Writer-director-star Angelina Jolie Pitt’s By the Sea is awfully pretty and mostly dreadful. It’s pretty dreadful.

The message of inspiration is strong and certainly qualifies as solid family entertainment. I only wish there were fewer trite truisms scattered throughout the script and less predictable dialogue for the solid troupe of actors to deliver.

The Paperboy is great trash, and as Pauline Kael told us, the movies are so seldom great art that if we can't appreciate great trash, we might as well not go at all.

On balance, I think it's an interesting miss, but a movie you might enjoy if (a) you don't expect a masterpiece, and (b) you like the dialogue in Quentin Tarantino movies.

Sniper expresses a cool competence that is a pleasure to watch. It isn't a particularly original film, but what it does, it does well. We've seen so many bad movies about guys walking through the jungle with rifles that it's interesting the way this one grabs us through its command of the locations and its storytelling skill.

It's not just sad, it's brutal. There's an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device.

Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.

Weighed down by its splendor. There are scenes where the costumes are so sumptuous, the sets so vast, the music so insistent, that we lose sight of the humans behind the dazzle of the production.

It follows the well-worn pathways of countless police dramas before it.

It is a fantasy, a sweet, light-hearted fairy tale with Reese Witherspoon at its center. She is as lovable as Doris Day would have been in this role (in fact, Doris Day was in this role, in "Please Don't Eat the Daisies").

The movie tells no clear story and has no clear ideas.

This is one of the craziest films to come along in a while and I can confidently say that anyone who sees it will either hail it is some kind of crackpot masterpiece or dismiss it as one of the silliest damn things they've ever seen.

The cast is uniformly capable and dead serious, and if you're buying what Luc Besson is selling, he's not short-changing you.

The movie is harmless and fitfully amusing.

The Distinguished Gentleman prefers to give us measured laughs at a leisurely pace, and then it settles for the sellout upbeat ending. Ho hum.

The movie is simply a failure of imagination. Nobody looked at the screenplay and observed that it didn’t try hard enough, that it had no surprises, that it didn’t attempt to delight its audiences with twists and turns on the phoned-in plotline.

For all the visceral depictions of hatred and violence and human destruction, it feels as if the director is chasing his own tail and forgetting about making it all mean something.

The plot of the movie is meh.

Lin takes an established franchise and makes it surprisingly fresh and intriguing. The movie is not exactly "Shogun" when it comes to the subject of an American in Japan (nor, on the other hand, is it "Lost in Translation"). But it's more observant than we expect, and uses its Japanese locations to make the story about something more than fast cars.

The result is an actor's dream, a film in which the truth of almost every scene has to be excavated out of the debris of social inhibition.

This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times. Now that I've seen it twice, I think I understand it, or maybe not. Certainly it's entertaining as it rolls along.

I don't require that a movie have a message, but in a message movie it is helpful to know what the message is.

It has elements of sweet romance and elements of macabre humor, and divides its characters between the two.

Nowhere near one of Crowe's great films (like "Almost Famous"), but it is sweet and good-hearted and has some real laughs.

Today's kids are learning from the Turtles that the world is a sinkhole of radioactive waste, that it's more reassuring to huddle together in sewers than take your chances competing at street level, and that individuality is dangerous. Cowabunga.

Even though of course we recognize the bravery and selfless heroism of the men on that train who risked their lives to save others, and even though there are a few pulse-quickening moments in The 15:17 to Paris, the movie is slow-paced and feels padded, even with that running time of just over an hour and a half.

Director Burr Steers...does a nifty job of rocketing from period-piece romance to gory bloodshed, with sprinkles of dark humor here and there.

Surrogates is entertaining and ingenious, but it settles too soon for formula.