The fights, taken on their own, are occasionally OK, but not enough to lift this joke-and-fun-free slog.

It feels like the brainchild of middle-aged guys (James Ponsoldt directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Eggers) who still think of Facebook as cutting edge.

“I see dead people,” Adrien Brody all but exclaims in Backtrack, a movie that tries to make a choo-choo out of “The Sixth Sense” but immediately goes off the rails.

The film tries to be clever by going meta: Once again, it’s rooted in Mr. Glass’ conviction that superheroes are real, and it repeatedly name-checks comic-book tropes that are reflected, languidly, in the movie’s own plot. But in the end, all it really reveals is a onetime visionary’s glass now half — no, let’s go with mostly — empty.

A reasonably entertaining cartoon feature.

Its faults -- banal dialogue, ludicrous and uninspired plotting, dull but vicious fight scenes -- make you realize just how much the summer action movie has declined in the last few years.

Has just enough fairy dust to charm its target audience.

It's not a bad premise for a movie, but writer-director Omar Naim, a 26-year-old Lebanese native making his feature debut, proves equally inept at handling plotting, actors and pacing.

An earnest, well-meaning film.

The highlight is a meta touch: A funny on-screen résumé is posted each time we meet a new character.

The movie was largely improvised, which lends itself more to scenes than a feature-length film.

Whenever there’s a lull here, a big laugh soon comes along with the force of a boa constrictor that conceals the flaws.

The CGI, by the way, looks awfully cheap in a market that includes boundary breakers such as Pixar and DreamWorks. Hanna-Barbera was never the animation powerhouse that Disney and Warner Bros. were back in the day, but it overcompensated with personality. Warner Animation Group’s Scoob! has got none of that.

A female revenge movie. But you could just as easily characterize it as fairly well-executed exploitation.

The gags run thin after half an hour or so.

Hugh Jackman appears briefly as Sophia's Aussie boyfriend, and gets to perform a lively song-and-dance number. But for some strange reason, his name isn't in the credits.

It's all a gorgeous error, a bonfire of overreach.

This poorly acted, directed and written (but slick-looking) vanity project was produced by Andrew Lauren (Ralph's son also ineptly plays G's major-domo) and shot at least four years ago.

A silly, boring supernatural thriller that squanders a potentially interesting premise and the rapper Snoop Dogg in his ostensible starring debut.

So tedious it's almost worth watching to see just how bad acting, inadequate direction and most important, a criminally crass and unimaginative screenplay can make so little out of a proven idea.

Beyond the cliched diaper-changing scenes and the oh-so-predictable romantic complications, the film inadvertently insults its presumed target audience.

Recycles the teen romantic comedies of the last few years...and it's easily the worst of the lot.

Mostly it fails to score. Maybe that's why no one has attempted summer-camp comedy since the third "Meatballs" sequel a decade ago.

That The Big Bounce works at all is a testament to Wilson, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter ("The Royal Tenenbaums") who probably could have come up with something better in his sleep.

A vast improvement over Schenkman's previous effort, "The Pompatus of Love."

Action flick machismo suffers an identity crisis in Stuber.

The demands of formula eventually stifle anything that even looks like inspiration or honesty.

The film strains credulity as it hurtles toward its conclusion.