Though not everyone agrees, Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” came close to finding the secret for making a movie about the secret of happiness. Peter Chelsom’s Hector and the Search for Happiness tries hard, but fails. Miserably.

It’s been a while since there’s been this much dead air onscreen; over and over, Smith sets up a sequence, lets his actors shpritz, and stands by as the energy fades into giggly catatonia.

A movie where the miracles -- and treacly moments -- keep topping each other.

Watching Granger and Priya chase each other around a hotel like squirrels in a park, you wonder what these two see in each other.

Meretricious without being entertaining, it's an easy game -- and an easier film -- to sit out.

This musical should have taken center stage in Theater Camp. The dreadful story surrounding it deserves to get the hook.

A fatally insubstantial film.

The repartee, as ever, is weak. Even with all the extra layers of digital detail, it’s still tough to keep these four straight. And the CG characters’ slimy rendering and motion-capture expressiveness could go down with “The Polar Express” as a study in inadvertent, technologically misguided screen creepiness. Wackier would have been OK, guys — it’s the Ninja Turtles.

As tiresome as the relentless, indulgent inscrutability and lack of story momentum can be, it says something for the movie’s visceral power that there isn’t an urge to quit on it.

The plot doesn’t take clever turns, the visual thrills aren’t all that thrilling, and you’re ultimately left to get your heist-movie kicks elsewhere.

A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.

The biggest unresolved question here is why we're paying $9.50, plus popcorn, for something we can presumably get at home for free.

It's coherent, well shot, and tartly acted, but it wears you down like a dinner guest showing off his doctorate.

Shot in a rich palette, the film does provide diversion with some of its funkily detailed sets and supporting actors.... Otherwise, the film distinguishes itself for its miscasting and misuse of its cast.

There’s a reason the movie has been pushed off the back of the truck into late February. It’s damaged goods.

It might even work if In the Cut was remotely convincing as a thriller, but Campion can't help wrinkling her nose at genre.

Crude, lewd comedy that makes ''Animal House'' seem wholesome.

No matter how hard Richard Gere huffs and puffs, his performance as the hunky manic-depressive known only as "Mr. Jones" won't blow you away. Bouncing foolishly from super-duper euphoria to catatonia and back, Gere expends too much energy to ever be believable. [8 Oct 1993, p.56]

Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

Dazzling to behold yet puny of imagination, the movie takes the “Star Wars” formula — hero myths nicked from Joseph Campbell, cutting-edge visual effects, comic-strip dialogue, goofy-looking aliens — and reduces it to generic Big Box shelf product.

It's hard to believe anyone would think importing a French comedy was a good idea.

And that’s what The Girl in the Spider’s Web is: soulless, bloodless product. Subtitled “A Dragon Tattoo Story,” it exists almost solely to drive a stake in the ground for the further franchising of author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Gillespie and his editor Kirk Baxter cycle through scenes of these one-dimensional characters, headache-inducing montages of cable news footage, YouTube re-creations, and TikTok videos. The pacing is frenetic, but the content is mind-numbingly dull.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is yet another factory product that plays more like a marketing strategy than a comedy. Like the other farces bearing the National Lampoon brand label, it's a comedy of obliviousness - family man Chevy Chase refuses to alter his sentimental notions of family rituals despite repeatedly being slammed in the face with evidence of how far short of his expectations they fall. Here, the word "vacation" is a misnomer. The Griswold family, headed by Chase, doesn't go anywhere. Neither does the film.

All that’s missing is Clyde the orangutan from Clint Eastwood’s “Every Which Way But Loose,” which, trust me, this movie could have used.

Unfortunately, director Aidan Zamiri and his co-writer Bertie Brandes are equally bad at mockumentaries and generating suspense.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that The In-Laws was directed by Andrew Fleming, who delivered the fizzy Nixon-era comedy ''Dick'' a few years back and who also had a hand in ''Grosse Pointe,'' the wicked, briefly-lived WB parody of TV teen dramas. The man obviously knows from satire, but not on the evidence of anything here.

Flirt has its moments, and Ewell and Nikaidoh are auspicious additions to the Hartley rep company. But Flirt will appeal mostly to Hartley completists. [23 Aug 1996]