Give it up for Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. You’ll never see them work harder at a comedy than in The Heat, a stumbling, aggressively loud and profane cop buddy picture where they struggle to wring “funny” out of a script that isn’t.

A slight and somewhat demure romantic comedy/friendship comedy built around two mildly interesting characters.

The resolution to this puzzle is so botched it’s insulting, as if they’re daring us to laugh at the notion that this is merely “the beginning.”

Neeson is the rock anchoring all this, making the incredible at least passably credible as he lurches into the frame with his limping boxer’s gait. But you get the sense that he is no more “Taken” with this than we are.

In this not-even-faintly scary, rarely funny horror comedy, Smith is still sucking down big gulps of empty calories and hoping we’ll laugh at his belch.

Walker has few “big” scenes, no memorable dialogue and plays up the exhaustion, which tamps down the emotions of his performance. So even an action packed finale can’t rescue this dramatically thin exercise in one-man showmanship.

“Magic” lacks too many things to rank among Allen’s better recent films — the come-uppance and zeitgeist currency of “Blue Jasmine,” the frivolity of that don’t-think-too-much-about-this lark “Midnight in Paris.” But the biggest shortcoming is right there in the title, a tease if ever there was one.

It's a junky, crowd-pleasing movie of sidekicks – Guzman and Knoxville – bad acting, over the top shootouts, and catch phrases.

Late to the game, blandly cast and scripted with every Italian American cliche in the “How to Make Spaghetti” cookbook, it is Eastwood’s worst film as a director.

In Let Me Explain, you’re never NOT aware that you’re watching a gifted, rubber-faced/rubber voiced performer (his “Laugh at My Pain” concert film was a surprising hit in 2011) work too hard to make inferior material go over.

The absurd turns the story takes to serve up streetwise and bloody "life lessons" for the kid will make any parent blanch and any movie lover roll his or her eyes.

A tragic quasi-musical that never quite finds its way.

Yes, the technology has improved in the 27 years that have passed. But the ensuing years have also produced first person shooter video games which utterly preclude the need for this as a movie. Visceral, violent toys that they are, they still have more heart than this.

Whatever its intent, White Bird in a Blizzard misuses most everybody involved, especially the dazzling young star of “The Descendants,””The Fault in Our Stars” and “Divergent.”

It’s preachier, more diverse in its casting. All of which make it more specific and limit it. Throw in generally lackluster performances and illogical plot twists and “Anarchy” is seriously crippled.

Like Vin Diesel, it has bulk, lumbering clumsily along as it repeats Diesel’s greatest hits — the ones that don’t require him to drive a fast and furious car.

A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, it’s a showboat’s movie cast with a lot of actors each promised “a big, cool scene.”

There’s no reason the missionary-recruiter turned stalker idea couldn’t work. But this one doesn’t.

Choppy and bordering on incoherent, Bullet to the Head is Stallone's answer to Schwarzenegger's "The Last Stand," an action exercise in "Here's how we used to do it."

Minor moments of slapstick may tickle the kids, but anybody older, especially those who remember what Williams was like in his prime and how funny Stiller was just two “Museum” movies ago, will wish this tomb had stayed sealed.

For all the fun these folks could have had with Hercules maintaining the supernatural assistance facade, or denying it as his handlers gild his lily testifying that it’s true, the movie is content to just go through the motions.

It’s too bad the script lacks the sight gags or one-liners that could have made this good looking picture more animated.

Rock is a poorly written and ineptly directed genre piece that lacks tension, suspense, fear, all those things that make’ a “thriller” thrilling.

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

The entire affair feels malnourished, under-rehearsed and starved of energy.

The best that can be said for “Step V” is that it has some sparkling moments of choreography, clever gimmicks as themes for the dance-offs and lovely costumes.

Seth MacFarlane wants to be a movie star in the worst way. A Million Ways to Die in the West is result of this longing, a long/longer/longest comedy with long waits between jokes and longer waits between those that work. Thus, does his leading man career begin and end with a “worst way” Western.

A graphically violent, sexually explicit teen horror tale, it was close to being ahead of its time, in its time. Now, it plays like a quaint, fairly obvious period piece — from 2006.