McConaughey, despite alarmingly orange makeup, does justice to the role, a hard-drinking, shipwreck- hunting senator's son with a 007 way with the ladies.

Their banter is fun at the start until it becomes relentless.

Dogfight doesn’t sum up an era; it merely romanticizes it. What could have been an incisive movie about alienation deteriorates into a conventional romance.

Should have been a fun update on the 1967 Brit farce. Director/co-writer Ramis comes on too strong with the camper trickery.

There’s so much wasted potential here, so little sense of how to get across a notion of solidarity in the face of catastrophic danger, and sexism, not in that order.

It's fun to see Sean Penn portray a playboy, like Bogart in "Casablanca," who hides his true heart behind a layer of cynicism.

What starts as freshly spun cotton candy ends as something pink, sticky and indigestible. You leave the theater wanting to puke it up.

If looks were everything, director Baz Luhrmann's epic salute to his native land would be the movie of the year. But, crikey, a padded script bloated with subplots and shameless sentimentality can wear you down.

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

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.

What happens to the film's title character — and the audience — shouldn't happen to a dog.

Broken Lizard does it with a shit-faced integrity that's worth a salute.

The movie itself ends up just hustling a stock redemption story window-dressed with issues as opposed to exploring them.

Don Roos's script for Single White Female, from the 1990 potboiler SWF Seeks Same, by John Lutz, is as empty as a hack's head. Schroeder goes through the motions — the movie is elegantly made — but this synthetic Hollywood package panders shamelessly to the baser instincts.

As a portrait of a friendship, one tested by decades of high times and lows, successes and failures, bad behavior and forgiveness, Nyad the movie is trawling deeper waters. As a bio-dramatization of one human’s resilience — and thus a stand-in for the triumph of the human spirit overall — it comes perilously close to merely treading them.

Ford is at his droll, grumpy-old-man best, so he can do his own acting without having his emotions computer generated. At least for now.

There's no script to speak of, just two appealing actors volleying comic-romantic cliches at each other.

Baumbach overreaches in White Noise. The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured.

A sexual-revolution pioneer, a “gay renegade” who was also “pre-gay,” a cultural saboteur, a sad old man in denial — we get a lot of opaque Scottys, all semi-attached to an alternate “history” that feels maddeningly incomplete and barely surface-scratched.

The film falls short; only Peet goes the whole nine yards.

It's a kick to see the adorably sexy Barrymore back in relaxed form again after the "Duplex" debacle and that calamitous "Charlie's Angels" sequel. Right now, she's the closest thing to sunshine you'll find at the movies.

What nearly saves the movie, besides the Rasmussen eye candy, is Paris itself, shot in shimmering black-and-white by the gifted Thierry Arbogast. Talk is cheap here, and often inane, but as a silent film, Angel-A could have been magic.

There's no arguing that Cuba Gooding Jr. is trying to do right by the mentally disabled James Robert Kennedy.

It fails as a character study because the murky inner workings of the character are all manifest, outwardly, in turns and attitudes that you can see from a mile away and are no wiser for being able to predict.

The movie has the makings of a devious erotic game, of a dirty pas-de-deux that spills out of the Van Allens’ marital bed and into a friend’s pool, a nearby quarry, and the woods. But the movie doesn’t quite have the backbone it’d need, or even the sense of fun, to clarify the extent to which this is a game that both players know they’re playing.

The disappointment is that the movie wields so much and achieves so relatively little.

Was this eventual big-screen take on Shakur going to be an epic look at a complicated legend's life and times – a Gandhi of gangsta rap iconography – or merely a slightly larger Lifetime TV movie filled with hysterics and greatest-hits moments. We now have an answer. It was not the one we wanted.

Despite the lofty tone of his literary, artistic and metaphysical allusions, Greenaway is working the same streets of human depravity as John Waters; he's just more pretentious about it. At best, Greenaway's film is a provocative and diabolically funny foray into the roots of passion and cruelty. At worst, the symbolic bric-a-brac gets so thick you lose sight of the characters.

Alas, this isn't the Trump-trolling toon you're looking for. People may search for protest art hidden among the potty jokes, but the closest they're going to get to a subtextual statement is the Beatles' "Blackbird" on the soundtrack – and that's been repurposed as a lullaby.

DeMonaco shows a sure hand at building tension. Too bad the film devolves into a series of home-invasion clichés. The Purge was almost on to something.

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.

A flabby farce that might win a pass at the box office because it's just so cute and family friendly. But where's your edge, guys? Where are the laughs that walk a tightrope?

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 film's problems lie with the lack of spark between a wired Dunst and a bland Bloom, and the meltdown of Drew's mother (Susan Sarandon), who grieves by tap-dancing.

It's no mystery that the target audience for this G-rated bubblegum fantasy is tweens, parents of tweens and the occasional pervert. They'll be so pleased. Anything for the rest of humanity? Not so much.

Depending on your reaction to the cinematic outrages perpetrated by Danish director Lars von Trier (remember Dogville?), you might want to add or subtract two stars from the halfway (half-assed?) rating I just gave Antichrist.

An extended rom-com meet-cute that just happens to have monsters lurking about, The Gorge works best when its just the two leads staring at each through binoculars, bantering via sketch-pad scrawlings and letting their flirtations organically morph something more intimate.

Chainsaw is produced by Michael Bay (Bad Boys I and II), which explains its soullessness. But nothing explains the flaw in this bad boy: How can a movie scare you when you’ve seen it all before?

It’s clear that a verité, fly-on-the-wall record of these SNL livewires on vacation would have made a hilarious documentary. What we have instead follows the Sitcom 101 formula.

Your chances for enjoying this will depend on giving up a search for depth and just strapping in for a B-movie hell ride.

There's no disguising the fact that Shrek the Third has come down with a bad case of sequelitis. You know the symptoms: Lots of razzle-dazzle to distract from the hole at the center of the story. You know, the place where fresh ideas should be.

Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland can do anything – except, perhaps, save this sentimental drool bucket of senior cinema.

When humor is served black, they call it dramedy. When it's done in this movie, I call it indigestible.

It helps that Kevin Kline excels as Ricki's ex, and Mamie Gummer, Streep's real-life daughter, imbues the fictional version with rare grit and grace. Otherwise, too many wrong notes.

The cliched script by Carol Heikkinen plays like "Dawson's Creek" in toeshoes.

Headley’s book is a hard nugget crackling with urgency. This feels like soft-boiled pulp.

An adventure that never met a cliche it couldn't saddle, mount and ride for a butt-numbing two hours and sixteen minutes.

The problem here isn't excessive pandering; the sheer existence of this second movie is already 100-percent fan service. It's that it doesn't give you much beyond a very subjective view of what these guys find hilarious.

The Pale Blue Eye is heavy, and not always to its advantage. Its glumness, meant to come off as a good-looking take on American gothic, gets in the way of its juicier, freakier bits. The offense is that it does so in service of a mystery that barely matters.

Ever since "True Blood" glamoured me, Twilight seems even more sexless and toothless. I prefer my undead with a little life in them.

Maybe money never sleeps, but this missed opportunity of a movie will have audiences dozing.

Before the jacked-up antics get to be too much, director Tony Leondis and co-writers Erich Siegel and Mike White get in a few satiric licks at a technology we've all come to call home.

So the sequel, A Game of Shadows, is more of the stupid same. It wouldn't matter so much if Downey and Jude Law, as the bromantic Dr. Watson, didn't look so ready to turn on the cerebral dazzle. Instead, Ritchie treats them like action goons out of his "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" basement.

Ninety minutes of being buried alive with Ryan Reynolds: Didn't we all suffer that in "The Proposal"?

It's all a jumble and, worse, a damned impersonal one.

The movie is so soggy and anonymous, I had to remind myself that the Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby, directed it. It's sad to watch the kingpins of gross-out try to dial down to cute. Swung at and missed.

Where "Drive" shrewdly mystifies, Only God Forgives stupefies. You can see its gears grinding. But I'll always hang on for a rare talent like Refn. Even when he stumbles, he leaves you eager to see what he's up to next.

Isn't much of a movie, but it's worth a look just to see screen legend Kirk Douglas, Michael's eighty-three-year-old father, kick ass.

The movie starts out desperately wanting to be E.T. It ends by pretending it’s the second coming of Field of Dreams.

May be only loosely true, but it is thoroughly Hollywood.

So flimsy it gives froth a bad name.

When the movie stalls, it’s Enzo to the rescue. Since the film covers a decade in the lives of its characters, two dogs take turns playing Enzo, at age 2 and 9. They’re both picks of the litters. And Ventimiglia contributes an emotional honesty that serves him well even when the plot sinks into marshmallow.

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.

The film version of Carnage hasn't just lost God from its title, it's lost the laughs from the play that brought it life.

No one would consider Oh, Hi! a failure. But you’ll be tempted to say byyyyyeeeeee more than once before this couple’s final bow.

The questions is: Can the minions carry a movie all by their mischievous mini-selves? 'Fraid not. This origin story, while being utterly harmless and far from despicable, wears out its welcome way too soon.

Essentially an old-fashioned weepie gussied up for Y2K.

A punishingly long (133 minutes), shamelessly shallow downer that makes the mistake of taking itself oh-so-seriously. Big mistake.

Confessions is no more than a painless time-waster. But the beguiling Fisher is well worth the investment.

By the time a final showdown snaps your suspension of disbelief and suggests there are bigger hornet’s nests to kick, The Beekeeper has crept out of the realm of pulpy B-movie thrills and falls just short of being a Bee movie dabbling in deep-state paranoia-mongering.

The swerve into bizarre melodrama in the final third knocks the film permanently off course, reducing a potentially rich examination of religious extremism into a missed opportunity.

I didn't believe a word of it.

The amount of casual charisma and commitment Pitt is bringing to this is the one thing that actually differentiates this from being just another stylishly lit, stupid-hip snarkfest.

Of all the World War II movies about the plots to kill the architects of the Third Reich, Anthropoid is guilty of being the dullest.

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.

The only touch of Caine's brutal sexiness is in the thrilling songs by Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart that should win Sir Mick his first Oscar. The rest is marshmallow.

How special.

Things go wrong quickly with Amazing 2. Am I the only one who hates the word Amazing to describe a movie that isn't? Just asking. If I had to pinpoint where this epic goes south, I'd start with the tonal shifts.

What begins brightly gets bogged down over 140 minutes. A film that took off like a hare on speed ends like a winded tortoise.

Cate Blanchett is the spark that keeps this well-meaning but by-the-numbers biopic going.

Duvall missteps in trying to mesh suspense with a love story that also involves the woman (Kathy Baker) John J. lives with and her young daughter (Katherine Micheaux Miller), on whom he disturbingly dotes.

Some may enjoy the slapstick, which plays like "Harold & Kumar Go to Old Peking," but this bloodless Coen crib job is simply not my cup of noodles.

By the time Fry lets darkness encroach on these bright young things, the fizz is gone, and so is any reason to make us give a damn.

Funny? Sometimes. Scary? Almost never. PP&Z spins merrily and menacingly along for about half an hour. Bad luck that the movie's running time is 107 minutes.

Lewis’s vintage rock is still cause for cheering. Too bad the movie that contains these Killer sounds never rises above a whimper.

Hell, I really meant to at least like 2 Guns. But I couldn't. The movie just didn't make the extra effort.

Killer Elite pretends to be fact-based and true to its 1980s period. Just know it's all baloney.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol -- gets this Hollywood satire off to a rousing start. But the middle flattens, despite Pacino firing on all cylinders. And the end just nose-dives into something silly and, worse, sentimental.

It's a gimmick, it's not a movie.

Elliot fails to make the needed connection between the audience and a peeper who has lost his moral balance.

Director Tony Goldwyn tries for the lyrical melancholy he brought to "A Walk on the Moon," but as Michael waits for days on Jenna's porch getting drenched (as irritating a scene as any in recent cinema), only the most rabid chick-flick fan will fail to notice that it's the movie that's all wet.

Here's the movie of the month for those who like their escapism big, brutal and brainless. Two fine young actors – James Marshall (Twin Peaks) and Cuba Gooding Jr. (Boyz n the Hood) – have inexplicably agreed to strike suitable-for-leering poses in their underwear while director Rowdy Herrington (Road House) devises other distractions from the idiotic plot.

The Rock has a flair for action and comedy; he's a real movie star.

The film collapses because Lee can't sew these vignettes into a seamless tapestry. He's more interested in getting even than he is in getting it right.

If you can't watch John Malkovich being John Malkovich, it's still a kick watching him play Alan Conway, a gay Brit who pretended to be the legendary and reclusive director Stanley Kubrick during the 1990s.

Wobbly but well-intentioned broadside against racism.

In his sappiest film since 1989's "Always," director Steven Spielberg has come down with a case of the cutes that the whole cast catches.

In these times of pandemic isolation it’s no crime to look for the film equivalent of comfort food. Military Wives, though deeply reliant on formula and wrapped in a blanket of bland, fits the bill.