Ty Burr

Among the most insane mainstream movies ever released.

Bra Boys uses reenactments to make the case that Jai acted in self-defense, but the tactic comes off cheap and unconvincing. Worse, the director never bothers to talk to anyone outside the tight coterie of insiders. Why should he when his brothers' freedom is at stake?

Hopefully the last, of the fake trailer spinoffs of 2007's "Grindhouse." It makes last year's "Machete" look like "The King's Speech."

If product proves especially difficult to swallow, take with a grain of salt and three or more alcoholic drinks, or wait until such time as active ingredients Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have been more effectively utilized elsewhere.

What it is is watchable, a thoroughly professional piece of Great Man hackwork that lacks the invention and spirit of its obvious model, "Shakespeare in Love.''

The man inside that legend has yet to come into focus 40 years on. Morrison wanted the world and he wanted it now, and he got it. What When You’re Strange can’t admit is that he had no idea what to do next.

An important film, on an important subject, that has had the life beaten out of it by Robert Redford, a man who should know better.

One hundred and thirty-two minutes of shrill, self-satisfied jazz hands, The Prom may be the biggest disappointment of the season.

Aggressive visual invention is rarely its own reward, and this movie does nothing to better the odds.

Ira Sachs’s muted family drama has locations to make a moviegoer swoon, rich music and cinematography, acting that’s attentive and wise. All that’s missing is a story.

It’s been a while since there’s been this much dead air onscreen; over and over, Smith sets up a sequence, lets his actors shpritz, and stands by as the energy fades into giggly catatonia.

After a long run of baroquely plotted crime dramas like "Layer Cake'' and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,'' it's a little depressing to come across a vigilante drama whose sole twist is its protagonist's advanced age.

Beautiful to look at and acted with full and tempestuous conviction, it still seems to be taking place in an apartment far across the way.

Hints at a place where desire, fear, pleasure, and power all intersect, but it never actually goes there.

The movie runs into its deepest trouble with its depiction of Lilly's captors. After years of Hollywood wooden Indians and a more recent run of tribal angels (as in "Dances With Wolves"), movies like "The Last of the Mohicans" have acknowledged the historical truth that Native Americans could be as bloody-minded as their white conquerors.

Even if you think Cruise has never had a moment of doubt in his life, he makes Nathan's self-loathing palpable, and the character's regeneration has a hoarse, cautious purposefulness that's striking.

At times in Song to Song, the effect is mesmerizing, mostly when Mara is onscreen in all her tremulous bioluminescence.

The dread in Mitchell’s film never cuts to the bone, because we never really care about his characters.

It has in Leonardo DiCaprio — magnificent is the only word to describe this performance — the best movie Gatsby by far, superhuman in his charm and connections, the host of revels beyond imagining, and at his heart an insecure fraud whose hopes are pinned to a woman.

Handsomely shot and edited, The Bank benefits greatly from the brutal ministrations of LaPaglia,

You can’t make this stuff up, but you can botch the telling of it, and that’s what sinks this satiric drama.

Above all, it is predictable.

To answer your first question: like a cross between Shrek, the Frankenstein monster, and a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot.

It’s a simple story, really, but Nair mucks it up with the hot-button suspense of the framing scenes: surging crowds and rooftop standoffs, panicky cellphone calls and crackling walkie-talkies.

It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there.

A charming but terribly self-indulgent trifle that's less than the sum of its many parts.

Writer Peter Harness has based his screenplay on his own childhood experiences, but personal doesn't necessarily translate to fresh.

Snow Cake is dazlious, too: overly forced, a shade too whimsical, but filling a void other words and other movies haven't the nerve or errant taste to confront.

Neither rare nor particularly well done. If you're looking for Danish meatballs served on dark wry, though, you could do worse.

Genocide is hard to decorate with the trimmings of dark farce. The Hunting Party wants to get at political truths through audaciousness, but it keeps bumping into that problem of taste, only to back down.

Here the foundation has been miscast. That's M-I-S-C-A-S-T.

If ever a movie were lost in translation, it’s Mood Indigo, the latest from the scattershot genius Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Science of Sleep”). With his penchant for sad-sack dreamers and gonzo visual gags, Gondry can make a director like Wes Anderson look like a prig, and “Mood” allows him freer access to his fancy than usual.

Like Life itself, this alien is nasty, brutish, and short.

To paraphrase the T-shirt, everyone here went to the Isle of Capri, and all we got was this lousy movie.

Has its moments of visual invention and self-aware humor — mostly when the hero’s trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is around — but otherwise it’s an awkwardly plotted extravaganza.

Humor in 'Jim' is a little too dry.

See Steve McQueen’s “Shame” (2011) if you want a sense of how destructive this sickness can be to the soul. See Thanks for Sharing if you want to know what people can do about it.

Is all the sound and fury worthwhile, the four years of championing, the four hours up on the screen? To the fans who’ve been in it for the long haul, of course. To HBO Max executives, you bet. To casual moviegoers, probably not.

The chief culprits are Townsend's TV-movie characterizations and a very muddled message.

Behind the familiar hits, Jersey Boys is a story about the pressures and rewards of professionalism. Far too little of that has made it into this biopic. It’s just too mediocre to be true.

The film version of Memoirs of a Geisha is very like a geisha itself: a thing of exquisitely refined surfaces beneath which beats an ordinary heart.

Zwigoff's overdue for a turkey, in other words. Art School Confidential is it.

Because Demme genuinely likes people and is interested in them, Ricki and the Flash feels like “Stella Dallas” as remade by Jean Renoir — it’s a humanist suburban fable.

A blood-smeared and almost completely scurrilous love letter to anyone who ever appeared in the junk movies of the '60s through '80s.

10 Items or Less is nearly an acting class exercise, except for the fact that these two have long since graduated.

Short, cheap, weird, and passably diverting.

A stuffy, treacly, overproduced slab of High British twaddle, it nevertheless reduced most of a recent preview audience to what the film itself calls “blubbing.” Even a flinthearted movie critic could be seen to dab his eyes from time to time.

In the new comedy Hamlet 2, Coogan comes perilously close to wearing out his welcome. It's actually a pretty fascinating sight.

If Woody Allen were a young, attractive gay woman, he might make something like this, or so Maggenti hopes. But it would probably be funnier, and it would definitely cut deeper.

The movie errs by turning Max into a figure of hangdog sympathy: "The 40 Year Old Virgin" with a shoe phone.

The film, like the tour it documents, wallops you in the face with politics.

Filmed with panache, wit, chic amorality, and an inexhaustible supply of Micro Uzi ammunition, ''Killer'' nevertheless represents a baroque dead end for the Hong Kong action genre.

Think low-budget ''Moonstruck'' but think again: A regional dish in the most heartwarming sense.

It’s an entertaining piece of Hollywood waxworks if you don’t set your expectations very high and it’s probably the best movie Rob Reiner has directed in more than a decade. (This only sounds like a compliment.)

In Made of Honor, the leads are beautiful and everyone else is a freak. So where does that leave us?

The thrill of watching an Olivier Assayas movie is that you often have no idea where it’s going next. This time out, it seems, neither does he.

The original Re-Animator was made by an artist working on a wicked, energetic high. Bride of Re-Animator is a smart piece of hack work. In the end, it’s best left standing at the altar.

At 85, Ian McKellen doesn’t have many performances left in him, so any movie that lets the actor carve ham with such exuberant relish as “The Critic” is worth his time and ours.

Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie’s self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now.

True to its title, Moxie has a lot of moxie, and it’s an easy watch, smartly acted by a crew of young talents.

Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.

Here, [Park] takes a 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel, “The Ax,” and applies it to his home country with malice aforethought. The result is an entertainment that draws blood.

The movie’s a platypus: cute as the dickens but what the heck is it?

Isn’t it a bit early for Isabelle Huppert to be entering the late Bette Davis era of her career? Why else on God’s green earth would she be appearing in Greta, a botched attempt to build a camp horror movie around a grand diva of the screen?

Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.

Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.

It ain’t Shakespeare, or even Kurosawa. But it’s an acceptable remake of a western that itself was an acceptable remake of one of the greatest movies ever made. Enjoyable, even, until the last act proves how dull an overextended gun battle can get.

The movie’s a watchable affair for most of the running time, not so much subverting cliches of the serial-killer genre as keeping the audience in suspense as to how, if, and when those cliches will be observed.

The movie's not even close to Pixar standards - the animation is slapdash and the story construction's a mess - but the vibe is loose-limbed and fluky, and the gags have an extra snap that's recognizably Seinfeldian.

One for the fans, even though writer-director Rodger Grossman and co-writer Michelle Baer Ghaffari labor mightily to spin it into something larger.

In pace, sensibility, and big, beating heart, this is a child's first indie film, and it's the better for it.

At its worst, Vacancy is merely the kind of taut B-chiller they don't make any more, other than to riff on them in "Grindhouse."

As a credible love story, though, the film never leaves the runway. If you're a fan of these actors, you may want to look up Jet Lag when it comes out on video, or catch it on an Air France flight while flirting with the passenger in the next seat.

It's the old-fashioned verities of documentary filmmaking that serve Thomason and Perry best.

You have an overstuffed story line, sloppy filmmaking, a general thinness of conception (if you've seen "Sister Act," you've pretty much seen The Fighting Temptations), and a lead performance that starts out obnoxious and becomes actively grating.

And again things go bump and eventually yarrrragghhh in the night.

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die may not be a gifted filmmaker’s worst movie, but it’s certainly his most cynical — a unique cinematic worldview reduced to schtick.

Be warned, though: This is the multiplex equivalent of ADD.

Where Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, go astray is turning this new 3-D version - a sequel, really, about a grown Alice returning to the psychic dreamworld of her childhood - into a fantasy adventure that looks like every other CGI epic out there.

So how’s the movie already? Not terrible, not great, something of a disappointment after what feels like a geological epoch of hype.

If anything, The Big Year plays like Ron Howard's "Parenthood'' with birds instead of children.

This feeble excuse for a comedy made me angry, and if you have any cherished cinematic feelings for the quartet of actresses at its center, you may feel angry, too.

The film is very near a comedy, and I'm not sure that's on purpose.

A good-natured but terminally mild British mockumentary.

This is a young filmmaker who so wants to make every shot freighted with import that he ends up robbing his film of importance.

The producers of Ella Enchanted probably assume, correctly, that many more kids haven't read the book than have, and they're out to give that audience a slick, shallow good time.

In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The film is unobjectionable, sentimental, and not a little dull.

"Unpredictable'' is one adjective you could use to describe the new Audrey Tautou movie, Delicacy. Others might be "charming,'' "offbeat,'' "droll.'' "Unfocused'' and "underwhelming'' also apply.

The movie's fodder for tweener girls with indiscriminate Nick TV addictions, but there's just enough wit on display to make you realize it could have been worse.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the cinematic equivalent of trying on your prom suit from 1984. Maybe it still fits, but not in the places it used to, and if you try to moonwalk, you’ll probably get a hernia.

Lubezki is arguably this movie’s secret star, and he invests the movie’s Los Angeles settings with the strangeness and newness of a NASA rover traveling across Mars.

A proficient, atmospheric fangfest that does nothing you haven't seen before but still does it passably well.

Handsomely shot and with a likable lead in Kuno Becker, it also suffers from a script so outrageously generic you could buy it at Costco.

Has a daft sweep, and if you're in the mood for empty swordplay in baroque settings, purple dialogue delivered with straight faces, and romantic yearnings that never, ever resolve, The Promise may be your cup of oolong.

Arriving with a blockbuster sound and fury that has been dialed up to 11, the movie is a dismayingly safe act of franchise closure. In terms of pure narrative, it’s satisfying. What it very rarely is is inspired.

Mostly, though, Being Flynn is memorable for the sight of a once-great actor rousing himself to a performance the movie itself isn't prepared to handle.

The most original thing about Lucky Number Slevin is that it lets Lucy Liu play a screwball heroine.

A stylish but essentially businesslike smash-and-crasher.

This Robin Hood is mostly a smart, muscular entertainment; it doesn’t breathe new life into a genre as did “Gladiator,’’ Scott’s first pairing with Russell Crowe, but it’s a brawny reimagining of a beloved old myth, a period popcorn movie turned out with professionalism and gusto.

The only entertainment value is in imagining Turner's apoplexy when he watched Spader having sex with Rosanna Arquette's leg wound.

Relaxed, valedictory, exquisitely titled, Grumpy Old Men feels like an odd couple's last hurrah.

As directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), it’s a steady, compelling accounting of events that intends to leave you infuriated and succeeds.

Weaver's randy, impatient, very funny performance is the main reason to see Imaginary Heroes.

Here’s the thing about Disney’s “live-action” remakes of its animated classics: The new versions may be bigger, louder, and more lavish, but they’ll never be original. The thrill of first impact is gone.

This loopy slacker horror farce is so intent on playing with your head — and time, and space, and paranoid conspiracy theories — that it doesn’t care about making sense. Which doesn’t stop the film from being a pretty good bad time.

The point of "the official Muslim comedy tour" is that these guys are ordinary Americans just like you and me. Unfortunately, that extends to a lot of the jokes.

She has been made lovable -- and a Vanity Fair with a lovable Becky Sharp has no reason to exist. It's as if Shakespeare had put Hamlet on Prozac: What's the point?

Turns out to be thoughtful, creative, and generally worthy of its subject, with sins that are more of ambition and miscalculation than of execution.

What makes Palindromes bearable is that Solondz has yet to come up with an answer.

The movie is largely set in a busy Paris restaurant, and, not surprisingly, the food looks terrific. You may come out hungry for poached sea bass and a little starved for drama.

The problem with Hysteria is that it keeps patting itself and us on the back for knowing better.

By the Grace of God shows how one man’s evil acts spread into the cracks of not just his victims’ lives but the lives of their loved ones as well. But the film’s gathering crowd also testifies to the sustenance people take when their pain is shared and they pool approaches and resources.

Almost as generic as its title, Fatherhood is made real enough to matter by the strength of its performances and the sincerity of its makers.

I'm still not convinced we needed a new Spider-Man series, but at least this installment is interestingly mediocre instead of actively bad.

The result is rather a mess, but it’s an honorable one, and very much worth wrestling with.

A Good Woman is pretty to look at and fakes witty elegance passably, so consider it a diversion -- a movie that might have been in the Oscar race if the elements had jelled but has instead been properly hung out to dry in February.

The film is crisply shot, expertly paced, solidly acted, and it gets a goose when Bill Pullman shows up in the late innings as a good-old-boy lawyer. (By contrast, it’s never convincingly explained what stake the union official played by Elias Koteas has in the drama.) All that’s missing is a reason.

It has its own bizarre charms and a breezy confidence that renders it the very definition of a simple pleasure.

It takes its sweet and sour time getting there, but eventually “Sacramento” finds a satisfying seriocomic groove in the plight of men facing the prospect of fatherhood and realizing adulthood has to come along for the ride.

The Book of Eli is “The Road’’ with twice the plot, four times the ammunition, and half the brains; it’ll probably make 10 times the money.

Watching Shea Whigham and Michael Shannon in The Quarry is like watching two highly qualified surgeons try to jolt a comatose patient back to life. They get the limbs twitching nicely, but the heart never turns over and starts running.

Luhrmann is working a tricky game: He's trying to come to terms with modern Australia's racist legacy while telling a ripping yarn while also making fun of ripping yarns - but not too much.

Too many cliches and not enough energy have come along for the ride.

Formulaic but extremely good-natured comedy.

Astro Boy alternately soars and sputters through a story line that’s not quite sure who it’s aimed at.

At its best, Year of the Fish makes a virtue of naivete - its heroine's, its director's, and the fragile fairy-tale belief that everyone deserves a happy ending.

A noisy and lazy stopgap movie that goes absolutely nowhere and takes 2 1/2 hours to get there.

Directing the film version, Lee gets lost in the grotesque pomp of the halftime spectacle and its lead-up. He gets fine performances from the actors playing the soldiers and a terrible one from Stewart, who flails her arms like an amateur. Martin’s role is beneath his talents, while Vin Diesel’s, as a Zen warrior of a sergeant, is almost beyond belief.

The new Carrie is a thoroughly dispiriting remake — “retread” is the appropriate word — that could have been directed by any proficient Hollywood hack.

Fly Me to the Moon strains to achieve liftoff, sometimes quite amusingly. But in the end, it’s just too heavy to get off the ground.

A gruesome, helpless spiral barely saved by an actress locating humanity where few would have cared to bother.

In a real sense, Nativity Story is the female other to Gibson's "Passion": Dedicated to life rather than death, it's suffused with a sense of the womanly divine.

The Penguin Lessons will please the kind of audiences who like to travel the world in comfort, as those PBS ads for Viking River Cruises say, but it accidentally offers those audiences uncomfortable food for thought.

A blandly filmed and subtext-heavy talkathon that wastes a game cast on a group of characters about whom it's almost impossible to care. If this were a cocktail party, you'd be back home with a good book already.

This is all far beyond silly, of course - the most inconsequential sort of winking, meta-movie in-joke.

Meant to be an insider's tale, but it feels like it comes from the cinema of hangers-on.

One nice thing about Mila Kunis’s portrayal of a heroin addict in Rodrigo García’s Four Good Days is that the vanity’s up front, in the character and in the star’s nervy embrace of a woman who has become human wreckage.

Elsa & Fred does graze against an interesting idea: that the vitality of our youths lives on in the prison of aging bodies.

One of those lovely little movies that starts out being about a handful of people and ends up being about all of us. That’s a tricky act to pull off and the talented writer-director Ira Sachs stumbles occasionally over moments of self-conscious lyricism. But then the film recovers its balance, looks at its characters with fondness and with faith, and quietly soars.

A movie about ordinary American heroes that stars ordinary American heroes. About 15 minutes of the film concerns the actual heroics. The rest is . . . ordinary.

What was intended as a tart elegy for a vanished way of life becomes a valedictory to a certain kind of filmmaking: beautifully appointed, intelligently played, and civilized into inertia.

Fay Grim falls victim to its own worried hyperactivity; it shuts you out with chattery paranoia. Hartley wants us to see the big picture, but he forgets we need artists like him to bring it into focus.

The Gospel of John is to "The Passion of the Christ" as tap water is to parboiled sacramental wine.

Beware of stoner rock stars talking politics. No matter where you stand on the spectrum, the ecological/anticorporate idealism of Greendale is so vague as to be insulting to anyone past the backpack-and-Birkenstocks stage of life.

It’s silly of mind and open of heart, full of visual and sonic eye candy while telling a predictable story with pleasurable generosity. The laughs are pitched right over the plate with the skill and enjoyment of a team of vaudeville pros. As reunions go, it’s a success.

How deeply silly is The Lake House? As silly as a movie about two letter-writing lovers separated by a wrinkle in time can be. How much sweet, dumb fun is it? More than you might want to admit.

Wilde is stuck with the harder job of simultaneously playing sexy, innocent, conniving, and heartsore, and the effort appears to give her a headache. "This is kind of like an old movie," Liza says to Jay in one scene. Lady, don't you wish.

The director is Lee Daniels, of Precious (2009) and The Butler (2013), here evoking the historical era and its figures with verve and intelligence but unable to find a dramatic center other than his electrifying star.

Haggis finally finds the movie's groove late in the game, and the escape sequence itself is hectic, suspenseful, and enjoyably ridiculous.

The Women on the 6th Floor is delicate and sensitive and utter bollocks - a bourgeois wet dream made to soothe the souls and stir the loins of powerful men in midlife crisis. But some of us wish we could see this movie told from the maids' point of view.

Visually dazzling and dramatically trite -- it's virtuoso piffle.

Well, there are worse ideas for movies and certainly worse casts, and Michael Lembeck’s genial, predictable comedy rolls along on well-worn tracks elevated by the class and commitment of actors who’ve earned our affection over decades of work.

Truly, there is nothing the woman (Isabelle Huppert) can't do - except save "Promise'' from the valley of the shadow of bad French movie pretensions.

A scattershot satire about the vulgar, privileged one percent, British division, that’s almost as funny as it is furious.

An inspirational sports movie, soccer subdivision, and it stops at every expected station of the cross on its road to the triumphant against-all-odds finale (in sudden-death overtime, yet). Yet it also feels appealingly handmade in a way most jock dramas don't.

The movie takes a decent “Twilight Zone” idea -- what if you had a second chance at youth? -- and runs it into the ground with watchable but diminishing returns.

There's grace here if the movie were willing to dig for it. Occasionally it does.

The film itself is painless, strained, occasionally amusing, and utterly disposable — just another studio buddy comedy/action movie that forgot where it put the script.

Scott’s “Exodus” is dutiful, deeply earnest, and more than a little dull.

It’s essentially “Romy and Michelle’s Mission Impossible” or “Lucy and Ethel Live and Let Die,” and it’s an easy, awfully disposable two hours that scatters some off-kilter belly laughs among a lot of labored gags and efficiently-shot action movie setpieces.

You may have to be from Iceland to take dialogue like ''You can't freeze love like a gutted fish'' with a straight face.

There are rich issues at play here, about the nature of attraction and whether individual will is or isn't pinned to the wheel of physiology. But Decena hasn't dramatized them; he's used them as talking points set to an indie-film guitar strum, and the result is both earnest and passionless.

All this manic invention is great fun for a while, until Tai Chi Zero falls apart on the rocks of the eternal verities: story, acting, direction.

What separates the good teen romances based on young adult novels from the soppy, ridiculous ones? Emotional conviction, mostly, and committed performances. Everything, Everything is mostly one of the good ones, even if it has everything (everything) that makes these movies head south for everyone (everyone) but the target audience of teenage girls.

It's a solid short film stretched to Silly Putty thinness.

An overstuffed turkey that's entertaining for all the wrong reasons.

Point is, the property is running on bald tires, and, for all its ear-splitting racket and lavish effects, “Apocalypse” is the barest of retreads.

It’s a great story, and much of it’s true. This should work like a pip. Instead, The Monuments Men is a tonal mishmash: Half “Hogan’s Post-Doctoral Heroes,” half “Saving Private Rembrandt,” and half “Ingres’s 11.” That’s three halves, so you can see the problem.

I can promise you a fairly good thriller with mixed-bag elements: preposterous plot, smartly elegant direction, one of the worst recent performances by a major actress, and a dynamite stick of an action scene that can stand close to the greats (the car chase in "The French Connection," the single-take battle sequence in "Children of Men") and from which the movie never really recovers.

Susan Stroman directed the show on Broadway and what she has done here is photograph that show -- no more, no less. This is good news for anyone who couldn't afford a trip to New York and $100 tickets, but it's a fairly odd approach to cinema.

Very broad and very silly, it's a doodle of a comedy -- a one-joke idea (fat guy goes luchador) padded out to feature length by Black's willingness to do anything for a laugh.

There’s a reason the movie has been pushed off the back of the truck into late February. It’s damaged goods.

A pleasant puff-pastry throwback to Sandra Dee movies, ''Bye Bye Birdie,'' and other pre-Beatles effluvia.

Everything about this curio is claustrophobic.

You come away enchanted less by the character than by the woman playing her.

The movie’s a somber affair, but if you see it in the right frame of mind, it’s the guilty-pleasure hoot of the season.

The filmmakers have made this for the purposes of near-term celebration rather than long-term understanding, and they’re probably judging their audience well.

The tension on the ship keeps accelerating in a straight and dramatically unsurprising line until the final scenes of “Slingshot,” at which point the twists come piling in, one after another, each shocker nullified by the next.

So this is the little movie that caused the big fuss. And little it is, a dopey bro-com that piddles along delivering mild laughs until it turns overly, unamusingly bloody in the climactic scenes.

The film doesn't embarrass itself or dishonor its predecessor, which is something.

It’s all a big, gluey metaphor for a girl’s sexual fears and raging mom conflicts, and, as in “Twilight,” the metaphor itself gets buried under mounting waves of CGI nonsense and a ridiculous back story about reincarnated Civil War lovers.

The Intern is bizarrely retrograde, implying that every working woman only needs a cuddly Yoda daddy to make it in the world of business. It’s soft in the heart — and soft in the head.

At times you feel Weitz flipping the pages and dog-earing wildly, and that's a shame: This is a movie that needs to be lengthy and discursive, the better to duck into the back alleys of its invention. A visionary is required. This director isn't one.

You can go see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom or you can save yourself the time and money by chugging a six-pack of Red Bull and running through the dinosaur exhibits at the Harvard Museum of Natural History until you can’t breathe. As experiences go, they’re equally adrenalizing and equally ephemeral.

Perhaps an experienced director could have pulled it off, but Scharfman isn’t there yet, and the result is a tonally confused, gracelessly shot and edited misfire that squanders its premise on escalating suspense and ugly, unconvincing digital effects.

An absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Phoebe in Wonderland gradually loses its grip on tone and believability, climaxing with a show-must-go-on moment that's just plain silly. Thankfully, Barnz knows exactly where to end his film: on the face of a girl, and an actress, at the crossroads.

The new version is completely unnecessary and sloppier than it should be. It’s also still funny, partly thanks to smart casting in a few key roles and partly because farce this ironclad cannot be denied.

In short, Besson builds a dazzling alterna-universe — a bit of Terry Gilliam, a dash of “Blade Runner,” a smidgen of “Star Wars” (which, to be fair, was probably influenced by the original comic), and a lot of extra-strength Besson-ian whimsy. And then he strands us with the two least interesting people there.

There’s no backstage dirt, then — for that, pick up the 2002 “uncensored history” written by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller — but there is an honest appraisal of the show’s peaks and valleys over the years.

A classy unintentional hoot.

It's notable for some astounding urban wildlife footage and for the way it unintentionally reflects the giddy narcissism of the primate known as homo sapiens.

Lightweight yet alluring.

Pakula insists that The Pelican Brief is haute cuisine, and the seriousness nearly wrecks it.

The film pulls off the remarkable feat of immersing a viewer in their world without providing any insights whatsoever.

Project Power is the kind of action/sci-fi bone-cruncher where the cast is better than the material, the characters are more interesting than the premise, and the dialogue chugs along in the middle. It’s on Netflix and is worth a few hours if you’re in a B-movie state of mind.

You’ve seen almost all of this before, with more wit and a better villain.

Powerful stuff, but unpowerfully told.

The result isn’t a great movie, but it is an excellent guilty pleasure.

Sensitively written, nicely shot, expertly acted, and intelligently ambiguous, Nobody Walks still manages to send you out with a shrug.

Glib, fast-paced entertainment that barely leaves a mark - which, given the subject, is just plain wrong.

Genially terrible, Lost is lazy, sloppy multiplex filler, good for a few solid giggles and not much more.

Finding Amanda, unfortunately, is one vast, irritating surface.

Dumbo flies! The movie, sadly, never soars.

What’s nice about this movie, actually, is that you can get a few shameless laughs out of it and then forget you saw it at all.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

The movie's amiable, impulsive, intense, and scattershot, and since those are qualities associated with Vaughn himself, in the end it's a fair representation.

Wonderful characters, these three, and The Hard Word never figures out what to do with them.

Adding to the general air of ''What the hell?'' is Australian pop singer Natalie Imbruglia as Lorna, the beautiful superspy who falls for our hero. With Lorna's help, Johnny discovers that Sauvage is plotting to take over the British throne -- the Battle of Hastings wasn't good enough, it seems.

All the good intentions in the world can't save White Irish Drinkers from playing like the baldest of retreads.

Mishandles Maria Semple’s best-selling comic novel into a clattery mess. There are deftly human moments to be found, but you have to dig for them like potatoes.

The production design is swank, the score impassioned. We should be riveted. Instead, you may feel you’ve seen this movie before, and, in a sense, you have: Woman in Gold plays remarkably like 2013’s “Philomena” with a change of cast and a different historical outrage.

A chilly inquest into very bad behavior, Savage Grace is presented to us like an entrée at a five-star French restaurant. It's decadence under glass.

There are good performances and fleeting moments of exquisite moviemaking, but the experience as a whole is an evolutionary dead end.

A noble, shipwrecked folly.

The movie takes its place alongside Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” (2016) as a work of true solemnity, one that wonders what we owe the divine in our worldly life. If the Scorsese film is arguably about the profoundest of doubts, A Hidden Life is something different. It’s an act of faith. Maybe Malick knows we’ll be needing it.

The Accountant keeps you hanging on all the way to the looney-toon ending, well past the point where your higher brain functions have called it a night. It’s not a good movie but it’s not a bad way to kill a few hours.

Music and nostalgia are what fuel all this filmmaker's movies, though, even a half-baked translation like this one.

Only Jane, as the cop who knows exactly what Mrs. Collins’s wayward daughter needs, has the sense of threat the movie is seeking. His and Woodley’s scenes together are dirty and alive.

Hotel for Dogs is agreeable Saturday afternoon multiplex piffle - friendly, formulaic, completely harmless.

Just Wright is as formulaic as they come, but at its core is a surprisingly tender romantic drama.

Since its maker is one of the least vain of Hollywood actors, it's one that is worthy of indulgence and respect.

Even the portrayal of the Hasidic community comes to feel like window-dressing, welcome for its exoticism but never truly understood.

Such a meticulously wrought piece of hokum that it's both easy to admire and impossible to warm up to.

You’ve seen pieces of this movie in “Psycho,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and 2004’s “Cellular.” Still, the early scenes in the Hive give The Call a needed novelty: It’s a workplace drama, and the work is responding to other people’s desperate worst-case scenarios.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates lopes along with bumptious likability but no real energy, urgency, structure, or wit.

Eventually the energy of the original short runs out and the movie coasts on fumes, but it remains surprisingly enjoyable for all that.

Bulging with period details and a large and busy cast, Parkland is well made and at times queasily fascinating. At others, it gives in to melodrama and the ticking off of facts.

Against the odds, John Carter is itself pretty amazing - an epic pulp saga that slowly rises to the level of its best imitations and wins you over by degrees.

A pall of disaster, in fact, hangs over everyone in this shapeless, hankie-wringing adaptation of the best-selling Jodi Picoult novel.

Take the kids at your peril. Mismarketing aside, Step Brothers is crudely funny, which means that sometimes it's crudely hilarious and more often it's just crude.

Smart, sick, and subversive, Super gives you what you want only to make you wonder why you want it.

Mines laughs from the ways in which its antihero's reductive philosophy consistently goes kerflooey in his face, but there's a weary sadness to it as well.

The special effects, when they kick in, are impressive, and the gore hounds in the audience will eventually get their gobbets of flesh, but the messaging of “Wolf Man” is so muddy that it’s not clear what the movie’s trying to say.

True Story, which leads with its chin from the title on down and which turns a startling tale of true crime and false identities into a heavy-breathing drama that, ironically, fails to convince.

Little kids, of course, will swallow it whole without thinking twice.

This big, brawny historical drama feels more personal to its maker as both an artist and an Australian. For better and for worse, the movie’s a labor of love and of national identification.

Ghobadi shows us a world where a village pond can hold both rare goldfish and unforgivable evil, and where every step is onto booby-trapped terrain.

Scott’s probably the perfect actor for this, since he’s too likably lightweight to suggest any emotion more crippling than exasperation.

Movies can convey the fever of new love more intensely than almost any other medium, and Song One is best when it shrinks the world down to James and Franny alone together in a crowded city.

A movie like Armored has been done better in the past. But it has also been done much, much worse, and Antal knows enough not to mess with the sturdy bones of the thing.

At the end, under the closing credits, Freeheld shows us photos of the real Hester and Andree, and we sense an immediacy the rest of the film lacks. These are the people we want to watch and not a movie simulacra, no matter how capably performed and earnestly felt.

If there's one thing Avary gets right, it's the brutal use-or-be-used approach to interpersonal relations that Ellis laid out with numbing detail, and James Van Der Beek is down to the challenge as Sean Bateman: horndog, cokehead, ceramics major, and all-around jerk.

Shot on Ramsey Island and other locations along the coast of Wales, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and it’s endearing enough to warm one’s hands and heart on a cold entertainment evening.

Worse, by neutering the specifics of where these people live and come from, Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy renders the story meaningless.

One thing's clear: R.J. Reynolds won't be showing Constantine at the company picnic any time soon.

Rebirth recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.

A clever, gory, often very funny piece of genre junk — a B+ movie — that carries a hidden warning: When we turn other people into cartoons of our worst fears, the only thing left to do is kill each other.

Of the two French films opening in the Boston area today - "Beloved" is the other - Little White Lies is the less ambitious, more watchable, and ultimately more annoying.

The movie's pleasant and light, though, and its emotional crises are the crust on an acceptably edible crème brulee.

Honey has enough charm, good humor, and wry gut laughs to smooth over the dull patches and flaws in logic.

True, the CGI dwarves (not “dwarfs,” thank you) are a pox upon the eyeballs, but other than that? It’s pretty good.

The results feel a little life lesson-y but also well-earned and well-observed, and Hahn takes advantage of a rare lead role to locate both the ugliness and beauty in her character.

A bad dopey Will Ferrell comedy – overlong, underwritten, as strained as its title, and running on schtick and storylines that are practically rims.

The 1979 film was both more casual and much darker about the realities and infirmities of old age, and it had one of George Burns’s better performances. It was a funny, touching experience, and it was a bitter pill. The new movie is a placebo, with Hallmark emotions put over by a cast of solid-gold professionals.

That Prom plays as pleasantly and inoffensively as it does is due to the performances, particularly McDonell as the rebellious Jesse.

Orwellian paranoia doesn’t die, it just gets fresh trimmings, and while The Zero Theorem is as messy and overstuffed as Fibber McGilliam’s closet, its sorrow and anger and demented humor strike just enough fresh sparks to keep this career alive.

Throw out any expectations you might have of coherent narrative structure or directorial control, and you might have a pretty good time.

The movie's silly, predictable, and surprisingly sweet - the sort of thing you can and probably should take your mother to.

Sometimes a cute-stalker movie can win the audience's heart. Management only makes you ponder the line between true love and a restraining order.

Both despite its familiarity and because of it, Nothing Like the Holidays brings it home for Christmas.

You can bet your parrot "Pirates" will be back, even if "At World's End" hasn't the foggiest idea when to quit.

It's just another happily idiotic Will Ferrell comedy, ably directed by Jay Roach ("Meet the Parents," "Dinner for Schmucks") and tossing its bawdy jokes at the side of the barn.

The overall tone is one of mild Sex Pistols excess combined with Monkees-era high jinks.

The larger problem is that the central duo is just plain dull.

The Ten is a virtually snicker-free exercise in audience pain. It's less a movie than an endurance test.

My Salinger Year isn’t much, but it isn’t phony.

All three actors come at this gloomy, borderline-preposterous tale from different directions; that they meet up at all - and they do - is a tribute to sincerity and craft.

Starts with savvy concepts (televised mind control and man’s reliance on robots, respectively) and quickly devolves into sour, overwritten diatribes.

Even older kids will understand that Pixar does it so much better, not because of their computers but because of an intelligent attention to script and character and craft. If the people running Disney don't understand that much anymore, maybe they should turn out the lights and go home.

Maybe it's the era we're living in, but the new film is as much fun as a shroud.

Not good enough to take seriously and, sadly, not bad enough to be any fun.

Stitched together from so many other movies that it plays like an attack of multiple déjà vu. Stray bits of “Star Wars,’’ “Pirates of the Caribbean,’’ “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,’’ and “Robin Hood’’ pass by like flotsam, and the overwhelming tone is good-natured but alarmingly generic.

Both provocative and muddled, the film's a moody, passive-aggressive tract that's buoyed by superior performances and sunk by its own uncertainties. An alternate title might be "The Joylessness of Sex."

A hell-for-leather action film with a healthy serving of scares. It really is "Aliens" on the open plains, "Independence Day" for the nation's centennial, and what the movie lacks in originality and stick-to-your-ribs Western authenticity, it makes up for in pell-mell multiplex entertainment.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

Still as moth-eaten as a Bengal tiger rug on the floor of a London men's club.

It's a Tibetan film -- a rare thing -- made by Tibetans, starring Tibetans, and set in the increasingly desperate exile community of Dharamsala .

The Mighty Macs sticks so closely to the underdog-sports-movie playbook that it's practically generic.

Three things and three things only keep Sex Drive from being teen-comedy landfill. The first is James Marsden, hilarious as the hero's bully-boy big brother. The second is Seth Green, beyond droll as an Amishman with attitude. The third is the Mexican doughnut costume.

What it is, distressingly, is a mess - a ragbag of promising ideas and failed narrative, of good acting and plain old bad filmmaking.

Turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.

There's a great movie somewhere in The Good German, but it's buried under three tons of run-amok formalism.

The longer it takes for the eldritch glop to hit the fan, in fact, the less true the movie may be to King. For better and for worse, Dreamcatcher is true to King.

Occasionally too pleased with itself, it's also pleasantly unpredictable, and it has a trio of sweet hambone performances at its center.

What keeps you interested in Demolition is accompanying Davis as he solves the mystery of himself. What keeps you checking your watch is that the character’s not terribly interesting to begin with.

The result is a state-of-the-art multiplex three-ring circus whose special effects stagger the senses and play like a video game, whose human drama aims for the cosmic and lands waist-deep in the Big Silly.

The only victims in Paid in Full are the dealers and their families -- and the only word for that is one this paper can't print.

As superbly crafted -- as good -- as this movie is, Condon never really owns up to the cloud of pessimism at its center.

The Fifth Estate is itself the response of an entrenched and corporatized information system toward something it barely comprehends. It makes a media format that has sustained us for decades — the two-hour movie — feel like a 20th-century dinosaur.

People Like Us is neither optimal nor prime.

Absolutely not for feminists, lovers of period films, and anyone whose sensibilities are bruised by over-the-top stuntwork, it's a cocktail made up of three parts testosterone to one part brains.

As the implausibilities and conspiracies and double-crosses pile up, Broken City paints itself into a corner. A plot can be confusing as long as the filmmakers themselves don't seem confused, but that's not the case here.

The latest installment in the venerable sci-fi action franchise turns out to be a straight-up war film, grim and muscular and thundering and joyless. It's the color of cement, and it weighs as much, too.

All in all, the movie’s a muddled and overlong experience, one that every so often drifts into dull, unintentional camp.

If Mary Shelley disappoints, it’s only because al-Mansour sticks to the tried and true bones of the bio-pic genre and plays it stylistically safe. Maybe the filmmaker hopes to prove her skill with a big-budget period piece; if so, she easily succeeds.