Does romantic comedy have to come off as sugared stupidity? It does here.

Luckily, Stewart, Balinska, and Scott are just the angels you need when a movie needs rescuing. They make the salvage operation that is Charlie’s Angels go down easy.

Only a hair overlong at two hours, this is the kind of disposable airport spy thriller that Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and which generally plays fine, maybe best, on cable over a lazy Saturday afternoon.

You’re left to wonder whether you’ve watched a freshman college course with laughs, or a failed comedy with a lecture surgically grafted on to it.

At least it looks super fly. It's too bad that Director X (born Julien Christian Lutz), the Canadian short-form film master for the likes of Rihanna, Drake and Nicki Minaj, stumbles when he has to stretch a scene past video length.

In a movie with more subtext than "Rosemary's Baby," nearly everyone, including Tim Roth as Dahlia's lawyer, harbors secrets. Salles unleashes a torrent of suspense for one purpose: to plumb the violence of the mind.

Tame is what Magic Mike’s Last Dance is — what it apparently wants to be, what it becomes in exchange for its new, cardboard-simple, ostensible pro-woman worldview. The movie’s pleasures mute themselves beneath its good intentions. It wants to be about what women want. But it feels like it never asked.

Adrien Brody deserves superlatives for his acting in the alternately mesmerizing and maddening Detachment.

Too much manic energy runs the movie off the rails.

Central Intelligence always takes the lazy way out. You go along for the ride because Hart and Johnson promise something they can't deliver: a movie as funny as they are.

Whoever enlisted Jorma Taccone to direct this deserves a raise, given that the charter member of the Lonely Island understands how to consistently ramp things up to levels of high ridiculousness.

Here's a better than average spook-house movie, mostly because Insidious decides it can haunt an audience without spraying it with blood.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a threadbare high-concept story given the high-thread-count treatment — a lovely piece of luxury pulp. It’s also the creepiest and classiest bit of late-summer counterprogramming you’re likely to find, which may say more about our current landscape of cinematic pleasures than the movie itself.

There’s such beautiful artisanal touches that Russo-Young adds to what could have been a standard YA-lit flick and so much that the actors do with scenes of people just talking that you can’t write it off. And there are too many dramatic moments that flatline when they should spike, too many plot turns that feel false and too much reliance on “coincidence” as some higher-power string-yanking to say it completely works.

The sharp economy of Lloyd's direction allows the incontestably great Streep to take impressionistic snatches of a life and build a woman in full. This is acting of the highest order.

It takes a lot of hard work and the perfect alignment of movie stars to make something this god-awful.

Exodus is a biblical epic that comes at you at maximum velocity but stays stirringly, inspiringly human.

This is a breakthrough star performance from a terrific actor getting a chance to let it rip.

At 134 minutes, Grindelwald can feel like an overload of homework on which we’ll we tested later. Fine for Pottermores, but a trial for us Muggles.

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.

Making a warm movie about friendship as a tribute to this weirdo is an impossible task.

The desert outpost, mostly shot in Morocco by the gifted cinematographer Chris Menges (a two-time Oscar winner for his camera work on The Killing Fields and The Mission), becomes a powerful symbol of human decency trying to hold out under the brutal siege of alleged law and order. It’s thuddingly obvious who the real barbarians are.

Light-hearted is the sweet spot for this would-be romp, yet the filmmakers keep trapping its stars in stunts that don’t play to their strengths and the dead weight that McKinnon has to lift in this lumbering spy farce would sink a lesser talent.

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.

Gondry and the gifted indie cinematographer Ellen Kuras have fun with the amateur versions of the likes of "RoboCop," "Rush Hour," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "King Kong" and "Driving Miss Daisy." These snippets are fun but frustratingly brief.

Starting with the outrageous and building from there, he ignites a slight love-on-the-run novel, creating a bonfire of a movie that confirms his reputation as the most exciting and innovative filmmaker of his generation.

Luckily, Ferrell is at his funniest being serious. Casa de Mi Padre, shot in 24 days for $6 million, is really an SNL-ish sketch stretched to feature length. But Ferrell is an hombre loco. Mi gusta.

300 is a movie blood-drunk on its own artful excess. Guys of all ages and sexes won't be able to resist it.

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.

It's all in the telling. Gruen provided grit and pungent detail. The movie settles for gloss.

Director Bryan Singer, who started the whole thing in high style with 2000's "X-Men," returns for a fourth time. Singer shows a lot of energy, but he and screenwriter Simon Kinberg (Fantastic Four, yuck) let the movie get way overcrowded.

Who knew? The work of the Monuments Men is fresh territory for film, and Clooney builds the story with intriguing detail and scope.

A decent thriller that should have been dazzling, is nothing if not topical.

Stroman should have studied the original Producers that Brooks directed in 1968, with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. It answers the question "Where did they go right?"

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

The premise is ripe; the thrills are rich; the payoff doesn’t come together quite as easily as the rest.

Triple 9 is no "Reservoir Dogs," but it is a twisty, terrific ride.

Who needs iambic pentameter when you have Jet Li around?

Overheated, underdone farce. Race for the exit.

The actors, especially Grace, fight hard against a schizoid script (the kids are rubes one sec, hipsters the next) and cotton-candy direction from Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde). It's a losing battle.

Scorches the screen with a badass bravado all its own. Smart, sexy, funny and dangerous this high-wire act is a movie and a half.

Just soak up that Tuscan sun and wonder when Lane will get another movie, like "Unfaithful" or "A Walk on the Moon," that will let her really shine.

Worse, Safe House asks us to believe that Ryan Reynolds can outclass Denzel Washington in the art of being a hard-ass. Not on this planet, baby.

The pie looks delicious, but Labor Day feels stale.

It's stupid. It's in bad taste. It impossible. I know all that. Look, Quentin Tarantino killed Hitler in "Inglourious Basterds" and the neo-Nazis stayed quiet. It's a farce, people.

Brazilian director José Padilha (Elite Squad, Bus 174) soldiers on stolidly, but lacks the Dutch Verheoeven's abiding sense of mischief.

It's a bigger yawn than it sounds.

A ragtag charmer. You will laugh.

It's not much of a movie. But raging bull Robert De Niro, suited up to play for humor and heart, proves he can be a world-class charmer.

It’s a fast, not as cheap, and much better than decent cover version of another song, one that knows very well that it’s a cover version.

There’s a constant feeling that a lot of hands were wrestling for the steering wheel of this biopic behind the scenes, with various parties pushing the story this way and that, even with the united goal of collectively crafting the greatest love letter of all. Yet Ackie just keeps her eyes on — and her energy directed toward — delivering a screen-worthy Whitney, scaling the heights and earning her Hall of Fame status.

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.

Me, I just think it blows. What does it matter if you spend millions on a movie - love the talking, battling bears! - if the effects are cheesy, the story runs off on tangents and after watching the movie fail utterly to be the next Lord of the Rings, you just want to go home.

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.

If Singleton, 25, stumbles, it is over ambition and not the complacency of a new Hollywood hotshot riding a trend.

The code talkers deserved better than a hollow tribute.

What I can't buy is that Refn has made a movie this lifeless and devoid of human interest.

Robinson means to leave you in tears, no matter how heavy-handed his approach. But the sentimental ending that suggests all loose ends have been tied up does a disservice to the battle ahead and a war still to be won in the name of the people left to pick up the pieces.

Wahlberg could sleepwalk through this role, and does. See this movie and you'll surely follow his lead.

Does the script by William Nicholson sometimes hit the sentiment pedal too hard? It does. But look at the tale it's telling.

It has homicidal fantasy critters, lots of sharp and pointy horns, and absolutely no teeth.

If you're a Gilliam junkie, as I am, you go with it, even when the script by Ehren Kruger (The Skeleton Key) loses its shaky hold on coherence.

Dench and Nighy are class personified. The secret here is merely to luxuriate in the pleasure of their company.

Recipe for nutso fun: Mix Zach Galifianakis with Robert Downey Jr. Apply the same mold John Hughes used for "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." Have Todd Phillips stir with wack-ass abandon. Don't worry about missing ingredients, like plot. Serve to an audience ready to lap it up.

Though Wilson is always reason enough to see a movie, she’s stuck here in a fluffball that plays like warmed-over subplots from "Sex and the City."

It's a bloodless, gutless piece of PG-13 fodder, geared to go down easy. That it does. It practically evaporates while you're watching it, lulling when you most want it to levitate.

It's as gorgeous as anything the French filmmaker has made and as empty as a Trump tweet.

The haunting, hypnotic, palm-sweating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross promises way more than the film delivers. By the way, the birds in the box are meant to set off alarms when the monsters approach. They see way more than we do, which is part of the problem. Why should birds have all the fun?

Keep your eye on Kidman, whose kinky, kittenish performance turns unexpected emotional corners that pull you up short.

Acted with relish by a note-perfect cast -- a romantic comedy of true sophistication. There's a sting in every laugh.

Julia Roberts glitters like gold dust, and she is ideally partnered with Rupert Everett, who gives a witty, wicked, bust-out performance.

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.

Whatever this eye-popping head trip lacks in plausibility, it makes up for in flash and a sense of a world spinning off its axis.

Fixed should have been, by any measure, the fix we needed in terms of balls-out hilarity about neurotic, sex-crazed creatures, or even just a parable from an animation godhead about humans being just as beholden to animal instincts as our four-legged friends. Instead, we get a wildly uneven, totally obvious, and often painfully unfunny 80 minutes.

What you get is, regrettably and rather surprisingly, something that’s a lot less exciting than the sum of those particular parts.

It would be easy and convenient to dismiss Irreversible as blatant sensationalism. But Noe's bruising film is too artfully crafted to write off as exploitation.

So Risen joins the swelling ranks of faith-based films that pander to audiences instead of serving them.

The scares are Hichcock hand-me-downs.

Spacey holds center. He's a bonfire.

The Grinch offers a solid service to anyone with kids in need of a nap under a blanket of bland.

Though Poison Ivy is more than whoopee, audiences may find the movie easier to get off on than to get into. But why settle for the usual walk around the exploitation block when Shea offers a wild ride with the top down into uncharted territory?

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.

The women in Rough Night are terrific company. They never wear out their welcome. You can't say the same for the movie.

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.

It's a mouthful of a title for a rowdy, ramshackle funfest that flies by on its spirited humor and surprising heart.

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.

The performances are uniformly terrific, finding the specific details that create a universal truth.

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.

There are tiny glimpses of someone who has genuine chops behind the camera, almost but not quite enough to make you think that, given more time and focus, he could have made something out of these spare parts. Or maybe, just maybe, this whole botched Operation is designed to make his older, possibly lesser work look better.

Money, madness, incest and murder! Just the recipe for a twisted mesmerizer of a movie, if it doesn't creep you out.

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

This flabby comedy deserves only one thing: to fall on its fat one.

It also doesn't grapple deeply enough with the core questions it raises, settling for telling a sob story that will go down easy at the box office. Still, you can't blame audiences too much for being seduced by two shining young stars in a movie romance that hits the spot, bitter and sweet.

In telling a tale of love across time, Aronofsky is sometimes guilty of creating arty, pretentious psychobabble. But in visual terms, he's trying to expose his own raw, romantic heart. Folly? Maybe. But a risk worth taking.

Like a particularly concise, purposefully elliptical short story, The Woman in the Yard quickly milks this beguiling, WTF-is-going-on-here? scenario for all the dread it’s worth, while not necessarily being in a hurry to fill folks in on the full 411 regarding this sticky situation.

Hardcore fans may get their kicks from seeing Macchio and Chan together. Everyone else will just feel like tempted to sweep the legs of everyone trying to cash in on a recently revived franchise and wring it dry.

It helps that Davis is insanely charismatic onscreen, but her ability to showcase the vulnerability and scar tissue beneath this human embodiment of an extended middle finger gives the movie a semblance of depth.

A blast of comic irreverence that serves as a starring vehicle for two stoner characters who had previously been relegated to the sidelines.