A lazy coffee-table book of a movie,

Isn't quite up to the comic standard of Rob Schneider's 1999 hit "Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo."

Coincidences and plot contrivances pile up. What starts out as a delightful black comedy and social commentary ends up, at best, as a guilty pleasure where I had a hard time sorting out the intentional from the unintentional laughs.

Erstwhile boy wizard Daniel Radcliffe works no magic as a grieving lawyer in The Woman in Black, a creaky haunted-house story that's strong on creepy atmosphere but woefully deficient in the scare department.

Sadly, laughs are sparse in this labor of love, a self-conscious spoof by longtime "X-Files" producer R.W. Goodwin.

Bad Samaritan plays like an unambitious episode of “Black Mirror,” low on techno-savvy but enhanced by the always-compelling David Tennant and Robert Sheehan, an Irish actor best known for his role on the British series “Misfits.”

Played by Logan Lerman -- the Zac Efron look-alike who was young George Hamilton in "My One and Only" -- Percy is a Manhattan high-schooler who learns he is a demigod.

A soggy cannoli of a domestic dramedy.

The film looks nifty, but the flat and unemotional English-language dialogue lessens its impact.

A marginally funny comedy at best, recycles themes, scenes and even lines from Allen's own old movies - like many of Allen's later efforts.

Compared to another recent teen weepie, “The Fault in Our Stars,” this one comes up wanting. That film’s strong point was the delight its heroine took in detonating romantic clichés; If I Stay seems determined to keep them on life support.

The most interesting parts of the movie are the long, sexy and well-staged dance sequences, some of them involving a very nimble Duvall.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the three-hour epic is third-rate schmaltz that pays only lip service to history.

Woo has never been particularly good at human stuff, and to the extent that Paycheck is, or should be, a love story, it feels forced.

Fair Game stars three imposing performers -- Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Sean Penn's lavish and intemperate hair, a fuming gusher of crazy-ass Sweeney Todd locks that dominates every scene. I couldn't tear my eyes from it, maybe because I couldn't maintain focus on anything else in this histrionic and shamelessly misleading wonk-work.

Director Christian Charles gets some comic mileage from the inimitable Walsh and Rae, but it’s ultimately hard to care too much about a caddish protagonist like Norman — or, for that matter, about the clichéd “women are crazy!” sentiment that hums nastily under the antics of Dori’s unorthodox family gathering.

Isn't a total loss, but neither does it have the charm of "The Full Monty" or other feel-good indie Brit flicks it emulates.

Jeff Goldblum is a hoot as Hatosy's pot-smoking shrink, who also happens to be his mom's boyfriend, but Dallas 362 is basically a road movie that doesn't really go anywhere.

Eight Below doesn't always quite put across the idea of extreme weather, either; the way the actors keep appearing outside with bare heads and jackets unzipped suggests November in Burbank, not 31 degrees below zero. The scenes in which Biggs appears in shorts kind of clinch the point.

If I Were You has more than its share of laughs, but director Joan Carr-Wiggin needed to cut half an hour to make this fly without interest flagging. She had the exact same problem with her last movie, “A Previous Engagement.’’

The charming cast...brightens up the screen, but the TV-sitcom script does them in.

The utopia-via-laboratory aspects of “Vol. 3” resemble “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” — only it’s the Wrath of Gunn. This chilling paperweight clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, making it the fourth longest Marvel film so far. And it’s wildly self-indulgent.

Don’t expect too much of Heist — it’s a cheesy formula picture all the way — but it has solid character foundations, the occasional bright line of dialogue (“Cops, this is robbers,” Morgan says on a phone call) and a neat final twist. As throwbacks go, it’s more bearable than shoulder pads.

Nuanced work by the great John Slattery ("Mad Men") as an emotionally distant dad isn't enough to sustain more than sporadic interest in Brian Savelson's underwritten, slow-moving indie, which plays distressingly like a photographed off-Broadway drama.

The poster art for Nanette Burstein's American Teen, which follows five students through their senior year at a high school in Indiana, is modeled after the one for "The Breakfast Club." So, to a large extent, is this ultra-slick and predictable documentary.

Lucas' films are like Cher's face. No matter how many times you rework the same material, it's never going to be new and fresh again. And so it is with his latest, Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

So udderly mediocre.

The jaw-droppingly nasty second act is intriguing, but it veers into territory so dark that it sucks the air out of the bouncy chick flick that surrounds it, making for one confused -- and confusing -- comedy.

The supporting voices are sublime. Alongside Hudson are Audra McDonald, Tituss Burgess and Broadway’s Hailey Kilgore and Saycon Sengbloh. But the music, absent a believable 1960s sense of place or real concert atmosphere, doesn’t rouse so much as please, not unlike the familiar movie it’s a part of. Respect settles for being respectable.

It’s only fitfully entertaining as an all-star indie team led again by director Jon Favreau, who gets swallowed up by the same sort of overproduced overkill as “Spider Man 3.”

A great-looking but torturously slow and often hokey cross between "The Exorcist" and "Dirty Harry."

Buck is best left to TV, where it will land soon. It's "The Horse Whisperer" that should be seen on the big screen.

As for the magical-realist horns, they make a nice bad-boy look for Radcliffe and a handy plot device, but are never really explained in a satisfactory way. They have the side effect of making anyone who sees them immediately forget them — which I suspect may be the case with this movie as well.

Cody’s satiric knocks on Christians couldn’t be more blundering and obvious. Yet her dialogue is often funny, and the unusual three-way friendship is refreshing. Even former star Brand has learned to dial back his manic mugging, though maybe not quite enough.

Rendition has the depth of a bumper sticker without the brevity.

Among the variations of gags from the original are a threesome involving Harold, Kumar and a giant bag of marijuana.

Starts out as a thriller inspired by that city's 2005 Tube and bus bombings but gets bogged down in a family soap opera.

If only its characters weren't such stereotypes.

For a movie called Breathe, Andy Serkis’ directorial debut is curiously airless — or maybe just quintessentially British, all stiff upper lip and light on emoting.

This belabored movie, which is much more serious than its predecessor and takes nearly an hour to take off, feels like it lasts a Day-O.

A murky, vaguely fact-based melodrama that quickly sinks into the same swamp as such recent De Niro mistakes as "15 Minutes" and "Showtime."

IF you like rap, you'll probably enjoy The Hip Hop Project. I don't like rap.

The plot of Attitude isn't exactly original and won't have you sitting on the edge of your seat. But Nilsson knows how to create a noirish mood, and some of the camera work is interesting, if pretentious.

Teen Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin) is trapped in a kind of undead, unfunny “Groundhog Day,” living one particular 24 hours with her family over and over.

The performances are so uniformly good that it's a shame the characters are stuck with such a listless plot.

There aren't many surprises as the story unfolds in soap-opera fashion, with a happy ending for all concerned.

It’s too bad Scott could not deliver a brilliant character study of one of the world’s great military leaders — and instead settled for letting a self-indulgent Phoenix fly over the cuckoo’s nest.

It's the snobs against the slobs at a Martha's Vine yard wedding in Jumping the Broom. Mostly, it's a tie: Both sides are equally irritating.

There are some charming moments and some funny scenes along the way. But you end up feeling sorry for the likes of Ron Howard, Karen Black, Fred Williamson and Peter Bogdanovich, who agreed to play themselves in cameo.

One of those indie excursions to Loserville that lasts an hour and a half but feels longer than "Roots."

I cracked up here and there watching this broad heist comedy, but it wasn’t laughter I felt great about. Director Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) has always gone for geeks and oddballs, but this film mostly punches down at characters for being poor, unfashionable and stupid.

Too bad nearly half the film is about DeLuca, who has an irritating Freddie Mercury wail and is both obnoxious ("We'll play downstairs after midnight or we won't play at all") and moronic.

It's déjà vu all over again for Aussie actor Guy Pearce, returning to motel rooms in the American Southwest to sort out metaphysical issues in the thriller First Snow, to somewhat less original effect than he did in "Memento."

Purists will probably have a conniption at the mere idea of messing with the form, but the worst thing about Jacquot's post-modern treatment is that its incongruity wrenches you out of the story.

For all its CGI showiness, the fact that Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal signed on for this splatterfest is the film’s most impressive feat.

Toward the end, despite the wintry script and chilly acting, some emotion begins to break through. But it’s never a good sign when the art direction offers more fascination than the sex.

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.

Burton may give us a bland hero, a tepid love story and a muddled plot but, hey, at least he’s got a skeleton army doing battle with giant tentacle monsters at an amusement park.

A wilderness survival romance that makes subzero weather, blizzards and broken limbs seem as taxing as a train delay.

Predictable, rarely scary.

Too much of the film is taken up by creaky plot devices and one sibling vowing to track down and talk to another one to resolve a problem.

American Hustle is a movie that was built backward, or inside out: It puts actors’ needs before the audience’s. There’s no heart under those polyester lapels, and what all that Aqua Net is pasting together is a few sparse strands of wispy story.

After the first two “Captain America” entries, the finest comic-book movies of the last five years, this one is disappointing. The story doesn’t make sense.

Offers interesting views of ordinary life in Baghdad that Americans won't find on TV news. But the impact is lessened by the director's failure to let those who think the war is justified have their say.

A lame TV sitcom with big-screen ambition that's almost touching in its hopelessness.

Mines the increasingly fertile territory of aging boomer parents and chafing middle-aged siblings, but at irritatingly high volume, with the cantankerous voices of Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Dustin Hoffman nearly constantly talking over one another.

The surfing sequences are some of the best I've ever seen in a film, and the re-creation of Jay's climactic battle to ride El Nino-driven waves is real white-knuckle stuff...But neither Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") nor the fellow veteran director who replaced him when Hanson took ill, Michael Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist"), can do much with the hokey sequences on land.

Too bad the script is predictable at every turn.

For a sex movie, Norwegian Wood is about as dry as a pocketful of sand. Even for a film set in a land that considers paper folding an exciting activity, this is dull stuff.

Matthews is supposed to be the star here, but it's Englund's hilarious, over-the-top performance that keeps Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, by director Jon Knautz, from becoming another forgettable exercise in horror.

It’s a slickly plotted ticking-time-bomb thriller with a crisp look and one standout debut performance, by Hitham Omari as a ruthless leader of a terrorist cell.

Gorgeous surroundings don't make up for sulky, feuding travel companions.

Frothy, forgettable comedy.

Garage Days is fun, but it would have been even more entertaining if Proyas had taken an unplugged approach.

May be momentarily entertaining, but don't expect anything profound from the lightweight saga.

Unfortunately, “Arthur” is rarely at its best, bogged down in countless CGI sequences of battlefields or monsters.

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

Pleasant and has not a few laughs.

Wants to be a "Last Tango in Paris" for the new millennium, but its flaccid dramatization and hollow moralizing doesn't rise even to the level of last year's "An Affair of Love," let alone Bertolucci's masterpiece.

Merely a passably amusing excuse to pass a couple of hours in an air-conditioned theater.

While there are some giggles in the film-within-the-film (also called "Road to Nowhere"), the artsy-fartsy direction and flat-as-a-pancake acting (including a cameo by Variety columnist Peter Bart as himself) invites invidious comparisons to "Mulholland Drive."

A cheesily amusing prequel to the 1993 film which starred Al Pacino as a Puerto Rican drug kingpin in Spanish Harlem, in one of his most entertaining performances. This time around, Jay Hernandez delivers a serviceable impression of a much younger version of Pacino.

The Report, true to its no-nonsense name, does the admirable work of trying to interest viewers in the way that bureaucracy can be used to hide the most terrible truths. Alas, the movie gets as buried in paper-pushing as its characters do.

The silliest sci-fi movie since "An Inconvenient Truth."

A wonder to look at, even as its increasingly pretentious manga-inspired story line outstays its welcome.

Chases its tail for so long, it morphs from a whodunit into a who-cares.

Edward's a remarkable young gentleman when you consider the hell he's been through: It turns out he's always 17, his fate to keep repeating high school, forever and ever. If that's my only option, kindly burn me at the stake.

An interesting debut for director Pesce, although it isn't worth running out to see. Wait for it to hit the small screen.

If you're thinking of taking the kids to Bear Cub because the title sounds like something they'd enjoy -- don't!

Some wonderful films have come out of Iran in the past few years, but A Moment of Innocence, by highly regarded director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is too smug and too self-indulgent to count as one of them.

The teen dance drama Step Up seems like it was not only inspired by a Janet Jackson video but entirely written during one.

The Great Playwrights for Dummies series that began with "Shakespeare in Love" continues with Molière, a French clone of that grating and smarmy Best Picture winner.

Parker is watchable chiefly for Statham, who exudes effortless cool and excels in hand-to-hand combat, as well as demonstrating his skill at wielding some very unlikely weapons.

The Fourth Kind has a clever gimmick and nothing more.

Set in a bar that echoes the far superior "Big Night," this labored two-hander plays more like an acting exercise than an actual movie.

It’s a lot of fun . . . until it becomes a mystery thriller so convoluted and tonally wacky, Angela Lansbury would have quit in a huff.

The movie amounts to an extended short story that progresses slowly and fades away with key questions unanswered. Ambiguity isn't necessarily interesting.

The timeless classic, a groundbreaking achievement for animation, has been turned into another pointless and awkward live-action automaton that vanishes from your mind the second it’s over.