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.