Ty Burr

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

Monster House is the first horror comedy made exclusively for fourth-graders.

As such things go, it’s not bad: slick and proficient, The Stepfather 2.0 gets the adrenaline pumping, but the original has the brains.

With Trance, story becomes just another element in Boyle’s commercial pop-Cubism, and the results are nearly fatal.

Goldsman takes Helprin’s book — a work overflowing with events, ideas, characters, passions — and pounds away at it until all that’s left is mush.

The carnage is cartoonishly graphic, but the onlookers watching through binoculars from a nearby sandy bluff are impressed.

Formulaic enough to suggest that franchise would be B level at best, a TV series at worst. But it's also just good enough to make you want to watch it, anyway.

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

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

An acrid family affair that has been aggressively over-directed by the talented Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”) and brought to intermittent life by a very good cast.

Watching Prometheus is like opening a deluxe gift box from Tiffany's to find a mug from the dollar store.

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.

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.

It's ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' with all the emotions and half the artistry.

Hot gospel singing and earnest family squabbles are all that distinguish Joyful Noise.

It’s tempting to see Tigertail in the tradition of the Ingmar Bergman classic “Wild Strawberries,” with its emotionally constipated hero looking back over a lifetime of mistakes and missed connections. But the comparison only highlights Yang’s weaknesses as a first-time feature director: flat dialogue that mistakes subtext for text, glacially paced scenes that lack dramatic momentum, stolidly unimaginative camerawork, and a central character so unsympathetic that you end up siding with his ex-wife and daughter.

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 movie is less a movie than a collection of scenes lined up in a row, and the tone wobbles between pomp and circumstantial melodrama.

Story lines don't come any clammier.

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

Watching Melancholia is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom.

A well-made, reasonably diverting night at the multiplex that will seem overly familiar to everyone except teenage girls.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

An acceptable but uninspired simulacrum: an overly faithful multiplex translation of a very, very popular airport novel.

The movie looks great at least, and the cast includes such stalwarts of Italian cinema as Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino.

The new version is a shiny piece of hardware that might as well be called "Sleuth 2.0," and it's exactly what you would expect from Pinter: very clever, extremely cold. Maliciously entertaining, too, until the halfway point, when you suddenly start wondering why anyone should care.

For all its unforgivable blandness, "High School Musical" opens young audiences to the charms of this most transporting of movie genres.

Whatever Works is very minor Woody, querulous, fitfully funny, and removed from any shared reality.

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.

Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors.

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

Isn't just lame; it's neutered.

Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.

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.

Completely unnecessary but painless, like dentistry performed by mimes.

One of the most lazily scripted, poorly structured, smugly stereotyped star vehicles in recent memory. Bizarrely, this seems to be the point.

If the Marvel/Disney comic-book movies tend toward the chromium brio of the “Avengers” series, the DC superhero movies purveyed by Warner Bros. have taken their cue over the years from the 1986 revisionist graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns,” and they are very dark indeed. Joker is the culmination of that approach, a slab of self-important pop-culture masonry whose only bright spot is the figure dancing brilliantly along its top.

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 movie has a pleasing skinned-knee innocence that makes you wish everything else about it wasn't so shoddy.

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.

Glass isn’t a terrible film but neither is it a particularly good one, and it certainly doesn’t stick the landing the way the filmmaker and his hardy fans have probably hoped. It’s by turns intriguing, awkward, inspired, misguided, and very, very talky.

Because there’s little internal logic in IF, you may find yourself constantly asking why the characters are doing what they do, or how the whole imaginary-friend thing works within the context of the movie.

The tacky New Jersey cousin with the nauseous cat, the gold-digging sister, the drug-running nephew — these are cruel cartoons, as grating to the viewer as they are to their hosts. Tucked between the pratfalls, though, is some surprisingly deft comedy.

A sweet, splattery bit of in-jokery; if it’s not actually a good movie, on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of a film set in 1850s Ireland but shot on Staten Island.

Despite the film’s length and aspirations, its anthropological correctness and historically accurate gore, Bale’s transformation from stone killer to empathetic ally is unconvincing.

It's the sort of thing you'll either find enchanting or an excellent reason to reach for the Scotch.

This Equalizer is a brooding, brutal origin tale, one that starts well but steadily caves into genre clichés. It’s a B-movie sheep in A-movie clothing, acceptable meathead mayhem as long as you know what you’re paying for.

Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.

Blandly noisy and inoffensively average.

I know the opening credits for a James Bond movie are supposed to be silly, but the start of Spectre achieves almost orgasmic levels of kitsch.

To press the point, there is absolutely no need for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.

Wild Mountain Thyme is not a good movie. Rather, it’s one that believes so deeply and joyously in its potted romantic Oirishness that the audience doesn’t have to.

This is back-to-basics stuff, which turns out to be not such a bad idea.

As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could.

The Hunter becomes turgid with corporate conspiracies, hired assassins, and offscreen tragedies, and the appealing leanness of the early scenes gets lost.

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

The Midnight Sky is handsome to look at and, in its early scenes, quite engrossing. But it’s an oddly structured affair and, in the end, the director can’t keep it on course.

Like Jolie's public persona, Blood and Honey is both strong and headstrong, equally invested in grit and glamour with a hazy understanding of the line separating the two.

I'm not the first observer, or even the second, to liken the star's (Penn) portrayal of fictional Louisiana governor Willie Stark to the late John Belushi's impersonation of Joe Cocker.

The movie’s a dog, but you almost wish for a sequel, if only to do right by these two.

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

There's a funkier and more interesting movie in Maureen, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Maureen is a single mom, a massage therapist, and a dimwit California follower of every new-age theory out there. She's a nasal, needy wreck, and Catch and Release is torn between adoring her and making ruthless fun of her.

In sum, the movie’s a passable time-waster, but it might be better — for Kravitz’s filmmaking future and for us — if we just forgot the whole thing.

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.

The movie has a problem, too: Spall is likable, Kazan is adorable, Driver is amusing enough as the blowhard best friend, and Radcliffe as Wallace is . . . a passive-aggressive lump.

It’s entertaining enough if you turn your brain off.

Straw has all the feels it wants and little of the art it needs. But there’s nothing to suggest Tyler Perry would have it any other way.

There’s a line between enjoyably stupid and stupid-stupid, and Nerve sails over it right around the halfway mark.

Here is where All Is By My Side runs into trouble. The real Etchingham has said, forcibly, that this didn’t happen — not the beating nor her subsequent attempted suicide, shown in the film.

The film casts Annette Bening as the vain, aging stage actress Irina Arkadina, Saoirse Ronan as the naive country beauty Nina, and Elisabeth Moss as bitter Masha, dressed in black “in mourning for my life.” Those are three excellent reasons to see the movie, and the filmmaking fights them almost every step of the way.

A mostly lumbering, occasionally rousing epic that walks a bizarre line between historical fact and Hollywood wishful thinking.

Old story, new beat: That sums up Feel the Noise, an acceptable if resolutely average low-budget drama set in the New York/Puerto Rican musical melting pot known as reggaeton.

The Sitter pushes the envelope with such sloppy gusto that you have to give in occasionally, and its comic timing finds its rhythm about every fifth joke.

Does have the enclosed, slightly overheated feel of a family theatrical.

Shallow and proud of it, an antic cartoon that lacks the comic inspiration to go the distance.

Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.

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.

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?

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

It’s a PG movie with pleasantly canned life lessons, and it’s safe for kids and adults alike, although anyone with a shred of cynicism may not want to be seen caving in to the script’s emotional inevitabilities.

Skips lightly along the sewers of human depravity as if the trip alone was worth the telling.

An overly muted and cautious piece of work. Watching it is like seeing a man ease out onto the limb of a tree, constantly testing its strength.

At its intermittent best, Troy suggests a primitive pro-wrestling smackdown with epochal consequences. At its worst, it's a throwback to the ham-fisted sword-and-sandal international coproductions of the early 1960s: "The 300 Spartans" with better sets. Barely.

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.

An acceptable creature feature at best and a waterlogged “Alien” at worst, Underwater sneaks into town as a true January release: a shelf-sitting production that 20th Century Fox’s new owner, Disney, is putting outside the store like a loaf of stale bread. It’s there if you want it, and you could chew on worse.

The results are exactly as patchwork as that sounds, with sequences of rowdy, sacrilegious invention punctuated by long spells of tedium.

There’s nothing in Military Wives you haven’t seen before, but these are times of comfort food, and this formulaic comedy-drama about a group of British army-base spouses who start a choir is so determined to be uplifting that your up may be lifted in spite of itself.

It’s content to keep things light and predictable, with the result that one of the richest song catalogs known to man is here to prop up an increasingly formulaic and far-fetched love story. Yesterday makes less sense the longer it lasts, albeit with some good bits along the way.

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

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.

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

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

"The Expendables" trotted out the concept this summer, and it was good dumb fun - a nudge-nudge wink-wink '80s movie on steroids. RED is more self-consciously wacky, more stridently in your face, and more disappointing.

The loosest, silliest, broadest thing the Coens have yet committed to celluloid, and that includes "Raising Arizona," one of this critic's favorites.

What sinks the movie (rather than the character) are the tortured melodramatics of its backstage plot and dialogue that aims for clever — and sometimes is — but that generally approximates Shakespeare for, like, beginners.

For the record, Rare Birds doesn't even fly as a birder's special, since Tasseter's Sulfurious Duck is a fictional species. Now, if they'd seen a Eurasian Wigeon, then we'd be talking.

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.

Broad as the side of a city bus and about as lumbering, Night School is a better-than-average Kevin Hart comedy — meaning that it’s an average comedy overall. It’s silly and rather sweet, and it’s blessed with an ensemble that makes the most of the dopey cartoon script patched together by Hart and five other writers.

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

Race wants so badly to get every last bit of the big picture that it dashes past the little details that actually tell a story. Like an over-trained athlete who pulls a hamstring in the big race, the movie tries to do it all and comes up short.

It’s a cheat, a cash grab, and it makes for 125 dystopian minutes of set-up with no resolution. But come back next November, folks, and we’ll show you the rest! They should have called it “Mockingjay, Part 1 — The Shakedown.” Or “The Hunger Games 3: Rubble Without a Cause.”

They’re calling it a movie, but no matter how you squint at it it’s a TV show.

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.

Reilly gives it his all, and he’s both very enjoyable and about as scary as a stubbed toe.

All thing considered, MacGruber’ is a lot better than it should be. That still doesn’t mean it’s all that great.

The only laugh to be had in Total Recall, a ripsnorting sci-fi action extravaganza that starts well and works its way down to average, is in the opening credits, where we learn that the movie's primary production company is called Original Film. Really?

Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.

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.

Everything in this good-cop/bad-cop action drama is shrouded in gray and attended by wailing. This isn't a feel-good genre, granted, but does it have to feel this bad?

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

Isn't a first-date movie. As a third -date movie, though, it's just about perfect.

There’s a lot of talent here and a lot of enthusiasm; also a lot of influences that haven’t been successfully reprocessed into something convincing or fresh. It’s a mess, but a reasonably charming one.

A tawdry, predictable hunk of movie headcheese, and I still had a pretty good time with it.

It plants a flag for a new corporate entertainment franchise and it will make international containerships of money, so does it matter that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is joyless and incoherent? Probably not.

Can a vastly talented cast raise a heartfelt but banal screenplay on their own? The verdict is mixed, to put it kindly.

Just a limp, jokey family film that wants to have its fairy tale magic and its hip irony, too.

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.

All the cinematic huffing and puffing only calls attention to the paradox on which this movie is built: It’s a portrait of a woman who’s not particularly interested in being seen other than to prod the world to value other women as much as they value men — culturally, politically, and financially.

Something to see and little to remember, an acrid character study undone by narrative implausibilities and its own lack of purpose.

Genuine, artful simplicity may be an impossible quality in a modern children's movie, so Curious George opts instead for mayhem under a blanket of sweetness. The little ones understand.

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.

The first Guy Maddin movie that feels as if it got only halfway out of the director's head and onto the screen.

An amiable if not especially urgent celebration of the life and work of Wayne White.

At its strongest cataloging the sheer sensory overkill of the festival -- the faces, the food, the many roads to bliss. Only the slightest historical information is offered and no spiritual background whatsoever.

It's pure plastic product from plot line to the pro forma 3-D to the tidy moral lessons - ersatz family entertainment as disposable as it is diverting. It made me want to go read a book.

Machine Gun Preacher is crude and ham-handed from its ridiculous title on down, but it still gets to some interesting places.

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.

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

Amirpour has the potential to see things as no other filmmaker does, but she doesn’t yet have a vision, and she may not as long as she keeps fiddling around with genre conventions laid down by others. She’s an eccentric magpie of a director, and this time the pieces she collects glitter but never quite cohere.

Time to Leave is an unintended litmus test for lovers of foreign films.

There's a great movie to be had in the notion of a busybody whose advice keeps blowing up in his face, but Dan in Real Life merely sets it up and walks away.

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.

It's both achingly affectionate and a terrible mess.

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

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.

I regret to report that Spinal Tap has become Dad Rock.

Often as noisy, dippy, and enjoyable as 2004's "National Treasure," and when it's not, it's just another sequel, more absurd than most.

A reasonably watchable sci-fi B movie, a case of a good director and some intriguing ideas struggling to overcome formula plotting, limp dialogue, and a serious case of the sillies.

Zemeckis and Hanks really seem to think they’re giving us a Christmas movie for the ages and a technology that will change cinema forever. They’re wrong on both counts. The Polar Express is merely a marvelous toy that has somehow become convinced it has a soul.

Begin Again is pleasantly predictable if you’re in an undemanding mood. If you’re not, it’s unbearable, like hearing a treasured folk song given a Hot 97 makeover.

Justice League may play well to hardcore DC cognoscenti, but if you’re not a fan, the movie’s failings are easy to enumerate. First off, the villain’s a dud.

Bahrani is brilliant at small gestures and the way they can speak volumes, but in At Any Price he’s aiming for grand tragedy, and he doesn’t yet have the knack. The pacing of the final act is uncertain; the epic sweep doesn’t arrive.

Aside from pretty people behaving cutely, there's just not much here, and even devoted Francophiles may nod into their cafe crèmes.

Largely plotless, confidently self-indulgent, and more leering toward those acting students than seems wise, Tommaso is worth a look for the Rome locations and the burnished widescreen cinematography of Peter Zeitlinger. Above all it’s a showcase for Dafoe, who continues a remarkable late-career run.

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.

It’s perfectly generic on-demand product that will eat up an hour and a half of your life and be immediately forgotten.

Which is precisely what’s missing from Oz the Great and Powerful: that sense of emotional journey.

It’s the kind of Hollywood formula product that proves why the formula’s so hard to kill: simultaneously easy to like and impossible to respect.

At its intermittent best, “Tuesday” pulls a rough and breathtaking beauty from the cataclysm. At its worst, it’s for the birds.

Ice Age: The Meltdown is pure sequel product that should make children and undemanding grown-ups happy even as it lacks anything resembling storytelling inspiration.

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.

If you're young, the film may intoxicate you. If you're older, it may make you relieved you're no longer young.

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

An effective, no-frills gruel-a-thon if that’s your cup of Swiss Miss, and it explores such burning questions as: What happens if you’re dumb enough to leave your bare hand on a metal safety bar overnight?

Involving and sometimes comically bleak but never fully convincing as drama.

It’s a critic’s failure to gauge the movie he wishes had been against the movie that is, but in this case the movie that is is disappointingly bloodless, cold rather than chilling, with a payoff that isn’t shocking so much as an admission that we’ve spent 90 minutes we’ll never get back.

The filmmaker’s uncertainty shows itself in drably functional camerawork and an over-reliance on Christophe Beck’s tasteful piano-and-violin score.

Before this urban revenge melodrama falls apart in a clatter of plot absurdities and pretensions, it has its loopy charms.

Dawdles amiably and can't quite decide what it wants to be.

Panettiere, I’m sad to report, is a dud as the title character, a supposed wild thang who never rises above the level of runty, obnoxious mall chick, down to the roll-on tan.

An opaque kidnapping drama that features three expertly crafted performances operating on three different planets.

The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.

Well intentioned on every level, the movie is successful only on some, and it falls flat when trying to visualize the innards of the poem itself.

Damsel, goofy, absurdist, and subversive, feels like a brave step in an uncertain direction.

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.

You realize the movie isn’t nearly as clever as it looks.

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

Will parents be able to sit through Kangaroo Jack without plunging sharp sticks into their eyes? The short answer? Yes. Barely.

The movie equivalent of a box of generic macaroni and cheese: bland, easily digested, comforting, forgettable.

Where the first film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke, plugged into Meyer’s vision of supernatural teenage lust with abandon, Chris Weitz is stuck with a sequel that’s a morning-after mope-fest.

Above all, it is predictable.

One walks out of Man of the Year aching for the squandered opportunities.

Is “Megalopolis” the movie that Coppola has wanted to make for more than 40 years? Absolutely. Is it an unfashionable ode to optimism and the freedom to create, a vision as generous as it is crazy as it is overflowing with delirious invention? That, too.

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.

Contains more than its share of implausibilities and absurdities.

Another tale of timid souls united by a sweet movie gimmick.

At its best when Anna confronts her tangled Afrikaaner legacy and when it brings the heretical notion of forgiveness up front, where a non-African audience can come to grips with it.

There is nothing especially wrong with it other than that for some of us it represents 105 minutes in hell.

The Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

The film's final scenes are among its silliest, unfortunately.

Note that it took six writers to come up with the script for The Jungle Book 2. Note that Rudyard Kipling isn't one of them.

This is a buddy movie in which one of the buddies is dead. Yet, if anything, the emotional bonding is — or wants to be — more resonant than ever.

The film is arriving on these shores in the wake of such successful foodie nonfictions as “Jiro Dreams of Shushi,” a 2012 art-house hit about an 85-year-old master of raw fish. Like that film, Ramen Heads reaches for the lyrical with slow-motion shots of roiling broth and soaring classical music on the soundtrack. Unlike the earlier movie, it goes so far overboard in ladling out praise that viewers might wonder if they’re being sold a bill of goods.

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.

It's a surprisingly joyless mash-up of every bit of fanboy flotsam floating around in its maker's cranium.

Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.

This new Fog floats in on the fumes of the 1980 John Carpenter original, but the surprise is that it's arguably better.

You Gotta Believe is an entry in the “heartwarming true story” genre, Little League subdivision, and it isn’t bad so much as resolutely average.

These are some of the questions raised and left on the table in the fascinating but frustratingly murky Author: The JT Leroy Story, a documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig that’s worth seeing if only to argue with the movie and with yourself.

The Way is a good, cheap vacation. At times, you wonder if Estevez isn't creating a cracked therapeutic remake of "The Wizard of Oz.'' He's got the nerve and the heart, all right. I'm less sure about the brains.

The Goldfinch isn’t great literature but it is a good read. By breaking up the chronology and yanking the audience back and forth between Theo’s fraught youth and crisis-ridden present, though, the film prevents an audience from gaining emotional traction.

It’s an August dog-day special, in other words: a few easy laughs, one or two flashes of inspiration, and enough sentimentality to ensure that no one actually gets hurt.

Hardcore fans and gamers will thrill to the contractually required scene where a fighter has his still-beating heart ripped out of his chest. But that’s the only time Mortal Kombat shows a pulse.

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."

It very much wants to be "Garden State" five years down the line.

What’s missing is the assurance of tone that a Lumet would provide.

It’s a watchable disappointment that leaves mostly frustration in its wake.

The film squeezes out its feel-good messages like toothpaste from a tube.

If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.

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.

Something has been lost in the translation, and it's not just the script.

Maybe there’s an epic novel in his head, but what [Costner's] given us with “Chapter 1” is a table of contents instead.

Marla Grayson is less a three-dimensional person (or even an interesting two-dimensional one) than a symptom of a sick society. And symptoms wear out their welcome pretty quickly. That shallowness renders Marla’s sexuality and stated feminism cynical rather than ironic, and it turns I Care a Lot into a lesser Coen brothers movie: No Country for Old Fogeys.

An intensely unpleasant killer-thriller mystery.

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

Climax is the first Noé film, though, to flirt with the novel sensation of boredom.

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

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

There’s just enough bite there to give the stars something to work with, and Diaz especially responds with the joy of the well-rested.

A comparison to Baz Luhrmann is useful: Where Taymor self-consciously aestheticizes pop vulgarity, a movie like "Moulin Rouge!" just dives right in.

The result is a clattery, unfocused affair that at times is more irritating than fun.

Mark Felt is a drama about an aggrieved control freak, which would be fine if director Landesman openly acknowledged it. He’s torn, though between offering a heroic celebration of the republic’s underappreciated savior and a more damning character portrait of a man who, for complex reasons, ended up doing the right thing.

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

Because the movie’s carrying a heavy load of corporate expectations, it gets pulled in different directions by competing agendas before eventually collapsing into incoherence.

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.

Hoffman confessed he was drawn to the role because ''this was a guy who didn't know how to feel, and I found that fascinating.'' His challenge is our frustration

A heartfelt but muddled melodrama.

The film itself suggests a sketch video on Ferrell and McKay's "Funny or Die" website, padded out to the dimensions of a character comedy.

An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.

Wants to be as shocking as its title, but it doesn't have the nerve.

A clever and heartfelt comedy-drama that remains aloft as long as it retains its sense of humor; when the going gets serious, the dialogue turns therapeutic and heavy. Still, it’s a decent debut and an ambitious attempt to juggle tones.

At best, it's unnecessary. At worst, it's vaguely insulting.

The movie is both stunning on the level of visual pageantry and curiously inert as cinema.

One of the prime laws of the multiplex states that any action or horror movie series will devolve into ritualized violence, self-mocking camp, and egregious silliness by part three. Blade: Trinity is right on schedule.

This payback-revenge storyline, told mostly at night with minimal dialogue, is tense but familiar, and Bruno's quick-draw costume changes are fun to watch.

The problem with Flash of Genius isn't that the subject is dull but that the movie is.

The movie looks great and sounds better, and its status as a pioneering work of cinematic eye candy seems secure. For one thing, it's hard to imagine ''Moulin Rouge'' without it. As a movie about recognizable human beings, however, One From the Heart remains a failure.

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

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

Not that terrible, but dispiritingly generic — the kind of off-brand, cable-ready product that functions as advertised but could have been cast with anybody other than some of the most unique and celebrated performers of their generations.

With all that good will and with an abundance of source material, why does the documentary Love, Gilda feel like such a disappointment? It’s fine for casual viewers: you’ll come away reasonably satisfied if you want to catch up on the basics of Radner’s life and career while having your nostalgia gently stroked.

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.

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.

The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.

The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

Invites us to both hate King David and admire his style, and there will probably be some hand-wringing about that.

What you might call conditional whimsy, predicated on the audience overlooking so many plot implausibilities that it might get tuckered out from all the charity.

If the movie's not as bad as it sounds, it's not all that great, either.

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.

It just plonks down the actress and a handful of stellar co-stars without much in the way of a script, storyline, or actual jokes. Yet you may still come out with a smile on your face. It’s very odd.

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

With mother!, Aronofsky throws caution to the winds and delivers his most abstract cinematic experience yet. It’s also arguably his worst.

The film's case against overdevelopment needs to be, and could be, aggressive, airtight. It should play to the unconverted. Instead, The Unforeseen gives us . . . poetry.

Henry Johnson is unusual for Mamet in that it focuses on the prey. It’s also as close as a movie can get to a filmed play without including your dinner and a ride home.

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.

The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.

The movie is congenial, self-effacing, and reasonably dull, and since it promises an inside look at 30 years of being a Rolling Stone, that has to be considered a disappointment. On the other hand, Oliver Murray’s film about the life and times of Bill Wyman offers proof that even average blokes can be rock stars, and maybe more of them than we think.

The parts, in other words, promise a brilliant whole. So why is this movie one of the signal disappointments of the year? You have to go back to the basics: Public Enemies has everything going for it except a reason and a script.

Carell's performance is enjoyable but safe, and while he and Knightley play well enough together, there's no genuine chemistry - no zap to convince us these two deserve to be the last lovers on Earth.

Scoop is distinctly minor Allen, with less weight to it than one of his old humor doodles in The New Yorker.

Fair Game takes one of the more shameful sub-chapters in modern US politics - and turns it into a strident, condescending Hollywood melodrama.

With The Invention of Lying, the British comic actor Ricky Gervais has come up with a wickedly funny idea for a movie - and then purged the wickedness right out of it.

The gap between storytelling and story is rarely as wide as in The Last Tree, a coming-of-age drama that is rapturously shot and dramatically trite.

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.

In short, there’s plenty of spectacle in Beauty and the Beast, which will be enough for many if not most young audiences. But there isn’t much magic, and what there is coasts on 26-year-old fumes.

Breezily enjoyable for about 10 minutes, until you realize the entire movie is going to be pitched at the same exuberantly manic pace. It's like being trapped in an elevator with a performing poodle that doesn't know when to quit.

The sequel isn’t a disaster, but it’s a dud.

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.

Thriller fans might remember a terrific 1987 B flick called ''The Stepfather.'' One Hour Photo is that film, directed by an art student.