Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”

The cast, plainly packed with second or third choices, lets it down. Is there anything in James Franco’s past that suggests larger-than-life, a fast-talking, womanizing con-man? And the three witches – Theodora, Evanora and Glinda – are Bland, Blander and Blond Bland.

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.

An empty-headed nothing of a caper comedy.

Call it a vanity project or bargain basement movie mythos, but no hard-boiled biker picture ever looked or sounded like Road to Paloma.

If you’re going to commit to a blasphemous stoner comedy mocking the New Testament prophesy of the coming Rapture, you’d better go all in. Because halfway isn’t funny.

So it’s no “Starbuck,” which most people won’t mind because Americans don’t read subtitles. But even in this form, Delivery Man and the guy who plays him still deliver where it counts.

After Walking with the Enemy, two hours and four minutes of torture, rape and mass shootings, you’ll feel you’ve been tested, too.

As impressive as the effects can be, as effective as the blend of TV news helicopter POV shots, security camera footage, cell-phone video and storm chaser images mimicked here turn out, the human stories are given short shrift in this “spend our budget on effects” action picture.

It aims for that “Hangover” blend of the sick and the sentimental. And it doesn’t work.

A historically interesting story is painted in broad, colorless strokes, alternating as it does between soap opera and slapstick.

A big, broad dysfunctional family comedy, sort of a “Parenthood” pushed into R-rated “Adulthood” territory.

It’s superficial, but that plays into the hands of the film’s star, Ashton Kutcher.

If it weren’t for the well-intentioned moments of pathos — a tear or two, hear and there — Tio Papi would be a complete waste of time.

The more correct title would have been “Retribution,” which could work for any number of Statham vehicles over the years. But Redemption is just different enough to make us remember “The Bank Job” or “Killer Elite” or that he’s about to give those fun-but-silly “Fast & Furious” movies a proper villain.

If you liked “Scrubs,” and I did, for a few seasons, anyway, you’ll be happy Braff got to make his movie and happy that you got to see it.

An instant midnight movie, a morbid mishmash of styles and filmmaking formats – 26 films, 26 filmmakers from the four corners of the horror globe, all making short films about death. It’s not for everyone.

The Brass Teapot stumbles into tedium, a parable that never quite resolves itself into the moral lesson it so desperately wants to convey.

For all the heists, chases and shoot-outs, it's a sluggish picture. Characters feel the need to stop the action to explain themselves. Thoroughly.

Fletcher and his players never quite hit on a tone that works. Fantastical dream sequences and side trips to the store to get “more bullets” never quite rise to the level of wry commentary. This just isn’t as cute and funny as Fletcher seems to think it is.

Writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins has lots of fun with this surreal set up, and only really loses the thread when reality intrudes.

Garlin doesn’t discover anything new about this well-documented phenomenon. But rounding up his (under-employed) comic pals and turning them loose on Little League is funny enough by itself.

Still waters may run deep, as the old saying goes. But Beside Still Waters there’s nothing deeper than “The Big Chill.”

This thoughtful but windy and winded sci-fi thriller shortchanges the science – understandably - and the thrills. The directing debut of “Dark Knight” cinematographer Wally Pfister is a mopey affair with indifferent performances, heartless romance and dull action. It transcends nothing.

Interns Wilson and Vaughn swap lines like veteran jazz musicians who still have a sense of play about them — an endless supply of nicknames, high-and-low fives, dated slang and goodwill — theirs for each other, and ours for them.

Despite an epic fight or two, Parker robs us of the revenge, the suspense of the hunt, of Parker's methodical way of tracking down those who betrayed him, one by one.

The line between “cute” and “cutesy” is violated, repeatedly, in the sometimes funny, often cloying comedy The English Teacher.

The younger sister of the formidable Vera Farmiga gives flat, rushed and unconvincing line readings, especially in her paragraph-long, exposition-packed monologues. Is that by design? Is this a clever teen “acting” to manipulate her memory detective? The actress should be better at masking that, if that’s the case. And if it isn’t, she should be just…better.

It’s never more than a theme park that isn’t worth the price of admission.

As exhausted as this series and the genre it comes from is, it still manages a few decent jolts thanks to that new approach and a pretty good cast’s reactions to what they, and we, see through the video camera’s viewfinder.

Besson aims his movie at anyone who’s ever held a grudge at an ill-mannered French waiter or clerk (haughty, and by the way, they’d NEVER condescend to speak to you in English). If that includes you, The Family has serves up a little wish-fulfillment payback, with a baseball bat.

It’s a epic tragedy, and summing it up in under two hours does nobody justice.

Not every cute movie about the mentally ill is Oscar worthy, but this touching and riotous one from Down Under works well enough.

Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz (“Terribly Happy”) can’t hide his cards and rarely even tries to. He’s stuck with a script that has “Promise you won’t kill us,” maybe the silliest line ever uttered to a murderer, but that features some dandy threats, some by the villain who doesn’t drive the Jaguar.

This is more “Something Mild” than “Something Wild.” But Firth and Blunt handle their characters’ many revelations with care and play with layers of hurt and disappointment with great sympathy and pathos.

A mad, laugh-out-loud mashup of “The Little Mermaid,” “Harry Potter,” assorted vampire tales, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the disaster epic “2012” and oh – “Pokemon” – just to impose the cinematic precedents on display here, Sorcerer is a Chinese twist on the reliable sword and sorcery genre which caused Hollywood to impose “Clash of the Titans” and “Immortals” on the undeserving.

It’s a live-action version of on an ’80s cartoon that was designed to sell toys. This is “Transformers” without the Bumblebee Camaro, a lot of action, a few one-liners, and a lot of gunplay.

Robert Rodriguez is like that friend who loves to tell jokes, but always goes on and on, well past the punch line. Remember how he beat the living daylights out of his “Spy Kids” franchise? That’s what he’s working toward with Machete.

Mostly, it’s just a clumsy lecture about who we’re becoming, haves vs have-nots, with the haves armed to the teeth.

The central premise is a half-hearted retread. And the gags come from a score of earlier films and sitcoms.

A little Kevin Hart goes a long way in Ride Along, a dull buddy picture engineered as a vehicle for the mini motor mouth and the perma-sneering Ice Cube.

An odd, unpleasant 2011 thriller from Austria only now earning limited U.S. release. It’s a reminder of why so few filmmakers experiment with visual-only storytelling. It’s hard to pull off.

For all the bursts of blood, the gunplay and execution-style head-shots that punctuate scores of deaths, it’s hard to see Olympus Has Fallen (Secret Service code) as much more than another movie manifestation of a first-person shooter video game.

That makes Kick Ass 2 more sour than sweet, a movie that jokes about comic book fanboys but stops short of mocking them the way the first film did.

They waste this cast and these characters on a story so conventional, so neatly wrapped up in the finale, that the real mystery is how Gregorini and co-writer Sarah Thorpe didn’t see that.

What Anderson delivers this one time is a genuine spectacle, a gladiator movie with a volcano in the middle of it.

When the Game Stands Tall is a solid if unsurprising and uninspiring melodrama.

Watching this head-slappingly stupid movie is an exercise is seeing David Ayer sucked into the drain that Arnold’s been spiraling down ever since his “comeback.”

Whatever twists this puzzle tosses at us, the film reminds us that a great actor, in close-up, telling a story with just her or his eyes, is still the greatest special effect the movies have to offer. This cast telling this story ensures us that nobody will be dozing off Before I Go to Sleep.

So as much as every generation deserves it’s own Romeo & Juliet, this latest one does nothing to make anyone older than Hailee Steinfeld forget the heat of Baz Lurhmann’s far sexier, noisier and passionate modern dress version of 1996, where Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio completely convinced us that they knew how to “play Satan’s game.” And how.

It’s a load of horrific hooey.

Gangster Squad is a gang war drama built on Western conventions, a rootin' tootin', Camel-smokin', whiskey swillin' shoot'em up.

The cloying narration and the inclusion of Fonda are just warnings for that moment, 70 minutes in, when this comic chemical train goes completely off the rails. Rockwell, Wilde, Monaghan are worth the price of admission, but “Better Living” would have been better off with more chemistry and less cutesy.

Your enjoyment of Horrible Bosses 2 is almost wholly dependent on your tolerance for clusters of funny actors, babbling, riffing — and in the case of Charlie Day, screeching — all at once.

Daft and sloppy as it is, 3 Days rarely fails to entertain.

No matter how great her ambitions, no matter how little she was able to accomplish, thanks to the strictures of her time, here was a woman history remembers simply through the force of her personality and the simple courage it took to be ahead of her time.

Catch Hell has physical torture and sexually explicit mind games. It has a star who seems resigned to his fate and willing to give up and savage bumpkins straight out of “Deliverance” ready to take out their hatred of Hollywood and Hollywood values on him. That description gives this simple, ferociously feral thriller more depth than it deserves.

Robinson manages some suspense, but the thriller’s ticking clock is a weak one.

Deliver Us from Evil takes a very long time to deliver us from dullness.

The Jason Statham vehicle Homefront is such a generic tough-guy-against-the-odds ’80s style actioner that you’d swear Sly Stallone starred in it. He did, back in the day. Or versions of it. This one, Stallone just scripted.

A perfectly adequate superhero comic-book movie, all explosions, chases, gunfights, sword fights and blood feuds. There’s even a little humor in it.

Mansions is like “Vehicle 19″ or “Takers,” dumb, noisy junk.

Charles Dance is the Nosferatu-garbed monster in the cave, a balding, toothy villain in the great tradition of British vampires — Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale among them. The moment he shows up, all shadowy menace and prophecy, “Dracula” gets interesting.

The quest, which takes our heroes to the Sea of Monsters, aka The Bermuda Triangle, is generic in the extreme. The fights/escapes all lack any sense of urgency and peril.

Rapace is all over the place with her performance — needy, then self-assured, enraged, then in love. The always feral Farrell seems as dismayed by her as the rest of us.

Needed more movie to go with its message.

The cast doesn’t have the sassy swagger of the “Fast & Furious” crew. Paul, surrounded by co-stars of the same modest height, isn’t particularly charismatic in this setting. He’s not a natural “quiet tough guy.” But the actors are second bananas here — to the Koenigsegg Ageras, Saleens and Shelby Mustang that feed America’s Need for Speed, on screen and off. And the cars deliver.

Aftershock then becomes a catalog of most every unpleasant way of dying you can imagine.

It’s more unpleasant than scary, and ever so slow in getting up to speed.

Melissa K. Stack’s script has snap and crackle to go with the pop, making this female wish-fulfillment fantasy an “Eat, Pray, Revenge” that delivers the punches that two “Sex and the City” movies never could.

Tammy, in the end, feels like a pulled punch. McCarthy promises a haymaker she never quite delivers.

Divorce Corp is a lot pointed outrage that damning as its seems, feels suspect.

As horror musicals go, Stage Fright is never more than an out-of-town tryout.

Planes looks, sounds and feels like a direct-to-video project, which in an earlier age when people still bought DVDs it would have been. In theaters, it’s nothing more than a laughless 90 minute commercial for toys available at a retailer near you.

A humorless, muddled, bloody and generally unpleasant thriller.

By the time we reach the third act, which is where the trial we’ve been teased plays out (at great, boring length), The Citizen has exhausted its supply of immigration cliches and our patience.

This generally mild-mannered comedy sinks or swims on Hart’s back. And as one scene makes clear, Little Man can’t swim.

Frozen, undercooked and sorely lacking much in the way of “all the trimmings,” this turkey isn’t ready to serve.

Whatever their other gifts, they cannot find the fizz here and can never get Wiig to commit to the sort of film that she, even when she was making it, must have realized was beneath her in her post-”Bridesmaids” glory.

Seeing these veteran players go through their paces, find their comic rhythms and probe for laughs where many a laugh has been found before is not a bad thing.

Haggis lets us get way ahead of the characters and the figure out what the title of this writerly tale — Third Person — has to do with the sometimes illogical connections between stories. That’s not a problem. Dragging, dragging dragging the tales out after he reaches a logical climax and something close to a resolution with each is not.

There are a TV season’s worth of soap opera betrayals, melodramatic traumas and blundering efforts to learn from and escape this media miasma.

As edgy female wish-fulfillment fantasy, showing that fantasy’s consequences, Adore engrosses and engages, never titillates and never betrays even the tiniest hint of revulsion.

Yet another “Blade Runner” knock-off, a sci-fi dystopia about robots getting too smart for humanity’s own good on an already sun-cooked Earth.

It’s the sort of movie whose finale leaves you wondering, “Why do they always leave out what happens next?”

Unlike “The Passion of the Christ,” there’s no Aramaic with English subtitles, a lot less blood and no anti-Semitism. No character feels like a caricature... But it’s also dramatically flat, with few actors making much of an impression as they play saints and sinners.

Gore Verbinski’s film is an overlong array of noisy, digitally-assisted chases, shootouts, crashes and explosions with the occasional flash of homage to the “real” Lone Ranger that suggests a better movie than the pricey, jumbled compromise Verbinski delivered.

“Walking” takes care to ID each new dinosaur species introduced, including factoids about what they ate and any special skills they might have had. It’s downright educational. Just don’t tell your kids that.

There’s nothing surprising about this late ’60s tale, including its connection to the modern ghost stories told in “The Amityville Horror” and “The Conjuring.” But what it lacks in originality it makes up with in hair-raising execution. You will scream like a teenage girl.

Cranston takes small bites of this Beef Jerky Tartar script and chews, chews chews — savoring every corny fake-Russian line like the voice actor he was before “Breaking Bad” made him a star.

“Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner takes his act to the big screen with Are You Here, which turns out to be the most quotable Owen Wilson comedy since “Zoolander.”

Better than any animated film released in the doldrums of January has a right to be.

Hollywood will be hard pressed to top this lean Canadian indie picture that knows it’s just another dumb werewolf movie, but has fun with that knowledge.

Cage, without having to play a ghostly motorcyclist or hot rod driver from Hell or sorcerer or sci-fi hero or kinky cop, reminds us that he used to know subtlety. So even if Frozen Ground breaks little new ground in the serial killer thriller genre, there’s hope Cage will leave the ham behind before Alaska freezes over.

Paris-Manhattan is an amusing little nothing of a movie built around the wit and wisdom of Woody Allen.

The sylvan setting and short bursts of dramatic interplay are more interesting than coherent in this brief, undeveloped adaptation.

You’d have to go back to the ’80s to find a film with this jaded a view of Hollywood, a town where every aspiring actor knows every yoga instructor who knows every producer and they all swap partners and dance. Constantly.