The Coen brothers’ new movie, set in Hollywood in 1951, brings easy laughs but dissipates from memory moments later, like the cheesy films to which it pays homage – or, perhaps, mocks.

Characterizations are rudimentary, performances dull.

I was not disappointed by Dreamer, the most dishonest movie I've seen in a while. Nobody gets a fatal disease before the end credits, but every other clich? is exploited in this fabric of impossibilities, nonsense, stereotypes and shameless tear-jerking.

The new Dawn of the Dead moves along with speed and slick visual style, but it's soulless and anonymous as -- well, a shopping mall.

Any story from the "Patch Adams" team of director Tom Shadyac and writer Steve Oedekerk is bound to end up floating in a soup of moral homilies, and "Bruce" does.

There's nothing outstandingly good or bad about the film.

Granted, it's great action. Terrific special effects. Pulse-pounding pacing. But it's a case of diminishing returns. Salvation so keeps its characters at arm's length that after a while it really doesn't matter what happens to them.

A painfully honest film, yet it's also painfully slow, drawn-out and simplistic in too many spots.

Watching this is like sitting by a pinsetter at a bowling alley. That's too bad, because the picture had potential.

sSo pleasingly forgettable that I spent most of the movie mentally casting American actors for the inevitable remake.

I recommend “Batman v. Superman” to anyone who thought director Zack Snyder showed too much restraint in “300,” who felt “Man of Steel” whisked by too briefly or who wondered how Ben Affleck could be made to seem one of America’s most animated actors while clenching his jaw as tight as a Christmas nutcracker.

Diary rather sloppily blends melodrama and spiritual uplift with crass comedy, sometimes in the same scene.

It draws you into its grim and mysterious world through the first half of the movie, then falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane.

Know how to tell if a war movie is mediocre? An outspoken bigot, usually a Southerner, abuses a patient member of an oppressed minority -- the Asian recruit, the African American or, in the case of Windtalkers, a pair of Navajo men from Arizona in his platoon.

Wanda Sykes and John Michael Higgins have energy as Evan's aides, and Jonah Hill (hot off "Knocked Up") gets laughs as a sycophantic researcher, but Graham has no chance to show what she can do.

Everything about this film, from the title to the metaphors, remains cloudy. And you can watch clouds only so long before you realize they don’t have any weight at all.

I just saw The Transporter 2 on the way home from the lobotomy clinic, and boy, is it enjoyable. What a difference a simple operation makes!

Oscar-winners Morgan Freeman and Melissa Leo turn up in cameo roles anyone could have played. Kosinski was smart to limit their screen time, because it’s awkward to have actors with weight and charisma hanging around those who lack both.

The overwrought White Oleander may be middling drama, but if it bears any resemblance to truth (which I doubt), it's a brutal indictment of the L.A. County Department of Social Services.

Gothika was supposed to provide proof that she (Berry) could carry a film as a leading lady, but it doesn't. That's not entirely her fault, since nobody can fetch a drink of water in a sieve.

The rest of us can pass this by, unless we're such fans of the actors - Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and Peter Krause - that we'd watch them in anything.

It relies on short bursts of Lawrence's zaniness, punctuated by an occasional joke about stinking feet or vile breath. For his admirers, that will be plenty.

If we had a story we could believe, we'd be in stitches.

The stars have chemistry, which may be all that we can hope for in factory-line fluff. But why stack the deck so clumsily?

Brooks gives himself the last word, appearing onscreen for the first time amid chorus girls oozing PG-13 pulchritude. "Go home!" he says. "It's over!" Could he be referring to his career?

The arc of the 800-page novel, crammed into 130 minutes, becomes a line as flat as the heart monitor of a dead patient. A story that ought to possess the mad grandeur of an opera acquires the tedious regularity of soap opera.

A loosely woven crazy quilt of other, better movies.

The conversion to 3-D has left the movie looking grim and dim. Almost every scene, whether indoors by candlelight or upon the open ocean, seems awkwardly dark; competent 3-D effects don’t compensate for this distraction. Equally drab are the performances, except for Gleeson and Whishaw.