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.