The film is shockingly light on music and heavy on crime scenes that play as bogus.

Demme can't sustain the fizz, but seeing a real filmmaker try and fall short is still more fun than watching a hack hit the mark.

What we do see is mom, dad, Braun, Usher, vocal coach Mama Jan Smith and the burgeoning Team Bieber claiming they only want the best for the boy as he goes through a punishing 84-date concert tour. Group hug.

Eisenberg and Stewart stay appealing to the last. The movie, not so much.

Trolls World Tour hits the home market at exactly the right time, celebrating music as a joyful, community experience that excludes no one. Nothing wrong with a movie, even this kiddie piffle, that steps up and does that.

There are funny scenes, nicely directed by Barry Levinson. Other stuff, involving De Niro's ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn) and their daughter (Kristen Stewart), are not much of anything. It's a tossup. Your call.

The strapping Owen as a guy who can't handle himself and cutie-pie Aniston as a witchy woman? I don't think so. Talk about derailed.

No cliché is left unturned, and Gordon compensates with slick action.

It’s the human devastation that gets short shrift in a movie that turns the hot, hilarious, out-for-blood Bernadette into the thing she hates most: conventional.

Look, it’s not like Tron: Ares, the third entry in this film series that now spans four decades, doesn’t have a few things going for it.

There are a few decent numbers left. Erivo still makes you feel like she owns this role. But for better or worse, For Good mostly feels like a mere reprise of the first film’s candy-colored cacophony, only with the volume slightly turned down.

Just a "Rambo" rehash.

Only fitfully funny, except when Ferrell is onscreen -- then you won't stop laughing.

Sad to say, the bloom is off the rose.

Statham is still playing it safe in Safe, but vulnerability is showing through the cracks.

Gorden teases out some affecting scenes, but not enough to carry a film that promises more than it delivers.

Cage works hard to find traces of humanity in a man that God forgot, as do screenwriter Steven Conrad and director Gore Verbinski. But in the face of a character no one cares about, can audiences be faulted for asking: Why should we?

Cusack captures that desperation vividly enough to make you wish this was the real Poe story, which The Raven onscreen leaves buried alive.

It's gross as hell.

The movie is such a chore because watching actors strain to wrap their mouths around prerecorded songs for 134 minutes is irritating and, worse, alienating.

Spade goes sweet and gooey. This is nucking futs.

The good news first: Keith Richards totally rocks it playing pirate daddy to Johnny Depp's Capt. Jack Sparrow. The deep rumble of his voice and those hooded eyes that narrowly open like the creaky gates of hell make him what the rest of this three-peat is not: authentically scary...So what's the bad news? Richards is onscreen for barely two minutes.

I can see why Fast and Furious might be a smash as audiences look for escape from a broken economy. All those wheelies and power slides are designed to obliterate thought, not provoke it. Talk about a movie for its time.

Curtis ladles sugar over the eager-to-please Love Actually to make it go down easy, forgetting that sometimes it just makes you gag.

It simply does not have the courage of its crass convictions. There's a going-through-the-motions vibe to the whole affair.

As a narrative that pretends to plumb the dark absence of missing children, however, Five Nights at Freddy’s is curiously inert, unwilling to get under your skin even as it grows dense with explanations of what’s happening.

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal are hotties with talent. And they maneuver through the daunting maze of shifting tones and intersecting plots of Love and Other Drugs like the pros they are.

Jessica Chastain isn’t just the reason to seek out The Eyes of Tammy Faye — she’s the only reason to see this curiously tepid biopic at all.

Good Boys rides highest on the teamwork of its three young stars.

This sequel has the perfunctory vibe that comes from filmmakers who cynically believe the public will buy anything T. Rex-related, no matter how shoddy the goods or warmed-over the plot.

The only thing this second-rate scarefest truly succeeds in doing, however, is giving Sweeney a hell of a showcase.

It gives me no pleasure to report that Aloha is still a mess, a handful of stories struggling for a unifying tone.

In the end, it’s not just that you’re watching a satire sans teeth — it’s more like you’re sitting through a version of Shattered Glass where Stephen Glass feels kind of bad about all those stories he made up.

The chance for delicious satire melts away quickly in Butter, a spoof without oomph.

Even sex can't save a film that produces instant narcolepsy.

Hoff-man and Broderick manage an affecting reconciliation, and Connery remains a peerless charmer. Still, there’s no telling what drew these three to such trite material. It’s like hiring the Rolling Stones and forcing them to sing Barry Manilow.

Between a diabolically funny start and a surprise climax, Scream 4 offers nothing more than a series of gory deaths that grow tiresome with repetition. The rating is a hard R, but Craven and Williamson keep it soft at its core. "Scream 1" is still the only keeper.

Graham, back in the porn territory she aced in “Boogie Nights,” steals the show. In the winter doldrums, you don't kick at a movie that puts a smile on your face.

It's Dead! It's Dead! By which I mean, It's Finished! It's Finished! Five movies have been squeezed out of four Stephenie Meyer Twilight books. All of them redefining cinematic tedium for a new century. And now, It's Over! It's Over! No more Twilight movies EVER! I'm so joyful that I might be overrating The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 by saying it's not half bad.

The snotty rich bastard? That role goes to Eugenio Derbez, Mexico's biggest star, who's allowed to speak a big chunk of his dialogue in Spanish, complete with subtitles. It's the one original idea that this retrofitted Overboard has to offer. The rest of the movie wears out its welcome muy rapido.

There's a killer idea circling this tricked-up teen thriller, which is more than you can say for most summer movies. But the idea never lands because Nerve lacks the, well, nerve to follow through on its convictions.

You can feel the narrative hitting predictable beats like it was upshifting an ATV’s gears, from infatuations with the outlaw life to blowing off good influences, getting sucked into the game to bad decisions leading to bodies dropping.

If "Pulp Fiction" impregnated "The Usual Suspects," the spawn would look a lot like Lucky Number Slevin. Great genes, but you keep wondering when the kid is going to grow up and find an identity of his own.

By the end of the film, the cliché of everybody getting along is reduced to both sides working together in the ultimate monument to capitalism: a mall. Some message.

Luna and Garai struggle to look like they're having the time of their life. But the movie, more wan than wicked, proves you can't go home again.

Reynolds is like a puppy dog who moonlights as a male model, or maybe vice versa. He’s the only reason to see Free Guy, but you already know this going in.

It's wickedly amusing for a little bit -- Robbins and Hurt really get into it -- but ultimately the film becomes what it's fighting: just noise.

It still feels like you’ve wandered into a Mob-themed animatronic presentation at some amusement park — the Disney Hall of Famous Mafia Bosses — and dutifully watch as landmark moments in crime history are checked off and re-enacted. Take away the De Niro Con: The Movie bona fides, and you’ve got nothing but a fancy Discovery special.

Looks and flows great, dripping with the 1940s crime-thriller atmosphere that James Ellroy described in his 1987 novel. On other levels -- plot (overstuffed), suspense (muted), acting (Hilary Swank as a femme fatale? Please!), posing (Scarlett Johansson plays dress-up as a mini Lana Turner), sex (it's all before and after) -- the movie is a bust.

Quick and the Dead plays like a crazed compilation of highlights from famous westerns. Raimi finds the right look but misses the heartbeat. You leave the film dazed instead of dazzled, as if an expert marksman had drawn his gun only to shoot himself in the foot.

It's the stunning location photography of camera ace Elliot Davis that provides what the movie itself lacks: authenticity.

It’s the sort true-story premise would be a fascinating starting point for a movie … if said film had more than a nodding acquaintance with the truth.

Wyatt keeps the action coming at a fast clip, but watching Jim repeatedly pursue a path of self-destruction for reasons never made clear grows wearying.

There is the slightly conspiratorial sense that the team behind this trip down movie-memory lane simply fed the scripts of various canonized sci-fi epics into an AI program and waited to see what sort of composite it spit out.

Missing is a sense of the interior life behind the smiling face that Selena showed the world.

No denying the relevance of the tale.

The gifted Myers lets his once and (I hope) future shag king get lost in an elephantine Hollywood franchise. The first time was the charm, baby.

It’s something closer to an amusement-park attraction named Generic Blockbuster Cruise, where you slowly glide past a bunch of prefab set-ups — over there you’ll see some thrills, look out on your right for some spills and chills — and the whole thing moves inexorably forward on a track, while a skipper cracks the same corny jokes.

Downey makes something lively, sexy and moving out of a role that's just a thin concept. But the movie feels like it's still in the darkroom.

Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck as star-crossed lovers, is the cinematic equivalent of Styrofoam: a weightless romantic comedy of synthetic feelings.

Too limp to deliver.

As the film stopped counting back in years and switched to months, I panicked that it would slog on to weeks, hours and seconds before reaching its inevitable end. I was wrong. About A Lot Like Love leaving you wanting a lot less, I am right.

This Nacho leaves your palate longing for more spice and less rancid cheese.

As a distraction, it’s inoffensive. But you can tell it wants to be the juggernaut on wheels, the unstoppable giant mowing down or devouring everything in its path. It’s really the smaller thing trying desperately to outrun oblivion. It’s all scraps and nothing but.

There's no Judy Garland songs, no Scarecrow, no Tin Man, no Cowardly Lion. There's also no simplicity, no magic, no truth.

Roger Moore already seems winded in his second outing as Bond. And the film's comedic approach to martial arts justly rankles true 007 afficionados. Compensation comes in the form of Christopher Lee's delicious take on evil as Scaramanga and Herve Villechaize's verve as Nick Nack, Scaramanga's dwarf manservant.

It’s not a knockout, but the actors frequently are. The rest is an exercise in not overdoing it. It’s here, it’s queer, it’s not much else — and that’s OK.

It's only when the film attempts to express its ideas in spoken English that logic dissolves into a muddle that would test the most rabid Dylanologist.

The climax, in which all the characters link arms in a dance and sing, could serve as a textbook illustration of forced gaiety. Much Ado is much askew.

Malick keeps pushing Affleck to the corner of the frame, as if he's more interested in the women. I found it difficult to maintain interest in anyone. If there's such a thing as a feather that weighs a ton, it's To the Wonder.

It's "The Exorcist" warmed over.

One gut-busting death after another, terror giving way to tedium. Your call.

Depp swans through this swashbuckler with a scene-stealing gusto unseen since Marlon Brando in "Mutiny on the Bounty." He's comic dynamite, but this plodding, repetitive bore should walk the plank for timidly refusing to light his fuse.

Safdie is so determined to keep his film at a low simmer that one occasionally wonders if he’s turned the stove on at all.

Then the aliens show up, chased by Morgan Freeman as a nut-job Army colonel, and the movie degenerates into a sorry, silly, gory, punishingly overlong creature feature.

Footloose 2011 is harmless as far as it goes, but on the dance floor and off it never goes nearly far enough.

By any fair standard, this lushly produced film is a long, bumpy ride to a major letdown.

There are times when Braff and Melfi hint at the darkness of a world that ignores seniors by making them invisible. But this new version of Going in Style sells uplift so hard it loses touch with reality – and any genuine reason for being.

The last part of the movie, which brings the whole cast together on “Super Trouper,” is almost worth the price of admission. Millions will happily get drunk on the film’s infectious high spirits. For the rest of us, who can’t get with the program, Here We Go Again will go down as more of a threat than a promise.

It's love with tragic complications, and director Luis Mandoki drags the torture out for two-plus hours.

Payback is a brutally entertaining crime drama that should have been a little more brutal and a little less entertaining.

What starts as one of those rare, unplaceable, maybe-satire, maybe-camp, high-wire pop confections morphs into a fairly straightforward biopic about a beloved superstar that seems overly wary of pissing off a living idol.

Meryl Streep can do anything: sing, dance, do splits, act her heart out. She (almost) saves this clumsy, overwrought film version of the Abba musical that's been running on stages from Broadway to Barcelona since 1999.

You can’t say that Cat Person is shy about taking the medium to task for selling a romantic ideal that’s more than a little curdled. If only it was this rigorous and incisive about the source material itself.

The Devil All the Time has the pretensions of a mythopoetic story that’s chipping away at a community’s dark underbelly. But here the misery is as belly-up and eager to be noticed as a house cat or a dead fish.

There are too many splendid little touches in this tale of letting go to dismiss it entirely, and too many latebreaking wrong turns it takes to completely forgive it. What you’re left with is the cinematic equivalent of a clipped-wing plummet.

The movie often plays like another Stranger Things dilution, watering down the paperback thrills of literature’s reigning master of horror into an inferior throwback substitution.

Bolstered by the strength of its admirable and talented cast — which includes Kiersey Clemons, Gabourey Sidibe, Jena Malone, Tongayi Chirisa, and Jack Huston — the movie is good at getting a good number of ideas going at once.

It's a bigger yawn than it sounds.

How do you screw this up? You've got three leading actresses – Susan Sarandon, Naomi Watts and Elle Fanning – who are usually worth watching in anything. But 3 Generations is pushing it. Even nurturing talent can't breathe life into a script that is completely D.O.A.

In "Gran Torino," Eastwood took on the moral issues that screenwriter Gary Young and first-time director Daniel Barber studiously avoid. It's the difference between riveting and repellent.

Director Vadim Jean is lucky that his low-octane comedy is long on Short.

It’s the old Monkees trick: If you can’t find a band, manufacture one. British director Alan Parker (Fame, Mississippi Burning) lucks out. The dozen unknowns he’s chosen — ten with no previous acting credits — make a joyful noise and rousing company. Parker, however, hasn’t made much of a movie.

Jokes dying on the lips of these easy riders are hard to stomach.

The best thing about The Highwaymen by a long shot is seeing Costner tap back into that Gary Cooper mode he once perfected and add older, wiser touches to it.

Many a road to movie hell is paved with good intentions. To that list of lost causes add Being Charlie, a well-meaning study of addiction that hits too many banal beats to snap us to attention.

Mulan emerges as a curious act of market negotiation. It is a perfectly fine movie; it will no doubt be meaningful for children, especially those who could afford to see more of themselves onscreen in heroines like Mulan. But its cast, its attitude, its overall eagerness to please — all benefits, one would think — don’t add up to a good movie. They add up to a blueprint of the movie this ought to be.

Sadly, Abominable fails to carve out its own place in a crowded field. The movie huffs and puffs, but there’s no fear of any houses being blown down.