There's a fine line between a character who has a sense of humor about herself and one who's being repeatedly humiliated for entertainment value, and I'm afraid Ally falls on the wrong side of the line.

The movie's look is artificially grainy, and most of the scenes are encrusted with CGI - you'd have to chip it away with a chisel to get to anything human or interesting or even remotely fantastical.

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

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

As horrific as Something Borrowed is, it's compelling in its own sick way.

Every actor in Friends with Benefits, including the nearly indestructible Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins, stalls out in the process of pedaling desperately to make this substandard material work.

Some of us wonder, still, how Margaret Thatcher can continue to live with herself. Watching Meryl Streep walk around so ably in Thatcher's skin isn't enlightening; it's more like a living nightmare.

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.

Somewhere in there is a little blonde girl and her dreamy princeling, but damned if I could see them through the dreck.

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.

Isn't just unfunny; it's so dull.

This latest is grim stuff: Little Fockers hardly bothers with finding a reason to exist, although one might assume a focus on the abiding hilarity of life with small children. That assumption would be wrong.

Your enjoyment - if that's the right word - of Buried will hinge on two things: Your ability to tolerate situations in which characters are confined to very tight spaces, and your willingness to be emotionally manipulated in the cheapest way imaginable.

Somewhere under all that bloat is the greatest short subject of all time.

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.

It was boring. So, so, so boring. It doesn’t even give Haley the courtesy of a bad-guy showcase; his face frozen and obscured behind burn prosthetics, he spends most of his time spitting distorted one-liners from the shadows, like some anonymous mob witness on an episode of Dateline NBC. It’s boring and a waste.

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

That's eventually what Unknown is - violent, impersonal and comforting.

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.

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

High School rushes through the parts it should savor and then pads out its runtime with filler elsewhere - and, less forgivably, it doesn't make getting high look like fun.

You want to tell Six that yes, we get it already. But then subtlety isn't exactly his thing.

"A Short Cuts" full of self-pitying sociopaths, Answers to Nothing follows its characters toward a succession of increasingly queasy conclusions it tries to pass off as heartfelt and human.

Hornet's Nest is filled with boring, not-great-looking white guys, talking - a lot.

Less a film than a product, New Year's Eve is so carefully calculated as to be, in its own way, admirable.

It doesn't help that even the pratfalls in A Thousand Words look tired and recycled.

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

Maddeningly repetitious.

The problem with Chernobyl Diaries isn't that it's offensive, it's that it's dumb.

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

Even by the most lenient of genre standards, the behavior of the characters in David Brooks's ATM is ludicrous enough to make anyone grind his or her teeth in frustration.

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.

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.

Step over to the liquor cabinet and mix yourself a good, stiff drink - if you plan on seeing this godforsaken thing, you'll need it.

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

It's as if, after years of playing characters with temper issues, Sandler has finally let some of that repressed rage leak out toward the audience.

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.

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 reality of The Devil Inside is that it's a half-hearted patchwork of ideas blatantly lifted from better films, with characters who have to act increasingly foolish in order to allow the action to go forward and an ending so anticlimactic and abrupt that the audience at the screening I attended erupted in enraged boos as the credits rolled.

What a dud of a story! You know what it needs to dress it up? Garden gnomes.

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.

Number of chipmunks who speak fluent chola when necessary: three. Number of Spider-Man/Pepe Le Pew mash-ups I can't really get into: one.

The disconcerting thing is how easy it is to fool viewers into being satisfied with not being involved, or even entertained - as long as they can RELATE.

Smith isn't up to doing anything other than setting up caricatures and then knocking them down.

Safe House is a twisted claw of a movie, a picture so visually ugly that, to borrow a line from Moms Mabley, it hurt my feelings.

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

A sugary jumble of goofy voices, hyperkinetic action scenes and rote plot elements that rolls forward just enough to get us to the de rigueur pop song that plays over the closing credits.

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.

Bromance or romance, This Means War feels like something scrawled by enterprising teenagers who developed their concepts of love and espionage from films and TV shows they caught over a few weekends of basic cable surfing.

It's not the addition of airships and male dangly earrings that make Paul W.S. Anderson's take on Alexandre Dumas' classic, much-adapted adventure such a drag, it's everything else - the incoherence, the anvil-heavy dialogue, the lack of anything beyond the broadest of characterizations.

Aside from a few arresting visuals, Red Riding Hood is just a slog through the woods.

The problem is, whether real, not real, or some Spector-headed stepchild of the two, meltdowns are still not inherently interesting.

It isn't a movie - it's more like the world's most expensive, elaborate viral video, making a detour to the big screen before being broken up into more easily consumable segments to be consumed on YouTube.

In another light the group's - and the film's - portentous resolution looks a lot like quitting, in true slacker style.

A moneygrubbing extravaganza, ugly to look at and interminable to sit through. No movie about the evils of excessive taxation should be this taxing.

This is a lumpy, dumb, suspenseless thing that sometimes scarcely feels finished.

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.

Peep World barely seems like a movie. Withered and shrunken, it feels even too small for TV.

Crazy Eyes is the third directorial effort from Adam Sherman, and is, like his 2010 "Happiness Runs," based on his own personal experiences, suggesting he either has a staggering sense of self-laceration or a just as noteworthy lack of awareness about audience empathy.

The film has the feel of something conceived and whipped together in very little time, perhaps to make its own built-in deadline.

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

As played by Heigl, Stephanie is mind-blowingly charmless.

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

That Bucky Larson's humor is stuck at a toilet-centric grade school level is less damning than how little of that or any humor it contains - the film, directed by Tom Brady (The Hot Chick), sets up scene after scene that wanders around in the general vicinity of a joke idea without ever approaching anything like a punchline.

With Scott Pilgrim, Wright leaps over the line from chattery cleverness to all-out self-consciousness.

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.

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

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

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

An incomprehensibly garbled, derivative attempt at a horror flick from first-time writer-director Todd Lincoln.

Everything he (Nolan) does is forced and overthought, and Inception, far from being his ticket into hall-of-fame greatness, is a very expensive-looking, elephantine film whose myriad so-called complexities -- of both the emotional and intellectual sort -- add up to a kind of ADD tedium.

Infinitely worse than you dared to hope it wouldn't be, You Again dumbfounded and then defeated me.

As you might have guessed from its title, Drinkers is as full of cheap sentimentality and predictable behavior as a Hell's Kitchen bar would have been in the 1970s.

If you've ever wondered how a bunch of blockheaded white boys would handle a bullet wound, you're in for a treat.

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

To describe what unfolds as a slow burn is to be awfully generous.

Punch manages to cram more slow motion into its first few minutes than a season of NFL highlights, all of "Inception" and every one of those NBC promos where the casts of whatever failing police procedural walk menacingly towards the camera.

It takes too long for the story to come around to the fact that Will is just plain nuts - and even then, he gets over it in a heartbeat.

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

Hits a new low of idiocy and crassness.

Rubber could have been a modest horror novelty, a wicked, malevolent version of "The Red Balloon."

"Piranha 3D" was ridiculous, gory and fun, everything Piranha 3DD is not.

The talking animals, though less tough to look at than those in "Marmaduke," are murder on the ears: Maya Rudolph as a neurotic giraffe and Sandler voicing a monkey could take the paint off of a Buick.

Skyline is a piece of junk, even in a movie climate littered with expensive - though sometimes fun - junkiness.

It really is just sensory bombardment, and in two dimensions you have even less of a grasp of what's happening and of what you're looking at than the poor bastards on-screen.

The original "Saw" was smart enough to tease its audience, to literally restrain its characters and gradually dial up the dread, setting the table for a truly shocking twist. The latest just wants bigger and bigger bangs.

Paranormal Activity 2 sinks much lower than it needs to in order to get a rush out of us - and in the end, the rush isn't even that great. The movie puts us through the paces with minimal payoff.

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.