The one perfect aspect of Jennifer's Body is its title: No one is going to like this movie for its brain.

It's a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its "originality."

It might be a solid hook if we thought their love was grand. Instead, it's kind of creepy.

Since that gifted, attractive performer is Hayden Panettiere, who has already won a wide following for "Heroes," it's a wonder that the studio hasn't been more heavily promoting her appearance in this decent, genial youth comedy. After all, she does play, ah, Beth Cooper.

You should have been able to treat this film as a grab-bag and pull out some plums. Instead it goes grabbing after you.

A bit like a real-world horror film with "heart," right down to the trick ending.

Any chance to generate atmosphere or sustained comedy and melodrama goes down the tubes, often literally.

This fourth "Terminator" film is the ultimate heavy-metal parody. Better make that travesty, because there are next to no moments of comedy.

Unlike Nicolas Cage in "National Treasure," Hanks lacks the game for it. The surface seriousness of these Dan Brown movies obstructs his affability and easy, attentive way with romance.

The movie could use less romantic boo-hoo-hoo and more Bunuel: It's engaging whenever Bunuel acts as ringleader or troublemaker, even when he's blustery and piggish.

Young Cyrus is undeniably cute, and some of her songs are as catchy as the law allows - especially "Hoedown Throwdown," But asked to anchor a full-length movie, she simply doesn't have the chops to pull it off.

You have to be willing to take a lot of punishment for a few good scares.

Knowing offers mumbo jumbo on an apocalyptic scale.

Cold, bland and gimmicky - that's how the movie has turned out.

The bad guys just seem like a bunch of X-Games rejects, and Blart's ingenuity proves way more effective than it has any right to be.

The whole thrust of the movie is to warn black women against emasculating their men.

The movie leaves you in an awful tangle of amazement and disbelief: Amazement that Tuvia Bielski did turn a group of civilians into a nimble fighting force and a commune that could defend itself, but disbelief at his accomplishment's stagey and banal rendering.

This movie is genial, forgettable piffle about the perhaps-beginning of a maybe affair. It's a romantic daydream so slim that it barely leaves the requisite sweet aftertaste.

Valkyrie's political and military subjects may have sounded like sure-fire thriller material. Wilkinson alone proves that a suspense film thrives on intriguing characters struggling to survive. Nothing in Valkyrie is as compelling as watching tides of calculation crash across Wilkinson's face.

This picture evaporates midway through because the story itself is a one-liner. Yet it also has a cast that gets into the silliness.

The problem with Doubt is its dramatic certainty.

Is there anyone out there who hasn't seen this movie a dozen times before? Maybe even as recently as last week, since it's basically the same story line as the funnier, if less heartfelt, "Four Christmases."

The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto Che Guevara's political life.

The Reader is ponderously self-important and smugly Socratic, brimming with unfinished sentences and pregnant pauses; if a single character would only say what he thinks, the movie would be over in 30 minutes

The movie is mainly geared to putting new twists on what John Hughes comedies used to call "sucking face." It will satisfy Meyer's devotees.

I found the movie impossibly basic and sanitized as a "never again" parable of the Final Solution - and simply wrongheaded as a story about children.

High School Musical 3 wore me out, but I'm not the target audience. My favorite high school musical was "Hamlet 2."

The result is a film that plays like a creaking melodrama, with good guys and bad guys and precious little in between.

As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.

You get the film's message, that mankind does not react well when challenged by unpleasantness it can't explain away, within the first 15 minutes -- leaving more than 100 minutes to ponderously belabor the point.

The problem isn't the history that the filmmakers leave in, but how much they leave out.

It's Cheadle's rich emotionality and sense of humor that have gone seriously missing in Traitor.

Too bad it shortchanges the music and fails to provide much evidence for Wilson's appeal.

To Pellington's credit, the performers eschew sentimentality.

Go to enjoy the technical expertise, and take a first-grader (and not a particularly savvy one) along to find something of value in everything else.

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

Bottle Shock wastes that intriguing bit of history and some seductive Napa Valley settings on a bland script that's part period piece, part underdog fable.

It's like an Indiana Jones movie without rhythm, wit or personality, just a desperate, headlong pace.

The whole enterprise suffers from tired blood.

Jarrold's reduction of the story is so archetypal that it's indistinguishable from soap opera.

A handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.

Like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.

More palatable than "Norbit" but equally uninspired, Murphy's benign, pedestrian Meet Dave mostly gives us "Mr. Ed," with a bit of Crazy Eddie mixed in.

You never get the sense that the director, Peter Segal, knows where the funny is, whether in his star or in the story.

Newcomers to the Mike Myers experience will leave this love train early.

With all the good will in the world, I couldn't warm up to Kit Kittredge. The movie is like a 1930s or 1940s short about Americans pulling together, stretched out to feature length.

Yet it's pretty in all the wrong ways: pretty slight, pretty preachy and pretty affected.

Shyamalan has said he wanted to create the best B-movie ever made, but it fails to be the best C movie of the month. (Stuck or Zohan are better C movies.)

Intermittently fresh and amusing in a low-down yet schmaltzy way.

Rarely has appalling, reckless behavior been so soporific as in Savage Grace.

Sex and the City, as a film, is a testament to bad faith. It wants its characters to eat their wedding cake and have it, too.

Thanks to Suvari, audiences laugh nervously at the mortification of soul and flesh, but she doesn't really do them much of a favor. She simply keeps them watching as a would-be gross-out comedy turns into would-be gross-out tragedy.

It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip.

By the time it reaches its supposedly crowd-pleasing finale, Baby Mama may have self-respecting comedy fans (and even Tina Fey fans) crying uncle.

This whole movie has zero chemistry. Broderick and Hunt are a match made in hell; Firth and Hunt are a match made in limbo.

This movie is a case of arthouse bait and switch. Its true subject is one decent Yank's desire to believe that Everyman and Everywoman - Everywhere! - are as warm and amiable as your average American Joe: him, Morgan Spurlock, the regular guy as fearless globetrotter.

See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."

You begin yearning for more cuteness from the anthropomorphic animals: a pelican, a sea lion and, best of all, a bearded dragon lizard. They're a lot more amusing than Foster, who pours on the angst.

If only it had some funny lines, a focused plot and an idea that stretched beyond the initial setup.

Kate Beckinsale is too good for any of the guys in Snow Angels and too good for this movie. Her inventiveness exposes just how puny this movie is.

It's doubly disappointing that all the subplots about Ace and Wallace and their fathers intertwine in increasingly predictable ways.

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

I found the sight of McAvoy as a piano player in jazzy-seedy duds a lot more disconcerting than Ricci's porcine prosthesis.

Spending more time with Downey's character would have benefited this movie no end.

This movie doesn't have a mean bone in its body; the problem is, it doesn't have any bone in its body.

An overly gimmicky and fatally repetitive terrorist thriller that quickly wears out its welcome.

With Diary of the Dead, Romero goes back to the beginning, only this time the amateurish look is calculated and the resulting film far less effective - if only because a handful of filmmakers have beaten him to the punch.

There's enough kinetic energy in Jumper to light a thousand houses. Unfortunately, there's no one home in any of them.

Scores some serious points for its dance moves but does a lousy job of remembering there's a lot more to this big old world than moving your feet.

Imagine a Three Stooges short with a feel-good ending, and you get the idea.

Lane gives the film her best shot; she's pretty much the only reason to see it. There's an intelligence mixed with ferocity that makes her performance compelling, far-more-so than anything else in the film.

Allen's latest, his 42nd effort as a director, is the work of an artist devoid of ideas and energy. Perfunctorily staged and lazily written, it comes to life in only the briefest of spurts, usually when the ever-reliable Tom Wilkinson is on-screen.

The pleasures of this slight caper film are strictly small-screen, as three talented actresses walk through quaint roles before they hurry on to the next project.

The movie is so confused about itself that it comes across as toneless, a bunch of characters wandering around in a story no one is controlling.

Anderson and Day-Lewis strip themselves of their natural talents for invention and poetry, as if any hint of romance, nobility or fun would soften the film.

The movie has its moments, and some are undeniably affecting. But even those seem artificial, relying far too much on our familiarity with and fondness for the film's stars.

A strictly by-the-book sequel: It doesn't cheat series fans but it doesn't offer many thrills or surprises or lingering puzzles, either.

The credits list a couple of dozen medical and scientific consultants. What this film really needed was a script doctor.

The movie has been hailed and marketed as this year's Little Miss Sunshine, but it has none of that movie's empathy and comic surprise. Too much of it is like a subpar episode of Freaks and Geeks, padded out to 92 minutes with pseudo-witty dialogue.

Essentially an episode of "24." Which may be a step up from a video game, but it's getting hard to tell.

If any man should be more than the sum of his parts, it's an artist. But Todd Haynes' I'm Not There makes Bob Dylan less than the sum of his parts. It's like a tony art-school parlor game.

The Mist contains nary a dollop of wit and irony. As adapted and directed by Frank Darabont, there's no ambiguity either.

Owing more to the sword-and-sex-play fantasies of 12-year-olds than the traditions of Old English poetry, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf will allow adolescents to have their cheesecake - and beefcake - and eat it, too.

The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud.

The problem with Lions for Lambs isn't its political engagement but its cinematic disengagement. Robert Redford directs and stars in this ambitious talkathon, which would have been more effective as a radio play.

Misplaced hero-worship and glibness get in the way of its amazing true story.

With all its cloying, tone-deaf attempts at genuine emotional warmth, all it really deserves is to be avoided.

It's seductive in its buildup but overall as subtle and, alas, as humorless as a hatchet to the brain.

Painfully boring.

This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.

As overstated and expository as a historical pageant, from the drippy music to a sputtering, running gag involving funky old jalopies to cliched speeches and teary-eyed deaths and a final voice-over crying out for peace. Why not add a song score and an exclamation mark in the title?

The best you can say about Owen is that no actor has looked better in thigh-high boots and puffed-out britches.

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

This Heartbreak Kid makes the mistake of trying to be semi-heartwarming.

Anderson creates a deluxe train set, for sure. All he neglects is building up an electric current or a head of steam.

The final half-hour is like the not-so-grand finale for a silly-sticky sitcom. It's a college-town “Friends” with an unearned doctorate.

Tang Wei brings a terrible and awe-inspiring purity to an impure character.