Suffers from a lack of good gags. That’s not to say there aren’t scads of chuckles scattered throughout – Dylan and his cast are nothing if not gluttons for the fast and cheap yuk (not to mention yuck) – but the howls of laughter that arose from Paul and Chris Weitz’s original slice of Pie just aren’t there.

Can someone dial down Cuba Gooding Jr. a few notches? He's so hyperactive during this MTV Films production - which is comedically indistinguishable from "Sister Act," but with more marketable music - that his Vegas-showgirl drag act in the dreadful "Boat Trip" looks like Bressonian minimalism by contrast.

This is your standard genre fare: Smart-a-- player gets schooled, finds love, and is redeemed in time for the final big game.

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.

For Sandler's core audience of developmentally arrested males, it may all be a little too cute.

The only thrill here comes from the adrenaline kick of the chase. Alas, it's an empty, Pavlovian kick at best.

It's diverting enough, and intermittently suspenseful, but also strangely empty and decadent in a way that truly merits that overused term.

Flag Day desperately wants to be an impassioned testament to the lives of both Jennifer and Dylan, but is hardly ever able to escape the myopic lens of its craftsman.

Feels overlong and underscripted.

It’s fun, but it’s no "Class of Nuke ’Em High."

This oddly dispassionate film about a young man dying of cancer is the French antidote to those Hollywood weepies in which the heroine courageously faces her own mortality with every hair in place.

This family melodrama is as subtle as a load of bricks and occasionally as painful, but it offers two of the most finely tuned acting performances yet this year.

The experience is a little like being stuck in a Doom Buggy on a day when the ride is very stop-start. The flow of the attraction collapses, becoming individual cool designs but not a story.

Just like it is in the world of "SNL" that Fey, Poehler, and McCullers sprang from, the choice gets made time and again to aim not for the high road but for the great, big, fat, juicy, unchallenging, uncontroversial middle ground, where everybody’s laughing but nothing is all that funny.

It’s a curiously inert, workmanlike production: a whole lot of pomp and incircumstance.

I, Frankenstein is nowhere near as garishly, ghoulishly awful as "Van Helsing," Universal’s last attempt to resurrect its classic monsters. It’s a grimly fiendish slog nonetheless, and hardly worth getting up out of the grave for.

Liger fails to live up to the standards of either star or director and instead winds up as a below average potboiler too reliant on local tropes to feel fresh for Telugu film veterans or welcoming for newcomers.

The film lacks the emotional resonance that made "Big" such a sentimental favorite with audiences of all ages.

Amusing but never rousing, this fourth installment in the Ice Age cartoon franchise comes fretted with freezer burn.

With his doughy face and oversized features, Travolta seems like a giant puppet these days. The lanky stud from "Urban Cowboy" or even the cool killer from "Pulp Fiction" are hazy memories amidst his over-the-top performance from the school of freak-out acting.

Rarely do I comment on characters’ hairstyles in movies, but the decision to give Waterston a hybrid bowl-cut/Prince Valiant bob is one of the most ill-advised things this film does. And in a film that treats its audience like morons, that is saying something.

So many logical questions go unasked in The Gift, which, ultimately, is the movie's downfall. Mark this package as Return to Sender.

As a filmmaker, Meredith has a strong, if derivative, visual sense, although his screenplay is packed with too many cliches and familiar riffs.

A lean, mean chase movie that plays like equal parts Donald Trump’s immigration policy, Steven Spielberg’s "Duel," and Wes Craven’s "The Hills Have Eyes," Cuarón’s desert-based take on "The Most Dangerous Game" is very much of the moment. It’s also, unfortunately, a one-note story populated with a handful of semi-anonymous archetypal characters.

Like the Flying Dutchman, this third Pirates outing is an empty vessel haunted by the ghosts of its sabre-rattling betters.

Ladybugs is a clapboard of a movie, but it's a genial, harmless one. The misfit antics of the soccer games are good for a few laughs, although Michael Ritchie's 1976 film The Bad News Bears is far superior in that area of comedy. Regardless, when you find yourself ashamedly laughing at Ladybugs, remember that comedy was never meant to be politically correct.

The actresses are terrific together, and it’s nice to see Helen Mirren smiling onscreen for a change. And although Calendar Girls is resolutely pleasant, the movie never really goes much beyond that.

The film is repetitive and not as suspenseful at it tries to be. Often gorgeous, sometimes fascinating, it is ultimately unwieldy and unsurprising. It fails as a Smith-family project. Jaden Smith, who was fine in "The Karate Kid," is flat here.