Such a feeble excuse for an action comedy that it's already taken pride of place in my upcoming worst-movies-of-2011 list.

The script by Allan Loeb careens all over the place without ever coming to rest on anything interesting.

Despite its length, it is one of the most consistently engrossing and powerful movies ever made.

Many of the interviews in the film – conducted with everyone from family members to Christopher Hitchens and Tom Hayden – look to be 10, even 20, years old. Together they concoct a complex portrait of an ultimately unknowable man.

It would take a lot more than holy water to rescue Season of the Witch from mediocrity.

Country Strong is the latest and, in many ways, the least impressive entrant in the achy-breaky sweepstakes.

Sometimes empty is just empty. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland can also apply to Somewhere: "There is no there there."

Gosling, as the Durst-like David Marks, is scarily effective before his performance turns opaque and horror-movie-ish.

A quintessential Mike Leigh performance. It deepens as it goes along until, in the end, in its final close-up, it overwhelms.

The film's time structure is splintered into shards of past and present, which is probably just as well – a strictly narrative chronology would make this wallow seem even sloggier.

A movie of such stupendous uninspiration that, watching it, I didn't know whether to be affronted or hornswoggled. Movies this monumentally dreadful, after all, don't come along every day.

A breathtakingly beautiful achievement in every way.

Kevin Spacey gives a bravura performance as superlobbyist Jack Abramoff in George Hickenlooper's uneven but often loopily entertaining Casino Jack.

On its own conventional terms, the film succeeds – maybe not as a "Coen Brothers" movie, but as a tall tale well told.

Ought to have been state of the art. But there's not a whole lot of artistry to be found in this movie.

Best when it's morphing into seriousness. Too often the comic bits seem like sops to the audience.

No doubt some of it is charming enough to induce giggles in its preteen target audience.

It's slobby, goony, and gross, also occasionally funny, but not occasionally enough.

The real star here is the big, unmanned freight train sparking through Pennsylvania at 70 m.p.h. while carrying hazardous cargo. Best of all, the train doesn't have any dialogue.

Love & Other Drugs is a slick weepie made by smart guys who want you to know they're better than the schlockmeisters. They've outsmarted themselves.

Despite his street cred, Muniz comes across as way too effete for these laborerers, many of whom have harrowing life stories to tell. But his intention to have them re-create photographic images of themselves out of garbage, while it may not pass muster as high art, has the effect of raising their spirits.

Leo, in particular, seems poleaxed with good intentions. Her Lois wins the Most Understanding Wife award.

A remarkable movie about a remarkable friendship. It honors the audience's intelligence, which makes it a double rarity.

Only Amy Adams, playing Mickey's tough-tender girlfriend Char­lene, manages to be convincingly working-class without seeming either dopey or rabid or strung-out.

Normally I'd watch Helen Mirren in anything, even if she was just putting out the laundry or reading the phone book. But, given the roteness of her line readings here, it might have been better if the phone book rather than Shakespeare was her text.

To see Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in The Tourist is like watching a chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong.

Michael Apted's direction veers into listlessness, but there is, at times, a pleasing elegance to the production, too. It doesn't assault you. Small favors are better than none.

As Disney animated features go, Tangled is middling.

If you go to Burlesque expecting a campy hoot on the order of "Showgirls," you may be in for a disappointment. It's not quite awful enough, although it's plenty bad.

Part 1 of the final installment, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' is another scrupulous adaptation of J.K Rowling's books.

Lena Dunham, the writer-director-star of the microbudget Tiny Furniture, has a distinctive comedic take on the world – a kind of haggard spiritedness.

The Bhutto family is often referred to as the "Pakistani Kennedys." After seeing this film, that designation doesn't sound so glib anymore.

An overstuffed odyssey that, while disappointing on many levels, has standout performances by Paul Giamatti.

The movie, at its best, is compellingly odd, which is also the most accurate description of Carrey's performance.

A love-it-or-hate-it movie. Put me in the (sort of) hate-it column. My slight qualification here is because Darren Aronofsky's movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that's out there.

I would rather have seen a documentary about the real women instead of this workmanlike dramatic rendition.

In its final half-hour, all the stops are pulled. The movie is still wildly implausible but at least it's hurtling forward. The only thing missing from the proceedings is a windmill for John to tilt at.

A long wallow in misery and, after a while, the pain morphs into polemic.

Tries mightily to make the case that Spitzer was brought down by his political enemies.

Morning Glory isn't targeting the dumbing down of TV news. It's pandering to the audience that craves the dumbness.

It's more than enough that the Wilsons were punished and pilloried for telling the truth. We don't need to see them sanctified by righteousness.

As a testament to positive thinking, 127 Hours will probably stand as a ringing affirmation for reckless survivalists. For those of us not so affirmed, Boyle's paean to heroism – a better title for it might have been "A Farewell to Arm" – is merely the best gross-out music video ever made.

Described in the film's production notes as a "classic French comedy" – although I've never heard of it – and perhaps this is the core problem. French farce doesn't mix well with English gooniness.

For the most part, plays like a pretty good TV police procedural.

Although von Trotta seems to regard von Bingen – played with a cool ferocity by Barbara Sukowa – as some sort of medieval feminist precursor, there are enough fault lines in the portrayal to subvert hagiography.

He is the least intrusive of great directors, and Boxing Gym, which is about a gym in Austin, Texas, is so offhandedly observant that, for a while, you may wonder if much of anything is really going on.

With scrupulous fairness, Ferguson meticulously lays out for us the whole sordid mess.

Despite the all-too-harrowing familiarity of these scenes, they seem more like illustrations than dramatizations of trauma.

Eastwood and Morgan are not con artists, but their awe here is so unblinking that their film comes across as a transcendent con job.

There is one aspect of Conviction that is a real cheat. No mention is made that Kenny, six months after his release from prison, accidentally fell and fatally fractured his skull. Did the filmmakers think that our knowing this would wreck a happy ending? For a film that prides itself on its realism, this omission is unspeakably wimpy.

Erotic comedies are often attempted but rarely realized. Tamara Drewe is proof that sexy and funny need not be mutually exclusive.

RED is a poisoned valentine to the CIA, and that approach, too, is in keeping with its cold-war sentimentality.

Disney studios, director Randall Wallace, and his screenwriter Mike Rich, obviously targeting a "faith-based" audience à la "The Blind Side," lard the soundtrack with "Oh Happy Day" and readings from the Book of Job.

A more contrived and tenuous premise you would be hard-pressed to find, although, since this is a romantic comedy, suspension of disbelief comes with the territory.

It's effective but schematic storytelling.

Even though the various patients too often come across as cutesy case studies, Fleck and Boden for the most part avoid working their lives up into some grand-scale "Cuckoo's Nest"-style microcosm of humanity.

The problem is, the geek in question, at least as Jesse Eisenberg plays him, doesn't have the emotional expansiveness to fill out a movie. Perhaps sensing this, the filmmakers play out the story line from multiple points of view and crowd the stage with a pageant of voluble supporting characters.

The film is provocative but also scattershot and not nearly as conclusive as it pretends to be. The almost complete absence of naysayers in any of the sections is a tip-off that the game is rigged.

"Money Never Sleeps" doesn't get inside the sociopathology of the money culture. In a sense, it is a product, an expression, of that culture. Maybe that's why it's so disagreeably agreeable.

Your heart goes out to all these kids, but Guggenheim's take on education stacks the deck against them even further by implying that only charters offer a ray of hope. Would that it were that simple.

The language of that poem, which periodically pours out from the screen, is the best thing in the movie. The worst thing: the interpolated animated sequences that are meant to "illustrate" the poem but which can't begin to compete with the imagery evoked by Ginsberg's words.

There are enough pleasantries and good jests in this new film to make a meal.

The Town might have amounted to something more than an occasionally good movie about crooks in trouble. There's a knife-edge here, but it's been blunted.

It must be said that the filmmakers, who profess to be as surprised as we are about how things play out, are being disingenuous at best and underhanded at worst.

Strangely moving and mournful, but I wish more had been made of the beauty these people are relinquishing, if only as a counterweight to all that artful drear.

It's an inescapable fact that Gould's singular musical insights – the way he brought out in Bach a mesmeric unity of sound – could only have arisen from a singular personality.

A little of this movie's preppy, whiny expostulation goes a long way.

Cary Grant, to take the premier example, was a great screwball comic who was, at the same time, intensely romantic. With Grant, funniness and sexiness were twinned. This is an exceedingly difficult combo to bring off, and Duris, though it would be unfair to compare him with Grant, doesn't come close.

As the boarding school honcho Father Benedictus, Geoffrey Rush chews so much scenery that he looks ready to burst.

Replete with boisterously unfunny black slapstick.

Once around the block with these folks is more than enough.

Fan's camera moves sinuously through these people's lives and gives a human face to a national panorama.

At some point in their careers, most male actors want to play (a) Hamlet, and (b) a hit man. I hope that Clooney has gotten "b" out of his system.

The rural atmosphere is well wrought and so is the depiction of phony evangelism – but it all devolves into the usual heebie-jeebies by the end.

Compared with, say, Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," which featured this sort of stuff in practically every frame, Marshall's film is downright Disneyish.

The humor is broad, the jokes not of the first freshness, and the cast, especially Bousdoukus, is hammy. And, for the record, the upscale menu, which is supposed to be scrumptious, doesn't look as tasty as the downscale one.

What with the title and pedigree, no one would expect Eat Pray Love to be filled with thrilling action. But the word "movie" does imply movement, and almost nothing ever happens throughout the protracted two hours and 20 minutes.

All very grim and unrelenting; Michôd generates some nail-biting suspense, though it's not the sort of experience that many people are likely to enjoy.

The opening action sequence, unrelated to the main story, is nicely done, but after that it's all downhill.

It's all a bit hokey, though the mountaineering footage is often spectacular.

It wants to be a movie about the intersection between criminality and the class system but, for that, it could have used a bit more class.

Is Jack, who is patterned on a real-life character, sociopathic or just plain clueless? Gallo doesn't seem to care. He cares about parading before us lowlifes living the high life.

You may find, as I did, that the lovely twilit moments in this movie stay with one, and that summoning them up in your mind is like slowing down time.

Not only Duvall shines. Murray, in case anybody still doubted it, is one of the finest character actors in America.

The characters who come off best in Dinner for Schmucks are those dead mice.

There are fine, wry moments tucked inside the curdled whimsy.

The only thing missing from Salt is Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb with her steel blade-tipped shoes from "From Russia With Love." Come to think of it, the Russian defector here does indeed kill with steel-blade shoes. Nice touch.

A little of Solondz's deadpan creepiness goes a long way with me. Life During Wartime is about how people are not what they seem to be, but most of its characters aren't rich enough to exhibit single, let alone double, lives.

Made-up horror movies have nothing on Countdown to Zero, a documentary about nuclear security that won't make you sleep better at night.

If there's anything missing from Bailey and Thompson's searing documentary, it's a consideration of the possible arguments against Campbell and Freeth.

For movie buffs, the only real fun to be had at Inception could be toting up the lifts from other movies, including Cocteau’s “Blood of a Poet” and “The Matrix” series and just about anything by Kubrick.

O'Neill and Curry, both heretofore nonactors, can't put across much more than a single emotion at a time, but their amateurishness isn't as annoying as it might have been in a movie with higher aspirations and artistry.

Cage is amusingly skanky, Molina is dependably arch, and Baruchel is engagingly down to earth. But do we really need to watch them play out this exhaustingly empty scenario?

Carrell has stated in interviews that his accent "falls someplace between Bela Lugosi and Ricardo Montalban," and that's about right.

What this film is really about is how interconnected we all are, like it or not, on the Internet, and how alluring and alarming this can be.

Positioned somewhere between sitcom and piercing human drama, The Kids Are All Right, is both overtly familiar and cutting edge.

Resembles nothing so much as a workmanlike TV crime thriller.

Movie actors are notoriously inarticulate about their craft, but what about movie directors? If the documentary Great Dir­ectors is any indication, the returns are a bit more promising.