The film is a hodgepodge, and it closes with a whimper. But along the way some lucid voices slip through.

It also comes as little surprise that she (Fonda) knocks the part out of the park, even if the film around her leaves something to be desired.

Luc Besson's Jumping Frog Action Factory looks mighty lame in Colombiana.

Like most “universe” movies, this one has about five beginnings and then segues into a round-up-the-team section that ought to have been sure-fire. But the banter has a droopy, depressed air, as if the actors know they’re coming from behind.

In any case, the last twenty minutes of Breaking Dawn are so harrowing that it's possible to forget that most of the acting is soap-operatic (the guy who plays Carlisle is aging to look like Liberace) and the dialogue from hunger. The movie's that primal.

The director, Richard Loncraine, doesn't generate much tension in Firewall's first half...The standard-issue climax is pretty exciting, though.

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 emotional resolutions aren't pat, exactly. But they're not messy either, and for material this inherently volatile, that seems like a cheat.

To keep his satirist’s street cred, Weitz chases the sentimentality with sour slaps at the audience. But for all its supposed outrageousness, American Dreamz has a soft center.

It's a shame, though, that so many of The Possession's later scenes, particularly the exorcism stuff at the end, is mostly a grab bag of tired old scares. You might have convinced yourself, for a while at least, that this one was going to rise above the crowd.

I've never seen a film in which what was actually onscreen seemed so irrelevant.

You keep watching not just because she and Brad and the Mediterranean are beautiful, but also because small, surprising details start to take on great importance.

It feels like a small miracle that the resulting film is so funny, lively, and light on its feet.

It offers a deranged hodgepodge of tones and acting styles and strange mannerisms and affectations and narrative dead ends that feels like it was assembled by a committee of bipolar extraterrestrials.

An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.

The screenwriters go out of their way to prepare you for Taken 3: Serbedzija has more sons, and Kim's virginity is getting harder and harder to preserve.

You admire the movie for refusing to ever, ever slow down, but you also wonder what might have happened had Kahn dared to settle, even just a bit. Instead, what we get is a mad kaleidoscope of genre, with occasional glimpses into the mysteries of the exploding teenage heart.

It's a terrific performance-and terrifying. Owen Wilson is aging: Where goeth my own youth?

I’ll give Flower props — in an age when so many teen movies are grasping so desperately for message-y topicality, it does the impossible, and manages to be about nothing at all.

The fifth entry in the popular dance-off franchise is, like the others, a fantasia that upends the usual rules of filmmaking. Here, the more threadbare the scenario, and the more unmotivated an action, the better. Character and story just get in the way of all the awesome dancing.

Probably the most garishly masochistic star turn since Mel Gibson's "The Man Without a Face." It could also be the most baroque chick flick ever made, the freakazoid spawn of "An Affair to Remember" and "The Matrix."

Seems tailor-made for an intelligent thriller in the Graham Greene mode, but in Jewison's hands, the dragnet that closes in on Brossard is lackadaisical, and the larger political overtones--especially concerning the complicity of the Catholic church in aiding Nazis--are spelled out over and over.

The Situation is, to put it kindly, a spotty piece of work. The script is by Wendell Steavenson, a reporter who seems to know everything about Iraq and next to nothing about screenwriting. The dialogue is flat, and the actors almost never rise above it.

Nicholas McCarthy, the director of the new bad-seed movie, The Prodigy, works in a low key that still somehow scrapes your nerves, so when the nasty stuff arrives, you realize (too late!) that you’ve been softened up for the kill. The film is cruelly well-made.

Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris celebrates old-fashioned American heroism, and I like it — in spite of its dumbbell infelicities.

The best thing about the movie is that you don’t have to invest a lot of time into seeing Austen’s prose manhandled. You can enjoy the film — well, parts of it — as a middling stock production with flurries of gore to break the monotony.

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.

Has its fun moments, and the dialogue, some of which was surely improvised, has a natural flow. But Soderbergh suffocates everything with stylistics. Soderbergh is exploring his navel.

Lila & Eve is an awkward movie, though sometimes by design.

The result is an underwhelming addiction story that feels not just familiar, but more focused on the bad-boy swagger of its main character than his actual recovery.

Again and again the killers linger sadistically over the dead or dying bodies of the people they've dispatched. Did Carnahan think these sickening scenes would give Smokin' Aces a moral complexity that's generally absent from this genre? I think they make the picture seem even more morally bankrupt.

I’m not terribly convinced that the overtly campy version of this film would be any better, but I’m very certain that this one is bad.

There is something sneakily gratifying about all this: Not since the days of "Earthquake" have Hollywood producers so indulged their fantasies of trashing the town.

She’s Funny That Way often displays an old-school generosity and polish, and at least one breakout performance — but just as often, its moments of inspiration are tempered by miscasting and shrill attempts at humor.

It's a perfect fortune cookie of a movie, full of bland life lessons for everybody; would that there were some drama or style in it somewhere along the way.

This film ultimately doesn’t reach its full potential in part because it can’t settle firmly enough on a vibe or viewpoint. It ping-pongs between buoyant caper, farce, and female empowerment drama without ever lingering long enough in a single zone to make an impact.

Works only in spurts.

It’s bright and fun and doesn’t look like any climactic fight of a superhero movie in recent memory.

Mapplethorpe doesn’t linger long enough to have a present tense. It hits its marks and breezes on. It’s not inept — there are few bad scenes. It doesn’t risk enough to be bad.

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.

A Joyful Noise overcomes. The big numbers are a gospel-pop-funk fusion that made me think, Hmmm, this seems very processed - before I noticed my feet were tapping of their own accord. How can you resist that wah-wah funk guitar?

Some of the gags do land — maybe one in four. But the genre-parody genre with big stars and poop jokes needs a little more class than MacFarlane is capable of providing.

Bushwick is actually an amazing template for the kind of virtual-reality entertainment that I bet will be common in a decade or two.

For all its agonizing true-life trappings, has the staying power of a grand-scale video game. Manhattan's sushi bars are in no danger of going dark.

It might seem as though there is nothing new to be done with the crime thriller, but The Code (La Mentale), directed by Manuel Boursinhac and written by Bibi Naceri, provides a new twist.

As a bare-minimum action flick, The Marksman is mostly serviceable.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is the bloated, campy, thoroughly stupid sequel to the 2014 action thriller "Kingsman: The Secret Service."

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!”

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

This is a low-stakes, no-frills, point-A-to-point-B crime thriller, taking inspiration from every parent’s worst nightmare, and pretty much nothing else.

Uprising’s script isn’t great at jokes or nuance or originality, but it’s pretty good at shuttling us from one set piece to the next. And when those set pieces are good — as is the case with an early Jaeger fight in Siberia, or the gee-whiz silliness of the climactic battle in Tokyo — it’s easy enough to overlook.

It’s a time-filler, not a time-waster. It’s a film of simple pleasures — but they are pleasures.

Parts of The Brothers Grimsby are very funny.

Hotel Transylvania 2 is minor, to be sure, but given the comedian’s recent work, it still counts as a pleasant surprise.

Most of Brightburn belabors the obvious.

The fundamental ironic juxtaposition — ultraviolence meets corporate banality — is a bludgeon that never feels fresh no matter how many times it’s driven into our aching skulls.

The new film stars The Rock, but The Wood might be a better description of his performance.

The real sin of The King’s Man is its near-total lack of fun.

Delivery Man feels more unformed, as if nobody’s bothered to give it that extra coat of slick Hollywood paint to cover up the patchwork beneath.

The dance he (Wang) ended up with is on the wrong lap.

Fred Schepisi, the great Australian director, had the thankless task of trying to turn Jesse Wigutow’s screenplay into something with a pulse, but his finesse is wasted on this steaming heap of dysfunctionalism.

There are a few funny sequences . . . But the film is otherwise so sloppily assembled, and so lazy, that it frequently ends up feeling like an inadvertent parody of the underdog-sports genre it belongs to.

Voyagers, in keeping its focus where it does, feels like a waste not just because of how predictable its beats are, but because it ends just when it feels like it’s getting interesting.

Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged--a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.

Like all good YA fantasy, it’s rooted in earnest adolescent anxieties, and dresses them up with the same level of earnestness.

Into the Storm is at once one of the dumbest films you'll see this year and one of the scariest.

The result is a loose conglomeration of jokes that never really holds together: Funny in parts, but overwhelmed by the bland emptiness where its protagonist should be.

As it cliff dives, unprompted, into reheated cocaine-nightmare territory done better by any number of 1990s ’70s nostalgia films before it, it not only ceases to be fun, but stops pretending it has any vision for where its lead characters should go.

There’s a debilitating cheapness that keeps this picture from reaching its true potential. I have no idea what the budget was — for all I know, it could have been bigger than the original film’s — but it feels at times like we’re watching a mock-up of what a movie called The Old Guard 2 might look like.

A noir written and directed by Paul Schrader that's so listless and numbing we need not wonder why it went directly to cable.

There’s enough going on to keep you watching — and, as I said, to keep fanboys wowed by the scale of the production and pretension. But most people will leave feeling drained and depressed, wondering how a studio can get away with withholding so much.

Somewhere in this mess, there might be a very good movie.

The Village is a better movie (than Signs) --probably his best since "The Sixth Sense"--but it indulges Shyamalan's penchant for messianic uplift.

At this point, what could have been a passably entertaining diversion, the kind of film best enjoyed overcoming a hangover or while folding laundry, falls flat on Diesel’s lips. He lacks the gravitas of delivery, disinterested in his lines even before he finishes saying them.

The problem is that the film gets too wrapped up in the myth to tell an effective behind-the-scenes tale.

Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.

Too eager to please to be truly dislikable, and Roberts and Cusack have a fine rapport.

If you want proof that Will Ferrell is the most riotously funny straight man since Jack Benny, observe the way his utter sincerity (in the Ralph Bellamy role, as Wendell’s rival for Eva Mendes) lifts this two-ton piece of whimsy into the stratosphere.

Palmetto is an unconvincing, paint-by-numbers pass at American noir by the usually ambitious German director Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum).

It’s a closed, depressing vision, elevated by compassion and superbly evocative filmmaking.

The Scorch Trials isn’t a particularly good movie, but it’s just fast and nutty enough to keep you entertained.

Its empty girl power aesthetic has the quality of an intrusive thought. Like something out of a time capsule cracked open too early, The Princess is an artifact of girlboss feminism that retains no resonance, but that’s also not distant enough to have curiosity value.

Hunter Killer won’t win any awards for originality, but it may win a couple for the brazenness with which it stacks clichés upon clichés. Basically, it’s "Crimson Tide" meets "Lone Survivor" meets "Under Siege" meets a Russian variation on "Olympus Has Fallen," with a bit of "Geostorm" thrown in. At least three of those movies are pretty good, so the overall math works in the film’s favor.

There are things in San Andreas that no one would have dreamed of seeing 40 years ago, when "Earthquake" (with its tacky, plaster-cracking “Sensurround”) represented the state of the art. But nothing means anything. The spectacle feels less earned than Dwayne Johnson’s biceps, which are ludicrous but not hollow.

The drama is so muddled that Shakespeare seems to be getting in the way of Taymor's spectacle, the magic long gone by the time Prospera hurls her staff off into the sea.

Yet another remake no one needs is The Omen.

He's (Gandolfini) the true star of the film, and his stardom is achieved in the most honest of ways, through the sheer brute force of his talent.

The result is a shallow picture book populated with cutouts where people should be.

Antebellum is ultimately a travesty of craft and filmmaking with a perspective that hollows out the Black experience in favor of wan horror.

I don’t hold Larsson’s novels in enough esteem to mind a theoretical sanding down of them into B-movie popcorn fare, but this isn’t the way to do it.

But a star — even a great star — can only do so much when the film around her is a haphazard mess on nearly every level, only able to work in fits and starts.

Being a cultural icon is a time-limited occupation; after a while, the culture moves on, and if you don't move with it, you end up with a movie like Anything Else.

As a psychological not-quite thriller, it’s consistently entertaining; as a visual exercise, it’s more adventurous than most would be.

In Redemption, too, Statham brings real conviction to the part of a broken man who winds up breaking himself even more. Look beyond the generic shell, and this wildly imperfect movie appears to have a rare soul lurking inside it.

Like Teddy, there’s a lot of sophomoric silliness Night School feels obligated to perform. But there’s a heap of good intentions behind it, and enough big laughs to make us want to forgive it in the end.

Wish I Was Here, not unlike its predecessor "Garden State," captures a certain generational drift. It just doesn’t know what to do with it. So it beats the damned thing into the ground until it’s dead.

There isn't anything in this Total Recall to match the immortal Arnold Schwarzenegger send-offs, "See you at the pah-ty" and everyone's favorite alimony killer, "Consider this a divorce."

Plays out like "Cool Hand Luke" meets "Attica," and it's quite the silliest thing.