Robert Rodriguez has somehow misplaced his energy, his flair and his humor in this third film, which is a flat and dreary disappointment.

From start to finish, this film seems strangely out of touch, never more so than when it tries to come across as enlightened.

The movie is set up as a valentine to Vardalos. She should try sending herself flowers.

Even with a terminally ill teenage son character, a pill-popping absentee mother and a crotchety grandpa character, The Forger is consistently ineffective as a sentimental tearjerker — and an even bigger failure as a heist movie.

A closing scene, rousingly patriotic, takes place back on the football field. I think I'm beginning to understand why the Chinese were not reckoned to be a prime market for this film.

Perhaps movies are like history, and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.

An average Adam Sandler comedy, which, sadly, means it’s a below-average comedy — because whatever comedic fire and bursts of genuinely inspired humor Sandler once possessed have long ago burnt out.

The plot is just high-tech Swiss Cheese, filled with holes and smelling like last week’s refrigerator contents.

This loud, bombastic, often incoherent mishmash of magical-themed storytelling simply was not worth whatever effort went into it. While there are some acceptable action sequences, it’s the screenplay — complicated by some less than inspired performances — that dooms “Warcraft” at every point along the way.

Uncle Buck attempts to tell a heart-warming story through a series of uncomfortable and unpleasant scenes; it's a tug-of-war between its ambitions and its methods.

An innocuous family feature that's too little/too late in the fast-moving world of feature animation.

What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall.

Movies like this demonstrate that when it comes to stupidity and vulgarity, only the best will do for our children.

Director/co-writer/actor Zach Braff’s Wish I Was Here is a precious and condescending exercise in self-indulgent pandering, featuring one of the whiniest lead characters in recent memory.

There is nothing funny about the situation in Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

The Legend of Zorro commits a lot of movie sins, but one is mortal: It turns the magnificent Elena into a nag.

It involves teenagers who have never existed, doing things no teenager has ever done, for reasons no teenager would understand. Of course, it's aimed at the teenage market.

Maybe I've lost touch with silly, brainless entertainments like this. Let's hope so: One of the purposes of growing up and getting an education is to learn why movies like Spaced Invaders are a waste of time. And yet, a small, far-away voice inside of me says there once was a time when I would have liked this movie, when I was young and open to wonderments.

A package like this looks OK on paper, but goes nowhere. It turns all of the characters into chess pieces, whose relationships depend on the plot, not on human chemistry. Since the plot is absurdly illogical, you’re not left with much.

It's nice, but it's not much of a comedy.

Cats is a slick and tedious and weird-looking exercise in self-indulgence.

You want gore, you get gore. Hatchet II plays less like a slasher movie than like the highlight reel from a slasher movie.

Obviously made with all of the best will in the world, its heart in the right place, this is a sluggish and dutiful film that plays more like a eulogy than an adventure.

I cringed.

I don’t think you and I need to connect on InstaSkypeChatFaceSnapTweeterBook for you to understand I’m saying we’ve seen this movie before. It’s just usually not this smug or condescending or muddled or inconsistent.

This material is wearing out its welcome. I have mastered all of the lessons The Karate Kid movies have to teach and all of the surprises they have to spring. I am also intimately familiar with the plot formula, so that nothing in this third film comes as the faintest surprise. Perhaps it is time, as Mr. Miyagi might say, to study something else.

I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbofest and got the bimbos but not the fest. Britney Spears' feature debut is curiously low-key and even sad.

We’re not buying what the script is selling, not for a hot second.