Ultimately, though, Dirty Weekend is a vague, languid affair.

The actual Chilean earthquake killed 300 people and turned thousands more homeless, but this movie distills everything for comic effect. Everyone gets robbed, raped, impaled, mutilated, decapitated or burned alive. But that’s not all. Crawling through the blood-drenched debris, here comes the tsunami!

Color it long, clumsy, gimmicky, schmaltzy and pointless.

Believer is a film wherein everyone’s effort — effort to underline a message, effort to deliver a nuanced performance, effort to be visually interesting, effort to shock the audience — is all a little too visible on screen. Intellectually, I can get behind almost all of it, but on a gut level, the level where horror lives and breathes, it does very little for me.

In a bargain-basement bomb called Inherit the Viper, three siblings survive one gruesome moment after another without any of them adding up to anything significant or life-affirming. Despite a running time of only 85 minutes, it feels like days of mean-spirited self-indulgence.

For meat-headed incoherence, a badly written, poorly directed and confusingly acted muddle of global nonsense, The Gunman is another ill-conceived entry in the latest dopey trend of middle-aged men blowing up stuff.

Legendary is a soap opera with steroids.

It’s a dull story that is still worth telling — but in a better film than Three Christs.

Tammy is not just a celebration of everything vulgar and stupid in the dumbing down of American movies. It’s a rambling, pointless and labored attempt to cash in on Ms. McCarthy’s fan base without respect for any audience with a collective IQ of 10. And it’s about as funny as a liver transplant.

Genial, jovial, and always reassuringly natural, Dennis Quaid has range and depth and is not afraid to explore challenging roles of every description. In the wacko thriller The Intruder, he decided it’s time for a trip to the dark side. Yes, fans, this time he’s the villain. Playing against type, he’s good at that, too.

Slogging along from one slaughter to the next, a benign narrative unfolds about a family of savages hell-bent on their own self-destruction, with no redeeming qualities.

A little of this corn goes a long way.

The problem is the movie never gives us a reason to care about Colin in the first place, or even to dislike him that much, if that’s how we’re supposed to feel. Colin is neutral, a kind of empty vessel, and Mr. Cage is his typical aloof self with a "Con Air" accent.

Directed by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) with an impressive cast that includes Will Smith and Clive Owen, the sci-fi action thriller Gemini Man should be better than the ossified bore it is. Instead, it substitutes the gimmicks technology-freaks might call “innovative” for anything that remotely resembles any element of plot, character development, or entertainment value.

The main issue is the script. The tale it tells is shopworn.

Ms. Farmiga is the only one who seems to be having any fun, as an aging flower child stuck in an earlier decade and addicted to healing vortex workshops and primal screams. Mellow, but very much a work in progress, Goats has a bland but overcrowded menu that could benefit from a little feta.

The bottom line is, whether you worship God, Satan, Xenu or Ron Paul, The Rite gets it wrong.

Seeking Justice is an intense thriller so full of shocks it keeps you wired from start to finish.

Yes, it’s a bit helter-skelter, but it is also an adequately enjoyable and untaxing way to kill off a couple of hours.

The insurmountable problem is that Imogene is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic character, and Kristen Wiig is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic actress. Nobody in this movie is really appealing enough to be much fun. The state of New Jersey should sue.

A tender showcase for a different kind of Jerry Lewis that utilizes the strengths and frailties of a 90-year-old show business survivor as few films have ever done.

The terrific cast is well worth watching, but everything else about this wayward movie mistake leaves you feeling just awful.

In retrospect, it's preposterous. But while you're gasping for air, it's one hell of a thrill ride, like being stuck on a malfunctioning roller coaster for an hour and a half at top speed, and unable to get off.

Clumsy and contrived, the film never manages to connect the dots in a trio of stories set in three different cities, and I had to pinch myself to keep from falling asleep.

With terrific Appalachian ambience and moments of carefully constructed action, Devil’s Peak is not a terrible movie, but in the bigger picture, it’s not a particularly memorable one, either. It just lies there on the table, like day-old grits.

Trevorrow does not add one fresh idea to this franchise. We are simply too far along in this technological revolution to think that the computer generated creatures themselves are enough, no matter how artfully they are arranged.

With so much to look at and a plot to digest as thick as Dutch cocoa, it is not without a few problems, but I found this astonishing movie so rich and satisfying that I liked it in spite of itself. It’s the kind of guilty pleasure that sometimes confuses, but never bores. Color it flawed but gorgeous.

Instead of the feel-good comedy they intended, you are left with the suspicion that the movie is really about a man suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness for which there is no cure.