Why doesn't anybody just buy a gun? I guess the female characters spent all their money on tight tank tops.

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

As my cat, Audrey, will confirm, I love animals. But I draw the line at having lions, tigers, gigantic snakes, bears and other predators as pets. Other people have different opinions.

At best a sporadically amusing sketchbook of theater types.

Does a first-rate job of remembering.

For maximum enjoyment, see this on the enormous classic IMAX screen.

At its best, the movie is an unbearably precious slice of stale imitation Wes Anderson. But at its worst, it's dull and strangled by its own would-be jaunty deadpan.

A Western, but any similarities between it and, say, a Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy shoot-em-up are nonexistent.

Though the movie has some engagingly quirky moments, everything falls into place far too easily for much suspense to build, and the romance between the two leads seems as contrived as everything else.

Writer-director Keith Bearden was also smart enough to round up a couple of other old pros: Brian Dennehy, as the hero's eccentric grandfather, and Keith David, as a wise collector of pop-culture artifacts.

You'd think it would be hard to make an uninteresting movie based on the true story of Bethany Hamilton... But the terminally bland Soul Surfer comes perilously close.

Your Highness refuses to take itself seriously, which is both boring and sort of charming to a limited extent.

Hanna doesn't go wrong immediately. It takes at least 2½ minutes.

Attempting to fill Dudley Moore's top hat in Arthur, Russell Brand rapidly descends the rungs of the comedy ladder from "unfunny" to "irritating" to "vulgar" to the bottom one - "Andy Dick."

Picture Monty Python writing an unusually odd "Twilight Zone" episode directed by surrealist Luis Buñuel. Or just empty your mind of all sense: This is Rubber.

Circo is more like "The Smallest Show on Earth" than "The Greatest Show on Earth," the 1952 Oscar winner, but it does provide a look at a unique family and a disappearing way of life.

The script is blaring and obvious at all times, and in his second directorial effort, David Schwimmer doesn't have a clue how dull it is for the audience to endure scene after scene of anguish, crying and screaming matches

Queen To Play is ultimately about people's capacity for emotional and intellectual growth at any age.

Even after he manages to get out of the car and slowly starts recovering his memory, Wrecked keeps you guessing.

Hop gives us . . . a bunny who poops jelly beans. That idea doesn't fill you with seasonal joy? Neither will the rest of the movie.

Director Susanne Bier's chilly morality play is slow to get started, but once established, its three parallel stories comment provocatively on one another.

A spoof of you-know-what that's a lot less funny than it sounds.

Creepy spirits in old-timey dress, ear-stabbing sound cues, slamming doors and bloody handprints: The horror flick Insidious isn't scared to be trite.

A fun ride of a sci-fi thriller with terrific romantic chemistry between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan.

A thoughtful and intelligent film, and should appeal to adventurous souls.

Anne Coesens, wife of the film's director, Olivier Masset-Depasse, gives a strong performance as Tania.

Writer-director John Gray, who created "Ghost Whisperer" on TV, is a son of Brooklyn whose love for the borough is as thick as a pint of Guinness, and he keeps finding fresh ways to present familiar plot points.

It's just that the script, which Ozon adapted from a play, is lightweight and better-suited to stage than screen.

Strands a good cast in a sea of stereotypes and clichés.

Far too childish to intrigue adults yet too slow and dull for kids.

Combining narrative heavy-handedness with an airy disdain for the details of the situation, director Julian Schnabel gives us a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Miral.

Seventh-graders are far cooler and more anarchic than depicted in this often-dopey movie, which is aimed at more of a fourth-grade sensibility.

A soul-deadening mash-up of "Kill Bill," "Showgirls" and dozens of other better flicks that's not the least bit exciting or sexy, Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch is what happens when a studio gives carte blanche to a filmmaker who has absolutely nothing original or even coherent to say.

Suffers from a lack of focus and a sitcom script.

The noise level reminds me of Canal Street in Chinatown on a Sunday afternoon.

May serve as a useful way to introduce teens to what World War II in Europe was like.

Scott's feature debut is beautifully filmed and offers an unexpectedly shocking ending.

An essential document of bad taste that needs to go right into the time capsule. History must not forget.

At the end, as Shadyac proclaims, "I stopped flying privately" (well, hurrah for you, Mahatma), renounces his Pasadena mansion and moves into a trailer park, the results of his epiphany grow funnier than any of his movies.

Beautifully filmed and well-acted, "The Gift to Stalin," directed by Rustem Abdrashev, has its schmaltzy, cliched moments, including an unnecessary finale in Jerusalem.

Unpretentious and unexpectedly moving.

It's a bit less good than McCarthy's earlier films -- Jeffrey Tambor has a large, superfluous role that abruptly disappears, and Ryan, a fine actress, makes a less than entirely convincing spouse for Giamatti. This one is a crowd-pleaser nonetheless.

Bateman has rarely had the opportunity to play a snarling lawman, but with his cool aviators and his bristling putdowns he's perfect, too.

Limitless may please a few looking for a shallow fantasy thriller, but won't fire up the synapses of the intellectually demanding.

It goes down as smoothly as a milkshake thanks to an impressive cast.

Plotwise, the movie can (like many a Brooklynite) barely be bothered to comb its hair. Just when the pace needs to pick up, everyone sits around discussing fruity drinks.

Sadly, with the Soviet Union gone, the art faces a new enemy: Islamic extremists.

Well-acted and acutely observed.

The hopelessly dated 1968 play "The Boys in the Band" yields a surprisingly sprightly and multifaceted documentary, Making the Boys.

The movie, a sequel to 2009's much more sprightly and amusing indie "Women in Trouble," seems to be reaching for Robert Altman territory. Instead of offering many intriguing stories, though, it can't come up with even one.

If you're in the mood for a clichéd gangland B-movie, though, you could do worse.

Literate and engrossing, with excellent performances.

Though deadly serious, Christopher Smith's European-made bubonic- plague melodrama provides good value with lots of blood and guts, as well as a solid cast.

Aside from a relatively brief appearance by Joan Cusack's avatar as the kidnapped mother, there are no involving characters or situations.

This silly extraterrestrial-invasion epic somehow manages the feat of making the destruction of La La Land seem tedious.

After 160 years, this is a story that still grips the heart and the mind.

I have no idea how to blow up a two-page fairy tale into 100 minutes of blockbuster, but frankly I was hoping for more backstory about the titular cape in Red Riding Hood. Thread count? Machine washability?

An enjoyable mix of tragedy and comedy.

You won't soon forget it -- if you have the guts to see it.

Perplexing but pleasing.

Isn't quite insipid, although if it were a little better, it could be.

A tediously unfunny comedy.

More than lives up to its name with ultra-campy performances, high-glucose direction, laughable dialogue, cheesy effects and a back-lot simulation of a Manhattan street that wouldn't pass muster on an after-school special.

The misleading trailers for the supremely goofy The Adjustment Bureau promise action-packed sci-fi. What you actually get is a love-struck Matt Damon running for the US Senate as he's stalked by fedora-wearing angels.

By the end I was getting a bit antsy from the rambling script and direction.

It's an interesting story, but the presentation is more like a home movie than something you'd pay to see in a theater.

It's also sugary and has a silly tear-jerker ending. But I found myself laughing at the film's gentle humor, anyway.

With its poky pacing, thin characters, obvious message and predictable plot, the movie amounts to a cinematic sermon that, like many of those given in houses of worship, has a good-hearted message that will be difficult to deliver to a snoozing audience.

An example of style over substance. There's lots of slo-mo and jittery hand-held camera work, and references to the French New Wave (especially François Truffaut), but little depth.

If there's an awkward moment, it's the scene in which the monks take part in a sort of Last Supper, drinking wine while Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" plays in the background. You keep waiting for Natalie Portman to twirl into the room.

If you go, be sure to stick around through the closing credits. By far the funniest part of the movie is a blackly humorous fantasy sequence starring Merchant.

The dialogue is banal and the acting, especially Wortham's, is unconvincing. Even the sex and nudity, of which there is a lot, grows tiresome after a while.

The Chaperone squanders nice locations and an expert comic performance by Yeardley Smith (the voice of Lisa Simpson) as the teacher trying to supervise the trip.

A deeply felt evocation of a place and a people by writer-director Matt Porterfield, who set this largely improvised film in his own lower-class Baltimore neighborhood.

A labored romantic farce whose only asset is Carlos Leon, best known as the father of Madonna's daughter Lourdes.

The film achieves a mild uptick in the final act, with a surprise change of heart and a race to save a little girl, but up till then it's thickly earnest -- a conquista-bore.

Morbidly funny art-house horror tale.

Not as elaborate or entertaining as Anderson's last feature, "Transsiberian," but it's got enough shocks for an entirely respectable addition to the post-apocalyptic genre.

Unknown actually has enough of a sense of humor to admit what it is: hybrid corn. But it's been crossbred from Hitchcockian stock.

For all of its homicidal aliens and toothy beasts, I Am Number Four did contain one element that genuinely unsettled me: the line "produced by Michael Bay." Nooooooo!

Fortunately, Winters' legendary inventiveness as a comedian has not diminished with the years.

Beautifully composed documentary.

Wind power plus solar power equals hot air in the propaganda piece Carbon Nation, a documentary so disconnected from reality it could have been produced by President Obama's speechwriters.

A technical and performance success. The chemistry between Sosa and Lujan heats up the screen as their lives spiral out of control.

Poetry, which rightfully won the best-screenplay prize at Cannes, never resorts to exploitation. Under Lee's guidence, it is a mature film for mature audiences.

This "Alfie" meets "Boogie Nights" bio fizzles because, although Sassoon never stops talking, he never says anything.

The film slowly builds up to Justin's first appearance at Madison Square Garden, where his show sold out in 22 minutes.

The clever screenplay, co-written by director Kelly Asbury (who co-helmed "Shrek 2"), follows the DreamWorks template of combining pop culture references, sight gags and action for the kids, and more sophisticated humor for adults.

A long slog through ancient muck, so-so sword fights and dumb luck.

Maybe the Midwest isn't actually like this, but if it were, would that be so bad?

You know you're in trouble when you're suffering a comedy shutout and the pinch-hitters you send in are Kidman and Dave Matthews.

Madsen interviews experts galore, but few seem to know what's going to happen with this project in the next decade -- let alone 100,000 years.

A drippy romance that makes Nicholas Sparks look like Leo Tolstoy.

An uplifting story to be sure, but director-producer David Swajeski doesn't do it justice.

Sergei Puskepalis (Sergei) and Grigory Dobrygin (Pavel) give powerful performances, but the real star is Mother Nature.

Weds half-hearted thriller elements to the self-absorbed, no-budget mumblecore films pioneered by Katz in efforts like "Dance Party, USA."

The Other Woman isn't a perfect film, but it makes better use of her (Portman) talents than her other current movie, "No Strings Attached."

It sounds like it was written by the star pupils at the Cameron Academy of Screenwriting.