The film, which has the ingredients for a thoughtful, tense thriller throws away a compelling first half so it can descend into silliness and clichés.

As coming of age stories go, Wah-Wah does little to distinguish itself.

By turns frustrating and tedious, this can sink even the most intriguing story.

Deliver us from directors who think that asking cast members to overact is the only way he can cover us the numerous ludicrous weaknesses of his screenplay.

A horror film that starts out creepy but ends up disjointed and borderline- incoherent. It's a shame that the final product isn't a little better packaged because, unlike many lame entries into the genre, this one actually contains a few interesting, philosophically titillating ideas.

The "Apatow formula" is pretty simple: raunchy comedy, likeable characters, and a dash of sweetness (but nothing too sweet). Drillbit Taylor fulfills the third characteristic but falls short in the other two.

The story's entire foundation is based upon a plot hole so gargantuan that anyone not suffering a brain cramp will identify it at once.

The movie ends up feeling superficial and mechanical. Warhol is a cut-and-dried villain rather than a complex individual.

This is not a good movie but, considering what Halloween has evolved into over the course of seven sequels, it's perhaps better than it has a right to be.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before but it’s done with sufficient schmaltz to work on its own terms. Damning with faint praise? You betcha, but that’s all I have.

Unfortunately, while director AJ Jankel (Super Mario Bros – yes, she’s the one responsible for that) captures aspects of the hostility toward lesbian relationships in that earlier era, she does it without nuance. Her framing of characters is black-and-white and the far-too-pat ending offers an unearned resolution.

There's no shortage of candidates for the fatal flaw: the artificial storyline; the presence of a ridiculously cliched character; the lack of chemistry between illicit lovers. Blaming one of these problems is probably unfair. The movie's failure is likely based on a fusion of all these, and perhaps a few others.

Some of the dialogue is astonishingly awful. Sex and relationships are constantly likened to animal interaction.

The story is so obvious that a viewer could leave the theater for fifteen minutes and not be even a little lost upon his return.

The occasional laughs provided aren't frequent enough or uproarious enough to warrant an investment of nearly two hours of a viewer's time.

The best way to sum up Freddy Vs. Jason is: good concept, mediocre execution.

A feature film adaptation of King’s best novel is deserving of something more epic than this throw-away production.

The Commuter falls into line with Neeson’s other high-octane, low-intelligence efforts and part of the reason it works (to the degree that it works) is because of the sincerity with which the actor attacks the part.

The Space between Us is what it looks like when a promising premise is betrayed by a dumbed-down, hackneyed screenplay.

It's tame and rather bland, and the laughter it generates is half-hearted. Director Jesse Peretz commits the unpardonable sin of wasting the considerable comedic talent of Paul Rudd.

Renaissance Man is a movie of moments, too many of which are mediocre or unfulfilling.

By de-mythologizing Alexander, Stone has turned him into an unbelievable individual. We accept great deeds from great people, not from sniveling whiners.

Friday the 13th is neither tense nor frightening (although, to be fair, it is at times creepy and atmospheric, due in part to budgetary limitations that led to a low-key style).

Working with time travel is never an easy task and, when a filmmaker doesn’t take a rigorous, consistent approach, it can become a mess. Such is the case with Don’t Let Go.

As high camp, Willard might have something going for it, but not as a horror movie.

Yes, A Late Quartet is disappointing. But it's also pretty bad.

Carlito's Way probably should have been a taut thriller, but choices by DePalma in both presentation and editing have hamstrung it.

Despite high production standards and a slick advertising campaign, Primal Fear is as trite and routine as any made-for-TV courtroom drama.

Unevenly paced and with a miscast lead, the movie fails to get us to care about its automaton main character as she goes through the motions in a generic spy thriller.

The obligatory concluding remark for a horror movie about the undead applies here: the best approach is to leave it buried.

Instead of vying for a so-bad-it’s-entertaining categorization, it falls squarely into the hell of cinematic mediocrity.

One of the cleverest moments in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator comes during the first five seconds: a memorial dedication to Kim Jong Il. It's all downhill from there.

The Dark Tower isn’t a bad movie even though there’s a clumsiness to its narrative and a cheapness to its appearance.

Bloodshot suffers from a world-building failure. With too little time and emphasis placed on crafting the setting and exploring some of the rich possibilities of the milieu in which events transpire, the movie turns into little more than a ho-hum Vin Diesel action film.

One of the most positive comments that can be made about Hick is that it advances Chloe Grace Moretz's claim to be one of the best young actresses emerging into today's spotlight.

Cutthroat Island is a mindless diversion. If, for whatever reason, you decide to go, maintain low expectations. Hoping for more than a bunch of loud bangs and ridiculous dialogue will rob Cutthroat Island of its amusement value.

The moment Showtime begins to take itself even remotely seriously, it loses whatever edge it might have had -- and that occurs less than 15 minutes into the proceedings. The best time for Showtime is no time.

All-in-all, however, even though Chaplin is fitfully entertaining, it fails to touch enough emotional chords to make it of more than passing interest.

Basically, this film is stale -- as unappetizing as week-old bread. With much better fare of this sort available on video (Airplane, The Naked Gun, etc.), renting a tape will be more satisfying, not to mention cost-effective. Loaded Weapon 1 is good for a few laughs, but there's no compelling reason to spend $5+ to see such a feeble feature-length comedy.

The caper is a dud - so stupid and implausible from beginning to end that it's impossible to take it seriously for even the briefest of moments.

At its best, Nightbitch offers a deeply honest, emotionally unsettling portrait of the darker side of parenting. Unfortunately, those moments are counterbalanced by a metaphorical story element that devolves into an exercise in campiness so tonally at variance with the core story as to create a dissonance many viewers won’t be able to overcome.

Hocus Pocus is an occasionally dull, mostly pedantic motion picture with little to recommend it. It belongs on the long list of summer movies that will quickly be buried and forgotten until the surface on video in six months. For real fun at the expense of the dead, see instead Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness.

There's no compelling reason to see Deal. Everything it offers is familiar to the extent where even though it's not a remake, it feels like one.

Saved by energetic musical numbers.

Instead of bringing intriguing characters with real problems and interesting dialogue to the bash, Kaplan and Elfont take the lazy approach of pulling generic stereotypes off the shelf and throwing them into a formulaic plot that doesn't offer one genuine surprise or meaningful moment.

Anyone approaching it today will find it horribly dated, badly produced, and filled with uninspired musical numbers and over-the-top performances. This is the kind of movie that turns off children of today's generation from titles made during the early talkie era.

The Pursuit of Happyness is long, dull, and depressing.

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu isn’t a movie. It’s a cog in a multibillion-dollar media empire, a soulless feature-length example of product placement at its most blatant.

Taken as a whole, Mad Dog and Glory is a disappointingly mixed bag. What's on the screen is passably diverting, but I often felt as if I was seeing only half the movie. With this intriguing premise and cast, the film should have offered more complete entertainment.

If not for Bornedal's stylish approach to the material and a couple of effectively chilling sequences, Nightwatch would have been a complete waste of time and effort.

A prefabricated example of shoddy workmanship.

Feel-good tripe: a string of clichés lashed together by a formulaic plot that features underwritten characters and sit-com style humor.

I have never been a fan of the original Carrie, but, despite the different slant offered by The Rage, there's not enough new material here for me to like the sequel any better.

Several strokes short of a respectable finish.

It is possible to make an engaging action/adventure picture of this sort, but The Scorpion King isn't it. The movie isn't godawful, but it's far from inspired, and, as I sat through its 90 minute running length, I found my mind wandering.

An amateurish effort that boasts direct-to-video characteristics, the latest version disappoints in almost every production aspect.

This lame animated fable, despite having "direct-to-video" written all over it, was released by Disney, in an act of unparalleled greed and desperation, into multiplexes.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is harmless enough, although it exists more as an afterthought than a legitimate continuation of a story that was fully told twenty years ago after the first 105 minutes.

The primary sin isn’t that Blue Beetle stinks the way really bad movies do but that it is so deeply mired in mediocrity that it’s tough to find a reason to care about its existence.

The narrative contains some clever moments but the resolution somehow feels like a cop-out, perhaps because we’ve seen it so many times before.

And, while it's not bad enough for me to suggest that it should have been left where it came from, this certainly isn't a shining example of Australian cinema.

Seen today, Going My Way looks and feels like a quaint, old-fashioned production that deserves to have been forgotten long ago.

The movie is populated by dislikeable individuals doing unpleasant things but isn't redeemed by the vein of viciously black comedy that made "The War of the Roses" and "Bad Santa" such devilish pleasures.

The concept may not be bad, but there are times when the execution borders on embarrassing.

We have entered generic action movie territory and the idiosyncrasies that made the series special at the outset have been leeched out, papered over, or turned into obligatory inserts.

There's a sense that a much better movie is trying to get out but it never attains escape velocity.

Perhaps in the hands of a visionary genius in touch with their inner child, it might have been possible to achieve something better than an overlong throwaway distraction for a preschooler. In the hands of these filmmakers, however, it feels like a soulless cash-grab – an attempt to tap into the family-friendly frenzy that has emerged this summer.

Instead of a satire, they give us a tired, tedious victory-for-the-underdog story, and the unevenness of Ferrell's comedy makes it less appealing.

Unfortunately, much of what's good about Promised Land is easily forgotten as a result of the preachy, impossible-to-swallow final 15 minutes in which the protagonist is subjected to character assassination, the screenplay turns into a sermon, and narrative intelligence is discarded in favor of a message.

It is, at best, an oversized, overbudgeted Saturday morning cartoon.

Much of the film's comedy feels muted; Fun with Dick and Jane isn't a lot of fun.

The most likely facial expression to be elicited by Mona Lisa Smile is a grimace.

The Beach House is a middling horror film with aspirations of recalling The Fog or The Mist but lacking the screenplay to come close to either.

Unfortunately, the film stumbles, offering too few legitimate scares and displaying an overreliance on traditional horror movie clichés.

With more attention to detail, this could have worked, but the time travel aspects are so badly executed that the movie as a whole falters and eventually rips apart at the seams.

The storyline is all over the place, with numerous unresolved subplots sprouting out of thin air and being left hanging (presumably to be resolved in future movies).

Ant-Man and the Wasp offers nothing close to what we have come to expect from entries into the MCU. Plodding, repetitive, replete with technobabble nonsense and lifeless action, this is easily the worst-written of any of the 20 MCU offerings and may be the worst all-around film featuring a Marvel superhero since Sony rebooted Spider-Man.

Let me admit to loving the premise behind Supervized. The problem is that a movie needs more than a great premise – it needs to grow and nurture that idea, and that’s where Supervized falls short.

The dialogue is routine, frequently punctuated by cliches, and the character-building scenes do little more than waste time.

Elements of Across the Universe are shockingly awful and the film lasts at least 30 minutes past the bearable stage. But if you like the Beatles and the idea of hearing about 20 covers of their work fills you with a perverse joy, this may be the movie for you.

Although Peter Straughan’s stripped-down regurgitation of the story is faithful to Tartt’s narrative in the broadest sense of the word, it lacks elegance and depth. A Dickensian coming-of-age tale, The Goldfinch is at times dull and pretentious and never earns its 2.5-hour running length as an example of either art or entertainment.

Although Shortbus doesn't work as porn (and I don't believe it's intended to), it also doesn't work as a serious drama. The storyline is juvenile and the characters remain poorly developed and incomplete.

Pitch Perfect looks, sounds, and feels like pretty much every other movie that features a singing or dancing competition.

What potentially could have been the greatest asset possessed by Che - its unapologetic length - turns into its greatest detriment.

Written without much concern for logic and coherence, the movie wavers between being a drama and a thriller and, as is too often the case in situations like these, doesn’t work as either.

The over-the-top acting is forgivable, but the plot's incoherence is not.

Black is a capable action director so the individual fight scenes are well-executed and occasionally involving. It might have helped the excitement level if we had more than a passing affinity for any of the characters.

Take away Kristen Wiig, and Masterminds offers nothing. She is by far the best thing about the movie and easily outshines her SNL compatriots Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and Jason Sudeikis.

Grumpier Old Men isn't as fun, spontaneous, or amusing as the original. In short, it's a poor retread that can't be redeemed by the pleasure of seeing Lemmon and Matthau together.

The movie doesn't offer enough to make it interesting or even diverting.

Unfortunately, Never Say Never Again is a poor excuse for the veteran actor's return. The humor is over-the-top, the direction is pedestrian, and the storyline drags. Were it not for the simple pleasure of seeing Connery playing 007 one more time, this film would have been nearly unwatchable. All things considered, it's not a very good movie, but at least Connery's charisma salvages parts of it. Unfortunately, Never Say Never Again is a poor excuse for the veteran actor's return. The humor is over-the-top, the direction is pedestrian, and the storyline drags. Were it not for the simple pleasure of seeing Connery playing 007 one more time, this film would have been nearly unwatchable. All things considered, it's not a very good movie, but at least Connery's charisma salvages parts of it.

Director Brett Ratner has always been associated with spectacle but, even for him, this represents a misstep because the "wow!" factor is muted.

Never representative of more than mediocrity from a technical or story-based standpoint, the Ice Age series has reached a new nadir with its third entry.

Those looking for a quick horror fix may be satisfied – there are enough jump-scares to fill a quota – but, when one considers the number of inventive and interesting genre titles that have graced multiplex screens in recent years, this a disappointing exception.

With its blend of existential science fiction and character-based romance, it would seem to be as close to a can’t-miss premise as one can imagine yet, despite that, it somehow does miss – and by a wide margin.

There are times when the story behind the making of a film is more interesting than the finished product. This is one of those occasions.

A clear case of a narrative running out of steam. Exhaustingly repetitive, this movie attempts many of the same things its predecessor did but with less succes.

Despite its flashy production design and big budget, it's shallow and unsatisfying and primarily interesting for what it says about the views of society when it was made.