Big-name star Liam Neeson looks on, trying to add some class to the joint, though even he seems to know it's a losing battle.

The Dilemma is bad in a way that seems to parody all the ways in which a film like, say, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" was good.

In the end Red Tails is mostly about the coolness of flying. Its heart is in the clouds, instead of with the men at the controls.

Bale's presence in the film is a kind of misdirect, a calculated element intended to better its international commercial prospects -- his character makes a clumsily predictable journey from cynical drunken expat to hero willing to sacrifice a chance to escape the country in order to care for the children who've ended up in his charge.

The Lorax is so big, flashy and redundant that it courts precisely the kind of blind consumerism it's supposed to be condemning. It doesn't trust kids to sit still and pay attention for even a minute.

The only bright spot in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Max von Sydow, as a mysterious, and mysteriously mute.

Despite this new expansion in scale, Immortals lacks the inexorable forward momentum of its role model "300," as well as that movie's audacious, gleeful fascism and oblivious, accidental homoeroticism.

Mirror Mirror has a great deal of energy and wit and color, so much that it sometimes threatens to go right over the top. Somehow, though, it always stops short of being just too much.

Turteltaub strives to show us realistic-looking magic, without realizing he'd be better off if he acknowledged that there's no such thing. Instead, we get human figures that emerge "magically" from swarms of cockroaches and sorceresses who dissolve into dust particles right before our eyes. It's the best CGI money can buy, and who cares?

Johnny English Reborn never quite ignites, even though it starts out promisingly enough.

There are a couple of scenes of pure, sentimental genius, as well as appealingly boggled turns by Rudd and Wilson.

A party disaster movie targeted at kids who find the "Hangover" franchise too sophisticated.

It's unpleasant, shrill and exhausting - everyone's so busy airing their own grievances no one has time to listen to anyone else's - but it's a genuine actors' film anchored by some good performances.

Nothing Cruise does seems to come from the inside -- every eye crinkle, every grimace, every brow furrow seems plucked from the air, collected from the universe around him and bent to do his bidding. Maybe that’s one kind of acting. But it’s not cool. Never will be.

As sticky-sweet and textureless as a bowl of pudding, though an amused central performance from star Morgan Freeman continually finds nuance and the unexpected where there ultimately isn't any.

It's that mean edge to Killing Bono's storytelling, none of it directed at the famous figure of the title, that makes it more than the film equivalent of someone's prize bar anecdote about the celebrity he knew (and could have been - nay, should have been) back in the day.

This new version of Straw Dogs, written and directed by Rod Lurie, has been contemporized, sanitized and stripped of all complexity, and what's left is as empty as a used piñata.

It comes to the party overdressed and still fails to make an impression.

Radnor is an overprotective first-time director, and the final effect is like watching a film with elbow pads, a helmet and training wheels.

Girl in Progress feels a little trapped by its own conceits: It plays with the idea that all rebellion is in some sense performed and makes a caricature out of the immature, attention-hungry mother, but it never liberates its characters from their molds.

None of it quite works, but it seems Beresford did his damnedest to try to pull it off.

In catsuits, swimsuits, and skimpy underthings, Saldana is as potently elusive as a shadow can be.

It's the most imaginative picture in the franchise.

As an insult comic, Madea has gone the way of her low-hanging bosom. There's little pleasure in watching her go off, and Perry's direction is reliably drab: Sitcom setups dominate, with strange blown-out lighting occasionally swapped in for the flat tones of a WB soundstage.

This variation on the demon child subgenre has enough of the familiar and the new to be a decently good time at the movies.

So much of Abbas' dialogue consists of stiff platitudes (the script is by journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her novel of the same name); the character she's playing has been reduced to a dull, saintly figure, and not even Abbas can find a way out of that miniature prison.

The picture is cluttered and convoluted and big, and Marshall - taking over the reins from Gore Verbinski - doesn't seem to grasp how exhausting nonstop action can be.

The Paperboy is a nutty movie in terms of content, but it's also assembled in a demented fashion - there's a sense that literally anything could happen, and that its raunchy, heat-dazed story could wander down any path without regard to sense or an overall narrative.

Taken 2 grabs everything that was surprisingly enjoyable about the original film and batters it into the ground.

A movie about childhood nightmares that plays too much like an actual, incoherent nightmare to make a good movie, Intruders is a psychodrama divided against itself.

The Comedy of Emasculation that Judd Apatow and his disciples have made into a separate economy was invented by the Farrelly brothers.

Though he lavishes praise on his subjects for being hyper-masculine and free-thinking, Stone is downright girlish in his devotion, scoffing at charges made against the leaders rather than examining them.

Portman is also a producer of Hesher; it is the first of her new company's films. It's not too tough to see what might have drawn a producer to the project: The story's mix of the mythical and the mundane has become an indie staple, and Hesher's edge might have proved artful instead of shredding everything in its path. For any actress, however, the part of Nicole is embarrassingly thin.

Country Strong rides pretty high in the saddle, confident in the remarkably realized world Feste has created for her characters.

The whole exercise has the trying-too-hard vibe of a bad toupee.

The result is way out there - so far that you won't quite recognize the terrain, and still feel strangely at home. The look has the impossible feel of a CGI soundstage: Not cheap, not even necessarily fake, just… weird.

A well-intentioned, pleasant-enough picture that shoots off in too many directions to ever ignite.

There's even a shootout sequence that plays out, from start to finish, while our hero is in flagrante. That's something I don't believe I've ever seen in a movie.

Built for speed, and for an action-savvy audience who can appreciate a throwaway vengeance flick for exactly what it is.

A handsome-looking thing, with fairly grand period costumes and reasonably lavish sets. So much for production values: In every other way the picture is stiff and unyielding, hampered by a clumsy plot and diorama performances. The whole thing has the feel of a second-rate living-history exhibit.

It follows the same essential pattern as its predecessor, but the ingenious loopiness is gone; the mechanism behind it grinds instead of whirrs.

Devil packs a lot of business into 80 brisk minutes but is shockingly short on fun or fright.

The picture, the debut feature of Irish director Gary McKendry, is rote and joyless, an exercise in disposability.

While Survival of the Dead does its best to work up a decent allegorical bent -- this time involving territorial pissing matches within a country under siege -- its power is diffused (and frankly, confused) by its execution.

Step Up Revolution is also not a movie you watch for its incredible story and dialogue. The film doesn't even share much connective tissue with its predecessors save for an appearance from Adam Sevani as Moose.

Veering between the windswept and the simply windy, The Tempest, I suspect, will provoke purists and only intermittently win the attention of less interested parties.

Doesn't turn out to be as gauzily sentimental as its beginning (or its marketing materials) suggests.

MacGruber never gathers any momentum. Once in a while a funny line or absurd sight gag will amble into the foreground, only to recede immediately in the rear-view mirror of memory.

The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre.

There's something immobile at the center of The Lady, a kind of Botoxed biopic with an unlikely director - Luc Besson - manning the syringe.

While Wesley is both too good to be true and an absence of a charisma on screen, Good Deeds is very fair to its two main female characters even as they're both entangled with the same man.

Gerard Butler, who's honed his screen persona as a brutish, charismatic jerk, isn't a bad fit for the role of Sam, even if he's more believable spraying bullets and stabbing hitchhikers than he is delivering a sermon.

The mannerisms and phrasings that Holmes mimics - call it strenuous naturalism - are so recognizably Cruise that instead of establishing Laura's inner conflict she lets the strange life of Katie Holmes (Scientologist starlet, Suri momma, and Cruise-candy) slip onto the screen.

As in "Country Strong," Meester's crack timing and irresistible poignancy illuminate a part that would leave other actresses simpering themselves off the screen.

To invoke Pauline Kael's review of Diane Kurys's "Entre Nous," it's about two women not having a lesbian affair.

The supposition, maybe, is that in an alleged thrill ride of a movie like this one, the words aren't supposed to matter.

The film is all for teaching as a calling. What it doesn't do is offer it the dignity of also being a job.

Bay doesn't care about your soul, he just wants your money - but he at least makes sure you go home feeling exhausted and spent rather than vaguely dissatisfied. It's a fair exchange.

With Tyler Perry gradually segueing toward non-drag leading man status with "Good Deeds" and the upcoming James Patterson thriller "Alex Cross," his latest appearance as the sassy, wisdom-dispensing matriarch of the title in Madea's Witness Protection has an aura of fatigued reluctance to it, as does the film itself.

It doesn't take long for Bekmambetov to wear out his welcome with a laundry list of generic-looking action sequences: When you've seen one vampire get stabbed in the eyeball, you've seen 'em all.

Take Me Home Tonight isn't nearly as much fun as the '80s actually were. Even worse, it's less fun than most '80s comedies were - and that's bad.

On the whole Bel Ami is highly watchable.

Designed to be both essential history lesson and costume weeper, Princess Kaiulani comes up short on both fronts: Deadly earnest intentions and lack of dramatic gumption ensure that the story of Hawaii’s favored daughter remains under-told.

This is a family movie, after all -- but you'll have to sit through some abrasively broad, unfunny exchanges to get there. Dialogue, alas, is the kind of thing that can't be enhanced by the wearing of 3-D glasses.

In the early scenes of Larry Crowne, Hanks' Larry is so assertively regular he almost comes off as a special-needs child - grinning into his coffee-cup in the big-box-store break room, he has all the sexual allure of Forrest Gump.

In the realms of pregnancy comedy, What to Expect When You're Expecting doesn't find new laughs, just layers on attempts at the tried-and-true ones.

Actually, the picture is perhaps not quite as painful as you might be expecting, though probably not as enjoyable, either.

There's nothing in it to inspire excitement or even a mild glimmer of delight; it's almost offensive in its dullness.

It's hard to tell what Wild Target is offering, besides the pleasure of its company.

To Stewart and screenwriter Cory Goodman's credit, the whole set up takes about 10 minutes flat, leaving Priest's remaining 77 minutes to the dark, desolate action at hand. Even more to their credit, there's something evocative in that darkness, something poetic in its desolation.

There's too much people and not enough dog in Lawrence Kasdan's Darling Companion, and even if you prefer people to dogs, that's a serious problem.

It's still a kick to watch Kathleen Turner don a housedress and trade soothing pieties with Richard Chamberlain. The Perfect Family feels like it could have been more than that, but I suppose counting its blessings is the more Christian thing to do.

The film is heavily reliant on jump scares, but its best moments are the ones before them, when the tension builds without the benefit of escalating music to queue you in to the approaching shock.

The plot might be summed up this way: America's having a war, and everybody's invited!

Kári relies too heavily on the fleeting rewards of situation for the film to come together as an involving story.

The first half hour of Here Comes the Boom is so good moviegoers might be fooled into expecting something better than an obvious wish fulfillment fantasy so patently implausible it's almost insulting.

The Virginity Hit feels forced, hollow and ultimately scattershot. Never has watching an on-screen teen trying to lose "it" seemed so empty.

You really need chemical aids to be able to sit through something so unabashedly half-assed.

Either in spite of or because of its whimsically convincing quality, Man on a Ledge is reasonably fun to watch along the way.

Beastly manages to show you all the ways it might have worked by missing every available mark, sometimes by the gaping expanse between Alex Pettyfer's ears, sometimes only by the feline curl of Vanessa Hudgens' smile.

Takes forever to get going and then goes nowhere.

Like the recent and only slightly less fantastical "Never Let Me Go," Inhale manages little more than a gesture toward untying its bundled moral knots.

Tainted by a script (by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) so risibly broad it makes "Wedding Crashers" look like Bergman in the Hamptons.

While this latest Rogen-penned iteration is a game try, it feels a bit like he's trying to make a volume out of a footnote.

Despite these two actors' decent - and occasionally very charming - performances the film stacks the odds of the audience caring about Heigl and Duhamel against a narrative vacuum that favors eye candy and cheap effect over emotional logic.

It's the closest thing you'll find yet to a recreation of a video game sensibility on the big screen - which is in line with the franchise's source material - and makes for a memorably unsettling if not particularly satisfying viewing experience.

The Sitter's a lazy ramble of a movie that's amusing enough to hold your gaze for 81 minutes while leaving you feeling a little cheated when it's over.

Murky and perpetually bluish in tinge, Underworld: Awakening does and gets little with the 3-D in which it's being offered, and ends by shamelessly setting up a further and fatally unnecessary installment.

The Lucky One aspires to but never reaches the grandly melodramatic heights of the über-Sparks adaptation "The Notebook," though a reconciliation embrace in an outdoor shower of some sort seems deliberately staged to evoke the earlier feature.

Hopkins is having a blast, and he's fun to watch.

Some of the film's limpness is due to the fact that Cage plays Will in a minor weird key as opposed to one of his major ones -- there are no fits of operatic oddness.

The story's obvious and various potential is left to stand on its own, and the scares are largely uninspired.

It offers glancing pleasures of the atmospheric kind – the impact is the equivalent of a filmy cobweb brushing against your cheek. It tickles more than it bites.

After a while, you stop hoping she'll tell her family to suck it up and watch some TV and then drink a bottle of rosé all by herself, and instead settle for wishing she'd develop a smidgen of self worth.

It wouldn't go so far as to say it feels like you went through Jeremy's ordeal for nothing, but I did wish I had come to know as much about Dorff's character as I did about the size and shape of his nostrils.

Trespass is best received as an almost viable B-movie that just happens to have A-list leads.

1911 isn't propaganda but more a relentless, serious, fiercely nationalistic bit of historical mythmaking.

Sorry to disappoint the fanboys, but this is the first film in the Resident Evil series in which Milla Jovovich neither begins nor ends the movie stark naked.