The vehicle may get a little jacked up along the way, but its passenger arrives in style: The kid's a star.

The film is being released in both 2- and 3-D, and from what I could tell the 3-D version is still almost 50-50. What use is made of the technology is hardly worth the effort, unless you've always wanted to experience a cascade of cheesies in 3-D.

Roos works from the edge of a precipice as well, distending the melodrama in his films until it finally tumbles in subtle, observant satire; Kudrow, who etches each pause in acid, was born to speak his dialogue.

Dirty Girl is harmless enough, and the early scenes, in which Danielle surveys poor Clarke with snobbish contempt, have a pleasing nastiness.

Svelte enough in its reassembling of familiar elements to be, for a while, as comfortably pleasant as sipping on what once used to be your go-to drink - until The Samaritan takes a jarring turn right out of Park Chan-wook, and from there takes a tumble into ludicrousness from which it doesn't recover.

Mirren tricked out in mid-70's pimp wear -- ahead of her time, she even brandishes a cane -- has a certain charm, but novelty alone can't keep Love Ranch's tiresome tropes and plodding storyline from dragging the film down through the Nevada dust.

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 Double does contain some delightfully over-the-top twists that make no sense but are great fun to consider.

W.E. is actually two intertwining stories - or maybe, more accurately, two stories clumsily rubbing against each other in an awkward attempt to set off a spark.

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.

Even if there were a compelling narrative here to begin with, Montiel's excessive technique would throw you right out of it.

I found myself forgetting The Art of Getting By as it unfolded, as though the Looney Tunes art department were two steps behind the characters, rolling up the scenery like so much carpeting.

Seyfried has spent too much time lately in vehicles that aren't worthy of her, "Red Riding Hood" being the most egregious example. Gone at least takes her seriously – except when, to delicious effect, it doesn't.

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 movie muddles to a rug-pulling ending that doesn't, despite its efforts, shed new light on what's come before.

It's not that The Watch is terrible – it's not not terrible, but there are sufficient diversions and more punitive ways to spend your evening – but that it's one of those smoke bomb comedies that seems to disappear even while you're watching, leaving no trace of itself behind.

It's tailored more to a gamer's eyes and expectations than a moviegoer's. On the whole the scenes play like levels, with one connecting in only the most basic way to the next.

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

There's enough froth along the way to keep the memory of Will Ferrell's recent "Casa Di Me Padre" close at hand.

It's painful to watch a movie like Dream House - well-acted, beautifully shot and directed with extraordinary care and attention to craft - only to realize that the story, the alleged backbone, is absurd.

It's got a great subject - the extraordinarily voluble comedian Jonathan Winters, whose constant rush of words can be like a blizzard: beautiful, maddening, exhausting and finally beautiful again. But it's not a great film.

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.

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.

On the whole the film is not much fun to watch. A job is a job, though; Yogi Bear did little to make it more than that.

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.

It's a slender story of mourning that manages some lovely bits of mood while also being dreary and a little preposterous in its spareness.

The smugness of the film grows wearying long before the end. Just because the people on and behind the camera are willing to acknowledge what we're watching is ridiculous crap doesn't really change the fact that, well, it is.

Getting a movie's setup right is one thing. But following through on an intriguing premise is the hard part, and that's where Matthew Chapman's The Ledge, a thriller that wrangles with intricate ideas about faith and religious extremism, goes splat.

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.

At times Jonah Hex carries whispery echoes of The Searchers and Sam Peckinpah.

Virginia is like a box full of someone's long ago summer vacation keepsakes: pretty, but representative of memories and meaning no one else will be able to grasp.

It's all sweet and very, very silly. I was surprised by the subtleties - both comedic and thematic.

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.

Because his character is never clear, Manolo's choices lack emotional interest and narrative urgency.

Just Go With It attempts to merge farce and romantic comedy with the Sandler sensibility, and the result is a story that evades where it should engage and a whiplash tone that dispirits when it should delight.

Defiantly unwatchable if occasionally transfixing, the film is essentially the home movies of three marauding burnouts.

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

Chastain, an incandescent redhead with a heart-shaped face and round, shining eyes, does more justice to the part than it deserves.

The puffy high tones of medieval fantasy punctured by the flatly vulgar and colloquial - is the film's central comic vein, one McBride taps it like it's never been tapped before.

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.

No matter how much good-hearted licentiousness follows in the rest of the movie, the opening sequence brings a unshakable sourness to the whole affair.

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.

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.

Alex Cross is filled with accidental comedy, and while it's a mess in any traditional movie sense, it's has its moments of preposterous fun that come in the form of a nonsensical plot and a fabulously competent, scenery-gnawing villain.

The film’s most impressive feat may be bringing a cartoon character to life while turning actual humans into 2-D cutouts.

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

This is a film that transcends "good" or "bad," "like" or "don't like."

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.

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

Unfortunately, outside of the proxy satisfaction it will give those who are dying to see the grim reaper let loose on the set of a very special episode of "Glee," the pleasures of Don't Go in the Woods can't quite compensate for its straggly bits.

"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.

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

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

Walks the jittery line between being exploitative and too sensitive, and while it's probably a relief that it tips more toward the latter, the movie also seems a bit unclear in its motives.

These characters are at best doodles, and none of the performances are able to tease more depth out of them.

Season of the Witch is barely even a Nicolas Cage movie. He wanders through the picture, zombified.

Though based on the Hemingway novel published 25 years after his death, Hemingway's Garden of Eden feels more like the result of an ungodly alliance between Harlequin house writers and the cut-and-paste masterminds at A&E Biography.

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

Hits a new low of idiocy and crassness.

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.

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

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

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.

The goof on New York's awful elite only gets grimmer and less viable as the film goes on.

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

With the out-of-nowhere success of 2016: Obama's America, the nation could finally have a conservative counterpart to Michael Moore. I say the nation rather than the Republicans, because a balanced box office is good for us all, at least as a reminder of our right to oppose the current government and make a profit in doing so.

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

There is enough lurid, ludicrous subtext in the material to keep fans of such things happy. As trash, this is top of the line.

The picture is directed with such a loose, slack hand that you'd think Craven had never directed a slasher-thriller before: I didn't jump once; I never even felt vaguely scared or creeped out.

As Nathan, the teenage hero of Abduction, Lautner shows he's handy with stunts, many of which he clearly and impressively performs himself, and good with a fight scene. But when it comes to exchanges of dialogue, displays of emotion or just standing around, he's stiff and manifestly uncomfortable.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Roommate has notched an unbelievable achievement; it makes the second rate "One Tree Hill" seems like it was about something.

It goes down like a canned but genial '80s comedy: Without fanfare or much nutrition; part of your balanced breakfast.

Over-narrated by Kiefer Sutherland in full "this is extremely important and also very, very cool" mode, from its first self-important minutes Twelve seems as if it can't possibly be serious. Would that it were not.

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

Fox and Rourke embody Lily and Nate's lost souls with vulnerability that's at once strikingly sincere and strange, particularly for two actors renowned for their impunity both on and off screen.

Shark Night isn't fantastic, but it's a good enough time, and it'll never be better than when it's watched with a rowdy crowd in a theater.

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

It’s so ineffectual and unfocused that after it’s over, you’re not even sure you watched a movie.

Completely harmless and inoffensive, and at the very least, Shyamalan appears to be having a little fun here.

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.

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

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

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

The tiniest bit of Hudson's wrinkly-crinkly cuteness goes a long way, and in A Little Bit of Heaven, watching her waste away becomes slow torture. She's like an adorbs Camille.

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.