The 'Burbs tries to position itself somewhere between Beetlejuice and The Twilight Zone, but it lacks the dementia of the first and the wicked intelligence of the second and turns instead into a long shaggy dog story.

Hickok is not without its corny, borderline-cheesy moments of fun — but it eventually loses steam due to the increasingly cliché-riddled story developments, not to mention the awkwardly edited shootouts that sometimes make it seem as if the combatants filmed their scenes on separate days.

It gets to the point where it hardly matters to us who lives and who dies, because they’re all stone-cold killers.

The movie lacks the warmth and edge of the two previous features ("Walking and Talking" and "Lovely and Amazing"). It seems to be more of an idea than a story.

It clearly aspires to be something more than another story about empty-headed teenagers in a remote cabin who get picked off one by one in gruesome fashion — but at the end of the day, that’s pretty much what we’re getting.

Three Thousand Years of Longing actually ends on a creative high note, but the path to that conclusion is filled with muddled adventures that play like something out of a 1980s B-movie. We find ourselves longing for the credits to roll.

Husbands has all the confidence of Cassavetes' masterpiece, Faces, but few of the other qualities of the film that preceded it. It has good intentions, I suppose, but it is an artistic disaster and only fitfully interesting on less ambitious levels.

It is an ambitious, dreamlike, beautifully shot movie (with cinematography by the legendary Roger Deakins) that aims for the fences again and again in the course of 149 minutes — but nearly every one of those mighty cuts is a swing and a miss.

Any professional film editor watching this movie is going to suffer through one moment after another that begs to be ripped from the film and cut up into ukulele picks. Never mind the film editor: A lot of audiences, with all the best will in the world, are going to feel the same way.

I prefer "Life Is Beautiful," which is clearly a fantasy, to Jakob the Liar, which is just as contrived and manipulative but pretends it is not.

Disclosure contains an inspiring terrific shot of Demi Moore's cleavage in a Wonderbra, surrounded by 125 minutes of pure goofiness leading up to, and resulting from, this moment.

A pleasant, genial, good-hearted, sometimes icky comedy that's like spending a weekend with well-meaning people you don't want to see again any time real soon.

The flat and uninspired Addams Family 2 is the wrong kind of “twofer,” in that it’s often too dark and grotesque and bizarre for children, but also profoundly unfunny when it tries to appeal to the grown-ups.

Here are people who do not allow the use of their last names, yet they cheerfully have sex in front of the camera -- and even willingly participate in scenes that make them look cruel, twisted, reckless and perhaps deranged.

True, Aniston does maybe her best film work to date in Cake. But it’s definitely not her best film.

Johnny Knoxville, famous for "Jackass,"...is, in fact, completely convincing and probably has a legitimate movie career ahead of him and doesn't have to stuff his underpants with dead chickens and hang upside down over alligator ponds any more.

Eddie and the Cruisers is all buildup and no payoff.

The problem is that Winterbottom has imagined both stories and several others, and tells them in a style designed to feel as if reality has been caught on the fly.

If we don’t care a whit about the characters and their respective dilemmas, a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot is just a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot.

The outcome of this journey is going to be predictable and disappointing. Mottola does his best to make the trip itself enjoyable.

Finally, a sci-fi action mega-movie filled with CGI battles in which barely distinguishable foes hurl each other about while delivering unspeakably corny lines, as we hear hip-hop hits on the soundtrack.

The movie is harmless and fitfully amusing.

The bloated, bombastic and brain-dead Netflix actioner The Gray Man is a depressingly formulaic waste of the talents of the Russo Brothers and the A-list cast — and a complete waste of 2 hours and 2 minutes of your time, unless you’re content to hit the “Recline” button on your theater seat, soak in the exotic locations, jam your arm into a bucket o’ popcorn and laugh at the hackneyed, cartoonishly violent and utterly ridiculous idiocy of the entire exercise.

"Star Trek V" is pretty much of a mess - a movie that betrays all the signs of having gone into production at a point where the script doctoring should have begun in earnest. There is no clear line from the beginning of the movie to the end, not much danger, no characters to really care about, little suspense, uninteresting or incomprehensible villains, and a great deal of small talk and pointless dead ends. Of all of the "Star Trek" movies, this is the worst.

Either this is a tragic family or a satirical one, and the film seems uncertain which way to jump.

The modern retelling retains little of the charm and whimsy of the source material, in favor of a cloying story, a most unwelcome new character and some pretty cheesy special effects.

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

A mixed-bag satire with ambitions that veer wildly from sharp political insight to slapstick farce to inspirational semi-autobiography. It never finds solid ground in any of those genres.