How can we take this doomsday scenario seriously when we keep waiting for Bruce Willis to rise from the ashes?

One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor."

There is no reason why Reservation Road could not have been great. George has co-written some powerful films in the past, including two for Daniel Day-Lewis, "In the Name of the Father" and "The Boxer." He is not wrong to want to mainline intensity here, but the inner lives of these men have not been explored, only displayed.

Turns one of the greatest geniuses of German literature into a love-struck rapscallion.

Muddled cop thriller The Son of No One has a top-drawer cast and a bottom-drawer script.

Stephen Root, Ted Danson, Dermot Mulroney, and other familiar faces lend their support, but it's not enough to overcome the limp, by-the-numbers execution. The film comprises innumerable expository scenes, leavened with uninspired comic relief.

As for me, I don't see why women being as slobby and gross as the guys is such a feminist breakthrough – especially since, as in Bachelorette, the slobbiness and grossness is witless.

Why would you take your kids to see Space Chimps, an uninspired animated feature about chimp astronauts, when you could take them instead to see "Wall-E"? And if they've already seen "Wall-E," you're really lowering the bar by venturing into this one.

This is the kind of movie where life lessons are posted every quarter-hour. (I timed it.)

The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the masked one, made me long to re-watch "Zorro the Gay Blade," the great spoof starring George Hamilton. In that film, the Spanish accents were meant to sound deliberately fake.

At least we have Alan Arkin playing the head of CONTROL. His drone and deadpan are a perfect complement to Carell's. But please, pretty please, let's not go for a sequel on this one, OK?

Although the film's visuals are a cut above, say, "Sin City," another serioso graphic novel-turned-movie, it has the same mood: a film-noir-ish soddenness punctuated by megaviolence. Watchmen is the anti-"Incredibles."

Emma Roberts is squeaky-clean to a fault and so is the movie.

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow with lots of dull spots, a few effectively intense moments, and as much gore as the monster genre usually calls for nowadays.

As a laughing-through-tears jokester tourist, Richard Dreyfuss provides the only moments of real acting, as opposed to overacting, mugging, and scenery chomping.

If you were a fan of David Cronenberg's "Crash," based on J.G. Ballard's book about people who get sexually excited by auto accidents, you might just be the target audience for Quid Pro Quo, a perverse psychological drama.

It would take a more expert director than Newman to pull the lumpy Harry & Son screenplay into shape, with its many trite scenes that can't decide whether they're funny or sad or in between. [19 Apr 1984, p.25]

Director John Byrum's idea of evoking the past is to usher a parade of overblown cliches across the screen. [15 Nov 1984, p.47]

Director Vadim Perelman is big on slo-mo lyrical effects and confusing time shifts, making the movie unnecessarily arty and detracting from what could have been a searing psychological study.

As Judah Ben-Hur – full names, please – Huston is serviceable, but he’s a finer actor than this costumed kitsch allow him to be. As Judah’s boyhood best friend and adoptive brother, Messala, against whom Judah will eventually square off in the Roman Circus, Toby Kebbell has even less to work with than Huston, and he bears a disconcerting resemblance to motivational guru Tony Robbins.

Even as they've smoothed the novel's rough edges, moreover, the filmmakers have tried to cram a maximum number of its incidents into about two hours of screen time. This gives the picture a hectic pace that adds to its feeling of weightlessness and unreality. Poor casting, especially in the major roles played by Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith, doesn't help.

Though much blood is shed, the film is bloodless.

As the doomed princess, Q’orianka Kilcher, who costarred as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s “The New World,” has imperially striking features but limited acting skills. If her performances should ever rise to the level of her looks, she’ll be great.

Although he gave the plot real momentum on the stage, director Saks has fudged and fuzzed things by translating it so listlessly to the screen. [2 Jan 1987, p.25]

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.

The blue humor in We’re the Millers is just bland. And yes, Aniston performs a (modified) striptease. That’s pretty bland, too.

The irony of the picture is the fact that Stone's visual imagination is tremendously impressive here. It is one of Hollywood's most stylistically adventurous films ever. What a pity its brilliant ideas are expended on a failed satire with little but rage on its agenda. [26 Aug 1994]

What this film really celebrates is crunch-and-thud video-game-style action, not especially well choreographed by director Guy Ritchie.