To begin with, how painful is it to watch actors as intelligent as Naomi Watts and Robin Wright mug their way through the story of two hard-bodied middle-aged Australian besties hitting the sack with one another's teenaged sons?

What's most surprising, given the latitude provided by all that conjecture, is that the Durst - "David Marks" for the purposes of the film - who emerges is less a character study than a thumbnail sketch.

By anyone's reckoning, Predators is a middling 1980s B movie; too bad this is 2010.

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.

Small kids won't really appreciate Johnny Depp, either, though frankly he's getting to be less fun as the series ages, possibly realizing that what's riskiest in Pirates 4 isn't walking the plank, but jumping the shark.

In the end, though, Seeking Justice evokes the post-Watergate paranoia of '70s thrillers like "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor" without having a worthy conspiracy at the bottom.

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.

There's lots of information, some nice images, plenty of earnest sermonizing about culture and almost no suspense, or tension, or character development, or structure. Or, well, art.

It all works out agreeably enough, albeit in strict adherence to rom-com formula, right down to the obligatory wacky-best-friend roles given to space cadets Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis.

Slowly but surely, Unfinished Song devolves into its premise's worst-case scenario: a generic portrait of suffering, resilience, grief and reconciliation that, even in its postscript dedication — "To Family" — can't reach beyond safe, all-encompassing but ultimately unsatisfying sentiments.

It's stately with a smirk, crossing Bram Stoker with "The Addams Family" to arrive at what sometimes feels like a wildly overproduced "Saturday Night Live" sketch.

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.

The incoherence is made all the more disappointing because Eisner displays a great deal of raw talent for the genre's tone and set pieces.

What's more annoying than the crassness, really, is the directorial sloppiness that results in a virtually mirthless first half-hour and a slow build to chuckles thereafter.

For all its rhetorical whimsy and hipster dressings, (500) Days of Summer is a thoroughly conservative affair, as culturally and romantically status quo as any Jennifer Aniston vehicle.

This is a film about people who are lost, and the filmmakers draw a direct line between their characters' existential wanderings and the religious obsessions they find for themselves.

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

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.

The problem is that Jonathan is possibly the most annoying romantic lead in any film in recent memory. His gnarly, X-Games-loving, righteous-dude shtick is so grating that my frustration with the lack of ferocity in the movie's monsters may be largely because I kept wishing one of them would act like a proper monster and tear him limb from limb.

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.

The newest model of the old submarine-from-hell picture.

At heart, though, the movie is as tame as "The Belles of St. Trinian's," the 1954 farce that started it all.

Presumably in response to criticism that "The Da Vinci Code" was static and talky, director Ron Howard has made Angels & Demons frantic -- and, well, talky.

Though the film features Holmes' fiercest villain and a plot partially cribbed from "The Final Problem," one of Conan Doyle's most beloved stories, the sense of mystery has gone missing. A most heinous crime has taken place. The fun, too, is nowhere in evidence.

Austenland, a clunky broadside aimed at the cult of Jane Austen, is worth seeing primarily for its end credits, a mix of pop oil and water so joyfully dippy it might have produced a stifled giggle even in Herself.

On the page, it's a funny little snapshot of the preteen mind, ruled by prevailing forces of fear and aggression, yet still given to silliness and lowbrow yuks. In a movie, however, Greg's thoughts are made painfully literal, so instead of being a reflection of his hyperactive imagination, they're grotesque cartoons standing in for real life.

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

In the past, the director has usually had an irreverent response on the issues of the day; Survival of the Dead is the first time in the series where he hasn't seemed to bother looking for one.