Ty Burr

A big, sorrowful, dramatically trite period epic about a bleak chapter in the history of modern France.

A faux-low-budget revenge thriller, pure and simple. There's nothing special about it, and that's what's refreshing.

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.

What could have been an effervescent 90-minute experience is so in love with the sound of its own voice that it develops genre trouble and piddles on for two-plus hours.

Enjoyable, occasionally grueling, and overstuffed with incident and agenda.

How do you make a boring movie about this guy? Beats me, but director Ben Lewin has managed to pull it off. Based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 biography of the same title, The Catcher Was a Spy is a decorous, dutiful dogtrot that tells Berg’s story with excellent production values and a conspicuous lack of energy. In its tastefully dull fashion it wastes not only a fascinating subject but the mercurial actor playing him.

It’s silly-sweet rather than silly-stupid, the script has enough snap to count, and – really, now – it allows us to spend time with Issa Rae.

Simple without being simple-minded, warm without worrying too much about being cool. It's agreeably silly fare for the very small set and not so noisy that parents can't either follow along or take a quick nap.

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

With ”Dennis,” Hughes takes har-de-har brutality to new depths — it’s a movie that seems made specifically to blunt the sensibilities.

A peppy, fast-moving, wafer-thin amusement that's fine for kids if you don't mind a lot of Three Stooges-style martial arts. For grown-ups, it's the equivalent of a 59-cent tin globe.

How many bicycling movies are there, let alone ones that know from frame geometry? "Breaking Away" is probably the champ, followed by "American Flyers," the hilariously awful Kevin Bacon bike-messenger movie "Quicksilver," and then we're already into "The Bicycle Thief " and "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." It's a small pack, and The Flying Scotsman rides close to the front by default.

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.

Family, sadly, is a plate of leftovers: a bland, baldly written melodrama about two longtime best friends and their messed-up families.

A well-intentioned indie that tries to be a "real" version of a Hollywood romantic comedy and ends up feeling more ersatz than ever.

Unlike "Tree" or "2001," Cloud Atlas offers more answers than it does questions, and by the end of its nearly three-hour running time - which flies by surprisingly fast, all things considered - it feels like the most feverishly expensive late-night college bull session ever. There are glories here, but they fade in the light of day.

The final act of Dark Matter is grim but unconvincing, and the shortfall leaves an ugly, exploitive taste in your mouth.

Murphy gives a reined in performance that, every so often, shows a spark of the ''Shrek''ish donkey within.

That uncertainty -- in the professor, in the audience -- is what drives Emperor's Club to a surprisingly thought-provoking, even disturbing conclusion.

The movie gets credit for showing the struggles he and millions of others with similar disorders live with on a daily basis. They’re not pretty, but — aside from Emma — they’re real.

The movie's an easy, engaging watch, even if it's literally all over the map.

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

Affleck the screenwriter seems to have dumped the story onto the kitchen table and pushed it around like dough, hoping for some shape to emerge. It resists.

Lee’s Oldboy stands on its own. It just stands a bit shorter.

If Ten9Eight brings NFTE to the attention of you, your child, or your school administrator, that’s probably all that matters.

If you’re already a subscriber to Apple TV Plus and have absolutely nothing else to do, “The Instigators” is worth a look.

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

A straight-up combat film. Not a very good combat film — it wallows in genre clichés and makes a hash of its action scenes — but one that does get you to empathize with its grunts, the “secret soldiers” of the title.

A slick, ripsnorting character drama whose artistic ambitions are consistently neutralized by its commercial imperatives, puts Downey in a box from which even he can’t escape.

A lukewarm thriller.

''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon.

It's an enjoyably demented meta-finale, the rivals showing what they could do if they ever bothered to actually do it.

It's a working illustration of what differentiates movie stars from TV stars. When we buy a ticket for a George Clooney movie, it's because we want to see George Clooney (or Emma Stone or Tom Hanks or whomever). The real stars of "Glee," on the other hand, are the characters, not the actors.

Divergent is almost good enough to make you forget what a cynical exercise it is on every possible level. The original 2011 young adult novel by Veronica Roth — reasonably engrossing, thoroughly disposable — reads exactly like what it is: an ambitious young author’s attempt to re-write “The Hunger Games” without bringing the lawyers down on her head.

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

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

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.

Brad Pitt and Michelle Pfeiffer? Great to look at. Astonishingly dull to listen to.

The plot -- it's inspired and ridiculous at the same time -- is best described as "Groundhog Day" meets "Memento."

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.

Paris Can Wait is Coppola’s feature solo writing-directing debut, filmed in her 80th year. It would be cheering to report that it’s a great movie, but you can’t have everything.

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.

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.

After a brisk and promising opening half-hour set in London and Hong Kong, the movie devolves into a Saturday matinee B-movie, and not in a good way. It’s pure product, and a waste of a savvy leading actress.

Shiny and peppy, with some solid laughs and dandy vocal performances, but even a small child may sense how forced this movie is -- how hard it tries to be all things to all audiences.

The movie's chief audience, consequently, will probably be gullible and young, responding to the cliches only because they haven't seen them before. They have a word in Vegas for these people: Suckers.

Faced with a limited location and concept, Renfroe points his camera everywhere: The movie's seriously overshot, never settling for one angle when five would do.

She's like Bob Hope with fake breasts and a wig. Now, that's scary.

Basically, if the first “300” was a pep-talk from Coach on how to lose with dignity, Rise of an Empire is an inspirational speech on the value of teamwork.

Ends with a curious whimper instead of the bang it has been pointing toward; the filmmaker's reverence for his heroine seems to bind his hands.

The Unholy Trinity is a reminder that they don’t make ’em like they used to — and maybe that’s a good thing. A pokey, low-budget Western enlivened by a couple of aging stars happily hamming it up, it’s the kind of B movie they used to program before the feature and after the cartoon in the old days.

Parts of it are close to genius; most of it is actively torturous to watch.

If only the movie had the courage to be as gonzo as it wants to be!

Dian Bachar, as Joe's pint-size sidekick, sounds the only note of sly wit; the unidentified stripper playing T-Rex delivers the only real shock value. The movie could have used a lot more of both.

When Lambert is onscreen, Fortress is just an effective action cheapie. Whenever Smith is the focus, it approaches junk poetry.

It's pretty endearing - a low-budget labor of schlock.

A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie.

This gulf between a woman's public and private faces is an intensely rich subject that Rapaport glosses over.

Tolkien gives us the passing of a vanished England and the loss of a generation but not quite enough about what was won, by him for us, nor the mystery of how he won it.

Shakhnazarov's film effortlessly captures the times and the author's conflicted yet unyielding attitude, yet it never draws any conclusions -- the film remains under glass.

Alive with infectious rhythm, likable characters, and slick dance moves, Step Up gives clichés a good name.

Cheerful, skittish entertainment that never takes its subject seriously enough.

One soggy slab of sentimental uplift, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else, and there's some honor in that.

The movie’s a mixture of good intentions, a wobbly tone, and a plastic script, and it debuts a somewhat kinder, softer Schumer than the in-your-face comic trainwreck of “Trainwreck” (2015). I’m not sure that’s an improvement.

Stuffed with smart performers doing graciously silly work, and all Levy has to do is manage traffic.

The movie itself is petrified meatloaf. It's a body-transference comedy in the vein of "Big," "Freaky Friday," and other candidates for Turner Classics.

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.

It does give believers and those tottering on the edge something to chew on, and it steadfastly refuses to demonize everybody else.

If writer-director Tony Vitale ladles on the cliches with extra sauce, Guido still has a hey-Ma-I'm-makin'-a-movie enthusiasm that's more infectious than it has a right to be.

Where "Nemo" was clever, soulful, and marvelous to look at, "Tale" is manic and surprisingly ugly, with a script that leans on the shallowest aspects of hip-hop street cred while pimping for corporate product placement at every turn.

Works hard to give quirk a bad name.

A broad, bawdy, silly French farce set on the Riviera in high season, it's a diversion at best and a strained souffle at worst, but it rings enough Gallic changes on the old family-summer-gone-horribly-wrong genre to deliver some unexpectedly sharp laughs.

Low of brow and pure of heart, the movie plays like "Animal House" extra-lite, and as such it's decent indecent fun.

It might even work if In the Cut was remotely convincing as a thriller, but Campion can't help wrinkling her nose at genre.

A shamelessly enjoyable retread, an ode to la belle vie that has been well turned on a factory spindle.

Good comfort food for most of its running time, thanks to a cast of attractive, unchallenging pros and Ken Kwapis's smooth direction.

Revolutions, the final installment in the trilogy, parcels things more neatly. You get 45 minutes of the Wachowskis' patented theosophical bong water, followed by an hour of the most muscular, hard-core special-effects rama-lama yet to hit the screen. Only then does Jesus show up.

In the Heart of the Sea plays as if the joke was real and everyone on the production had caved in. The result, as a movie, is a joke.

Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.

Predictable, square, and honorable all at once.

A torpidly precious love story about death-obsessed adolescents, the film's becalmed and embalmed in its own sensitive self-pity.

The movie's straightforward and ingratiating, and as pretty-boy history lessons go, it's a lot less obnoxious than "Pearl Harbor."

Disappointing not for what it is but what it could have been.

How's the movie? Technologically incredible, aesthetically pretty hideous, and narratively lumpy: Kids who aren't cynics (i.e., 9 and under) will roll with it.

Taken as a whole, The Sunlit Night is fey and inconclusive, and whether something of more substance got cut in the post-Sundance re-edit or was never there to begin with is at this point moot. The movie’s up a most beautiful creek without a paddle.

Irresistible is a movie of the moment. Unfortunately, that moment is 2015.

Boy Kills World, a cheeky and extremely bloody action extravaganza, keeps an audience so off-balance for so long that you may throw in the towel well before the final bad guy falls.

It’s weird-stupid more than good-stupid.

At its best, The Time Traveler’s Wife does suggest the preciousness of a life that’s too often beyond our control. At its worst, it’s more than a little nuts.

As it is, the movie only shudders to life when Dickie Pilager's onscreen.

Blandly noisy and inoffensively average.

While Heaven Is for Real asks a lot of questions, it ultimately has no doubt whatsoever about the answers. Take it on faith or not at all.

The movie runs an hour and a half. Lowry’s book can be read in less than a day. It still gives anyone — child or adult — more than enough to wrestle with.

Monogamy sets up a nifty idea that it doesn't follow through.

The movie is too blatant a throwback to crass '80s teen fodder to really work.

The upshot is that Blair Witch comes to the party very late and very tired, and it doesn’t improve from there.

The movie has its cheesy pleasures, and some of them are even intended. I'm just not sure whether Tom Cruise's impersonation of Axl Rose is one of them. 

I don't want to sell Like Mike as something it's not. It's a cash-in, all right - just better written, more tightly edited, sharply performed, and a little more heartfelt than most.

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

The real struggle in The Alamo is between historic revisionism and Hollywood notions of sacrifice, and it's not much of a contest: Hollywood wins, as it did in John Wayne's sprawling, factually spurious 1960 film.

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

The problem with Semi-Pro is that it keeps forgetting it's a parody of sports movies; the final scenes are supposed to be uplifting (sort of) but they're not fooling anyone. The film's much better when it just lets the guys gas and sass each other.

It’s rated PG, but trust me, it’ll give younger kids the screaming meemees.

In short, a little too spongy for high- quality junk food.

Seems to be exactly the movie Mel Gibson wanted to make as an abiding profession of his traditionalist Catholic faith. On that score it is a success.

Funnier than any low-rent rip-off of "There's Something About Mary" has a right to be. It's crass, it's unsophisticated, it aims right for the slapsticky pleasure center of the under-30 moviegoer's brain. So sue me, I laughed. A lot.

A heart-rending account of people trying to dodge the hurdles that politics puts in front of them. By the end of this humanist epic, some are ennobled by their struggle. Most are exhausted.

The ugly duckling of Nickelodeon's after-bath lineup. That's its strength.

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.

You sense River Phoenix would rather be elsewhere, and whether he’s responding to the movie or to something larger is not ours to say. But the feeling persists. It’s like watching a premature ghost.

The result is a curious hash: warmly funny in the comic scenes and shamelessly sentimental during the sad bits, of which there are many.

It’s a twisty dark comedy in the action-suspense vein, piled high with talented actors playing cretinous fools and featuring enough betrayals, mistaken identities, and narrative switchbacks to keep you pleasurably befuddled.

Wonder Wheel, Allen’s new film, is one of the Very Bad Ones. Set in a post-WWII Coney Island that glows with the hues of popsicles at sunset, it’s a strained adultery melodrama that appears to have been written poorly on purpose, as a sour parody of 1950s theatrical clichés.

If anything, Burke & Hare is a slaphappy mess that recalls Landis's earliest work on 1970s midnight movies like "Schlock'' and "The Kentucky Fried Movie.''

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

Maybe The Oranges does represent a middle-age male fantasy, but Laurie lets you see its pitfalls as well as its pleasures.

It’s worth remembering that movies can have soul, too, if their filmmakers are willing to do the work to find it.

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

Has something many movies don't these days: interesting and attractive people talking to each other.

Everyone behaves themselves in this Rebecca, whereas the point of the book and the first movie is that our worst behavior is always floating just below the waterline, ready to bob to the surface at the wrong moment.

The film is spiked with moments of gleeful violence, but Coen and Cooke understand that the primal reason we go to the movies is to look at beautiful people in nice clothes, and on that score ‘Honey Don’t!” is a rousing success. On every other score, it’s a short, shambling, surprisingly horny mess — amusing if you’re in an indulgent mood, obnoxious if you’re not.

King Arthur does to this legend what "Troy" did to Homer, with one important difference: It's a better movie.

The movie balances cardboard comic bad-guys with believable teenagers, has the courage to avoid romance, and unlike most Hollywood films suggests parents can be helpful and loving as well as clueless.

The movie tries to tell the whole story instead of just a good one.

A heartfelt but muddled melodrama.

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

The British actor works his gonzo Method madness with such rigorous control, though, that he’s mesmerizing to watch even when the movie around him is losing its mind.

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

With more daring than success, Joker: Folie à Deux says that anyone who takes the Joker for a hero to be emulated is as delusional as Arthur Fleck, and it serves up its comic-book cake at the same time it stuffs it with rat poison.

Making a comedy that celebrates binge drinking and cretinous behavior isn't a crime against nature. Making one that's as brutally unfunny as Beerfest is.

The biggest unresolved question here is why we're paying $9.50, plus popcorn, for something we can presumably get at home for free.

The movie’s a piece of high-octane summer piffle: stylish, funny, brainless without being too obnoxious about it, and Cruise is its manic animating principle.

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.

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.

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

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that The In-Laws was directed by Andrew Fleming, who delivered the fizzy Nixon-era comedy ''Dick'' a few years back and who also had a hand in ''Grosse Pointe,'' the wicked, briefly-lived WB parody of TV teen dramas. The man obviously knows from satire, but not on the evidence of anything here.

Shyamalan the elder makes suspense-horror dramas that either give a half-baked idea a fully baked cinematic treatment or vice versa; Shyamalan the daughter’s first feature-length film is just half-baked all around.

Ideally, it would give you a sense of an entire people knocking the planet off its axis with a shake of their hips. If only El Cantante were that movie. Instead, it's a curiously sludgy cross between a Doomed Star biopic and a J. Lo vanity project.

The Last of Robin Hood plays like a laboratory control experiment gone wrong: What would happen if you made a movie with a great cast and terrible everything else?

Sweet, smartly acted, and charmingly old-fashioned, Flipped is a minor pleasure that will strike a lot of moviegoers - those who think no one makes movies for them anymore - as a major treat.

Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.

Despite the best of intentions, a career-best performance from Kevin Costner, and outstanding work by Octavia Spencer and child actor Jillian Estell, Black or White succumbs to some of the same stereotypes it tries to dispel.

The question that has to be asked is: Why? The original six-part BBC ''Singing Detective'' remains one of the signal achievements in the history of television -- really -- and its release on DVD this past spring puts it easily within reach of the curious.

A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.

Takers might have made a perfectly decent little B heist movie, but someone had to go and forget to give the cameraman his Ritalin.

Factory Girl is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It's something worse: an irredeemably banal drama about some of the most protean, contradictory creative forces of the 1960s.

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

One aches to think what the great "Looney Tunes" directors could have done with this material.

The Good Son delivers its knuckle-gnawing set pieces with a skill that makes other thrillers look logy.

Buried somewhere within the bipolar extravaganza that is The Invasion is an awfully good movie that got away.

Me, I'm a Johnny Rotten man, so this limp culture-clash comedy with a heart of patchouli just made me want to stab my eyeballs out.

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

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.

A movie like this needs a suave, amoral villain, so here's Paul Bettany.

A fertile example of the Studio Film Gone Berserk, where too many characters and too many story lines geometrically progress until a level of blissful absurdity is reached.

It's Lopez who's the proper focus of this dream. So intent has she been on becoming a superstar in the past few years that many people have forgotten that, given decent material, she can act.

French films have long specialized in depicting the impassioned, go-for-broke infatuation known as l'amour fou. Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare may be the first to investigate l'amour annoying.

An earnest, simplistic, affecting slice of low-watt indie filmmaking that goes where few American movies bother: below the poverty line.

The top-secret message this pigeon is carrying reads ''Wait for the DVD."

American Dreamz pitches its softballs with style. Martin Tweed, the preeningly heartless British host of the title TV show, just may be the great comic role that has always eluded Hugh Grant.

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

This prompts the perverse thought that By the Sea may simply exist as a movie for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to watch. It’s two hours of vacation, voyeurism, and celebrity marriage therapy, and you and I aren’t actually invited.

If it doesn't quite represent the new, improved Adam Sandler, it shows him almost desperately trying to figure out who that might be.

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?

Isn't just lame; it's neutered.

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

Watching this movie in 3-D is very much like sticking one's head in a blender and hitting "pulse."

Sydney White makes "Mean Girls" look like Shakespeare.

Filmed with a cold, poetic beauty, The Return slowly strips away motivation until it arrives at a place of myth both private and oddly universal.

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.

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.

A stunningly well-acted drama for grown-ups.

At times, Fanboys is every rowdy low-budget '80s road movie you've ever seen on Cinemax at 2 in the morning. What keeps the movie near, if not actually in, hyperdrive is its love of deep-dish geek culture and a gaggle of cameo appearances.

When Laura Linney turns up about an hour into The Hottest State, you can see the movie that might have been.

A genre cheapie from its digital-video camerawork to its Casiotone soundtrack to its bland, buff cast, the movie is a cultural watershed in a dry gulch.

The women of Perry's army will come out feeling they've been well-served, and for the rest of us there's Bassett, getting her groove back after a spate of less than worthy roles. Perry's getting his groove, too - I give him two more films and an A-list cameraman.

This is an old-fashioned sports hagiography of the sort that Gary Cooper used to star in while Teresa Wright sat smiling and worried on the sidelines, and, amazingly, it engages your attention and even respect while trotting out every clubhouse cliche in the book.

It would have been nice if someone had included a script, too.

It's a fearsome and giddily unhinged performance in a movie that isn't entirely sure what to do with it.

Expendables is the closest thing to movie Viagra yet invented. It's reprehensible. It's stoopid violent. It's a lot of unholy fun.

Those who love police overkill, guns, jingoistic race-baiting, guns, macho smugness, and guns will be well served.

Its swooping 3-D visuals let fans briefly feel they can touch a group that barely exists behind a wall of beefy security men.

The hair is funny, in part, because not much else is. “Burt Wonderstone” is a lazy, underwritten imitation Will Ferrell movie.

Cherry is three movies in one, none of them fresh, all of them overlong.

It achieves something previously thought impossible: It renders Billy Bob Thornton unfunny.

The director deserves admiration for sticking to her guns, but here's a heretical notion: Maybe the producer's cut would have been a better movie. This version may be too late, but it's also too little, and that's what hurts.

Maybe if Mapplethorpe hadn’t been commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, it would have been a batter movie. As it is, this sour, undernourished biopic is a disappointment just shy of a disaster — a portrait of a boundary-destroying artist that stays well within the safe borders of convention.

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

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

It’s clear what MacFarlane is shooting for — nothing less than the chance to be both the Bob Hope and the Mel Brooks of his generation. Be careful what you wish for.

"Maybe" was watchable and blandly pleasant; "Theory" is a smidgen better than that, if not the cruelly funny farce the movie's best impulses and its own trailer would have you believe.

The acting makes the difference, and in Jacket it rises above the needs of the material.

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.

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.

It all might wash in a Johnny Weissmuller “Tarzan” movie from the 1940s. It no longer suffices today. Filmmakers, it’s time to pack up Greystoke Manor. Tarzan is dead.

Manages a fairly rare trick: It's a movie that's both deeply felt and completely phony.

In trying to play up the naughty, witty side of the rom-com equation, the movie settles for snarky. It’s an acrid fairy tale, if not without a few pleasures, and it arrives on Netflix just in time for — wait, Christmas?

Unfortunately, Churchill the movie is simply dreadful, a stiff, melodramatic “Great Man” travesty that gets both the larger history and the details wrong while encouraging its star’s most overwrought excesses. What Cox serves in this movie is ham, poorly sliced.

It's a B-flick all the way, but it has no pretensions to the contrary, and that's some kind of refreshing.

Hopper peppers the cast with his usual assortment of fringe players (Dean Stockwell, Crispin Glover, Seymour Cassell), but his own cameo as a horny salesman is an embarrassment, and the dreadful script mistakes cuss words for wit every step of the way.

Delivery Man is predictable but likable, schmaltzy but sweet.

Faster is meat-and-potatoes action with a side of crazy.

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

Voyagers shows that Burger can still move a story along with craft, pace, and skill, even if that story is, in the end, awfully predictable.

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.

Gets better -- more rambunctiously astute -- as it goes, and its comic engine sputters into fitful life when Bernie Mac arrives on the scene.

Bring on the bread and circuses. Into the Storm features laughable dialogue, far-fetched situations, and generic characters played by actors who almost look like more famous stars. I still had a blast; and if you lower your resistance, you may too.

A grimly preposterous serial-killer thriller set in 19th-century Baltimore, this riff on the final days of the author of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other masterpieces of the macabre might qualify as literary desecration if it weren't so silly.

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.

If not better, a Part II always has to be bigger. In the case of The Hangover Part II, that means raunchier, nastier, darker. It also means much more predictable, which is ruinous.

It's painless, especially if you have a small child in tow, and the Rock, bless his heart, acts like it's all new to him. The star should do more comedy - he's got quick reflexes and a face that lends itself to cartoon double takes, and he's not afraid to look completely ridiculous.

Where Mia and the Migoo triumphs is in the art department alone, with rich brown charcoal outlines, majestic pastel washes that give depth to the landscapes, and riotous colors that are more vivid than the story line.

Barney’s Great Adventure is insipid, but it’s also harmless, and, besides, why shouldn’t toddlers enjoy the pleasures of their own kitsch?

Unknown is punchy and entertaining. Maybe not the sort of thing you'd want to spend $10 plus a mortgage for popcorn on, but a nifty surprise on DVD several months from now -- or on pay-cable on-demand right now.

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.

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

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.

A glorious disaster.

Explicit yet consistently unerotic. It's also intensely sad, capturing everything about these people except the high they ceaselessly chase.

And that dog -- or, rather, that digitally enhanced replicant -- is just plain creepy.

Simultaneously overplotted and simplistic, the new barnyard/racecourse comedy from Warner Brothers is predictable every step of the way, and it contains at least three too many poop jokes.

A movie only a copyright lawyer could love. It strip-mines at least three Hitchcock classics - "North by Northwest," "The Wrong Man," and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" - then commits unlawful assault on Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" just for the heck of it.

Has a welcome humor but only in theory, and theory, chilly and self-involved, is where this filmmaker seems most at home. Like its bio-digital sirens, the movie never quite comes alive.

Everything about the movie feels secondhand, including the wheezy plot about a treasure map and buried gold. The real problem, though, is plain old sequel-itis: Because the first story completed the narrative of these characters, the only reason to make a second film is money.

A new movie based on Roth’s 1997 novel “American Pastoral” offers proof yet again that this writer’s great literary gifts are almost impossible to translate to the screen. Roth is a protean American inner voice. The movies, sad to say, remain better at exteriors.

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.

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

It's a smart, provocative idea for a movie. I wish 9 Songs was that movie.

It's quite watchable date-night cheese - the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.

It’s refreshing to see Monáe show what she can do as a lead, and her performance as Veronica possesses a wit and savvy that complement the performer’s natural poise.

And that’s what The Girl in the Spider’s Web is: soulless, bloodless product. Subtitled “A Dragon Tattoo Story,” it exists almost solely to drive a stake in the ground for the further franchising of author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

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

Year by the Sea is for audiences who don’t trust the shiftiness of nuance and craft, of messages that rise up from dramatic situations rather than being pasted on top of them, and who would prefer their life lessons stated loudly and for maximum applicability.

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.

As an actor, Braff does thin-skinned sad-sack quite well. As a writer, he’s hopelessly banal. As a director, he’s a disaster.

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?

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

It’s acceptable scary-silly kid fodder that adults will find only mildly insulting. Unless they’re Bette Midler fans. In which case it’s depressing as hell.

The movie is by no means good but it’s surprisingly enjoyable: a misty, moody Saturday-matinee monster-chiller-horror special.

At its best, the movie's crazy in unexpected and poetic ways; at its worst, merely preposterous.

It can't be easy to turn one of the most stirring human rights dramas of the past quarter century into stultifying screen pageantry, but director Luc Besson and writer Rebecca Frayn have managed the trick with The Lady.

The tumultuous emotional, sexual, and literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West would make a fascinating movie — it’s a shame that Vita & Virginia isn’t it.

By now, we’ve come to expect certain things in movies adapted from Stephen King novels: brooding misanthropy, a pound or two of viscera, and — perhaps most horrifying of all — Hollywood actors delivering their lines with bad Maine accents. Needful Things delivers on said expectations, no more, no less.

The movie is decent and heartfelt, and it eventually settles into some sharp diamond action, but the small-town homilies are dropped like an anvil. If you thought 1993's "Rudy" was too spare and unsentimental, Final Season is for you.

A textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall.

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?

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

Throughout, Knightley gives this genteel silliness conviction, grace, heart, and nerve. Sarsgaard gives it smolder and sex appeal. And sometimes, dear reader, that’s all a movie needs.

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.

A vanity film refreshingly lacking in vanity.

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

Turns out to be a grade-A B-movie that grounds its thrills in particulars of time, place, and character, so that when the time comes to make the leap into the wholly preposterous, we do so willingly. This is a movie that earns our trust -- and then happily abuses it.

The new movie, in fact, has been made with the approval of the Winehouse family; coincidentally or not, “Back to Black” has the feeling of a whitewash.

For a series supposedly dedicated to the pleasure of superhero movies, Dark Phoenix somehow ends up illustrating their limits.

More drama than tract, it's a low-budget Christian indie that just clears the runway on the sincerity of its performances and inclusiveness of its message.

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

The dialogue is as subtle as a placard, the drama manages to be both cooked-up and dull, and the movie’s fear of brainwashed, tech-addicted millennials is so broad as to be unintentionally funny.

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.

Williams gives a performance that's honest and carefully wrought but on some level still a stunt. All that courtliness is wearing him out, and it's wearing us out too.

So unfocused is Shonda Rhimes's screenplay and so flabby is Marshall's direction.

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.

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.

Unfrosted may be the Platonic ideal of the Netflix movie: ephemeral, edible, enjoyable, forgettable.

The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.

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

No one on the screen bothers to commit to a character.

With a by-the-numbers screenplay by Tripper Clancy and assembly-line direction from Michael Dowse (see his 2013 hockey comedy, “Goon,” instead), Stuber is just the umpteenth iteration of the buddy-cop action drama pioneered by “48 Hrs.” almost 40 years ago.

A muscular Australian B-movie down to the thin characters and boilerplate dialogue.

The issue is contentious, messy, prone to wishful thinking. Some see a corporate plot to privatize schools. Others see a last chance to save them. Won't Back Down is on the latter side, obviously, and it has the boilerplate urgency of a TV movie that has been blessed with a high-end cast.

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

There’s a lot of intelligence in Transcendence. Ironically, almost all of it feels artificial.

As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.

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.

It’s an inane, absurd, fitfully amusing time-waster that ranks low on the believability scale and somewhere in the middle as mindless entertainment.

Inferno is the exact cinematic equivalent of an airport paperback, which is what’s fine and forgettable about it.

If you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

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.

Hess has made a classic rookie director mistake: Any spoof has to be at least as smart as the thing it’s spoofing, and this one’s twice as dumb.

Mystery Team is a guilty pleasure - a deeply dumb movie made by pretty smart people.

It isn’t even a disaster; that, at least, might be interesting.

Bacon makes an appropriately detestable villain; unfortunately, he's the most interesting character here. As for Love, well, this puts her one career rung closer to ''Hollywood Squares.''

It's bigger, noisier, shinier, and dumber, and it has no earthly reason to exist.

Aliens in the Attic is conveyor-belt family product, an action/adventure/sci-fi/comedy made from the bland corporate DNA of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. It appears designed for families who never leave the mall.

A pox upon history and an insult to the 16th president of the United States. It's that, of course - actually, that's the point - but this joyless, deafening cinematic headache commits a different crime. It's a sin against entertainment.

The best part of Orphan is the outstandingly lunatic plot twist that kicks in just as you're checking your watch and hoping they'll wrap things up. This development - I'd love to tell you, but you wouldn't believe me - boosts the movie into overdrive for a final 20 minutes of happy, disreputable mayhem.

Completely unoriginal, sure, but watchable and even likable.

Robert Pattinson isn't all that bad in Bel Ami. He just isn't right.

Speaking as both a parent and a critic, I do believe I'd rather drive rusty railroad spikes through my eyes than have to sit through one more computer generated family film about talking animals. The bad news for Hollywood is that after seeing Barnyard my kids feel the same way.

Suburbicon is George Clooney’s sixth feature as a director and the latest spiral downward in terms of quality.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is stupid enough to send you back to the one movie that did the saga right by ripping it to shreds, 1975’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

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.

It can’t be easy to turn the story of Hawaii’s last royal into a waxworks parade, but writer-director Marc Forby has pulled it off.

By never fessing up to its own bloodlust, Lionheart is, at bottom, chickenhearted.

Starts off mildly ridiculous, ascends to the full-blown ludicrous, and finally sails boldly off the edge of the absolutely preposterous.