A big fat geek kiss to the movies of Steven Spielberg and his fanboys, Paul is a mild, meandering comedy.

Shows glimmers of great drama, but jettisons too much essential cargo (character development, relationships, plot, common sense) in an effort to be lean and clean.

Vacancy, in the end, simply offers a particularly aggressive brand of couples counseling.

Gritty, jumpy and rife with cliches.

The premise, which initially has a certain interior logic, grows implausible and then nonsensical.

The real problem isn't with the actors, it's with 1) the source material, a highfalutin romance novel with a clever literary conceit, and 2) LaBute's clumsy, uncomfortable efforts to telescope Byatt's book into a workable movie.

It's not original, but unlike some of this summer's movies (such as The Island and Stealth), The Cave knows its place. Its job is to deliver a few jolty thrills and a couple of laughs and wrap things up before it starts to get too dumb.

Relying on improv-y riffing and watch-them-coming-from-down-the-block-and-around-the-corner sight gags, The Campaign is intermittently amusing, but more often just interminable.

Begins with a scene of mass repentance, but the real sin here is a profligate waste of talent.

Overstocked farce.

The characters are (hand-painted) so flat that the film looks like a paper-doll convention at Epcot.

Driven is in both its script and its execution a paint-by-numbers affair.

What are you going to do when your lead actress offers a performance that's as unlikable as the woman she's portraying? Maybe it's the script (flimsy, formulaic), or filmmaker Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's conspicuous direction, but Tammy Blanchard's Nina, a waitress with a dour disposition and an unwanted pregnancy, pretty much sucks the life out of this well-meaning melodrama.

A raunchy romp through the peeping-Tomism, potty humor, raging hormones and social humiliation that are standard issue in the Hollywood high-school sex comedy.

There's nothing original, nor compelling, about Twist.

Not even Halle Berry, emerging from the blue Caribbean in an orange two-piece -- can bring this thing to life.

Feels more like a postscript than a probing, provocative documentary.

A silly melodrama.

It's not so much a miscalculation of his audience by Burton as it is a disregard. What lingers after Frankenweenie, far more than its stunning technique, is a sad suggestion of solipsism.

Far-fetched and utterly humorless, with a literally tacked-on conclusion (yes, more text on the screen), the only thing that's surprising about Unbreakable is how lame it is.

Like Clint Eastwood’s masterful 2006 WWII drama "Flags of Our Fathers," Lee’s film is as much about how we spin war stories as it is about war itself. Both involve a group of heroic soldiers sent home by the Pentagon to help drum up popular support. Both are made by filmmakers keenly aware that stories have the power to justify a war or turn the public against it.

Cute, cloying and catastrophically predictable.

This isn't a movie, it's an animatronic theme-park ride - an artificially processed, easily digestible treat for kids.Ho, ho hum.

It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.

The film's intimations of bisexual romance have a certain innate drama that no amount of bad acting or cornball rugby matches can completely erase.

The moral of Taken 2? If you're going on a family vacation, be sure that the human-trafficking ring you put out of business in that far more satisfying and suspenseful thriller from a few years ago doesn't know how to find you.

To do this kind of satire successfully, you need the kind of merciless and unrelenting wit of films such as Gus Van Sant's "To Die For" or John Huston's "Prizzi's Honor."

Firth is brilliant as a preternaturally patient man - every day he has to tell her the same exact story. But he has a creepy way about him. Is it love that drives him, or something darker?

Death Sentence's message - that vengeance is ultimately futile, spinning out a vicious circle of rage and hate - may be commendable, but there's nothing noteworthy about the way Wan, Bacon and their troops go about delivering it.

Not to say that it isn't fun, only to say that it is more about sensation than sense.

Owen is all right as the harried husband whose relationship at home has turned frosty, but the essential heat between him and Aniston is missing. The actress succeeds in shedding her "Friends" persona, but there's something missing here, especially as things get knottier.

The film is a squeamish exercise, like watching a cruel child pull the wings off flies - especially the climactic scene, which is so gory it would turn a coyote's stomach.

While it misses the mark most of the time, director Hilary Brougher's film has a promising story, an impressive cast, and occasional moments of grace.

The result is a movie that is both laugh-out-loud funny and cringe-worthily silent.

Ultimately the voyage is so choppy and long (2 hours, 48 minutes) that into the third hour I found myself yawning, "Yo-ho-hum and a very sore bum."

The whole thing is rather insipid. But Thomas makes it smoother and more palatable than it deserves to be.

It isn't frightening. Sometimes, in fact, it's laughable.

This invitation to look down upon the stupidity of numskulls is one that should be declined as swiftly as a call to poke fun at Special Olympians.

With no clear idea how to end the movie, which has come to resemble an excessive episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, writer/director Stuart Beattie (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) uses an old but still effective Hollywood trick: He blows up everything on the screen to smithereens.

Roughly an hour in, Transformers 2 morphs from teen adventure into lumbering war movie. Bay and his screenwriters squander their human capital in order to show us scenes of 20-ton toys crushing 10-ton toys.

A likable and completely dispensable heist film starring two of the deftest comedians working (Keaton and Latifah), the film from Callie Khouri is itself an American retread of the British caper telefilm "Hot Money."

Virtually every set-up and set-piece in this extravagantly tedious adventure is misleading, or worse, irrelevant.

It's nothing if not predictable.

A preposterous, if admittedly fun, exercise in sci-fi/horror mayhem.

While Last Days succeeds as a nature documentary, Van Sant fails to penetrate human nature. The result is a portrait without a face.

There's nothing to say that crass can't be funny - and it sometimes is in Daley and Goldstein's iteration - but Vacation loses any of the ooey-gooey, family-friendly heart that made you really want Clark to get to Walley World to begin with.

As a commentary on gender roles, maternity, paternity and test-tube fertilization, Junior does manage to get in a few good yuks - but far fewer than you'd expect given the story's, um, fertile premise. [23 Nov 1994, p.E01]

Nothing wrong about a movie that says, Stop and smell the roses. Now, if only director Rob Reiner hadn't rubbed our noses in a bouquet of plastic blooms.

If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket.

Bleak and painfully earnest.

For this dynamic to work, the actors need to be of complementary temperament and equal power. This is not the case.

A long, tedious and convoluted follow-up to 2003's rollicking high-seas hit, The Curse of the Black Pearl, this second installment in the promised trilogy lacks the swash and buckle of the original. And then some.

A gagfest that makes viewers gag at least twice as often as they giggle, American Wedding -- third in the American Pie trilogy -- whipsaws the audience between gross-out and guffaw.

Although Schrader is an otherwise accomplished director and screenwriter, Touch's two moods combat rather than complement each other. [14 Feb 1997, p.04]

Premonition is an odd little thing, with a protagonist in a protracted fugue state and a plot that doesn't know whether its coming or going. Or maybe it does.

Handsomely photographed by Eric Schmidt and nicely underplayed by the actors, the film relies too much on its jukebox soundtrack to convey mood.

By the halfway mark, Rogen's performance, like his voice, is less cuddly than grating, and the carbonated giggle that is Elizabeth Banks grows flat. This one's for the Smith cultists.

Director Robert Schwentke and his writing team do their best to move things along. Actually, who knows if it's their best? Maybe they're suffering from Divergent fatigue along with the rest of us.

Shot like a Disney period piece (prettily, with spiffy props, shiny vintage vehicles, and costumes just back from the cleaners), Flyboys introduces its squadron the old-fashioned way: with character-establishing setups.

If the shrill Italian melodrama Remember Me, My Love were a television soap opera, it would be called The Not-So-Young and the Restless.

Tonally, the film from director Anurag Basu has more personalities than Sybil. Basu strictly observes the B-movie convention of giving the audience an embrace, explosion, or chase sequence at regular intervals. If you don't like the genre, wait three minutes.

As a director, Poitier hasn't come up with any startingly new twists on the old Western cliches. [11 May 1972, p.14]

There's no doubt that the formula for this kind of action film is showing its age.

Rock Star sinks into a morass of melodrama.

Most of it plays like Jackass.

Full of macho swagger and unabashed hero-worship.

A twisty, turny and ultimately silly thriller from "Inside Man's" Russell Gewirtz.

A creepy, oozy, dopey remake of the stylish 1998 Japanese thriller, "Ringu."

The plot is preposterous. Particularly the part about a kid who has never before played an instrument, but can pick up a guitar and play like Eric Clapton and belly up to a church organ and perform like Mozart.

A woefully thin and pointless musical comedy boasting the no-chemistry coupling of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyonc?

War is hell, war is cruelty, war is toil and trouble, war is just a shot away. But is war a snooze? Well, by the time Enemy at the Gates has run its course — it sure seems that way.

An uneven, perpetually redundant comedy-drama.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

Tumbledown comes up light in the categories that matter most, miring a capable cast in a forced cable-knit folksiness familiar to anyone who has ever watched anything set in New England.

An uninspired computer-animated feature that may satisfy undiscriminating pipsqueaks and nearly no one else, Planet 51 is a low-IQ E.T. in reverse.

A worthy subject is poorly executed.

Fuzzy, feel-good movie about baseball, babes and believing in yourself.

Willis is always on target, but Last Man Standing is an aimless excuse for the kind of action at which Hill undeniably excels. [20 Sep 1996, p.03]

Promised Land is a frustrating film to watch. It should be better than this, smarter than this.

Full of clunky humor, battle-of-the-sexes musings and spicy accordion music, Everybody Wants to Be Italian is relentless - but not necessarily relentless fun.

Basic Instinct's characters lack psychology and therefore motive. Admittedly they possess pathology, but that's not enough to maintain suspense in a movie with plot holes big enough to drive a tank through.

By turns entertaining and excruciating.

Only in its aggressively imaginative profanity is the film consistent.

Not even Chan's imaginative fight choreography redeems this folly.

If only I liked The Majestic half as much as I liked Carrey in it.

However insulting the script is to the formidable talents of Clayburgh and Tambor, they turn in Shinola performances.

My advice: Skip Beyond Borders and write a check to the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders.

Spectacularly silly and perversely entertaining.

A sweet, if predictable, kids' comedy. But you have to overlook the conveniently inconsistent behavior of all the characters - except in Garner's case. She never establishes a character.

The movie's main purpose seems to be to make audiences squirm uncomfortably. Yelp and shriek in armchair-clawing glee? Not likely.

The worst sin is the way the film borrows and corrupts the gravity-defying action style of Yun-Fat's international hit, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Although its low-key realism is admirable, Eden doesn't really work: the long silences, the aching stares, the telling props, Breda's quivering blues, Billy's drunkenness, his distraction. There might as well be a sign stuck to the Farrells' front door: Dysfunctional family lives here.

Shot on the cheap, with cheesy animated credits and comic-panel "Bams!" and "Pows!" splashed across the screen, Super has a jokey, low-rent quality (or lack of quality) that could be endearing, if Wilson's performance weren't so nihilistically dull, and if there were somebody in the picture who had a soul.

Cold and stylish, slick and violent.

A toothless political satire set in a Maine coastal village. It plays like six subplots in search of a sitcom.

Usually Amy Adams can work all kinds of magic with her wide-eyed gaze and wistful smile. But these attributes aren't assets here, they are distancing devices.

Between Owen's quiet intensity and Mirren's showy color, they make a complementary pair for screen or garden.

Warrior has the underwritten, overproduced bluster of "Conan the Barbarian."