Repeatedly shoots for laughs -- but ends up mostly firing blanks.

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

The real unflinching truth is that an average newspaper reporter can do a more artful, compassionate job with a drug-war story than this movie does.

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

Boasts exceptionally attractive locations, but its painfully amateurish plotting, dialogue and acting -- combined with slack pacing -- make this Beijing-set indie romance something of a trial.

Christopher Plummer confronts Nazi horrors again in Atom Egoyan’s preposterous thriller, which squanders a terrific performance by the Oscar-winning actor.

Has precious little to add to the canon -- and does so in a highly melodramatic manner.

This maudlin, fact-inspired and anti-feminist dramedy is no "Far From Heaven" or "The Hours."

Fine for fans? Sure. This stuff is crack for fans. Crack is really bad!

This lame teenage James Bond will leave audiences neither shaken nor stirred.

The movie is about a situation, not a story — there’s little narrative momentum — and as is often the case with movies about journalists, the mood of smug sanctimony becomes unbearable.

Five minutes before The Golden Compass started, I was wondering when it was going to start. Forty minutes into it, I was wondering exactly the same thing.

It's a simple-minded celebration of speed that pretends to be nothing else, even throwing in the occasional wink to acknowledge its own silliness.

First-time feature director Jeff Preiss has a top-notch duo in John Hawkes, as the affable but troubled Joe, and Elle Fanning as his teen daughter, Amy, but neither can really get out from under the film’s heavy-handed tone, a one-note trip down a bleak memory lane.

It's a worthy idea, but the uninspired scripts, acting and direction never rise above the level of an after-school TV special.

There is also something surgically sterile. The movie sounds as though it was recorded in a padded chamber instead of a bustling school, and it looks like it came from some alternate world, one that basks in the eternal sunshine of the spotless skin.

Snoozy and unconvincing.

As a comedy, The Brothers Grimsby is weak and scattershot, but it’s useful as an unintended self-indictment of the chattering classes’ disgust and disdain for white working folk.

So consistently silly and overwrought that it flirts with the elusive so-bad-it's-entertaining category.

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

The origins story Dracula Untold is Dracula unbold — unoriginal, unimaginative and utterly non-unprecedented. This Vlad the Impaler has all the edge of Vlasic the pickle.

This one is a “different kind of superhero movie,” meaning even more fiercely attached to the mode of artistic expression known as “puberty.”

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.

Note to Greek chorus of execs: Turning a space psychodrama into a “He went to Jared” commercial is pretty low, even for you.

I Saw the Light is as vital as a two-hour shrug.

Shankman's staging of the numbers - especially the leaden choreography and hackneyed locations such as the Hollywood sign - was far sloppier and less creative than for his last musical, the vastly superior "Hairspray."

Deadly dull.

The material in this spy spoof is, pardon the pun, awfully frayed.

This Canadian-South African labor of love has its heart in the right place, even if the leads seem to have been cast more for their hunky looks than their stiff acting.

Much of this footage might have been illuminating, even fascinating, in 2003. But seven years on, it's ancient history lacking insight, hindsight or a fresh take.

Why make a documentary about these marginal historical figures? Wouldn't one about their famous dad, author of "Death in Venice," etc., be more valuable?

A glacially paced, extremely moist, terminally gloomy and cliché-laden romantic drama with a supernatural twist.

Needlessly violent? No, Rambo is needfully violent. Johnny R. is a man constructed of violence.

It’s too bad there’s already a movie out this week called “The Shallows”; it would work so perfectly for the new film from Nicholas Winding Refn (“Drive”).

Herzlinger is a flack, not a filmmaker.

There are a few scares, but not enough to make up for the murky script.

Presenting a “true” adventure about a giant whale that supposedly inspired “Moby-Dick” raises tsunami-high expectations about In the Heart of the Sea that are crushed as thoroughly as if star Chris Hemsworth had brought down his “Thor” hammer on the entire enterprise.

Although a quick summary would suggest that Our Little Secret is the simplest and most domestic of Lohan’s trilogy of terror, the devices that lead to its wrap-up are anything but Hallmark happy.

A genuine oddity that's more watchable than it sounds.

An icky S&M thriller.

Never decides whether it wants to be a black comedy, drama, melodrama or some combination of the three. The acting and direction are all over the map in this consistently depressing, if occasionally interesting, slice of life.

A gorgeous snooze, somewhere between imitation Terrence Malick and a feature version of star Brad Pitt's notorious Vanity Fair layout with Angelina Jolie and their faux kids.

A sour, plotless and witless comedy-drama based on the final Mordecai Richler novel, wants to remind you of "Sideways" and its forlorn drink-moistened soul search. Giamatti is an ideal casting choice, but even this talented actor can't sell a lovable-jerk

This is one of those movies that's too cool to have a plot.

A popcorn picture that thinks it’s “The Last Emperor,” The Karate Kid is about as likely to grab your youngster’s attention as any other propaganda film made by the Chinese government.

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

A sluggish and murky sub-Polanski-esque psychodrama.

A gooey morass of indie-movie clichés, the wacky-family dramedy The Hollars marks yet another egregiously cutesy attempt to rekindle that “Garden State” magic.

Honest but also derivative and crude.

Feeble comic one-liners and slow pacing combine for a routine fangfest in this remake of the 1985 film.

Relentlessly depressing.

Overlong and grim to the point where some scenes are virtually unwatchable.

Drab, despairing and pointless.

Bright spots in The Greening of Whitney Brown are Bob the horse, a Gypsy Vanner who teaches Whitney about friendship and her rancher grandpa (Kris Kristofferson), who gets the Philly princess mucking out stalls.

A caper comedy that forgot to put in the laughs.

A better cast this time around — Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Sofía Vergara and Max Casella, with cameos by Jason Alexander, Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis — tries to breathe life into Goldman’s cliché-ridden plot.

The bite and bark of Underdog are both pretty awful, but little kids might take this pooch for a walk.

Chop up the film’s segments, replay them in any order, and things would make no more or less sense.

The races of Trading Paint, however, are as exciting as a Ford Taurus trying to parallel park.

This morbid, cruel movie seems leached of all things that might inadvertently give viewers pleasure.

It's a shame that the book "We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young" fell into the hands of writer-director Randall Wallace ("Braveheart"), a filmmaker who wouldn't recognize subtlety and understatement if they were to attack him in the street.

Boring and irritating, and also mildly offensive in its ignorant depiction of both Judaism and Catholicism.

Snowden could have been a character portrait, but instead it’s like “The Bourne Identity” minus the chases and fights, which is like a ham and cheese sandwich minus the ham and cheese. As a consequence, I suspect, this film will make no bread.

There's not much story but there are plenty of colorful, almost David Lynchian drug freakouts, as well as lots of sick violence.

The ingredients are there for a cute con game, but instead the movie turns out to be a mushy melodrama.

Indeed, one never doubts that cast and crew went into Wide Awake with anything but the best intentions. Yet, spiritual kiddie flick or not, one knows what the road to hell is paved with. [20 Mar 1998, p.50]

Uma Thurman plays a flying hero who might as well be called Not Funny Woman.

None of these seemingly plot-rich questions are explored; instead, we’re stuck with a greasy-haired Mark Ruffalo, as his detective character flounders along in their wake, muttering that he doesn’t have time for this magic crap.

Has its laughs, but pretty much every single one of them is in the trailer. And even more unfortunately, the improbable new romantic comedy team of Steve Carell and Keira Knightley works about as well as you'd guess - like oil and water.

A strange Gallic imitation of a Woody Allen comedy, replete with a neurotic older hero.

Another project whose narrative gets swallowed by its design.

Sherlock Holmes dumbs down a century-old synonym for intelligence with S&M gags, witless sarcasm, murky bombast and twirling action-hero moves that belong in a ninja flick.

We keep waiting for a story, or at least some comedy, but none ever materializes. The dialogue makes Algebra II seem fascinating by comparison.

Sarah's Key belongs to the Holocaust for Dummies section of Harvey Weinstein's History for Dummies series of mer etricious glossy dramas that ransack global events and turn them into middlebrow women's weepies to fill his trophy case.

The problem is that there's not a sympathetic character among the nasty, brutish males. And the women, except for a flashy cameo by a swimsuit-clad Paris Hilton, are given short shrift.

Provides a few minor thrills, but overall is talky and implausible.

Lethally dull and self-important remake.

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

A wildly misanthropic and overlong black comedy.

James' character is a charmless, boring lump and it's very hard to care if he gets the girl or not.

A dreary message movie.

A lukewarm film about what might happen to three New York City friends if the draft were reinstated, proves that even the most controversial of topics can be the basis for the dullest indie films.

A bland look at professional surfing.

I had the sensation of sitting through a fourth-grade school play that contained no children of my own: the very definition of a nightmare.

A sluggish and prototypically earnest little indie on the not exactly fresh theme of a woman undergoing a midlife crisis.

Indulgent, tedious documentary.

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

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

What they’ve chopped up is a cacophony of half-baked characters and rushed ideas that leave you puzzled and unsatisfied. A better title would be “The Chore.”

A slow trudge devoid of suspense and adrenaline.

Richard Jeffries' script tosses together bits of plot borrowed from such "bad things happen when you leave the city" classics as "Straw Dogs" and "Deliverance" without any awareness of how or why genre conventions work.

As the fourth entry of a painfully uninspired series, this version features new actors portraying the trio of adolescent warriors. [10 Apr 1998, p.49]

"Schindler's List" it ain't, and the whole is rendered occasionally surreal by Janusz Stoklosa's laughably heavy-handed score.

Seems almost like a self-parody of Williams' earlier work.

The best compensation for sitting through this silliness is Alice Taglioni as the primary cop.

The new movie, directed by Joe Wright and written by Dinklage’s wife Erica Schmidt, ranks with the most lifeless adaptations. Even the swishy dances are a downer.

It's a cute idea that a better filmmaker than writer-director Michael Schroeder could have done a lot with.

The film is narrated by Russell Crowe, whose star power is probably the only reason it's being released here.