There are bits and pieces of Lift strewn throughout that hint at the better movie it could have been with some inspiration and discipline.

Perhaps seeking not to sensationalize or to Hollywood-ize a story set in a drab, mundane world, Sollett shoots without any frills. That’s usually a good thing, but here it helps to suck the life out of the material — in part because Nyswaner’s screenplay seems to have settled for the most direct, speechifying way of dramatizing the issues at hand.

Despite the heavy context and historical precedent, there’s not a whole lot on Overlord’s mind, and a gestured-at “defeating the monsters makes us monstrous” philosophical thread ends symmetrically but pointlessly.

The style is immersive, meant to envelop us and bring us into the story, but it ends up making the movie feel abstract and distant. And there’s a void at the center.

However you cut it, with all that talent, Charlie Countryman feels like a sad, wasted opportunity.

The film bulldozes any genuine nuance or insight or even emotion in exchange for ready-made plot points and by-the-numbers catharsis.

Thirteen doesn't really offer much more insight into exasperated mother-daughter relationships or twisted teens than, say, "Freaky Friday," which I much prefer. At least that film was funny and didn't try to fob itself off as a bulletin from the front lines.

There is one nice pop-up scare against a dozen or so false, ineffectual ones - a poor percentage. As the title states, she is a woman and wears black, but she might as well be a hastily decked-out script girl for all her impact.

Look, Dear Mr. Watterson is a nice movie. Calvin & Hobbes fans may get a kick out of it. But it falls squarely into the promotional genre of documentary filmmaking — the same way so many music docs nowadays seem to be just movies about how awesome the director’s favorite band is.

This is another of those dead-kid dramas in which the terrible event is handled like a striptease--tantalizing flashes until the climax.

In the all-star movie adaptation of August: Osage County, another play that holds the stage with fang and claw feels less momentous onscreen.

You wish Rio 2 had the smarts and the inventiveness to match its scattered bursts of ambition.

Leterrier’s film is the kind that doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny: The more you know about it, the more befuddled you’ll be.

If you want your movie to blow up the right way, you have to do better than the paint-by-numbers story and characters presented here.

Intolerable Cruelty, while tolerable, isn't very radical--or very good, either. The Coens wrote the script eight years ago on assignment, not intending to direct it, and that may explain why the result often lacks their customary bizarro facetiousness.

I can’t tell if Korine is a true dramatist or a simpleminded provocateur who lives to mess with our heads. Both, probably. To him, the joke is that it’s all movie fodder. Moondog is an existential hero for a weightless universe.

It puts the same characters into a vaguely familiar situation, with diminishing, tepid returns. They should have just called it 2.

As an actor, Matt Damon has too much integrity to pretend he can multitask to that advanced degree and still be, you know, a fun person. So he turns his face into a mask of stoicism and gives the dullest performance of his career.

Death Wish is a classier version of what you can find on cable in the wee hours — it’s not worth seeing in the theater — but it’s worth pausing over its politics of guns.

The movie is, in all senses, a big downer.

It underscores, with ample footage from his rallying speeches and his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just how important it was for the antiwar movement to be represented by someone like Kerry.

A character as psychologically complex as Guerin -- whose drive may not have been fully comprehensible even to herself -- needs a lot of room to expand on screen. Schumacher and Bruckheimer box her in.

This one never quite decides if it wants to be a big, boisterous epic or a solemn retelling, and it nearly disappears into the crack between the two.

More a dark fairy tale about vengeance than the action-packed crime thriller it purports to be, the film is at times exhilarating, bold, and beautiful — when it’s not busy being ludicrous, fragmented, and just plain stupid.

Cronenberg is transmitting to us from the borders of death, behind the enemy lines of inconsolable grief. And the man’s mind is still so alive that it seems churlish to ding this movie for being so — God, this isn’t the word I want to use, but I must — lifeless. Sadly, the inertia eventually gets to us.

The film is a dead-on skewering of the high-on-their-own supply megalomania that now afflicts so many members of the techno oligarchy, who unfortunately also control the levers of the world. I found it incredibly unpleasant to watch, in a way that made me think about comedy’s limitations as a critique of power when its targets are already more awful and more ridiculous than any fictional version.

The movie isn’t dead on arrival, like Snyder’s over-reverent "Watchmen." But it’s pleasure-free.

Exquisitely produced, immaculately acted, and thoroughly uninvolving, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a perfect nothing of a movie.