A LEGO Brickumentary feels like one of those cheerful corporate videos that gets screened at team meetings, designed to rouse employees into a rah-rah fervor. The down side: Most videos of that ilk don’t last for 90 minutes.

A popular topic for debate is whether television or movies are better right now. Movie defenders are not going to want to use Dorfman in Love to bolster their argument.

It might have worked, too, if Black had anything remotely funny to work with.

The elements are all there. They’re just thrown together in haphazard fashion. A funny scene here, an attempt at a touching scene there, toss, repeat randomly, the end.

Picture Alan Alda in the title role of "Dirty Harry," and you have a good idea why Tyler Perry playing a hard-edged cop in "Alex Cross" doesn't work. [19 Oct 2012]

For a movie that aspires to be heartwarming, it sure does inspire a lot of eye rolling.

If you’re just going to rip off the action movies of yore, why not rip off more of the good stuff?

Somewhere, deep inside Justice Served, there is the kernel of an interesting idea. But you've got to look hard, because the finished product is pretty dire stuff.

Youth on the fun can be a whole lot of fun, but Reckless, by first-time director James Foley, is a particularly dreary affair. [16 Feb 1984, p.81]

It’s not fair to either of these actors to want to see Rocky and the Terminator over and over again. But it is fair to want to see them in something better than this.

The problem isn’t that it pokes fun at romantic comedies, it’s that it itself isn’t a terribly good one.

The ending is sick enough to make it almost worth the wait. Key word: almost.

It's an ironclad rule for comedies: Stupid is fine, as long as it's funny. But if it's not? Well, then it's just . . . stupid.

What really saves Super Troopers 2, to the extent that it even wants to be saved, is how gleefully the Broken Lizard bunch goes about its work.

There aren't any scares to speak of, though there is some gore. The cast is game to try anything, but there's just not much here for them to work with. Like most zombies, Burying the Ex is an idea that should have stayed dead.

It’s a juicy story squandered by the poor telling. It’s got all the trappings of a good ol’-fashioned Merchant Ivory pic — lush locales, exotic period trappings — but none of the soul.

Without real innovation or story evolution, Blair Witch becomes a trip down a rabbit hole of misery and suffering.

With its convoluted plot and fading stars, The Double feels like a straight-to-DVD feature that somehow sneaked onto the big screen. It's simply not very good.

While Baldoni had a surplus of material and talent to work with, "It Ends with Us" felt flat and uninspiring.

It seems hollow, somehow false, even by its own campy standards.

The characters are clichés and the plot is assembly-line predictable.

Basically, a lot of things happen; not interesting or believable things, but, hey, there's movement and action.

This movie is exhausting.

Inferno...is the kind of movie that stops — and stoops — to explain, early and often. Not that the explanations amount to much; the movie makes almost no sense.

With Sarah Palin: You Betcha! director Nick Broomfield manages to screw it up.

For an R-rated romance about a young writer's affair with a sultry French siren, 5 to 7 generates all the heat of an Easy-Bake Oven. It aims to sizzle but quickly fizzles.

The film, like most of MacFarlane's work, is a mix of occasional laugh-out-loud moments — there are some here — and cringe-worthy misfires that play a lot more tone-deaf than he seems to intend.

The Wachowskis never lack for ambition. It's in the execution where they run into trouble.

Yes, The Family has skills. They’re like “The Incredibles” — except they’re heroes for sadists and sociopaths only.

The Forest is one of those horror movies that starts with an intriguing idea but has no idea what to do with it.

It's no surprise The Boy Next Door is junk. What is disappointing is that it's not fun junk. It doesn't even merit a good hate-watching, because the whole thing is so meh.

Some of the imagery is memorable, in a twisted-horror kind of way. Zombie has no trouble scaring up atmosphere. But other scenes are ridiculous, unintentionally funny, particularly one he builds up to ominously, only to give us a silly payoff.

Subtle, it's not.

Despite their palpable comedic chops, Hart and Cranston are unable to make this unlikely and stereotypical pair likable.

For one thing, all the characters are far too pleasant.

Seventh Son is recommended only for the most far-gone of fantasy addicts, for whom it will serve as a sort of methadone. It won't exactly satisfy, but it will tide you over until the next season of "Game of Thrones."

Unfortunately, what the filmmaker has wound up with is something that feels like it should be playing at the bottom end of a triple bill at a drive-in.

You’d think a move about the potential for the destruction of universes would feel pretty high stakes, but this one doesn’t. Nor does it connect on the family drawn together through adversity front.

It’s not just that the jokes aren’t funny, or that they’re given to genius comic actors like Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to deliver — which has to be some kind of pop-culture crime — the bigger issue is that there's not a single instance of recognizable human behavior in the entire film.

Except where “The Conjuring” invigorated horror-movie tropes with inventive application and strong characters, Insidious only wallows in them.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau never made a movie called Grumpy Old Men Go Camping. If they had, it surely would look a lot like A Walk in the Woods.

The production is nice looking, and telling the Edward-and-Wallis story from her side is an interesting idea, but it's one that Madonna simply can't pull off here.

If you insist on seeing Men in Black: International, do yourself a favor and zap yourself with an official MIB neuralyzer, erasing all memories of previous films in the franchise.

Everyone here has been better, and funnier, in other things. This is a lazy story, wholly dependent upon the likability of its cast which, while considerable, isn’t enough to make it worth the trouble.

Representing the 78-year-old writer and director at his perfunctory worst, Magic in the Moonlight is an unfunny, unromantic comedy.

Beyond the Reach is a misfire, one of those movies that never quite rises to the level of guilty pleasure.

3 Generations feels focus-grouped into existence, like its every development was fine-tuned to be as inoffensively on-message as possible in its treatment of trans issues. That’s good for take-home pamphlets and afterschool specials, but deadly to dramas.

It all has the air of a community theater troupe performing in a Disney parade, overeager in the exaggerated artifice. That's well enough for an amusement park, but on film it's embarrassing.

It’s a maudlin, meandering bit of moviemaking that sheds little light on the loyal opposition in the North.

How much of this is actually funny is a question of taste, but even a confirmed Perry hater might get caught laughing once or twice.

It’s an action movie without an exciting moment. It’s a special effects flick with chintzy visuals. And it’s a Gerard Butler vehicle without enough Gerard to go around.

Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return lacks any sense of magic.

The movie ultimately winds up falling between two stools, failing as both a biography and an action film. Martial arts fans will naturally be drawn to the story, but the film does nothing to open up the world to outsiders.

If you’re going to make an origin story, make an origin story. On second thought, if you’re Joe Wright looking to tell us where Peter Pan and Captain Hook came from, maybe don’t.

It’s a lazy, thoroughly unoriginal bit of storytelling, but it has just enough cheeky humor and bass-thumping action scenes to be a potential crowd-pleaser.

You can practically see Hart straining to break free of the script and let loose with a wild improvisational rant, and you never lose hope that he might. (Spoiler alert: He doesn’t.)

Storks is charmless with rote obligation. This is a kid’s film for hire, with none of the creativity, emotion and design that elevate the genre to art, or even simply a fun time at the movies.

You can't get close to Bennett — not because he's a morally ambiguous character, as the movie would have you believe, but because he never puts anything on the table. He struts through every consequence, a man with nothing to lose because he never had anything worth losing in the first place.

Peter Lepeniotis’ animated film brings together a good cast, including Will Arnett, Brendan Fraser and Liam Neeson, which sounds like a sweet deal. But it places them in an uninspired little movie about selfish behavior, which, while overcome (of course), never really manages to escape its bitter roots.

A documentary so enthusiastic, good-natured and sweet about such an abject disaster that it almost makes "Troll 2" worthwhile. Almost.

The best thing about the movie, by far, is Green. Her Artemisia is a real nut case with a taste for blood, and Green is the only one in the cast who seems to be having any fun at all.

The report is important. Its findings and the attempts to undermine them and the investigators, shouldn’t be forgotten. That The Report tries to keep these lessons in a fickle public’s consciousness is a good thing. If only anything committed to screen here were memorable.

Aside from Dance and some hazy views of impaled bodies, the film is low on shock and gore. It's aiming more for sweeping historical epic, but it doesn't work on either level.

The Last Days on Mars isn’t a disaster. Robinson, in fact, shows some promise. It’s just not much of anything, a movie ultimately as barren as the landscape on which it takes place.

It’s a lame, scare-free film that wants really badly to work in the vein of “It Follows,” but has none of the intelligence.

May walk like a comedy and quack like a comedy, but despite the absurd extremes to which it takes the squabbling-family formula, it inspires nary a chuckle.

The problem with movies based on a single joke is that a single joke is rarely funny enough to sustain the running time of a feature-length film. And with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the whole joke is in the title.

This is a wretched movie, trading on characters we revere, yet doing nothing to honor them. Director Peter Segal tries everything he can to recapture the magic of the earlier movies, but to no avail. It’s all rather sad.

You'd learn a lot more if you went out and, well, actually met a Mormon.

Dog Days isn't so much a movie as an emotional delivery system, meant to make you laugh a little, cry a little and say, "Awww" about 10,000 times. On that front, it's a complete success. As an actual film, well, not so much.

The kind of fantasy that a 15-year-old boy would love, although parents probably should keep younger teens far, far away. This movie pushes the boundaries of its R rating about as far as they can go.

It’s befuddling that such a barrier-breaking filmmaker would make a biopic about a woman who shares similar daring qualities that’s so … ordinary. To make boring the revelries of 19th century literati is no mean feat, but it is Mary Shelley's chief accomplishment.

Its real accomplishment is that, with so much money behind it and a true visionary at the helm, it manages to feel so dated.

Planes was originally scheduled to be released straight to video. Although the smallest children might like bits and pieces of it, there’s nothing in the movie that suggests why Disney strayed from its original plan.

The look of the film is impressive enough, but the performances are merely OK. The same goes for the story.

The chemistry between Baldwin and Moore is strangely disconnected. The performers aren't bad, but they don't generate any kind of heat.

Fuqua tries to create the illusion of meaning by copycatting the style and techniques of better directors, but he can't save the naked emperor of the script.

To say The Marvels is all over the place is to imply that there is an anchor to it somewhere. There’s not.

It's all silly and meant to be fun, except when Najafi tries to throw in some serious bits, which wind up being sillier still.

Checking subtlety at the door, Monteverde goes for broke on the emotional-manipulation front. Perhaps that's OK as a device for illustrating a parable, but it doesn't make for much of a movie.

Director David Leitch’s film, based on the novel by Kôtarô Isaka, is a hyper-stylized, hyper-violent action film that rarely comes up for air. It’s also a big ol’ mess. Although everyone involved seems to be having a good time.

There is an engrossing, important story at the heart of 7 Days in Entebbe. Unfortunately, it only shows up intermittently.

The characters flutter about, argue and flirt, but they are simply too bland and vacuous to make much of an impression. It doesn't help that half of them serve no purpose other than to fill the camera frame.

A greeting card set in motion, Chasing Mavericks cheeses up the story of real-life surfing phenom Jay Moriarity so thickly you could spread it on a cracker.

Turns out there can be too much of a good thing. Or a campy thing. Or a silly thing. Or a subtle-as-a-brick-in-the-face thing.

For the most part the jokes here are tired. William H. Macy is a welcome presence in the small role of Phil's offbeat-but- intense boss.

It is clean, crisp and passionless. You almost wish for some Bravo sleaze to add a little edge to the proceedings.

Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is a rather lackluster affair, a cash grab that tries to aim a little higher but confuses sappy shortcuts with real emotion.

If this is the end — and who are we kidding, the film’s box-office returns will determine that, not its plot — it’s a disappointing one. But it’s long past time to let it die.

Nick Ryan’s documentary looks at the disaster by using interviews, actual footage and re-enactments. The latter move undercuts some of the movie’s authenticity. Granted, there probably wasn’t another way to film it, but it muddies the film’s sense of truth.

All the action leads inexorably toward the unavoidable destination.

The characters aren’t the only things painted in broad strokes. Sweetwater is rife with gauche symbolism and imagery.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates gives us too much hangover and not enough buzz.

As with most prequels, there's ultimately not a lot of suspense, since we know what's going to happen in the next installments. Tell us something something to care about.

Will anyone really believe in this GQ-perfect big man on campus who lacks the courage to ask her out on a date?

Let's just call "Allegiant" what it is: A way for the studio to make money and bring you back next year for the real finale. See you then. Maybe.

Safe Haven plays out less like a love story than it does a two-hour audition tape Julianne Hough commissioned to land a lucrative lip-gloss-modeling contract.

There is never any doubt where this is going, and the film takes far too long to get there.