Costner works hard, and it shows. That's even more true of Leary. Garner's stuck in a thankless role. Only Langella seems to be having unencumbered fun.

You'd expect the sequel to be an improvement based on production values alone, and you would be right, but not by much.

What we’re left with are a few PG-13 murders, uninspired performances, some not-so-scary urban legends and a couple of actresses who must be wondering how they got here.

The Gunman is a predictable slog through action-movie tropes, and Penn's intensity isn't a good fit.

Live by Night is a mess. It’s got some interesting elements that Affleck, who wrote the script based on a Dennis Lehane novel, surprisingly can’t pull together. And, it must be said, his performance in the lead role isn’t up to snuff.

Too bad. You sense that someone could have made a good movie with this material. Unfortunately, Leth didn't.

While Below Her Mouth is no doubt some classy-looking porn, it’s a pretty lousy movie, because all that sex leaves precious little time to develop character, plot or thematic depth.

Blackhat is a mess of a movie from Michael Mann, a would-be cyberthriller slowed by stupidity and sabotaged by a stunningly silly subplot.

On the Map is more like a sleepy lecture during the last week of high school: You may hear some worthwhile information, but it's not going to stick.

The utter lack of surprises and waste of a first-rate cast — Anthony Hopkins as Alfred "Freddy" Heineken; Jim Sturgess and Sam Worthington as kidnappers — make for a tremendous letdown.

The film is cinematically brilliant but morally obtuse.

The imagery is romantically period, with textured scenes staged in handsomely lit smoke-filled rooms, its newsreels and baseball stadiums suffused with charming Americana. But you can’t root for set design or feel empathy for colored filters. You need human beings for that, and The Catcher Was a Spy keeps its heart under lock and key.

With bright colors and jokes that are delivered quicker than you can process them, kids will enjoy this. Even though there are overwhelming changes in animation style, it's never boring to look at.

The problem is that almost everything in the film feels either forced or false, so the tears aren't earned.

Bitter Harvest, bless its low-budget heart, means well. But George Mendeluk’s film, about the Holodomor, the forced famine and starvation that killed between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians, falls well short of its ambitions.

There’s a prayer repeated throughout the film: “blessed be the goddess of all worlds that has not made me a man.” Well, blessed be the goddess of all worlds that has let me survive this film.

The movie is content to simply mimic the old Stooges, bringing nothing new to the table.

In Chernobyl Diaries, directed by Bradley Parker, stupidity is taken to extremes.

Occasionally cute but not much else, Alpha and Omega is an animated flick that doesn't leave much of an impression.

Everything feels pat and oversimplified, with no gray areas. That's not uncommon in films of this nature, but Christensen is unable to make the movie feel like anything more than propaganda.

The Internship has some funny moments. The cast is too talented for it to come up completely dry. But for a movie about a place so filled with ambitious climbers, it is far too lazy.

Angels Sing is a shameless holiday movie, one that will stop at nothing — even killing off characters — to try to wring one last bit of emotion out of the audience.

The cornpone wisdom overflows from the screen during Joyful Noise, like maple syrup on your grandmama's flapjacks.

The Freemans’ minivan is moving 35 miles per hour, max, in every scene set in the car. They needed a lot more horsepower in order to convey a sense of urgency and thrill, and I’m not just talking about the van.

Newton's character is the only one we really become invested in. At least that's something. But Good Deeds leaves you wanting much more.

Several good performances are left adrift, as the characters roam from scene to scene, singing (quite well) as they go. Even as a sort of long-form music video, it's disjointed.

A movie that never quite comes to life, despite its title.

Although the visuals are spectacular — a barren Colorado River looks like a landscape from a science-fiction epic — there's not much else here to grab on.

There are a few scares in Come Back to Me. They would be a lot scarier if we either hadn't seen them coming, or hadn't seen them before.

You don't have to be endowed with an otherworldly gift to know that What Men Want will do little to please the men or women watching it.

What it has instead is really bad acting set against often-stunning cave-wall backdrops and underwater action sequences.

It’s not the moms that are bad — it’s the movie.

Sex and the City 2 isn't a feature film as much as it is consumer porn. The audience is not asked to relate to the characters, or at least what we remember of them, as much as to their shoes, their bags, their apartments, their couture, their stuff.

By the time the main vampire shows up, Salem’s Lot has already been rendered toothless.

The charm of these movies — such as it is — comes from the notion of aging action stars slugging it out between wheezes. So when Stallone brings in a new cast of mostly generic warriors, the premise, like the movie, deflates.

Call it what you want, but the best word to describe it is: unnecessary.

There should be a sense of, yes, wonder at play at all times here. Too often “Alice Through the Looking Glass” feels like a slog through time.

This isn't a terrible movie. It just falls flat, in almost every way. It exists and not much else. It's all too predictable, and way too heavy-handed.

Enchantment is an essential ingredient of an animated film, particularly one that skirts dark edges. The Boxtrolls doesn't have nearly enough of it.

Charm, alas, is the one thing lost in all the banging and clanging of the remake.

There are some laughs here, but not many. Johnson and Wayans have a pleasant enough chemistry, but the best parts of the movie are when Johnson gives Ryan an unhinged quality.

For a film that purports to love dinosaurs, this bigger, flashier Walking With Dinosaurs sure doesn’t trust them to be interesting enough to carry five minutes of a movie without the copious aid of slapstick and bathroom humor in a screenplay so rote it makes creatures that have been dead for 65 million years feel less fossilized than the jokes.

It's an unnecessary movie, with some funny parts and a few callbacks to the original, as if visiting Las Vegas for a bit might bring back some of the original magic. It doesn't, but at least this time it seems like they're trying. A little, at least.

Hector and the Search for Happiness is more like "audiences and the search for a good movie," and despite the effort of Pegg and the other actors, you won't find that here.

Vincent Grashaw's film, although well-meaning (as a postscript reminds us), tries too hard, both in content and form.

For a movie filled with amateur porn, sex toys, cocaine and Cameron Diaz's butt, "Sex Tape" is awfully tame. You're in greater danger of taking a nap than needing a safe word.

By far the scariest thing about director Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, a terrible would-be horror story that somehow roped in a couple of really good actors, is that the ending seems to suggest the possibility of a sequel. Now that’s horror.

Another entry in a long line of good video games adapted into terrible movies, Assassin’s Creed is ragingly stupid. That its incoherent plotline is treated with the utmost reverence by skilled thespians only brings its idiocy into sharper relief.

Jenkins is a fantastically adaptable talent. It helps that his character here is supposed to be innately likable (by everyone, evidently, but his girlfriend's family), since Jenkins is so likable as an actor. Good thing, because there is little else to like about Darling Companion.

Olivier Megaton (he helmed "Taken 2") starts things off at a sluggish pace and never picks up speed. Even the action scenes, which often are filmed in jittery fashion, don't generate thrills.

It strains both credulity and patience in its attempt to be different, and it leaves you feeling creeped out as well.

Paul Schrader, the once-brilliant screenwriter of such films as “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” has fashioned a movie that seems to exist to be repugnant. Maybe that’s the point; it was written by Bret Easton Ellis. Nearly every character in this movie is unlikable.

A relentlessly unfunny comedy, it wastes the talents of Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as egregiously as one could possibly imagine, resorting to lame jokes, cliches and incompetent storytelling to pass the time.

It’s not clear that the movie has anything to say, new or otherwise. . . . Other than that it’s just blood and guts, and lots of it.

There is nothing brave about Bravetown, a film so paint-by-the-numbers bland that its efforts to piggyback the sacrifice of American servicemen and women for emotional depth is downright craven.

The purpose of San Andreas is not to make us think, but to make us gape, to pummel us with effect and effect until we finally give in. Fair enough. Uncle. I need a Tylenol anyway.

Mean-spirited.

It's all-around generic, made notable by its weirdly schizophrenic tone. Sometimes it strives to be a character-driven thriller in the Jason Bourne mold. In other moments, it goes for over-the-top action and violence. But it's never very exciting.

CHIPS is a miserable movie, an exercise in stupidity that takes whatever nostalgia one had for the late-1970s television series – this assumes anyone actually had nostalgia for it — and beats it to death on a bed of idiocy. The action scenes, though, are pretty well-directed.

If you have young kids and want to spend two hours out of the house in a cool, air-conditioned theater, then go see “Haunted Mansion.” But if you can hold out until it’s released on Disney+ all the better. It’s really not worth spending money on the ticket.

It’s a spectacularly wrong-headed, chemistry-free romance, and too dumb to know how sexist it is.

Without Lohan, Falling for Christmas would be another of the near-anonymous morass of holiday movies so prevalent during the season. Even with her it’s not much more.

Journalists deserve to be heralded — just not in this holier-than-thou cinematic cri de coeur. So, on behalf of journalists everywhere, I have to tell Mr. Reiner thanks, but no thanks.

It’s hard to get excited about any of the on-screen happenings, because director Justin Lin can’t seem to hit the right notes.

There is nothing about the movie that isn’t utterly predictable. You meet a character, and it’s immediately obvious what’s going to happen to him (or her). And then it happens. Maybe it’s meant to make you feel good about your deductive reasoning skills or something. But mostly it just makes you want to see something else.

Director and co-writer Jeremy Garelick doesn't even reach high enough to pick the low-hanging fruit, opting instead to gather half-rotted, fly-infested jokes off the ground and expect Kevin Hart to make them funny by virtue of being Kevin Hart. Only grudgingly will I acknowledge that he sometimes does.

¡He Matado a Mi Marido! seems to be inspired by the kind of bold comedies that Pedro Almodóvar specializes in, with divas at center stage and madcap situations. But writer-director Francisco Lupini-Basagoiti is no Almodóvar, mistaking stupidity for zaniness.

The Snowman is like if aliens studied humanity and tried to make their own movie in an attempt to communicate with us. This simulacrum contains all the requisite pieces of a movie, but humanity got lost in translation.

Aside from the waste of talent, the frustrating thing about The Lazarus Effect is how it cheats. Good horror movies work on internal logic.

Gomez plays ... well, that’s one of the problems. Her character is so underdeveloped in director Courtney Solomon’s movie that she doesn’t actually have a name.

Josh C. Waller’s movie is just prurient nonsense, a film only a couple of notches up from the women-in-prison films that were popular years and years ago.

What a mess. Its meandering plot draws attention to the alarming lack of laughs — not what you look for in a supposed comedy.

Director Michael Goi is big on jump shocks that get increasingly tiresome.

There are plot twists galore, but they unfold in ham-fisted fashion, as if the screenwriter (newbie Brian Tucker) didn't know how to layer the mystery. Instead, the movie simply drops these secrets out of nowhere, in clunky fashion.

Written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolen, who gives himself a small role, the movie fails as both a comedy and morality tale.

Long-winded, tiresome and free of any tension, The Company You Keep will ultimately be remembered as a Redford vanity project, in every sense of the word.

Strangely, almost everyone must have been in the middle of some weird creative dry spell. Some stories are pretentious, some are annoyingly whimsical and some are just out-and-out obnoxious.

The film is based on a popular series of young-adult books (big surprise), but one figures only die-hard fans will enjoy the result. The movie is slow-witted and moves at a glacial pace.

The acting is so poor and the story so badly told that the viewer's feelings about Rand's novel - an epic ode to free-market fundamentalism - are almost immaterial.

Could be fun, you might think. No. Bad acting and worse dialogue quickly put an end to that notion.

Nothing feels believable in “Big Stone Gap,” a bungled, charm-free look at small-town life in the South in the late '70s.

If there’s any social commentary being made here, it doesn’t come through in performances so wooden you can’t tell if the actors are that bad or the characters that vapid.

A by-the-numbers thriller that wouldn’t even have made for a particularly good hourlong episode of a weekly crime procedural, never mind an honest-to-God feature-length movie.

A mean-spirited little movie, investing its limited charms in all the wrong characters.

There is something admirable about Fun Size. Not in how it succeeds, because it doesn't. Whoo, boy, it doesn't. Rather, in how bad it is on so many levels, in how it will offend and disappoint different segments of its audience for different reasons. It's an equal-opportunity bad movie. Something to hate for everyone! [25 Oct 2012]

Life Itself is one of the worst kind of bad movies, because it achieves nothing that it sets out to do.

People who love thrillers without question may find a lot to enjoy here. For a political thriller, it's not one of the most cerebral out there. Those who simply love Curtis and Sumpter might also like the film. But other than those perks, audiences are better off saving their money.

Jonah Hex somehow manages to waste the talents of Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a story that combines vengeance, the occult and an Old West war on terror (really).

If you like a little bit more in a movie — say, characters that are mildly interesting or a plot that's a wee bit logical — stay far away.

It’s all predictable and, despite the best efforts of Turteltaub and screenwriter Dan Fogelman at something a little risky, it’s pretty lame.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a curious mess, a movie that doesn’t really seem to have any reason to exist, other than maybe to give writer and director Roman Coppola and star Charlie Sheen something to do for a few weeks.

Too often the jokes don’t land. Neither does the physical comedy. The story doesn’t really hold. It’s clear that Schneider and his daughter love each other, and this film is a way to express that. But it’s a lot to ask of the rest of us to watch it.

You know it's not working when you don't care about any of them. Sadly, that's the case with Answers to Nothing, Matthew Leutwyler's dud about a revolving cast of characters in Los Angeles.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be swept away — about as much as you would be by artificial roses. Movies like this may look like the real thing, but they're not.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is a movie that didn't need to be made, and certainly doesn't need to be seen — not when you can rent the original and still feel good about yourself afterward.

The script, written by the actress, is downright wretched at times.

While its audacity is laudable, the film ultimately has all the thrill of watching someone else play a first-person-shooter video game.

There's just not a lot to like here, with the exception of what may be one of the all-time best bad movie lines, one Conan utters to Tamara as a kind of personal credo: "I live. I love. I slay. I am content."