It's a film so filled with sex and violence that many critics have derided it as nothing short of hardcore porn.

Manages to capture the essence of one of the world's most surprising success stories.

Midway through, there’s a truly riotous set-piece involving Bruiser’s gay love affair with a Great Dane, but not even a Chihuahua in leather bondage gear can zest up a franchise that has degraded from sleeper to snoozer.

It's an obvious effort through and through, but that doesn't seem to dampen its ridiculous charm one bit.

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.

As a heartwarming tribute to the courage of firefighters, Ladder 49 delivers.

Burlesque bumps and grinds. And then it continues to grind and grind and grind.

The horror that lies at the heart of the film is fairly obvious, and with no characters for whom we have a rooting interest, A Cure for Wellness is as difficult to swallow as castor oil.

This story about two death-obsessed teens is twee and precious instead of genuine and candid.

Never Go Back is boilerplate action-thriller, filmed with an anonymous style and scripted so that characters talk in catchphrases.

While director Bill nails the sheer spectacle of squads of SPADs dovetailing in flames into the wide blue yonder, the earthbound action (much as it was in another sputtering epic, Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor") is strictly laissez faire.

The Dressmaker’s twists are best experienced blind, and its treats are modest but genuine.

It's all peak Anderson, which sadly also means his inability to put a story together.

It's a glorious mess, though, with genuine bits of comic genius strewn amidst the rubble, not unlike a plane crash in its own way.

Swing Vote may muster a few easy laughs, but the film is no contender.

Mancini's character boils down to a lot of self-loathing and unresolved mommy issues – which is as tedious as it sounds.

For a film that’s rooted in genre tropes, there’s no genre atmosphere to visually anchor down the film’s themes. With the spectacle fizzled out, visually Williams’ film isn’t enough to take it over the edge and make it memorable. Still, first-time direction hurdles aside, it’s a serviceable, fun goth romp.

What we’re left with is a plodding, pompous horror, only memorable for the ways that it completely drops the ball in sidelining its headliner to take a poor shot at turning this into a series about something oh-so-ever important. It’s just as silly as any of the original sequels and is maybe even more egregious given the inherent benefit of hindsight and the fact that this outing seems to think it’s outsmarting the formula.

Wish doesn’t evoke swelling feelings of nostalgia, but rather a longing for the pristine storytelling of the studio’s past.

As cold and unseemly as that stiff found in the shower.

It's a consistently entertaining story.

Stunning camera shots by ace Michael Ballhaus are lovely to look at, and the performances are all excellent.

Joseph Fiennes smolders as young Luther, but it’s a performance that makes you wish instead that his older brother Ralph -– an actor who is one of the greatest at being able to portray inner torture and anguish -– were playing the part.

When it works, Shall We Dance? has a way of sweeping you off your feet.

Zombie continues to have a true, unflinching artist's eye for the sublimely horrific (a woodsy murder sequence is pregnant with disturbing, painterly compositions), that eye is wasted here on an unnecessarily moribund history of sociopathy as it relates to Halloween in Haddonfield, Illinois.

Midway does a decent job of cramming in not only the eponymous three-day naval battle between the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy but also treats the audience to a wealth of other, related Greatest Generation’s greatest hits.

The filmmakers assume familiarity with the show's documentary premise and in-jokes (e.g., deputy Garant giving all his commands in French), which will make the movie even less accessible to novices.

Even though the movie is made with an abundance of heart, it's sad to report that the final result has only a weak pulse.

British actor Hiddleston transcendently captures the sound of Williams’ voice and his performative swagger, and it’s something that’s worth seeing for its amazing conjuring act.

An end-of-summer burst of adrenaline, The Hitman’s Bodyguard promises nothing more and nothing less.

About as pedestrian as you can get.

Makes largely cosmetic changes to the material without offering much in the way of distinctive frights.

Norton's performance and the well-paced tension preceding the movie's climactic sequence provide an entertaining if slightly predictable thriller.

Emmerich’s sense of irony has rarely been so pointed, and The Day After Tomorrow, for all its obvious cataclysmic set-pieces and stock characterizations, is nothing if not timely.

At the end, you feel dusty and worn and are prone to think of other talents who gave similar territory much more life.

If anything gets lost in the mayhem, it’s Johnson’s reliably charming personality.

If the film had allowed them to fall in love in real time, instead of to the drumbeat of history, their relationship would seem immeasurably more nuanced.

Even a C-section couldn't rescue the shallow script and overplayed performances by Hugh Grant and Tom Arnold.

Stallone makes good-hearted fun of his street-wise Italian-American persona and also of himself as big shot. I'm not used to having much good to say about the guy, but Stallone has evidenced a nascient sense of humor before, and here he allows it to blossom.

There are precious few things for a Zorro fan – or a film fan, for that matter – not to loathe about The Legend of Zorro.

It's not just that this is poorly timed: there would never be any good time for this level of monstrous clumsiness and obviousness.

The jokes hit about half the time – the best bits have an off-the-cuff feel – and it’s pocked with the kind of rom-com clichés that are practically written in stone (screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna's script for "The Devil Wears Prada" was far sharper).

The movie’s disjointed weirdness begs the question: Was Hess ever in the driver’s seat?

“Caution: Contents may induce brain bleed.” That is, if you think too hard on the logic and mechanics of its time-travel conceit.

Despite the film’s largely hectic point-of-view, first-time helmer Dean Israelite credibly establishes a science-positive environment that ultimately results in less-than-intelligent displays of teenage impulsiveness, and the kids have a believably determined camaraderie as they only ever use the device together to get revenge on bullies, win the lottery, and snag backstage passes at Lollapalooza.

"Interview With the Vampire" it's not, but marginally thrilling nonetheless, and besides, any film that features a house party in which the ceiling-mounted fire extinguishers expel freshets of crimson goo in place of H2O gets my vote.

The script fires off clunker after clunker so fast you don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I chose to laugh as I'd already done enough crying at The English Patient.) Vintage bad Stallone, this lost-in-the-shuffle Summer of '96 blockbuster is just what you thought it would be: loud, boisterous, and without a single original line of dialogue. It's enough to make you miss Judge Dredd.

It's just a little too ironic (to quote Okay Pop Singer Alanis Morrisette) that a movie with the word "magic" in its title should be such a perfect example of the difference between competence and inspiration.

Fascinating, perplexing, amusing, and irascible.

The trouble with retooling fairy tales to jibe with our more enlightened times is that too often the fun gets stripped along with the offensive parts.

Ultimately more bleak and furious than most Hollywood tales of this sort. Man on Fire plays it out to the bloody end, like there’s no fire extinguisher in Mexico but for the oceans that hold its borders.

It’s all proper nonsense that in some ways lends itself to a more inspired, manic experience than the initial outing but in others is still held back by generic kids’ movie fluff.

There’s definitely ore to be mined in Silver City but Sayles’ pan comes up with only particles of dust.

Sort of annoying, and it doesn't do what you want it to do, but you know, it's so scrappy and persistent that it seems kind of cute in spite of itself.

The Nun II might be a slight step up from the slog that was The Nun, but that’s a low bar to creep up from.

A strong first film, and with a better-honed script, Williams should prove to be a director to watch.

Highly recommended for graduate psychology students in aberrant sexuality, but others can probably skip sans regret.

Open Windows has plenty to say about both the death of privacy and the dominion of the always-connected digiverse we now inhabit, and editor Bernat Vilaplana does a remarkable job of keeping the film’s frenetic pace rushing headlong toward an ending that you’ll never see coming.

A well-meaning but misshapen movie about the folly of pursuing answers to unanswerable questions.

The film begins to get a bit lost as the story develops and pushes toward a wobbly climax and conclusion. And what to make of that sled, which is the first bit of knowledge Jonas receives. Rosebud, anyone?

Less a traditional martial-artistry marathon than it is an exercise in filmic frustration, lovely to look at by small degrees, but a mud-spattered mess of a movie overall.

It all comes off as too sketchy and too obvious, and after 90 minutes, we're bloated with incidents but still hungry for satisfying drama.

Alice stitches together an intriguing premise, but ends up weaker than the sum of its parts.

It’s a fun and mostly effective ride while it lasts, part Slenderman creepypasta weird and part full-on, nerve-jangling horror, but it’s ultimately, perhaps unavoidably, unsatisfying.

A top-notch cast was gathered and then wasted in this atmospheric but prosaic hoodoo spooker.

As for Hotel Transylvania,, no need to put a stake in it, it's deadly dull already.

Creating plot from lyrics, in this case, leads to heavy-handed literalism and limited creativity. The wall of music is amusing for a while, but grows into a loud, wearying assault long before the movie's two hours are up.

As much as Gillan, Headey, and the three Librarians (Bassett, Gugino, and Yeoh) of the gunplay apocalypse embrace the visual stylization and harshly annunciated dialogue, Gunpower Milkshake is immemorable. Like a decent milkshake, it's fine while you're consuming it, but chances are you won't remember it after the last slurp.

They've become deadly dull, these two once-keen buckers of bureaucratic BS, and watching them interact on screen is akin to having your pleasure centers removed by knobby little aliens whose only knowledge of mankind comes from Jack Webb's stoically unvarying television incarnations.

Like Mike is a slight and uninventive movie: Like the exalted Michael Jordan referred to in the title, many can aspire but none can equal. Even "Space Jam" was better than this.

Fact is, good looks will go a long way in masking mediocrity, and Hollywood Homicide capitalizes on that fact doubly so: Co-writer/director Ron Shelton’s latest boasts two pretty faces, and all across the country, mothers and daughters sigh alike.

Ironically, the problem may lie in Baird and screenwriter John Pogue's over-eagerness to give us what they think we want.

Inoffensive fun that kids will love and adults will likely love too, it's a middle of the road affair, but a far cry from roadkill.

A gleefully overplotted crime yarn that channels in sanitized form the perverse subtropical-noir sensibilities of Carl Hiassen.

It’s The Alamo, all right, but will anyone want to remember it?

As Norman Bates, Vince Vaughn makes us better appreciate how much Anthony Perkins brought to the original project. It's clear now that he owned the role and that he shares equally with Hitchcock the credit for making Psycho the memorable creep show it is -- and was.

Hedges has demonstrated his sensitivity to internecine family conflicts and the tenor of small-time life. However, The Odd Life of Timothy Green seems always to be straining for whimsy and wonder.

But basketball … basketball doesn’t deserve the Ferrell treatment. Basketball is a sport of kings, a thing of beauty and elegance, America’s game. Which doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be mocked but that if it must be mocked it deserves to be mocked well, and Semi-Pro, unfortunately, isn’t up to the challenge.

Boilerplate stuff through and through.

It's that rare horror-comedy that is both comedic and horrifying.

There are some good gags here, and I caught myself grinning more than a few times, but Hughes and Columbus are so set in their ways that everything they work on seems to look, feel, and sound the same.

Everybody’s Fine – a movie about the lies grown children tell their parents – is, ironically, one of the most disingenuous movies to come out of Hollywood in a while.

There’s a hollowness to its beauty, as much as there is with its messaging.

It's an exploration by the audience, the filmmakers, and the subjects themselves of a kind you've never quite seen in a documentary before.

The original Shazam! may not have broken new ground as a superhero movie, but it did what the rest of the recent Warner Bros. superhero films seemed unwilling to do: Restore compassion to the realm of heroes. Shazam! Fury of the Gods loses the thing that made it special.

It doesn't always succeed, and sometimes it has the egocentric obviousness of a particularly clever, grad-student thesis film, but at least Harrison is game enough to mess with your head in the first place.

There's a manipulative streak to the proceedings, and you'd have to be stone cold dead not to grasp the inevitable outcome long before the third act, but it's a professionally handled sort of emotional manipulation common to its genre, dating back to "Blithe Spirit" and, somewhat less memorably, "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."

Gere is excellent as this disturbed fellow; his twitches and too-happy smile are right on the money, but this only serves to illuminate the ramshackle state of the rest of the film, which is a shame: good, honest films dealing with mental illness are exceedingly few and far between. This, however, is not one of them.

The cast seems to have been assembled primarily for its blinking resemblance to the stars of the original Eighties TV series about a renegade group of former Army Rangers now for hire.

It's not the most flattering depiction of Jews I've seen. Still, The Passion of the Christ is something of a masterpiece, terrible to behold, unfit for children, certainly, but very much the work of a director in the throes of his own distinct passion.

The script, by Adam "Tex" Vegas, ricochets between over-earnest romantic comedy staples and a noticeable lack of any consistent tone for Reynolds’ character.

Inoffensive and sporadically funny, its chief charm is Arnold's ridiculous noggin, and that's not saying much.

The stellar cast is uniformly great, but perhaps that speaks more toward the subject matter of grief and moving on, giving everyone a showcase to sink their teeth into acting.

Isaac and Olsen are both mesmerizing actors, and Lange and Felton also do very good work in supporting roles, but their collective gameness – all that acting their pants off (sometimes literally) – is underserved by the film’s script and direction.

It's shoot-em-up action from start to finish, beginning at such a peak that there's hardly any room for the action to build or climax.

The John Hughes script must have taken him all of thirty minutes to write – simply a matter of a few name and location changes. It wasn't a good script the first time, either.

In the end, Forces of Nature is a creampuff of a film, it being a scrappy romantic comedy of the purest stripe, what's so wrong with that? Not a thing.

This is stilted stuff. The acting is disjointed, the movie should be subtitled Three Actors in Search of Their Characters. River Phoenix gives a somnambulant impersonation of Christian Slater impersonating Jack Nicholson, and Samantha Mathis spends much of the movie trying to figure out exactly who her character is.