Fallen's pretentious vision of a demonic force out to shatter the life of one lowly homicide detective is, ultimately, a pretty silly ride despite the film's obvious strengths and some genuinely eerie scenes.

If you have an 8- to 16-year-old underfoot in the house, there are worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.

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."

With dreary visuals and a lack of real twists or scares, there isn’t much here for a general audience to hold onto. Die-hard fans will be satisfied, however, and for young newcomers to horror, it might just be a perfect scarefest and jumping-off point into the genre.

Sisto's direction is a victory of glacial tone over actual content, and John and the Hole's frustrations outweigh its insight into the forces that can spawn a monster.

This is fussy filmmaking, overly made-up (the costume mandate seems to include the buzzwords "coffee filters," "croquembouche," and "Day-Glo paint") and bereft of wit.

Refreshingly, there’s nary a cheap scare manifested in this Conjuring, although the unspoken corollary to that is that The Conjuring 2 just isn’t very scary, or even unnerving.

The Mauritanian wants to be a fusion of Papillon and A Few Good Men, but it cannot work out whether it wants to make a purely emotive argument, or engage in a brutal cross-examination of the legal system.

The film is a hoot and goes by quickly, but there's nothing here you haven't seen before.

Summertime’s boisterous enthusiasm sometimes finds an endearing spark, but it never erupts like the fireworks that scatter across the L.A. skyline at the film’s end. It’s a mess and it’s exhausting, with its heart always on the brink of exploding from its exhilarating optimistic nature.

As suspicion shifts from passenger to passenger, the film starts to resemble a parlor-room whodunit, while logic becomes its first fatality. Fasten your seat belts before takeoff, because Non-Stop is a bumpy ride.

As always, there's the combustible band of mismatched survivors.

Time may ultimately be kind to Cooper’s first foray into the horror genre, but the present holds nothing but darkness.

The sidekicks Jean-Bob, the dandy French frog (Cleese), and Speedy, the true-blue turtle (Wright), are mildly amusing, but knowing the talent behind the voices, you can't help but wish that they'd had a hand in the writing as well. Still, the picture has a certain sweetness about it that melds nicely with its old-fashioned look (the cels are all hand-drawn and hand-colored) and the characters are not totally without charm. What it boils down to is that The Swan Princess just doesn't have that old bibbity bobbity boo.

Episodically eventful but utterly unsuspenseful, the film is a diversion that requires little attention and satisfies the film-going needs of a wide variety of viewers.

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.

In a word, it’s soulless.

Hell, even Heston's performance elicited cheers back in the day. Franco, in a totally, tonally different role, but still the prime human here, is a pale shadow of the ruined future to come.

Maybe America will prove me wrong by voting, but I felt like you were holding back until the end.

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.

There's none of Spielberg's verbal wit or the astonishing shot composition that helped the rest of the films flourish so far above their gutsy, 1930s action serial roots. Dial of Destiny feels like a less skilled hand tracing over the work of his favorite artists: The lines may be their own, but you'll always see the superior work underneath, overshadowing it and making you wish you could see the original instead.

Guilty of the most mortal of all movie sins: It's dull.

Blends into so much white noise, until all that's left is the lingering sense that the tragic and promising story of Doug and Richard won't be sticking with you past the closing credits.

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

Viewed as a war film, it's strictly standard run 'n' gun fare.

When she's (Dunst) off the screen, Elizabethtown goes dark and broody, stranding us with the morose Bloom during a third-act road trip that goes everywhere and nowhere at once.

So bereft of hope... that it's a chore to withstand.

Two-and-a-half hour slice of unmitigated depression.