Killer Joe isn't as outlandish in premise as it is in execution, which is saying something.

A chick flick for do-gooders, The Help suffers from a malady common to the discrimination drama: its treatment of inequality is more condescending than the prejudice it aims to remedy.

A movie whose confusing narrative and at times intriguing parts are at war with each other, and never quite gel.

The profundity to tedium ratio is around 1 to 3. Not bad for a micro-release slated to screen seven times in a museum (NY's Rubin Museum of Art) but it's a film more interesting in theory than reality.

Shows remarkable access to military materials and personnel but, as a film, is unremarkable every other way.

It seems impossible that a sequel to a movie as ridiculous as "Piranha 3D" could disappoint but Piranha 3DD stops at mediocre before arriving at gloriously bad.

One of Hot Tub Time Machine’s only genuinely nifty moves is getting John Cusack, Dobler himself, to topline the film.

A superficially provocative movie that tries way too hard to be memorable. Horror aficionados will be tantalized before walking away unsatisfied.

Puncture is rarely more convincing than the usual legal saga.

Don McKay just never seems to be able to blend its noir elements into a story that makes us care one way or the other.

The dark is not threatening, and metaphorical darkness is even less so; as a result this movie is not particularly scary.

Lola Versus arrives with a pedigree that suggests it should be better than it sounds. It isn't.

The bright spot-and what saves Greenspan's debut feature from being nothing more than a long tedious draft of an ordinary craft brew-is James Liston's cinematography.

The storytelling falters throughout and The Eagle, despite its grandeur.

The melodrama is tiresome, overwrought and clichéd.

While in many respects Spoken Word is adequately specific, it's still not very deep.

Silent House is undeniably built on its "one-shot, real-time" gimmick. And while it works reasonably well - especially in the first half of the film - it's still just a gimmick trying to gussy up a common horror flick.

More so than his other documentaries, Nygard remains in the spotlight from start to finish as he traveled across the globe to seek answers from various religious leaders. It's one thing to fail as a doc showman but by the film's end you feel like you have no answers to any of his questions.

Rather than take a broad-brush approach director Muntean boggs us down in the detail of an adulterous affair. There are some similarities with his previous outing "Boogie" in that the main character is a man having a premature mid-life crisis.

A formula picture made by someone who doesn't even believe in the formula - he knows it all has to work out, we know it all has to work out, and he can't even muster an ironic wink for our trouble.

Mercy can be described as a moody picture that traffics in variations of only one mood or sentiment: self-pity.

A feast for the eyes, Mysteries of Lisbon deals with 19th century passions, love affairs and escapades on a broad canvas. It might have made a lovely TV series, parsed out over several weeks, but at one sitting it's a challenge.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is the kind of movie whose cool-looking trailer entices you to midnight screenings, but the film will bore you so profoundly you'll fall asleep halfway and wake up disoriented during the closing credits.

Nobody here brings their A-game, denying us the pleasure of what Adams and director Anand Tucker could create together.

Ultimately, however, the movie is about the fact that there was a civil rights movement at all, and incidents like the murder of Dickie Marrow necessitated that movement--deep into the 1970s and beyond.

Auds will be wise to the contrived metaphors and realize there's not much going on below the surface except stock discourse.

Likely to disappoint both literary aficionados and action-thriller fans, the film neither captures the creepy atmospheres of Poe's influential writing nor works on its own.

Fun Size isn't good enough to ascend to those John Hughesian ranks, and its small holiday window means it won't scarf much box office. But at least first time feature director Josh Schwartz can expect a minor slumber party hit on DVD.

It's only sporadically amusing and it's certainly not original.

In 1994, 16-year-old surfer Jay Moriarity braved the biggest waves ever seen off the coast of Northern California. His biopic, Chasing Mavericks, gets that fact right but changes everything else about his life in order to bowl audiences over in a saccharine tsunami.

See What I’m Saying is at once heartbreaking and irritating, enlightening and boring, but frankly not aesthetically well made in any particular way.

Notwithstanding Steven Soderbergh's name among the nine credited producers, this is strictly mid-level assembly line product, designed to ride entirely on the modest marquee value of second-tier or past-prime stars.

Devotees and the curious may find it mildly diverting, otherwise this effort is not for the faint-headed.

Brotherhood moves fast, but it can't outrun its superficiality.

No one is expected to take any of this seriously, so Schwentke keeps things light: light on big laughs, light on unique action set pieces and light on any sense that these game but retired spies are too old for this crap.

Genre movies like The Warrior's Way are all about pleasing core fan boys. While the film claims dazzling visuals, Lee fails to deliver the type of never-before-seen martial arts fights fans demand.

Even Reese Witherspoon, whose adorable scrunch-face projects the romantic travails of lovelorn women everywhere, looks unsure of herself.

A thing of endless contrivances. Jolie's phony plotting and graphic depictions of sexual assault and murder are transparent attempts to bluntly convey the war's atrocities.

ParaNorman is easily one of the most charming, imaginative and quirky comedies to come out of Laika Entertainment (Coraline), but for all its cleverness and urbane wit, it's in no way appropriate for kids.

Almost totally devoid of charm and genuine laughs despite the presence of star Kevin James and a wonderful veteran voice cast for the creatures.

The bigger problem is that the action literally bleeds together and there's no sense of pacing.

This ho-hum offshoot of Megan McDonald's book series earns negative "thrill points" as it chronicles the mirthless backyard shenanigans of a suburban Pippi Longstocking.

Jack and Jill is a barrage of fart jokes and fat jokes and mean jokes that sincerely thinks it deserves to end with a hug. It doesn't deserve awwwws - and it doesn't deserve your money.

Part of Me strains so hard to make Perry seem at once triumphant but totally relatable that it veers toward a self-seriousness you won't find in her music, image or Hershey's Kiss bra.

The mother/daughter drama should have played a bigger part in this film as the 87-minute runtime passes quickly and leaves us feeling utterly short-changed.

Turns out to be a huge disappointment.

Strictly for 6 year olds, this uninspired, one-joke comedy is full of too many misfired gags and weak comic setups to cross over to anyone whose head reaches above the seat back.

If Peckinpah's original was a rotten plank spiked with rusty nails, Rod Lurie's redo is something closer to a nicely carved Louisville Slugger.

Lucky has its moments, but even with good, sometimes exceptional performances, its criminally vile characters are never likable enough to make you laugh at (or forgive) their wickedness.

Director Steven Spielberg doesn't have a steady grip on War Horse's careening tone, but he'll be damned if there's not 15 minutes in there for everyone.

It has sufficient flavor to perform relatively well in markets with significant South Asian populations or amongst serious foodies who'll flock to anything remotely germane to their passion.

Wrath of the Titans delivers blockbuster bluster with single-minded blandness.

A talented cast is game, but the lazy script utterly fails them.

Despite Brody and Polley's reasonable efforts, they can't compensate for a script that undermines its curiosity about humanity.

Stone embarrasses himself by backing the wrong horse and then making a weak case for him.

Offers very little new for those who saw the original.

The emotions are flat, predictable and forced when they ought to be romantic.

Essentially a B-movie dressed up with A-level special effects, Legion looks spiffy but sounds bad with a lot of overwritten dialogue scenes and predictable action.

An uneven mix of middle-age anxiety and family comedy.

A credible suspense story with a surprisingly bold ending, The Woman In Black is a solid step away from Harry Potter for star Daniel Radcliffe - while it, too, is British and fantastical, the tone is sinister, adult and bleak.

It becomes a parade of interpersonal conflict and miserable circumstances that adds up to nothing less than angst-porn.

The Vow proves that love can't conquer bad writing.

It has its moments, although the charmless main character Julio (played by Diego Noguera) begins to get on your nerves, as he seems incapable of extricating himself from difficult situations.

Most of its truth (and any irony) is undercut by director Vikram Jayanti's fawning approach.

The results are perfunctory, lugubrious and historically questionable.

The soulless-ness of their empty plot of track homes and super-store existence invokes both "Poltergeist" and "Employee of the Month."

Production values from designer Anthony A. Ianni are matter-of-fact with the exception of standout effects from key make up artist Colin Penman and his staff. Its cast is fairly forgettable with the exception of Saw veteran Tobin Bell as Jigsaw and Cary Elwes as Gordon.

It's easy to like the cast - thanks as much to their previous work as anything on screen here - but with such a convoluted, illogical and dull story, no one fares particularly well.

Thompson's brutality and misogyny are on full display, but it is too slick, there is little suspense or energy, and the whole affair has a curiously embalmed quality.

Paco Plaza turns his [REC] franchise on its rotting head with [REC]3: Genesis, switching up the series' blistering first-person-perspective terror for a more conventional, jokey and-much to the film's detriment-self-conscious approach.

Leigh certainly has a sense of cinematic style and Emily Browning possesses a fragile beauty that hides a remarkably resilient interior. It's a pity, however, that Jane Campion did not exert a more powerful sway on the result.

While A Thousand Words features some reverent flashes and even has the potential to touch audiences (a moment involving a mother with Alzheimer's particularly hits home), it suffers from being too broad.

A movie that ought to entice people to want to travel with Gulliver instead inveigles them to run from him.

So it's apropos that Forby's biggest misstep is his thin and careful script that can't carry us away on the same winds of fate that would put a sovereign republic's future in the hands of such a young woman.

Strictly for patient, gay-friendly audiences, this drawn-out melodrama about an ageing drag star in overstays its welcome.

An amusing turn from Steve Buscemi in the title role and some sporadically funny, off-beat dialogue provided by debuting writer/director Hue Rhodes make for a passable, if forgettable, little time passer.

To his credit, director Neil Burger either doesn't realize or doesn't care that the material is hokey to the point of unintentional hilarity-if not for the film's intermittent moments of hyper-stylization and its almost crippling sense of self-importance, Limitless might have been a truly unwatchable bore rather than just annoyingly silly and tedious.

If there was ever a horror film that made fans of the genre feel old, it's Scream 4.

While it never quite rises above the problems inherent in the material, The Spy Next Door does shine in those moments when Jackie and his stunt crew are permitted to do what they do best.

To say the franchise is coasting along on fumes suggests it once ran on a full tank, which may not even be true for "Meet the Parents," the surprise hit that kicked off this broad comic franchise.

Too introverted and gimmicky for its own good.

It's the sheer lack of investment one feels for the couple that truly sabotages the film.

As tales of troubled families go, it may have aspirations to be like "Ordinary People," but it falls way short.

It's a simple story that gets the gentle nudge it needs to reveal its greater purpose. Probably too subtle for most tastes, the novel's reputation and its unique idea should draw people to cinemas.

Green Zone is an exercise in commercial cowardice masquerading as a thriller about political bravery.

This archly self-aware coming-of-age tale fizzles, as the targeted Latino audience is upstaged by a culture more firmly rooted in the film's soggy Seattle setting.

There are no surprises in this tale, filmed with deliberately deglamorized handheld camera (yet inexplicably in widescreen); it puts the "adult" in "adultery drama," if by "adult" you mean joyless bores.

This is admirably ambitious, but Carnahan's not nearly good enough a writer or director to pull it off: the results are portentous, muddled and not nearly as entertaining as Neeson's usual face-punching antics.

That's My Boy has the same freewheeling appeal and potty-mouthed, go-for-broke mania of Sandler's earlier comedies. But there's a new undercurrent of energy that's likely the consequence of Sandler separating from his usual collaborators.

Hardcore genre fans will likely be quite disappointed to find a film that trades vision and originality for something best described as bland and inoffensive.

Even with a big name cast that includes three Oscar winners - Halle Berry, Robert De Niro and Hilary Swank - New Year's Eve is at best a pleasant diversion.

Gone starts off as a character study about a woman struggling to regain control of her world in the wake of a horribly intrusive event, but that sort of thing doesn't make for a fun night at the movies, so it quickly concedes to a Hitchcockian "wrong woman" riff, in which sexually motivated abduction serves as the worst MacGuffin in movie history.

From Prada to Nada might appeal to tweens but word of mouth won't be nearly as strong as Austen's parlor gossip.

While well known to many Down-Under fans, Bran Nue Dae has too much comic kitsch for U.S. specialty film audiences.

A movie that overrules logic irritates its audience; we don't like to be reminded that there's a writer pulling the strings. And here, the POV horror is a conceit as well as a distraction, a crutch to create suspense from shaky, dark footage.

Sex and abortion are the main topics of this installment, which tips between dullness and total camp.

Sadly, the documentary just doesn't have enough coherent passages to make anything about this now seemingly ancient journey compelling for contemporary audiences.

Tsui Hark's films aren't famous for their coherence, but Flying Swords of Dragon Gate is such a wantonly incomprehensible experience that it occasionally feels like an epic piece of outsider art.