As a parable about the inherently dehumanizing aspects of the rat race, it’s bloody good fun.

Director Siri has a stylish eye that makes this film resemble a film noir outing, but the script (by Doug Richardson) is at first routine before growing increasingly outlandish.

Retains and updates the basic plot points while losing much of the original's heart and soul.

So syrupy-sweet in its depictions of the game, angels, orphans, children's wishes, and estranged parents, that it may be all you can do to keep from taking a Louisville Slugger to the projectionist.

Come Out and Play is a good example of how to eke out film thrills with a minimum of elements. Makinov should prove to be a filmmaker to watch.

It's just a good ol' bad ol' low-road road movie, a throwback to thirty years ago, a picture with hairy arms and a brew in one fist. Maybe that's why, as it ended, I could swear I heard Sam Peckinpah's ghost chuckling away.

All the broad humor of the original film is gone, replaced by clunky and often tasteless gags, and the attempts to extract pathos from genuine tragedies vary from tacky to insulting.

Predictable, affable, and completely guileless, the only part of Made in Italy that distinguishes it as having been made now, rather than any other random point in the last 30 years, is how grizzled Neeson's beard has become. The hapless English romantic lead bumbles on.

From the ad campaign, we pretty much know how things are going to turn out, and her pedestrian attempts at subplots are even more transparent than those in "Awakenings."

By fashioning itself a thriller above all else, Foe obstinately opts for the no-man’s land in between both tracks, in the process wasting its tiny, mighty cast, and the opportunity to say anything impactful.

The film lacks any undercurrent of believability.

This is meat-and-potatoes (and bullets) action filmmaking, although, really, that title's got to go.

The film tries so very hard to be The Movie of Summer '93 that it almost makes you sick for what could have been, what should have been, and, in the end, what it is: soulless sound and fury -- action in a vacuum.

Rollicking is the term that best sums up Plunkett and Macleane, not in itself a bad thing, just, I think, not a very good thing.

Schepisi underscores each emotional note by pulling the camera away from his actors and pointing it at family photographs, a saccharine conceit that becomes more irritating each time it appears.

Adults may discover, however, that when they get to the center of this particular world, they find no real there there.

Not only is Kikujiro sweet and funny, it is, no doubt, Kitano's experimental "art film."

It’s a shame that Waititi’s return to Indigenous-centered filmmaking is marred by regressive narrative choices and lazy jokes. Otherwise, we might have had a real winner on our hands.

More thought seems to have gone into the future foodstuff and eating utensil design than in the narrative. It’s a lazy film, one whose future will most likely live on in mediocre undergraduate term papers.

You can take a page from Wes Craven before he went flat and keep repeating, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie; it's only a movie." But is it?

There’s a rumbling, inconsolable guilt at the heart of Clean, the latest from fascinatingly flexible writer/director Paul Solet.

As it stands, The Ruins is about as interesting as a pile of old stones and a monkey-dumb yanqui falling prey to the horrors of globalization. And that's pretty dumb.

Ultimately, Mortal Engines is the kind of non-summer blockbuster that seems destined to find a few ardent defenders. Too unfocused to be good, too packed full of ideas to be entirely bad, it should become quite the cable television staple in just a few years' time.

Call it what it is: Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a copy of a copy.

It's a testament to Bill Nighy's cadaverous panache that this third entry in the ongoing exsanguinators vs. lycanthropes franchise (that's vampires and werewolves to anyone not weaned on Famous Monsters) is as tolerable as it is.

There’s only the faintest glimmer of Rock’s talent for piercingly funny humor here, a shortcoming for which the comic can only blame himself, given that he also produced and directed the movie.

Into the Storm captures the magnificence of tornadoes, their awful beauty when they set down, the devastation they wreak, and the enormity of their consequences. The film features a rich array of well-developed characters – including the storm itself – which makes it ever more involving as it unfolds.

Sure, Double Team is a mind-numbingly silly outing, full of gratuitous violence, testosterone-fueled goonishness, and acting turns that make TV's Van Patten family look positively Emmy-bound, but lest we forget, it's also pulse-pounding, often hilarious fun.

It is, in a word or two, everything that Poe's tales and poems were not: interminable and picayune.

One glance at the title shows you just where Brooks's head is these days: in his pants, specifically, in the area immediately below the belt. The one-time master parodist (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein) seems so focused on this universe bounded by the ass on one end, so to speak, and the groin on the other, that he forgets to do anything at all original to spoof Robin Hood or the swashbuckling films Hollywood has made of him.

It's a mess alright, but it's easy on the eyes. Like phone sex is for the ears. Only not as much fun.

With the exception of Roberts, who blends into the background in every scene in which she appears, the cast comprising the Millers keeps this sweetly crude comedy afloat.

This Hangover is a doozy, not quite as much fun (or well-written) as the original, but neither does it lack for lunatic plot complications that could only spring from the minds of writers Phillips, Craig Mazin, and Scot Armstrong.

Like some sentimental fool, I allowed Johnson’s good-hearted buffoonery and Pettis’ overpowering sweetness and Millard and Price’s unwavering belief in the healing power of love to get the better of my senses and travel straight passed my brain to my heart.

Something of a snooze.

This is interesting and fun to watch, but not so much for what it reveals as for what it hints at. Cantinflas just doesn't provide enough for getting a handle on the man, but will have me, at least, doing further reading and watching as it really whets the appetite to know more about this great talent.

A gothic little slip of a film, beautiful to behold but with less substance than the shadowy tendrils of fog that blanket nearly every scene.

It's only at film's end that you realize the whole soggy, overlong mess isn't going to go anywhere.

Just sputters along, albeit pleasantly, while revisiting the realm of the abundantly familiar.

Like most dreams revisited with eyes wide open, this one's content dissolves into a transparent puddle of inchoate thoughts and predictable iconography.

It’s not terrible as far as video game adaptations go, but as with many of them you’ll be wondering what the point is when a superior experience already exists.

The Long Night may not be revolutionary, it's definitely got its own dark magic.

It's all rather clumsy and routine.

Of course, the film is critic-proof, but as a longtime comic book (and film) nerd, I can say with some surety that Snyder has crammed too much of a great thing into his film, resulting in a super-slog that has just too much of everything.

Subtle it ain’t, but there’s an undercurrent of palpable rage that pokes through the (very funny) banter-banter gloss of the thing, and the actors rip into it with relish.

It's chop-socky vindaloo, pleasing on a platter but awfully difficult to swallow whole.

Although the transvestites’ plight – mishandled, misunderstood, and/or misappropriated – is meant to supply Connie and Carla's emotional core, one never gets the feeling of anything stronger than an at-shoulder-length's sympathy from this film.

It's exasperating watching so much top-drawer talent wasted in a film that wraps itself up with one of the most preposterous (not to mention obvious) endings the genre has ever seen.

Final verdict: Cast is excellent; movie is OK; men and women are soooo different.

Widen gets an “A” for ambition here, but by the end of the whole shebang, you really couldn't care less.

Mortal Kombat commits the unforgivable sin of actually being boring duing the middle hour of training and exposition. Even when it finally gets into full combat mode, there's no tournament, just a 30 minute throw down between a bunch of vaguely recognizable characters.

This comedy has a few genuine laughs, but The Bronze never even comes close to making it to qualifiers.

Two Eighties genre staples – Disease-of-the-Week and Poppin' the Cherry – meet, shake hands, and mostly play nice in this sweet, if overly earnest feature.

So much of the movies is the right kind of entertaining, with the right kind of actors playing the right kind of second-tier blockbuster roles, that Bloodshot cannot help but be a cult classic in the making. This is Hollywood escapism at its finest at a time when we need it the most.

It fails to rise above the inherent limitations of the traditional Hollywood biopic and it's about as insanely great as a Mac "low cost" LC model – which was, to be fair, pretty cool.

Do we like John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester? As played by Depp, this 17th-century nobleman-cum-travesty is a carriage crash of epic proportions, and so it's difficult not to crane your neck around to get a better view of the proceedings.

It's not rocket science making nonstop action feel semi-fresh, and The Losers’ script by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt manages to render each individual, um, a loser in the broadest and most memorable strokes. It's not a masterpiece, either, but it'll do until Hannibal, Murdock, and the rest the A-gamers start blowing things up come June.

It appears that Kelly spent the intervening years (since "Donnie Darko") taking hallucinogenic drugs, reading Philip K. Dick novels upside down, and – most disastrously – believing his own hype.

In the end, Devil feels like an ingenious short film pumped up for theatrical release. Shyamalan's story is sound, but the execution dragged me to hell and left me there wondering if his much-rumored sequel to "Unbreakable" was ever going to arrive.

It's just that audiences are going to have a hard time tidily summarizing what it is they just experienced (and I suspect the same holds true for Soderbergh himself).

Fails to completely engage the viewer at the basic level of story.

The whole thing still reeks of voyeurism -- and not the fly-on-the-wall voyeurism of a vérité doc, but rather the dirty-old-man-in-the-peep-show-booth kind. Might as well just wait for it to hit late-night cable.

At its heart the film wants nothing more than to make you giggle, and at that it succeeds admirably.

Vromen does make some efforts at re-creating the period. But what links 1992 to the era is that it feels like part of that wave of low-budget late-Nineties Heat knockoffs, all featuring a cast that can do better but hey, a paycheck is a paycheck. 1992 is just Hard Rain with the riots standing in for a storm.

There's nothing here for the viewer to do, no kinks to work out, no double-crossings to anticipate, not even a half-hearted flail at figuring out how Danny ticks.

As the film's central focal point, Simpson (who also co-wrote the script) is an awful zero – you could hardly imagine a more uncharismatic lead – and his embarrassing swings at big emotion in the climax prove the final blow to a film already hobbled by mawkishness.

I hate to sound like a disappointed parent, but I expected more from Luke Wilson.

But just like no sports team can be populated entirely by superstars, there’s certainly a place for high-floor horror that understands its audience, works within the confines of its PG-13 rating, and provides just enough visual and storytelling variety to keep the audience satisfied.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that just because we CAN use computer technology to give dogs goofy faces, that doesn’t mean we SHOULD.

Simply put, no matter what this zebra thinks of himself, Stripes is no thoroughbred.

Good, manic fun plus a heavy dose of political intrigue adding up to two hours of clamorous, mind-numbing nonsense.

Palmetto follows the rules of film noir so slavishly that it's tough not to like it just on its own dopey, headstrong merit.

The film feels like a truly awful "Saturday Night Live" sketch padded out to such unholy lengths as to make "It's Pat" seems like a comic masterstroke.

The trouble comes when somebody opens their mouth and you’re reminded this is supremely silly stuff, and overall a much lesser version of teens versus the titans of post-apocalypse industry – a copy of a copy of a copy.

Only Palance is worthwhile, as Curly's long-lost brother Duke (there's an inspired cowboy name for ya), and even that role seems dazed and clichéd. Tack on an absolutely deranged, hackneyed final reel, and you've got a movie that'll fade from your memory so quick it'll make your eyes water and your teeth hurt.

Aside from the ridiculous dialogue, of which there is much, and truly crappy CGI gore, of which there is even more, Survival of the Dead feels like the single weakest link in what is otherwise the strongest, smartest, and most transgressively revolutionary horror series in cinema history.

With the warmth of Elliott Davis' cinematography and The Band and the Staple Singers on the score, Larger Than Life has much that's appealing for an older, old-fashioned crowd.

In short, it's nothing you haven't seen countless times before and, while it's not offensively bad, it also adds zero to the same old routine. Meh.

There is much to recommend this earnest and enraged film.

A surprisingly fun throwback to Cold War thrillers.

Like the jelly-bean sugar high in one of the more manic running gags, it’s all terribly exhausting in the way most movies tailored to the under-10 crowd can be.

San Andreas, by its very nature, begs, borrows, and outright steals from other, occasionally better, disaster epics.

The adaptation, by screenwriter John Romano and McGregor, debuting as a director, roughly sticks to the plot points of the novel but sheds its nuance, and reduces Zuckerman’s role to a mere background information delivery system.

Now it's just another romantic comedy, neither terribly bad nor truly great, buoyed along on currents of hope and post-traumatic good cheer.

Utterly pointless remake.

Suicide Kings' morbid sense of humor does nothing but muddle the film's overall tone. Comedy? Caper flick? It's all too much, and simultaneously not enough by a long shot.

Plenty of killings abound, nevertheless the film is a masterful -- albeit warped -- love-story-cum-road-movie that revolves around three of the most invigorating performances of the year.

Hardly a comic masterpiece -- the jokes are awfully broad and obvious -- but I couldn't help feeling relieved at the film's absence of malice.

If Affleck stumbles, Smith's script does nothing to catch his fall. Surprisingly, Smith's truest talent – that of writing – is Jersey Girl's weakest link.

Fathers' Day offers little in the way of comic relief.

It works best as a spank-it movie you don’t have to feel guilty about and that you can dance to. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Perhaps Sucsy was overwhelmed by his immersion in such colorful and outré material; he's chosen for his followup, the I Can't Believe It's Not Nicholas Sparks weepie The Vow, the cinematic equivalent of a lie-down.

The next generation won’t learn the artist’s whole life story from this biopic, but they just might be inspired to do some Googling after the credits roll.

Hot Rod is a stupid movie about stupid people doing stupid things.

Neither inspired enough to work as a fable nor sufficiently grounded to bear up to even an instant of examination, Antebellum is a woeful misfire.

Maybe it’s supposed to be the enlightening tale of one bird’s self-redemption from neurotic negativity, but I just wanted to punch this film in the snout.

Le Chef is practically bursting with good-natured bonhomie.

There are a few nice special effects, and Jerry Goldsmith's score works overtime to make the rather bland proceedings a bit more exciting, but, ultimately, any movie in which even Morgan Freeman manages to give a lackluster performance can only be considered a seriously botched job.