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.