While writer-director Frank Darabont often fails to make King's story plausible, that's no fault of the actors. The performances are the movie's strong suit.

Mildly amusing, both charming and diverting, it plays like a La La Land home movie.

Infuriating on almost every conceivable level.

A pleasant surprise that The Crew offers up the charms it does.

A very odd cinematic creature.

Hamstrung by a script that is too often smug, obvious and self-important.

Story. Character. They used to mean something to George Lucas.

At the end of the day, it’s a sure-handed sequel, but not a terribly thrilling one.

What rescues the movie, time and again, is the strength of Jones' and Jackson's performances.

Compared to such current television shows as ''Sex and the City" and ''Action," this menage-a-trois tale seems downright tame.

Crowe gives the kind of thoughtful performance that suggests what Mystery, Alaska could have been if it had stayed in focus.

There are satisfying moments throughout the movie.

It's not that this is lousy entertainment, it's just that it's a Serious Topic given unnecessary Celebrity Sheen.

While it's not exactly the complete bomb that some were predicting, Charlie's Angels is ultimately just an amiable mess.

The accidental beating and killing of innocent people satirizes "Pulp Fiction," or is this Sabu's homage to Tarantino?

The plot is convoluted.

It has to be noted that the use of music in this film is the worse in recent memory: maudlin, syrupy, and overwrought.

A strange combination of mental exhaustion and boredom.

Not a conventional love story, and perhaps it's not a love story at all. After more than two hours, you're left wondering what it is.

The audience for this film would be those people who like their cinematic fare pre-digested and painfully familiar.

An authentically spirited popcorn movie.

The story of Groove... provides an ingratiating road map to a cultural phenomenon. Just make sure you drink lots of water while you're there.

The result is fantasy that wafts away.

The Company You Keep at least manages to maintain an audience’s interest for a solid 80 percent of the film. The ending is a slight flop, which keeps the film from an overall recommendation, and in the stark light of day, it seems fairly evident not everything adds up.

For every poignant moment there’s a gaudy dream sequence, wretched internal monologue, ham-fisted zoom or an exchange of dialogue sorely lacking nuance.

Too slow-moving and too understated in much of its humor.

Sometimes star power alone can keep you from walking out of a movie, and this is one of those times.

Sunshine's historical reference-heavy narrative walks a fine line between novelistic tragedy and comically overstated melodrama, falling down on the job more than once.

(Smith) seems out of his depth in this talky, rambling religious satire.

It’s half of a good movie, and another half that no one asked for or wanted.

Given the enormous praise, the film falls short.

Carrey's performance, and Forman's lively attempts to ask serious questions about the nature of comedy, keep it interesting. Certainly it's never dull.

Ross might have been better served by dismissing verisimilitude altogether and going for a real fable-fable to make what is essentially a very simple point about the dangers and rewards of accepting life's beautiful risks.

The filmmakers went for cheap laughs as well as for some a little harder-earned. The only thing pure about this film is the dog, and he's magnificent.

The story, ultimately, is about the classic conflict between a desire to cherish and protect one's unique gifts from a brutal world and a more practical instinct to compromise beauty.

This mild but amusing comedy wasn't written by Levinson, and the accents may be different, but the feel is similar.

Like "American Beauty" without the fangs - or the magic.

Utterly lacks the spark that makes caper movies fun.

It all coalesces in a TV-level pleasantness, which isn't quite enough to fill a big screen.

There are tones of 1970s shaggy realism that are interrupted by moments of character-driven shtick. The wistful scenes aren’t rich enough to engross you and the comedy isn’t clever enough to make a difference.

Like the melancholy remininces of an old relative who lived through an exciting, even harrowing time, but no longer possesses the mental faculties to really flesh out the tale they're spinning.

A sort of "Pretty Woman" for the underworld.

A Mexican film that reaches for a very weird and risky tone, and, I think, fails.

The lack of chemistry between he (Yun-Fat) and Foster is truly striking: so much so, in fact, that the strain of trying to manufacture some keeps her looking on the verge of outright illness throughout.

Lacks dramatic tension and fails to bring this great music alive. It does not sing.

More aggravating than endearing, although there’s an interesting idea buried beneath all the cutesy plot details.

Emperor may not be the most dazzling of history lessons, but it never treats the past as a dusty, deserted place.

Hateship, Loveship suffers due to its dedication to an oddly unsettling type of earnestness.

This is not a great comedy, but it has some honest laughs, a few touching moments.

[Aja] has outfitted Horns with enough talent that the film is rather easy to admire aesthetically. The problems are more foundational, even conceptual—and they are thus harder to reconcile.

Suffers from a script that places dramatic emphasis in all the wrong places.

Once at sea, The Perfect Storm collapses in a heap of spectacle and a dubious piling-on of scary incidents.

These film-making provocateurs are divided between sweet and sour, between the romance of classic screwball comedy and Mad magazine on acid.

Actions do have their consequences, though, and Weitz doesn’t try to end things too tidily for their own good. Were only that he had succeeded in committing to one of those films over the other, then Admission might have been this year’s “Liberal Arts” rather than this year’s “Smart People.”

Leaves almost no impression at all.

Using current hand-held camera technology to ape the political and esthetic sensibility of the 1960s.

Co-writers and stars June Diane Raphael (“Whitney,” “New Girl”) and Casey Wilson (“Happy Endings”) are genuine and true comic performers. Even though the story stunk, the set pieces were uninspired and the direction was downright wretched, when these two are “on” and doing schtick, they are absolutely fresh and hilarious.

(Herron) just doesn't make the case that this book was worth filming.

While we may like what we see, it's impossible to comprehend what much of it means or why we should care.

Ambitious and perversely fascinating.

Its grimness is so unrelenting that I can only recommend it to filmgoers who need a movie to tell them that incest is bad.

Given Garant and Lennon’s background on “The State” and “Reno 911,” their scattershot approach as filmmakers isn’t especially surprising; for every oddly specific Shakespeare reference or detour to the local po-boy joint, there’s an ongoing parade of puke and an awful rubber suit with which to contend.

For 8- to 12-year-olds and the grownups who love them, Recess is a pleasant Saturday-matinee diversion. The fact that it doesn't aim to be anything more is, in its own way, a blessed relief.

It has its moments.

The audience is ready for an unhappy ending -- and Hollywood should have the courage to provide it.

Tries so hard to push all the pre-ordained buttons, and it's so anxious to be liked, nay, adored, that it left me sullen and uninvolved instead.

Simply can't sustain interest for much of its final hour.

Enough pep in this picture to make it rise above teen-movie expectations.

Does a lot of little stuff right, and it sparkles at times.

You just watch one carefully constructed but emotionally vacant image piled up on another - sometimes with regard to an overall effect, but often just for the sake of style over substance.

If the current flood of pre-millennial tension movies teaches us nothing else, it demonstrates how desperate we've all become to see whether we could make our peace in the time provided, if forced to by circumstances beyond our control.

Destined to be remembered not for its laugh-per-minute ratio, but for breaking a barrier of crudeness in mainstream movies.

Lawrence's style is purely will-it-stick-the-wall-or-not, and when it doesn't he looks pretty puny up there on the big screen.

An embarrassing gut-punch of unfiltered schmaltz, but its sympathy for the devil-style humanism is well-meaning.

It may be possible that people who never go to the movies will stumble across Blow Dry and find it a charming way to spend an hour and a half, but the rest of us will have the ending written in our heads by the end of the first five minutes.

So self-conscious that it alienates the viewer early and often.

Both Tipton and Teller are better than this material.

Palpably well-intentioned, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is nevertheless phony to the core.

Rather than thrilling, the courtroom sequences seem only enervating, nudging us toward a quiet outrage.

What’s truly unnerving about the whole thing is how good certain scenes are, and how great a few of the performances come off, especially Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep – they’re doing amazing work, only it’s the equivalent of building a lovely home on a foundation of quicksand.

A dark, dreary and dull “Mad Max in Neutral” from director David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) that tries to pass off its blunt narrative and repetitiveness as some sort of style.

Fellowes' many changes diminish the power of Shakespeare's story.

Discordance, meet The Iceman, a film so wrong-footed it should take Eugene Levy out for a coffee.

Only completists need check in with Homefront. The rest of us can just stay home.

Frankly, no one in this ensemble is done any favors by Jason Hall and Barry Levy’s screenplay, a “Duplicity” for dummies filled to the brim with double-crossing cliches.

At first, it’s all fun and games whenever somebody gets hurt, but that’s not enough in and of itself to sustain the movie’s tension. We’re left waiting for characters to die off without much of a vested interest in anyone’s survival.

A movie of fools, by fools, for fools, Grown Ups 2 is easily forgotten, which isn’t as bad a feature as you’d think.

A visually colorful but otherwise vanilla continuation of the series.

The most awkward thing about That Awkward Moment is that the majority of it just doesn’t make much sense and, as a relatively light-hearted spin on the romantic comedy genre, it absolutely should.

Every scene of Danny Mooney’s directorial debut is brightly lit, every car squeaky clean, every moral dilemma transparent, with evidently thorough period detail undone by production values that lend even the riots an idyllic glow, while foiling the potential for truly dramatic conflict with leaden dialogue and predictable changes of heart.

The idea of the film is certainly clever enough, it’s the execution that lacks finesse.

Watching Identity Thief will steal nearly two hours of your life that you’ll never get back. It takes far more than it gives.

The violence is so indifferently presented that it has no kick; it’s not grim or graphic enough to shock, but it doesn’t rev us up, either. The picture’s various shoot-’em-up sequences are so generically conceived and shot that each one is indistinguishable from the next – by the movie’s end, they may as well all collapse into an exhausted heap.

To the film’s credit, it doesn’t waste much time in doling out shadowy figures and fake-outs for the gullible and easily goosed, and the cast as a whole dutifully delivers its panicked looks and cries in the night.

Struck by Lightning may appeal to fans of Colfer’s work on “Glee,” but as a film it’s utterly lacking in scope, depth or meaning beyond an immediate chuckle or two.

Unfortunately the bulk of the picture is cut together like a beer commercial on poorly lit cheap video without much panache. Unless primary colors with a gauzy halo is panache.

Dead Man Down is actually mildly entertaining, without being particularly fun.

For all of Krauss’ clearly good intentions, the film still falls staggeringly flat, even with the inclusion of a bold and unexpected performance from Vanessa Hudgens, doing her damndest to break out of the Disney mold and turn in actual work here.