This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there.

What was once a lazy, crazy, charming afternoon daydream of a movie is now a frantic, insistent, often unfunny sci-fi comedy. It might distract young children with its hyper, family-forward story line, but most of the magic has vanished.

Unfortunately, there's also a certain artificiality to the whole film, both visually and narratively.

It's like being trapped inside a fever dream of Oscar-night production numbers.

What Men Want is a wildly uneven stretch of a movie that’s more of a flail than a romp.

Resembles a full-length promo for itself. The action, virtually nonstop, is a series of can-you-top-this? set pieces.

It’s too gutless to actually untangle the web of selfishness, Islamophobia, and privilege it weaves around its protagonists.

The screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith is witless and meandering, though the witlessness wouldn't matter so much if it moved, or the meandering if it were droll.

A movie like Hart's War, for all its realistic trappings, is essentially escapism. And yet it inadvertently pushes the 9/11 button. The real world is going to intrude a lot this year at the movies. Better get used to it.

As the film progresses, the actor fails to progress with it: As Charles Swan seems to become more aware of his loneliness, Charlie Sheen seems to become more protective of his Charlie Sheen–ness.

Director Mike Newell and screenwriters Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal should have uncorseted their own imaginations. The girls on display are all tightly stereotyped.

For a movie marking a week in which theaters are reopening, Unhinged feels a lot like a movie that would be best caught on cable someday.

There is something endearing about watching a high-end cast and crew treat this material with such seriousness, even if they all seem to have missed the point. Sometimes schlock is just schlock, and it’s better off treated that way.

None of the characters has a true home. Comedies end with weddings, with order replacing chaos, but After the Wedding is not a comedy and weddings don’t fool anyone.

An agreeable time-killer, but I'll bet a couple of clever kids could make a livelier movie with a Woody puppet and a Predator doll.

To give A Big Bold Beautiful Journey credit, it is a democratically even-handed waste of talent.

The sequel to an influential eighties motion picture is so loaded with characters and crosscurrents that we wonder why it isn't a thirteen-hour cable mini-series instead of an impacted two-hour mess. The film is like my portfolio: full of promise, with minuscule returns.

That G.I. Joe silliness the first film embraced has been steamrolled into tentpole flatness this time around. It’s not stoopid anymore, but just plain stupid.

A Wrinkle in Time, was strong enough to carry me through the film’s first, wobbly 15 minutes — but not a lot further.

Brody doesn’t deserve this movie.

The time shifts are awkward, and Egoyan displays little of the deftness of characterization he evinced in such movies as "Exotica" (1994) and "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997); the result is a cold scold of a movie.

Aside from a trio of witches that can hold its own with Eastwick’s in the dishiness department, Oz the Great and Powerful is a peculiarly joyless occasion.

It's difficult to work up a strong case of the heebie-jeebies when you keep getting thrown out of the movie by all the atrocious acting.

Weitz’s pacing is so limp you’re going to need the electricity generated by a live audience to keep from yelling, “Hurry it up!”

Every unhappy movie is unhappy in its own way, and Joe Wright's Anna Karenina is as boldly original a miscalculation as any you're likely to see.

The result is maybe more interesting than we might have expected, but it’s not particularly funny.

For all the occasional grace of its high-flying derring-do, Red Tails barely feels like a movie. It's an uncertain hodgepodge of impulses and desires that never coheres enough to even crash and burn.

It’s a carefully crafted world of hyperfemininity intended to be as ominously smothering as it is pretty, and if the story that Paradise Hills, the directorial debut of Spanish filmmaker Alice Waddington, told were as sharp as its visuals, it’d have a guaranteed future as a cult classic. Instead, it’s a disappointingly half-baked riff on The Stepford Wives whose brand of feminism feels more 1970s than 2010s.

Williams once knew how to be very still and yet allow us to see the plangent human being underneath. In One Hour Photo, Sy's scary ordinariness is a species of acting stunt. There's no there there.

In the end, Powell thanks his doctor for sharing the journey, but audiences who sit through this zoologically daft back-to-nature clinker may feel far less charitable.

If the movie were just these two (Costner/Hurt), bopping around arguing and offing people, it would have been better than the unholy mess it turns into.

The Coens have a true feeling for the sleek surfaces of the genre, but they don't connect with its sordid, sexy undercurrent; that's why Crane is made to seem so passive.

Where to Invade Next shows Moore at his cheapest, while also affording glimpses of the filmmaker he once was.

For all its feints at sensitivity, this isn't a movie, it's a machine, and it's hard not to be impressed - perhaps even awed - by the sheer ruthlessness with which it jerks the tears from your eyes. If anything, a real movie might just have gotten in the way.

Inception manages to be clunky and confusing on four separate levels of reality.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t unwatchable. It’s competent, uninspired swill, undone largely by the fact that it’s following up a superior first movie.

The glee everyone involved obviously felt in getting this improbable flick made is never balanced out by a sense of why anyone would need to actually watch it.

Crudely written, rife with clichés, and leaves out anything that would transform a piece of propaganda into a work of art akin to Samuel Fuller’s "The Steel Helmet," Brian DePalma’s "Casualties of War," or Steven Spielberg’s "Saving Private Ryan."

It's tempting to praise The Ides of March as a realistic depiction of how low we've sunk. But that would mean accepting the second-rate writing and third-rate melodrama and incredible shrinking characters.

Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but this all just feels so familiar.

I never really bought the onscreen relationship in We Live in Time, in part because I could constantly feel the movie trying too hard. The love story is syrupy, and the tragedy even more syrupy.

In the Heart of the Sea isn’t a bad film, necessarily. It has some genuinely effective passages in its first half, and Howard is nothing if not a dutiful, check-the-boxes kind of director. But a story like this – one of horror and madness, which helped give birth to an ornate masterpiece of obsession – needs to go a little crazy. And this director doesn’t do crazy.

Musicals are inherently fake — they can be ecstatically, transcendentally fake — but this is a whole other level of disingenuousness.

The problem with all this don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it dramaturgy is that ultimately everything is sacrificed for effect. When you're dealing, as Ritchie is, with explosions of real violence and viciousness, the hyperslick technique can't accommodate the real pain that comes with the territory, or ought to. What we're left with is a cackling amorality -- not a philosophy of life, just a posture.

The movie's a smorgasbord of horror, and, ironically, that takes the teeth out of it. We're not really in this villain's world, because we don't know what his world is, or what he is, or what he's trying to even do. It's like a nightmare designed by someone who's heard a lot about nightmares but has never actually had one.

A hodgepodge of relationship movie clichés occasionally redeemed by a game cast.

Lisa Frankenstein just doesn’t seem all that interested in what its main character is going through, which leaves it feeling lamentably flimsy, just a collection of references assembled around a hollow center.

The thinness of the movie, which is what is intermittently enjoyable about it, is at odds with its sob-sister pretensions.

Because it’s darker and a bit more intense, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a slight improvement over the first film, which seemed to mistake family-friendly restraint for abject lifelessness.

Most of the dialogue is listless, and no matter how much Soderbergh snips and stitches, the movie is a corpse with twitching limbs.

A thoroughly boilerplate bayou actioner, with one notable feature. It’s got good villains – nasty, delirious, stupid villains, among them Franco and Ryder – and for that it’s almost worth seeing. Almost.

For all its bloodshed, the movie’s not sharp enough to land a cutting blow — or even to break skin.

There’s enough material for a rollicking 25-minute short in Death of a Unicorn, which unfortunately spreads its goods out over the stretch of a feature.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday (which is out now on Hulu) wants to be a history lesson, but it’s at times so one-note and inert that it loses any sense of authenticity.

It’s both thin and overstuffed, filled with intricate, at times dazzling set-pieces peopled by characters we don’t care about, and an irreverent sense of fun that nevertheless leaves us cold. It tries so hard… and ultimately achieves so little.

An interesting take. The problem is that Guadagnino can’t cast a decent spell.

None of the female characters in the film acts in ways that suggest Farhadi has actually given much thought to what it’s like to move through the world as a woman.

Spring Breakers strikes me as another of Korine’s calculated punk outrages, a sploog in Disney’s direction.

A weepie for audiences under the (mistaken) impression that independent movies are always more emotionally honest than Hollywood movies.

The new Tarzan film, The Legend of Tarzan, plays as if a dog ate part of the script.

On just about every other level other than visuals, Planes is dry, dry, dry. There's no verbal wit, no standout vocal performances.

By the end of Freed, Christian and Ana are no longer a rich man and his middle-class girlfriend, but two rich people telling the tale of how and why they got rich to each other. Doesn’t get more deviant than that.

Its own pointlessness may keep The Dirt from feeling like an actual affront to humanity, but that doesn't make it very good, either.

Though often beautiful, this is an emotionally paralyzed film about emotionally paralyzed people.

It’s so devoid of bangers or any remotely memorable tunes that there’s nothing to distract you from the movie’s lack of clear stakes, or meaningful drama, or antagonists with any personality.

O'Sullivan's movie could easily have been made 60 years ago. This is not intended as a compliment.

The cast…is first-rate, but each is given a single note to play.

Wasikowska drabs herself down. Her body is undefined in dowdy clothes, her hair hangs limply. But her eyes usher you into her inner world, with its battle between girlish longing and the impatience to move on and be what she really is — whatever that might be. It’s a richer performance than the movie deserves.

Their movie has its moments, to be sure, and the target evangelical audience may well respond enthusiastically, but, unless your own salvation is riding on it, the film is mostly a slog.

Like so many of today’s action films, The Legend of Hercules is too busy peddling slick, stone-faced portent to ever bother making us laugh, or engaging us in any way.

If Shyamalan is an original, his originality is in draining the life out of pop archetypes, twerpily annotating them, and presenting it all as a gift from on high.

I’m not sure about Hawn. A youthful twitterer, she has developed an expressively croaky voice, but nothing about her reads “nervous, agoraphobic cat lady.” She’s no longer a jumpy clown — she doesn’t need the humiliation.

As a piece of suspense, it ain’t exactly "North by Northwest," or even "Three Days of the Condor"; the awkward attempts at chase scenes make it clear that Redford the actor, who has always given off a slightly lugubrious air, has lost a step or two physically.

I found parts of The Sacrament more effective than anything else he’s done to date, as it’s probably the least genre of his movies. But don’t tell West that; I’m pretty sure he still thinks he’s made a horror flick.

Lynch needs to renew himself with an influx of the deep feeling he has for people, for outcasts, and lay off the cretins and hobgoblins and zombies for a while. Mulholland Drive is the product of David Lynch, Inc.

It was undoubtedly a great experience for everyone involved, and the show itself might have been a romp. But as a movie, Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show makes you think of the days in which troupes that didn’t deliver were run out of town, bullets pinging off their heels.

This is yet another of Soderbergh’s “exercises in style,” which means he has one big idea and sticks to it. He makes the space shallow and ugly (faces are bathed in orange) and adds groovy sixties titles and Marvin Hamlisch music.

In common with most recovery stories, Rocketman boils down to a fat lump of self-pity, but the music does leaven things.

An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.

The film is a stodgy snooze, and Theron, who is about as expressive here as a porcelain doll, lacks all believability--she's followed her best performance (in Monster) with her worst.

It’s all thematically muddled, narratively regurgitated stuff that makes the film feel like a nearly three-hour backsliding of this franchise’s onetime political forcefulness.

A social worker’s take on a lost soul can be valuable, but in a drama it’s too orienting. You want to see how a person could surrender herself — her self — to something so diabolical, which demands a higher level of insanity than the filmmakers can muster.

We get a reboot that takes no risks and steers away from the uncomfortable sexual jolts of its predecessor. This movie doesn’t raise hell. Honestly, it barely raises heck.

For all the goodwill generated by its early scenes, by the time The 5th Wave lumbers to its conclusion, you realize you’re not watching a movie but an act of crisis management.

Vehicle 19 sets up a fascinating conceit for itself, and then loses interest in delivering on it. It just wants to get to the cool car chase, but by the time it does, we’ve stopped caring.

In the main 13th makes connections that haven’t been made in a mainstream documentary before.

The kind of movie you keep wishing would just cut loose and go off the deep end. Nobody goes to these "Fatal Attraction" retreads anymore for serious drama. But this one is a movie torn — too grim and self-important to go truly nuts, but too silly and slipshod to work on a more somber level.

The Mummy is an enormously silly gross-out flick that for some reason believes it ought to be a meditative slow-burn affair.

Wrath at least has the good sense to try to have a little fun with its mince-myth premise. It's better than Clash, but it's still not particularly good.

As you watch the nannies mistreated and the children left to cry themselves to sleep, the only surprise is that there are no surprises. It’s zombie-land.

Together, Lopez and Caviezel make quite a pair. Sorrowful yet hip, they seem to be inventing a new mood: designer melancholia.

Napoleon is not, thank god, a hagiography. But it has the faltering rhythms of a rough draft — it plays as though Scott gave up on trying to carve a good film out of what actually ended up on screen.

It appears that the filmmakers have taken Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" way too literally.

Twisted and outrageous but ultimately artificial. Albert Brooks did this art-reality thing a lot better years ago in "Real Life," his takeoff on PBS's "An American Family," and was sidesplitting besides.

Where the last two Charlie’s Angels installments were sold on their trio of stars, this soft reboot has leads at various levels of recognizability, and they all seem to be acting in their own movie.

There are moments of welcome tension amid the inchoate lunacy, but these in turn merely highlight why the rest of the film doesn’t work.

The period thriller Gangster Squad plays like an untalented 12-year-old's imitation of Brian DePalma's "The Untouchables."

The result is reasonably entertaining and totally disposable. Which it shouldn’t be, given that its focus is on guns and the way that they facilitate mayhem. Gory farce can be bracing. It’s the glibness that’s unconscionable.