Wesley Morris

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

If good intentions were all it took to create a decent movie, Thom Fitzgerald's 3 Needles would be some kind of masterpiece.

The Great Raid amounts to a noble failure. This is sad news for those of us who remain hopelessly partial to Dahl's mean streak. The failure we can live with. It's the noble part that will never do.

Neither (Bullock/Reynolds) brings out anything good in the other, and watching them try hurts the eyes, the tummy, and the libido.

As Diesel says, ''I like something fast enough to do something stupid in.'' Mission accomplished.

Miley may vacillate, but for now her indentured servitude to Disney continues. The image that comes to mind is Princess Leia chained to Jabba the Hutt, but that's probably just me.

A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.

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.’’

Writers Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow remake is more devilish, hitting its targets with the reckless glee required for a round of Whac-A-Mole.

What should have been 90 zippy minutes of jingling, giggling, winking fakery adds up to only about 20 minutes of fun.

The movie offers up too many airy spiritual lessons in the hope of crossing from farce to sentiment.

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

The Box is the work of a visionary flirting with commercialism after having so grandly flouted it with “Southland Tales.’’ He doesn’t give in completely. Several trips to the megaplex might be required for The Box to make complete sense.

The movie brings to mind the more polite parts of "Wedding Crashers." Failure to Launch, while totally exuberant and appealingly made, is not nearly as randy.

The film has a persuasive murkiness and one extended mythopoetic final sequence that's almost moving in its silence.

Like Schumacher, director Gregor Schnitzler is more preoccupied with his characters' looks than their behavior. You might not buy the ideas. But you'll definitely want the T-shirt.

In the Land of Women sounds like a piece of cheap science fiction about the last man on earth. If you're the lovelorn mother and daughter in Jonathan Kasdan's first movie, a grating romantic drama, that's painfully close to the truth.

You don't want to think, what would Preston Sturges or Alexander Payne do with this material? But there is a seed of satirical cynicism in this movie that a smart, clear mind could have finessed. Jake Kasdan is not that director. He doesn't appear to know what to do.

The mix of mawkishness and polemic is naive. Children, though, will probably leave with a lot of good questions. A better movie would leave them with more.

It does not feel good to report that a movie with Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise makes the eyelids droop. But that's what Lions for Lambs does.

A crafty, sometimes craven, but hardly worshipful snapshot of an unlikely candidate for biggest rock act on earth.

Not particularly good -- meaning navigable, remotely entertaining, pleasing to the eye -- it does, rather nobly, want to hip its audience to gender fluidity.

Witherspoon is a professional, demanding we give ourselves over to her carbonated pluck.

Silly to the last drop of rationed water.

It's entertaining enough, like watching a celebrity workout film with a plot. But never once is it believable.

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

A gentle collection of scenes that work and scenes that don't.

An erotic thriller. It is also an Atom Egoyan picture, which means any claims either to actual eroticism or conventional thrills are theoretical at best.

The laughs come in all the wrong places when they come at all.

As entertaining, charming and conceited as other Robert Redford joints, but it's also insufferably obvious.

Any movie that would think Calista Flockhart to be the sort of high-strung basket case who'd hurl obscenities down at a dog kennel outside her apartment is worth sitting through.

The film winds up stranding us in a desperate wilderness of collapse and betrothal.

Gere is a pleasure, smiling and spinning and high-fiving his two classmates -- played by Bobby Cannavale and Omar Miller -- and the movie is happy and extremely likable.

This low-rent, nonsense cop business filled me with a nostalgic twinge. I didn't know I wanted the "Police Academy" series resurrected with a lot more hilarity, but I'm glad somebody did it.

The Lost City is Andy Garcia's ballad to Havana during the Cuban revolution. You'll have to forgive the penthouse view, though -- it's the only one Garcia can seem to find.

Emmerich does know his way around an action scene -- there's an exciting sequence in which Sam and his buddies run from wolves while looking for meds inside the huge ship that pulls up alongside the library. But he's a master of disaster with no people skills. The characters in The Day After Tomorrow are fantastically stupid.

Uses lots of stock footage and takes looks back at America's big transitional period as though the era came in a can.

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.

A sporadically entertaining cupcake of a movie.

Ideological disaster!

This is a smart piece of revisionist fluff that dares to question what happens after the royal honeymoon is over.

Man on Fire is ponderous and bloated, dragging the Bible and Giannini into its swirling cesspool. Scott can't give the movie any real emotional weight. And Washington gives his first lifeless performance.

What the cast members lack in sharpened skill they more than make up for in raw gusto and athletic scrappiness (most of the actors have logged a lot of soccer in their pasts). These guys give a sport that is virtually nameless in the movies a good name in this one.

A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.

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

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

It’s network television drama, starring actors best known for their TV work and full of the petty gripes and mild worries of characters who really have nothing compelling to worry about.

Perrier’s Bounty is all stock material, full of characters that deserve more than the cliched shootouts and showdowns that befall them. Even the movie’s most natural impulses seem to come from a can.

The movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the cliches of the genre take over.

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

Offers cliches instead of chills.

It’s a stagy, half-entertaining, half-tedious acting competition between five excellent Englishmen.

Just Like Heaven suggests that a post-coma Elizabeth might understand what life is truly all about. Of course, if being alive means having to live in this movie, maybe she was better off the way she was.

As lifeless and unneeded as The A-Team is, it might have been worse.

Phyllis and Harold is really about Phyllis and how discontent has a way of spilling, then spreading. Kleine never quite says so, but her mother’s life was a tragedy.

Sexual doublespeak is everywhere.

An arcade game disguised as a love story, nearly comatose with cute.

Howard never decides on tones that complement each other, and the dissonance is jarring.

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

The Flowers of War is the latest movie focused on the Nanking atrocities. Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death'' was released in the United States last year and presented a far greater, grimmer, and more punishing re-creation of the sacking.

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.

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.

It's been animated by the same company that made "Despicable Me,'' which is to say you don't know whether to watch The Lorax or lick it.

So all the handsome shots that turn the city into a toyland and all the superb editing and vibrant art direction - all the formal tricks Daldry uses to whip you up and work you over - risk being too much. After 45 minutes, it can feel like junk on a sundae. But the movie has a human coup.

Needs a gritty intervention.

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

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.

Unofficially, You, Me and Dupree is a companion piece to last summer's "Wedding Crashers," a movie whose lunacy is desperately needed this summer.

Spike Lee has been treading similar terrain with both greater cogency and fewer similarities to Bertolt Brecht. Manderlay, though, is mad and perplexed in its own inscrutable, schematic way. The trouble is the angrier it gets, the more infuriatingly banal it becomes.

It's the year's best movie sex.

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

The movie is only sporadically interesting.

At some point, he finds himself drifting around a swimming pool, and it's tempting to think of Dustin Hoffman sinking to the bottom of the deep end in "The Graduate." But there's a difference. Swanson's pool is empty.

The experiment in the new movie is this: What happens when his Type A's are forced out of their comfort zones? If only Brooks had managed to leave his. How Do You Know feels like a collection of scenarios he's done better.

The moviemaking is driven only by contempt; he (Roth) wants to nauseate us into submission.

A shamelessly dumb movie.

A jokey, junky potboiler.

By 2009, the franchise has nothing new to offer. The culture, through video games and reality television, has caught up to the series and surpassed it.

This is one of those your-roots-are-showing family circuses where just about everybody seems like a clown.

Bruce Almighty would rather go runny and bland, mostly where Aniston's Grace is concerned.

As long as Saw stays in that big, nasty bathroom, all we need to believe is the knot in our stomachs.

Leave it to Ron Howard to turn a plaintive Dr. Seuss ditty into a C-grade Tim Burton psychodrama.

CJ7 is precisely the 80-something minutes of delirium and cheesy special-effects you'd expect from the man responsible for the chaos of "Shaolin Soccer" and the lunacy of "Kung Fu Hustle."

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.

An hour and a half of cultural and sexual headaches only barely leavened by MacLachlan's performance.

The fun of these movies is that Linney often seems too refined for such greasy junk, but there she is anyway, hamming it down as it were.

While Lane is her typical winning self, the film is mawkish. The more we're cajoled to root for Sarah Nolan, the divorced preschool teacher she plays, the more Must Love Dogs stops resembling a movie and starts feeling like a greeting card.

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

If you want to watch a gaggle of pretty faux-neurotic people hang out and throw quips, you're probably better off watching "Friends."

This is Jenny from the blah.

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.

This remake is ultimately content to be repugnant.

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

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

It's one TV-movie romp that Kristy McNichol never got around to starring in.

A screwball comedy that made me wish I were 13 again, because this is precisely the kind of movie I would have gone nuts for in the ninth grade.

It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.

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

The reliable Mike Newell directs Mona Lisa Smile with such assurance that the important moments are never mawkish or dull, and he encourages the women to act with absolute conviction.

Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.

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

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

The screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs affirms life and jerks tears with welcome degrees of humor and muscle.

Numbing story.

Into the Blue is as much a mesmerizing aquatic expedition as it is a reasonably suspenseful action adventure.

This is as safe and sweet a movie as you could make about America’s sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll-est event.

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

I was not a fan of Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" (2005), but Brooks, at least, seemed willing to concede before it was over that his movie was a terrible idea. Spurlock seems opportunistically optimistic.

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.

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.

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

On most levels his performance is as flat as his abs: very early Wahlberg.

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

Such a well-meaning but unambitious work that it's tempting to take it seriously even as you dismiss it.

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.

Miral feels like gastric bypass moviemaking. It's a miniseries awkwardly stuffed in the body of a two-hour drama about the Palestinians' long struggle against the Israelis.

I've never seen a movie like this. Not on purpose. Daniels isn't saying he's tasteful. He's just saying that his tasteless trash is as deserving of our attention as the tasteful trash we feel like we have to see. The whole thing's a crazy fantasy, like watching a porno dream it can win the Oscar.

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

A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of José Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.

Historians might demand a little more history from Elizabeth: The Golden Age. But soap opera loyalists could hardly ask for more soap.

Shouting the title never quite prepared me for either how stripping zombies aren't as hot or as funny as I thought they would be or how quickly the movie's eager intelligence collapses on itself.

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

The movie itself is never truly clear. If it's also never intentionally bad, its unintentional badness keeps blasting into shockingly clever places.

Hall Pass is the brothers' 10th movie, and their most gangbusters since "Me, Myself & Irene."

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.

Audiences of a certain hipster disposition, in fact, will see Elizabethtown and pine for Zach Braff's ''Garden State," the movie to which Elizabethtown bears an unfortunate and inferior resemblance.

Mediocre-TV-drama-load of formulas.

Harwood's screenplay obscures any sort of philosophical, religious, or historical considerations in favor of pulpy and faith-bruising sensationalism.

A movie drunk on its very existence, one that misses more frequently than it hits and couldn't care less.

A terrifyingly cheap-looking B-movie comedy mocking terrifyingly cheap-looking science-fiction B-movies. As such things go, this one has its moments.

Too smitten with the Eisenhower-era nostalgia.

Studding your movie with friends, admirers, and sycophants is having a ball; it does not bring us to question the illusory power of cinema or the politics of entertainment.

In light of our recent crackdown on runaway nudity, the steady stream of exposed breasts in the gnarly Eurotrip give it a nostalgic feel.

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

Sadly, more than an hour of this movie is given over to talking. And not the wink-wink Quentin Tarantino kind, either.

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.

Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.

Wields its Middle America values and moralistic flogging of idiosyncratic lifestyle choices like a flipped bird.

Basically, talented French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has too much style on his hands. His film isn't as amorally grandiose as "City of God." Nor does it achieve the hulking tragedy of "Gomorrah."

Come for the surfing. Stay for the sainthood.

A wildly dull, predictable script whose holes seem to be courtesy of random sniper fire.

For a movie with such a misplaced sense of history, The Scorpion King seems afraid to have more fun with its own stupidity.

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.

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

The resulting movie is a nauseating flight of Hollywood navel-gazing.

Rush Hour 3 reminds us that Tucker is an utterly strange entertainment phenomenon: He exists only in the world of these movies.

Works as a quixotic study of emotional quirks.

Its finest moments come in sequences such as Alice and Darlene's prison break and the girls' final wrenching plea for freedom.

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

Drive Angry is something new for Cage - a movie that feels like it's straight FROM cable.

For his part, Short, another pop choreographer, sounds like Vin Diesel, but he moves like a bee. When he dances, he makes sure every girl in the theater goes home stung.

Creaky, earnest melodrama.

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

A surprisingly effective little horror nightmare.

An effortless heartwarmer that manages to be utterly corny but quite likable.

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.

Scares up few chills.

The movie's queer delight is contagious. You'll exit lip-synching.

Spellbinding if ponderous.

The director, Beeban Kidron, handles the proceedings with an episodic aimlessness on par with Bridget's.

The amusement it provides is cheap, disposable, and hardly worth the number of quarters you fed into the slot in a frenzy not to go home empty-handed.

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.

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

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

Kennedy doesn't take the character any deeper than a caricature of rich, nonblack fans of hip-hop culture. But as a caricature, he's fantastic.

It's a terrible sign for a movie when the sole reason for its existence is a satanic opening date.

Eloquent and unapologetically cute.

If the movie weren't so playfully dumb -- did you ever think you'd see Ian McShane throw Andy Samberg through a basement shelving unit? -- this would be exasperating.

A laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.

An edgy, hypnotic entertainment that's like a Club Med production of "Lord of the Flies."

If Perry’s cinematic vision remains less than 20/20, his sagacity gets stronger by the movie.

We're left with the painful reality that Paycheck might get Alfred Hitchcock, but it certainly doesn't know Philip K. Dick.

An overblown urban crime drama that should be a lot better than it is.

Week in and week out, horror movies cheat us, so it's wonderfully cathartic to watch a bunch of kids cheat death in what turns out to be the best installment yet in the "Final Destination" franchise.

On just about every occasion in Meet Dave, Murphy appears to be on the verge of cracking himself up. This is good news. At least someone found him funny.

Little of the fragile wisdom with which García Márquez imbued that idea has survived this timid Hollywood treatment.

Its commendable, if juvenile, sense of erogenous adventure is sullied by bland technique, canned suburban punk music, and the fact that all the exploration does amount to maturer characters.

A brutally inane movie.

Crashes the slapstick of "Home Alone" into the youthful angst of "The Breakfast Club."

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.

For most of Not Easily Broken, I wondered why the movie wasn't worse. Then I remembered it was directed by the veteran Bill Duke, who applies ample TLC.

It's a tale of two missused Academy Award winners trying to justify their participation in a moribund, noisome redux of any disposable prison movie you care to remember by lobbing Oscar clips at each other.

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

This is a movie that's built around characters the audience is bound to find more insufferable than anyone does in the movie itself.

Honestly, the whole movie is from 1960-something.

Paul Haggis switches from the problem of racism to the problem of Iraq. The war is a better fit. None of the exasperating guilt on display in "Crash" has made it into In the Valley of Elah, a solidly made genre movie: the Army mystery.

Cradle of lifelessness.

It's fun, it's kind of somber and it succeeds in making you think about how you might be squandering middle age.

A thriller whose title remains printable only because the right people probably don't know that it refers to a violent sex act.

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

An impressively competent "how will male teen star get with female teen star at high school dance?" romance.

Daredevil the movie strains itself trying to catch up with Sam Raimi's web-slinging megasmash. It's a faceless copy, right down to the muscle-rock groaning on the soundtrack.

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

Blakeney can't decide if this is a quirky romantic comedy or a quirky mob essay, and you can see the movie thinking itself into a rhythmless hole with cement shoes.

There's an unstable genius brewing beneath Mary Katherine's scarlet headband. As "SNL" women go, only Gilda Radner seemed as willing to rib so much of herself for our pleasure.

Lawrence just leans on Grant and Bullock, who could have done a movie this breezy from the set of their next one -- where, presumably, Bullock will be playing Medea.

Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.

Reinforcing the chasm between movie magic and wishful thinking.

It's hilarious -- and on purpose, too. This is the first satisfying adult summer comedy set in New England to come out of Hollywood since "The Witches of Eastwick" in 1987.

In The Bucket List, Nicholson is human-ish. And Freeman is so human.

Fred Claus sells you something you didn't know you wanted: a Vince Vaughn Christmas movie. Vaughn is not the hook. Neither is the holiday. The script, by Dan Fogelman, is smarter than that.

This is the sort of asinine action exercise that needs a star to blow up cars and leap from rooftop to rooftop with gusto.

As murky and derivative-looking as the film is, it moves with an authority that pummels you into submission.

It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a movie, and the closest Jaglom has come to brilliant satire. It also explains why this woman is just chatting on a countertop and not Jay Leno's couch.

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!

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.

Relentlessly bland.

Like the current hit "Taken," Last House 2009 packs a vicarious jolt that might feel cathartic to certain moviegoers.

A watchably absurd popcorn flick about a man who can see two minutes into the future.

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?

Something feels off with von Trier’s sense of artistry now. Something feels stuck, like his head’s wound up lodged in his rear, which brings the movie closer to “The Human Centipede” than I would have thought. But this isn’t cinematic horror. It’s proctology.

In a sense, Sandler is damned if he develops, damned if he devolves. But he needn't apologize for being who he is by turning a goldmine sitcom into a tame "Baby Boom" for guys.

This is the most-off-the-mark adaptation of a novel since Brian DePalma's what-was-that "Bonfire of the Vanities."

For kids strung out on Anthony Horowitz's 007-lite adventure series, this maiden adaptation is a pleasant enough diversion from having to flip the pages.

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.

Even by the unambitious standards of some children's movies and many movies that star Caine, this one has a difficult time making a case for itself as anything other than an adventure in baby-sitting.

Forget the metaphors, why not just make a movie about poor, exploited Mexicans?

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

This is the feistiest Hollywood movie about American women and their thankless jobs since "9 to 5."

It is a traffic jam of broken hearts, fluxing racial identities and deplorable outfits that has everything but a salsa overhaul of "I Will Survive."

The punch line isn't that funny.

The movie is a serviceable way to pass the time: Kids will cheer the bright colors and funny new words ("Kowabunga!").

Invites you not simply to identify with its low IQ but to cheer it on. This is a movie that knows you know it's dumb, and that's enough to make the whole thing worth tolerating.

We have lots of terminology for what happens when two male stars appear to have the platonic hots for each other. The genre is called bromance. The feelings are bromantic. The orientation is bromosexuality. What Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have in 21 Jump Street scrambles, transcends, and explodes all of that.

Often grating in its presentation.

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

A sorry excuse for a ghetto SOS.

Neither thrilling nor psychological, but it's chicly shot and edited and is pretty much art-directed to death.

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.

In another universe - though it is difficult to imagine which one - Garry Shandling might be sexy.

A depressing piece of gun-crazy Hollywood scuzz that, with its gassy style and runaway immorality, makes a Tony Scott movie look like a Robert Bresson picture.

The film feels long when it should be brisk, and it's bloated with stretches of hot, dead air. The racial kitsch goes nowhere.

Hop may have taken years to design and animate, but it feels as if minutes were required to compose it.

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

By taking nonsense seriously Outlander never achieves camp. It's a comic book that's mistaken itself for scripture.

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.

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.

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

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

Peculiarly entertaining exercise in bare-bones, Hollywood-style action heroism.

He doesn't just kill a good buzz. He bludgeons it.

It has a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for romance will find only cardboard lovers. People looking for a resounding musical will find it odd that the camera runs away from the lip-synching cast. And people looking for opera -- well, shame on you.

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

The movie crassly repurposes tragedy to excuse its cliches.

What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure.

The movie seems terrified of true psychological complexity or perversity. It's less a family tragedy than a lousy country dirge.

The best there is to say is that it's better than ''Troy."

Part sketch-comedy cartoon, part Cracked magazine spoof, installment four is the most scornfully made yet.

National Treasure even has a rough time approaching the heart of ''The Amazing Race," a show that manages, in 44 minutes, to make you care about average folks as they follow clues across the globe.

This movie brings to mind much better cable TV shows like the marijuana comedy "Weeds,’" the one-on-one psychodramas of "In Treatment," and the astonishingly cinematic "Breaking Bad."

There's the world-alteringly scary possibility that (Leder) might be trying to kill us with a star-studded "After School Special."

The product of immaturity. It approaches suffering with a meaninglessness that must be a luxury for anyone who has never lost anyone, or is incapable of empathizing with someone who has.

There's nothing really wrong with it -- it's bad, but no worse than it needs to be, which is the problem.

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.

Miserable as it crawls for two eternal hours toward being "life-affirming."

It's mesmerizing nonetheless for its flagrant disregard for narrative, character, pacing, performance and good lighting.

I wish I could say there is something pleasurable in watching John Goodman reminisce about the good old days while impaled on a steering wheel in the Volvo he's crashed on a California freeway, but I can't find what it is.

The characterization couldn't be more flagrant if the soundtrack creaked out an oldie by a certain ancient pop quintet: You're a candy girl.

"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 film is remarkably stunted.

If I must watch two men not be gay together for the 300th time this summer, those men should be Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds.

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.

Bland though it is, "Havana Nights" could be the start of a globe-bettering franchise -- and across history, too: "Dirty Dancing: Monticello Mornings"; "Dirty Dancing: Gaza Strip Afternoons."

You put up the cash, the movie clunks.

Sadly, the movie is a zoo.

Once a hurricane blows Gere and Lane into each other's arms, all the director's tasteful style and good sense turn into mush. Given the material, I suppose it has to.

The movie is just a cheesy, preposterous, semi-eroticized way of yelling, "Fight! Fight!," when two people go at it in the school cafeteria.

A deplorable piece of cynicism whose only point of interest is Gael Garcia Bernal's accent

Looks like something stubbed out in an ashtray.

The Daddy Day Care business model appears to be the 1983 Michael Keaton vehicle ''Mr. Mom,'' put on an unstoppable sugar high.

Most atrocious movies build into their badness, as lacks of talent, ideas, self-confidence, or a total hatred of an audience, are revealed. This one gets it out of the way up front and never looks back.

It's the year's funniest, most absurd sight gag.

Blithely inept.

This is a bright, broad, silly, harmless movie whose sweetness is a means to an end.

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.

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

Seeing her (Schilling) and Efron fumble at each other is like watching a stick of butter and a bag of flour not turn into a cake.

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.

Has no intention of taking a more sophisticated path to make its point.

Almost nothing works in this movie.

The strip is now a cartoonish sitcom pretending to be a romantic comedy about a drama queen and his adventures in lust. The movie might have gotten away with it, were it interested in romance or comedy.

The movie is made livelier by its bit players -- King, Murphy, Lupe Ontiveros as Lucia’s bigoted grandma, Anna Maria Horseford as Marcus’s grandmother, Shannyn Sossamon as one of Whitaker’s airhead girlfriends, and, best of all, Anjelah Johnson as Lucia’s car-mechanic sister.

As the eviscerations ensue, the truth becomes undeniable: This is easily the most gruesome, most pointless, episode of "Scooby Doo" ever.

Because the characters in the movie have only stock obsessions and vague personal histories, there's no reason to be interested in them.

The mess that's been made with all this money is maddening. This isn't economical moviemaking. It's a deluxe trailer for "Eragon 2."

Rossellini doesn't do much more than show up and be a hundred kinds of ravishing. Yet there's a movie in her ageless face and that untamed bouffant.

Bay's movie is also a confident mega-production that feels it doesn't need to lean on its visual frills if it has Smith and Lawrence -- it's a natural-born buddy flick.

A tall glass of hogwash that's terrified to declare itself the racial-healing melodrama it is.

This movie has no light to shed on the matter. It is its own contradiction: a film about confessions in which nothing much is confessed.

It's a half-life better than Martin Lawrence treading similar, simpler water in "Big Momma's House."

There's not much of a script. The direction is the pits, and stars Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore, playing dueling divorce lawyers who fall in love, are lousy, too.

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

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.