Wesley Morris

I left as frustrated as that band teacher is at the beginning of the movie. Enough with these meek, banal exercises, David Gordon Green. Hit me with the sledgehammer in your heart.

This movie is especially egregious since it bundles the civil rights era, garden-variety bigotry, and the achievements of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.

Long on mood and moodiness, but at a loss as how to break any interesting human ground.

There's more gymnastic yammering in Loving Jezebel than in a season of "Dawson's Creek."

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

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.

Eddie Murphy in another mediocre family comedy? Imagine that.

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

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

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 laserdisc of media movies - it plays fine, but it's clunky and cumbersome.

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

The movie's enthusiasm is as indelible and shiny as the lip gloss its star wears to bed.

A shameless "Shawshank" redux.

Even 007 is a big old queen. Yes, Roger Moore's on board as a lusty codger, who, unlike the rest of us, can't get enough of Sanz.

It's a fact that becomes riotously evident in the reel of outtakes that caps the picture and incites wonder about why no one thought to give us 90 minutes of those instead.

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.

Had Spacey made Beyond the Sea 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been close to transporting.

Miracle at St. Anna is not work of outrage or joy. It's something distressingly new for the filmmaker: a work of obligation. It feels like a movie Lee made in order to say he did it.

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.

Actually, everything in Bowdon’s rant about America’s woeful public school system is important, including Bowdon.

It's not remotely as luscious or half as bold as Malick's movie, but it is shorter and more educational.

It's called Queens and, no, silly, it's not about six gay men who want to get married. It's about their MOTHERS. And this being a Spanish comedy of the lowest Almodovar-ian order, the moms are a lot more flamboyant than their sons.

Notably Wayansless. It's also notably devoid of a point of view.

A slow and silly action-comedy romantic-thriller.

As innocuous as the love songs on its soundtrack.

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

The only thing sadder than Jonah Hex is what appears to have happened to his movie.

Latest Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle stalls at on-ramp.

As Changeling strains toward its mawkishly optimistic conclusion, the old-fashioned moviemaking that Eastwood settled into doesn't suit either him or his star. It feels like a corny joke.

If Pulse is unsurprising as a horror movie (come on: chalky, soul-sucking freaks again?), as a campaign against the Internet, digital piracy, cellphones, and anything that computes anything (like laptops or brains), it's a riot.

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

Very little of it is as persuasive or enveloping as its beloved English counterpart. But it works very hard to distract 11-year-olds from thinking about the November arrival of “The Deathly Hallows.’’

Too much of Taxi is just tired.

It's an exasperating exercise in B-movie hokum and screenwriter's gimmickry.

This sequel, with the return of the first movie's insatiably slutty Los Angeles collegians, is as vulgar as its predecessor and just as almost-smart.

Needs a gritty intervention.

Doesn't have what it takes to be truly terrible.

A cheery version of a darker, grislier movie, one in which people like Daniel beat up people like Charlie, girls like Vicky end up in far more compromising positions, and women like Celia turn to Scotch and prescription drugs to cope with their pain.

The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.

They're still fighting in this sequel. But this is a more visually inspired, muscularly made movie than its predecessor.

Like a Bond picture with no spies or villains or car chases or gadgets or explosions.

Right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me.

This is an old man's movie, without an old man's experience. Despite McGinly's stated affection for Kreskin (the movie ends with a written appreciation of him), there's nothing personal about it. It's the movie equivalent of handing us a business card.

Disappointing for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's silly. For another, it's not always silly enough to be diverting.

It has the wild, rancid atmosphere of a garbage bag that a raccoon has ripped open.

Well-meant though it may be, the movie has an advertorial gloss.

Like most of Hallström's Hollywood movies ("The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat"), this one is excruciatingly tasteful.

An unremarkable comedy-drama.

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

The movie partners all the cliches of the inner-city school drama with the cliches of the dance instructional, and the two keep stomping on each other's toes.

Perry is a playwright, and his dialogue here is usually entertaining.

The Sentinel isn't an entire season of ''24" smushed into a bland two hours of movie? Does Kiefer Sutherland know?

This is a movie whose cynicism in the name of idealism might have appealed to Billy Wilder.

Written in wisps and watery double-entendres by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller, and the movie is so benign that its proceedings are beside the point.

Lopez smiles, whines, and blinks her way through this movie. She seems more relaxed than she ever has. And yet it seems like she’s hiding in romantic comedies, lest we discover that she doesn’t have a “Monster’s Ball’’ or even a “Blind Side’’ in her.

Veronica Guerin hardly trusts you to follow its story, opening with the murder, then a series of titles that explain what's to follow.

The Treatment fails to do anything interesting with Jake.

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

A defective poker comedy where the poker is a lot more interesting than the people playing it.

It's hard to care about people this generic - even when they're naked.

Most of the time it looks like we're on the back lot for a Romanian production of "Lord of the Rings IV."

Is a truly political stoner movie even possible? The entire point of getting high is to take some of the sting out of life. The movie goes after easy targets and goes soft on the harder issues.

The movie has embarrassingly limited ideas about both the sexes and sex. Like Sandra Bullock’s career woman in “The Proposal,’’ Abby appears to have never heard of intercourse, much less experienced it.

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.

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

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.

If it's difficult to find straight laughs in a colorblind prison movie (It's difficult enough to find a colorblind prison movie), finding straight laughs in a black one is almost impossible.

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

Not the sweaty midnight stroll through the garden of carnal delights that its title wants you to believe.

The movie has a jolly, half-remembered quality, as though it were adapted from a particularly rose-colored memoir.

You want the movie to stir your soul, push your intellect, or at the very least, break your heart. But it's such a repetitive and thinly constructed piece of filmmaking that the scope and complexity of Sampedro's case are turned to porridge.

De Bont's effects-riddled remake of the '63 spook-out adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel is not nearly as creepy as either its cinematic or its literary precedents. But it's a hokey, hokey entertainment and a $100 million Lili Taylor movie.

This is neither a psychological thriller nor an erotic one, so any interest in the story is purely the work of its stars.

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.

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

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.

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.

Everybody in the movie is so tightly wound that Walters seems a model of actorly limberness. She cuts through the movie with speed and mannish, zany wit.

Feels like an interminable pilot for a show to fill that deadly 8:30 slot between "Friends" and "Will and Grace."

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.

The early dilemma in "Rise of the Silver Surfer " is this: Save the world or marry Jessica Alba . Your conscience says, "Save the world." But the Maxim reader in you knows better.

Rendition is a reminder that, in the wrong hands, political outrage can be a slog.

"Wolverine" feels enslaved to its many masters - Marvel Comics, Hollywood, and the young men who devour their products - never sidestepping the déjà vu it inspires.

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

In the end, it's hard to see a real reason for the movie's existence. We already have Muppets.

The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.

A righteous but wrongheaded thriller, chokes on its well-meant outrage and leaves a moth-eaten plot and handful of nonsense characters on its way to a dopey finish.

In James Marsh's The King, the usually wonderful Gael Garcia Bernal is all wrong for the role of Elvis Valderez.

After a sensuous introductory act, The Reader descends into a series of dismaying contradictions regarding the moral toxins of the Holocaust - which still pollute postwar Germany.

Perry shelves his crowd-pleasing Madea character and aspires for the impossible mix of 1950s social melodrama, gospel-inflected public service announcement, soap opera, R&B video, girl-centric sitcom on the CW, and any episode of "Good Times," featuring Janet Jackson's oft-affronted Penny. Were Perry a visual director or a logical, patient screenwriter, that hybrid would count as a feat of singular ambition. Instead, it seems like the product of an abbreviated attention span.

Implausibly dainty.

The movie's not bad enough to be world-ending, merely clumsy.

The appeal of Bedtime Stories belongs entirely to Sandler. As a comedian, he doesn't have to stoop to a kid's level. He's usually already there.

The problem with the new movie is the same as with the previous one. Vardalos has this idea that she's a marm. And while it's true that she personifies her movies, I don't quite buy her librarian mode.

A pure Frankenstein flick -- ugly, profane, terror-inducing, clumsy, nasty, desperate, stupid, contemptible, horny and brought to life by schlocky, shoddy science and an electric wish to prove that its makers still matter.

The movie is as inconsequentially pleasant as its star, and far nicer than the title lets on, too.

A flavorless family-friendly action-adventure that doubles as memory exploitation. It has nothing to do with either the Mickey Mouse broom sequence of the same name from 1940's "Fantasia'' or the 213-year-old Goethe poem that inspired it.

The World Is Not Enough, like a 19th version of anything, is inanely self-parodic. So much so that one wonders why Austin Powers need have bothered in the first place.

Blame the unsexy subject matter if you want, but blame the uninspired casting first.

Not horrifying enough.

There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.

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.

This is a corny tale, told with both generous helpings of deli-sliced cheese and a brief stretch of chilling tumultuousness.

The movie's banal fantasies badly chafe any anthropological consideration of what a girl should do with her career. This isn't life. It's Lifetime.

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.

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

It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth.

More vulgar than funny.

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.

The real problem with this movie isn't its trashy side - the "Death Wish" stuff is actually suspenseful. It's the creepy note of causal judgment that hangs over it.

The movie has none of the embarrassing absurdity and cheap effects that made last year's trip back to the 14th century, "Timeline,'' such a joke. We should be so lucky. Instead, we get a listless avenger drama.

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

The movie is full of risible pontifications about the nature of art but falls well short of capturing the angst of creative frustration.

The score is the most effective thing about the film. Sometimes it's a suspicious, mischie-vous distraction from the reality that not enough of this makes sense.

Despite the Gallic source material, what we truly have in Unfaithful is a tasteful, adult-contemporary ''Fatal Attraction'' redux, right down to the mister's Soho address and the happy family tucked away in the New York hinterlands.

This is the kind of movie that mistakes heartbreak for being housebroken.

Once it’s clear the movie won’t be deviating at all from its formula, Frank’s journey gets tedious.

The film has a habit of cutting away from interviews for Maher's commentary during the drive to the next location. You can see him trying to work the car for a laugh.

A rather pat, occasionally desperate road comedy.

Directed by F. Gary Gray and written by Christian Gudegast and Paul T. Scheuring, the movie isn't even worthy of former NFL linebacker turned straight-to-video action figure Brian Bosworth.

Dreary-looking and painfully slow, but it's not terrible.

Their movie is watchable - never more gratuitously so than when Alba is filmed showering and slipping into a tank top. But we've been here before, no?

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.

It's an exercise in 1970s mood. But all the film does is conjure, channel, and allude, until there's really no movie of Green's own for an audience to grab onto.

As the movie is in step with Connelly's aching heroine and not trying to scare our socks off, Dark Water is of a piece with Salles's sensitive filmmaking. Obviously, from a genre standpoint, that presents a tremendous problem. Nobody goes to a horror movie for a good cry.

An earnest, alarmist new docu-plea for nuclear disarmament, concludes with an orgy of such destruction. Mushroom clouds. Infernal white light. Obliterating energy blasts. It's all here, and mostly beyond the pale.

Even if the story is hackneyed, it's hackneyed in a warm and universal way.

It's as if a version of Oliver Stone's movie has been frozen in some fraternity house beer cooler since 1987 and thawed for the age of plasma screen TVs.

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

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!

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life.

Brüno is what "Borat’" was too well-done to be: a publicity stunt about publicity stunts.

The trouble with Quantum of Solace is that the frills are a mess, too. Even the customary opening title sequence, with its writhing silhouettes and screechy theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys, is a cheesy throwback to the Roger Moore era: Ladies and gentlemen, the Quantum of Solace dancers!

Hopped up on standard action riffs, most of the film feels like hand-me-downs purchased from the John Woo outlet.

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

The movie is so dependant on its source material that it fails to put Carter, Thompson, Penn, and Christy to better use.

Eckhart, who gets more rugged by the picture, certainly works hard to bring the audience along. But he's a nervous wreck for nothing. This movie isn't talking to us, it's talking to other serial killer movies.

The platitudes in this gratuitously sentimental movie are taken a lot more seriously than the people.

It’s not a good sign when the first few minutes of a movie about singing, dancing, rapping, video-camera-wielding teenagers reminds you of a certain grimy horror franchise.

Particularly anticlimactic - the film itself seems sprung from molting yuppie catalogs.

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

Silly little thriller.

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

If there's nothing here for romantics, there's even less for gourmands. Nettelbeck fails to produce a good food metaphor, let alone an impressive, palate-aching preparation montage

If we learn nothing else about Krasinski as a filmmaker, it’s that he thinks more is more.

Date Night manages to live down to its store-brand title.

Often grating in its presentation.

It's a heart-warmer, a well-meaning movie that sets out to wring a modern message (and preferably some tears) from a famous but largely forgotten moment in history.

The laughless outtakes for ''Armed and Fabulous" helpfully remind us that it could have been worse.

There is no central drama, no surprise, no tension in his comedy. The ads for Along Came Polly make it look so upbeat and simple that you're convinced it must be hiding something, like death or a disease. But the truth is there in the advertising: nothing happens.

So much of Virgin is bunk masquerading as sexual politics.

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.

The movie doesn't hang together as a thriller, and the characters don't hang together as interesting people.

You get the sense that the cheap thrill of cheating is like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. The movie feels just as inadequate emotionally and psychologically. There's a lot of outward behavior but no inner life.

Determined to try your patience, asking you to fall in love with it.

If Crossing Over is less self-congratulatory than "Crash" about confronting its designated problem, it's just as inept at dramatizing the complex ways that problem unites and divides us. Here every cause is something you can wear around your neck.

More altruistic would be if Williams stopped torturing us with weepy endearments so he could look for that complex clown who used to mug just for laughs.

Takes a dedicated and true snapshot of African-American life. But so little of its presentation is memorable. This is a haircut movie that redefines ''fade.''

American Violet feels less like life and unreasonably more like the movies.

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

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.

The F&F series is the 21st century's beach movie, one for some beachless future world where the kids are crowning 25 and seem capable of living off of hair gel and exhaust fumes.

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.

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

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.

This is a movie about excess. It's excessively long (at least it feels that way), the slo-mo is used in excess (so are the swords), and our heroine, Yuki (Yumiko Shaku), when she does emote, is excessively weepy for a coldblooded assassin.

There is, however, Viola Davis, who might win an Oscar tomorrow for her one scene in "Doubt." Her part here - a minister combing the street for crack-whores to rescue - is about three times as large.

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

If most boxing movies are about redemption, Resurrecting the Champ is a boxing movie that goes to exasperating lengths to redeem its boxing writer.

For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.

Berman can’t quite juggle it all.

The movie is weak on attempts at survivalist philosophy (anyone bit by a zombie is likely to become one). Even the religious overtones feel tinny and unpronounced.

Walking Tall, which is credited to four different writers, is wanting for a reason to be.

In Sandler's movies, men don't cry; they urinate. So the scene in which the stars empty their bladders and change the color of a swimming pool's water might be the weepiest of the year.

This is territory previously covered in the French film "Ma Vie en Rose," which took a relatively more sophisticated view of both a child's self-expression and adults' discomfort over it.

As much as the director andco-writer, Paolo Virzi, might try, he can't bring any of these people into focus. The movie is shapeless, too.

Come for the surfing. Stay for the sainthood.

A sequel that makes it clear that the outrageous antics of the first movie had a one-time-only charm.

Not entirely persuasive, not entirely schmaltzy, "The Tic Code" is one of those well-meant dramatizations... that mysteriously made it all the way to a theater near you.

Somewhere in this movie, amid the ponderous exchanges and unfortunate O. Henry-style coincidences, there's American tragedy.

As an up-to-the-minute representation of the specifics of the teen universe, Sleepover lacks authenticity.

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?

The comedian's thankful willingness to do anything for Blue Streak...is its redeeming grace.

The camerawork is steady, the editing patient, the choreography playful. It's a zippy and inspired piece of moviemaking. But there's one problem. It's playing under the closing credits.

The picture's structural intricacy is a smoke screen for its psychological and emotional shallowness.

The explicit encounters and dirty talk in Eating Out suggest a new genre -- call it porncom -- that seeks to amuse and arouse at the same time.

A movie that sports more cameos than a "HeeHaw" marathon but not much else.

It's an unfocused overview that intersperses choppy interviews and observations with clips from "Deep Throat," including some of its most notorious and explicit scenes.

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.

A lazy, torpid piece of animated tourism.

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

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

Brown Sugar fails to produce an image of hip-hoppery as fascinating and complex as the moment when Halle Berry set her tongue wagging during a ghetto-fabulous grind with Warren Beatty in ''Bulworth.''

Only in the last 30 minutes does Evan Almighty put his gifts to decent use. Epically hairy and biblically robed, Carell suggests at that point what a bolder, more psychologically serious treatment of religious conviction would have been like.

But what can you do with Hayden Christensen? He's as close as we have to an android actor. It's all a chore for him. He never looks sufficiently scared, impressed, or surprised by any of this.

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

Blows to the head are delivered with more subtlety than the message of Diary of a Mad Black Woman.

Leans so heavily on its stars that their performances are marred by their emptiness.

It's often a lapsed, under-informed documentary with restagings.

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

You put up the cash, the movie clunks.

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

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

Freeman and Hunter are both overqualified for material this ponderous, but she plays along, while he appears to have made a minimal emotional investment in the oncoming avalanche of coincidences and cliches.

There are two reasons to put up with Soul Men, and that's the soul men themselves. Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac appear to be having a good time, and for most of this raunchy, poorly orchestrated buddy comedy, that's enough.

Delgo demonstrates how hard it is to create a memorable, credible-looking piece of animated entertainment.

This movie is the worst episode of ''Gilmore Girls'' ever.

The movie has a dramatic thinness, breezy tone, and unconvincing happy-ish ending that make it feel more inconsequential than anything about killers and imperiled children probably should.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The truth is, indeed, still out there. And when Carter finds it, may he heed its wisdom: Let go.

This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.

The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.

For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of House of Wax will only stoke their schadenfreude.

The lack of sexual tension is astounding.

Stardust certainly could have gone somewhere fun. But the magic and zip you need to get a blimp like this off the ground is scarce.

The casting alone should warn you about what kind of bottom this movie's going to hit.

The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.

Boring, mediocre movie.

Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack.

Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize.

It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.

Like so many of these farm-raised films, this one looks polished, but takes no risks, offers no surprises, and contains a final sequence that's laughable for its lack of courage.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.

You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.

It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.

Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.

The secret here is that the movie is rather tasteless. It has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.

The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?

Good Deeds is the first of the 11 movies he's written and directed to try a one-tone-fits-all approach. Sadly, that tone is funereal, and it's always a beat out of step with the rhythms of both real life and most movies.

Watching Granger and Priya chase each other around a hotel like squirrels in a park, you wonder what these two see in each other.

A one-trick action thriller that feels like a poor cousin of an episode of ''24." Call it ''12."

Franco can be exhilarating in movies -- tremulous, unhinged, a little wild. Here his jaw never stops quivering and his eyes stay welled up, advertising a breakdown that never comes. Not that Myles has a presence a man would fall apart over. She's too professional to drive anybody crazy.

It's actually a pretty lousy thriller.

Finding Home is well meant and earnest but is stretched to almost twice what would have been a comfortable length.

Seeing her (Kidman) in junk like this is a bit like watching the Queen of England eat a Taco Bell chalupa.

Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.

The horrible anticipation he [Aja] builds is derailed by a gimmick that makes the twist in, say, ''Fight Club" seem perfectly logical. To say more would be to ruin the movie, and why should I do that when its own makers have done it for you?

At the very least, a movie like this requires coherence to stay afloat. Barring that, it needs a star to distract us.

Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.

Some bad movies can make you feel awful for the people who made them and worse for the audience that shows up. The actors, the script, the camera: There's nowhere good they can go. For Greater Glory is that kind of bad movie: a total embarrassment.

Unlike most of what Moore has been in, Dedication is unlikely to delight retirement homes on movie night. But it's not imaginative, lively, or true enough to speak to its intended audience of American Apparel shoppers, either. It's a slog.

The most popular facial expression for victims in The Grudge 2 is something I'd like to call "deep befuddlement." This time "deep befuddlement" goes double for paying customers.

The Hollywood version of one of those fawning "60 Minutes" segments about musical prodigies. For most of it, I could hear the congested awe of Morley Safer.

It plays better as exasperating comedy than genuine horror -- although there is something terrifying about being stuck in a movie whose idea of a bogeyman is a scarecrow with an eating disorder.

If Bunraku were serious about subverting or reinventing the genres it's cobbled together, Moore would play the gunslinger or the samurai or the crime boss. But no. All she gets are a couple of scenes that demonstrate that she still looks great soaking wet.

Perhaps Employee of the Month, which was typed then directed by Greg Coolidge, is unfolding in the key of satire. But you'd have to be a dog to hear it.

Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.

Brainless thriller.

It’s like Bob Fosse night at the martial-arts studio. Most of the killing here is done with bladed throwing stars that, like the ninjas themselves, arrive from nowhere. They appear to have been used to edit the film as well.

The Bounty Hunter does give Christine Baranski, as an Atlantic City entertainer and Mama Aniston, another opportunity to enthrall us with her drag-queenliness.

Because Spun is so plotless it's almost avant-garde, we're meant to be delighted with its assortment of set pieces.

Drillbit Taylor sounds like a rediscovered blaxploitation movie or a name near the top of the NFL draft.

It’s unclear what Amy Adams did to deserve Leap Year, but all that’s missing from the movie is a set of jailhouse bars over her scenes.

Offers cliches instead of chills.

Creaky, earnest melodrama.

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

For better and worse, the movie is more attractive and competently assembled than its schlock peers. That's refreshing, but it hardly excuses the appalling lack of suspense, intermittent tastelessness, or shockingly low camp quotient.

Almost nothing works in this movie.

This story could have gone in a number of more inspiring allegorical directions but winds up your average bedtime story instead.

The sex bits are flat, the racial innuendo is flatter, and somewhere, Cosby is having a Pudding Pop and shaking his head in disbelief.