an unstoppable fireball, but proves far from thrilling in the down time spent with a largely dull assortment of troubled human beings.

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

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

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

Serves up all the requisite elements with enough self-deprecating humor to suggest it doesn't take itself too seriously.

There are certainly good laughs to be had. But the contrived script and bland direction prevent the film from ever developing a comic life of its own, leaving what fun there is seeming like the foundation to a rumpus room that's never finished.

Silk is a snooze. Vacuous, arid and terminally dull, this adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's freak bestseller hasn't a trace of real life or energy to it, and is hamstrung by a lethargic lead performance by Michael Pitt.

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.

The central idea is quite clever and appealing, and that the charm meter is turned up all the way.

Wallow in Hollywood hipster self-absorption.

It’s a waste of a good cast as well as a serious trip-wire for McCarthy, who may know what’s best for her talents but, on the evidence, needs a deft-handed outsider to make sure she’s maximizing them.

Viewers who sit through Exit Wounds should at least do themselves the favor of staying for the end credits, which feature some truly funny off-color banter between Anderson and Arnold on the latter's ostensible talkshow.

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.

Embalming the simple and simplistic yarn in an amber glow that is all but suffocating and banishing from it any traces of humor and spontaneity, director Scott Hicks serves up this treacly tale with absolutely no trace of self-consciousness about the material's cliches or simple-mindedness.

While After the Sunset is never exactly dull and is smartly cut to a brief running time, it never quickens the pulse.

After lightly going through the motions of a plot, it all ends up in the quarry, where assorted machinery provides the excuse for a parade of slapstick gags and amusement park-like predicaments that seem mostly lumbering.

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.

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.

A somber, absorbing thriller that treads familiar psycho serial killer terrain with style. Elegantly made and comparatively restrained in cramming sick and grisly stuff down the audience's throat.

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

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

Action scenes are accumulated as if mandated by a stop-watch and almost invariably seem like warmed-over versions of stuff we've seen before, in Terminator entries and elsewhere.

The feel of a direct-to-video title that's been upgraded to theatrical status in the hopes of wringing a few extra bucks out of it and improving its not-too-distant homevid marketability.

As overblown as it is overlong, Bad Boys II is an enervating case of more is less.

In and of itself, this revamp is mildly engaging but also feels like it's expending a great deal of energy for quite modest entertainment returns.

As a young lady who can't say no to a beautiful dress or accessory, Isla Fisher is not to be denied, and her irrepressible comic personality overcomes a number of the film's impediments.

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

While this John Singleton-directed sequel provides a breezy enough joyride, it lacks the unassuming freshness and appealing neighborhood feel of the economy-priced original.

In a role that Tom Hanks might have played a decade or so ago, Perry is pretty bland and doesn't provide any hints as to why Alex is so emotionally stymied.

Screechily abrasive and sorely lacking in elements that engage the imagination.

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.

Generates tension from the get-go, albeit of an increasingly unpleasant variety, on its way to a disappointingly generic climax.

Jason Reitman's new film skillfully navigates through the personal melodramas of many characters with a nice sense of balance and a sharp appreciation of generational differences.

The way the picture dwells almost exclusively on cinematically exploitable elements -- gangbanger crime, prostitution, honor killing, terrorism paranoia -- gives it a sordid patina that even the classy, able thesps can't offset.

Misguided, diminished and dismally done in every way, this late-summer afterthought will richly earn the distinction of becoming the first Ben-Hur in any form to flop.

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.

A shoot-'em-up exploitationer with a few interesting ideas floating around in it, Guncrazy lacks the exhilaration of a first-class lovers-on-the-run crime drama. After a promising beginning, competently made indie effort settles into a surprisingly somber mood that suppresses the possibilities latent in the story and actors.

An ideal rainy day matinee attraction for well-to-do ladies of a certain age.

With a far-fetched script that might barely have passed muster at the B units in the old studio days, this Dimension release will command a certain up-front attention due to cast topliners.

An attractive cast led by a vibrant, all-in Paula Patton and spiffy visuals courtesy of renowned cinematographer Dante Spinotti make the sleaze and predictable plotting go down a bit easier than they would have otherwise, but there's still no disguising the project's fundamentally lurid underpinnings.

This quite mediocre spawned-from-television feature feels like a Jesus film designed primarily for true believers, meaning that the faith-based public that has already been put on alert by seal-of-approval-dispensing church leaders that this is a film to see will make the Fox release into a significant Heartland attraction.

Like a long fishing day without a bite, Serenity invites impatience rather than excited anticipation, and the eventual payoff provokes a big “huh?”

Staggeringly misjudged in virtually every department, from the wannabe effervescent script to Johnny Depp's dopey hairdo.

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

This is a relentlessly mechanical piece of work that will not or cannot take the imaginative leaps to yield even fleeting moments of awe, wonder or charm.

A moderately amusing but very uneven revisionist adventure with franchise and theme park intentions written all over it...This attempt by Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to plant the flag for another Pirates of the Caribbean-scaled series tries to have it too many ways tonally, resulting in a work that wobbles and thrashes all over the place as it attempts to find the right groove.

Duvall can play an avuncular cowboy sage in his sleep, but there's truly no one on Earth you'd rather see dishing out homespun aphorisms, so it's pointless to resist the pleasure of watching him do what he can do better than anyone else. Baker and Melissa Leo, as the waitress' mom, are not asked to exhibit a fraction of their talent, but they further class the joint up.

This is a sloppy stew in which the ingredients of battle action, murder mystery, little-kid sentiment and history lesson don't mix well.

Arriving eight years after the lame third installment in Dimension's profitable series, this seems like far too little way too late.

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.

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

It’s thin stuff, but the ingratiating naivete of the characters and the aw-shucks friendliness of the cast are disarming, and it becomes easy to just let this go down as a country tune with some moonshine on the side.

The novelty value is completely gone the second time around.

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.

A woefully predictable imperiled-yuppie-family-under-siege suspenser that hardly seems worth the attention of its relatively high-profile participants.

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.

Aimed squarely at family audiences, the Wachowski Brothers' return behind the camera for the first time since the "Matrix" trilogy is a blur of video action painting and very loud sounds notable solely for its technical wizardry. In every other respect, it's pure cotton candy -- entirely non-nutritious but too sweet and pretty for young people to resist.

As easy on the eyes and ears as it is embalmed from any dramatic point of view.

An endlessly sentimental fable about sacrifice and redemption that aims only at the heart at the expense of the head. Intricately constructed so as to infuriate anyone predominantly guided by rationality and intellect.

Callahan mostly overcomes its grungy technical quality with entertaining dialogue, nervy confrontation scenes, decent thesping and some truly spectacular shooting on the green velvet.

Color of Night is a knuckleheaded thriller that means to get a rise out of audiences, but will merely make them see red. It's confounding and sad that director Richard Rush waited 14 years to make another film after his striking "The Stunt Man," only to choose a script as dismal as this.

Passably interesting psychological study of emotionally wounded characters until it commits dramatic suicide by showing its true colors as a tricked-up "Fatal Attraction" wannabe.

Far from the renegade, boundary-pushing, sexually explicit sensation that its makers have been suggesting, The Canyons is a lame, one-dimensional and ultimately dreary look at peripheral Hollywood types not worth anyone's time either onscreen or in real life.

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

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.

With its strong premise, a couple of fine performances and highly polished tooling, The Jackal scores as an involving high-tech thriller that occasionally hits peaks of pulsating excitement.

Sex Tape is sexcruciating.

What fun there is falls to Jackman, who gives the grand old man of pirate characters plenty of fresh and unusual wrinkles and emerges better than the others simply by virtue of playing a two-dimensional, rather than one-dimensional, figure.

What's actually up onscreen in this vaguely ambitious but tawdry melodrama falls into an in-between no-man's-land that endows it with no distinction whatsoever, a work lacking both style and insight into the netherworld it seeks to reveal.

Lucy in the Sky is the odd film that starts cosmically big and gradually becomes narrower and more conventional as it goes along, to diminishing returns.

There’s enough fun, writerly glee and actors enjoying their little rampages to make Velvet Buzzsaw a decent distraction for a couple of hours, but also something of a schizophrenic case all its own.

Serves up enough goofy pranks and fractured wordplay to keep the series purring along.

Overall, pic’s conception of the future isn’t terribly original or inventive, and viewers not into the head trip of bigscreen computer graphics will want to download a lot sooner than Johnny does.

Cleverly titled but noxious British comedy.

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

Venom feels like a throwback, a poor second cousin to the all-stars that have reliably dominated the box-office charts for most of this century. Partly, this is due to the fact that, as an origin story, this one seems rote and unimaginative. On top of that, the writing and filmmaking are blah in every respect; the film looks like an imitator, a wannabe, not the real deal.

There's something about novelist Stephenie Meyer that induces formerly interesting directors to suddenly make films that are slow, silly and soporific.

The sense of evil overkill is entirely representative of the picture itself, which repeatedly looks ready to blow all its fuses due to sensory overload.

With Melissa McCarthy playing a one-woman demolition team who, for 95 percent of the running time, is a genuine affront to nature, there are unavoidably some laughs here, although the gifted comic actor got more of them in less screen time in her previous films than she does in this starring role.

Dismally unfunny...It's clear from the first few minutes that the performers are fighting an uphill battle against lame material, and the situation never improves as pic labors on.

A pale reworking of its predecessor.

A Eurotrashy vidgame knockoff that misses its target by a mile. Numbingly unthrilling as it lurches from one violent encounter to another, the pic's dark roots in an electronic, non-dramatic medium are plain to see, and unsuspecting gamers lured to theaters will soon wish they were back home participating in the action themselves.

An empty shell.

As dull and arid as a hike through the desert.

In outer space, no one can hear you scream -- of boredom.

The somber tone and low-end production values may not be exactly in tune with young neo-noir enthusiasts, but more seasoned fans of the genre and the filmmaker will recognize and embrace Hill’s use of noir to play with and comment on topical issues in a deliciously subversive way, political correctness be damned.

Mostly clunky and vaguely unsavory.

A thriller more contrived than it is exciting.

It's good to see Schwarzenegger doing his thing again after what, for him, was a long sabbatical.

Once the revisionist frisson of a black Jesus, not to mention Mary, Joseph and Judas, has worn off, one is stuck with more mundane matters such as story dynamics, visual style and character verisimilitude, much to the misfortune of the audience.

Speak a great deal, but they don't have much to say. A dull ensembler.

The teasing tale is told with such dispatch it will carry willing audiences along; genre staples of action, macho attitude and corruption through the ranks are delivered intact.

Spawn is a moodily malevolent, anything-goes revenge fantasy that relies more upon special visual and digitally animated effects for its intended appeal than any comics-derived sci-fier to date.

Conventional where it should be bold and mild where it should be wild, 10,000 BC reps a missed opportunity to present an imaginative vision of a prehistoric moment.

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.

This paean to youthful irresponsibility applies the right crude and rude 'tude to its bulging sack of gags to have the desired effect on its target audience.

A lot of talent on both sides of the camera operating in low gear.

Nine very good actors are wasted, if not embarrassed, by the thoroughly unconvincing shenanigans perpetrated by first-time writer-director Michael Clancy, while a tenth -- Zooey Deschanel -- somehow manages to float ethereally above it all with her dignity intact.

More than an embarrassment, it's an insult.

Has the distinction of being a major motion picture that's far less imaginative, and quite a bit more stupid, than the interactive game it's based on.

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

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 predicable, overlong romantic farce has enough sass and sex appeal to appease fans of stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston.

Well made but unlikable and dramatically absurd picture.

The sight and sound of Lawrence in fat-lady drag remains engaging throughout; script may often let him down, forcing him to keep things afloat almost single-handedly.

Being Human never comes alive. This stillborn series of little fables is so flat and ill-conceived that it could convince the uninitiated that neither Robin Williams nor the highly idiosyncratic Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth had any talent.

This low-rent, R-rated "Rush Hour"-ish comic caper could have been several notches better with more charismatic leads and some dialogue upgrades but still would have felt like a genre hand-me-down.

Just as the basic plot points are hard to swallow, even the most rudimentary aspects of the characters' interactions feel forced, artificial and unspontaneous.

Once you realize the film is just going to be a string of encomiums against a backdrop of frantically edited archival material in which few shots are allowed to stay onscreen longer than three seconds, it's clear that no meaningful analysis of the woman's career or political agenda will be forthcoming.

The director doesn't display the spirit of a natural entertainer; while intellectual notions abound, he never grabs the audience by the hand to pull them into the tale emotionally.

A very earthbound comic fantasy, a racially flip-flopped "Heaven Can Wait" redo stuck in a purgatory with just enough meager laughs to keep it from a more fiery fate.

Evinces no interest in such niceties as credible dialogue, character motivation or forward momentum.

Racing in high gear from start to finish, Danny Boyle’s electric direction tempermentally complements Sorkin’s highly theatrical three-act study.

Star-driven, high-minded claptrap that, fatally, can't even rig a rooting interest in its central love story.

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

Mendelsohn's villain is boringly one-note, Eve Hewson's Marion uses an incongruous Yank accent and always looks as though she's just stepped out of the makeup trailer, F. Murray Abraham swans around in fancy cardinal's vestments looking sinister and Foxx seems pissed off that he's not somewhere, perhaps anywhere, else. As for Egerton, he's a boy doing a man's job.

May hold some appeal for Latino auds in the Southwest but will fold after a couple of rounds in the big arena.

A desperately slight romantic comedy marked by contrived romance and little comedy.

A romantic comedy as lamely generic as its title.

A shrill, strained and shallow riff on a tired idea.

Strictly a minor-league late fall entry.

This perfectly dreadful romantic action comedy manages to embarrass its three eminently attractive leading players in every scene, making this an automatic candidate for whatever raspberries or golden turkeys or other dubious awards may be given in future for the films of 2012.

Put together by Tucker and his co-director/editor wife Petra Epperlein without a hint of artifice, docu offers up its sounds and images bluntly, and they are very much sounds and images worth having as part of the record.

Has the distinction of being one of the most amateurish features ever released by a major studio.

An indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, biblical hash and thoroughly unpalatable spice.

Shrill, undermotivated, feature-length catfight.

Phantom is easily consumable eye candy, but it contains no nutrients for the heart or mind.

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

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.

A remarkably mirthless and inept romantic comedy.

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.

The film is essentially nothing but little and ineffectual bits of recycled shtick with no sense of freshness of invention. And the women never bond in even the most rote or superficial way that's expected in this sort of claptrap.

Reheating the ingredients can't disguise how stale they are, as setpiece after setpiece strains to whip up excitement, only to fall flat while reminding of previous sequences that did such things ever so much better.

Aspiring transcendent love stories don't come much more claptrappy and unconvincing than Winter's Tale.

Blandness and lack of daring characterize nearly every minute of the very long two hours, which are marked by a high degree of professionalism at the service of little content.

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.

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

Robinson's script is alive to the material's literary roots, although there is a sense that the brakes have been applied so as not to push into territory perceived as too esoteric for American teenagers.

Newman's charismatic, multishaded performance elevates the hodgepodge caper comedy a couple of notches above its preposterous plotting and self-consciously movieish texture.

A shamelessly manipulative commercial on behalf of national health insurance.

This overwrought and egregiously self-serious thriller about the poisonous fruit borne of child abuse grows more ridiculous by the quarter-hour and is poised for a theatrical life span scarcely longer than that of its eponymous insect.

A highly homogenized and sanitized remake that's little better than its 1981 predecessor.

Banal and trite where it could have been insightful and emotionally truthful, this Fox release is also notable for featuring the first disappointing performance by teen star Natalie Portman.

Although one would never have expected to find her in a film like this, Dawson, by dint of enthusiasm, is the only actor who rises above the material with her dignity intact.

A flighty and unnecessary send-up of reality television.

Goes down like sour eggnog on Christmas Eve.

Although decked out with a legitimate star and handsome production carpentry, pic takes no greater interest in creating three-dimensional characters or fleshing out a credible storyline than does the run-of-the-mill straight-to-video thriller.

A muted coming-of-age piece that more often reflects rusty movie conventions than it freshly observes real-life struggles.

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

As it thuds along from one wolf attack to the next, Catherine Hardwicke's first film since taking leave of Bella and her toothy friends adamantly refuses to provide any wit, humor or fun.

The gaps between the hipster comedy of the star, the incipient sentimentality of the story and the gravely depressing reality of the setting provide tonal abysses simply too vast to bridge in Rock the Kasbah, an intermittently amusing but dramatically problematic mish-mash that careens all over a rough and rocky road.

Although The Postman conveys a thoroughly imagined vision of a future society, its basic concerns are actually far from those of traditional sci-fi, as it quickly comes to feel more like a Western than anything else.

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.

A hillbilly romantic comedy in which the hillbillies show up but the romance and comedy never do.

Unfortunately, John Moore has directed these sequences in a way that makes the incidents look so far-fetched and essentially unsurvivable that you can only laugh.

While not nearly as elaborate, nor as visually sophisticated as the last Mission: Impossible outing or the most recent Bonds, London Has Fallen is actually more plausible at its core, if not in its details, which is partly why it succeeds in laying claim to an audience's attention for the entirety of its swift running time.

Director Rob Cohen has pulled together a simple yarn of an itinerant dragonslayer who decides to team with his prey to rid the land of an evil ruler who has betrayed them both. Tale’s poignancy stems from the fact that fire-breathing, armor-plated, high-flying creature is the last of its kind; when he dies, dragons will have passed entirely from Earth.

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.

The central battle between fearsomely independent corporate mavericks and hostile big government has been updated in a half-baked, unconvincing way that's exacerbated by button-pushing TV-style direction, threadbare production values and blah performances except for that of Taylor Schilling in the central role.

The Ugly Truth is an arch, contrived, entirely predictable romantic comedy assembled with sufficient audience-friendly elements to put it over as both a good girls' night attraction and a date-night lure raunchy enough to leave couples in the right mood afterward.

At isolated moments a tolerably amusing send-up of alien invasion disaster movies in which the attackers are video arcade-era renegades arrived to gobble up as many famous landmarks as possible, this one-note comedy runs out of gas within an hour (it is based on a short film) and should have been trimmed to a neat 90 minutes.

A contrived but entirely workable premise is given a well-tooled treatment in Sweet November, a femme-slanted doomed romance with a heavily calculated feel to it.

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.

Awfully lame bigscreen debut for pop diva Britney Spears.

A thick slice of bogus inspirational cheese that only makes itself look bad by recycling so many golden movie memories.

Clearly nothing but a paycheck project for all concerned, this is definitely the least and hopefully the last of a franchise that started amusingly enough a decade ago but has now officially overstayed its welcome.

A sense of heaviness, gloom and complete disappointment settles in during the second half, as the mundane set-up results in no dramatic or sensory dividends whatsoever.

This is a film that just very expensively sits there onscreen with nothing ever seeming even remotely at stake. It has no weight or substance and delivers no impact of any kind.

A compelling and disturbing drama about some elemental male issues.

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.

A white-trash black comedy, a caustic working-class whodunit in which the solution to the murder mystery takes a distant back seat to countless barbs and jibes tossed in the direction of the mostly imbecilic cast of characters.

Lusterless trifle.

This is a second-rate special effects-dominated 3D entry that will join several prominent would-be blockbusters that need not be mentioned on the summer junk heap.

An intensely whimsical shaggy-dog crime story that ricochets between goofy violence and some endearing personal moments.

Guy Ritchie shoots a blank with Revolver, which replays the low-life criminal shtick from his first two features with an ill-advised overlay of pretension. The action, attitude and wise-guy talk all feel moldy this time around.

Impossibly vulgar, tawdry and coarse, this much-touted major studio splash into NC-17 waters is akin to being keelhauled through a cesspool, with sharks swimming alongside.

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.

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.

A useless remake of Mike Hodges' 1971 British gangland cult classic.

A perfectly dreadful film.

A shrill, mechanical comedy.

Gus Van Sant’s sticky, gooey side — previously on display in the likes of Finding Forrester and especially in the 2011 Restless — oozes out once more in the woefully sentimental and maudlin The Sea of Trees.

If The Legend of Hercules were just a little more inept or over-the-top, it might have been ridiculous fun. As it is, unfortunately, Harlin embraces the mediocrity of the screenplay with a dour straight face, draining it of any enjoyably camp possibilities.

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

Conservatives score a few political points but aren't very funny in An American Carol, a cheesy spitball directed at the very large target of a Michael Moore-like filmmaker.

One of the most obnoxious and least necessary animated films of the century thus far.

Takes a prominent place along with "Tomcats," "Say It Isn't So," "Saving Silverman" and "Get Over It" on the list of reasons why raucous teen farce is headed six feet under.

Series regulars Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo and Randy Quaid (who joined for "Christmas Vacation") are all back for more, and thank God for Quaid, who injects a few bracing shots of mangy humor into what is otherwise a lukewarm brew.

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.

On a moment to moment basis, however, picture continuously skirts very close to the ludicrous in its advanced-stage grimness and outre forms of torture foreplay.

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.

Ludicrous in the extreme, the picture easily snatches from "Revolution" the prize as Al Pacino's career worst.

Feels like the most shameless effort yet in the renewed exploitation of the youth market.

So comprehensively does the film fail to represent the labyrinthian literary wonders of Amis’ book that it scarcely seems worthwhile to detail its universal shortcomings.

A boner-headed comedy whose sense of gross-out humor is calculated rather than inspired.

Supplied with uniformly vapid dialogue, the characters come off like a bunch of twits.

Has there ever been a Hollywood adaptation of a major novel as faithful and yet so misguided and downright strange as the three-part version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged that now comes to a conclusion with the third installment?

Few pretty actresses have so thoroughly discarded their vanity in an outright vanity piece as Jenny McCarthy does in Dirty Love, so it's unfortunate for her this exercise in comic self-abnegation, which she wrote for herself, falls so awfully flat.

Compensating for the technical faults is the writer-director's unmistakable and undiluted need to express the issues he feels are at the heart of his community.