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.

Fails as a detective story, but it does offer an entertaining look at the punk scene in the 1970s.

The would-be noir Beyond a Rea sonable Doubt has an absurd story, but on the plus side you can hardly see what's going on because the photography is so murky.

The terrorism thriller Java Heat sure is violent. I don’t even want to tell you how viciously Mickey Rourke mangles the French accent he’s trying to do.

Cavanagh, the always-engaging former star of "Ed" (with whom I am friendly), and the adorable Faris (whom I don't know -- but feel free to look me up, Anna!) make the non-animated scenes amusing, as the ranger and the documentarian fall in love and fight to save the park. But the script doesn't give them a lot to do.

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.

Hollywood's Thanksgiving turkey arrives today - 27 days early - in the gobbling guise of the heavily hyped, brain-dead comedy, I Spy.

Strictly a kids' movie, but parents may be relieved to sit back and enjoy the fact that for two full hours, they won't have to hear the kids asking them to buy any more Pokemon trading cards.

The Wedding Ringer is not so much a rom-com as an anatomy lesson. And the lesson is this: Men have balls. They must have them, or grow them, otherwise they are not men. They are little girls.

The schmaltzy Diana is directed at a dirge-like pace by German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose film “Downfall’’ depicted the final days of Hitler and provided one of the Internet’s most enduring memes.

Dull and dreary prequel.

Self/less is a celluloid smoothie blended from dozens of familiar elements, but it’s neither tasty nor nutritious.

It features well-below-par writing, acting, direction, special effects and music, while oozing a nauseating New Age sentimentality that undermines any tension in the underlying story.

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

Watching Wake is akin to listening to anonymous neighbors argue about matters you know nothing about -- nor care about. You only wish they'd shut up.

Un-magical, unfunny and un-romantic alleged comedy.

Lopez, appearing in her first rom-com since “Monster-in-Law” five years ago, is still a likable screen presence who throws herself into the movie’s slapstick sequences with unwarranted enthusiasm.

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.

Among group-suicide movies, A Long Way Down may prove uniquely inspirational: It’s bound to make audience members want to kill themselves. It might be the only summer movie during which the snack bars will be selling cyanide Kool-Aid.

An amusingly preposterous last act keeps you guessing, or maybe keeps you ducking, as it lets rip an avalanche of startling revelations and double-crosses. Nothing is what it seems - unless it seems cheesy.

It's nicely photographed but slow-moving, dull and utterly predictable.

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.

Japan’s loony suicide culture seems like an adequately scary backdrop for a horror movie, but the routine horror flick The Forest mostly settles for cheap thrills.

The director, Queens-born Adam Watstein, who also edited and co-produced, deserves credit for making a film with modest resources.

Looks great for a no-budget indie, but not a single moment rings true in this sluggish vanity project, which is sorely in need of Viagra.

The season's first genuine guilty pleasure.

Copperhead has a more accurate period look, but dramatically it’s inert.

Screenwriter Marc Lawrence, who worked on the original, throws in unbelievable plot twists merely as excuses for comic mayhem.

A hapless family film that's too scary for little kids and too boring for everyone else.

More "it stinks" than *NSYNC.

The dialogue, at best serviceable, becomes completely superfluous.

Just to give you a taste of the movie's sophisticated idea of wit, it also makes fun of gay men.

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

Aloft is less like a story than a dream, populated with gorgeous people and symbolism you can interpret any way you like.

Too bad this Tower of Error will leave them muttering “Redrum. Redrum” on the way out.

The movie left me amazed — amazed that Nicolas Cage wasn’t in it.

It’s well-executed but familiar territory, with a dearth of jarring moments. Those of us who aren’t friends and family of the crew could use a little wake-up shove here and there.

“Grandpa” is, at least, not as moronic as much of De Niro’s recent résumé. But that’s a low, low bar.

The film is only 91 minutes long, but it seemed to stretch out for days.

The movies of prolific and popular Japanese director Takashi Miike evoke many emotions -- nausea, excitement, awe, amazement, shock. One emotion they don't often evoke is boredom. Sad to say,Dead or Alive: Final is boring.

Works just fine as a generic but fast-paced - and rather ugly - cop buddy flick.

This mostly laugh-and scare-free turkey offers an utterly bored -- and boring -- Eddie Murphy taking a back seat to special effects, elaborate sets and a wispy story slapped together by David Berenbaum (the overrated "Elf").

The two leads spend a lot of their time doing static interviews, in a format familiar from TV shows like “The Office.” This glorified narration gets old, fast.

Prasad has a hard time keeping her bulging narrative straight; the twitchy editing, jarring close-ups and bobbing camera only muddle the audience.

If the jokes in Get Hard were a set of Jeopardy categories, they’d read as follows: Things Will Ferrell Puts Up His Butt, Butt Rape, Shots of Will Ferrell’s Bare Butt and Satirical Comparisons of Violent and Nonviolent Crime Not Excluding Mentions of Balzac.

Thin yet excruciating, the film is a quintessential vanity production. The script feels like a first draft that aspired merely to mediocrity and fell well short.

At last, the missing link be tween "Phantom of the Opera" and "Saw." Welcome to the gonzo revenge saga Law Abiding Citizen.

Resolves the romantic dilemma in the most artificial and unsatisfying way. A blaring swing score and some obvious dubbing do little to ease the pain.

Is the Crystal Lake PD really doing such a good job? You'd have to go back to Phnom Penh in 1975 to find a place with a higher per-capita rate of unprosecuted homicides.

The ludicrous action thriller Beyond the Reach fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency of “No Country for Old Men,” but there’s no denying it brings to mind another Southwestern classic about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons.

The movie seems to think it's building up massive suspense by not telling us our hero's back story, but given that the wife and kid aren't around and he keeps telling people who ask that he's not divorced, it's obvious they're dead. The only mystery, then, is what exactly happened to them. The answer is: nothing interesting.

Of course, nobody watches a Jackie Chan movie for the sophisticated plots or deep characters. They come for the martial arts. But those, too, settle for being not much more than a kick in the park.

The only part of this movie anyone's ever going to remember is the pair of scenes in which Ghost Rider pees flame.

Has a split personality. It starts as a comedy but morphs into an icky family melodrama. It should have stuck with the yuks.

Its script isn't worth the papyrus it's inscribed on.

If Carrie Bradshaw ever trades her Manolos for sneakers and starts blogging about raising children, I pray she wouldn't be as tiresome as the heroine of Katherine Dieckmann's insufferable comedy Motherhood.

A dispiriting rehash of dysfunctional family clichés that seems to last longer than Thanksgiving Day dinner.

For the most wonderful time of the year comes the worst movie of the year.

Little more than 91 minutes of cheesy special effects in search of a remotely coherent story.

Coincidence and contrivance are the name of the game throughout.

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

In the ’80s, I hated Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan and the Smurfs. It’s comforting to know I got one thing right.

You certainly get your 20 bucks worth of spectacle out of Alice Through the Looking Glass. So breathtaking are the landscapes, so whimsical are the creatures, so marvelous are the marvels that I wanted to give a standing ovation to whoever signed the check to pay for all this. Expensiver and expensiver!

Suspenselessly directed by Robby Henson, Thr3e commits the eighth deadly sin - boredom.

The Fourth Kind has a clever gimmick and nothing more.

James Van Der Beek plays the same suspect over a 50-year period, sporting some of the worst old-age makeup in memory in the present-day sequences.

Nothing in this movie would actually happen, so what’s irritating is that it presents itself as a savvy, “Am I right, ladies?” dating commentary.

A hokey, overblown and deeply unsatisfying movie.

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?

Dangerously low on laughs and sex, not to mention believability.

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

The point isn't really to make you laugh. The film is supposed to make people feel good about their families, and it does a fine job of it.

Toby is so un-self-aware that his journey seems like mere obtuseness; what the film has to say about youthful degeneracy is less than zero.

Despite the pace, though -- pedal, have you met my friend metal? -- Ninja Assassin still has some of its best stuff left at the end, when the master returns to demonstrate his extra-special, super-most-deadliest technique.

My All American would have done better to dig deeper in its portrayal of a man who set such a high bar for the intrinsic character of a football player. Because he’s actually the kind of example the sport could really use right now.

The plot swerves around just enough to make you think something more complex is going on. Ultimately, it really isn’t — certainly not enough to make up for the clichés and sexist tropes that litter Lucas’ path toward a confrontation with the bad guys.

Calling it pretentious doesn't do justice to the toxic faux-bohemianism and unearned self-regard that bubble and ooze out of every aspect of Chelsea Walls.

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

Isn't great, but it's an enjoyable if overly discreet and romanticized look at a long-vanished show-business world.

The hero is the Texas prosecutor who won a questionable indictment of DeLay, Ronnie Earle. But he sounds more extreme the more he talks.

Maybe DVDs of "Buried" and ATM will be sold in the same package someday. You could call it a trapped-in-a-box set.

Thanks to Marvel, many films are trying to cash in on cape-and-spandex mania right now, but unlike the MCU, they look like crapola. If you’re going to make a superhero movie today, you gotta have a budget. “Secret Society,” perhaps, had Microsoft Paint.

Kim Basinger gives one of her strongest performances in Even Money, a kind of "Crash" fueled by gambling instead of racism.

The dialogue isn't ridiculous, and sometimes it's witty: A cynical cop (Donnie Wahlberg) doesn't buy Jamie's theory that the doll had something to do with the murder: "The mystery toy department is down the hall. This is the homicide department."

If you experience any laughter while in the presence of this movie, it's a credit to your imagination. But if you can tickle yourself, why spend the $10.75?

I was kind of rough on "Apocalypto," which in retrospect seems like a minor classic compared to 10,000 BC.

You'd hope a political-insider indie reuniting "West Wing" stars Rob Lowe and Richard Schiff, and informed by the experiences of an actual former spin doctor, would be a small delight. You would be wrong.

Stiller’s one good idea is turning things over to Will Ferrell, who does some amusingly demented things while haranguing Anna Wintour and Tommy Hilfiger and is probably funnier in his sleep than Stiller is at his best.

Less funny or romantic than your average colonoscopy, this cringe-inducing bore provides dubious employment for four Oscar winners, two nominees and a raft of TV performers.

Makes the most of its wintry settings and never insults the audience's intelligence -- no mean feat for a family film. It's a real crowd-pleaser.

May be the steamiest lesbian romp in recent memory.

A smarmy, smirky but ultimately boring film.

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

Isn't very good. Not only has Ritter made his documentary a one-sided one, but he commits the journalistic sin of using himself as the film's main talking head. In other words, he's interviewing himself.

The story is so slight, a low-wattage hair dryer could blow it away.

LaBruce devotees will be tickled pink; others will be perplexed and/or disgusted.

Just because your comedy is dumb doesn’t mean it’s funny.

Adapting the author’s cornball formula for a second time around is once-ambitious director Lasse Hallström (“Dear John”), who delivers a cinematic valentine you’ll be reasonably content to watch on a flight in a year or so.