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.