A hit-and-miss affair.

The film feels unbelievably long at 84 minutes, and the color-drained, hand-held cinematography serves only as a reminder of just how good "Night of the Living Dead" really was.

None of the actors has the heft to elevate this rote material, though to be fair, the task may be impossible. The dreamy shots of a poisoned sea in Little Birds show an imagination sorely missing from its drab plot and characters.

The documentary is unapologetically one-sided, and spends more time canonizing Abu-Jamal than exploring the murder and trial themselves. Still it raises issues of racism in America (flashback to George Wallace) that are worthy of discussion.

A mockumentary that veers unsteadily between satire and an infomercial for Dash's Roc-A-Fella records.

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

A truly baffling late entry in the "Pulp Fiction" sweepstakes that ends up drowning in its own pretensions -- along with, quite possibly, what's left of Val Kilmer's movie career.

At first glance, Grassroots doesn't seem like much of an idea for a movie. Nor at second, third or fourth glance. Your fifth glance will be at your watch, and at sixth glance your eyelids will be getting very, very heavy.

There are a few ingenious zig zags in its otherwise by-the-numbers plot...but what keeps you interested... is the sheer movie-star presence of the actors in the lead roles.

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.

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.

Thanks to an unexpected twist and a clever motivation lurking in the back story of the super-villain, G-Force has enough going on to more or less maintain grown-up interest, and there's plenty to please the kiddies.

Lurches so wildly and meaninglessly between genres and time frames that all it creates is motion sickness.

You'd be better off renting Demi Moore's "Striptease."

A pointless, wincingly snide exercise.

Overall, Miss Bala is a misfire — but its leading lady is No. 1 with a bullet. And that’s a beautiful sight to see.

Unfortunately, the film turns out to be not quite as twisty as promised: it’s less a pretzel than it is a Cheez Curl. And I do mean cheez: The resolution, when it comes, is wholly lacking in nutritional value.

The movie boasts five Oscar winners. That figure exceeds by five the number of times I laughed at this cheap collection of icky jokes.

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

Williams appears to be having trouble keeping his eyes open, and the audience will, too.

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.

A movie that won’t knock you out with originality but may charm you with its wit.

Mojave is a movie-length standoff between two detestable villains. One is a serial killer. The other is a filmmaker.

They resort too often to infantile flatulence jokes and fairly obvious gags about errant G-strings, with the anorexic plot culminating in the brothers having - yawn - learned to respect women's feelings.

“Short Circuit” meets “RoboCop” — with asides to “WALL-E,” “E.T.,” “The Road Warrior” and many other better movies — in Chappie, an interminable, violent, incoherent and wearying R-rated sci-fi action comedy.

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.

Italian director Carlo Carlei has a background in TV movies, and this film, plodding and earnest, seems meant for the small screen, too.

An eccentric little comic thriller filled with enough laughs that I was mostly willing to overlook the fact that it makes virtually no sense as a thriller.

Veteran screenwriter John Pogue, in his second directorial outing, tries repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully to jolt his audience by amping up the abundant sound effects to ear-shattering levels.

While it's not a disaster like Kasdan's last film, "Dreamcatcher'' (2003), Darling Companion doesn't amount to much more than a fairly painless way for the AARP set to spend an hour and a half watching a movie with stars their own age.

Treats us to some feverish decapitating, juicy stabbing and non-anesthetized fingertip removal.

The real mystery here is why this slapdash semi-effort didn't go straight to video.

A particularly gross exploitation of the Holocaust for financial gain.

Ignore the furiously overplotted, headache-inducing story -- derived from a series of comic books -- and focus on the exquisitely drawn Japanese animation.

The only prize this shamelessly derivative schlock is likely to be in the running for is the year's dullest thriller.

Visually stunning.

The best thing about Some Body -- an amateurish, quasi-improvised acting exercise shot on ugly digital video -- is that it's all over in 80 minutes.

Crystal, for what it’s worth, stays genuine through the increasingly viscous plot. He still has that warmth beneath his zingers that you don’t find in the frigid comedians of today. Nonetheless, we resent his movie’s aggressive efforts to force us into crying with strained, untruthful moments by the bucketful.

Gerren's story is fascinating, but Roberts dilutes it by going off on tangents about unsafe cosmetics and phony plastic surgeons. Both topics need exploring - just not here. There's more than enough drama in Gerren's life.

So deadpan are the dialogue and narration that it's hard to tell whether the laughs are intentional. What with all the shrieking, dumb bad-girl hookers and the wistful, wounded good-girl hookers, the sexism is so creepy it might be an ironic genre critique. Then again, maybe it's just creepy.

If Falling for Christmas simply fleshed out Sierra more, and made us believe she was in love with Jake, not just grinning at everybody, we’d have a movie. Instead, it’s a predictable stunt.

Molly’s Theory of Relativity is anti-cinema. All hope for any plot atrophies as Molly and her husband discuss their possible move to Norway with the wit and passion of a representative reading a tribute to Calvin Coolidge into the Congressional Record.

Yet another murky film about the 1970s that's watchable mostly for its cast rather than the story.

A cartoonish 1940s shoot-'em-up that's impossible to take seriously.

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.

Gibson’s got another strong performance in him, I think, but this Christmas crapola sure ain’t it.

Somewhat refreshingly aspiring to be nothing more than a disposable summer popcorn movie, this is a flick that delivers more smiles than laughs and has some wonderful special effects.

Sex can be fun and exciting and wonderful. It also can be deadly boring, as in Psychopathia Sexu alis.

The sort of lowbrow sports comedy best enjoyed on a 50-inch screen with a six-pack, a bucket of wings and a fast-forward button.

We keep waiting for one of those outlandish musical treats to bring some life to the clichéd script. Kunder throws in a few breaks, but they're tepid and brief.

Throws in enough hurtling bodies, screaming bullets and totaled cars that it at least holds your interest, so it passes the worth-watching-if-you're-stuck-on-an-airplane test.

Directed by Susan Montford, While She Was Out is a straight-to-DVD movie making a brief stop in theaters.

Make no mistake, though: The Perfect Family is Kathleen Turner's show. And when a series of crises forces Eileen to re-examine her values and beliefs, Turner rises magnificently to the occasion.

This is hardly reinventing the wheel, but it is serviceable, if you're looking for a few shivery communal scares.

Coming Up Roses swerves into a third-act twist that's both an indie cliché and dramatically unnecessary.

Imagine the French lesbian romance “Blue Is the Warmest Color’’ as a raunchy American exploitation flick with loads of fake gore. That’s a rough idea of the latest from Lloyd Kaufman, the exuberant shockmeister whose Troma Team is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

Congratulations are in order to Table 19: This comedy about the random losers stuck together at a wedding reception actually, uncannily, creates an experience as dull, awkward and excruciating as the thing it mocks.

Refreshing as it is to see the military portrayed as something other than a band of neurotics and creeps, there's a reason this brand of rah-rah and bang-bang didn't outlast the age of Whitesnake and Marty McFly.

McCarthy shines when loosely riffing, but the plot tightens around her like a vise.

The three friends do things that venture beyond entertainingly dumb and into exasperatingly unbelievable.

As the horror genre has, in recent years, grown more sophisticated and clever, you heave a sigh of relief to be handed a thriller that’s so dumb.

The movie begins to wear out its welcome even before a conclusion of breathtaking corniness.

Molly Shannon is dementedly charming as Eva.

Low on raunch but even lower on laughs. It also looks like half the lighting crew failed to show up.

Train wreck.

The generic plot is redeemed by exciting action sequences, good-looking location photography and a hot sex scene involving a femme fatale named Lea (pixie-haired Melanie Thierry).

If it has a genius for anything, it’s disorganization: What promised to be a Super Bowl of villainy turned out more like toddler playtime.

Lackluster anime.

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.

It wouldn't matter so much that this arrogant Richard Pryor wannabe's routine is offensive, puerile and unimaginatively foul-mouthed if it was at least funny.

Bland, occasionally funny.

The sort of heart-tugger a small group of people will love passionately.

Crashing chandelier, crashing bore.

Damonically awful.

The Goldfinch should be called “CliffsNotes: The Movie,” because after seeing this pedantic film adaptation, I now know all 3 billion plot points of Donna Tartt’s acclaimed 2013 novel. And, like skimming a colorless cheat sheet, I still have no clue what’s so great about it.

At last, someone has figured out that there might be laughs in teens trying to lose their virginity.

An occasionally delightful mess of a movie.

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

Tim & Eric seem driven by a hatred of the audience and a wish to punish the same. Every episode of every sitcom I've ever seen is funnier than this movie, and I used to watch "Just Shoot Me."

Besson provided the story and co-wrote the screenplay for a film directed by McG, who does his usual McGhastly job with action and is McGruesome when it comes to comedy.

Despite a sympathetic lead performance from Steve Carell, the fictionalized version bogs down in extensive animated doll sequences, so similar they grow increasingly tiresome.

One of the silliest, most sieve-like screenplays of the year.

A gleaming hunk of French period schmaltz expertly rendered by director Christophe Barratier.

The banality of evil has met its match in the banality of Good, a Holocaust parable that barely registers a pulse.

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

The dullness of this writing is more than matched by the dull look achieved by director Allen Coulter, who appears to have shot the film through a piece of yard-sale Tupperware.

Todd Robinson’s Phantom gives us a couple of things we haven’t seen in a while: the great Ed Harris and a Cold War submarine thriller. It’s not something you want to plunk down $12 for, but just diverting enough to check out when it arrives on Netflix Instant.

A perfect storm of wooden acting, hackneyed direction, inane scripting and laughably cartoonish special effects produces a shapeless mess more wearyingly stupid than arch-villian Dr. Doom is evil.

Expertly serves shivers, buckets of gore — and pretty much every cliché of the genre.

In “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy,” Robert De Niro did stand-up comedy badly. In The Comedian he does it badly again — there’s that same air of menace and gracelessness — but this time the movie want us to think he’s brilliant.

Funny more often than not. Worth checking out on video.

Relentlessly depressing.

As huge a travesty and a bore as 1956's "Alexander the Great," in which Richard Burton looked equally uncomfortable as a blond.

Without Branagh's pitch-perfect comedic skills the entire movie could have been crushed under the avalanche of quips and wisecracks tumbling from Kalesniko's too-clever-by-half pen.

Relentlessly stupid.

They may not have made another "Back to the Future," but to their credit, the makers of Clockstoppers don't patronize or underestimate their pre-teen audience nearly as much as has become customary.

Scary Movie 4 concludes by satirizing Cruise's couch-jumping orgy on "Oprah." Funny, but nowhere near as hilarious as the real thing.

Sort of "The Da Vinci Code for Dummies."