Listen to me: trash can surprise you. So don't get all elitist about the so-called cheap thrills in Mr. Brooks.

The film ultimately gives in to a case of TV-movie blahs.

Christensen is the only jolt of excitement in this turgid soap opera.

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

You'll notice that the actors are way overqualified for this nonsense. But the kick they get out of one another is what pulls you in. Traeger's script does more than strain credulity, it administers multiple fractures.

Writer-director Angelina Jolie's attempt to emulate European art cinema is a slow, sodden, stupefyingly dull take on a 1970s marriage gone bad.

Regardless of whether you’ve ever played Minecraft or not, you’ll recognize the kind of endless ribbing, nudging, winking knowingness on display here; this is steeped in the self-aware absurdism of, say, those Old Spice commercials that aim to confuse and confound in the name of moving products off store shelves. A Minecraft Movie is essentially a 101-minute version of that.

This hot mess got booed by the snobs at Cannes, but there's no denying its profane energy.

Unforgettable is definitely the wrong title for a movie you want to erase from your memory the second it ends.

It's a perversely comic movie ride into the wild blue of crime and punishment.

Can no one save the talented Sandler from himself? I hate this movie. Click. I hate this movie. Click. I hate this movie. Click.

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

Cate Blanchett can do anything, even play Bob Dylan, but she can't save this creaky sequel to her star-making 1998 biopic of Elizabeth I.

Its value is unquestionable as drama and moral provocation.

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.

The team of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala drops the ball with this droopy, snail-paced prigs-in-wigs movie.

It's a lame trailer, but the movie itself is much, much worse.

The F&F franchise ran out of gas half way into the 2001 original.

Kasdan has inexplicably reduced flesh-and-blood characters to cartoons.

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.

Jewison dodges the issues in the script by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) to focus on cat-and-mouse chases that kill interest.

Crowe's tantalizing film sticks with you.

The complex movie that might have been is still on the drawing board, teasing us with a deeper story that's disappointingly out of reach.

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.

You can feel the desperation of the filmmakers as they throw in fist fights, car chases, and, yes, more wig changes to give an illusion of momentum to a grab bag of botched ideas. No sale.

Director Susan Seidelman takes aim at the box office with the team of movie queen Meryl Streep and TV slob queen Roseanne Barr. She misfires. Streep gets all the jokes, and Barr, looking stranded, plays it straight. Worse, nobody’s bothered to write them a big scene together. But for a while you can see the possibilities.

The pleasures here come almost exclusively from Schumer and Hawn playing off each other like the rock stars of comedy they are.

There's not that much that's new in screenwriter Marshall Karp's sitcom-ish memoir, but Alexander keeps the laughs coming.

Slack direction fails to touch a nerve. Martin was scarier and funnier extracting Bill Murray's molars without Novocaine in "Little Shop of Horrors." Now that was one crazy dentist.

It's all part of the joke. Soderbergh may have created a bit of a mess with Full Frontal, but it's a playful and scrappy mess.

It's too bad. Jones deserved better than a biopic with a TV-movie heart.

All you’re left with is Wilson’s exquisitely left-of-center take on the master of friendly trees, which keeps creeping toward the sublime before Paint knocks it back into the middle of an undefined road.

As played by the spectacular Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hesher is the id run rampant.

You can look past it muting the spiky chemistry of Rudd and Coon, who deserve more scenes and their own rom-com together, or the way the narrative’s father issues feel so incredibly forced, or how so many of the sequences appear to simply be killing time until the final act. What’s less forgivable is the way that it gets so caught up in the mythology of its hollow nostalgia that is misses why the original meant so much to so many of us way back when.

Best consumed with pizza and lots of brewskis, Joe Carnahan's Smokin' Aces is shamelessly and unapologetically a guy movie. It's lewd, crude and loaded with shootouts and hot lesbo action.

As sexist propaganda, the film is shameless.

The Americanized version is miscast, misguided and misbegotten.

Though the movie ups the TV ante on nudity, language and violence, Lynch's control falters. But if inspiration is lacking, talent is not.

So much of The Mother feels like a movie star doing an imitation of what they think a tough, serious, jaded hero is like rather than actually playing one. Lopez is an actor with a particularly deep set of skills. You wish she’d brought some more of her expressive ones to this revenge flick.

This lame-ass chick-flick sampling of "Crazy Heart" is more like country Kryptonite.

It's easy to root for George. The movie deserves the finger.

Francis Coppola's revision of his 1983 film of S.E. Hinton's best seller The Outsiders is funny, touching and revelatory, with twenty-two minutes of added footage and a new soundtrack featuring Elvis Presley. [Review of re-release]

So why oh why is The Expendables such a limp-dick bust? Because Stallone forgets to include non-spazzy direction, a coherent plot, dialogue that actors can speak without cringing, stunts that don't fizzle, blood that isn't digital and an animating spirit that might convince us to give a damn.

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.

When a chick flick goes wrong -- and this one hits a dead end in hell -- it's a wipeout.

The comic screenplay...pivots on a toothless premise: Russ needs to get in touch with his inner child.

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.

Friedkin turns on the juice and Jones and Jackson let it rip.

A dreary film that's damn near torture to sit through.

What makes Legends such an entertaining male weepie is the star shine. Though the admirable Quinn has the toughest role, Pitt carries the picture.

Magicians have been pulling rabbits out of hats for ages. And yet, with all this talent, no one can make a decent script materialize.

The movie is so overbearingly high on its own fizzy, clever stylishness that it strands the heart of its own story.

Uproarious and unexpectedly biting.

Director and co-writer James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted) is supplying comfort food for bruised romantics.

What’s missing are the moments in between that actually make up a life and give it emotional resonance.

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

Lots of talented young singers decorate the scenery, notably Jeremy Jordan (late of Broadway's failed Bonnie & Clyde but soon-to-open in Newsies)who has vocal and acting chops that shine even in this bucket of Glee Goes Gospel cornpone.

Call this cowpoke comedy "Blazing Saddles" for millennials. Or just call it icky.

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

The film has no soul. An epic about this day of infamy should shake you to the core. But the real infamy about Pearl Harbor is that when you exit, you don't feel a thing.

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.

Though shot for maximum moodiness by the gifted Peter Deming ("Mulholland Drive"), the movie straps you in for a head trip that promises hallucinatory wonders but delivers the same old Hollywood formula with sugar on top.

True Kingsman fans will appreciate that director Matthew Vaughn reacted to digs at "The Secret Service" for being gratuitously violent, sexually adolescent and politically reactionary by laying all of it on three times thicker.

Patrick Lussier is listed as The Director, though I saw no evidence of anyone in control.

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

It's a heavy thematic load for a single movie to handle — especially this one, which nearly collapses from its burden. But it's hard to fault director David Yates, who captained the last four Harry Potter movies, for having ambition.

This putrid dish marks a new low for director Roland Joffe.

This is Transformers-level inanity. This is a blow to your head from a mallet. It will not make you feel like a 10-year-old, but it will make you feel 10 years older than when you first entered the theater. It is certainly not personal in any way, shape or form, just strictly chilly, corporate to a fault and somehow both chintzy and wildly overblown.

These are movies for those who find the Knives Out franchise too sophisticated and droll, red meat for the Sandler faithful. It’s a movie of small ambitions tailor-made for the small screen. It is exactly what you think it is.

It's the strafing satire that's MIA.

It’s “The Bad Seed meets The Omen,” and it’s predictable, plodding and dim-witted every step of the way. To be fair, if you like watching someone pull a shard of glass out of her eyeball, you won’t be disappointed. But there’s a difference between gory and scary that this movie doesn’t seem to grasp.

You can certainly argue just how speculative this film version of Churchill is as history. But Cox's performance cannot be faulted. It's a master class in acting.

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

Take a tired formula...Stir with a director, Florent Siri, who has no shame about stealing every sadistic suspense trick from the Die Hard series. Serve to a gullible audience willing to pay top dollar for secondhand goods.

There was a time when guys would grab a six-pack and watch this kind of flick at a drive-in. I mean that as a compliment.

A lighter-than-air comedy than runs on pure fizz.

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.

Foe knows the tale it wants to tell. But because of the often mannered, occasionally stagy way that it ends up telling it, this is a movie that has a tendency to be its own worst enemy

Watching [Hanks] in this career footnote now is a little like seeing an unformed lump of sculptor’s clay and knowing that there’s a famous statue just a few well-placed moves away.

Delivery Man is one joke stretched to the breaking point. Mine was reached.

No one’s denying that American Samoa’s brief moment of victory — it didn’t make it to Cup playoffs, yet it’s never been in last place again — is a major coup. So why does this feel like such a lost opportunity for all involved?

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.

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.

Doesn't seem directed at all; you half expect the actors to crash into each other. Still, give me the attempted satire of Head of State over the racial stereotyping of "Bringing Down the House" anyday. You can feel a mind at work when you watch Rock.

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

Girl 6 is shameless stuff -- pompous, sentimental and attitudinizing. To swat the Spikeman with his own symbol, the film feels like he phoned it in.

How could a 2009 raunchfest that slapped a grin on my face I couldn't unglue degenerate into a cold dish of sloppy seconds?

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

It’s a new chapter in a saga, yet like its characters who’ve been practicing the art of war since Sun Tzu coined the term, the sequel somehow feels ancient and a little creaky.

You have to admire Nakata's skill at letting the dead run free while hinting that we may have more to fear from the living. With a braver step in that direction, this middling movie would ring more than box-office bells.

How can a film look so radiant and be so hollow?

Better than Man of Steel but below the high bar set by Nolan's Dark Knight, Dawn of Justice is still a colossus, the stuff that DC Comics dreams are made of for that kid in all of us who yearns to see Batman and Superman suit up and go in for the kill.

This comedy about a death is a funeral for the audience.

The Village, even when its step falters, is on to something more provocative than seeing dead people. Its power, unrelated to digital monsters, comes from the tension building inside the characters.

Is it the clumsy script or the switch in directors -- Beeban Kidron in for Sharon Maguire -- that has sucked out the charm of the original and replaced it with crude pratfalls and enough shag gags to stuff the next three Austin Powers movies?

The movie’s not quite a fight-scene masterclass, though compared to much else on offer from studio action of the moment, it sometimes feels like one. It’s solid entertainment — refreshing, even, for finding ways to navigate the familiar pivots on its own terms.

Martin Sheen makes his directing debut with this military drama mixed with laughs. It isn’t awful — just bland, which is worse.