An ungodly mess that's great fun to look at for about 15 minutes and exhausting the rest of the time.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Ultimately the movie ridicules the culture that compels what Cedric the Entertainer calls grown-ass men to dress up like comic-book characters, as well as the Christian attempts to co-opt that culture.

At 84 he describes himself as being kept alive by young women's laughter and infernal baby-talk, marking off perhaps his final, groaning aspirational standard. Almost makes me feel sorry for those men still trying to keep up.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Armadillo tells us lots of things we shouldn't be so naïve as to think we don't already know. Maybe we need to see these things again and again, just so we don't lose sight of the costs and risks of the wars in which American and European soldiers are currently engaged.

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

The writing and directing debut of Italian actress Marta Mondelli, is a classic example of a director who wanted to make a film but lacked a story that demanded telling.

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.

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.

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.

One senses that the movie doesn't quite have the chutzpah to be what it wants to be - a "Fast and Furious"-like sequence of balletic car chases - so it periodically halts to wedge in some romance.

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.

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.

Too earnest and dour to be a silly bit of summer fun, but it's not exactly scientifically sound, either.

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.

God Bless America only wants to see the worst in people - in fact actively seeks it out in order to be disgusted, and that feels almost as bad as the behavior the film is critiquing.

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.

There are some body-horror gross-outs if you're into that sort of thing, but mostly what you get are a bunch of too-obvious leftovers from the "Alien" stockroom, including a selection of moist innards, slimy tendons, dripping fangs and the like.

In the least, and most significantly, Day of Reckoning should propel British martial artist/stunt veteran Adkins out of the niche genre world - action cinema's Adkins diet?