The result is verisimilitude without engagement -- a risk-taker's story told entirely without narrative risk -- and a movie that consequently never takes flight.

Aided by subtly wounded performances by Daniels and Stone, and a surprisingly affecting comic turn from Reynolds, Paper Man makes up for many of its shortcomings with an abundance of heart.

The plot doesn't quite sink Baywatch, but it sure slows it down.

Inescapable is Nadda's first foray into thriller territory, and her inexperience shows in awkwardly mounted fight scenes and clumsy car chases, not to mention an almost fatally explanatory script.

An awkward jumble of half-assed thriller and lumbering romantic comedy, less competent by a wide margin than "The Lives of Others." It's also a whole lot sillier, though not in a good way.

There's a couple of hundred million dollars' worth of technical wizardry up there on screen, and nothing is at stake. Except, maybe, for some future amusement park ride, and the sequels, and toys and hats and masks. And piles and piles of silver, if enough people lay down their hard-earned dollars to hear Hammer's hearty "Hi-yo."

This ode to "moving on" from grief packs so little genuine emotion that it will touch only the most susceptible of viewers.

Even in a film that clocks in at a quasi-epic 2 hours and 40 minutes, that's just too much narrative. And matters aren't helped by the fact that Lee, who has never staged battle sequences before, hasn't quite got the rhythms or camera angles right.

Bear in mind that Fun Size is the only comedy in recent memory to feature a Ruth Bader Ginsburg joke. You won't find any of those in the "Hangover" movies' bag of tricks.

Mirren cuts the figure of a bodice-ripping paperback heroine, a withering desert flower who blooms in the arms of a swarthy prizefighter roughly half her age. Mirren embodies the fantasy beautifully -- but Hackford's feature-length valentine to her all but sabotages the rest of the movie.

Given the feel-good themes of the average kids' movie — be yourself, follow the golden rule, love each other, blah blah blah — it's refreshing to see an animated comedy chuck that guck and focus on a real jerk.

There's a stiffness to the actors' performances that reinforces the film's ambiguous tone. And Chen's use of jump cuts is jarring and arbitrary, their ubiquity upping the ante on the film's already tiring hyperactivity.

It dresses up boilerplate horror in a classy shell, yet never gives it the pulse it needs.

The only apparent reason Tooth Fairy exists at all is to squeeze tough-guy ex-wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson into tights and a tutu. As comic ideas go, that doesn't stretch much further than the poster.

This Arthur cravenly turns Susan into a monstrous status-seeker, making her less of a human being and thus much easier for Arthur to trample over in securing a meaningful adult relationship.

Judging from the lack of care that went into making this one, I'm not so sure how much Schrader cares about the movies anymore either.

Slack, morally ambiguous, decidedly sub-Dexter serial-killer-cop story that's been cooked up for them (De Niro/Pacino).

There are swords and sorcery, pirates and monsters, taxed bodices and taxing mythology. In other words, there's the bare minimum necessary to summon this dismal movie into existence.

The Watch perks up when Ayoade's spacey line readings give it something unique and unexpected - otherwise, per Costco, audiences are buying their generic sci-fi comedy in bulk.

I Am Number Four's CGI sequences are murky and dark, its performances negligible, its script genuinely inept. There is, I should note, a puppy, which arguably keeps the film this side of completely unbearable, but just barely.

Without the humor, the stereotypes that define these characters aren't satirical; they're just mean-spirited and dull.

Such a catalog of missed opportunities, it probably makes sense just to list them.

What's Your Number? trades in the sort of hard-R crudity that's become standard since "The Hangover," but the added explicitness doesn't make it any less artificial a contraption.

Like the decent B-movie director that he is, Hyams tosses in two gripping car chases and blows up a few more vehicles for good measure. But otherwise, there's little in this pointless rehash to distract audiences from the pleasure of watching Tamblyn.

If what audiences are looking for is a thrill ride, or even a pervasive eeriness, The Happening's just not happening.

We're supposed to be awed, but a more reasonable response is to giggle. How does a Kevlar tie kill? And if it can, why hasn't the CIA sent a Kevlar scarf to Osama bin Laden?

Motherhood doesn't really need a recession to call attention to its flaws. The movie's a perfect dud on its own terms.

When he divides the screen into quadrants for his big finish, the effect is just laughable -- but then by that point, the movie is too.

Playing like a mashup of tropes from far superior small- and large-screen entertainments (Scandal, House of Lies, Ides of March), this clunky feature from Bill Guttentag is satire at its most soft-bellied and toadying.

If Marshall is an unrepentant Tory on some issues -- Valentine's Day stumps for teen abstinence and marrying your best friend, and warns that career women may end up alone -- he is open-hearted and generously conciliatory on gay rights, and he implies quite casually that multi-culti coupling may be the surest way to dispose of racism.

Shot in New Mexico on a limited budget, Boys of Abu Ghraib is a credible depiction of the tedium, frustration and humiliation of wartime service. (Jack gets coated in human excrement not once but twice.) Naturalistic scenes of boxing, bantering and masturbation, set to a rap and hard-rock score, emphasize that these boys are young American everymen.

Connelly, Harris and Amy Madigan, as Tipton's devastated wife, all do their best to bring a measure of soul to Black's creations, but there's something fundamentally synthetic about Virginia, which lays bare its influences without doing much to reanimate them.

If that's the best Hollywood screenwriters can do, maybe they should sign up for a self-help seminar. Nothing focuses the mind like a little firewalking.

The shame of it is, all this ridiculousness might have worked under surer hands. After all, farces are supposed to be a little silly, and the audience, for lack of a better phrase, can be trained to just go with it. The trick? Don't treat us like a bunch of Palmers.

A disastrous father-son endeavor about a calamitous father-son expedition, After Earth doesn't play to the strengths of any of its major participants.

Aside from the giggles induced by the romance-novel bits, the movie's principal hazard is exhaustion. There are too many characters, and too many of them spend too much time morphing into something else. Five more like this? That would be demonic.

Lumbering comedy, adapted by Larry Doyle from his own novel.

The overused homages and a tacked-on twist ending are just failed attempts to save Repo Men from its own shallow blood lust.

With the material they're given, they mostly just seem foolish for showing up to the movie to begin with. Audiences would do well to avoid the same mistake.

Neither innovative nor profound, but it is kinetic, visceral and sometimes moving.

Hard to say what's dumber, the premise or the characters in William Olsson's trashily preposterous An American Affair.

The new Red Dawn's body count is as high as its predecessor's. But the fatalism in all of Milius' projects - even the silliest ones - has weight. That's not the case with the remake, whose portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.

Olek never decides what his film should be, and the result takes wild stabs at slasher gore, supernatural horror, black comedy and even social commentary, thanks to a zero-hour attempt to tie things up with a morality tale about the damaging effects of organized religion.

Tedious to watch and torture to listen to.

The effect eventually becomes that of about a dozen story pitches all strung together. Any one of them might have the potential for greatness in isolation. Try to mash them up into one movie, though, and much like Jack, they fall to pieces.

It's a strange sort of film that casts Gallic tough guy Jean Reno as a clean-fingernailed mogul while employing cross-dressing comic Tyler Perry as a guy capable of hand-to-hand combat with someone called The Butcher of Sligo.

Rickman is too theatrical, and too British, to vanish entirely into the person of Hilly Kristal. But he's entertaining to watch, and ultimately one of the more persuasive actors in a movie that suffers from as many odd casting decisions as Lee Daniels' The Butler.

Indeed, despite occasional attempts at plot and character, this is basically a roast with scenery.

There's no chemistry between Zellweger and Connick, and there's not a moment in which anything anyone does feels remotely plausible.

What is watchable here is made possible by the sheer will of the gifted Moretz, who's in every scene as the precocious Luli.

Weighed down by its plodding mediocrity.

An overwrought, undercooked tale of crazy love and crazier revenge.

Along with the rest of the movie's fine cast, Franco presumably believes he is in the presence of art. Me, I know a fire hose when I see one.

As the loosely aligned band of survivors turns into a pack of sociopathic loners, the only reasonable conclusion is that they were all pretty rotten to begin with.

Zackham's film feels as plastic as a cake topper — and just as hard to digest.

The moody picture even swings toward hopeful in its final minutes, as it tries to celebrate Charles as the man he is, faults and all. It's enough to leave you wondering whether even a glimpse inside this mind is too much.

A deeply off-putting independent comedy.

The Ugly Truth serves up yet another tightly wound career woman, ripe for chopping up, tenderizing and ravishing by an alpha male who knows what's good for her.

You don't have to be a fan of Sex and the City to appreciate the kitsch humor here. Part TV-series sequel, part Hollywood sendup, SATC 2 is all satire. It's hard to miss that this film is making gentle fun of itself, of the franchise's materialism, even of its own cinematic allusions.

Style can be a risky thing in a movie like this, which aspires above all to inoffensiveness. Originally titled "Playing the Field," which was deemed too racy, this rom-com would have been more aptly renamed "Running Out the Clock."

If Nenette as a character is more a narrative convenience than a depiction of an actual condition, her permanent childhood does provide the 63-year-old Balasko with an exuberant, unpredictable role. That she continues to make work for herself as both an actress and a director is a good thing, but it would be better if she found a more ambitious writer.

None of them -- not one, not for a moment -- is remotely funny.

Never before has a movie's direction and script lagged so far behind the actor's hapless persona. If Fraser's character is a human Wile E. Coyote, director Roger Kumble is barely Elmer Fudd.

First-time feature director Peter Billingsley could have enlivened the action with more vigorous editing. Everything takes too long, and the slapstick sequences are particularly lethargic.

The road to hell is paved not just with good intentions, but with movies that attempt to capture the way women really talk.

At its heart, Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve is soup made of rocks.

This is a movie for those who watched Liam Neeson in "Taken" and thought, "Hey, this is fun, but can we do it without having to wait 15 minutes for the action to start?" Solomon has 90 minutes at his disposal, and doesn't want to waste time with setup.

Miles ahead in terms of production values and a conscious avoidance of overt proselytizing. It will likely be an enormous success with the evangelical communities at which it's targeted. That doesn't save it from being an utter failure outside that narrow context.

This movie, like all of Sandler's, insists on its star's likability.

If it's about anything at all, the lame new comedy All About Steve is mostly about Mary, a logorrheic crossword compiler with too much arcane information in her head -- and the social skills of an excitable 6-year-old boy.

The film places a great deal of stock in the role of geography in its characters' happiness, but doesn't really address the fact that their problems don't necessarily stay in the rear-view mirror once they hit the road for that change of scenery.