There's not enough here to sustain a half-hour sitcom, but Reese Witherspoon shoulders the burden with star shine to spare.

A shock ending may be the best hope for this film, a convoluted mystery that thinks it's way smarter than it is.

In not knowing who it needs to please, I Want to Believe pleases no one.

If you're like me, diluted Smith is still better than no Smith at all.

An otherwise mild-mannered diversion from the American indie hinterland, Swan Song is the rare film to give this cult actor the center-stage spotlight, and a mirrorball-refracted spotlight at that. The fact that he’s in every scene of Todd Stephens’ sentimental queer comedy is, it turns out, the boldest decision in a film that doesn’t always honor its professed credo to live life out loud.

It's a one-joke premise that ultimately wears thin, but Krueger works some playful variations on a theme.

The action and jokes pile up with exhausting repetitiveness. But Theroux and Franco make a truly hilarious team.

In his screenwriting debut, Glee's gifted Chris Colfer, 22, proves he can lace a line with sass and soul. The downside of Struck by Lightning, besides the fact that Colfer's character, Carson Phillips, is struck dead in the first scene, is that Colfer hands himself all the best lines.

When the script, by Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz and John Logan, doesn't sabotage the images, and the great cinematographer John Toll turns action into poetry, The Last Samurai emerges as a haunting silent movie.

Aussie singer Natalie Imbruglia gets to play the babe, nothing more, but she does that brightly. The rest of the movie is a dim bulb.

It becomes a lot of movies at once. Some fly, some don’t, but the sum effect is that it winds up spinning its wheels, its hyperkinetic delights (all I’ll say is: magnets) awash in too many strands of background drama.

The too-blunt comedy defangs the film. As does the irritating voiceover from the Rolling Stone reporter, played Scoot McNary, which breaks a cardinal rule of filmmaking: show, don't tell.

Oddly, the published screenplay – while far from McCarthy's top-drawer – reads better than it plays. What's onscreen recalls a line from No Country: "It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?"

Hungarian director Istvan Szabo (Sunshine) overplays his hand and traps Bening in a role that's all emoting, no emotion.

Hemsworth and Thompson, who has the makings of a major star, do the heavy lifting. And, miraculously, they keep it light, breezy and watchable. Memorable? That’s asking too much.

(It) feels like a pale facsimile of Jarmusch. There are a few lovely, random laughs and a resonant political subtext, but the tone is off.

There's no denying the ambition in A Hologram for the King, but a struggle does not add up to a satisfying movie — or even a reasonable facsimile of the beauty and terror Eggers evokes on the page.

Assassination Nation thinks its a f*ck-you punchline. It’s actually the film’s most honest admission — its one true self-own.

Robert De Niro – wait for it – in the role of a mobster. Now there's an original idea.

With the exception of a battle scene with apes on all fours charging the humans, the film is monumentally silly.

Bad Teacher keeps running away from its combustibly nasty premise. Damn shame.

Nolte brings a raspy authority to the role, and director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) surrounds him with colorful characters.

It can't decide whether it wants to be magnificently toxic or merely mediocre. Mileage may vary on where the movie eventually lands, but either way, this is a "romp" that's keen on going nowhere ... and sloooowly.

A long sit in the shallows, the equivalent of five half-hour episodes strung together.

Short review of three little words: Way. Too. Long.

Clooney and company work it too hard this time. You can tell they're huffing and puffing to stay afloat. But all I hear is: glug glug glug.

The script by Linda Woolverton stays surface faithful to the characters created by Lewis Carroll, but the film has lost its soul.

You spend a good deal of Keeper forming theories about what’s going on, keenly sifting through clues in the hopes of possible answers. Once everything is revealed, however, you wish you’d gone back that previous ignorance that now seems like a state of bliss. To say that Tatiana Maslany is a saving grace here is obvious, given that she’s rescued a few projects from utter disaster.

The Zeitlins have dreamed since childhood of bringing their version of "Peter Pan" to the screen. Their collective imaginative powers are indisputable. But what started as a visually gripping, fiercely funny, and emotionally centered take on Wendy’s mission statement (“The more you grow up, the less things you get to do that you wanna”) ends in a chaotic clutter that deserves, well, the hook.

The only way to react is by bringing a barf bag or a strong sense of gallows humor.

Not a great movie, but courtesy of director Robert Lorenz, a lean, plausibly entertaining one with all the fixin’s and none of the extra flab of deep, incisive meaning. It’s a buddy movie, a cartel chase, a sentimental redemption story. It’s a comfort watch.

What a handsome empty shell of a movie Allied is.

Escapism with a human touch -- it feels lived-in.

It's tough to imagine a guy who won't squirm through this tale of 1950s housewife Evelyn Ryan.

Reiner gets lucky with his two stars. Wilson has charm to spare, and Hudson brings humor and sexiness to playing Emma and four au pair girls from different countries. But even they can't float a balloon with lead in it.

Aquaman is a mess of clashing tones and shameless silliness, but a relief after all the franchise’s recent superhero gloom. Any budget-busting epic that finds time to show us an octopus playing bongos gets a pass in our book.

This is a pulpy B movie that is dying to be a prestige project, and there’s a big part of you that wishes everyone had just leaned into the teensploitation aspects more.

What the movie’s effortful attempts at symbolism and meaning do most effectively are undercut what’s smart about the questions it raises — and DaCosta’s fine hand at creeping us out. The movie wants to be more than it is. The result is that it winds up amounting to less than it could have been.

Marshall deserves props for putting the "show" back into the Pirates business. But face it, he's polishing a giant turd.

The new Body Snatchers is the most graphic of all, featuring more overt violence and decomposing flesh than the other two films combined. But it sorely lacks the focus and resonance of its predecessors.

It's hard to hate a movie, even one this droolingly crass, that knows how to laugh at itself.

What we have here is a model for the paint-by-numbers, perfectly generic, proudly soulless summer action flick. An original idea would die for lack of oxygen in S.W.A.T.

The acting? Common and the Game score as baddies, but Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp.

Ritchie is all about the whooshing and headbanging, leaving no space between Holmes' words to savor their meaning. Downey is irresistible. The movie, not so much.

Hollywood has a knack for sanitizing books that deserve better. In the case of The Glass Castle, it's a damn shame.

It plays like an opportunity missed.

Character gets sacrificed for just another true-crime drama.

It's unlikely audiences will be echoing a starving Oliver's most famous line: "Please, sir, I want some more."

Does it tick off the boxes of what we’ve come to expect from this series? Yes. Does it add up to more than The Chris Farley Show of Alien movies? Well … let’s just say no one may be able to hear you scream in space, but they will assuredly hear your resigned sighs in a theater.

Like a doggie in a window, this romcom relentlessly wags its tail so you'll fall in love and take it home. Not this time, puppy.

The actors and admirably sensitive director Jake Scott (son of Ridley) can't compensate for Ken Hixon's long slog of a script.

Alex Cross has been neutered on film, deprived of his sexuality, his family, his friends.

If nothing else, How to Make a Killing is an abject lesson in how to hire the right person to salvage your movie.

Perhaps director Harold Becker thought flashy acting could distract us from the gaping plot holes. Becker gets so intent on confusing us, he forgets to give us characters to care about, the way he did in Sea of Love with Al Pacino. Malice is way out of that classy league. It’s got suspense but no staying power.

Even the great ones hit snags. With The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmsuch gets tangled up in his own deadpan.

Gray says she hates fishermen who catch and release: Getting jerked around hurts the jaw. See this movie and you'll know the feeling.

Ledger's comic flair is a big plus in a film that is fanatically busy and fatally sexless.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. You’ll leave still loving Gilda. The movie, not so much.

Mixing Rock with ooh-la-la turns out to be as appetizing as chalk and cheese.

The result, sadly, is a mess.

Our Idiot Brother comes off as a blueprint for a smart script no one really made. Now that's what I call dumb.

Hamstrung by a script that seems determined to stop at all the big moments in Frida's life (she died in 1954 at age forty-seven) without giving anything time to resonate.

The film is moving. It’s also a bit reductive. The flaw is in the way that one enables the other.

With Del Toro's name in the credits, standard chills aren't enough. We want imagination to run riot.

The scares are Hichcock hand-me-downs.

The actors can't perform miracles. Hot dogs are served in the final scene, but trust me, Hyde Park on Hudson is no picnic.

The result is just good enough to pass as an action flick you watch with the forgiving gaze that comes from too many beers and too little sleep.

Magic Mike slowly degenerates into a simplistic cautionary fable. I didn't see that coming from a sharp observer like Soderbergh.

Carrey knocks himself out trying to make The Cable Guy different, then neglects the quiet, telling moments that would make it real.

ignore the pileup of implausibilities and Unknown becomes a diabolically entertaining con game. Does it jerk you around? Yes. Suck it up. The ride's worth it.

Working in Spanish for the first time, the filmmaker somehow allows the interweaving threads of his plot to get tangled into a jumble even he can’t satisfactorily unravel. It’s a damn shame.

Formula mother-brat stuff...It's only the deft teamwork of Portman and Sarandon that keeps the triteness at bay.

Even a nice chianti couldn't help you wash down this lump of tear-jerking twaddle.

The villains, an incestuous brother and sister played by real-life marrieds Amy Poehler and Will Arnett are a hoot. And "Office" honey Jenna Fischer is welcome as Jimmy’s love.

Everything sly and low-key about The In-Laws, a 1979 comedy...is supersized and coarsened in Andrew Fleming's remake.

The result is chaotic, but never lacking in energy – and the cast is up for anything.

Audiences expecting more Bullock or more weighty import from A Time to Kill will have to adjust expectations and settle for the kick of a good yarn.

Any similarities between Josey and Lois Jenson, the real woman who made Eveleth Mines pay for their sins in a landmark 1988 class-action suit, are purely coincidental. Instead, we get a TV-movie fantasy of female empowerment glazed with soap-opera theatrics.

At its best, this tale of a young female assassin seeking vengeance and wreaking havoc is one more chance to see expertly choreographed mayhem. At its worst, it plays like a Wick-ipedia sub-entry ambitiously pumped up to main-event status. Let’s just say the balance tilts toward the latter more than you’d like.

For now, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is just one more walk on the mild sides for tweens who dream of being penetrated by cold flesh that will keep them young and cute forever.

Talk about beating a dead orc. In dutifully completing his prequel trilogy to his three-part Lord of the Rings triumph, director Peter Jackson has sadly saved the worst for last.

Nguyen can stir up all the sturm and drang he wants, but Hummingbird feels as humdrum and impersonal as a blueprint.

The actors do what they can to keep their heads above the sudsy script. No go. It’s distressing to see a great subject go wrong in the right hands.

The mutual grief and abiding love felt by the Irish actor, 68, and his son, 25, cuts close to home and brings the film a touching honesty it otherwise sorely lacks.

Witherspoon has the class, the sass and the full-out talent to sustain a major career. Who else could turn the wimpy Sweet Home Alabama into a date-movie winner? She's one of that select group who is worth watching in anything. Even in this less-than-magic kingdom, Reese rules.

We pity Linda, but it's no substitute for understanding her.

Timberlake walks off with the movie. Too bad it's not worth stealing.

This live-action re-imagining of Disney’s 1941 animated classic may be the sweetest film Tim Burton has ever made. It’s also the safest.

Anselmo, basing his script on a true story, juggles more plots than a full season of "The O.C.," setting his cast adrift in a sea of soap-opera bubbles.

There are much worse things than semi-stylish, slightly generic horror films, especially those channeling the sort of moody children’s-lit work of authors like Maurice Sendak (an alt-title: Where the Wild Things Scar?) in the name of creepiness. There are also better movies to seek out in the name of mining childhood for nightmare fodder.

Suffers from franchise fatigue. Its rote suspense is strictly a business proposition.

It's as if the brothers admired the Swiss-watch precision of the original and wanted to take it apart to see how the pieces would work in a new setting. As an experiment, it's fascinating. But damn if the fiddling doesn't suck the life out of the laughs.

Playwright Stephen Belber (Match), in his directing debut, comes close to the sweet spot. He's not there yet. But he'll be worth watching next time.

This one means well, a kiss-of-death review if there ever was one.

I don't like this movie. I don't like how it walks, talks, struts and sells itself. I find it contrived, tortured, humorless, infuriating and interminable. And yet if you care anything about film and the creative drive that still exists in the people who make them, then Third Person needs to be seen.

If the script for this comic spin on Fatal Attraction were only a tenth as hot as Uma Thurman, director Ivan Reitman might have had something here.

In his second film as a feature director, following the mess that was "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," Berlinger loses his way in a game of let’s pretend that ends in a tangle of tonal shifts and missed opportunities.