You cannot always judge movies by their titles, but you sometimes get good advice. The sequel Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, supplies its own five-word review.

This stale, redundant story goes round in the same tight circles, revealing one piddling new secret and containing one unconvincing change of character.

Jokes don’t pay off at all or take so long to do so that they lose their snap.

If this project is some kind of huge in-joke, I’m willing to admit I didn’t get it. But if I did get it (and I’m afraid I did), it’s a huge disappointment.

No characterization. A plot you could write on a single sheet of toilet paper. Sadistic violence we’re meant to cheer. A surprise that wouldn’t fool anyone who left the theater after the opening credits and came back for the last 10 minutes.

For all the talk about passion, the main feeling Youth conveys is self-pity.

At the center of the film, like a man trying to pull a donkey out of a peat bog, stands Craig: inexpressive, uninflected and obviously tired. Perhaps he’s trying to play a chap who never allows himself access to his emotions, for fear loved ones may be snatched away, but he just looks like an actor who wishes he could quit his job.

Director David Gordon Green steers a clumsy course between crass humor and sudden drama.

Writer Simon Fuchs begins with a reasonable idea – we’re all likely to be curious about the origins of Peter Pan – and does unreasonable things ever after.

I think Baumbach and Gerwig mean Brooke to be a life-affirming free spirit who can’t find a place in our mercenary world. Instead, she comes off as selfish, rude, deluded, irresponsible and mean-spirited.

Plotting has never been writer-director Allen’s strong point, and the story falls apart. It depends on coincidences that are unlikely individually and ridiculous together.

To call the film “unwatchable” is to unfairly insult Josée Deshaies; his lush cinematography delights the eye when the camera roams around Saint Laurent’s workrooms. But “incomprehensible,” “interminable” and “immaterial” all apply.

It’s hard to stay connected to a disaster film where the biggest disaster is the script.

The most frustrating thing about the movie (as with “Cloud Atlas”) is that it could’ve been memorable, had the Wachowskis turned their vision over to more talented storytellers.

The rest of the film couldn’t convince a sixth-grader it might happen. CIA agents search a home for evidence but leave the front door unlocked and unguarded, so Devereaux sneaks in and knocks them out.

Many movies require us to turn off our brains, and many rely on clichés and/or coincidences. It takes a special kind of shamelessness to do both, and Into the Storm has that in spades.

The movie feels not only calculated but tired.

Here’s something I never expected to say, something I doubt I’d have believed if someone else had said it to me: Martin Scorsese can make a three-hour movie without one fresh perspective or compelling character from end to end. The proof, for three agonizing hours, can be found in The Wolf of Wall Street.

What do you get? A reboot of "The Lone Ranger” that metaphorically drags this noble story – and literally drags its title character – through a steaming heap of horse droppings.

It begins as energetic, clichéd nonsense and ends as irritating, clichéd nonsense.

I hope his life was less dull than the movie he's made from it.

The movie that's meant to be his (Apatow) most personal turns out to be his most dully generic.

The worst thing about the picture is that the people involved all seem to realize it's generic.

The film's filled with inconsequential scenes and supporting characters who add useless atmosphere or by-the-book diversity.

The sequel doesn't develop the characters, interject any warmth into its frenetic story or take us anywhere we haven't been.

The Critic's Code of Honor forbids me from explaining in detail why the storytelling is so inept, because I'd have to spoil the silly surprises. So I'll say only this: You can interpret the climax two ways, and both will probably infuriate you.

An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.

Angelina Jolie is definitely worth her salt as an action hero, but Salt is never worth its Angelina Jolie.

Ronan, however, transcends the script. She's innocent yet wise, gentle yet forceful. She's the one thing in this picture that shows how great a movie The Lovely Bones might have been, had the people who made it believed in the book with all their hearts.

The sequel to the 2008 hit “Twilight” makes no effort to satisfy outsiders. It's strictly for devotees who won't balk at plot absurdities, clunky dialogue and patchy characterizations.

Naive but ambitious, it comes across as a "Battlestar Galactica" vetted by pacifists, "Clone Wars" neutered for Saturday morning kids' TV.

It's a terrible muddle unless you take it as a satire on the Age of Ellis, the Jacqueline Susann for that Flock of Seagulls era. That way, the unintentional laughs seem almost ironic.

Reviewers sometimes insult actors by saying they don't vary their expressions across an entire movie. But until Knowing, I never thought that could literally be true. Nicolas Cage does widen his eyes with about 15 minutes left in the film.

Solace is especially frustrating when it moves down interesting paths, then stops.

A brazen title card declares this " true story." (Wow, not even "based on.") However many facts may be accurate, the movie feels contrived, with climax piled upon climax.

The best way to sit through Max Payne is by using minimal brain.

A feel-nothing movie – a series of disconnected, implausible incidents that end as arbitrarily as they began, in an effort to inspire emotions the picture never justifies.

OK, so no plot, really.

Allen's laziness is startling, even in so mechanical a filmmaker. He uses a monotonous narrator to tell us what the characters think and do, though he then shows them performing the actions that have just been described.

I'm afraid it just stinks.

We waited 10 years for a sequel to the movie version of "The X-Files" – and the best Chris Carter could do is The X-Files: I Want to Believe?

It's neither dull nor stimulating, neither off-putting nor engaging.

Sandler proves even a hardened Israeli secret service agent can be an imbecilic juvenile.

As a film, it's flabby and utterly predictable.

Bertino directs at a funereal pace. Speedman remains comatose, though Tyler flickers fitfully to life. The mournful look on her face suggests she's remembering the days when she was given more psychologically complex scripts, such as "Armageddon."

Speed Racer is chaotic as a six-ring circus, gaudy as a transvestites convention and soullessly cute as a robot puppy.

The script by Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen and the direction by Steven Brill have a careless, never-gave-a-damn feel that's as insulting to viewers as the film is dull.

Just Will Ferrell doing the same man-boy shtick he usually does.

Director Doug Liman and a trio of writers eventually forget the rules they set up and hurl combatants to places they could never have seen or even known about: Who'd willingly project himself into the middle of a Chechnyan war zone?

Of COURSE it's bad. It was always going to be. But it's worse than necessary.

No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The film is a saggy, oddly mean-spirited takeoff of "Walk the Line."

Lee sleepwalks through his part, even in romantic scenes with equally bland Cameron Richardson.

The final sad joke is this: Weitz took a wonderful story about the danger of severing a soul from its otherwise empty body and did that very thing to his source.

You'll have to swallow this gooey confection whole or spit it out after the first couple of bites.

It's almost impossible for a movie to go irrevocably wrong during the opening credits, but the ceaselessly irritating The Jane Austen Book Club does just that.

Once again, something that might have been a faintly amusing sketch on "Saturday Night Live" -- maybe even a tolerable 30-minute short, had the writing been more clever -- gets tortured into the shape of a feature film.

Plays like some uninformed seventh-grader's view of gay men.

Quirkiness is as essential to a small indie film as beef stock to French onion soup. But if you don't have enough of any other ingredient, you end up with a watery, barely edible broth.

It's marginally possible that Nancy Drew is spoofing high school adventure movies, and I almost hope so. Otherwise, it's unwatchable on every level.

The filmmakers' ineptitude is staggering.

The storytelling is inept and illogical.

Attaching Chris Rock to I Think I Love My Wife is like chaining a Kentucky Derby winner to the merry-go-round in a petting zoo. His humor is hobbled, his personality dulled, his energy depleted. Who's responsible for this lapse in judgment? Chris Rock.

Errors in logic will delight the attentive.

As close to perfectly unwatchable as it can be.

Its main feature is incessant, unimaginative profanity...Take out the cursing, and you're left with a plebeian drama about angry, aimless potheads, sloppily directed by the man who wrote it.

This movie is made by and for people who don't care about good storytelling.

The only interesting character is the dragon, who grows from an adorably dependent baby to a protective, intelligent adult voiced by Rachel Weisz.

It's "Braveheart" without historical significance and "Passion" without spirituality, though it dabbles in both, and it represents as brazen an act of career suicide as I can recall from a star director. If he were a first-timer, he'd never work again.

Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe attempt light romantic comedy in A Good Year, and the results are as grindingly discordant as a punk band writing a suite of waltzes.

Harsh Times contains exactly 30 seconds of novelty.

Writer-director Coppola and her production team have gotten the look of the late 18th century right...But they've gotten almost everything else wrong.

Writer-director Barry Levinson leaned on Robin Williams the way a one-ring circus relies on its lone acrobat. So they're jointly responsible for the film's utter failure.

Yet even the language, finally, becomes as inauthentic as the accents.

Babbit clumsily underlines emotional moods.

"Man" is like a sour, half-formed version of a TV sitcom full of dislikable, disconnected characters.

If you really must see Miami Vice (and you mustn't), buy a ticket to something better, then slip into "Vice" at the 95-minute mark and watch the last third of the movie. No one involved will profit by your curiosity, and you won't miss a thing of importance.

When Allen revives his plodding "Manhattan Murder Mystery" as the even duller Scoop, I snore.

This isn't nitpicking. Every bit of the tale is as full of holes as a wool sweater at a moth convention, and Shyamalan telegraphs each potential surprise.

Director Vondie Curtis-Hall has managed to top (or should I say "bottom"?) his last theatrical release, Mariah Carey's "Glitter," with a movie that offers not one praiseworthy moment: not a scene, not a performance, not a technical achievement, not even a line of dialogue.

The writer-producer-director of American Dreamz makes nearly every mistake in the satirical book. His targets are either too easy or too dated. He's inconsistent in his attitudes toward them. His stereotypes are stale.

I once said I'd watch Chiwetel Ejiofor act in any piece of disposable fluff, and now I have.

Is Josh Hartnett attracted to cinematic bombs, or do movies merely self-destruct once he signs on as the leading man?

This script by the husband-and-wife team of Leora Barish and Henry Bean is hopelessly contrived and takes forever to get to the point. (I warn you: The film does not absolutely identify the killer.)

Director Chris Robinson moves his camera aimlessly, cutting in and out of speeches as if he were just as bored as I.

Martin, who plays Clouseau and wrote the script with Len Blum, has completely mishandled the character.

There's nothing more painful than watching comics tank, and Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World is a 95-minute wince.

Writer Guillermo Arriaga earns most of the blame. He played similar games with narrative in the vastly better "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," jumping back and forth in time to show relationships among subplots and characters. But "Burials" barely has one plot.

The "Puppetoonish" characters in Hoodwinked didn't bother me: They're primitive and inexpressive, but their personalities come through. In fact, the problem is that their personalities do come through: They're all wackily sarcastic, unfunny nonentities.

Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.

What comes from the mouth of Johnny Depp...not the crucial spark of wit or insight that could encourage us to spend two hours with this cruel bore.

Most painfully, the semi-alert Owen and the leaden Aniston go together like sausages and syrup.

The hot comic du jour wants to startle us but is merely startlingly dull.

I expected Get Rich or Die Tryin' to be gritty, scary, maybe disturbing or thought-provoking. What I didn't realize was that it would be so dull that any other effect it could have made was wiped away.

We don't need a discussion of plot in a review of a movie made from a video game, do we? Nor do we care whether the characters are complicated (no), the acting is sophisticated (no), the direction is competent (no) or the camerawork is clever (no).

Gosling's been better elsewhere but delivers an adequate performance. McGregor and Watts seem baffled most of the time, as well they might be. Forster keeps us from drifting off with inventive camerawork; in this case, that's like saying a hideous suit has well-stitched lapels.

The truly appalling thing, though, is the stupidity of the screenplay by Richard Kelly.

Not even the repeated sight of Jessica Alba in a bikini, the camera caressing her like the eyes of a strip-club patron, can lift this leaden refuse off the ocean floor.