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.