Ty Burr

The problem is that both Philippa Goslett's script and Paul Morrison's direction lack the stylistic craziness - the sense of real, lunatic danger - a project like this desperately needs.

We get it: Stand Up Guys is supposed to be cutesy criminal magic realism. But Stevens, an actor turned director, never finds the right vibe, and the movie's genuinely creepy misogyny sours the attempts to go sentimental in the final act.

Love Wedding Repeat isn’t more than the sum of its fairly foolproof parts, and it suffers from a leading man who’s likable but who lacks the mad gleam of a true farceur. The rest of the cast pulls their weight.

Almost but not quite as obnoxious as its title. Little kids will love it. You’ll need a hazmat suit.

The premise of Agent Cody Banks is more than a little bizarre.

What a waste.

Kick-Ass 2 is a special kind of crap: the kind smart people make for audiences they think are stupid.

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.

All the pieces are in place for an incisive tale of Brit-pop ego and madness, but filmmaker Stephen Woolley -- a celebrated UK producer ("The Crying Game") making his directing debut -- lets the story get away from him.

Jarmusch has come up with a dud.

Imagine some very smart people setting out to make a very naughty action film and shooting themselves in the foot. Voila: Crank: High Voltage.

Stupid, sadistic, misogynistic, confusing, and more than a little ridiculous. Here’s the thing, though: It keeps you watching, if only to see how tortured the plot or characters are going to get. I’m not sure that “entertainingly awful” is a recommendation, but the shoe fits.

The general consensus on this one: Rats.

Four Christmases is essentially "Meet the Parents" quadrupled.

Carlos Carlei’s Romeo and Juliet is a failure of skill.

Darling Companion would be instantly forgettable if not for Keaton, who imbues Beth with a sorrow, warmth, wisdom, and rage that feel earned.

The movie's a genuine oddity: a Latino action drama with one foot in bullet-spitting genre flicks -- '70s blaxploitation and '80s coke-kingpin films are the primary reference points -- and the other in raggedly personal family melodrama.

Del Toro does remind you of Brando here; unfortunately, it's the Brando of ''Apocalypse Now,'' the one with the green face and puffy line readings. Jones fares better, even if he wears the same grieving-for-humanity expression throughout the film.

The result is a movie that's both clever and stupid - an interesting feat.

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

Suicide Squad prides itself on being “dark,” but it’s really just jokey, cynical, and violent, not to mention visually ugly as sin. It’s as subversive as milk. But the cast and the pacing keep it moving.

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 more like "Porky's for Dummies," a thoroughly depressing teen farce in which Internet voyeurism has replaced human intimacy and where privacy is SO 20th century.

3 Days to Kill is pretty terrible, but it’s not really Kevin Costner’s fault.

The tone is almost willfully off-putting. The parts that are supposed to be cute could give you the creeps. The film is almost a Platonic ideal of how to take an emotionally transfixing real-life story and get it wrong.

Movies that are entertainingly nuts don't come around very often, and when they do they need to be given their due.

The stand-up routines — from Jackie and the pros alike — are funny and blue enough to shock a few laughs out of you, sometimes in spite of your better judgment, and the star seems once again genuinely invested in creating a character.

Some documentaries are an embarrassment of riches. Salinger is merely an embarrassment.

A sludgy action thriller with an out-of-shape star, Blood and Money doesn’t have a lot going for it other than its setting: the uncharted north Maine woods in the dead of winter.

Indeed a rip-off - a rehash of Hong Kong superstar Chow's greatest celluloid moments with an overlay of Hollywood action cliches, youth-flick silliness, and ah-so stereotypes.

Aloha is as generic as its title. The islands exist solely as an exotic backdrop for the pretty Hollywood haoles to play in. Business as usual, and I never thought I’d say that about a Cameron Crowe movie.

If you're up for a relentlessly overripe melodrama that takes place in movie-Europe as opposed to the real thing (the Parisian streetwalkers in berets are a good tip-off), by all means catch Head in the Clouds.

The script tries to work up sympathy for a character who’s not much more than the bastard trailer-park spawn of Jerry Lewis. Sadly, this is everything you ever thought an Ernest movie would be.

Dazzling to behold yet puny of imagination, the movie takes the “Star Wars” formula — hero myths nicked from Joseph Campbell, cutting-edge visual effects, comic-strip dialogue, goofy-looking aliens — and reduces it to generic Big Box shelf product.

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

The film's biggest miracle is the straight face Nick Nolte maintains in his role as Socrates.

Butter dearly wants to be a hot-button social satire that plays rough with sacred cows: Midwestern power-moms, the religious right, race, sex, you name it. Mostly, it wants to be an Alexander Payne movie from the 1990s. "Citizen Ruth," say, or "Election." Instead, it's a shrill, cartoonish mess.

Grim, ridiculous, and dull.

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

The results are -- there’s no other word for it -- a disaster.

Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.

It's off-putting, rude, misshapen, and more often than not hysterically funny. The second half, sadly, is an ear-splitting train wreck.

The dialogue is brightly self-conscious, and sometimes it clicks. Just as often it curdles into an entitled whining.

It's coherent, well shot, and tartly acted, but it wears you down like a dinner guest showing off his doctorate.

There are about 15 minutes of genuine, bust-a-gut comedy in Bringing Down the House, and, surprisingly, they belong to Steve Martin, who hasn't been funny on film in years.

All that’s missing is Clyde the orangutan from Clint Eastwood’s “Every Which Way But Loose,” which, trust me, this movie could have used.

Life as We Know It gives bland and predictable a good name.

In no way, shape, or fashion does Queen of the Desert qualify as a good movie, but for fans of Werner Herzog — those of us who have followed cinema’s Teutonic imp of the perverse since the 1970s, when he was staging all-dwarf fables and sending conquistadors across mountains — it is fascinating and something close to a must-see.

A "great poet" movie, the poet in this case being Dylan Thomas, and it's utter bollocks.

There's an interesting movie in here, too, about the isolation of Indian brides brought to a new country by strange new husbands and mistreated, but Provoked rarely ducks below its glossy surface to go there.

Like most family movies these days, "Alvin" is torn between the glitz that sells and the homilies that endure. It's a load of Ting Tang Wallet-Wallet Bling Blang.

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

At this late date, the rules of the adolescent slice-‘n’-dice genre have codified into ritual (teens + sex = death), suggesting that those who rent this may have bigger problems than just bad taste.

Both writer and director are men, which perhaps explains why much of the talk in Chick Fight about female empowerment and channeling one’s womanly rage comes off as lip service on the way to the next beat-down or snuggle-up.

You'll come away from Legendary with no sense of what amateur wrestling is about.

One of those loud, cringe-y female-empowerment comedies that feels like it was made by people who hate women.

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.

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.

Watching Arthur and the Invisibles is like sticking your head in a Gallic pinball machine: It's hectic, technically impressive, and your skull starts to pound after a while.

This is quite enjoyable as creature features go, and Bale continues to demonstrate his curious under-the-radar appeal. As for McConaughey, let's just say a star is reborn. Suddenly that whole naked-bongo-playing incident makes a lot more sense.

A woozy, wheezy impressionistic take on a woman’s nervous breakdown that aspires to the avant-garde but plays like a bad head-trip movie from the late 1960s. It’s dreadful. Worse, it’s not quite bad enough to be much fun.

Young children and adults with high pain thresholds will enjoy the movie during its brief pause on the way to your On Demand menu.

For a movie that's sexist, racist, and possibly the most deeply closeted gay love story to be released this year, After the Sunset is reasonably entertaining.

Sister Act 2 is pretty much a mess. It takes forever to get on its feet and doesn’t make a lot of sense once it does.

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

Like everything in this humorless new genre, "Chronicles" comes with its own snap-together mythology.

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.

"I'll be back," the man said, and he kept the promise, but I'm not sure we wanted him back like this.

It’s a not-unwatchable retread that has been tricked up to pass as a whole new thing. The problem with high-frame-rate productions is that they don’t look like what we’re used to calling “movies.” The problem with this one is that there wasn’t much movie there to begin with.

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.

An American Haunting sets the bar at a new low: It makes ''The Blair Witch Project" look like a masterpiece of world cinema.

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

Gigantic plays like a Sundance movie with half the nouns removed; fetchingly cryptic for a while, it's ultimately just obscure.

The movie's primary pleasure is Hopkins, who manages to take the role of Father Lucas seriously without being serious about it at all.

Works so hard to be inoffensive that you may well be offended.

The producers - Fox Films and the usually reliable Walden Media - have tried to gin up the story for multiplex audiences. They've succeeded in making a movie for no audience at all.

One doesn’t really want to beat up on Girl Most Likely, because it means well and everyone in it appears to be having a good time. But so many things are wrong with the film, from a script that’s bright but never sharp to the editing that leaves scenes hanging flaccidly in the breeze.

The leads are all vaguely Protestant and all suspiciously chipper, yet this dopey farce somehow backs itself into cross-dressing, gender reversal, and gay camp while insisting that everything's in good, butch fun. [23 Feb 2007, p.D10]

And So It Goes looks like it was shot on outdated video equipment and has a forced, jokey script by Mark Andrus (”As Good As It Gets,” “Georgia Rule”).

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.

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

Third Person staggers well over the two-hour mark only to self-destruct in a burst of overwrought cleverness.

It’s one of those multi-character morality plays — think “American Beauty” meets “Crash” — and it will play especially well to freaked-out parents, even as it distances itself from them by acknowledging that the kids (most of them, anyway) are all right.

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.

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

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.

As B-level suspensers go, though, The Return isn't actively awful -- just slow and cursed with a lead who acts with her t-shirt.

One could forgive a budget this threadbare, performances this amateurish, a plot this tortuous if the 3-D effects passed the cool test. Sadly, watching ''Adventures" is an experience akin to seeing the world through dung-colored glasses.

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

Inside Amelia is a sharp idea struggling to get out: How does a woman marketed to the public as a star turn herself back into a human being? And at what cost?

A guilty pleasure that’s guiltier than most, a southern-fried potboiler that seems to be settling in as a camp remake of “Body Heat” before it turns itself inside out and becomes something else entirely.

There are really only two kinds of big-budget action movies: stupid, and good and stupid. Surprisingly, XXX: State of the Union is good and stupid, which makes it an immediate improvement over 2002's meatheaded "XXX."

The greater embarrassment is that so many millions of dollars have been wasted on an entertainment that feels so smug, so pointless, and so thunderously empty.

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.

All that's missing is coherence. Call it Blunderbuss Satire.

That this witless, formulaic sequel to the hit comedy Analyze This even dares to spoof ''The Sopranos'' is embarrassing. It's like Freddie Prinze Jr. slamming Gene Hackman as a bad actor.

The Duke is not only name-checked in passing, but Eckhart (who's excellent) even bears a squinty resemblance by the final scenes.

The film is a disquieting and often very funny examination of yuppie unease in the country. The problem is, it's disguised as a dopey suspense thriller.

The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.

Only God Forgives is the kind of remarkable disaster only a very talented director can make after he finds success and is then allowed to do whatever he wants.

Succeeds at its main tasks. It re-creates new wave New York with Proustian force, from the Kiev (the diner) to Fiorucci (the clothing store).

The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier.

W.E., her second effort after 2008's "Filth and Wisdom,'' tries awfully hard. In the end it tries our patience.

Abandon is this CLOSE to being good, juicy, bad-movie fun.

When all is said and done, the movie's a steaming plate of corn -- and, indeed, that's part of the pleasure. Myles, though, delivers a fine comic performance with no strings attached.

McAvoy’s performance is a deep, deep shade of gonzo and by far the most enjoyable aspect of Victor Frankenstein — you don’t often see over-acting this enthusiastic or this flecked with spittle.

Short, cheap, weird, and passably diverting.

If the director had brought any toughness of perspective - or at least the self-lacerating humor of 2002's "Igby Goes Down,'' still the reigning champ of screwed-up-Manhattan-prepster films - we might be able to digest George's follies without cringing.

This frantic farce about a married couple whose video frolic goes viral would be much less bearable without the topspin Segel imparts to even his silliest dialogue. But he looks hollow-eyed and gaunt, like a man starving himself to prove a point. I want the old, lumpy Jason Segel back. Eat, bubbe, eat.

Fly Me to the Moon is a crummy movie for kids, yet it still holds out the prospect of past wonders and future marvels. It's one small step for a housefly, one giant leap for 3-D.

Perhaps because Campbell is a purist at heart, My Name Is Bruce is as awful as anything he has done - a broadly silly gore comedy in which no gag is too cartoonish to be indulged in at least once and preferably three times.

As for the movie itself, it's tolerable.

It must have looked great on paper. On screen, it’s a soapy mess that even Joan Crawford in her delusional late-period prime couldn’t save.

"Prison isn't all that different from a nightclub,'' comments Alig toward the end. Funny; this movie isn't all that different from prison.

When it’s time for the hot sex scene between Timberlake’s ambitious Richie Furst and Rebecca (Gemma Arterton), his boss’s luscious second-in-command, the encounter is as charmless and chemistry-free as the wooden banter that has led up to it. I’ve had dentist’s appointments that were sexier.

It's another one of those loud, penis-obsessed bro farces, lazily written (by actor Seth Rogen, among others) and haphazardly directed.

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.

Everyone has piled into this dumber, sillier, more consistently funny reprise with an enthusiasm that’s infectious, and not in a low-grade medical way.

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

A fully felt, decently crafted teen B-movie melodrama, plenty preposterous in places but alive to the vibrant miseries of being young and misunderstood.

Nothing in How to Lose Friends feels fresh or on target.

For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt isn't naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night at the movies. It's an obscenity.

Venom, the movie, is a reptilian Marvel mishmash whose touch saps the life force of almost everyone in it.

A watchable, unnecessary re-do that works hard but lacks the charm to really zing.

2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture.

The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.

Isn't for the kiddies. It probably isn't for anyone not interested in the darkest corners of the human psyche.

If you doubt that August is the boneyard for movies too poor to release in other months, here’s The Kitchen, an addled and actively unpleasant crime comedy-drama with a high-profile cast and a mean streak a mile wide. Based on a limited-edition comic book and completed in July 2018, the movie’s been sitting on the shelf until enough people are on vacation to not see it.

We haven't had a good Frankenstein, Dracula, or Wolf Man movie in a long time, so here's one where the whole gang shows up. One catch: It's not good.

Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.

Proficiently filmed and utterly uninspired.

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.

At nearly two hours, Mirrors is overlong for a summer horror toss-off, and the movie's three or four false endings make it seem even more of a haul.

There have been plenty of movies adapted from video games before, but Hitman may be the first one that actually feels like a computer wrote and directed it.

Primeval is a hoot if you're in the mood, though, and it gets points for trying to stuff a little globo-think into the minds of Friday night mayhem fans (who will probably rebel, since only one skull pops like a grape).

A by-the-numbers B flick with a preposterous script and a good cast trying their best.

Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

Picture Timberlake in the booth recording his lines and you have the best joke in the movie. Everything else is actively painful, a frenetic, unfunny mix of action, romance, dud dialogue, and icky things popping out of the screen.

Hirschbiegel and Watts don’t have the nerve for camp. Even a scene of a rejected Diana back at Kensington, forlornly playing Bach at her piano while mascara streams down her face, is played gloomily straight.

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.

Bewitched presents a phony and cynical look at how Hollywood might make or remake a television show. It's as grating, laughless, and narcissistic (though, to its credit, not as cruel) as that new Lisa Kudrow show-within-a-show-within-a-show, "The Comeback."

The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

Ghosts is better-than-average McConaughey swill, but not by much - that's its pleasure and its curse.

You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career.

The movie makes me finally want to test-drive one of the “Dark Tower” novels, if only to see what King himself was able to bring to the party. Maybe that’s been his evil plan all along.

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.

It is spectacularly average. Neither an inspired reimagining nor a painful dud,

Any good will the movie generates, though, is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.

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.

To watch Alice Through the Looking Glass is to witness an army of smart, creative people dumbing themselves down into delivering what they think the market wants.

Noisy, silly, gratingly upbeat, and piously sentimental, 'Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is what passes for wholesome family entertainment these days. It's the sort of movie to send small children and grandparents out of the theater hugging each other and strong men in search of bourbon.

Completely unnecessary but painless, like dentistry performed by mimes.

So, yea, it is a stinker. But it is prophesied that in six months time you shall come across 10,000 B.C.’ in the land of Pay-Per-View. And you shall say: ‘‘Pass the popcorn.’’

This needless sequel amps the silliness to DEFCON-4 levels of frantic surrealism and overstuffs the running time with famous faces. It’s a pop quiz instead of a movie, and it’ll be dated by tomorrow morning.

Shabbily filmed, thoroughly harmless Official Product.

In Undead, sadly, rigor mortis has set in.

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.

What’s interesting about Vacation is that it holds on to the original’s acrid cynicism for the first 40 minutes or so before turning predictable and bland. There are some real, nasty laughs to be had here, but they’re front-loaded.

Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.

Equilibrium just happens to be a really bad comic book.

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.

Someone once said about W.C. Fields that he had the rare ability to despise amusingly. I can imagine no greater compliment than to say that Ricky Gervais seems, at his best, like a young Fields.

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.

It's a disappointingly limp small-town farce played several shades too broadly by a cast that has done better work elsewhere.

Son of the Pink Panther isn’t an unwatchable mess like 1982’s Curse of the Pink Panther; it trots along quickly with series veterans like Herbert Lom adding needed class. But there’s a void at the center of this film about Inspector Clouseau’s long-lost son, and its name is Roberto Benigni. Where Peter Sellers’ Clouseau had a blissfully out-of-it officiousness, the Italian comedian’s sole shtick is to beam idiotically. He’s that ruinous oxymoron: an unsurprising clown.

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

One of those sticky dramas.

Flatters its audience by dividing the grown-up world into mean idiots and nice idiots, which might be interestingly subversive if the movie had anything on its mind. Instead, it's just a Hollywood crash course: Heist Films 101.

Older moviegoers may also recognize The Space Between Us as a dress-up variation on the old Jeff Bridges/Karen Allen movie “Starman” (1984), and by far the best parts have to do with Gardner’s often comic adjustments to life on Earth.

RV has teeth -- more teeth than the last few Steve Martin films, anyway -- but it's terrified to bite down, knowing that the paying audience would feel it more than anyone.

Watching the movie is a little like picking up issue #42 of a comic book after you've skipped the first 41: There's an entire back story mythos hovering in the background like a phantom limb.

The unforced cleverness of the opening scenes gives way to lazy plotting, awkwardly staged musical numbers, and car chases. By the end, the movie resembles just another formulaic, family-friendly piece of product, one the kids will enjoy and you’ll endure as it goes in the DVD player for the 40th time.

How can you tell the target age for Superhero Movie is exactly 13 1/2 years? Because most of the jokes are Internet-related.

The feel-bad movie of the summer.

In a better movie -- a much better movie -- LaBeouf might make the same sort of impact Dustin Hoffman did in ''The Graduate.'' But the kid's young. There are movies to come.

Taking wobbly aim at our country's complicated love affair with guns, the movie's the very definition of a cheap shot.

Dreadful.

The film eventually collapses under the weight of its no-budget arrogance, but it goes some interesting places beforehand.

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.

The movie must be bad, right? Worse, it’s a bore.

A loud but proficient slab of explode-o-rama summer blockbuster nonsense, perfectly entertaining if you like that sort of thing, extremely skippable if you don't.

The bad news, for those looking forward to The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause with anything like enthusiasm, is this: Bernard the Elf is history.

The exact cinematic equivalent of a classic Bob Dylan song. It's also proof that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another.

We don’t go to Hollywood movies for hard facts, but it’d be nice to think we’re getting some kind of truth with our entertainment. Maybe Aaron Sorkin thinks we can’t handle the truth.

I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by Cats — the musical, the movie, the disaster. In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.

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

After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?

The most painful movie so far in a year that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel, Your Highness is a tedious, dung-colored misfire that sullies the genre of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "The Princess Bride."

A weirdly airless disaster, a turkey so insistently DOA that the dialogue serves as its own epitaph.

Shakespeare this ain’t. In the long, long history of “Romeo and Juliet” movie adaptations, “Juliet & Romeo” lands well below the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and just above 2011’s “Gnomeo & Juliet,” in which the characters are portrayed as animated garden gnomes.

Everything about the film is a welcome rebuke to the happy-face apocalypse of “2012,’’ a movie that turns mass extinction into the Greatest Show on Earth. In The Road, what has been lost is recognized as infinitely precious; what’s left is bitter and our due.

A stultifying drama based on the 2009 season of the Abilene High Eagles, Lights suffers from sermonizing dialogue, amateurish performances, and an ugly racial blind spot disguised as white savior paternalism.

The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.

Despite exotic locations, epic cinematography, and much spectacular crash and bang, this "Mummy" feels like a threadbare toss-off.

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.

If most December movie releases are epic-length and Oscar-ambitious, then Punisher: War Zone has to be considered Hobbesian counterprogramming: It's nasty, brutish, and short.

The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.

This third go-round for the "Wolf Pack" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, the new movie heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad.

JUST worth your children's time, and hardly worth yours.

Has the distinction of being much dumber and pulpier than the comic book on which it's based -- the ink practically comes off on your fingers as you watch it.

Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.

Teenage boys will be in heaven. All others: Check, please.

Stands to delight small children while probably causing their parents' heads to cave in.

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

The bottom line: Any movie that gives Jonathan Winters work is doing something right.

A dull little PG-rated spook story for tweener girls.

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.

Earnest and predictable, Crossover deserves more than the horselaughs that will probably greet it in theaters -- but not a lot more. The movie is harmless, which is both its strength and its weakness.

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

Faris is delightful, in fact, and she steals the movie right out from under Schneider.

Garner bulls her way through the film with determination and a minimum of facial expressions, like someone who’s been told to clean up something awful and just wants to get it over with. So what if Charlize Theron did it better in “Atomic Blonde,” last year’s female-led brawler that is in every conceivable way superior to Peppermint?

You've seen New in Town before, and you've seen it done better. Still, it's a sweet-hearted bit of anemia, pleasant and obvious, and there are a few honest laughs to it.

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

There's not much else for viewers to do but give themselves over to the whims of the bad-movie gods.

The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.

This is one schlockfest that may be enjoyed more by casual viewers than by hard-core fans, since writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson breaks with the established mythology of both properties whenever he feels like it. Like it matters.

A laughably inept series of adolescent poses trying to pass itself off as a movie.

Rock the Kasbah is a pandering, poorly assembled botch that thinks it’s playing fair by Afghan popular culture but only manages to add insult to the countless other injuries inflicted upon that country. If it were any worse, they’d be screening it as evidence at The Hague.

Force of Nature lives up, down, and sideways to all those demands; it’s hardly a great film, but it keeps you watching, and only partly in disbelief.

Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.

Heading straight to streaming platform Paramount+ without the embarrassment of appearing in theaters first, the movie is both blissfully incoherent and weirdly generic, as if it had been assembled from the spare parts of other movies and glued together with stuntwork.

There are two problems with A Good Day to Die Hard: It’s terribly filmed and nothing in it makes any sense.

Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''

Reasonably painless if you've never seen a comedy about the travails of newlyweds.

If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.

A pallidly "hip" revision of classic fairy tales that would be better told straight up if anyone had the nerve. It will divert small children, but so will a brightly colored object if you twirl it.

The actor/walking disaster known as Charlie Sheen gives a perfectly credible performance here. It’s the rest of the film that tries your patience.

The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").

A comedy that can’t even admit to its own overwhelming sense of disgust.

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

A dunderheaded comic melodrama with clothes to die for and dialogue to shrink from. It’s downright depressing.

A pleasant, thin, hammerlocked movie about the pleasures of breaking free - it's the Cliff Notes version of anarchic classics like ''Bringing Up Baby'' or ''What's Up, Doc?'' Should you want to take the graduate course, you'll find those films at your video store.

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.

The plot is a canvas on which to bludgeon the audience with action sequences that have been shot for maximum overstimulation.

The Heart Is Deceitful wants to cauterize us into feeling something -- anything -- but it's far too heartless to know what.

The film’s so formulaic your 6-year-old will be ticking off the plot points as they lope by.

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

It's a remarkably laugh-free comedy that takes on a dark subject and skitters along its surface.

Musketeer's fight scenes are underlit, overmiked, and appallingly edited, with none of the spacious grace that even routine Asian action flicks get right. Worse, the narrative scenes make less sense.

Who on earth is this embarrassment -- easily the worst film of the year to date -- aimed at?

Is there a statute of limitations for how many good actors can be wasted in a bad movie?

Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.

And while I understand Downey wanting to make a movie for his kids, the world might be better served if, at long last, he made one for himself.

The accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,

Pure Saturday matinee kiddie fodder and this close to going straight to DVD.

Slightly better than it should be. For Tucker Max, this possibly represents a triumph.

It's nearly unwatchable, a farrago of confusing direction, stupid plot coincidences, and banal dialogue.

Worst of all, the movie's simply not very shocking. Madonna has made a career out of toying with image and ego, but this is a vanity project in the smallest sense possible.

The movie isn't THAT bad -- it's just made-for-TV historical treacle that has somehow found its way to the big screen (and barely that; if you want to be moved or outraged by the film, you'll have to travel to Danvers or Revere).

For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

Harmless in the extreme and it'll mute your kids for nearly 80 minutes, but why not just treat the little yard apes to the real deal and take them to ''Spirited Away''?

A chick flick that makes its chick characters - and by extension its chick audience - look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

The result isn’t art but it is an improvement: a scurrilous, lowdown, sub-Tarantino action comedy that, unlike the original, doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. How’s that for praise?

Vengeance has the odor of court-ordered community service. The jokes never rise above the groin. The trees look plastic, the characters more so.

Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.

There’s nothing wrong with a good, dumb comedy, but “Bride Hard” doesn’t even qualify as in-flight entertainment.

Bloody and bloody funny, and Jackson and Carlyle make the best salt-and-pepper team since Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte knocked heads in ''48 HRS., '' but ultimately the movie can't find a way out of its own dead end.

For a movie about the Great Communicator, “Reagan” communicates surprisingly little.

Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.

Kranks is a feel-good movie in which every character is hateful (except, sigh, the cancer lady), and a Christmas movie too chickenhearted to mention Jesus.

''Health Inspector" hopes to do for Larry what ''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" did for Jim Carrey, who in this context looks like Noel Coward.

A live-action film based on a line of dolls, it's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow, purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my brain stem shrivel up as I watched it.

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.

You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.

The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.

If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.

Saved from total puff only by the obnoxiousness of its star, who seems to be laboring under the delusion that he's the next Eddie Murphy.

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, and in Old Dogs, we have the season’s blue-ribbon gobbler.

The Covenant is dopey, formulaic stuff for the Friday night fright crowd. Worse for them, it's never remotely scary.

An overlong, joyless, and inconsequential affair, full of dead air, and possessing only a few moments of jaw-dropping bad taste. It's a dull disaster.

How inept is Serving Sara? It makes even Elizabeth Hurley seem graceless and ugly.

The line between gross-out humor that's inspired and the kind that's witless is fine indeed, and Movie 43 obliterates it with poop and movie stars.

This is first-degree cultural homicide.

Generic teen dice-and-slice with interior design by way of ''Saw." The movie's tight and reasonably well shot, though, and there are flashes of nasty invention between the ritual guttings.

While the Nightmare on Elm Street movies possess a sick yet clever surrealism, and the first Halloween was at least well crafted, the Friday the 13th series has always been the cut-rate horror franchise, offering barely functional sex-and-slash pitched straight at the moron brigade. Jason Goes to Hell varies the formula a bit, with ideas swiped from The Terminator, The Hidden, and Alien, but after nine installments the impalements and dismemberments all look the same. So go to hell already, Jason — and take Sean Cunningham, the ”brains” behind this dreck, with you.

Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock’s entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.

Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.

It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.

An intensely unpleasant killer-thriller mystery.

The original 1989 dead-guy farce maybe had a few laughs if you caught it on cable at one in the morning. Blind drunk. Weekend At Bernie’s II not quite that good.

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

House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.

Carpool is affably stupid Saturday-matinee fare -- good for opiating the kids for a few hours -- but let's just say it's no Big Bully.

Innocuous amusement for 5- to 8-year-olds and other people stuck in the anal stage of development.

By far the funniest part of Strange Wilderness is the trailer for "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" that's running before it.

The scenes with Keaton and Irons, too, rise above the mediocrity-unto-badness of Love, Weddings & Other Disasters on the strength of the actors’ charisma alone. Irons thaws satisfyingly as a snob finding unexpected love, and Keaton remains adorably, engagingly herself, turning her character’s blindness into a la-di-da form of grace. They are diamonds at a garage sale, and they deserve better.

A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.

You've seen dozens of movies like this on cable in the wee hours.

This isn't a great movie -- it's barely good, really -- but it gets something about New Hampshire I've rarely seen onscreen: a defiant pride in the way things don't work out. Live Free is a comedy of vastly diminished criminal expectations. That's the fun of it, and the frustration, too.

A bleakly allusive look at frozen lives, Curling is very much a specialty item - a movie that goes nowhere slowly.

The RKO Swiss Family Robinson isn't considered a lost classic — a lost pretty-good-movie is more like it — but the fact that Disney is finally releasing a movie they bought specifically to sit on is unexpected and welcome. [20 Oct 2019, p.N1]

Civics lessons rarely come this disturbing or this convincing.