The film is at its best when it focuses on real-life human drama rooted in character: failing marriages, crushing poverty, professional malaise. Davis in particular delivers as impassioned a performance as ever -- good enough that you wish you could airlift her character into another movie.

Statham is always good as the silent butt-kicking type and is fine here. Franco, as is often the case, seems to be acting in his own private movie and having a grand old time doing so; results for the audience may vary. Bosworth is good, scary skinny and wired for trouble as a menacing mom.

The Shallows is pretty much a woman stranded on a rock, with a big shark between her and the shore. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat?” “We’re gonna need a smaller bikini,” more like.

You see this cast, you expect to see a lot of violent action. And in that regard, The Expendables delivers, and then some. In this case, then, the old saying applies: Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

Mostly harmless, but the largely joyless exercise is a letdown after getting a glimpse of a re-energized Murphy in "Tower Heist."

The script feels structurally inept, building up scenes and characters then cutting them off, never to be revisited. The end result is a film that feels full of staircases that lead nowhere.

The film is packed with moments of rank idiocy.

Jang and Odagiri are good as the rival runners and soldiers. But they are surrounded by over-the-top performances, which play out like a mugging contest.

The film is visually striking, even if the images don’t always make sense.

The result is a pious mess of a movie that falls short both as history and as storytelling.

The filmmaker's seeming lack of skepticism makes for rough going if you don't buy into Kenyon's vision.

Everything, Everything is a flawed film in many ways, but there is one that’s a deal breaker: It doesn’t make you cry.

Trouble is, it all adds up to . . . not much.

There are a couple of intriguing ideas floating around here and there, but that's all they do - float around, unmoored by any sense of reality and, thus, suspense.

Carrey and Daniels are good actors, and it's understandable when an artist wants to revisit a career-high point. How much you enjoy Dumb and Dumber To will depend greatly upon whether you think "Dumb and Dumber" was one.

At times it’s a learn-your-lesson story. At times it’s a shoot-’em-up that does not skimp on the gore. Whatever trope it dips into, it does so without much originality.

It's a modestly interesting coming-of-age movie, and a totally forgettable mystery.

Unfortunately, nothing in the film –Foy's performance included – cuts the chill, and you're left trapped in a big, wintry void.

First-time writer-director Tom Gormican keeps the dialogue moving at a rapid pace, which doesn’t obscure the fact that most of what is said is dopey and witless.

There are brief bursts of hilarity, and they are all, without exception, owed to McCarthy’s innate charisma and comedic timing.

There is the occasional cool visual and clever world-building detail, like jellyfish couture and eye-popping underwater physics, but Aquaman never fully commits to its lunacy.

Beyond the leaps in logic, the most troubling part of this film is that it just feels like a defense of the excess of Christmas.

It's not as if every funny movie has to offer something in the way of social commentary or greater insight. Sometimes funny is just funny. Sometimes, as is too often the case here, it's not.

When all the parts are sewn together, the end result proves as crude and slapdash as the monster itself.

There’s a freewheeling spirit to The Bubble that’s meant to reflect the times during which the film was made, but instead of creative forces finally unleashed it comes off as half-baked, more like a first draft than a finished film. Apatow knows comedy, and his intentions here are good. It’s just the movie that isn’t.

MacFarlane's film is too broad, too dumb, too offensive to justify the meager laughs it generates.

The effect is initially giddy but it ultimately wears the viewer down.

It is hard to imagine that a Scandinavian-set comedy starring Jenny Slate would lack charisma, but unfortunately, the most interesting characters in The Sunlit Night are a yellow barn and the sprawling scenery of rural Norway.

Ultimately, the whole affair is forgettable. The original film was promoted with the tagline "It knows what scares you." If there was a truth-in-advertising law regarding films, this movie's ad copy would read: "Poltergeist: Meh."

There are some scares here, in the same way that there is some pain when you hit your thumb with a hammer. Blunt force carries a lot of power. But there isn’t a lot of thought. It’s the same idea as the first movie, just not as well-done.

Everyone would have been better off if the editors had just cobbled together a 90-minute blooper reel and called it a day.

Wayne Wang directed "The Joy Luck Club," a fine, sentimental look at Chinese women. Now he presents another look at Chinese sisterhood in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and it feels like a shallow imitation: Imagine getting Kate Hudson when you expect Goldie Hawn.

It's just kind of a mess, as unfocused and immature as the four mutant turtles at its core. Stuff happens, stuff blows up and this is probably a good time to mention that Michael Bay produced the film.

Perhaps the problem isn’t one of too little ambition, but of too much. The Spy Who Dumped Me is, after all, trying earnestly to be about half a dozen different things: a buddy comedy, a spy drama, a raunch fest, a thrilling action film. It’s just that it doesn't have the focus to do any of those things particularly well.

Nothing seems real here, with everything too broadly drawn.

The dialogue is particularly bad, which is odd because the Duplass crowd typically excels at natural-sounding dialogue.

Kartheiser brings some zip and smarm to the proceedings as the villain with a million years in his vault, but it's not nearly enough to make In Time worth your time. Or your money.

[Denis] definitely never holds back from shocking the audience with multiple sudden deaths, haunting rape scenes and various graphic moments. But with such little character development, why invest in these stories?

Home Again is a romantic comedy with its heart in the right place. And that’s just about the only thing it has going for it. It’s facile, disingenuous, artificial in nearly every way.

Everything is overwrought, every circumstance a potential tragedy. Humor is largely absent.

The film's lack of common sense reaches out-of-control proportions in the final minutes.

There might be a decent movie in here somewhere, if the focus had been on the right character.

It seems unfinished, choppy, the storytelling almost of the after-school special variety.

[Estevez] still hasn't progressed beyond the film-school basics, but somehow he managed to recruit an all-star cast of (presumably) like-minded activists for The Public.

Burke and Hare is a waste of a good cast and a better story, as well as a hollow reminder of how John Landis seemingly has lost his touch.

For anyone familiar with the original Peter Rabbit, it’s a little depressing to see its storybook charm reduced to slapstick. You can only see a person get electrocuted so many times before the gag wears thin, and with it the movie’s welcome.

Freeman is back in Reiner's latest, The Magic of Belle Isle, which has all the pathos and saccharine of "The Bucket List" but little of the humor. It's earnest, predictable and disposable.

It’s a stumble down the catwalk not even Blue Steel can save.

As with any movie of this sort, there are a few laughs. Johnson is as likable an actor as there is, and it’s to the actors’ credit that they buy in to the stupidity. But there aren’t enough laughs and not nearly enough story.

If Eastwood wanted to use the real men, a documentary would have been just as powerful and more dramatically satisfying. Instead, the acting is distracting. The film’s intentions are sterling. Its execution, not so much.

There's far too much going on in Valentine's Day, and far too little of it is worth the trouble.

What makes mythology so great is its sense of danger, the threat of real loss. This version of “Percy” has none of that.

Make no mistake, “Hold On” proves De Ette a talented singer, one destined for success. We didn’t need a movie to see that. A music video would have sufficed.

Outdoing all of the headliners, at least when it comes to capturing voices and body language, is a new character inside the game played by Awkwafina of “Crazy Rich Asians.” It’s subtle, but there’s something more authentic about her version of the shtick. She’s just more in the moment — or maybe less desperate for a laugh.

It’s all too much without ever turning into much at all.

Take away the confusing plot and throwaway punchlines and the cast is by far the best part of the film — and the reason many will go see it. If only they were part of a different movie. The Gentlemen doesn't live up to the hype.

While the movie is a mess, it can be a fun ride as long as you first put your brain into "do not disturb" mode.

An unruly mix of science, morality, family dysfunction, horror and finger-down-the-throat gross-out ridiculousness.

Loopers: The Caddie's Long Walk treads far too lightly upon a decades-long racial divide between caddies and golfers, falling silent on the subject as a hushed gallery during a backswing.

"Unfun" isn't a real word, but boy, it sure describes The Legend of Tarzan.

It's big and it's loud, but ultimately not much more than that.

Using the horror genre to tell a faith-based story is an interesting idea, even if it doesn’t really work in the end. And then Beck shows up, and that’s the scariest thing of all.

All pleasures in Last Christmas are as slight. Like the Christmas shop and its baubles, it’s shiny and attractive and intermittently distracting, but it’s all just so much glitter on cheap plastic. It’s angling hard for holiday cheer, but there’s nothing more joyless than forced whimsy.

Movies like this are supposed to be ridiculous on some level. It's part of the fun. But, dang. Falling through space, popping your parachute and landing on the one empty stretch of freeway in some bustling future city? C'mon. We all have our limits.

One kudo to this lazy effort: The climax does have a real end-of-a-trilogy feel, making further sequels less likely. Silver linings, folks.

It’s an awkwardly constructed movie that doesn’t really gel.

The movie, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer of “Twilight” fame and directed by Andrew Niccol, is just kind of dumb. Like the more famous books and movies, about a love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf and a human girl, it often plays like a teenage girl’s idea of how literary romances play out.

It aims to match the mythic gravitas of “The Lord of the Rings” — even throwing in a nod to the Book of Exodus for good measure — and the results fall paint-by-numbers flat.

Ultimately, the movie is really boring. Any charm or spark it might have had is quashed by a lack of strong direction and writing.

Procedural and uninspired, the Vietnam War-focused melodrama The Last Full Measure isn't as strong as its real-life hero.

The cast is intriguing, with Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas as the targets of Pattinson's ambitious amour. But they're not given a whole lot to do -- at least not much that's interesting.

A lackluster second effort that mines a lot of the same jokes. Only no joke is as funny the second time around, even when it's being delivered by really funny people.

I can give the filmmakers — director Dito Montiel and screenwriter Adam G. Simon — the benefit of the doubt on good intentions, but their approach doesn’t tug at the heartstrings so much as it pistol-whips the audience with its grandiose and (ineptly) manipulative storytelling.

The trouble with a movie like Jungle Cruise is the comparison it invites. And in this case, the ride is better.

There are some good ideas in there, even timely. But eventually, like everything else in the movie, they’re washed away in a sea of blood and a hail of bullets.

The gags are stale, the characters uninvolving and bits meant to titillate don’t.

The idea of dropping in on characters at different points in their lives can work - see "Same Time, Next Year" for how it should be done. Here, it simply puts a distance between the audience and two characters that aren't that interesting to start with.

The problem is the movie itself – the script, the editing, the construction, all of which combine to make the whole thing feel flat, lifeless and confusing.

The jolts are of the jump-out-from-behind-the-door variety; you can see them coming from a long way off, too. Shyamalan seems to no longer have the confidence to let audiences figure things out or the patience to allow them to.

The most interesting parts of Father Stu, an OK film in which Mark Wahlberg plays a rough-hewn man who finds redemption in an unexpected place, are not the ones you — and possibly the filmmakers — would expect.

Like nine out of 10 faith-based films, it lets the message crowd out the other elements of good art: character development, thematic complexity, even basics such as a compelling conflict.

Director Wes Ball's film is a mad dash from one place to the next, with little time in between for rest, recuperation or plot development.

Diggs does what he can with the part, as does Patton. There are some funny moments, because most of the cast is so charming. But not enough to make up for the Stone Age attitude about women and marriage.

Unfinished Business is a jumble of half-baked ideas, none particularly interesting.

The handling of the faith aspect is actually one of the stronger parts of the film. Some movies like this lay it on thick, basically existing as a religious recruitment video. Here, and here alone, Ellis lays off and lets the audience think things through. The message is more effective this way.

The story has potential and the acting is good, but the buildup is thrown away as the movie draws to a close. It feels divided, as if it were two different films.

Comparisons are unfair and inevitable. But even when taken on its own terms, the new Carrie rings hollow, a horror movie that is unsure of itself, with little to offer the uninitiated and less to offer fans of the first film.

Black or White is more remarkable for what it isn't than for what it is. For example, it isn't ripe with drama. It isn't a thoughtful exploration of racial identity in America. It isn't a compelling look at judicial bias and class conflict. It is, instead, a movie that's every bit as oversimplified and obvious as its title.

In an era where horror films are attempting to get smarter (a nod to you, “A Quiet Place,”) this just makes everyone dumber.

To be fair, both Anton and Green do a fair job of giving Kol and Adam believability. But do we really need another tragic period gay love story? How about yes, but do it better.

It recycles the same tired battle-of-the-sexes premise employed by every third romantic comedy that gets made.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a movie in search of a reason to exist. Despite a needlessly excessive running time, it never finds one.

Scoob! is a poorly written, nonsensical animated update of the Scooby gang.

It's all just empty calories and little more than an excuse to watch Zac Efron play with puppies. It's nice, but for anyone who's too mature for Tiger Beat, it's not enough.

Yes, there are sex scenes in the film, quite a few. But for a movie where people are naked for a large chunk of time and play at bondage and dominance (without ever really seeming all that committed to it), it sure is boring.

Bad Samaritan is a horrible little movie with two things going for it: one wigged-out performance and one genuinely terrific line that's so great, you want to be able to say that it saves the film.

Add romantic chemistry to the list of things that fall flat in the film, alongside dialogue and acting.

Laughably bad dialogue and wooden acting.