Detention does have imaginative editing and a stylish, candy-colored look - that is, so long as no one's vomiting, an activity that takes up an ungodly portion of the running time.

Arlyck spends more time following himself and his own lefty family than checking up on Sean.

Isn't as bad as you'd think, but this comic mash-up of "The Bourne Identity" and "Fat Albert" doesn't have much heft.

The characters are so cartoonish, it's hard to care on any level -- except that it wastes such talented performers.

Watching Meryl Streep act can be an exhausting experience - and never more so than during Music of the Heart.

Every Little Step shows only this: It hurts to flunk an audition, and it's nice to get hired. Everything it has to say about Broadway was said better in Bob Fosse's movie "All That Jazz" -- in its opening five minutes.

Just because the goods are made in Italy doesn't mean they're designer-quality; Don't Tell is glossy on the outside, cardboard and staples on the inside.

If you want to punish your kids, send them to bed without dinner. If you want to disturb, frighten and depress them while making sure they fail biology, take them to the animated feature Barnyard.

Unlike Van Sant's grittier, less sentimental recent small films, it's twee enough to make your teeth ache. It's the director's biggest miscalculation since "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" 18 years ago.

In Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler says, "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of that hurt a lot of people." But enough about "The Bounty Hunter," "The Ugly Truth" and "P.S. I Love You."

A rote exercise in both animation and storytelling.

This overlong, obvious and indifferently acted melodrama was written and directed by Luke Eberl, a former child actor, before he turned 21.

Part of the limp-rag ambience is due to Talt, who seems to be channeling Sarah Jessica Parker — which, unsurprisingly, does not work. Mostly it’s due to the script, which fails to meet the major romantic-comedy requirement of being clever about keeping lovers apart. All by itself, “The hero is kind of a drip” doesn’t cut it.

Exploring pain in novel ways in film is a good thing. Next time, though, pick a different novel.

It's a thinly disguised lecture about intolerance, spotted with historical inaccuracies and groaning with dialogue so dreadful that it makes a fine cast look ridiculous again and again.

Coming-of-age road trips have rarely been more tedious or predictable.

A lame stoner comedy.

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.

Better than most Martin Lawrence movies - much as strep throat is better than malaria.

Pineda is lovely, but I stopped believin’ in this documentary long before it was over.

Seldom does The Bang Bang Club show much interest in the big picture of South Africa. When moral issues do come to the forefront, the big worry seems to be not questionable behavior but bad publicity.

The characters are so flat and the dialogue so dull you expect it to be one of those movies whose existence is justified by a big final twist. But it's three days after the screening, and still no twist. Maybe it's coming in the mail?

An unrelenting assault on the brain and eardrums.

Justice League is a pointless flail of expensive (yet, somehow, cheap-looking) CGI that no amount of tacked-on quips, or even Gadot’s luminescent star power, can rescue.

The mutants are brain-damaged; the filmmakers don't have that excuse to justify this movie, which is the kind of thing the sergeant would call "a stunning display of individual and group stupidity."

Compelling drama it is not.

It's so gosh-darned darling it almost turns your stomach.

Dicey entertainment, indeed.