Under Mark Palansky's uninspired direction, magic eludes Penelope in scene after scene.

Rent "Enchanted" with Adams, and watch Goode as Colin Firth's boyfriend in his other current movie, "A Single Man."

One of those painfully earnest -- and pretentious -- little indies in which a pair of emotional cripples neatly resolve all of their problems within 48 hours of meeting each other.

Relentlessly mediocre cartoon.

The scenes are either too heavy (the climax is the downer of the year), too sedate or too gross.

For all its promise to be a wry commentary on the savagery of office politics, The Belko Experiment is more like an experiment in how many cracked-open skulls can be crammed into one movie.

For starters, it wasn't a great idea to basically borrow the premise of "The Blues Brothers'' and turn these quintessential Jewish characters (something that's not even hinted at) into the bumbling would-be saviors of the Catholic orphanage where they were raised.

A real crock.

A noisy, amateurish mess that doesn't work on any level - an extended, clich-ridden MTV video set to anachronistic bad music.

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

For a 99 percenter movie, then, Elysium is kind of a head-scratcher. It throws away its best opportunity for drama. It’s as if Han and Leia parked on the Death Star and started asking, “How much is a two-bedroom around here?”

Spits out enough scares and twists to maintain our interest, but the film's psycho-sociological layer is almost as cheesy and unconvincing as its low-rent action scenes.

Misses everything that made the first one eat into your spine like meningitis.

This future looks awfully passé: The stimulus didn't work out. Neither did 1917 Russia.

Do these stylistic and narrative departures constitute a smart shake-up of the old mummy formula, as Cronin’s movie promises to do? Eh, not really. The director mostly reshapes what a mummy actually is to suit his lackluster whims.

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.

You get the feeling the guy who wrote Transformers: Age of Extinction used the entire script as a passive-aggressive running joke on his boss, director Michael Bay.

You know a movie's got problems when the most memo rable thing about it is Sienna Miller's mustache.

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

The men who made The Guardian strive to be the averagest of the average - and don't quite succeed.

In The Life of Chuck, the pieces come together much too obviously. And the takeaways — that a person is the product of experience, and don’t judge a book by its cover — are well-tread to the point of total flatness.

Hollywood movies are rarely as contemptuous of the audience as Dragonfly, with its half-witted, treacly New Age sappiness and its mechanical borrowings from other, better supernatural thrillers.

Relies far too much on an overdose of gore and a pack of hungry wolves to deliver its chills.

As in genuine porn, most of the acting (except for Skarsgard, who deliberately tries to be funny and sometimes succeeds) is as flat and uninteresting as the script — even when the older Joe narrates a montage of flaccid penises.

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.”

The shtick movie Paranormal Activity 3 is the horror equivalent of vaudeville comedy: a little patter, a little pie in the face, repeat.

A movie that features Wahlberg suggesting everyone try to outrun the wind can barely be watched once.

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

Bad in ways that are almost endearing, St. Trinian's does offer the spectacle of Rupert Everett mincing around in drag as a headmistress bedeviled by Colin Firth, as an education minister and former lover who wants to shut down her out-of-control school.

Mostly, Freak Weather is just pathetic.

It is a boring parade of talking heads and technical gibberish that will do little to advance the Linux cause. Try again, guys.

Lame family filler.

It turns out the stories don't unite at all. Instead, we get a series of dramatic vignettes, most of them decently executed but all of them rooted in the weepy sensibility of TV movies.

Mildly interesting.

I’ve never seen a restaurant documentary that seemed less interested in showing the joy of food.

New Moon is supposed to be an exciting love story plus monster action. So where’s the excitement? Where’s the action?

So Arnold Schwarzenegger has reached the shaky-cam-and-hoodies stage of his career. But it’s a bit late in the day for Arnold to try to get all indie and complicated.

What was once a sophisticated, edgy, witty, sexy drama series has become “The Love Boat” Season 10. Though these wax figures’ love is even less exciting and neeeeew than that old show.

Preposterous romantic melodrama, which uses a fractured narrative to cloud an absurd plot that would probably be laughed off the screen if it were presented in a straightforward manner.

Blake Lively doesn't have a whole lot to do as Hal's employer and occasional lover, who sometimes requires rescuing. No great loss; she and Reynolds have minus-zero chemistry.

There's an argument to be made that sex scenes, done to death, are best left to the imagination - but only if they're replaced by something more interesting. In 30 Beats, the conversational foreplay is hopelessly flaccid.

About the only reason to stay with this increasingly histrionic film is to satisfy curiosity about exactly how Diego will (as we learn at the outset) die, but long before we learn that Twice Born chokes to death on its own melodrama.

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

A self-indulgent chronicle of Chris Roe's whiny power struggle with his father over where to eat dinner in various exotic locales.

The considerable talents of Banks make the movie bearable.

Jon Stewart’s filmmaking debut Rosewater has much in common with “The Daily Show” — it’s blaringly obvious, it’s naive, it plays to the cheap seats and it’s enamored with cheap jokes.

Poor John Leguizamo, who hopefully got well-paid to voice a stereotypical Latino bird providing a stream of nonsensical narration.

The screenplay by Zekri (based on Jorge Amado novel) is crude stuff, and director Ossama Fawzi gets such cartoonish performances from his cast, it's hard to care about the characters.

Marinated in clichés and mawkish dialogue.

It’s all terribly talky and low-energy; that wonderful noirish title, it turns out, was just a front for a history lecture.

The dialogue is so vague, and the plot so minimal, it all feels like a rather pointless exercise.

Beautiful Brit actress Sophia Myles ("From Hell") is so arch, canny and amusing as the posh, pink-obsessed spy Lady Penelope, it's as if she is acting in the movie this should have been.

Director Boaz Yakin (“Remember the Titans”) indulges in an awful lot of gunplay for a PG-rated family film, but sure knows how to stage a dirt-bike race. The Belgian malinoises who play Max way out-act the humans.

an overlong and surprisingly dull documentary.

Despite oblique references to "Psycho" and "Children of the Corn," Freddy vs. Jason lacks the knowing wit needed to keep it afloat in an age when even the horror spoofs have been spoofed.

Argentina’s noir Everybody Has a Plan is as sludgy as the river delta in which it takes place.

Working in Terribly Serious mode, rookie director Chris Terrio proves as pompous as filmmakers three times his age.

It's apt that the Rome weather in this stodgy film, contrary to the title, seems quite temperate.

Horror-movie vets Harrington ("Wrong Turn") and Sagemiller ("Soul Survivors") struggle unsuccessfully with characters who are frequently more plastic than Nikki.

With seemingly no understanding of how tone-deaf it might be to cast a straight, white, able-bodied blonde like Schumer as victimized by society’s judgment, the lazily written I Feel Pretty takes a talented comic and casts her in the worst possible light (and I don’t mean that literally — she looks fine).

Ben Stiller's overbearing schtick officially reaches its expiration date with the desperate and puerile Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

A suspenseless rehash.

The story of a guy who never goes anywhere or does anything. Until he goes everywhere and does everything, but he might as well have stayed home.

Yet another screwed-up mess that will give audiences another excuse to shun the multiplexes this weekend.

The story is far less gripping than the consistency of the hunky lead actor’s facial hair. For most of the two hours or so, the beard is perfect. Frozen in time.

A cartoonish, unfocused and mostly unfunny satire.

Real Steel is to action what the Anthony Weiner habit was to sex: It's so virtual, so distant from the thrill, that you wonder what the point is. Do you really want to pay to watch an actor playing a kid who in turn plays what amounts to a video game?

The contrast between Chan's charm and physical prowess and Tucker's lack of same is even more dramatic in this tiresome, leaden sequel.

Much has been made of the fact that Promised Land was partly funded by the enemies of our domestic gas industry - the foreign oil nabobs in the United Arab Emirates. But the film gets so cheesy that I suspect it was also secretly funded by Velveeta.

Combines a sketch-comedy premise with pacing like a philosophy seminar.

It’s a heavy lift to find any single thing that happens here remotely plausible, and ultimately it almost seems a horror movie misinterpreted as a romance. File this one under “The Fault in Our Screenplay.”

Sex comedies work best with light touch, and as the ponderous title (a literal translation of the French term for orgasm) indicates, Australian writer-director Josh Lawson mostly doesn’t have it.

A cinematic listicle of misleading economic talking points.

Fairly cringe-inducing, full of witless double-entendres and the requisite "gags" involving bodily fluids.

You can't spell cliché without Che. And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right?

Young men and fast cars are automatically stupid together, but even if you set your intelligence level at “off” — and you should — you’ll get a hangover from this cocktail of 200-proof stupid, clinking with moron ice cubes and with an idiot cherry on top.

This movie is basically “Spinal Tap” minus the jokes. Two of the band members have the word “Metallica” emblazoned on their clothing. Metallica — it’s the band that has to remind fans whom they’re watching!

While the original was an art-house success, this English-language redo, now getting a one-week run after sitting on the shelf for a year and a half, doesn't measure up.

Rockwell is incapable of being boring, so there’s some small entertainment to be found in watching his buttoned-up beta male blossom into full Sam Rockwell.

Oblivious to both narrative logic and the laws of physics, the cliché-filled San Andreas doesn’t nearly have the star power of earlier, better disaster movies it borrows from like “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno.”

It often seems like an acting workshop: Behave as if you are the parent of a dead child.

Shooting in South Africa and Botswana, director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee never lacks for atmosphere, but his film is painfully awkward in execution, from the stiff dialogue to the time-padding slo-mo sequences and glaring CGI.

Treading the same halls as “Kick-Ass” and “Kingsman,” Barely Lethal imagines an academy of teen assassins. Life there is deadly, but not as scary as high school.

Li is powerless when the film slows to a crawl to provide a little drama.

This rambling, overproduced, tone-deaf melange of romance, comedy and drama is only slightly more engaging than Brooks' other feature this century, the unfortunate Adam Sandler vehicle "Spanglish" (2004).

Takeshi's elliptical directorial style here is overwhelmed by the script's crudeness and lack of narrative power.

It’s macho eye-candy of the cheapest kind, endless scenes of gunfire and explosions and rugged, handsome actors running while shooting and yelling.

“First Steps” marks a slight improvement from the preceding trilogy of terror. But Marvel still can’t nail what should be one of its premiere attractions.

Intermittently funny, often vulgar.

This is the kind of movie that gives art-house movies a bad name. Seeing as it’s about lobotomies in the 1950s, it is also ripe for “ice-pick- through-the-eye” jokes about the pain of watching it. But I would never stoop so low.

Director Kevin Bray, whose clichéd style betrays his music-video roots, devotes far too much time to the mechanics of the illogical plot.

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

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

Take away the shaky cam, the indie-film sheen, the “brave” close-ups of Lively looking wretched, and what’s left has all the depth of a 1970s B movie.

Turn the River lacks almost everything Eigeman has as a performer: charisma, wit and snappy delivery.

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.

Would be a perfectly decent B-action movie if it weren't shipwrecked in the last act by laughably ridiculous plotting and a lazily executed climax.

The tone of The Playroom is one of soppy moroseness. This imitation “Ice Storm” is as refreshing as a step into a puddle of slush.