Wesley Morris

This is not a deep movie. A lot of it isn’t even good. The images and story are chaotically assembled. The arrangements bring the music too naggingly close to the rounded, boppy, angsty gleam of certain 21st-century stage musicals . . . Even so, the people who’ve made this thing understand what the Indigo Girls are all about.

The sad news is that nothing in “This Is Me … Now” is as fun — or funny — as those commercials. This project doesn’t seem to have brought Lopez any closer to serenity or levity. It’s an occasion for even more toil.

It’s a shame that the shots here are all over the place — the stage, the sky, too close, too far, too kinetic; only occasionally, in medium close-ups, just right. The director is Sam Wrench, and it’s unclear whether he’s making a movie or a salad. Under the circumstances, he’s done the best he probably could.

The best I can say about all of this is that it didn’t bore me.

No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premise. It’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment.

If anything, The Automat seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage.

There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.

Marry Me is a sad tale that’s too busy leaping from plot point to plot point for Lopez to express anything close to real. It tells a lot and shows nothing.

It’s bad, the sort of bad that knows what it is — campy rather than camp. “Campy” is camp with a diploma and a martini. And “Christmas on the Square” is a drunk.

The King of Staten Island is one of those 10-block-radius life slices whose smallness and intimacy ought to be a virtue. But the movie seems afraid of itself.

The Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.

Berman can’t quite juggle it all.

The whole thing just makes me miss how horny and violent movies used to be. Here, all the violence is sex. Only, it’s not. It’s just winking.

I liked the deluge of visual information and personalities. The pictures, footage, biography, news and gossip are the opposite of a Halston dress — unruly, busy, fussed over. But they come at you with an energy that feels substantial. Knowing what to do with all of that material is its own kind of intelligence. Why overthink it? Or: why show us what you’ve overthought?

You can see what this movie is after, something cockeyed but sincere, something in the neighborhood of Paul Mazursky, Elaine May or Alexander Payne. But the writing and filmmaking (Snyder directed) just aren’t quick enough.

This is Jenny from the blah.

It’s just two and a half years of — sorry, two and a half hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.

Ms. Streep’s near total absence leaves a hole Cher is expected to fill. It’s too little, way too late, of course, and because it’s Cher, it’s also too much.

Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between - loud, flashy, and unnecessary.

Parental Guidance is overly generous with regard to the silliness. However, it's not clueless. Crystal seems determined to give as generously as he gets. When a bully whacks him, Crystal covers the bully in vomit. Good for him.

This movie is the height of by-the-book dullness.

There is one bright spot. Ellie Kendrick plays Dolly's silly, breathlessly romantic little sister, Kitty.

The Collection is an honest title. The movie is just a lot of other people's greatest hits.

This fifth and mercifully final installment features so much idle anticipation that it's unclear whether we're watching a movie or an Apple product launch.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.

Come for the surfing. Stay for the sainthood.

The ending steals actionably from "The Blair Witch Project," the movie that helped spawn these first-person chillers.

For some, Atlas Shrugged Part II is a ridiculous movie. For others, it's scripture.

The whole thing ends with an urgent plea to visit the movie's site, which is partially devoted to The Issues, which involve such topics as "overmedication," "overtreatment," and "reimbursement."

It's a stupid movie by smart people who aren't smart enough to realize it's stupid.

An inconsequential high-school-reunion comedy that gets better when it stops trying to make you laugh.

The Words aspires to depths greater than the sex we never see these two have. There's nothing for the eye to do while the ear fills with the banalities of two streams of narration, one by Dennis Quaid, the other by Jeremy Irons, all of it built around a lie.

Oh my God, evil. What's with you? Ever since "The Exorcist," it's been the same song-and-crab-dance: Demons don't kill, divorce does.

Birbiglia, who's from Shrewsbury, has done some wonderful things with awkwardness. I'm sad to report that Sleepwalk With Me isn't one of them.

This tired little movie got on my last nerve. If Driss is so charismatic and so full of ingenuity, why isn't he using any of that skill to help lift up his family?

It's a movie so late in noticing a shift in American male grooming that for a documentary on the subject to work, Spurlock would either have to pitch it to our grandparents (or be a grandparent) or trace the arc of the shift and unpack it.

You're left with an inert, politically neutral movie, a satire that can't bring itself to properly satirize anything.

This is a manic hour and a half. It's full of pushy, grabby, assertive, borderline obnoxious characters, not all of whom went to Harvard.

It's all been called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, just like Paul Torday's 2007 novel, and, except for some despicable behavior in the later going, it couldn't be more harmless.

There's also new piety and self-righteousness about parenting. Comedies are nervous to find the real humor and wonder in having a family. It's usually tragedy or nothing.

This is acting that seems more freaked out, more traumatized than it ought to for a movie about an unwanted houseguest.

The party itself is something to see. A Pasadena blowout turns into a horny, druggy, apocalyptic scene culminating in riot police, news choppers, and a gentleman with a flamethrower.

Roskam appears more interested in trying to combine genres that don't easily cohere. On one hand, the film's a crime-thriller and police procedural. On the other, it's about the lingering trauma of Jacky's personal misfortune. The other hand is much stronger.

This movie has no teeth. It does not want to say anything, other than the unprintable word for penis, over and over.

As ponderous and overwrought as a film hogged by a couple of young hipsters named Roméo and Juliette can be.

I'm not getting the most of his (Washington) charisma or enough of that million-dollar dental work. I'm not getting the joy, and I miss that.

Janet McTeer provides a little ham to the role of a woman who dresses up her dogs because she misses her dead twin sons. But there's not nearly enough of her. Nor is there enough legitimate suspense.

It's cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson "Quit Taking My Stuff'' movie and an existential thriller about survival.

The movie is so desperate to be palatable, to appeal to everybody that it doesn't taste like anything.

It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.

There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of Shame. But never at him. That face tells the story of addiction: the joylessness of sex.

The movie is long and uniquely bad, the last of Stephenie Meyer's four books greedily tortured into two installments.

The moviemaking is proficient, if unremarkable. I like the idea of an Elizabethan action movie apparently more than I enjoy watching one.

The movie tries to do for forearms what the loosely similar science-fiction romance "The Adjustment Bureau'' attempted for men's hats: make them chic.

This is a ridiculous movie - a thriller so indifferent to suspense, so above mystery that one character literally stabs another in the front.

The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.

Killer Elite is based on a true story and about a half-dozen Jason Statham movies.

There's too much narration and too many drug-movie cliches.

It's basically a blaxploitation movie stretched to meaninglessly international proportions that leans on tired Colombian stereotypes. But if Saldana's aiming to be some kind of new Pam Grier, she needs to save more than herself.

Chasing Madoff is mostly that sort of movie, the kind you make when all you've seen is other movies and television shows about crime, when you want someone to know what you can do with a juicy story that takes some effort to ruin.

The crime is appallingly petty. But occasionally the friction between two actors' idiocy will produce a comic spark.

Bring Wet-Naps to The Devil's Double. It's coated and fried in the same batter KFC uses for Extra Crispy chicken. The movie might be greasier, actually.

It's hard to tell whether this is a tribute to female solidarity or a lamentation.

Larry Crowne isn't a movie for adults. It's a movie for adults who don't like things with screens and keyboards.

He concocts a climactic war that flattens downtown Chicago. Bay is such a little boy's director. You know he picked that city because it's the one with the best rock-'em-sock-'em street names. Wacker! Wabash!

This is a flavorless adaptation of Richard and Florence Atwater's 73-year-old children's book.

Mosteller might be the movie's real discovery. He twists his lisp and slurry speech around the dialogue in a way that exudes far less attitude than the kids.

It's the sort of movie that thinks cutting between two different stories makes it art. Usually, it feels like an exercise in art. There's a lot of calisthenics but very little beauty or truth or whatever it is the movie is going for.

The most provocative thing about The Beaver is the adult-movie title. The film itself is alternately fascinating and dull, though mostly the latter.

The camera, costumes, and art direction do everything right. Too much so. The movie strips away both the grand weirdness of the circus and the dire desolation of the Depression. Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange are exchanged for Vanity Fair.

Scream 4 has a smart beginning, featuring Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, and one well-delivered line at the end that would have brought down the house in a better movie.

The new remake of Arthur is a thin copy of the 1981 original. But it has a few things going for it.

Shadyac doesn't film how his change inspires more change, or showing him, say, starting a school for destitute orphans. All we see him give is this movie. It's not much of a contribution.

The movie is generic and shallow in its glimpse of the love and sex lives of a handful of young New Yorkers.

Canner is either overwhelmed by so much impressive access to so many alarming business opportunities or lacking the investigative rigor to drive home the moral problems of these drugs and the existential problems of these women.

But that ending is a whopper all the same: a heartless blast of tragedy, exploitation, amusement, and general flagrance.

Whether this movie works for you largely depends on whether you're willing to work for it. To which I say: Bring your gym clothes.

Part of the trouble is casting. This is a movie that needs a great or gonzo performer to give it depth or heft.

Paltrow makes the part look natural. She's not impersonating an actual singer, so she seems merely like a twangy, alcoholic version of herself. She should be stopped from dancing in enormous arenas, but her thin voice is rather pretty.

All the movie's good style goes to waste on a not terribly compelling conceit and loosely sketched characters.

I can't say why Coppola wanted to spend time with this man. It's like following someone on Twitter who fails to generate many compelling tweets.

Tron: Legacy gives us a dud stud named Garrett Hedlund as Sam Flynn, the hero of this petrified sequel to 1982's "Tron." None of what he sees impresses. The feeling is mutual.

A rather pat, occasionally desperate road comedy.

A slow and silly action-comedy romantic-thriller.

The Dawn Treader, like its predecessors, has no real struggle or drama. We're dealing with kids for whom everything comes too easily for us to care.

This native send-off is robotic enough to leave you eager to see what an artist might do with a reboot.

As cosmetically sanitized revisions of history go: This is as good as it gets.

Mostly, Smart People is a failure of imagination.

Little Nicky is but a meek gross-out cousin of "The Waterboy."

There's something wrong with this picture, and the problem is there on Smith's face -- Smith looks distressingly I-was-an-Oscar-nominee bored. That goes double for Jones.

Waist Deep is a cynical excuse for the writer and director (and talented actor) Vondie Curtis-Hall to sock some money away for the kids' college tuition. It's as if he watched "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " and thought, "It needs more palm trees."

Reinforcing the chasm between movie magic and wishful thinking.

Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace.

An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.

This movie wants to cover every base without thinking very deeply about them. So while a lot of ground is covered in 80 brisk minutes, the information presented is only abstractly useful.

Cop Out seems aptly named. It’s not personal. It’s barely even a movie. It’s a fire hydrant that the director and his stars use for exterior shots.

It's too long and self-consciously progressive to be entertaining, but it's too well-intentioned to be dismissed altogether.