Todd McCarthy

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.

Kasdan's direction here is even less energized than his writing.

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

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

Recycles familiar adventure and cartoon devices with minimal wit and flair, and the lack of imagination will seem all the more dramatic to audiences in comparison to the winningly sophisticated "Shrek."

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 thriller more contrived than it is exciting.

Pic fails to provide any hard facts or make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about, so intellectually Moore is largely preaching to the converted in this blatant cinematic 2004 campaign pamphlet.

This wan, mundane coming-of-ager focuses on kids enacting a pale imitation of '50s car-centered, "American Graffiti"-style time-killing, with the impediment of exceptionally dull dialogue.

A miscast James Franco and a lack of charm and humor doom Sam Raimi's prequel to the 1939 Hollywood classic. Oz the Wimpy and Weak would be more like it.

Unfortunately, Barthes brings nothing new to the familiar story.

A bit more discipline would have helped this one, which struggles to hold viewer interest across two full hours but would likely register more strongly with 15-20 minutes removed.

This material cant help but be interesting, even compelling up to a point, but its prosaic presentation suggests that the story's full potential, encompassing deep, disturbing and enduring pain on all sides of the issue, has only begun to be touched.

Spielberg is such a talented director it’s a shame to see him lose all sense of subtlety and nuance.

As usual, there are only fragments of thoughts, nothing is developed, and it will be left only to the tiny band of die-hard Godardians to try to make any meaningful sense of the disparate fragments stitched together here.

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.

Could use a little extra comic poundage. The Farrelly brothers' latest sees the team tapping a sweeter, milder vein of humor than their outrageous norm.

If you're going to ask an audience to sit through a three-hour, nine-minute rendition of an oft-told story, it would help to have a strong point of view on your material and an urgent reason to relate it. Such is not the case with Wyatt Earp, a handsome, grandiose gentleman's Western that tries to tell evenhandedly more about the famous Tombstone lawman than has ever before been put onscreen.

Unfortunately, the film never begins to reveal what's really going on inside Joe Albany.

By-the-numbers plotting, seen-it-all-before action moves, banal locations and a largely anonymous cast alongside the star give this a low-rent feel.

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.

The ever-righteous profile maintained by Boseman’s detective gets to be a bit limiting after a while; if anything was going to have multiple dimensions in this film, it should have been him, but the script is instead built around the goal of providing maximum movement and hoped-for tension. It’s got the former but only sporadically achieves the latter.

The constant repetition of these shock tactics, in lieu of genuine suspense, makes The Wolfman feel cheap, despite the vast amounts obviously spent on Rick Heinrichs' opulent production design, the extensive visual effects, the more-than-effective special makeup effects, Milena Canonero's luxurious costumes, Danny Elfman's insistent score and the tony cast.

Without the pleasure of watching Cate Blanchett continue the role that launched her to stardom, there would be little to recommend this latest of many cinematic and television accounts of the celebrated monarch's life.

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.

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.

Daylight is a lower-echelon disaster thriller, in which the best character is knocked off early on and the leading man runs out of ideas with a third of the picture still to go. Noisy, technically proficient actioner about a group of people trapped in the Holland Tunnel after an explosion gets off a few decent blasts, but is just too limited in scope, imagination and excitement to burst out as a major B.O. winner domestically.

More numbing than exciting.

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

None of the characters is given much depth or meaningful backgrounding, leaving the capable thesps with plenty of anguish and emotion to play but not much else.

A dramatic situation that should be wrenching is mostly tedious in Reservation Road.

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.

Dennis the Menace isn't really appropriate for anyone over the age of 12. Very young children may find the numskull, by-the-numbers gags here amusing, but teens will consider this kids' stuff and adults will be pained.

A very vulgar pro-faith comedy rather than a sacrilegious goof, Dogma is an extraordinarily uneven film.

Achieves some glancing poetic effects during its first hour, but becomes gross and exploitative during the shooting rampage of the final act.

Harmless tale of the giant pooch helping out some itinerant performing animals while longing for home will go down smoothly with the preschool faithful, but anyone over 5 will feel antsy even given the brief running time.

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

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

A well-upholstered but hopelessly contrived romantic comedy, Picture Perfect is too ineffectual to tickle either the funnybone or the heartstrings.

After a strong run of films during the past decade, David Cronenberg blows a tire with Cosmopolis.

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.

A self-indulgent drama about a Harlem drug kingpin trying to go straight, Sugar Hill plays like a dreary variation on New Jack City.

Rather like a cross between "Up in Smoke" and an episode of "The Jeffersons, Friday is a crudely made, sometimes funny bit of porchfront humor from the 'hood.

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.

Paul Schrader hits a low water mark with Forever Mine, a strenuously straight-faced film noir wanna-be that edges perilously close to self-parody.

Antic and frantic, Spies is very much a one-joke affair, which is fine for a short but woefully insufficient for a 101-minute feature.

The Intervention feels bland and without consequence, as it’s not possible to invest in characters about whom we’re offered so little.

Without Watts, Scott Coffey's feature-length expansion of his identically titled short wouldn't amount to much.

It's a very academic movie about academics that belongs in academia, not movie theaters.

At nearly three hours, however, it rather overstays its welcome, trying the patience even as it sustains intrigue regarding its final revelations.

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.

As in their previous films (I Love You Phillip Morris; Crazy, Stupid, Love; Focus), directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa enjoy just scattershot success in hitting their seriocomic targets, scoring from time to time with their more coarse and outlandish gambits but rarely inducing one to take what they're watching very seriously.

A generally old-fashioned costumer that runs out of gas even faster than does the tempestuous love affair between writer George Sand and poet Alfred de Musset that it so devotedly recounts.

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.

Short on real drama and incident and long on tedium.

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.

Funny as much of the action is, however, the approach feels rather less fresh, and the gross-outs seem more gratuitous.

Not the worst but is very far from the best film the star has made in his career.

Half formulaic and half simply unimaginative.

Clever enough to provoke a few abrupt laughs along the way, this big screen debut for two television stalwarts, director Matt Shakman (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and writer Robert Patino (Sons of Anarchy, Prime Suspect), is sabotaged by some frightfully on-the-nose expository dialogue and an adamantly prosaic visual style.

Could scarcely be more dazzling on a purely visual level, but it's mortally anemic in the story, character and thematic departments.

A strained and pallid concoction that won't fire the collective imaginations of modern children.

Result is still innocuously mild and inconsequential.

Will serve as an excellent gauge of any viewer's tolerance level for schmaltzy contrivance and manipulation.

Nocturnal setting, uneven tone, abrasive score and only fitfully successful attempts at humor create a generally grim atmosphere, occasionally leavened by goofy ideas and flashes of explosive action.

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.

Essentially approaches its subject seriously, but does take stabs both at horror and grotesque comedy, neither with much success.

The intended metaphors and commentary about the interchangeability and disposability of bodies are entirely clear, although from the evidence it would appear that Refn is perhaps even more entranced by the surface glamour of the world he so voluptuously depicts than he is repelled by it.

Goes down like sour eggnog on Christmas Eve.

Every conceivable button is pushed to achieve rote satisfaction in young viewers, while any notion of creating tension and suspense is dutifully ignored. Not for a moment is actual peril considered as something worthy of a dramatic climax.

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.

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.

Rarely has a picture been so self-consciously designed to be a culturally meaningful touchstone, and fallen so woefully short, as Southland Tales.

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 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.

There’s no denying that The Tomorrow Man has a knockout ending. But is it worth sitting through the mundane, relatively uneventful film that precedes it? Few will think so.

Defiantly uncommunicative picture.

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.

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.

Despite its scaldingly hot cast and formidable writer/director combination, The Counselor is simply not a very likable or gratifying film. In fact, it's a bummer.

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

Arid, self-consciously arty and emotionally uninvolving.

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.

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.

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.

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?

This mangy, dimwitted gender switch on "The Last Detail" won't even have the benefit of trial before being sentenced to the video brig, since it's virtually there already.

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.

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

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

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.

A dreadfully dull, completely conventional story of a young wife's recuperation from being unceremoniously dumped, this is a by-the-numbers bit of emotional calculation without a single fresh, original or offbeat move in its system, apart from a nifty opening sequence.

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

An admirable idea in theory proves to be a real slog to sit through in Everyday.

The dramatic trajectory is frightfully obvious, the characters tediously one-dimensional, the dialogue banal.

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.

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.

The ‘70s recreation is reasonable -- there are plenty of vintage cars and pop tunes of the moment -- but the characters never register beyond the surfaces of the scenes despite being equipped with long-festering resentments and grudges.

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

A stillborn would-be comedy.

Sure to turn off general viewers due to its emotional inaccessibility, multitude of narrative problems and preoccupation with a torture Web site.

It's something you'd think only the crassest of Hollywood producers would come up with - injecting sex appeal into an event as ghastly at the Nanjing massacre - but it's an element central to The Flowers of War, a contrived and unpersuasive look at an oft-dramatized historical moment.

The effects are snazzy, even if they pass by quite quickly, and there's enough going on to keep audiences watching, if not entirely happy. Smith, Theron and Bateman capably handle the main roles, but such is the skimpiness of the scenario that no further characters make any impact.

A creaky haunted house that, once the big twist is revealed, makes very little sense at all.

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.

It’s a film that wants to be visionary but isn’t.

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 shrill, mechanical comedy.

The submarine goes deep but the story never does in U-571, a good old-fashioned WWII picture that is exciting in only the most superficial way.

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

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.

Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist. As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images.

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

Feels like a film from several years ago, one of the many made in the wake of "Pulp Fiction" that tried and failed to be as clever as its progenitor.

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.

Cleverly titled but noxious British comedy.

Blandly internationalized, generically derivative, drained of any personality, edited as if by computer and bleached of the slightest hint of emotion other than a holiday card-like sympathy for children and allegedly cute animals, The Meg is a one hundred percent inorganic meal, something made from pre-tasted and then regurgitated ingredients.

A film that seems drained of life and ideas rather than sustained by them.

Despite a couple of unconvincingly upbeat tacked-on moments at the end, Project X basically reads as nihilistic, as not believing in or standing for anything. Not even fun.

Just compare their superficiality to the complex characters in "From Here to Eternity" and what's missing here becomes terribly clear.

Sex Tape is sexcruciating.

Basically the film consists of a bunch of techies in white shirts and glasses laboriously discussing their views, exchanges you get the feeling the filmmaker thought would come off as humorous.

Begins as though the filmmakers imagine that they're making a daringly anti-p.c. serio-comedy, but long before it's over, the picture is wearing its bleeding liberal heart all over its sleeve.

They just don't make 'em like this anymore, and it's a good thing, too.

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.

A flighty and unnecessary send-up of reality television.

The story of a veritable devil who comes to test and destroy a family of faith, The King is a noxious film morally and an aggravating one dramatically.

Well made but unlikable and dramatically absurd picture.

The most banal and indulgent of Gus Van Sant's periodic studies of troubled kids, this agonizingly treacly tale comes off like an indie version of "Love Story" except with worse music.

This hokey thriller reps what one can only hope will be a one-of-a-kind hybrid between a World War II actioner and a ghost story outfitted with innumerable false-alarm shock cuts and shot with enough colored lights and filters to delight Baz Luhrmann.

There is no one to become attached to in The Four Feathers, no interest or sympathies appealed to or engaged.

Another tale of out-of-it working-class men cooking up a harebrained scheme to improve their lot in life.

It’s impossible to buy into the film’s plea to be taken seriously at the end, just as the upbeat finale feels false.

A noxious little tale of Wall Street types whose amorality knows no limit, Rick takes smarmy knowingness to ludicrous extremes.

Garishly unattractive to look at and lacking the spirit that made Wonder Woman, which came out five months ago, the most engaging of Warner Bros.' DC Comics-derived extravaganzas to date, this hodgepodge throws a bunch of superheroes into a mix that neither congeals nor particularly makes you want to see more of them in future. Plainly put, it's simply not fun.

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

Dramatically and philosophically void and unprovocative on the grand scale of apocalyptic speculative fiction, this low-budget indie is somber and dreary on a moment-to-moment basis and leaves its talented cast stranded with few opportunities to alleviate the sense of stasis.

Lusterless trifle.

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.

Universal’s attempt to find gold by bringing to new life one of the mustier items in its vaults is pure hokum and scarcely of the first order.

Robin Williams and Billy Crystal can each provoke a lot more laughs in a minute of standup than they jointly manage during the entire running time of Fathers' Day.

The novelty value is completely gone the second time around.

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.

A remarkably mirthless and inept romantic comedy.

This is one of those high-concept pictures with a big windup and weak delivery.

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.

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.

Never comes close to making the case that its subject is worthy of the viewer's interest.

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

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

Its politics and dramatic line are familiar and far from convincing.

Delivers only annoyance and impatience.

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

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.

Traditionalists and older viewers in general will scoff, while pop culture addicts will no doubt go with the flow.

Cronenberg is a master of creating and sustaining a mood of insinuating cool and dark allure, but while the director remains firmly behind the wheel for the first hour or so, he cracks up toward the end with sequences that send the film and the audience into a ditch.

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.

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

Crude, repetitive and rigorously single-minded, the popular actor’s writing and directing debut lays it all on a bit thick, as the few points the film has to make are underscored time and time again.

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.

Shrill, undermotivated, feature-length catfight.

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.

Wallow in Hollywood hipster self-absorption.

An aggravating romance that runs only 78 minutes but ends not a moment too soon.

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

Director Jon Turteltaub's insistence upon hammering every point home with giant closeups and relentless musical underlining makes this insufferably cloying and sickly sweet.

Roman Coppola's first film has sympathetic aims but is distressingly lacking in flair, style, wit or fun.

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.

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.

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.

Some of the filmmaker's keen intelligence remains on display, but only in fractured and often obscure form, and pic overall gives the impression of a giant expurgation of negative feelings about things in general rather than a carefully articulated brief on recognizable subjects.

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

Strictly a minor-league late fall entry.

A series that's provided a successful, moderately enjoyable ride up to now blows its tires, gasket and transmission on its way to flaming out in Fast & Furious.

A shamelessly manipulative commercial on behalf of national health insurance.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 lifeless, tone-deaf variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. ... There’s just nothing going on here with which to engage your interest, nor is there a single moment to even slightly increase the viewer’s pulse rate.

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

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.

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.

A romantic comedy as lamely generic as its title.

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

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.

Senselessly long at two-and-three-quarters hours and with a protracted climax that eradicates any goodwill established in the fastidious first couple of reels.

Shallow is a mild word for it. Others would be silly, miscalculated, unconvincing, artless, pandering, hokey, ridiculous. Or just plain awful.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The story is told in a hammer-on-anvil manner that evinces no gift for social satire or sharp cultural insight.

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.

Awfully lame bigscreen debut for pop diva Britney Spears.

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.

Shrill, strenuous and entirely without charm, Ron Howard's attempt at a Christmas classic is an elaborately wrapped empty box that will fool many people into buying it but will not greatly please its recipients.

As dull and arid as a hike through the desert.

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

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

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.

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.

At no point along the way does the film provide a reason to invest your interest in any of this.

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

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

A perfectly dreadful film.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Debuting writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski come off like Coen brothers wannabes with no sense of humor.

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.

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

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.

More than an embarrassment, it's an insult.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

This lushly and pretentiously made drama about a young American whose worst instincts are unleashed during a stay in Paris endeavors to entice with details of the seedy underworld of La Pigalle but is a turn-off in almost every respect.

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.

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.

A minnow of a movie. A drear moment in the careers of all concerned.

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.