Murray blusters and hams his way through the first two acts before turning all mushy in the third.

It's also a real shame that such a fascinating reminder of how far civil rights have come in the last five decades has been reduced to such a turkey of a film.

Jason Schwartzman is upstaged by his dog in 7 Chinese Brothers.

It doesn't help that director Ken Kwapis stages everything like a sitcom, has no sense of pace, and buries the theme of late-life friendship under a haze of sentiment and trail dust.

Peter Bogdanovich made a great screwball comedy. This isn't it.

This is the Fantastic Four. Maybe someday they'll get to act like it.

Allen's movies, even at their lowest, have usually boasted interesting musical scores, melding jazz, classical, and American standards. Irrational Man, though, uses The Ramsey Lewis Trio's "The 'In' Crowd," an already overexposed riff, so repetitively that I thought I was seeing the film with a temp soundtrack. The real Woody, whatever his flaws, would never have allowed this. I hope he comes back someday.

There are legitimate excuses for going to see Pixels. Losing a bet, perhaps. Having a loved one held for ransom. Maybe a serious blow to the head. But none of those (except maybe the last) would allow you watch and actually enjoy the latest cinematic leavings of Adam Sandler.

Once goateed, acerbic Kingsley vanishes from the screen, he takes any smidgen of life with him.

Run! Run for your lives! Get out of this theater now! Two hours is a terrible thing to waste!

Making a movie with a sad-sack protagonist this hard to root for is like laying track for the main line express to nowhere. Watching it is like taking a ride so bumpy, with scenery so boring, that you end up hoping for a derailment. Either way, buying a ticket for The D Train is something to regret.

It's the kind of movie where the bloopers that run with the end credits are much funnier than anything that came before. That's a good rule for a comedy: if the blooper reel is funnier than the movie, you're in trouble.

It's OK to rip off/pay homage to a better movie, but the idea is to improve on it, and ideas one thing that's completely missing from Get Hard.

If you think you've seen this movie, you have. Once it had a male protagonist and was called "Harry Potter." Then it starred Jennifer Lawrence and was called "The Hunger Games." Now it stars Shailene Woodley and goes by "The Divergent Series." Same thing, only worse.

There's also something tired and way too familiar to the story of a white guy who acts as the savior of Africa while the only major black character in the movie stands ineptly on the sidelines.

The film's structure is a reminder that being Pinteresque isn't the same as being written by Harold Pinter, and its lyrics prove that there's a big difference between something Sondheim-esque and the real deal.

The creators of Jupiter Ascending spent $175 million on special effects and 25 cents on a story. Audiences do not get their money's worth.

It's a thriller, if the term can be applied to an inept, perfunctory movie with more laughs than thrills — and it only has a couple laughs. Let's call it an attempted thriller and an inadvertent comedy.

Occasionally, particularly when it sticks to simple slapstick, the movie wins a laugh. But the majority of it isn't just dumb and dumber, or even crude and cruder. At nearly two hours, it's just dull — and duller.

If this Dracula can kill hundreds of enemies by himself — and he can, and does, in several dull and protracted battle scenes — then where's the suspense? If he's become a monster for noble reasons, then where's the dark conflict?

Tusk is a step backward into an insular world. True, it will probably play well to gore fans, and that dedicated audience who already cheer everything Smith does.

The period details are unconvincing, the cinematography is flat, and the performances are surprisingly one note considering the talent involved.

Everyone on screen looks like they'd rather be anywhere else than under the control of novice director Dustin Marcellino, whose first (and hopefully last) feature this is.

If the film had been trimmed to 45 minutes of crazed storm-chasing and storm-fleeing, it might've been worth a matinee ticket. But as is, it's the sort of lazy late-summer idiocy you'd be wise to huddle beneath an overpass to avoid.

Grating attempt at comedy, the latest failed attempt to capitalize on McCarthy's considerable charm.

The bi-culturalism actually is kind of fitting. Asia sends us their junk as toys. We repurpose that junk and send it back as movies. See? Recyling. Everybody wins. Except audiences.

He plays it so low-key there's nothing much for him to do, apart from the clueless-dad shtick and some awkward comedy with an ostrich. The big laughs never come.

The only thing missing from this steaming casserole, in fact, is the one crucial ingredient: A sense of humor.

Both a prequel and a sequel to the original tale, only with more bloodspilling and slow-motion, and even less wit or truth.

From the evidence presented here, this film's three screenwriters have not only never taken a commercial flight, they've never met any actual human beings. The details of air travel and human behavior are equally foreign to the film.

It's a spectacle, all right -- but mostly just of a lot of people, some of whom should know better, making an utter ash of themselves.

It's a movie that's races from no place to get nowhere.

The only thing Stratton, a former television actor making his first feature, has going for him is the casting of Jessica Lange.

This is supposed to be a movie about obsession. Instead it's just cupcake meets beefcake, with a big glass of milk on the side. And that's one Valentine's Day dinner you can easily pass up.

It's not pretty. In fact, it's downright scary when the two of them, after an hour-and-a-half of insults, finally drop the robes and get into the ring. It's like two old leather handbags come to life and slapping each other around in slow-motion.

Directed as if it were an after-school special, with listless performances and musical numbers (Mary J. Blige shows up as a platinum-wigged congregant), Black Nativity is as simple and condescending as Hughes' work was complex and demanding.

The Counselor is nothing but a dumb, gory, grab-bag of clichés and the biggest waste of talent since "Savages." It makes Oliver Stone look subtle.

It's the film, though, that remains handcuffed. The early part of the story -- with Riddick stranded on an unfriendly planet -- is taut enough, but hampered by flagrantly unreal effects and Diesel's punch-drunk narration.

If it works at all, fitfully, it's because of the precociously talented and in-control Moretz, who carries the film on her own small shoulders.

Sudeikis has always been a charming comedic actor. He usually doesn't have to work this hard for laughs.

The ferociously misguided new rendition of The Lone Ranger has no legitimate reason to exist.

Galifianakis tries hard, and he has a few nice moments with guest star Melissa McCarthy, but this is a movie to make teetotalers of us all.

Bay seems to have been gunning for something along the lines of "Blood Simple" or "A Simple Plan," but Pain & Gain is just plain simple.

The deadly dull action-comedy Identity Thief is an infuriating waste of time, on all sides of camera and screen. I did not know I could yawn angrily. This movie somehow proved it possible.

It's often said that actors with distinctive vocal styles could compellingly read the phone book -- in this case, it would absolutely be a more entertaining hour-and-a-half.

The movie never pauses -- at least, not to waste time on anything like developing the female characters. But there's no edge to anything, either dramatically or politically.

The movie is stunningly perfunctory, soul-crushingly oblivious to its own lack of originality, and, to be blunt, just plain dumb.

The only reliable smiles come courtesy of Steve Buscemi, a frequent presence in Sandler movies, here voicing an exasperated, over-extended werewolf dad.

A nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.

There's almost nothing to Battleship beyond its grindingly dull, digitally rendered naval warfare.

Scenes will wander from gross-out gag to sentimental schmaltz to pervy leer to cheap nostalgia within a 30-second span, utterly free of clear directorial guidance. Even worse, very little of it is remotely funny.

Ugly, dull, bloodless, dumb, and phony to its core.

The comic moments are fewer, flatter and far, far less welcome.

It's shaping up to be a long, dry summer, at least at the multiplex.

What could have been a biting, darkly comic action flick about capitalistic health care run amok is instead a familiar, gory, post-apocalyptic slog.

Unfortunately, the movie is the worst sort of liar: an unfunny one. Its gormless, assertion-free protagonist offends as a role model for idio youths, and, even worse, offends as drama.

Cop Out wouldn't be as disappointing if it hadn't been made by Smith, but for those who dig the vulgar wit of his early, funny films, it's not just stupid, it's sad. At least the worst film of the year also bears its most forgettable title.

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.

The movie's a fish-out-of-water romantic-comedy thriller that forgets to be romantic, comedic or thrilling.

Witless, tasteless, toothless, pointless, garish, repetitive, obvious, and painfully dull, Pirate Radio is that exceedingly rare film that never, but never puts a foot right.

If you want genuine laughs and romance in a carnival setting, go rent "Adventureland."

Better luck trying to find out what truly happened to the real Earhart than trying to diagnose all that's wrong with this hapless film.

Structurally, this is as by-the-numbers as rom-coms get, right down to the wacky best friends, played by Judy Greer and Dan Fogler. For a while, it's low-key enough to be tolerable.

I was stunned to learn that "Beth Cooper" was adapted by former "Simpsons" writer Larry Doyle from his young-adult novel and directed by "Harry Potter" helmer Chris Columbus. Rarely have two seasoned Hollywood professionals produced something so painfully, amateurishly, relentlessly unfunny.

Revenge of the Fallen almost feels like it's signaling an end-game for blockbuster movies: all sensation, no content, catastrophic expense.

It's dull and crude and silly and without a lick of quality.

Spoiler alert: It can leave you feeling kind of empty and sad! It's pretty, icky and boring all at once, and feels like nothing so much as an unusually depressing Ban du Soleil commercial.

Scratch the surface, and the movie's underpinnings are an insult to women everywhere -- the film is slick stupid propaganda for the myth of The One True Love that wastes the talents of fine actresses.

Reprehensible.

The movie is a septic tank of vapid noir posturing, bad narration, bizarre pacing, cartoonishly hot femme fatales and ineptly staged slapstick.

Is there anything more depressing than when middlebrow filmmakers decide to remake bona fide classics that did not, under any circumstances, need to be remade?

Every so often there's a tabloid news story about the Virgin Mary seen in a piece of toast or Mother Teresa on a tortilla, and most of us equate them with Elvis sightings. This film is for the rest.

Shrill, unfunny third installment.

I can see how Mamma Mia! might be a fun stage musical. As a movie musical, it's a train wreck.

Might actually be the stupidest movie with good intentions that I've ever seen.

Confused, morally queasy, self-important mess.

It's awful. Awful. That's all. Keep walking. For the love of all that's holy. Keep. Walking.

The all-description storytelling leads to other problems, too, the worst being that "Boleyn" suffers from the same affliction as "The Golden Compass," where you're told about interesting stuff happening elsewhere in another movie you'd much rather be watching.

This moronic yuletide time-waster might work as a way to grab a few winks at the mall during last-minute shopping, but it's not going to end up as a highlight on the resume of anyone involved.

All this star power goes for naught in Traeger's film, which tries to blend bucolic sweetness with juvenile let's-make-a-porno jokes.

Although it contains crime and absurdity, it's not thrilling or funny and the title doesn't refer to a gun.

Seeing Hitman isn't like playing a video game or even like watching someone else play a video game. It's like watching someone stupid play a bad video game.

I could see people enjoying Dan in Real Life, I guess -- the scenery is nice and the people are pretty and the songs are cute little emotion substitutes. But Dan? Buddy? It's not all about you.

The results are not endearing. Eddie comes off not as a beleaguered Everyman but a heedless, dishonest knob trying to undo a deal that gave him exactly what he deserved. The real surprise is Carlos Mencia, playing an exuberant clerk at the resort hotel. But when Carlos Mencia is the funniest thing in your movie, you've got serious problems.

It's trying to fill some perceived market void created by the end of "Harry Potter."

You end up with a movie that takes that real problem and makes it feel like an exploitation contrivance.

Kyra Sedgwick is turned into a caricature of a sports agent. "NYPD Blue" grad Gordon Clapp gets one line of dialogue. And Morris Chestnut is pushed out to make room for one more "ain't she cute" moment.

An atrocious Robin Williams vehicle that might be Hollywood's first anti-romantic comedy.

The loudest, dumbest, slowest, least entertaining and most annoying by a very comfortable margin.

Fonda, playing grandmother to this clan of narcissists, is the only one who keeps her dignity. She's funny and low-key and deserves better comeback material than this and "Monster-in-Law." The other two actresses are humiliated.

At what point does The Condemned turn from a stupid-fun action movie into something unpleasant and hypocritical?

In a way, it's perfect: You can't imagine anyone seeing this mess and not feeling lesser for the experience.

Nothing shakes this pathetic attempt at humor from its self-satisfied torpor.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers failed to replace sex, splatter and cursing with sharp dialogue, characters and plotting.

Endless and tedious. It's also written-in-crayon, smack-your-face dumb, and edited so that every other shot is a close-up of a flailing limb.

It's meant to be funny, but I couldn't help thinking they were figuring out where to plant the pipe bombs.

Freedomland is the worst kind of bad movie: one that thinks it's important.

It's pathetic.