This is one of those rare cop/action movies driven by character, not spectacle. Murphy helps the cause with the most focused, persuasive acting of his career. As a young phenom, he got by on charisma, which he promptly commodified and cheapened with Hollywood’s enthusiastic collusion. Now there’s a calm, unfakeable assurance behind his eyes that only comes with life experience. It’s something he can and should build on.

Never transcends its clichés.

It sounds as ridiculous as a "Pokemon" episode gone horribly awry.

Feels sterile and chilly; the humor -- Yiddish and otherwise -- falls flat, and sadly so does the film.

That it has so little new to say, and replaces spirited fantasy with an overbearing glumness, is just disappointing.

With absolutely as little time devoted to character or plot development as possible, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie may not be Battleship Potemkin, but it does deliver the cheesy sci-fi goods for fans of the colorful television show, even if it's not likely to win any new converts.

Despite the unrelenting action and the terrific cast, Gangster Squad comes up more scattered than successful.

As far as revisionist takes on the Santa story go, Fatman is a long way from the whimsical charm of last year's Oscar-nominated Klaus. Yet for all its bizarre Spaghetti Western nihilism, sporadically going full Franco Nero Django bloodfest, Fatman has an oddly warm heart under its brutal exterior.

It's bigger, but it ain't necessarily better.

The film switches timelines every fifteen minutes, jumping between six months before and present day with an absolute disregard for storytelling, and this is merely the most obvious problem, not its worst.

A bad sequel to a good movie...The main concentration is on gross-out effects and lame chase scenes.

If you can work your way past Vantage Point's goofy casting that places a bland, blank-eyed Hurt in the White House, then I suppose you can manage to forgive this "Rashomon" rip-off's other glaring idiosyncrasies, of which there are many.

The jokes just aren't there, which makes it very hard for the stars -- who are trying very, very hard -- to really make a dent.

This is one horror franchise that's burned itself out, and then some – not even the rare shock cuts to nothing much at all will startle anyone over the age of 8.

Blitz, however, brings no visual snap to Table 19’s proceedings, and maintains a distant relationship with its characters.

Avildsen is a master at pulling populist heartstrings, Johnny Clegg provides the African music which is so essential to the movie's plot and the panoramic shots of the veldt are frequently breathtaking. But these things alone do not a good movie make.

Despite the weak performances and the scattershot screenplay, the film is visually terrific.

There are a lot of laughs in The Boss. The problem is that the space in between them is stagnant and shapeless. Falcone, who also directed and co-wrote "Tammy," is a dud as a filmmaker.

As much as The Carpenter’s Son threatens to swallow you whole, and as much as it probes the oft-ignored darkness inherent in the Bible even outside of the Apocrypha, its thesis remains a little too academic to move the soul.

The humor ranges from situational gags to wordplay both clever and juvenile. Despite routine lapses into gay panic and the kind of dick-stroking shadowplay that was exhausted a decade ago by the Austin Powers franchise, there are strong laughs sprinkled throughout, culminating in an unexpectedly inspired climactic car chase.

The plot twists and turns on itself endlessly and incriminates everyone. It's as if the filmmakers are trying to incorporate all the plot details from all the classics they so obviously love. But love isn't enough either. You gotta have brains, baby, and a heart and soul would be nice.

All in all, it's a bleak lesson in civility: don't honk your horn, because you just never know who you're honking at.

Times sure have changed since the old Shaft made women swoon by simply treating them like sh*t. As for the new Shaft, is he still a bad mutha? Shut your mouth.

Pixar this isn't, but neither is it "Mary Shelley's Veggie Tales." If only.

"Here Comes the Bomb" would've been a more fitting title, but props to Henry Winkler for rising to the occasion and turning in a sweet, idealistic performance in a film that otherwise feels like a tawdry commercial for the UFC and MMA.

For some reason Derailed never fully engages our sympathies. I think that's because it's difficult to swallow Owen as anything other than eminently resourceful.

Not a man, but the romanticizing of him. A lot of jive-shit.

It's gritty, nasty, predictably meat-and-potatoes suspense, but genuinely gonzo fun nonetheless.

There’s no one to root for in this movie, and no one whose prospects we care about. Several plot points lack coherence, and inserted flashbacks add to a sense of the film having been fused into shape in the editing room. It seems that Suicide Squad was done in by its own hand.

If you go into 65 expecting Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, lower your expectations. While there’s not enough outer space to call it an intergalactic odyssey and barely enough dino havoc, 65 has just the right amount of vigor to survive its relatively short runtime.

It's a comic book movie in the broadest sense of the term, and although it's neither as emotionally resonant as "The Crow" nor as surreally goofy as "Tank Girl," Barb Wire still manages to get you going, Anderson Lee fan or not.

Despite earning his bread and butter with genial comedy noted for its family-friendly language and humor, Jim Gaffigan performs laudably in this decidedly dark role.

Breaks down before it gets out of the driveway.

A frenetic affair, busy and silly enough to make family froth like "The Princess Diaries" look like Grand Illusion.

One can't help but wonder how much better this film would have played straight, without its characters in seemingly constant song. God help us if there's a film version of "Cats" in the works.

A decent enough spot of silliness.

An enthralling story on the page, this adaptation fails to capture what good adaptations can: the heart and spirit of a story told in another medium.

Bad Kids Go to Hell is the kind of movie its own pampered, careless, coked-up characters would make as a class project at the ass-end of senior year: boys running around with weapons, girls mugging sexy-sassy, narrative continuity be damned.

Unfortunately, most of the budget seems to have been spent on the first half, a murky slog through the depths of the meg-infested abyssal depths of the titular Trench where the characters are puddle-deep and the villains so cardboard that their biggest danger isn't being chum but dissolving in water.

The Virginity Hit is repugnant.

Selick is widely and rightly regarded as a master of surreal, dark humor, and wildly inventive animation technique, and Monkeybone is the first tarnish on his otherwise spotless reputation.

Lack of imagination or subtlety.

Ross’ script is never able to pull this out of the depths of trite banality, every line and emotional beat clocked from a mile away and cribbed from every other faith-based drama you’ve ever seen.

Viewers approaching Tim and Eric's comedy for the first time will probably be baffled by their popularity and success. Their Billion Dollar Movie will not win new converts, and their stretched-out routines demonstrate the old saw about less sometimes being more.

The central conceit in 3 Days to Kill – the family man moonlighting as a gun-for-hire – is hardly a fresh one. It worked in films released 10 or 20 years ago (see True Lies or Mr. and Mrs. Smith), but here it feels played out, clichéd.

Overlong, overplotted, and pocked with improbabilities.

Ultimately, this is the best version of this story that the CG-obsessed Zemeckis could have possibly produced. But just because he could make it, that doesn't mean he should.

This American version can't hold a candle to its French counterpart, which was deeply, eerily resonant where this is only frustrating, a Rubik's cube, minus its colorful signage.

In the end, it's much ado about nothing. Oh, the ennui, the ennui.

If only the movie that encases this character were as sharp and distinctive as Harriet.

There is, quite simply, a rather refreshing ordinariness to Remember Me in the unflashy, knuckle-down attention it gives to character development and the building of plausible and involving family and friend dynamics.

After this mediocrity, no one's even going to remember Roger Corman's godawful bargain-basement 1994 version. Which, on second thought, had a lot more heart that this one.

The mutilated, slobbering, howling possessed in Deliver Us From Evil crawl on all fours like animals, and furiously dig into surfaces until their fingers bleed, but they’re nothing more than a sideshow, freaks on display for your perverse enjoyment. It’s unsettling, but never terrifying.

While occasionally engaging, The Comedian isn’t very funny.

Salerno spends more time talking to photographers with telephoto lenses who, over the decades, laid in wait for Salinger in the hope of capturing a grainy picture, than he does talking to literary analysts and historians.

These fun-loving mutants meet life on their own terms, they are heroes despite themselves. Their appeal is apparently strong enough to overcome any potential disturbance regarding plot disjointedness, pseudo-scientific reasoning and historical inaccuracy.

Unfortunately, Sleepwalking isn’t content being a character study of damaged adult siblings (if it were, it would have made a nice companion piece to Kenneth Lonergan’s "You Can Count on Me," which is a far less sobering, but far more effective, movie).

It is, in a word, boring, and that's the most un-Oliver Stone adjective I can think of.

So lazy it's downright boring, something not even a naked Leslie Nielson (!) can salvage.

Monk would probably make a nice rental on a dull evening, with some kind of salty snack and a drinking-game accompaniment. (Drink whenever Scott cries, "Oh, shit!")

Pack the kids off to the multiplex with an easy conscience and forgiving critical sensibility.

These thugs, needless to say, are pulverized as effortlessly as so many Easter chicks. This is a problem I've always had with Seagal's martial arts sequences; there's seldom a nanosecond of suspense, and the fight choreography has all the sophistication of Seventies drive-in fare such as Billy Jack and Walking Tall.

Absurdism taken to a new extreme.

A well-chosen cast props up this otherwise shallow story.

A strictly-for-the-kiddies animated reboot of the seemingly ancient Smurf brand, The Lost Village is so tame it hardly merits a PG rating.

The entire movie has a creepy aura of self-consciousness. In addition to the aforementioned definitions of aloha, the word also doubles as a coming-and-going greeting in the Hawaiian vernacular. Here, it regrettably signifies the possible goodbye to a once-promising career of a filmmaker who had us at hello.

Insidious: Chapter 2 is perhaps an even more scattershot mess than its predecessor. Whannell's script is so rife with portentous backstory, third-act goofiness, and a denouement that practically screams "Insidious 3: Same Old Shit," that the film as a whole is jarring, and not in a good way.

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

Although I do think PP fans will be satisfied with the finale, let’s hope this is the last redux for these pitches.

Duigan has the makings of a good yarn, but instead of trusting the story and his characters, he becomes fatally bogged down in trying to make statements.

At its core, a very manipulative piece of work.

A serviceable cast of unfamiliar actors (the exception: Thompson as the family matriarch, Marmee); a serviceable script that takes few if any chances, with occasional wordless montages of shiny happy people; and serviceable direction that gets the job done and nothing more.

One brother grows up to be a dashing smuggler, the other is a dork and it's a tribute to Van Damme's acting ability that it's frequently impossible to tell which one is which. I could go on, I'm having a pretty good time at this, but I think I'll save my usual rants about homophobia, racism, and generally insensitive stupidity for a movie that attracts an audience that reads film reviews.

You've got to admire a movie that's willing to journey down paths that have no clear antecedents in the creation of a modern whimsical fable, but you don't have to admire the fractured results.

While the totality of Jupiter Ascending is just too much for its own massive narrative heft to support, kudos to the Wachowskis for beating back against mainstream Hollywood by casting actors of all races and genders in key roles, something they’ve been doing since their 1996 debut "Bound."

The film is mostly predictable, but throws a few curveballs and ends up being surprisingly entertaining, if not at all outstanding.

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.

To its credit, the film rockets toward its conclusion with scant downtime. It's come and gone before you even know it, and, like death, that's a good thing.

About as two-dimensional as a comic book, RoboCop 3 should be regarded as the last strike-out.

A thing of beauty. But then so is a cloud and I wouldn't want to stare at one of those for an hour and half.

The real problem isn't that Anacondas is bad – it's just so bland, so unremarkable, so by-the-numbers, and so instantly forgettable that bad might be a step up.

Something haunting is going on here, but it's as difficult for the viewers as it is for the characters to sink their teeth into anything truly satisfying.

In the end it's all much ado about not so much, a semifunctional thriller that tingles but never terrifies. Ledge schmedge.

Be it the use of faux snow that looks like the dog ends of previously owned Q-Tips or the successively worse series of blue-screened visuals, the film is shoddy from frame one.

Director-screenwriter Dearden, who wrote the script for Fatal Attraction, does a terrible job of making the pieces of the who's-he-going-to-kill-next narrative stick; jumping around with an unnerving frequency, this film self-destructs before your very eyes.

Deep Impact takes the high road and offers up more tearful reunions than actual fireballs and more egregious, sappy dialogue than you can shake a tsunami at.

On screen, Wolf and Dacascos have a remarkable chemistry. They bounce cheesy lines off of one another like they were reciting Shakespeare or Tarantino or whatever passes for great writing these days. Both are surprisingly good actors. Unfortunately, there are no further surprises.

The script by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock (Ghost Dad) is so jumbled and the direction so chaotic that it's often hard to tell what's going on -- where, when, and why.

Dull, unnecessary film.

Spiral embodies the franchise James Wan and Leigh Whannell built, while being totally refurbished for a new generation.

Only the most indulgent would fail to notice that this movie can't hold a tune.

It's a pleasure to watch, but I found myself wondering if having a story here even mattered to the director at all.

Several steps shy of a satisfying lesson.

Above all, there's Nolte, who hovers over the whole production like some sapient force of nature.

Garner hasn't come across as amusing as she is here in quite some time. Despite many funny bits, Butter also, at times, seems to excoriate the blinkered Midwesterners in the flyover states.

Hudgens' dimples threaten at times to overtake the narrative, but in the end, they're no match for Olsen's creepy-ass smirk, which, frankly, appears ready-made for Tim Burton's next outing.

Wolverine is a noisy mess, an origin/prequel that's nicely full of Jackman's ace glare as Wolverine and seriously killer snarl – The Boy From Aaarrrgh! – but utterly devoid of any of the borderline subversive smarts that made Bryan Singer's "X-Men" outings so contemporarily resonant.

The exquisitely precise direction by Seligman (making an impressive debut here), the trim editing by Eric F. Martin, the gorgeous nighttime cinematography by Matthias Schubert – all contribute to an eerie otherworldliness in this beautifully executed opening sequence of Coyote Lake. As you witness it, you wonder: Is this a real place in a real time, or some metaphysical state of mind? The movie has barely begun, and you’re utterly intrigued.