Marines did not play football in full anti-chemical suits in 112-degree weather; men would have been collapsing and perhaps dying because it was so hard to breathe in the gas masks. Do I quibble over details? Details are all the movie offers. There isn't a story.

Latifah, a formidable actress who's almost always better than her movies, easily dominates this hokey cross between "Glee'' and "Sister Act.''

It all leads nowhere. There are pull-the-rug-out endings, and then there are pull-the-floor-out endings. The Escapist leaves you standing on nothing, like Wile E. Coyote, wondering why you bothered to come this far.

Isn't as bad as the year's first abysmal Martian movie, "Mission to Mars," but it's pretty close.

Preying on a hurting city might be forgiven if the movie was any good. But Willis, who was once a formidable action star, is performing “Die Hard With an Ambien” as he exhibits zero emotion and mutters under his breath like an accountant who’s upset with his boss.

Ultimately, though, the lack of story and relentless suffering make Raze appealing for hard-core genre fans only.

An ugly, failed attempt to pull off a "Heathers"-style, teen-oriented black comedy.

Jobs amounts to, at best, a Cliffs Notes version of the man’s early life. If you want the real story, you’ll have to read Walter Isaacson’s fascinating 2011 biography, which would make a much better film than this one.

At some point, all this visual trickery stops being clever and devolves into flashy, vaguely silly overkill.

Worse, it’s as funny as a political science class.

For a noir, the film is way too talky and convoluted, yet for a physics lesson, it's trash.

The film is clearly an unfinished work and one that feels like a ragged assemblage of parts from at least two entirely different movies all with the same cast.

This flaccid comedy tries to spark your interest by undressing two of its four stars down to their underwear for significant periods of time. More outrageously, neither of those people is Jon Hamm.

The bloodshed is artful, at least.

Less than compelling as drama -- but boy is this an impressive collection of wildly ugly hairstyles, moustaches, clothing and "earth tone" furniture from 1983.

Running Scared has some camp value as the kind of midnight movie you can laugh at (not with), but it isn't so much imitation Tarantino as it is imitation imitation Tarantino.

A sloppy and only mildly engaging documentary.

When Neeson engages in bare-knuckle fisticuffs at the climax of the cartoonish Taken 2, I honestly couldn't figure out if the 60-year-old actor was actually present at all except for the close-ups.

Gil Kofman has an interesting and funny story to tell in his documentary Unmade in China. Too bad he spends more time talking about himself than detailing his misadventures in Xiamen, China, population 3.67 million.

Their '50s-style comedy mugging not only don't come across to Americans, it's hard to believe even New Zealanders would care.

Cop Car is an instance of what happens when an airy indie filmmaker tries to “do genre” and winds up being as convincing as John Kerry putting down his demitasse and dressing up in hunting gear.

A brightly colored but terminally dull cartoon.

For connoisseurs of the “Grudge” series, the brief prelude of this fourth installation links it to the ones that came before. Everybody else, good luck making that connection.

Matthew Broderick graduates from "boyish" and lurches straight into "curmudgeonly" in the would-be indie heartwarmer Wonderful World.

One sequence is amusing: a number called “Fairytale Life (After the Spell)” in which panini grills and espresso machines sing along like they live in Pee-wee’s Playhouse. You struggle to care about the rest.

A good cast equipped with cute names is forced to muddle through terminal whimsy in this less-than-magical adaptation of Aimee Bender's adult fairy tale, sluggishly directed by Marilyn Agrelo, who more successfully helmed the delightful documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom."

Aside from an additional 30 minutes or so of plot, Trade of Innocents offers no more than a middling episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

A kid unversed in other name-brand fantasy movies might go for The Seeker, but in 2007 it's redundant, a puttering Potter without wit and whimsy.

"Precious" worked partly because it did not wrap its sordid tale in Christian uplift and dime-store psychology -- elements that have made Tyler Perry a rich filmmaker but have turned For Colored Girls shrill and manipulative.

In the clumsy hands of director Rob Marshall, this tacky, all-star botch more closely resembles a video catalog for Victoria’s Secret.

Most damning of all, the dark mystery hinted at throughout is revealed so lazily it lands with zero impact. It’s long been clear that Cage has opted for quantity in his movie roles, but maybe a little quality control wouldn’t hurt.

Suffers from terminal hoof-in-mouth disease.

Ralph Fiennes as Gun’s eventual lawyer, however, is totally forgettable, as is much of the standard-issue, self-important docudrama. So much of Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein and Gavin Hood’s screenplay arrives with a thud that it might’ve been written with clenched fists. Knightley’s overwrought performance doesn’t help either.

So unremittingly vulgar and inept it makes "The Best Man" and "Runaway Bride" look like masterpieces by comparison.

A cheap exploitation picture wrapped in miles and miles of stale would-be Oscar scenes.

Do your kids a favor - and take them to see something more worthwhile than the relentlessly vulgar and stupid See Spot Run.

Alas, the laughs - courtesy of screenwriters J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress and director David R. Ellis - are unintentional.

Give director Paul Borghese credit for daring in giving his movie a title that evokes Sergio Leone’s two most famous epics. The trouble with doing that, of course, is that you better be prepared to deliver a movie on the same level.

Basically a deadly dull rehash of "Resident Evil," which in turn was a third-generation clone of "Aliens."

Not every movie can come from the heart: This one is from the crotch. But what’s left for the sequel? Maybe it’ll feature Mark and Denzel sporting matching leather codpieces or giving each other bikini waxes. We can only hope.

Director Gabe Torres lobs a twist you'll likely see coming, and another you may not - neither satisfying enough to justify an hour and a half of Dorff-in-a-box.

Violent and unoriginal actioner.

A well-intentioned, semi-autobiographical pastiche, is trapped in a straitjacket of political correctness, self-conscious acting and spurts of try-hard dialogue that come off as precious.

Remarkably dull thriller.

Has the aroma of an autobiographical confession by someone for whom life hasn’t been overly difficult.

The preachy movie is hardly worth the hassle and money required to see it in a theater. Better to download it or wait for it to pop up on TV.

The kind of movie that cries out for the fast-forward button.

The cheesy techno-thriller The Outsider is a blaring B-movie that doesn’t have much going for it, but it does have an engaging action hero in its leading man, a snarling Cockney badass named Craig Fairbrass.

The last topic is the hook for audience members not related to Gregory or Kleine, but just as insight appears, back we go to Kleine's tediously selfreferential narration.

Keeps such a lazy pace, with so many scenes that fail to move the story forward, that it should be cited for failing to meet the minimum speed for a crime drama.

The movie independently bungles everything it tries, like a Central Park busker who simultaneously sucks at juggling, harmonica playing and skateboarding.

This (hopefully) final chapter's interminable first hour...showcases some of the clunkiest dialogue and wooden acting since the most recent "Star Wars" movies.

Not as vile as "Sleepover," nor as tangy as "Mean Girls."

CHOKE tries to be dirty but manages merely to be dingy.

The first time I saw Yes Man, I thought the concept was getting kind of stale toward the end. As it turns out, that was only the trailer.

These films take years to produce, so The Wild isn't exactly a ripoff - but it isn't exactly fun, either.

A raunchy, sporadically funny comedy.

A very shallow, very glossy 2½-hour travelogue starring a miscast Julia Roberts as a spoiled, self-centered divorcée who decides to get away from it all.

A film so rife with plot holes that it would make a decent pasta strainer.

Lilien is an amateur filmmaker, and his movie -- which at times is more about Lilien than Pale Male -- shows it.

Even dumber than Perry's "Three to Tango," this latest sitcommy exercise is sporadically funny in spite of itself -- and not quite as dreadful as you would suspect.

Allegiance works better as a way of reminding us who does the fighting in this age of outsourcing than it does as a human drama.

What was great fun before is mostly mopey and depressing now. A hunk, a hunk of burning IP.

For a story whose appeal hinges on the saving grace of getting a "purpose-driven life," this one's got remarkably little of it.

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!”

Incoherent, inept, testosterone-drenched mess, which is very much the brain-dead male equivalent of "Sex and the City 2."

For the most part, it's both sitcomishly predictable and cloying in its attempts to be poignant.

What is astonishing is that husband-and-wife writers Wally Wolodarsky (who also directed) and Maya Forbes, with combined credits that include "The Simpsons" and "The Larry Sanders Show," could churn out something this nasty and ludicrous.

This is less a documentary than a wholly uncritical celebration.

Pretentious, stagy and over-the-top update of Chekov's "The Three Sisters."

The opening montage raises expectations of a serious, politically incisive depiction of the region. What we actually get is an offensively pandering, Bruckheimer-esque riff on the real-life Khobar Towers bombing of 1996, a Saudi Hezbollah attack that killed 19 Americans.

The worst crime perpetrated in the Swiss-cheese screenplay by Gerald Di Pego ("Angel Eyes") is the cynical use of a mother's love for her child as a plot device for an intelligence-insulting sci-fi dud.

As portrayed by Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky weren't exactly Rhett & Scarlett.

Frank’s work is phenomenal, but his longtime editor and collaborator Laura Israel seems determined during the course of her documentary never to give you a moment long enough to contemplate it.

For a movie that's trumpeted as providing a probing look beyond the comic's onstage patter, there's an awful lot of onstage patter -- and what nasty, hateful stuff it is.

Might have worked as a travelogue, minus the story. In its present form, it is hardly worth the $10 you will be asked to fork over at the box office.

A slow train to Dullsville that makes all local stops. You know a film is in trouble if the most interesting thing in it is the luggage.

The clichéd and predictable Suspect Zero is the latest evidence that Hollywood has run the serial-killer thriller into the ground through overuse - the same way it earlier exhausted, say, buddy action-comedies.

Fake-sounding dialogue, some over-deliberate performances and five amazingly trite linked stories.

Ryan Reynolds isn't around this time - and neither is most of the wit.

A couple of grand, intriguing ideas does not a movie make. Say it with me, folks: It’s the little things.

There's a hint of nostalgia toward the end, with Jason encountering two nubile female campers in a virtual reality Camp Crystal Lake -- but it merely serves as a reminder that the franchise should have quit while it was ahead.

The girl kept talking and strategizing as heavy string music played on the soundtrack. This was doubly weird because: a) it made me feel like the bad guy; and b) life doesn’t normally have a soundtrack. Somehow the bitch got hold of a flare gun. Ever had a flare gun fired into your hide? Unpleasant.

Amy Sedaris, channeling her inner Frances McDormand as a hyper admissions coach, gets most of the laughs.

The Concert is an art-house trap, the cinematic equivalent of one of those salads that turns out to have more calories than a Big Mac. And for the same reason: gobs of thick, sweet dressing.

A great-looking but wearyingly cliched and confusing vanity production.

Murphy has fallen back into the comfortable rut of sloppy family comedies that are low on laughs and high on toilet jokes.

Something high schoolers might yawn through in history class, but they have no choice. You do.

By the time this corn festival is over, you'll be crying out for the relative toughness of the average Jimmy Stewart film.

A campy docu-drama about the secretly gay world of 1950's muscle magazines.

To paraphrase that old quip about slow-paced art films, it literally is watching paint dry.

Well-meaning yawn-fest.

Unfortunately, this version of the familiar formula lacks the inspiration, genuine wit and raunchy charm of 1998's outrageous "There's Something About Mary."

Remarkably sluggish and not particularly suspenseful.

Might have worked as a 10-minute sketch.

Branagh’s warped vision of these films as putrid, depressing slogs makes Death on the Nile interminable.

An awkward hybrid of genres that just doesn't work.

Slicker than most attempts to document Monroe's successes and tragic trajectory, but even her own words don't provide much more of an insight into what made this troubled icon tick.