Despite an excellent ensemble cast of comedic treasures as well as veterans of drama taking a walk down a lighter aisle, A.C.O.D (i.e. Adult Children of Divorce) delivers only a few sporadic chuckles amidst a slew of clunky scenes.

There’s no narrator, no interviews, no dramatic re-creations of events—simply an admittedly well-edited but ultimately unenlightening mash-up of archival footage, person-on-the-street interviews from the time, snippets from chat shows and audio and video clips of various newscasters and pundits. We’re left wondering: What. Is. The. Point.

The Little Drummer Girl lacks the two essential qualities it needs to work: It's not comprehensible, and it's not involving.

The actual case isn’t all that complex or compelling, and the eventual explanation for what happened is almost an afterthought. By the time all the ghosts and feuds have been put to rest, it’s surprising how little we care about these characters.

Candy Cane Lane is harmless but teeters on the brink of being quite terrible.

A love story about two people with no apparent chemistry, whose lives are changed by a stranger who remains an uninteresting enigma. No wonder it just sits there on the screen.

It's never really believable, but it tries to be, and it would have had a better chance as straight satirical comment.

My Favorite Martian is slapstick and silliness, wild sight gags and a hyped-up acting style. The Marx Brothers would have been at home here. The movie is clever in its visuals, labored in its audios, and noisy enough to entertain kids.

Its hero upstages anything the plot can possibly come up with.

It's so determined to be crude, vulgar and offensive that after a while I grew weary. Abbott and Costello used to knock out funnier movies on this exact intellectual plane without using a single F, S, C, P or A word.

Crimson Peak is a gorgeous mediocrity.

The charisma of such actors as Gandolfini, Pitt, Liotta and Jenkins depends largely on their screen presences and our memories of them in better roles.

The movie is curious in how close it comes to delivering on its material: Sequence after sequence seems to contain all the necessary material, to be well on the way toward a payoff, and then it somehow doesn't work.

Actually two movies, one wretched, the other funny. The funny one involves the Jennifer Tilly scenes.

OK, OK. They're good dancers, and well-choreographed. You can see the movie for that and be charitable about the moronic plot.

The great Jared Harris does what he can with an underwritten role.

It might work on video for viewers who glance up at the screen from time to time. The more attention you pay to it, the less it's there.

The kind of performance Penn delivers in I Am Sam, which may look hard, is easy, compared, say, to his amazing work in Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown."

Things Heard & Seen has the requisite horror-movie look (deep shades of brown and orange, low camera angles, repeated glimpses of effectively creepy paintings and haunting photographs, religious symbolism everywhere) and Norton in particular is a hoot as just the worst person in the world — but still, Things Heard & Seen should be neither of those things.

Lacks some of the idiocy of your average teenage rom-com. But it doesn't bring much to the party. It sort of ambles along, with two nice people at the center of a human scavenger hunt. It's not much of a film, but it sort gets you halfway there, like a Yugo.

Unlocked has the DNA of many a 21st century late summer release: It’s a well-made but terribly uneven film that’s been sitting on a shelf for two years, despite the credentials of the veteran director and a star-studded cast.

Poker Face has a lean, cool look, and there are some effective dramatic moments, mostly due to the weight-of-the-old weariness in Crowe’s powerful performance. Unfortunately, Paul Tassone’s over-the-top theatrics as the main villain border on the cartoonish, as the psychological gamesmanship gives way to standard action movie stuff, and the cards and the chips have long been forgotten.

Is the film worth seeing? Depends. It breaks no new ground as horror movies go, but it does introduce an intriguing location, and it's well made technically. It's better than you expect but not as good as you hope.

The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences.

Tired, uninspired and meandering, Wrath of Man is a step backward for Ritchie, a step sideways for the stoic-for-life Jason Statham (reteaming with Ritchie for the first time in 16 years) and a misstep for anyone who invests their time and money on 118 minutes of such convoluted and forgettable nonsense.

Kafka, as subject or character, simply doesn't fit into the world of this film. Soderbergh does demonstrate again here that he's a gifted director, however unwise in his choice of project.

There’s not a bad performance in this movie. De Niro, Keaton and Sarandon are particularly good, what a surprise. But it feels as if all the guests at “The Big Wedding” are wearing ID tags telling us their one Plot Point.

It all comes down to whether you can tolerate Leon Barlow. I can't. Big Bad Love can, and is filled with characters who love and accept him, even though he is a full-time, gold-plated pain in the can.