An alarmingly charmless attempt to evoke the elegant romance and jaunty, jet-setting intrigue of the aforementioned titles, The Tourist is notable for the total absence of movie-star heat that movie stars are paid unseemly sums to radiate.

I laughed once.

Domino is less a movie than a hyperkinetic slide show - presented during a nuclear attack.

Appalling sequel.

Rarely has a film so equally balanced macho and nacho, but Wrath does leave us with a few valuable lessons: a.) fratricide is a nasty business, best left to the Greeks and b) fighting fire with fire may sound good, but it turns out to be a really stupid idea.

A wild, wacky, wide-screen reimagining of the vintage radio serial and TV series, the film - with Armie Hammer in the hat and mask, galloping across Texas righting wrongs, and Depp as his trusty Indian sidekick, Tonto - is an epic good time.

Ultimately, Evan Almighty is too sappy, too sanctimonious.

Winterbottom's films never bore. They do sometimes frustrate, provoke - even anger. That's the case with his entry in the true-story genre, The Face of an Angel.

The cast, especially The Game, does a fairly good job with this meager material, but it's like trying to make chateaubriand out of Spam.

Until Seven Days in Utopia sucker punches you with a surfeit of faith-based platitudes, its upbeat brand of golf mysticism isn't altogether unappealing.

The byplay between Efron and newcomer Tahan as his brother has a warmth and intimacy that establish the film's tone. The performances carry the film.

Sadly, Annabelle, a cheap, sleazy, low-budget prequel meant to explain the origins of that particular doll, is as undistinguished, uninteresting, and unscary as the worst of the Chucky films.

Man, oh, man, much of the dialogue is so heavy, and heavy-handed, that you can see fine actors such as Derek Luke and Michael Ealy buckle under the weight. Clearly, Lee fell in love with McBride's words and couldn't bear to cut them, even when the visuals made those words redundant.

Bad Company would just be another silly, intermittently funny, buddy comedy (Anthony Hopkins is Rock's training agent) were it not for a plot unlaughably close to current events.

The "Golden Girls" with gats.

The moral of this crude, intermittently funny Adam Sandler comedy costarring the reliable Kevin James is that: It's OK to be gay, it's not OK to call someone a faggot, and it takes a real man to admit he loves his man pal.

A tale of disaffection, devastation and epiphanies of the catastrophic kind.

If Matthew Weiner's Are You Here is good for anything, it's to illustrate how the themes and conflicts he has worked out with such depth and dexterity in all these seasons of "Mad Men" can go terribly amiss with the wrong actors, wrong backdrop, wrong tone, wrong time.

In essence, a wild soap opera disguised as a political allegory, it's a movie, with its over-the-map performances, that is worth catching only for the inadvertent laugh or two.

The film is based on Ryne Douglas Peardon's novel Simple Simon, which I haven't read. I can only hope it's less exploitive of people with autism than Mercury Rising is. For all the filmmakers' apparent efforts to treat the issue with sensitivity (there are teachers and nurses who patiently explain to Willis the various symptoms, the behavioral patterns of autistic children), the issue has no place in a standard-issue Hollywood thriller. It feels like a gimmick, and a shameless one at that. [3 Apr 1998, p.03]

This is a movie that both parodies "The Sopranos" and aspires to its mordant humor. I don't think anyone -- not Tony Soprano, not Paul Vitti -- can have it both ways.

An ineffective, derivative, and awkwardly executed mash-up of ghost flicks and voodoo movies.

By no means is this a good movie, but it's warmed by the solar energy of its star, who surely deserves better than this formula empowerment flick.

That this is a cautionary tale about any people who would wage war in order to win the spoils of oil and water? Your guess is as good as mine.

Fails to provide one essential ingredient: suspense.

A squirmy mix of therapy-session slogans, pop psychobabble, and lots of crying, yelling and pouting on the part of its two stars, who appear in various alarming hairpieces.

Despite some jaunty performances and its pretty Cotswolds locale, the film, in the end, is hardly a pleasure at all.

Rarely do you encounter a movie without a shred of originality. You Got Served is such a cinematic vacuum.

Speed Racer offers a crazy, turbo-charged mix of cartoon kitsch, gamer action, and a wild new way to think of - and look at - movies.

Madonna the director deserves a script better than the one Madonna the screenwriter handed off to her. The movie is full of incidents that don't quite cohere into a story - kind of like a Power Point presentation without a throughline.

Seven Pounds is one part jigsaw puzzle, one part "The Giving Tree" and both parts marinated in melancholy.

Perry and Campbell are charming despite this straitjacket plot.

The whole affair has a painfully self-conscious, self-referential air. Jokes land with a thud, and so, alas, does Rocky, who seems to have forgotten how to fly.

Looking for plausibility in a farce is like looking for a million dollars in a box of breakfast cereal, but elements of real life can make a comedy resonate instead of thud. Little Black Book does the latter.

An entertaining mess. [19 Aug 1994, p.03]

Michael Lembeck directs with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, pounding every joke and cliche until they are flat, flat, flat.

When remaking a popular film, you must remember this: First, do no harm to the original. Arthur accomplishes this, with Russell Brand slurring his way neatly through the title role.

A riotously awful biopic rife with stereotypes and boxing movie cliches, Against the Ropes represents -- among other things -- a woeful turn in its star's career.

This low-budget, high-gore sequel can be effectively frightening at times, and just plain boring, too. The suspense builds, the blood gushes, the momentum dissipates. It's an unsatisfying mix.

This startlingly lame tale about a young upstart challenging a veteran leader of the pack doesn't update the genre, it simply recasts it.

Yes, there's a hastily added new ending - an ending that doesn't make sense when you think about it. Not that it's worth the effort

So achingly empty, it's nearly existential.

A harmless and mildly amusing family comedy.

It's clean and cheerful entertainment, blithely piggybacking on a beloved classic. No wonder Anderson washed his hands of this project - the filmmakers tampered with and trampled on his magic formula.

A kind of mad coming-of-age yarn embellished with lightning bolts and monsters made of cadaverous flesh.

Those who want something more substantial from a movie than a vid-game script with centerfold appeal will not find it in this noisy, bone-crushing survivalist flick inspired by the Game Cube diversion.

Criminal, with its criminally lazy title, is mostly Costner's to growl and scowl his way through.

A very curious and very entertaining mix, the Labradoodle of inspirational romantic-comedy-melodramas.

This heavy-handed muddle of a cop thriller is just impossibly bad.

A monster chiller sequel that is visually spectacular but rather overburdened with story.

The kind of date movie that should do a lot to promote celibacy.

Parental Guidance is an engaging comedy that bridges multiple generation gaps, making it that rare movie that grandparents, their kids, and their kids can enjoy.

"The Godfather" without Brando, "GoodFellas" without Scorsese, "The Sopranos" without Gandolfini - 10th & Wolf is all that, and less.

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

8 1/2 Women is a collage-y, self-reflexive sort of film that is designed to shock but more often just annoys.

The script appears to have been designed, created and produced entirely in 1-D: a mishmash of kidcentric antics, follow-your-dream cliches, and innocuously icky humor.

It also has great momentum, good set pieces, and so much frothy nihilism it’s just plain fun.

Owing a debt to Scarface (the DePalma remake more than the Hawks original) and to the gangland opuses of Scorsese, Belly gets inside the gangsta culture with a wired authenticity. [04 Nov 1998, p.E04]

Lady in the Water boasts an eclectic cast - almost entirely squandered.

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.

Serena is one long eye-roll of calamities and corn.

A handsomely staged and craftily constructed tearjerker.

The sort of generic crime thriller - stick-figure characters, pointless muddle of plot, people entering and exiting SUVs and Lear jets with a sense of urgency - that feels like it could drag on forever, and drag us down into a purgatory of stupefaction with it.

Painfully cute drama.

The film is intermittently funny and strangely intermittent.

Reality aside, The Watch is harmless enough - and even occasionally humorous, in a riffy, sketch-comedy kind of way.

Nasty stuff. It's xenophobic (message: Americans, steer clear of the Third World); it's photogenic (the Sports Illustrated-likeswimsuit issue beach scenes, the colorful villages, the lush landscapes); it's gruesome (operating table POV shots); and it's violent.

More strident than funny, the film illustrates that old French proverb, "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."

The whole project is a cloying, artificial mess. The slapstick comedy doesn't bite, and the formulaic sentimentality doesn't grip.

A naughtily funny, skin-deep satire.

An effectively unsettling mix of Southern gothic and Old Testament hugger-mugger, with shades of "The Exorcist" and even "Rosemary's Baby" thrown in.

To give the film its due, the stupidity is served up with energy and good pace. But it takes a thin premise and stretches it like Silly Putty. The title should really be "Obvious and Obviouser."

With clunky dialogue...I Am Number Four puts the burden on its special effects (passable) and the chemistry between Pettyfer and Agron.

Their chemistry goes like this: He cleans up real nice; she dirties down with gusto.

Level of humor: subteen.

To paraphrase one of its few laughs, it's a zombie movie directed by Vera Wang.

Even when his technique is amateurish, Jones' belief in the material is refreshing. Pollak's gentle humor is well balanced by the blunt wit of Bonnie Hunt as the O'Malley matriarch.

All things are possible, Julie-san, Miyagi constantly encourages his young charge. All things may be possible, Miyagi-sensei, but not this movie. [10 Sep 1994, p.D9]

Johnny Mnemonic may aspire to be Blade Runner. It succeeds only in being a parody of Flipper. [27 May 1995, p.D09]

Push has a cool, sinewy style, energy to burn.

Has its moments of charm, but it's ultimately a fascinating failure that surely looked better on paper than it does on the screen.

Phase II has some nice comic touches, but it's a forgettable B-movie.

Theron proves the master of operatic hissy fits, Blunt lets the pain show beneath the glacial cool, Chastain brings her usual Juilliard-schooled commitment to the occasion, and Hemsworth is Hemsworthian, if oft-times incomprehensible, delivering his lines in a gorse-y whorl of vowels and consonants.

Even though it's all preliminaries, no main event, Grudge Match is harmless enough as entertainment. Just not as harmless as its poor protagonists.

An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir.

Williamson's screenplay doesn't match the cleverness of his conceit; it lacks the requisite archness and wit.

If Stealth were a recruitment film for aircraft-carrier duty, one would be tempted to say, "Mission accomplished." As a feature film, it's a washout.

The best that can be said about the movie is that it's harmless and mostly charmless. The Clone Wars is to Star Wars what karaoke is to pop music.

Fast is a good quality in an action/adventure. But there is lightning-paced and then there is warp speed. Doug Liman's Jumper is the latter, a not-so-good quality in an action/adventure for the simple reason that the audience can't figure out what's going on.

It's not that Salvation Boulevard is bad: It's quite funny at times and has some good performances. But it's so predictable it has no bite, either as social satire or as slapstick comedy.

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 snappily fun Mantrap Movie, as films about husband-hunting gals are known, is that rare hybrid of romantic comedy and Super Bowl.

Would I see it again? Not even for a Scooby snack.

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

Proves a theory first advanced in the movie "Repo Man": The more you drive, the stupider you get.

It's wholesome as a glass of milk, and as refreshing.

Stiff but handsome film, there's little sense of the conflict and complexities that drove Alma Mahler.

A silly, if fun, futuristic sci-fi romance.