Wesley Morris

Neither hot nor square, it's as simple and earnest as any after-school special and as cameo-laden as any rap video.

Joshua is the sort of movie in which nobody does what you would do: like spank or demand an extra-strength time out.

One wants to find enlightenment - or at least entertainment - in this reconsideration of Playboy and of Hefner. But it's tainted.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

What the writer and director, Lance Daly, means as some kind of transporting urban adventure for them is a disenchanting slog for us.

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

Full of action, but no soul.

Watching the uncertain and disappointing new apartheid documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony'' is like going to the lecture of an impassioned but really disorganized professor.

Some will find it chicly inspired, recalling blaxploitation's heyday with its grimy urban realism. Some will rightly find it corny, absurd, and an insultingly limited presentation of options for the most disenfranchised African-Americans: I'm still waiting for the movie fantasy about the pimp who wants to get his GED.

The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.

The movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis.

The biggest problem with this movie - not that it's mediocre, dull, or barely written (though it's guilty on all counts). It's that Carrey himself is miscast.

One wishes Incantato was made of something other than musty air. Avati provides no real emotional counterweight for all the whimsy and nonsense, and the movie carries neither the force of morality nor the titillation of trashiness.

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

Harmless enough, but "indie comedy" sounds like something better seen at Urban Outfitters than at a movie theater.

It's taken Dreamgirls 25 years and several false starts to get to the screen, so it's a shame to see what a rush job it feels like.

What follows is serviceable action set to music you'd find in a video game -- or a military ad.

It's scant to the point of irrelevance.

As films about the young and the horny go, I preferred the smarter approach director Jeffrey Blitz takes in "Rocket Science."

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.

An arthritic failure, genuine only when the two outcast lovers' eyes dart toward each other, then retreat.

It also goes out of its way to give you a schlocky B-movie vibe by wrangling bait in the form of a bunch of Big-Gulp stupid stock characters - that's a whopping 44 oz. more stupid than you probably were bargaining for.

The characters are intended to be slightly stupid, but the writing isn’t necessarily smarter.