In transgressive cinema, there is only one real sin, and that is to be boring. Somewhere around the six-hour mark of Gaspar Noé's 96-minute drug freakout fable Climax.

Suffers from a lack of good gags. That’s not to say there aren’t scads of chuckles scattered throughout – Dylan and his cast are nothing if not gluttons for the fast and cheap yuk (not to mention yuck) – but the howls of laughter that arose from Paul and Chris Weitz’s original slice of Pie just aren’t there.

Can someone dial down Cuba Gooding Jr. a few notches? He's so hyperactive during this MTV Films production - which is comedically indistinguishable from "Sister Act," but with more marketable music - that his Vegas-showgirl drag act in the dreadful "Boat Trip" looks like Bressonian minimalism by contrast.

This is your standard genre fare: Smart-a-- player gets schooled, finds love, and is redeemed in time for the final big game.

Doggedly mediocre actioner The 355 is the cinematic equivalent of gathering together Formula 1’s finest drivers and tossing them the keys to a Yugo. With two Oscar wins and four Oscar nominations between them, Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, and Lupita Nyong’o are gonna do some pretty nifty work with a Yugo. Still, actors this capable deserve better gear.

For Sandler's core audience of developmentally arrested males, it may all be a little too cute.

The only thrill here comes from the adrenaline kick of the chase. Alas, it's an empty, Pavlovian kick at best.

It's diverting enough, and intermittently suspenseful, but also strangely empty and decadent in a way that truly merits that overused term.

Flag Day desperately wants to be an impassioned testament to the lives of both Jennifer and Dylan, but is hardly ever able to escape the myopic lens of its craftsman.

Feels overlong and underscripted.

It’s fun, but it’s no "Class of Nuke ’Em High."

This oddly dispassionate film about a young man dying of cancer is the French antidote to those Hollywood weepies in which the heroine courageously faces her own mortality with every hair in place.

This family melodrama is as subtle as a load of bricks and occasionally as painful, but it offers two of the most finely tuned acting performances yet this year.

The experience is a little like being stuck in a Doom Buggy on a day when the ride is very stop-start. The flow of the attraction collapses, becoming individual cool designs but not a story.

Just like it is in the world of "SNL" that Fey, Poehler, and McCullers sprang from, the choice gets made time and again to aim not for the high road but for the great, big, fat, juicy, unchallenging, uncontroversial middle ground, where everybody’s laughing but nothing is all that funny.

It’s a curiously inert, workmanlike production: a whole lot of pomp and incircumstance.

I, Frankenstein is nowhere near as garishly, ghoulishly awful as "Van Helsing," Universal’s last attempt to resurrect its classic monsters. It’s a grimly fiendish slog nonetheless, and hardly worth getting up out of the grave for.

Liger fails to live up to the standards of either star or director and instead winds up as a below average potboiler too reliant on local tropes to feel fresh for Telugu film veterans or welcoming for newcomers.

The film lacks the emotional resonance that made "Big" such a sentimental favorite with audiences of all ages.

Amusing but never rousing, this fourth installment in the Ice Age cartoon franchise comes fretted with freezer burn.

With his doughy face and oversized features, Travolta seems like a giant puppet these days. The lanky stud from "Urban Cowboy" or even the cool killer from "Pulp Fiction" are hazy memories amidst his over-the-top performance from the school of freak-out acting.

Rarely do I comment on characters’ hairstyles in movies, but the decision to give Waterston a hybrid bowl-cut/Prince Valiant bob is one of the most ill-advised things this film does. And in a film that treats its audience like morons, that is saying something.

So many logical questions go unasked in The Gift, which, ultimately, is the movie's downfall. Mark this package as Return to Sender.

As a filmmaker, Meredith has a strong, if derivative, visual sense, although his screenplay is packed with too many cliches and familiar riffs.

A lean, mean chase movie that plays like equal parts Donald Trump’s immigration policy, Steven Spielberg’s "Duel," and Wes Craven’s "The Hills Have Eyes," Cuarón’s desert-based take on "The Most Dangerous Game" is very much of the moment. It’s also, unfortunately, a one-note story populated with a handful of semi-anonymous archetypal characters.

Like the Flying Dutchman, this third Pirates outing is an empty vessel haunted by the ghosts of its sabre-rattling betters.

Ladybugs is a clapboard of a movie, but it's a genial, harmless one. The misfit antics of the soccer games are good for a few laughs, although Michael Ritchie's 1976 film The Bad News Bears is far superior in that area of comedy. Regardless, when you find yourself ashamedly laughing at Ladybugs, remember that comedy was never meant to be politically correct.

The actresses are terrific together, and it’s nice to see Helen Mirren smiling onscreen for a change. And although Calendar Girls is resolutely pleasant, the movie never really goes much beyond that.

The film is repetitive and not as suspenseful at it tries to be. Often gorgeous, sometimes fascinating, it is ultimately unwieldy and unsurprising. It fails as a Smith-family project. Jaden Smith, who was fine in "The Karate Kid," is flat here.

With the exception of the handful of scenes in which the Flubber does its stuff, however, the youngsters will no doubt be bored by it all.

I.Q. doesn't profess to explore the theory of relativity, but even as a light romantic comedy it fails to engage the viewer completely.

It just devolves into the limp sort of schmaltzy conclusion you keep hoping it will avoid.

The film's moody, dark palette and soft, inchoate backgrounds tend to lull the senses rather than actively engage the viewer. The magic practiced by this illusionist does not extend to the screen.

It’s as if Caveny had so many ideas that she simply couldn’t bear to leave any of them crumpled up on her office floor.

For anyone over the age of nine, Yankee's journey is ultimately a dull one paved with good intentions.

Edge of Darkness has the look and feel of a Brit film shot in America – it's all dark, boxy rooms with powerful white men in impeccable black suits discussing how to tidy up the minor mishaps of their game over brandy and cigars.

Exploitative and crass, the film paints an ugly portrait of youth gone wild and the ineffectuality of the police to curb the menace.

It's the narrative equivalent of Twitter: so much there, but nothing going on.

There are football movies, and then there's this 800-pound gorilla of a gridiron weepie, which should be penalized for roughing the viewer.

Between the cardboard characterization, the heavy-handed emotional outbursts, the intrusive murder subplot, locker room morale-boosting speeches that should have stayed in the locker room, a strange lack of meaningful emotional beats, and the utter inability to tackle its white-savior subtext, Under the Stadium Lights is pee wee by comparison to Peter Berg's All-American.

Admittedly, the original had its unruly moments, but there’s little to no discipline here. The storyline goes in six different directions, and the actors are unleashed in an apparent free-for-all as they vie for center stage at the Parthenon.

The film is so self-referencing, however, that a running gag about Wax/Travolta craving a “royale with cheese” moves the film’s energy backward rather than forward. Perhaps instead it was a reference to the film’s nutritional value rather than its screen precedents.

Bell steals every scene she's in, and her abrupt dismissal feels all the crueler for so much charisma wasted: She shoulda been a contender.

No groundbreaking cinemagic there, but Out of the Shadows’ oddball moments keep things weirdly surreal throughout.

If you were one of the many who thought the original film was brilliant, you'll undoubtedly laugh yourself stupid over this one, too. Me, I think I'll go turn on the VCR and watch the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. Again.

Too bloodless to satisfy except as a political exercise.

This time the dog wags the tale and proves, at least to Papi, that love really is a bitch.

Unfortunately, the formulaic Spirit Untamed never seems to know which trail it's taking.

This overly sentimental family Christmas drama, featuring a veritable checklist of prominent Hispanic actors, falls victim to the shortcoming so prevalent in similarly ethnic-themed movies with similar casts – everything and everyone is so damn serious.

Emblazoned with ambition, this throwback Seventies-style private-eye movie (think Robert Altman’s "The Long Goodbye" or Robert Aldrich’s "Hustle") seems more invested in its form than its content.

Sometimes the heartstrings need tugging to an old, established rhythm, played here with simple charm by Zhu, and given high notes by Hu's dedication to highlighting what being profoundly dyslexic can mean.

Some of this – the simplest parts, the interpersonal drama played out in the rehearsal room, the power dynamics between actors and directors – are genuinely fascinating and darkly fun, as director Karl quietly abuses his position for his own ends. If Warmerdam had kept to that refined perspective, with quibbling about blocking and line delivery, then Nr. 10 might have become more of a complete film.

Overall, Planes: Fire & Rescue, though featuring lovely graphics and stunning animation, is just too mundane.

The audience is required to invest their emotional energy in seven people who consistently make terrible decisions and give even worse advice, and it's not worth the return.

Perhaps there was some confusion – should we play this as a lark or a lesson in geopolitical unrest? – or maybe there was some studio involvement to defang the politics; whatever the case, the noncommittal Charlie Wilson's War treads a good-natured but yawning in-between.

There’s no denying the poetry at work in his film, but so much of it is inchoate and fundamentally sexualized that it becomes more of a turn-off than a turn-on. Malick’s Cups is ultimately half-full.

When Bardem is onscreen, the emotional stakes are high, engaging you in a way the principal storyline fails to do. It’s a masterful turn by a masterful actor, one that’s blissfully on-target in The Gunman.

The sentiment is saccharin; the plot is … well, let's be generous and say unambitious.

Starts out as a lark, but veers into grittier, more emotionally complex territory -- just like a real relationship -- that the film doesn't have the chops to sustain.

A visual tour-de-force; it's just that there's not much else to sink your teeth into once the pretty colors fade from view.

Falls short of both the social history lesson it so pointedly strives to impart and the sport it so roughly embraces.

Book of Secrets isn’t so much a romp as a long trudge through American history factoids and conspiracy-theory gobbledygook. Cool car chase, though.

Those satisfied with a few solid jump scares - of the Things-In-a-Mirror or Hands-on-the-Shoulder variety - will likely find just enough in Mercy Black to pass muster. It’s just a shame that a horror movie smart enough to ask all the right questions cannot seem to provide us with many answers.

This Earth Day release has honorable intentions, but it imbues the animals with human emotions and motives, which only muddies our understanding of these ferocious feline species.

The Boy’s overriding concern is telegraphed enough in advance that fans of Gothic suspense will almost certainly have guessed it 45 minutes in.

The presence of Lohan – a celebrity whose every move is tracked by the media like an endangered species of hawk – only serves to highlight the point that the truly fascinating story behind the murder of Lennon wasn't Chapman's madness (and certainly not his weight) but the depths of our celebrity mania and the influence we’re willing to concede to personalities larger than our own.

Theroux (who co-wrote with director Dower) manages to dredge up some new, albeit not particularly revelatory, intel on the litigation-happy group, and the tack they take to get there is interesting in and of itself.

Reminiscent of the opening moments of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," actually, only without the clever wit.

The film may seem a bit undercooked until it gets to the staging of the ultimate battle, but Obsessed is swinging from the chandeliers by the end.

Absolutely marvelous special effects are the salvation and the curse of this movie.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but you can bet your life there's absolutely nothing new about Rush Hour at all.

Set mostly during the waning years of Stalin’s totalitarian grip on the USSR, Child 44 does a superb job of capturing the grim living conditions and pervasive paranoia that marked the bleak era. Sadly, that’s about all this movie does well.

By the end, though, it's all too much what it seems, a literalist adventure with a socko "Twilight Zone" twist that's finally too little, too late.

There's so much and so little going on here simultaneously that you're not sure whether to squirm or doze.

Perhaps time will be kind to Drive-Away Dolls; the cast of rising stars seems destined for greatness, and the setting will sharpen into focus the farther we move away from the decade. But it’s hard not to feel that Drive-Away Dolls is the sum of its production history: a decades-old concept that missed its window for relevance.

Why remake Norman Jewison's staunchly cool 1968 heist film in such a lackadaisical, uninspired manner?

House of Gucci isn't aggressively bad, but it is undeniably tedious, threadbare, and unengaging.

It’s a pleasure to watch, if not always to sit through.

Cynical yet mildly amusing Yuletide-season comedy.

Just don't go expecting complex moral and ethical quandaries and you'll likely never think of "Ishtar" even once.

Dead, the latest from the Land of the Long White Cloud, is closer in tone and subject to last year's phenomenal low-key Irish exorcism comedy "Extra Ordinary" – just without its charm or gentle silliness.

David Hunt’s exhausting film runs over two hours and adheres to a kitchen-sink ethos of sports tropes and spiritual asides.

Short to short, it’s a Russian roulette.

While the first film was nothing special – it often felt like a packaged product, in the worst Nancy Meyers sort of way – it still had some snap-crackle-and-pop energy now and then. This sequel, however, plays like soggy cereal.

It just may be a movie that has difficulty transcending national borders.

Even by Byington’s lo-fi standards, Lousy Carter feels ramshackle. It’s got traces of the familiar warm bathos of his sardonic best work. However, like Lousy’s cardigan, it’s all a little threadbare.

Valiantly tries to recapture the spit and polish indie feel of the original, and comes up looking more like something Franklin might have directed on a Bad Day.

If what you want is a fancier episode of The Great British Baking Show, then you'll "ooh" and "ah" at all the right moments as Ottolenghi assembles his kitchen of world-class patisserie chefs and jelly experts.

Too sloppy, pinning psychological crime dramatics to good old-fashioned gunplay.

You can barely tell what's going on half the time, but what you do see is effective.

In essence, the whole Knock Off experience can be summed up neatly in four words: loud, stupid, blurry, frenetic.

At the very least, Hoodlum might have been better off had it been filmed in monochromatic black-and-white instead of the garish color palette (and plenty of gore) that Duke opted for because they, unfortunately, only reinforce the hamminess of the picture.

The problem, ultimately, is that little of this is of any real interest. The brothers' bickering can be amusing at times but even at 76 minutes, the movie feels repetitive and overly long.

It's a real gone flick, daddy-o.

There's no denying the fact that Jackson is woefully miscast here, and as a result spends much of his time struggling to define his role as a “serious” collector of objets d'art in this muddled-though-gorgeous omnibus film.

Their travelogue-ready romance is utterly doofy but not disagreeable, and this sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy will strike the right chord with Moore’s fan base of preteen girls.

To its credit, this third GND installment earnestly attempts to give some degree of lip service to diverging perspectives on the socio-religious-political scale without too much proselytizing, although there’s never any question about who’s side it’s on.

Fallen's pretentious vision of a demonic force out to shatter the life of one lowly homicide detective is, ultimately, a pretty silly ride despite the film's obvious strengths and some genuinely eerie scenes.