It's stupid, then it veers toward the absurd, but with James at its center it remains sort of sweet throughout. You can't hate James or the movie; both are just sort of dopey but well-meaning.

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.

I predict that within a decade, Mother’s and Daughters will be mandatory viewing at film schools across the country. There are precious few such perfect examples of how not to make a film.

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

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.

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.

It’s cute and entertaining, in a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, but this one is just for the kiddies.

A brittle, pompous drama.

There is a sort of unintentional campy fun to be had in places. Just don't go in expecting much, in other words, and perhaps you'll live happily ever after.

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

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.

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.

Agonizingly stupid and painfully illogical.

There are no surprises here, just a by-the-numbers comedy that's better, and funnier, than it has a right to be, thanks to the efforts of the actors in it.

The title Acts of Violence has less to do with the storyline of the movie it graces and more about what’s perpetrated against the audience watching it.

Newbie director Aleksander Bach handles the project with a competent precision. The film doesn’t rise above the genre and the plot is muddled, but he pulls off the basic elements with a distinctly chilly European style.

Clearly, Zeroville is not a film for everyone. But if you love movies and you’re willing to experiment, it’s an enjoyable trip.

While some of the sequels have been entertaining enough, A Good Day to Die Hard signals that it may be a better day for John McClane to retire.

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.

Director Enrique Begné, who helmed this year's winsome "Busco Novio Para mi Mujer," directs with an emphasis on action over comedy. Sometimes that feels misplaced; the stretches without laughs grow increasingly longer as the plot moves forward. But he keeps things enjoyably fast-paced, so it's hard to complain too much.

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.

Landais certainly brought little cinematic verve to The Aspern Papers, telling the story largely in turgid literary voiceover lifted directly from the original source material.

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.

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.

Grovic knows all the tricks of the trade, such as keeping the lighting dark (often too dark), in an attempt to add atmosphere. But in the end it seems like a series of shortcuts.

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.

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.

A Madea Christmas, for all its narrative shortcomings, also has plenty of laughs.