Dear George Lucas: What gives with this Eragon jazz? I mean, gee whiz, did you seriously think that we wouldn't recognize you, the Great Man, as the guiding, um, FORCE behind this dull retelling of "Star Wars"?

Like its protagonist, the movie tries to rise above convention, flails about a bit, and slides back into self-parody.

A limp and lackluster affair that telegraphs its feel-good smarm miles in advance.

The movie’s length forces our suspension of disbelief for at least an hour more than is comfortable and pushes mindlessness to a dangerous longevity.

The Green Inferno feels like a retread of a retread.

It really IS fun to watch yet another oddball turn by Sutherland, and a marginally restrained one from Spacek. It's just not THAT fun.

Let no one ever say that Dark Streets doesn't have the perfect title. It may not be much more than a stylized regurgitation of creaky film-noir clichés and crime-fiction conventions … but its streets are undeniably dark.

A flat and tedious action film that elicited the most lethal response possible when I asked my movie date what she thought after the credits rolled: “boring.” Agreed.

Few actors are as good at playing confident idiots as Chris Hemsworth. Few actresses are also as good at playing sick-of-your-shit heroines as Tessa Thompson. Thanks to "Thor: Ragnarok," we know these two actors possess delightful onscreen chemistry and can bounce their way through an action scene with the best of them. Shockingly, it takes every bit of this talent and this charisma to keep Men in Black: International from being an outright disaster.

From the creature FX to the stilted dialogue, Sleepwalkers offers nothing new for horror fans to sink their collective fangs into.

The artist’s intellectual and political foundations are demonstrated along with his “Thug Life” credo and lifestyle, but the result is a dualistic, rather than truly complex, portrait of the man.

A mildly entertaining reworking of the Farrelly Brothers' superior micro-sport parody "Kingpin."

Perelman eases the transitions between the past and the present with echoing phrases and situations, but they all seem rather pat and contrived. Does he really think that repeated refrains from the Zombies oldie, "She's Not There," won't be a dead (so to speak) giveaway?

This is a scattershot affair, though fans of Reno should find it engagingly loopy.

You don’t have to be a cynic to find Radio naive for suggesting that high school is a good place for emotionally fragile misfits, that racism is not a problem, that caring for someone is all it takes.

If Never Die Alone had even a smidgeon of comic relief (or even, say, a bunch of zombies) to offset some of its relentlessly downbeat brutality, it might have been at best tolerable. But it doesn't, and it's not.

Movies like The Vatican Tapes are by nature sloppy and derivative, seeking to evoke a thrill that’s long gone.

Hasbro’s long-lasting occult board game gets its own starring role in a film that makes those other recent Hasbro plaything adaptations – namely "Transformers" and "G.I. Joe" – look like triumphs of subtly engineered cinematic magic.

For all its genuine thrill-ride gestalt, No Escape completely short-shrifts its Southeast Asian players. There’s exactly one Asian character of note, a Kenny Rogers-loving tuk-tuk driver (Boonthanakit). Everyone else is a nameless victim of the equally nameless mob.

It's just not all that interesting to watch two pretty young things go through the muddled rituals of the pas de duh when I can, you know, do it just as poorly myself.

The problem nipping at the designer heels of Confessions is not the state of the economy but, rather, the film's predictability.

The November Man is diligently executed, and Brosnan gives a fine performance as an action hero who can convey a character’s thought processes as well as deliver a punch.

Delivers sinister atmosphere but few shocks.

Sporadically funny, the film seems weighted down, literally, with bulging, bulbous Murphys flatulating endlessly.

Posey and Sheen appear to have a blast playing oversized characters so obnoxious that it's obvious they belong together.

There’s nothing especially offensive about the actress (Hudson); if anything, it’s that lack of offense, her overwhelmingly benign vibe, that has become increasingly repugnant with every picture she puts out.

All this would be fine if the script by Forrest Smith had more wit and fewer clichés, or the direction by former makeup artist Abascal had more inventiveness.

None of this made a lick of sense to me, nor did it appear to be all that obvious to either the cast or screenwriter Hodge, whose work here feels as though he'd given up in frustration halfway through before deciding to see how far he could push the vaguely Harry Potter-esque shenanigans before getting sacked.

Chaos Walking is, as with any pop confection, catchy and has a solid beat, it’s just a shame that this tune is all too familiar.

There’s a difference between being transgressive and offensive, and that, in a nutshell (or roasted chestnut), is the difference between Bad Santa and Bad Santa 2.

An exercise in pure sadism, The Collection moves at a clip that leaps over plot holes in its race to elicit fright.

I defy you to hate John Cena. Really. You can try all you want, but I don't think you'll make it.

A piece of garbage and the best argument for reading books since the first pop-up appeared.

Part metaphysical treatise, part educational primer, and part dangerously goofy self-help manual for the New Age set, this bizarre and not unentertaining documentary strives mightily to teach the lay audience everything there is to know about quantum physics in 108 minutes.

And, by comparison, it almost makes Basic Instinct's ending look coherent.

Sick, twisted, and very funny, Parker and Stone have arrived. Again.

So yeah, the great man is welcome on our screens any day. On the other hand, Carpenter's comeback packs very little of his usual cinematic flair. It's not even all that scary.

Although the scares in this movie are minimal, Ernest Scared Stupid nonetheless offers the frightening prospect of yet another installment of the Big E's misguided antics.

Everyone in the ensemble is game for their respective misadventures, but little of it seems all that inspired.

August Rush is a rather prosaic, oddly anxious, contemporary take on Dickens' Oliver Twist, with Williams – in nasty-man twee mode, a newish one for him – thrown in for bad measure.

The performances are all solid, although the screenplay frequently bogs down with the complexity of palace intrigues and plots that could have been rendered more consumer-friendly.

Free Birds falls flat, despite its good intentions, ideological cuteness, humorous polish, and skillful computer animation. The fine voice talents of the almost-ideal cast are wasted.

Tiny and well-intentioned but dramatically inert and sham-kooky, Girl Most Likely is for Kristen Wiig completists only, and even they may squirm at spending a whole movie waiting for her character to pull her head out of her ass.

As played with startlingly veracity by Jonas Dassler, there's nothing romantic about him: a deformed nose, shuffling gait, slack-jawed and with a misaligned eye, he looks exactly like the man responsible for the deaths of at least four women in 1970s Hamburg.

The finished product is as predictably dull as a newborn's soft spot.

It’s all very nice to look at, sure, but pretty colors and molten intercoolers aside, 2 Fast 2 Furious is about as exciting as a Yugo in quicksand.

For the first 30 minutes I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching a really promising pilot for network TV.

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.

The script is replete with filler inserted in the name of “real life”: bad jokes and silly riddles, spontaneous songs, and improvised scenes in which conversations go around in circles.

Certain scenes play as if Reiner forgot to show up on the day of filming, so the actors and cameraman just winged it. Perhaps his embarrassing (and pointless) turn as Leah’s clueless accompanist with the bad toupee distracted him from his principal responsibilities behind the camera. What a Meathead.

One of the Peking Opera-trained superstar's most mediocre films, rivaling last year’s God-awful "The Tuxedo" for sheer messy filmmaking and brazen acts of tedium... Abysmal.

It’s a message movie, as are all kids films these days, but these environmentally-aware messages are sweet and unforced, and well worth hearing.

It's good -- no, great -- to see Williams as a mean rat bastard.

Murphy's screentime takes a back seat to Douglas', of course, but from that back seat she makes a very big noise.

Ultimately, one has to chalk up The Pink Panther to the good old traditions of Hollywood greed and chutzpah. Nothing this slapdash and badly executed is done for the love of movies.

The kind of film that will be suitable for all-ages entertainment once the family runs out of conversation after devouring all the turkey, but it's unlikely to expand its audience beyond these captives.

It starts out promising, using the conventions and trappings of the fondly remembered Ward cartoons, but after a bit of good silliness with maps, stock footage, and the flustered narrator, a convoluted espionage plot, and way too much effort in fleshing out our two heroic villains results in a film that's as hard to follow as it is to laugh at.

Not just narratively crude but aesthetically ugly, Men, Women & Children’s framing occasionally cuts characters off at the forehead, in effect lobotomizing them. I couldn’t think of a better metaphor for this brainless splotch of self-important scaremongering.

Does it make any sense? Nope. Does this detract from the film? Not at all. It's classic Italian Grand Guignol at its most disturbing; a car crash, autopsy, and disembowelment all wrapped up in a nice, soggy package.

The latticework of social meaning that makes up Crossing Over is ultimately a flimsy structure that pays lip service to liberal values while only occasionally inventing anything of dramatic significance.

It’s not the unmitigated disaster early reviews suggested. Instead, it is a blandly competent and doggedly uninspired redo of material adapted a half-dozen times already.

Perhaps it’s just not-the-best-translation of "Taiyō no Uta," the title of the 2006 Japanese original, but I’m (unfortunately) not a language scholar, so I can’t be certain either way. What I can tell you is that this remake kind of sucks.

In the end, Dominion brings back likable characters and has the good grace to move at a fast clip. It is a testament to how low the bar has gotten that those two elements feel like enough to make it a passable summer movie.

At it's best, it's a wishy-washy treatise that fails to elicit much of any reaction.

As for Zach Galifianakis, playing a dim-witted drunk – file his role under head-scratching.

Howard, mercifully, dumps most of Vance's political cant in favor of a maudlin, slow, rehab drama, carried on the backs of a cavalcade of wafer-thin characters.

Amos & Andrew is a better-than-average comedy that's likable enough while unfolding but evaporative when over.

Of all the missteps made and absurdities offered, the most glaring is the casting of what appears to be a steroidal Eurotrash pimp as no less than Dracula.

It's hard to decide what rankles most: what an astonishing monument to Shadyac's self-absorption I Am is, or how flat-out bad – incompetent, even – the filmmaking is.

A welcome antidote to most of the crap that for passes today for horror and other supernaturally themed movies.

I didn't care much for this movie. It's brutal and it's brutalizing. It seeks to make the audience an accomplice rather than a rational observer.

A moribund Harrison Ford vehicle, stodgily dull, and seemingly endless in its monotony.

The film's rhythm is jerky, bouncing all around the place and making some of the setups feel unnecessary.

It’s most definitely not for the squeamish nor the easily offended -- the death scenes in Final Destination 2, of which there are many, are immensely bloody and imaginative affairs, full of exploding limbs, squashed bodies, and graphic, gory ultra-violence.

A film that is long on atmosphere, but short on smarts: Plot points are easily unraveled 20 minutes in advance (no fun sleuthing for the audience here), the ending is an unsatisfying pastiche off too many horror tropes, and it would take a week to plug all of Gothika’s gaps in logic.

A strange Hollywood film, but for a home movie it's one bang-up job.

Keating’s no-rules narrative, and amped-up, super-stylized visuals are intoxicating and disturbing, as each killer gets their own captivating moment in the spotlight.

With the exception of Kroll’s gravelly-intoned Uncle Fester, the voicework is sketchy, with Theron’s Seven-Sisters elocution bordering on sacrilege.

It's not atrocious, but it borders on it, thanks to Dennis Quaid's annoying narration and his even more irritating portrait of the self-loathing writer whose presence bookends the two main storylines.

What this really comes down to is the film's central lie. Made of Honor pins its hopes on a character who acts utterly without honor, and on an actor who has only two settings – sensitive or smarmy. The smarm wins.

By the time the closing credits roll, you're wondering if anyone else noticed that nothing made much sense.

Most devastating to the film’s effectiveness is its inability to convey that one essential to the story of Amelia Earhart: the tangible pleasures of flying.

Manic energy is the term that comes most readily to mind when describing Ace Ventura.

In the wake of the debacle known as Showgirls, Striptease has had to fight to establish its separate identity and credentials. In retrospect, it appears to have been wasted energy.

For a movie that’s ostensibly about scratching at real feelings, it comes off as phony as a perfume ad.

Neil Diamond isn't the best actor, and the 1980 version of The Jazz Singer doesn't have the best script, but this movie (love on the) rocks nonetheless.

Noble intentions, ignoble results.

The elements of the film don’t quite mesh: The villains are cartoony, but Du Chau aims for soggy family drama in his father-son story.

The Last Legion offers guilty-pleasure fun in a cheesy, very De Laurentiis way (much like 1976's Mandingo rip-off Drum), but, in the end, it's just not a very inspired or well-conceived film, despite Kingsley's strangely endearing turn as the proto-Merlin.

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

Best never to have left dry dock with this one.

Ultimately, though, and despite an enormously creepy turn from Bentley (American Beauty), the story has nowhere else to go but into the standard (albeit judiciously-used) stalk-and-slash territory.

For the most part, Baywatch resembles a scarce amount of its origin and relies on a none-too-arch humor that misses more than it hits.

Charmless, unfrightening, and even devoid of the requisite gratuitous nudity, Anaconda just plain bites.

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 first "Nightmare on Elm Street" was wickedly surreal, but the wacky dream sequences were offset by the sitcomlike, almost satirical flatness of ordinary suburban life; that was the really scary part. Freddy Vs. Jason is innocent of such nuances.

It's a messy, overlong film, but it's impossible to take seriously and therefore more than a little entertaining.

It pains me to say it, but Afterlife, the latest installment in this seemingly eternal zombie apocalypse franchise, is considerably more entertaining than George A. Romero's most recent exhumation.