She (Parker) looks exhausted, first scene to last, and that fatigue spills off the screen onto us.

They (Refn and Gosling) have collaborated on a car picture that unnerves us with its idling quiet, and then pins our ears back when they stomp the accelerator.

It's an ugly movie to look at and a faintly nauseating one to sit through, truth be told.

Absurdly plotted, ineptly scripted and haplessly acted, Creature is a new variation on the "Creature from the Black Lagoon" theme.

Farmiga directs and plays this as a woman with questions. Thus, the tone is a bit all over the place - frank discussion and depictions of sex, but with an equally frank embrace of Christianity, talking the talk and walking the walk.

There is little urgency to this spiraling disaster. Soderbergh has made a lot of noise this past year about quitting directing and taking up a less collaborative, more solitary pursuit - painting. This is an anti-social painter's movie. Millions are dying, but he doesn't care that much. So why should we?

Whatever merits the production values have, the cheap frights don't deliver, the performers bring no pathos and the gimmick behind Apollo 18 flat out does not work.

Lawyer-turned-screenwriter Dylan Schaffer's script is an unhappy combination of genres, tones, too many dead stretches of people in cars and inept dialogue. Rapaport's tiresome patter doesn't allow for the weak laughs to land.

Warrior is a straight genre picture, a fight movie of the old school. But it's a mixed martial arts tale, and as such, it's the best MMA movie ever.

The worst movie of the summer, arriving on the last weekend of the summer.

Lacks surprises.

The sex sequences are revealingly awkward - with their "Don't try this at home" message. But without characters we can invest in, this "Hangover Meets Zack & Miri Make a Porno" is just the "porno," and entirely too tame for that, too.

"The Debt," a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.

That makes Sarah's Key that rare Holocaust tale that punches through the cobwebs of history and its dry, inhuman statistics, and brings that terrible past to life.

As straight exploitation, it's amusing, in fits and starts. It's just that Colombiana lacks the kinetic energy of "The Transporter" and the pathos of "La Femme Nikita."

The unfailing sweetness of Paul Rudd's lead performance makes what could have been another raunchy and rude R-rated farce a bracing change of pace in a summer of aggressive comedies about aggressive people, from "Bad Teachers" to "Horrible Bosses."

Entirely too literal, but it still manages to be a literally hair-raising piece of modern-style old school Gothic horror.

The Guard soars along on a script, like those by the other McDonagh (Martin wrote and directed "In Bruges" and the Oscar winning short "Six Shooter," both starring Gleeson) built out of verbal flourishes and Irish curses.

Nobody has much that's funny to say or cool to do. Even the spy gadgets are lame.

This episodic romance works in fits and starts, and captures a bittersweet faux British turn by Anne Hathaway, plainly mismatched in being paired with real-life Brit Jim Sturgess.

Fright Night can also boast of having the best vampire-villain in ages. The bushy-browed Colin Farrell was BORN to wear fangs.

The sweet, the comic and the tragic blend together most agreeably in the winsome French romance The Hedgehog.

Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian" and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like.

This isn't the worst of the bunch, not by far. But my premonition is this won't be the finale this series has screamed out for these past few years. This decapitation train never seems to reach its destination.

The wildly improbable set-up is merely the jumping off point for an exploration of grief, guilt and redemption.

There's too much cheese, but there are still enough amusing action beats and funny one-liners to let one say, 30 Minutes or Less delivers, more or less on time.

Haters, head for the door. But Gleeks? Get your "Glee" on.

Davis and Spencer give faces and fully-fleshed out lives to women who must have been more than what they did for a living as The Help.