It's a shame if the controversy surrounding Bubble Boy distracts people from what a smart, subversive, and genuinely good-hearted film it is.

Amiable and proficient, this indie romantic comedy is never more or less than reliable.

It's certainly one of the most beautiful costume-drama/historical-romance naps you'll ever have, but this effortlessly evocative, endlessly ennui-inducing paean to Hawaii's final princess is, ultimately, a dull, "Upstairs Downstairs" affair.

This is nothing like the absorbing Nordic noir of modern Scandinavian television and cinema. It more resembles good old-fashioned American mediocrity.

It's just engaging enough to make you accept the possibility that two kids from the Boston suburbs may just be mankind’s only hope for the future, and just exciting enough to make you forget that you're watching a Nicolas Cage movie.

The result is a goofy-weird mishmash of some pretty swell CGI creatures and some downright lousy screenwriting.

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

A slight, facile, and ultimately yawn worthy romantic comedy, and one of the most obvious if unexpected missteps in Hanks' career.

Memory is better than some Neeson action flicks, worse than others, but, predictable as it is to say, you'll have trouble remembering it much longer than its run time.

John Tucker Must Die will undoubtedly fade into obscurity like so many silly and sentimental teen comedies before it.

Move over, Gordon Gecko: The new poster boy for American greed in the movies isn’t a silver-tongued corporate hustler with pomaded hair and a closet full of $10,000 suits. In fact, the new poster boy for American greed in the movies isn’t a boy at all. I know you won’t believe me when I tell you, but you’ve been replaced by Diane Keaton.

With wonderful music, interesting characters, and lots of laughter, this picture feels much bigger than it really is.

It's all pretty goofy, which I assume is the point, but it's also pretty dull.

A story disappointingly similar to the original.

Hopelessly old-fashioned then, but not the aggressively bad picture you might have anticipated.

Director Condon displays a sure hand with material that could easily have turned out far worse, making this a nicely disturbing piece of work that rises well above the conventions of the genre almost all the way through.

Maybe they thought that for the amount of time this movie had been gestating it just had to be something special. But for as long as this thing has been cooking, the end result is seriously underbaked.

One wants to reach through the screen at the end of this narcissistic exercise, grasp his shoulders and give him a good shake: “Get a grip, man. You’re Clarence Thomas.”

As we find ourselves again immersed in a time of war, Trumbo's ageless story offers a useful corollary.

There actually is some clever dialogue in the film, especially early on between Roadblock and Duke (Tatum). But this fades over the course of the film, and too much of what the characters say sounds as though it’s been lifted verbatim from 1930s and 1940s serials.

Effective performances by the principals are unable to surmount the movie’s many cliches, although the actors render them more endurable. A more evocative title for this Hindu Gothic might be: "Mommies Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things."

It works extremely well as a drunken, date-night midnighter or film-fest entry, all madcap bloodletting and surrealist non sequiturs.

While Smith's testosterone-loaded humor is a taste I have yet to acquire, his choices of a comic book-inspired credit sequence, the guest appearance of Marvel Comics genius Stan Lee, and the film's overall superhero aesthetic perfectly capture the mall mise-en-scene.

It's all probably too slippery for the youngest viewers to grasp and too sketchy for the nostalgia crowd (for whom this revival seems most geared).

This crass and hugely dumb aliens vs. multiple earthling navies should thrill the hyperactive 10-year-old inside you. Adults, on the other hand – and especially genre-fan adults – will be bored to tears and wishing Bay (or at least Jerry Bruckheimer) had something of their own on the marquee out front.

Instantly forgettable but good-natured all the same.

Torque knows it’s one big joke, dusty chaps, heaving bosoms, and all, which makes it all that much easier to swallow. And forget.

Disappointing flop that is best left off your dance card.

To be fair, not even Meg Ryan’s nose-scrunch, Kate Hudson’s sass, or Julia Roberts’ million-dollar smile could jolt this muddled rom-com to life.

As a trilogy capper, The Last Dance is barely a shuffle and a shimmy.

The revelation of Little Ashes turns out to be none of the leading men but rather Gatell, a riveting actress cast as the girlfriend who is mystified by Lorca’s lack of sexual interest in her.

After establishing this interesting premise, writer/director James DeMonaco only scratches the surface of its implications before devolving into a creepy roundelay of murders and deaths averted.

Almost all of it has to do with watching the occasionally nude Jovovich look absolutely smashing in duster and sidearms, but sometimes, let's face it, that's not enough.

Does anyone, young or old, wish to see a 72-year-old Pacino sporting spiky hair and goatee, hollering in his "Tony Montana" voice about having a boner? Is he in a contest with Mick Jagger to see who can keep up the wild-man shtick into the triple digits?

Director Irwin Winkler and his cast obviously hope to shed light on the boundaries of love, and instead come up with a walloping case of the preachies.

Good Burger is not fully cooked but it provides a taste of things to come.

Scarlet Bond collapses into the hourlong, supposedly epic but ultimately low-stakes multifront battle de rigueur in too much anime right now. That leaves no room to explore the story's most interesting character: Rimiru himself.

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.

The hit-or-miss nature of the gags makes NBT too uneven to recommend, but it's a great calling-card movie for guys who want to become professional comedy writers.

This rote buddy-cop action comedy is instantly forgettable. We’ve seen it all before, and worse than that, we’ve seen it done far better in films ranging from last year’s "The Heat" to Eighties classics such as "Midnight Run" and "Lethal Weapon."

Unfortunately, Mr. Woodcock is funny for exactly five minutes, during which time Woodcock is shown throwing basketballs at boys’ heads and mocking them for having dead parents.

The film’s narrative and characters reason that any difficult situation can be solved with blind brute force and a pistol. If you’re looking for a cutting critique of the American addiction industry, look elsewhere.

The Squeakquel might be appreciated by filmgoers aged 10 or younger.

Chris Dowling’s second feature at first seems anodyne enough, but once the plot mechanics kick into high gear, the film becomes as unsurprising as a prix fixe menu.

It's not "Billy Madison," quite, but The Waterboy is still pure Sandler. If you like that sort of thing.

It's a shame that the subjects of Gazecki's film come off as so many quasi-mystical loonies.

Thanks to this relentlessly likable film's playful sexuality and utter lack of pretension it's surprisingly easy to let all of one's objections float away on a fragrant cloud of kitchen sweat, pheromones, and sweet lime zest.

Cody Banks would probably be appropriate for the 13-and-older crowd, but it’s far too dopey for teenage sophisticates.

The abundance of talent gathered for Meet the Fockers is sadly shortchanged by the unimaginative script and directorial laissez faire. It’s more like the audience has been snookered rather than Fockered.

Moonfall is bad – the wrong kind of bad – because everything in this formula fails to hold up its end of the bargain. The effects are muddled; the supporting cast is terrible. The only thing Moonfall delivers on is the big ideas, but by the time the movie begins to layer in the sci-fi absurdity, the film is already three-quarters of the way home.

The characters never come across as anything more than self-interested parties. It’s hard to have a rooting interest in any of their fates, and even less in the outcome of this movie.

Tyler Perry has already been here and done that to such a degree that this particular cinematic field should now be plowed under and salted so that nothing might grow thereupon forevermore. Amen.

Melissa Leo has some standout scenes as the secretary of defense, who gets pretty well beaten up for defying her captors, but others, such as Angela Bassett and Morgan Freeman, have little to do but bite their lips and look tense from the confines of their command posts.

Kick-Ass 2 returns with the original’s rollicking sense of vulgarity and bodily trauma fully intact, but the story has more plot lines to string together than absolutely necessary.

As a take on contemporary television culture, Stay Tuned has a lot to say, but much of it is presented in such a broad comedic format that it passes by unnoticed. This is a comedy, after all; politics aside, though, it never really rises above the level of mediocrity, and never actually descends to the level of television itself.

Exploitation fans will be disappointed to see that Roy Frumkes, who wrote the incredible cult favorite Street Trash and directed the excellent documentary Document of the Dead, and Alan Ormsby, who collaborated with Bob Clark on his forgotten classics Deathdream, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, and Deranged, were partly responsible for The Substitute's abysmal screenplay.

Forster should be commended for attempting something as daunting as the overreaching Stay, which despite all of its muddled logic and porous reality – or perhaps because of it – forces you to think, a genuine rarity these days.

It’s as if Finding You was written by a computer program that studied 2000s rom-coms, taking the worst tropes and clunkily blending them together.

A cheap attempt to re-create the spark that has made the "Conjuring" franchise so lucrative. It’s pathetic, and both horror fans and the Latinx community deserve more respect than this lazy attempt at a cash grab. A decent performance from Linda Cardellini doesn’t save a film loaded with predictable jump scares and weak mythos building.

The movie is both harrowing and funny, but I’m not sure the filmmakers would agree with everyone about which scenes are which.

Carpenter's updating of the classic 1960 chiller is mediocre at best, and at times plummets into unintentional humor. It's arguably the weakest horror film he's ever made.

Much to my dismay this is not an unauthorized sequel to Abel Ferrara's 1979 East Village art-world freakout "Driller Killer." This is instead a dispiritingly mediocre tweener comedy from some very talented people who appear to be experiencing a delayed sophomore slump.

Maybe it's indicative of my end-of-the-year brain-fry, but this dopey comedy about two of the dumbest guys in the universe on a road trip to misadventure is a hoot.

Pompeii delivers the goods – well, at least during its final 20 minutes.

Certainly there are filmgoers who enjoy this kind of noncommittal metaphysical quest. I am not one of them. It makes me think that the filmmaker is more interested in showing us his vacation slides instead of sharing any real insights.

It’s an impossible standard, maybe, but in 42 minutes, TV’s "Friday Night Lights" delivered all-star-level emotional complexity and action. When the Game Stands Tall is strictly JV squad.

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

Silk Road is not without its pleasures – Clarke especially is fun to watch as he gets increasingly cornered with his shakedown shenanigans – just don’t expect the kush; this is strictly schwag.

Though the movie’s raison d’être is unmistakable from the outset, the most compelling moments come not when God’s name is being invoked out loud and with great frequency, but rather when the loving symbiosis between two young people facing adversity and caring for each other is tenderly communicated without uttering any words, conveyed in something as simple as the direct gaze between two pairs of locked eyes. Now that’s the notion of a higher power in which we can all believe.

Laughably and knowingly preposterous, cheerfully un-PC, and violent in a way that makes the myriad slaphappy deaths of Wile E. Coyote seem downright dull in comparison.

Quite possibly, this could have been a hit back in 1975 or so, and almost certainly for Blake Edwards, but here and now it's just a puzzling aberration.

187 (the title refers to copspeak for a homicide) circles round and round, never making a salient point that isn't countered by another, utterly opposite notion three scenes later.

It’s nowhere near as soulful or questing as "2001" or "Moon" – but as popcorn entertainment, it’s surprisingly provocative.

For all its faults, is a solid piece of dirty work.

It's an utterly contemporary film that forces - and rewards - hard reflection on the nature of truth, goodness, and identity.

Predictable piffle, a comically unbelievable story that leaves almost no impression except what a sham our legal system is.

The most distressing thing is the complete lack of accountability for Tripp and Creech’s destructive joyride, which results in a significant amount of vehicular damage and possible human injury.

It's not just a bad movie it actually manages to suck the very hope out of the air, leaving behind a cinematic vacuum populated by mobsters, sadists, pedophiliac demon-people, and an overwhelming sense of futility that just makes you want to run in the other direction.

The violence is always vicious, the catalog of brutally attacked, pornographically bloody bodies is unending, and despite the abundance of action the film is terribly dull.

Vacant and pointless.

As out-of-whack and sophomoric as all this is, the movie sustains a rudimentary action interest.

There's something about that extra layer of distancing that a book can offer and the screen can't, which in this case might account for why film viewers feel vaguely discomforted by an icky fifth-wheel sensation.

There are times when it’s funny. There are also times when it beats you over the head with context clues. When the action ramps up, the over-the-top music score seems to stomp its foot and say, “Something is hap-pen-ing!” Certain plot points are overemphasized. It veers toward parody. But it’s also satisfying to see the outcome.

Before I Go to Sleep still offers a near encyclopedic look at what not to do.

From the swooping aerial shots of downtown Miami, to the long, long-legged beauties that seem to crop up every time the action threatens to slow down, to the nonsensical lack of logic that permeates the film like the acrid odor of wasted cordite, Bad Boys oozes Eighties Hollywood clichés like no film since "Top Gun."

It's a Big Idea movie that comes out only half-baked.

This year's entry in this lowly subgenre is Four Christmases, a D-list comedy with A-list actors.

Super Troopers 2 is a movie out of time and out of sync with comedy in 2018. It might have managed the success of its precursor, if only it had been released in 2002.

An upper-tier addition to a long running horror franchise that arguably deserves better than a January release.

Lean as a hellhound, Shelby Oaks doesn’t rely on jump scares, although there are plenty of those. Instead, its true terror is found in writer/director Chris Stuckmann’s ability to move effortlessly from adrenaline shocks to creeping psychological strain.

Previously responsible for The Hitcher, a disturbingly cold-blooded exercise but still a powerful cinematic vehicle, Harmon still doesn't show enough humanity to be considered anything more than a stylish director. But he is a damned stylish one, who keeps the film interesting and the action sequences effective. If you don't expect much (and the developer vs. land owner plot is ridiculous) you may be surprised at what's here.

If we don’t have an amazing Filipino American family, we can all still relate to the familial shenanigans that revolve around a holiday. Is it worth a watch? Sure. Is it worth seeing on the big screen? Nah.

The script, written by the three brothers, is ludicrous and incomprehensible, and plays cat-and-mouse games with what could have been some deeply funny comments on race, wealth, and, in one inspired changing-room scene, eating disorders.

Now, with Chappie, the director/co-writer returns home for an uneven showcase of impeccable visual effects and lackluster emotional affect.

Some films are saccharine, but Hop is pure sugar.

The film finds some momentum once the bodies start dropping – but maybe that was only the sweet relief in knowing the end was nigh.

There’s no sense of trepidation in The Quiet Ones, because suspense requires a cogent storyline to either create or defy the viewer’s expectations. This lack of plausible narrative is either the result of lazy filmmaking or shortcut editing. Either way, you lose.

Bettany exudes an intensity that lays the groundwork for an interesting character, but Priest hasn't a prayer of creating anything more subtle than the giant cross tattooed on his face.