It's supposed to be about a Kafkaesque experience. Instead, it IS a Kafkaesque experience. Why are we here? Is everything absurd? Is anyone in charge?

Dopey as the film is on a plot level, it’s equally vapid in its psychology.

You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.

Tedious and pretentious.

An indie exercise in macho posturing disguised as a tale of grief, reminds us that losing one’s parents is psychically debilitating. But that’s about as useful as knowing that rain is wet.

The teen movie The Spectacular Now begins like “Say Anything” but soon turns into “Drink Anything.”

To paraphrase that old quip about slow-paced art films, it literally is watching paint dry.

Inherent Vice, meandering even by Anderson’s standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2½-hour endurance test.

No, which has been nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988. That means light flaring up to spoil the image, bumpy camerawork, a nearly square picture and all-around grubbiness.

At the end of it all comes McKay’s big angry harrumph about the meaning of the crisis — a sign of failed, frustrated satire. If you can make your message clear through comedy, there’s no need to say, “Here’s my moral.” A funnyman can’t afford to get caught wagging his finger.

The movie independently bungles everything it tries, like a Central Park busker who simultaneously sucks at juggling, harmonica playing and skateboarding.

The movie offers very little that food radicals don't already know.

The packaging of “Barbie” is a lot more fun than the tedious toy inside the box.

I’m probably more intrigued than 99.3 percent of the American public by the idea of deconstructing the hidden symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but the theories proposed in the doc Room 237 aren’t eye-opening. They’re laughable.

A backstage drama that has all the sizzle of a glass of water resting on the windowsill, Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria mistakes lack of dramatic imagination for smoldering subtlety.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

Sure to be a favorite with racists, Beasts of No Nation sheds no light whatsoever on Africa’s civil wars but turns its gaze on black people brutalizing one another with machetes, howitzers, rifles and anything else that comes to hand. I picture Calvin Candie, the plantation owner in “Django Unchained,” yelling, “Yeah! Git ’em!”

Anderson, in her first major non-Scully film role, is lethally miscast.

Essentially a weird series of nonsequiturs. I'd rather be watching a sequel to the much-maligned "Little Nicky" -- a Sandler film that was at least trying to do something interesting -- than this failed experiment in fusing high and low culture.

Indulgent, tedious documentary.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

Why was this pointless movie made? Because quality actors like Blanchett and Weaving like to play drug addicts. They can't stop themselves. They need help.

With Philomena, British producer-writer-star Steve Coogan and director Stephen Frears hit double blackjack, finding a true-life tale that would enable them to simultaneously attack Catholics and Republicans. There’s no other purpose to the movie, so if 90 minutes of organized hate brings you joy, go and buy your ticket now.

Oh no, another let's-drag-a-dead-body-to-Mexico flick?

Every Little Step shows only this: It hurts to flunk an audition, and it's nice to get hired. Everything it has to say about Broadway was said better in Bob Fosse's movie "All That Jazz" -- in its opening five minutes.

Has the aroma of an autobiographical confession by someone for whom life hasn’t been overly difficult.

Guardians of the Galaxy brings to mind some of the most unforgettable sci-fi event movies of the last 30 years. Alas, those films are “Howard the Duck” and “Green Lantern.”

The laziness of this filmmaking (which assumes you know that Gray killed himself in 2004) is of a piece with the emphatically uninteresting tales told by a classic dinner-party bore who once referred to his ramblings as "creative narcissism." He was half-right.

No, this film by director/co-writer Gillian Robespierre just isn’t funny, and the mismatched leads aren’t even interesting together.

It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling -- and then sits back awaiting congratulation.

Frank’s work is phenomenal, but his longtime editor and collaborator Laura Israel seems determined during the course of her documentary never to give you a moment long enough to contemplate it.

Seems to exist solely to drive this observation home in the most heavy-handed way.

Shot through with ’60s London energy, illuminating on several fronts and featuring bits of many great Who tracks, the film is nevertheless a mess that should be taught in film schools to illustrate how not to edit a documentary.

If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — Wolf of Wall Street.

Dr. Godard drops and quotes more names than you’d find in a week’s worth of Page Six, but lots of luck figuring any of this out before dozing off. The good thing about Goodbye to Language is that you’ll wake up with no side effects, albeit your wallet will be $12 lighter.

The climate-change documentary Time To Choose makes the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” look like a model of judiciousness and restraint.

By the time two hours had dragged by, I felt a lot like I had sat through a five-hour wedding.

Avoiding the usual vein-popping diatribes, he comes across as learned, calm and folksy. But much of what Gore says in this slide show he gives to people whose minds are not yet fully formed (undergraduates, actors) is absurd, and his assertions often contradict each other.

Like its subject, a lawsuit that is expected to go on for another 10 years, Crude has no ending. This is the perfect ending for this Goliath versus Goliath documentary about powerful personal-injury lawyers taking on a powerful corporation.

The plot plods along — they drive a bit, guy gets shot, they drive some more, guy gets shot — and the dialogue is bottom of the barrel.

If bluegrass were as static and dull as this concert film indicates, Nashville would have hustled all the hillbillies back to the Smokies long ago.

The movie is trying to do far too much and doesn't do anything well. "Ambitious" isn't the word here; "random" is more like it.

The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it's a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge.

Few kinds of art are more boring than the insistently transgressive, and few movies are more boring than Humpday.

What Amenabar offers here is an unconvincing, pretentiously artsy pastiche of just about every hoary old gothic thriller you can think of.

Even for a mumblecore film, Computer Chess is weak stuff, a punitively dull chunk of quirk that is about, and feels like, being stuck in a motel with a gaggle of programming nerds for a weekend.

Sir! No Sir! doesn't make a lot of sense, but it does have some fascinating footage of Jane Fonda, both as a dippy young protester and today, when she remains dazzled by her own legend.

Heavy-handed, predictable and almost completely unbelievable.

Jacques Rivette's film is full of painstaking historical detail, but the behavior of the two nonlovers is mired in inaction and emotionally incomprehensible.

The only possible interest the movie will inspire in anyone comes when Paltrow flashes a breast toward the end, far too late to pump any excitement into an aggressively boring film that gurgles with self-indulgence.

The nicest thing I can think of to say about the doc Neil Young Journeys is that at least it isn't in 3-D.

A yawn-provoking little farm melodrama.

Snoozy and unconvincing.

This film is narratively inert (we spend a lot of time listening to the same questions being asked over and over) and, like virtually all docs in its genre, less than vigorous in its pursuit of truth.

An English-language film from Italy, Tale of Tales toys with the ogres, princesses and crones of classic fairy tales to almost no dramatic effect, albeit with lots of sex and gore. Imagine the Brothers Grimm’s cousins Tyler and Jake writing for a late-night slot on Cinemax and you’ll get the idea.

I've seen a lot of rip-offs of "The Truman Show" and a lot of rip-offs of "Scream." I guess I have to give credit to The Cabin in the Woods for ripping off both at once.

Only rarely does the film present a genuine insight, such as the observation that many black people loved to dress up in their finest for church because, during the week, they were so often dressed as servants and manual laborers.

The only darkness here — besides the dingy-looking images dimmed by 3-D glasses — is the murky plot, which is as silly as it is arbitrary.

Slow West certainly lives up to its title: It’s one poky Western, plodding and perambulating and moseying across the 1870 frontier on a grim march to a pointless ending.

Two dull people have a dull love affair in Summertime, a French drama that drags on like an August afternoon.

Kontroll calls itself a thriller, and you will agree if you are excited by scenes of bored inspectors arguing with sullen straphangers.

This indie documentary is egregiously Hollywood in spirit. That a take-charge white football coach can buck up a place like Manassas HS with some gridiron grit is a lie we want to believe.

There needs to be a 12-step program for movie people to stop sharing their "deeply personal" yet insight-free stories of addiction.

Wal-Mart's home office in Bentonville, Ark., can rest easy: Greenwald, as usual, is hysterically preaching to the choir.

If the film is meant to make us feel good about African justice, it does anything but.

The misleading documentary Trumbo paints a golden nimbus of holiness around the onetime highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Dalton Trumbo, an on-the-record hater of democracy, defender of authoritarian rule and avowed Communist.

Grunting and boarlike, Gérard Depardieu supplies a one-note rendition of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Abel Ferrara’s peculiarly unilluminating Welcome to New York.

Keeps such a lazy pace, with so many scenes that fail to move the story forward, that it should be cited for failing to meet the minimum speed for a crime drama.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, as you'd expect, rubbish, but the word is slightly too kind. The David Fincher film (like the very similar Swedish one - released in the US just last year! - and the book) is not even good rubbish.

Boring.

A cheap exploitation picture wrapped in miles and miles of stale would-be Oscar scenes.

It'll be a real miracle if anyone manages to stay awake throughout this extravagantly dull film.

An exhausting, overindulgent film, at least for American audiences...the experience feels like Grampa Simpson meets "Cinema Paradiso."

Boynton isn't interested in telling a story, only in the atmosphere of political consultancy.

Resembles a period version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" - played dead straight.

May well be the dullest and most pointless version ever filmed, thanks to a stunningly bad lead performance by Ethan Hawke.

Schmaltzy and contrived.

Imagine “Moby-Dick” rewritten in crayon, and you’ll get the idea.

It's not much fun to watch people go to raves. And it's even less fun to listen to people talk about how much fun it is to go to raves.

Frustratingly superficial.

Is nothing sacred? In the schizophrenic war epic The War lords, Jet Li, the hunky action hero, cries -- no, make that sobs -- several times. What will his legion of young male fans think?

Ron Howard's bio-pic is an Oscar-baiting fairy tale that manipulates the audience at every turn of the clich.

Director Ferzan Ozpetek's film doesn't break any new ground; rather, it recycles every cliché about gays in what is essentially an extended soap opera.

Blockers is the latest example of the millennium’s most dispiriting film trend: Stupid drunk people making stupid drunk decisions for two stupid hours.

Big Star’s fans are so passionate that this film may well please some of them, but as for myself, I already knew their music was genius. By the end, I was muttering at every critic and musician and record producer, “Guys, tell me something I don’t know.”

With great power comes the responsibility to make a decent movie, but the mysterious force running through Chronicle is the power to supersuck.

Ho-ho-huh? Arthur Christmas is an animated kiddie comedy that delivers all the wonder you'd expect in a movie about a guy delivering one package. Maybe they should have called it "UPS Man: The Movie."

Having root-canal surgery would be less painful than sitting through the martial-arts disaster Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior.

They should have called it “Star Trek Into Drowsiness.”

Best watched while doing a crossword or reading the paper.

In this pretentious art-house downer version of "The Bad Seed," the only surprise is that the folks didn't ship the little monster off to the looney bin before he reached puberty.

Let’s say you wanted to have another go at “Red Dawn” but you think more like Redford. Voilà: You’d have The East, a cockamamie valentine to eco-terrorism.

The Hateful Eight is basically an expensive vanity project allowing Tarantino to expound on his bizarre theories about race relations.

The praise for this static, overlong, stagebound work is a mystery to me.

Hard-core Hollywood haters will best appreciate Maps to the Stars, a campy poison-pen letter to Tinseltown that makes “Sunset Boulevard’’ look like a tourism infomercial by comparison.

Aside from the very occasional stab with a dagger, John prefers to shoot people at point-blank range. It gets old fast.

Let us return to reality (all this happened less than three years ago; do documentarians think we don't read the papers?).

This rehash of familiar pacifist arguments offers neither heat nor light. It's "Fahrenheit: Room Temperature."