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

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.

Shelton obviously wants to distill something innocent and romantic from a relationship the world saw as sleazy. A noble mission. But he's left out a few essentials — like the facts.

It's simply a retread of the first Ride Along, a 2014 box-office hit, and proof positive that a bigger budget doesn’t buy bigger laughs.

Army of the Dead is neither the best of Snyder nor the worst. In whipping a bit of both extremes into a dependably watchable piece of pop froth that hits the appropriate marks, the movie strives for the expected relevance, offers the right amount of nonsurprise surprises, and distinguishes itself from the given rules of the genre just so that it, more or less, breaks even.

Certainly blunt, and since Anderson and Bach are veterans of the porn trade, there is no skimping on the sex.

It’s not hard to be sympathetic to Let Him Go’s desire to broaden, drift, be all-encompassing; that’s what yarns are good for. It’s what makes the movie an okay hang as is. And it’s also what may make you crave a better movie.

Death on the Nile has its joys and flaws apart from that Armie factor, but it’s almost like trying to assess whether the appetizer course could have been slightly undercooked while an elephant stampedes over the whole dinner table.

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.

On the surface, this may sound like a nice, trashy little diversion. We can confirm the “trashy” part, and you know that any time you give Moore the chance to either weep, become enraged or, in a best case scenario, do both at once, it’s going to reap some sort of dividends.

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?"

As a thriller, Firewall is flabby and familiar.

The filmmakers don't trust us to understand what Eddie is feeling about the Olympics without blaring a musical message from Hall and Oates on the soundtrack, "you make my dreams come true."

It’s feels like the New Puritanism (recently repped by the outcry over Janet Jackson’s "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl) is seeping in. But in the barbershop? Say it isn’t so.

Imagine David Mamet rewriting his political satire "Wag the Dog" -- in which a president and his advisers declare war to distract the media from the prez's horn-dog activities -- as a joke-free kidnap drama.

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.

The film looks and feels authentic, but Duchovny has powered his undeniably personal journey with a counterfeit heart.

With Newman, the movie emerges as a lively character piece with flashes of humor and grace.

Would it be asking too much if the hit-and-miss jokes could maybe nudge an inch beyond the obvious?

It's slick girlie stuff, but the cast makes it go down easy.

It’s funny to think of this new chapter, with all its mean twists and its tense character convolution, as a prelude to the story we already know. Orphan is the longer movie, but compared to First Kill, it’s a psychologically slim, unmessy affair in comparison.

What a shame that Kelly's pacing doesn't run as fast as his imagination. Instead of sweeping you along, The Box just sits there like something unclaimed at lost and found. Damaged goods.

To cut Toys a minor break, it is ambitious. It is also a gimmicky, obvious and pious bore, not to mention overproduced and overlong.

With Red, White & Royal Blue seemingly attempting to straddle the line between BookTok virality and on-screen sensuality, the film is content with being merely rewatchable.

Dragon errs by trafficking too much in what made Bruce Lee sell instead of what made him tick.

The estrogen overload damn near did me in.

Part intellectual-property barrel-scraping, part pumped-up star vehicle and part fumbling bid for Sony to cross media-revenue streams, Uncharted isn’t the worst attempt to bring a beloved video game to the screen — just the latest bit of evidence that these things are really a zero-sum game.

For a while, The Dark Half is a compelling study, in chiller guise, of an artist wrestling with his creative demons. But Stark is a real terror only in the shadows. When he emerges, all we see is Hutton — in a showy makeup job — struggling to change his wimp image.