Jennifer Garner is indeed a charmer, but she's the victim of a charmless treatment in 13 Going on 30.

This is Spielberg's weakest film since "1941."

My two-star rating represents a compromise between admiration and horror.

Too clever by half. It's the worst kind of con: It tells us it's a con, so we don't even have the consolation of being led down the garden path.

The scenes between Gleeson and Huppert are rendered in muted tones and are sweet and effective. Subplots involving Sylvia and Paul are flat and uninteresting.

A curiously flat movie. It functions like clockwork and it looks right, but it doesn't feel like much.

Rocky IV is movie-making by the numbers. Even the climactic fight scene isn't as exciting as it should be, maybe because we know with a certainty born of long experience how it will turn out.

Support Your Local Sheriff is a textbook example of the evil influence TV has on the movies. It's essentially a lousy TV situation comedy dragged out to feature length for no good reason.

It’s meant to be a soufflé-light charmer, but the bland, predictable French comedy Le Chef basically falls flat.

I guess it's a tribute to The Man With Two Brains that I found myself laughing a fair amount of the time, despite my feelings about Martin.

Everything is brought together at the end in a flash of revelation that is spectacularly underwhelming.

Pfeiffer is delivering one of the best performances of her career as the complex and formidable and deeply sad Frances, but she’s like a world-class basketball player stuck on the court with a bunch of weekend amateurs. There’s no one to give her a decent game.

A fast-paced sequel with some appeal for young video gamers, but without the eye-opening qualities of the first "Lawnmower Man." [17 Jan 1996, p.38]

Carny is bursting with more information about American carnivals that it can contain, surrounding a plot too thin to support it. Without knowing much about the reasons why the movie was made, I'd guess on the evidence that the director, Robert Kaylor, was fascinated by carnivals, spent a lot of time with one and shot a lot of film, and then found himself forced, to shape his material into some sort of traditional, commercial story. Inside this movie is a documentary struggling to get out.

Thor: Love and Thunder is one of the goofiest and least consequential sagas in MCU history — an allegedly wild and wacky but ultimately disappointing and disjointed chapter in the ongoing story of the God of Thunder, who seems to get more clueless with each passing movie.

Here's a case of two actors who do everything humanly possible to create characters who are sweet and believable, and are defeated by a screenplay that forces them into bizarre, implausible behavior.

This movie wasn't made for me. It was made for the people who will love it, of which there may be a multitude. The stage musical has sold 30 million tickets, and I feel like the grouch at the party.

F9: The Fast Saga isn’t the worst entry in the long-running and popular Fast & Furious franchise, but it just might be the silliest and the loudest and the most ridiculous — and while that might well have been the filmmakers’ intention, it’s not a compliment.

Walking out of the screening, I was thinking: Elizabeth Hurley for girlfriend, Courtney Love for Satan.

Shapiro fails to sell Shavitz as the “wise and wry, ornery and opinionated” figure the press notes promise. No opinion, wise or otherwise, is uttered by this rustic quasi-eccentric, let alone a green ethos.

Disney continues to make movies like Gus and people continue to pay to see them, but the process seems futile and this time even the mule seems bored.

The Mothman is singularly ineffective as a threat because it is only vaguely glimpsed, has no nature we can understand, doesn't operate under rules that the story can focus on, and seems to be involved in space-time shifts far beyond its presumed focus. There is also the problem that insects make unsatisfactory villains unless they are very big.

For the most part, Halloween II is a retread of “Halloween” without that movie's craft, exquisite timing, and thorough understanding of horror.

Clocking in at just 93 minutes and yet still feeling a bit stretched out, “Beast” features a wonderful cast and some gorgeous location photography in South Africa, but the screenplay requires everyone in this story to behave like the dopiest characters in the schlockiest of horror B-movies.

The makers of this film got so carried away by their High Concept that they missed the point of the whole story.

A disappointing and murky mess of a film that feels like an uncompleted project and leaves the viewer frustrated, despite the gritty visuals and a game lead performance by two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank.

For a film so aggressively intent on Big Shock Moments (cannibalism and lesbian necrophilia, anyone?), it’s more often stultifying and tedious than provocative.

The fight scenes in Bulletproof Monk are not as inventive as some I've seen (although the opening fight on a rope bridge is so well done that it raises expectations it cannot fulfill).

The entire movie comes across as if the screenwriters had gathered the scripts for dozens of similar films in the genre, dropped them into some sort of software blender — and whipped up one big bland smoothie of a story.

Forget the title: The only time Boiling Point generates any heat is when treasury agent Jimmy Mercer (Wesley Snipes) torches his unending supply of little cigars. [19 Apr 1993, p.21]

This is a home run swing that results in a strikeout and a long trudge back to the dugout.

The kind of dread dark horror film where you better hope nobody in the audience snickers, because the film teeters right on the edge of the ridiculous.

While the members of the Broken Lizard comedy group retain their likability, and there’s something kind of endearing about the disjointed, throw-everything-at-the-wall, “Caddyshack” type chaos behind the comedy, there are simply too many dead spots and cheap jokes and flat gags to carry a full-length feature.

What distinguished Stand by Me was the psychological soundness of the story: We could believe it and care about it. Now and Then is made of artificial bits and pieces.

Nearly everything in this movie feels borrowed from other movies and ever so slightly reshaped, and almost never for the better.

It’s a shame Eternals devolves into such a run-of-the-mill superhero movie, given it features some groundbreaking and/or relatively unusual elements, including a deaf character, an openly gay character and an actual lovemaking scene between two otherworldly entities (although it’s tamer than what you’d see in a 1950s romance).

The story is such a compilation of cliches that I hesitate to describe it, for fear of being taken for a satirist.

The true story of Freddy Heineken’s kidnapping is fascinating, but Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is a disappointingly superficial film in which neither the kidnappers nor their captives are particularly interesting.

An intriguing plot is established, a new character is brought on with a complex set of problems, and then all the groundwork disintegrates into the usual hash of preposterous action sequences.

Although Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Lords of Dogtown, has a good sense for the period and does what she can with her actors, we've seen the originals, and these aren't the originals.

So the movie is daring, and well-acted. Yet it isn't very satisfying, because the serious content keeps breaking through the soggy plot intended to contain it.

Mars Attacks! has the look and feel of a schlocky 1950s science-fiction movie, and if it's not as bad as a Wood film, that's not a plus: A movie like this should be a lot better, or a lot worse.

I'm all for movies that create unease, but I prefer them to appear to know why they're doing that. Super is a film ending in narrative anarchy, exercising a destructive impulse to no greater purpose than to mess with us.

There's nothing much wrong with the film; my complaint is that there's nothing much right about it.

Alas, though Ishana Night Shyamalan demonstrates promise as a filmmaker and delivers some arresting visuals and a few good jump-scares, “The Watchers” feels like a cover band’s take on familiar scary movie themes, with little in the way of original ideas or surprises.

A little more zip, and Hero might really have worked. It has all the ingredients for a terrific entertainment, but it lingers over the kinds of details that belong in a different kind of movie.

Vikander is in nearly every scene in the movie, and she’s absolutely terrific. Endearing and funny in the early scenes in London, easy to root for as she dives into the cartoon of an adventure. Of course Tomb Raider sets the table for future adventures, but if the future chapters are to be this silly and disposable, one hopes Vikander moves on as quickly from this film as I did as a viewer.

Reeves has many arrows in his quiver, but screwball comedy isn't one of them.

Writer-director Amy Miller Gross clearly is a competent director and has a fine ear for dialogue; it feels as if “Sister of the Groom” exists in the real world. Alas, it’s not a world where you’d want to hang out, unless your thing is watching selfish narcissists do verbal and sometimes physical battle over decidedly First World Problems.

Michael Winterbottom (“The Claim,” “24 Hour Party People,” “Code 46”) is a wonderfully gifted and versatile director, so it comes as no small surprise Greed is such a thudding. one-note takedown of a fictional avaricious fashion mogul.

The movie has a certain mordant humor, and some macho dialogue that's funny. Woods manfully keeps a straight face through goofy situations where many another actor would have signaled us with a wink. But the movie is not scary, and the plot is just one gory showdown after another.

It’s more exhausting than entertaining, and the multiple conclusions to the interconnecting storylines are more on the level of the dud that was “Rocky V” than the thrills of “Rocky III.”

There might indeed be a fine movie lurking within the pages of that original source material, but “The King’s Daughter” is not that movie.

We’re halfway through the movie when the villain’s identity becomes painfully obvious. Spoiler alert: We’re not wrong. The dialogue is often so painful, it’s almost entertaining on some level.

Watching the movie made me think of those subteen career novels I used to read in grade school, with titles like Brent Jones, Boy Reporter. They were always about how some kid got a lucky break and got hired by a newspaper, where of course he quickly learned the ropes and scooped the world on a big story, after which he got a telegram from the president and went off to college with a rosy future ahead of him. Those books came from a more innocent time, but Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead has been made in the same spirit.

All the players in The Misogynists sound as if they’ve been handed talking points instead of a screenplay.

Tells a pointlessly convoluted version of a love story that would really be very simple, if anyone in the movie possessed common sense.

It’s like a low-budget, Canadian version of “Ocean’s 11,” with about half as many characters and about one-tenth the charm and style.

Right up until an ending straight out of a mediocre rom-com from the early 2000s, You People never feels like more than a series of stitched-together scenes making some legitimate but obvious points about racial differences.

In this film there is a scene where something is said in English pronounced with one accent, and a character asks, ''What did he say?'' and he is told -- in English pronounced with another accent.

A high-tech and well made violent action picture using the name of Robin Hood for no better reason than that it’s an established brand not protected by copyright.

The film never allows the audience to truly get to know any of the characters in Larry’s world.

The movie is too impressed with its own solemn insights to work up much entertainment value; is too much fable to be convincing as life.

Paradise is a ringing disappointment. Cody shows some potential as a director, but her own script lets her down.

As a movie, it knows little about men, women or television shows, but has studied movie formulas so carefully that we can see each new twist and turn as it creeps ever so slowly into view.

The Smurfs 2 probably isn’t any worse than you might expect. On the other hand, it’s almost certainly not any better. It’s just a matter of figuring out how much punishment you’re willing to endure for the sake of the small child you’re taking to the movies.

There are small moments of real humor.

There's a lot of potential charm here, but the director, Emma-Kate Croghan, is so distracted by stylistic quirks that the characters are forever being upstaged by the shots they're in.

It’s ugly but not scary. It’s creepy but not chilling. It’s one of the least successful adaptations of a Stephen King story since …The last Pet Sematary.

As a movie, Veronica Mars looks and feels, well, like a glorified TV movie, with just decent production values, mostly unexceptional performances and ridiculous plot developments no more innovative than you’d see on a dozen network TV detective shows.

It’s The Maltese Falcon meets Inception somewhere in the Vanilla Sky on the way to Chinatown in the inventive and ambitious but wildly convoluted and ultimately disappointing sci-fi noir Reminiscence, which careens this way and that, and this way and that, before running off the rails.

Assembled from the debris of countless worn-out images of the Deep South and is indeed beautifully photographed. But the writer-director, Deborah Kampmeier, has become inflamed by the imagery and trusts it as the material for a story, which seems grotesque and lurid.

[Harris and Franco] bring out the finest in each other as they punch and counter-punch vastly different memories of horrific incidents from the past. It’s great stuff. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the The Adderall Diaries is overwrought, convoluted and irritating.

She’s Having a Baby begins with the simplest and most moving of stories and interrupts it with an amazing assortment of gimmicks. It is some kind of tribute to the strength of the story, and the warmth of the performances by Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern, that the movie somehow manages almost to work, in spite of the adornments.

Despite the fine performances, A Good Person starts off on the wrong foot and never finds a solid stride.

True Colors requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief; it demands a willful abandonment of incredulity.

It proceeds so deliberately from one plot point to the next that we want to stand next to the camera, holding up cards upon which we have lettered clues and suggestions.

In the end, I'm conflicted about the film. As an accessible family film, it delivers the goods. But it lives in the shadow of "March of the Penguins." Despite its sad scenes, it sentimentalizes.

It's one of those off-balance movies that seems searching for the right tone.

The movie is all the more artificial because it has been made with great, almost painful, earnestness.

Amusing enough to watch and passes the time, but it's the kind of movie you're content to wait for on your friendly indie cable channel.

Here, the charm doesn't happen because the movie doesn't care about them as people. They have little human dimension; they are the tools of the plot, and it's unfair to ask actors to supply qualities that the screenplay doesn't account for.

Curran’s script never digs deep enough.

The sex in the movie is so mild that I assumed the R rating was generated primarily by the gay theme, until I learned the R is in fact because of too many f-words.

If there’s anything worse than a long, slow, boring buildup to a payoff, it’s the buildup without the payoff. This movie doesn’t feel finished.

There’s an admirable commitment to absurdity, yet it belies the thoughtful coming-of-age journey for the five teens up until they hit “morphin time.”

Of the two co-stars, what I can say is that I’m looking forward to their next films.

The result is a tiresome exercise that circles at great length through various prefabricated stories defined by the advice each couple needs (or doesn't need).

It's a muddled, sometimes-atmospheric effort.

Chop off the last two or three minutes, fade to black, and you have a decent film.

By the end of the movie, I frankly didn't give a damn. There's an ironic twist, but the movie hadn't paid for it and didn't deserve it. And I was struck by the complete lack of morality in Demonlover.

So the screenplay is a soap operatic mess, involving distractions, loose ends, and sheer carelessness.

What's lacking is a little more depth. This is a movie that covers a lot of distance in only 87 minutes.

A brave and ambitious but chaotic attempt at political satire.

Here are the two most obvious problems that sentient audiences will have with the plot. (1) Modern encryption cannot be intuitively deciphered, by rainmen or anyone else, without a key. And, (2) If a 9-year-old kid can break your code, don't kill the kid, kill the programmers.

Give the Sony Pictures-backed Affirm Films and Risen director and co-writer Kevin Reynolds credit for making a different kind of Biblical semi-epic.

While Mirren and McKellen are as wonderful as you’d expect, especially in the early going when their respective characters are just getting to know one another, even these two legendary talents can’t overcome a convoluted, unfocused and increasingly implausible storyline.

I will say that the attempt to reinterpret the memorable closing shot of "Blood Simple" is so gauche and graceless that I involuntarily moaned in disgust. I docked the film another half-star just for that.