Gorgeous surroundings don't make up for sulky, feuding travel companions.

The plot, however, comes with twists you can spot as far off as a Himalayan peak. The dialogue is heavily expository, and the actors are not up to the task of breathing life into characters meant to symbolize the Spirit of the Afghan People or the Nature of Evil.

The surfing sequences are some of the best I've ever seen in a film, and the re-creation of Jay's climactic battle to ride El Nino-driven waves is real white-knuckle stuff...But neither Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") nor the fellow veteran director who replaced him when Hanson took ill, Michael Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist"), can do much with the hokey sequences on land.

I'll grant that the film has many layers. All of them are terrible.

The posthumous campaign to polish Michael Jackson's tarnished reputation continues apace with this Spike Lee infomercial, commissioned by Sony and the money-grubbing Jackson estate to promote the 25th anniversary of his 1987 album "Bad.''

Aside from these curious role reversals, though, Alex Cross is a mess. Drawing on every conceivable '80s B-movie action cliché and treating its beleaguered female characters like pieces of meat (literally, in one scene of butchery), director Rob Cohen squanders a surprisingly recognizable cast on a half-baked plot adapted from James Patterson's series of novels.

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

The sort of enigmatic movie that many critics embrace because it's open to endless interpretation.

It's deeply frustrating to discover that this 2012 movie has precisely the same concerns as the ["The Women"] - appearance and men - with raunchy frankness about sex added and every trace of real wit siphoned out.

Brooklyn Castle is an engaging tale, and the principal is wrong: These kids are much more lovable than the Yankees.

Tai Chi Zero is loads of fun to watch, especially a battle in which watermelons, bananas and other fruits and veggies serve as flying weapons.

An inoffensive but bland ode to the talky high school movies of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe.

None of Dunham's humor comes across, except when someone says, "And when you speak, your words are snakes I swat at with swords," which is hilarious, but not intentionally.

Watching this yoga documentary mirrored how I feel about taking weekly classes: The ancient Eastern tradition is demonstrably beneficial for both mind and body, but its execution can be so boring and its teachers so painfully earnest.

No one loves a broad comedy like the French, but Gallic touches of restraint tend to keep such light entertainment pleasing rather than blundering.

The very sex-positive The Sessions treats intimacy with an explicitness and honesty that's very rare in movies. It may be the first film that doesn't turn premature ejaculation into a punch line.

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

Utterly delightful.

The results are too predictable.

The classical music is soothing, the cinematography handsome and the acting strong, but the Swedish coming-of-age saga Simon and the Oaks is burdened with a sappy, soap-opera-ish script.

Even if you overlooked the production values from a 1986 porno and special effects like something your nephew cooked up on his Mac, the movie's "Yay, money!" zingers are just a big bag of sad.

Director Ava DuVernay, in showing Ruby's life in waiting, occasionally lets the pace slip into tedium.

The parallels between the kids' war and the real one are made far too obvious by Christophe Barratier, who made the equally treacly "The Chorus" and infests the movie with nonstop musical goo.

Much of the plot stretches credulity, but the way it's constructed keeps tension high.

A raunchy, sporadically funny comedy.

In the end (which continues into the credits), I was left thinking McDonagh can do better than this, and yet I was slightly more agog with admiration than peevish with frustration. Most of all, I wanted to see the film again.

Harris, a talented comic actress who looks more like a real person than a Hollywood facsimile of one, makes every scene she's in shine.

Here's the thing: Found footage is scary when - because - it leaves you to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself. But actually watching whole families have terrible things done to them - well, hard-core horror fans may dig it, I guess. I'd call it forced voyeurism of the worst sort.