The finest effect in this visceral gouge of a picture is Korean pop star Rain.

Toothless, gutless, one-note political movies like Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate, a picture that purports to have a galvanizing, liberal-minded theme (big business is taking over our country and our lives) but is really just ploddingly pedestrian.

Isn't emotionally manipulative but simply dull.

This isn't a boring movie or a dishonest one. But it's a relentlessly literal-minded one, light on vision and atmosphere, that moves through the history of the Germs with a checklist.

There's enough sweetness, and enough just-under-the-surface intelligence, in The Education of Charlie Banks to suggest that Durst may have a future as a filmmaker.

Mercifully, as seen from 11 years later, Jayson Blair himself seems a lot less important, not to mention a lot less interesting.

It's pretentious highbrow trash, but as far as that goes it works pretty well.

Isn't exactly bad and isn't exactly good. It's raw in some places and overcooked in others.

Misfires on multiple levels but isn't all that terrible.

The big screen doesn't seem to like Kutcher much, or even to GET him, whatever there is to get.

A self-indulgent and icky film, but reasonably well made and undeniably addictive.

So unself-conscious and breezy that you find yourself sailing along with it; its flaws become as negligible as harmless barnacles nestled well below the water line.

Mostly it's got a barely tolerable level of metaness.

It's a movie almost doomed to be called "refreshing," in the way that the word is used to excuse the game but amateurish presentation of a quirky premise.

Basically brings home the bacon for horror fans -- it offers decent special effects and a nice array of those moments where you shriek and jump and nearly pee your pants but it turns out to be Mom or the cat after all.

This is the kind of movie where most people know what they want and are pretty sure what they will get, that being “more of the same, please.”

With its wiry twists and turns, ends up buckling under the weight of its own cleverness.

The fatal flaw of Down With Love... is that in mining what's kitschily amusing about those movies, it also re-creates far too faithfully everything that's unbearable about them.

The ultra-tangled plotline of Terminator Genisys makes the rhythm of the action beats especially weird; we see the entire world nuked into rubble by the machine overlords really early in the movie, which makes it hard to get excited about a few buildings falling down later on.

A neo-vampire movie for tender-hearted preadolescent girls who are afraid of sex. If that's your thing, go for it. But there's something genuinely creepy, and not in the good way.

It's nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it's enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn't mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.

The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.

I’m being deliberately mean about a plot device that Curtis wants to come off as a goofy, harmless comic metaphor, but the idea that this implausible inherited trait is actually a cryptic, creepazoid form of domination over women is right there in the movie.

I left Australia feeling drained and weakened, as if I'd suffered a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist.

As enjoyable as Close is, Heights as a whole is a mannered simulation that only occasionally and accidentally feels like real New York life.

Actually, the problem with wunderkind director Shane Acker's "stitchpunk" animated fantasy 9 isn't so much that it bears a sped-up, dumbed-down resemblance to "The Lord of the Rings," although it does. It's more that Acker's dark and whimsical creation, so clearly in the tradition of his mentor Tim Burton, is wondrous to behold but offers only an indifferent and generic mishmash of quest fantasy and post-apocalyptic science fiction when it comes to story.

A little more flair and polish could have made Girlfight a terrific movie instead of just the decent one it is.

After its deceptively fleet opening 20 minutes or so, Chamber of Secrets settles into a plodding amble, a rickety framework in which many allegedly exciting things happen -- and are forgotten only minutes later.

Through its first two-thirds, at least, Hide and Seek does a good enough job of piquing our curiosity that the movie's ultimate dumbness is more than a minor insult.

Certainly pleasant enough, and if you can put the preachiness out of mind it's entertaining, in its square, conventional way.

The movie never makes much of a case for its own existence; it's a mediocre western clumsily welded to a mediocre alien shoot-'em-up, and if you allow yourself to think about its treatment of history for as long as one second, you'll feel insulted.

A little like the '80s crowd-pleaser "Ghost," but way artier.

I don't begrudge Take Me Home Tonight or the whole "I Love the Eighties" juggernaut its fight for its right to party, but there is something touchingly off-base about it.

Over and over again, Hoblit misses opportunities to make an engaging picture, instead giving us a merely pedestrian one.

It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.

A disappointingly blunt, monochrome work.

It's sunny and cheerful without coming off as too saccharine.

You know how they say to find one thing and do one thing well? Well, Pattinson's thing is glowering. It doesn't help matters that the movie itself is so painfully mediocre.

It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.

By the end of Love Object a dorky loner who wants a rubber sex doll at his beck and call seems a lot less objectionable than a director who wants a talented flesh-and-blood actress at his.

The lost opportunity of Hidalgo isn't that it fails to live up to its potential for romantic adventure, but that it fails to dig into the romance between man and horse that's at the heart of the story.

Everything about Proof of Life is intriguing and a little off.

Chan is still one of the most amazing -- and one of the most charming -- physical performers the movies have given us.

Made in Dagenham offers girl power in a can, lightly seasoned with swinging London and topped with cute-clumsy Sally Hawkins charming us to pieces. But the real women of Dagenham deserve better, and so do their sisters in the audience.

The surprise of the movie is that it actually does have a talented director and star. It doesn't begin to make up for the low quality of the story or the numerous other unfortunate elements, but it does suggest little flashes of something that, with more thought, might actually have been somewhat interesting.

This movie is bizarre, conflicted, unintentionally hilarious and profoundly mediocre – something like one of those based-on-a-true-story demonic possession yarns, with its polarities reversed – but not stupid in the way you’re probably thinking.

The picture is so gentle, it barely leaves an impression.

I don't mean that this movie is strikingly good or strikingly bad, in cosmic terms -- it's a solid but totally forgettable entertainment, redeemed somewhat by Barrymore's loud, horsey laugh and some agreeably racy comic situations.

The kind of bland, perky comedy that neuters whoever is spun into its cotton-candy web.

So gentle it barely has enough vitality to stick to the screen.

If you boil Thirteen down to its flimsy bones, you'll find that it's not really so much about peer pressure in contemporary teen life as it is a story about a classic bad egg. That right there dilutes its highfalutin aspirations.

Breaking and Entering is so bloodless that even Minghella's best ideas come off as wan and pale.

Bleach out the colors, backdate the wardrobes, insert Gary Cooper and Rosalind Russell and you've got one of Frank Capra's lesser films.

Van Damme's remarkable performance -- I say this in all seriousness -- comes pretty close to redeeming the picture's murky and overly complicated artistic intentions.

I'm afraid that whoever it was in the New York Film Critics Circle who voted for The Hobbit as best animated film had a point. And so did the people who suspected that this whole thing was a bad idea.

Should have been a quick and dirty pulp tall tale. But it pokes along instead of accelerating, and though it isn't exactly smug it's rather too pleased with its own manufactured outrageousness.

Like too many young filmmakers, Anderson seems to equate honesty with choppy editing, bad lighting (so harsh in a couple of shots you can see the pancake on Davis' face) and herky-jerky camera movements.

A flatulent blast of superheated air from the seething bowels of Hollywood, features all the usual idiocies -- implausibility on an epic scale, bogus "human interest" elements, plot developments that offer all the surprises of a Bob Dole speech.

Carefully made, respectful and dull.

The Holiday drags on for more than two hours, long enough for even the most ardent suitor to lose interest. The premise, so delectable at the start, quickly begins to feel tired and oversold.

"Star Wars" fans deserve better.

Schroeder isn’t much of a comic-strip expert or historian, by his own admission, so Dear Mr. Watterson bounces off many of the most interesting issues in and around “Calvin and Hobbes,” noticing them but not exploring them deeply.

The reality is that it's neither hip nor funny: Instead, it's excessively broad one minute and unctuously instructional the next.

Viewed as cinema, it’s an unstable and almost surrealist combination of Soviet-style war propaganda film, Zack Snyder-style action flick and sentimental fairy tale.

An acceptably entertaining picture. At just 100 minutes long, it feels tight and trim, and unlike so many contemporary action pictures, it boasts only one ending, instead of three false ones. What's more, it's just as dumb as the original.

Saying that Raimi’s trip to Oz is adequate eye candy with a good heart isn’t the same thing as saying it’s actually good. I was charmed at some moments, profoundly bored by others and almost never felt genuinely excited or emotionally engaged.

What is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women?

At 2 hours and 20 minutes Les Miserables is an unholy slog. It's the sort of movie where, when a title pops up saying, "Ten Years Later," you sink down in your seat certain it's going to be 20 before you get the hell out of there.

How you'll feel about Sunshine Cleaning probably depends on your tolerance for slender, semi-hip comedic dramas about oddball families grappling with sometimes overwhelming problems.

It's a late-night infomercial masquerading as a concert movie, more an advertisement for vitality than a picture of vitality itself. There's something self-congratulatory, preening, about both the performance and the filmmaking.

Less a movie for intelligent moviegoers than a suggestion that we're all brainless chickens.

Taken on its own terms, it's a light, sweet, curiously enjoyable misfit romance, whose real star is not Aniston but her magnificently awkward Lothario, Jason Bateman.

As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive.

"Pearl Harbor" is exactly the kind of prestige project you'd expect from a director like Bay, hitting all its targets with plodding precision and never once achieving surprise.

So stylized and slow-moving (even at a spare 75 minutes) that you may have trouble adapting to its hypnotic rhythms -- but if you can, there are sumptuous visual rewards to be found, plus the faintest emotional uptick right at the end.

It's mediocre and half-baked, with flashes of a potential good movie showing through here and there.

For all its dumb clichés it offers the basic appeal of teen movies: the pleasure of watching kids be kids, acting as they do among themselves instead of how parents and teachers expect them to act.

Offers only the stingiest platform for its actors, and as a piece of storytelling -- built on the foundation of a great story -- it's an epic that's been sliced and diced into so many little morsels that almost nothing in it has any weight.

A very mixed bag. It's an oddly dry fusion of documentary and narrative film that arguably doesn't quite click on either level.

You have seen this movie before, every morsel of it.

In terms of the gap between the movie it's trying to be and the movie it actually is, Mona Lisa Smile is in many ways indefensible. Yet for all its problems, it's satisfyingly movielike. The minutes drift by pleasurably and mindlessly.

Fever Pitch lacks that Farrelly spark, that warm, crazy glint.

When Pegg is breaking protocols with his uniquely ballsy aplomb, dancing like a doofus or doing battle with Venetian blinds, the film almost flies.

Here's a real mystery: How can John Cusack, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, acting in a John Grisham thriller, be so dull?

Paranormal Activity 2 suffers from the excessive expository blah-blah that's so common in horror-movie sequels.

At times, the relentless preciousness, the ironic distance, the posture of "We're just adorably like this" gets to be a little too much.

The Island walks a weird, wobbly line between being stupid, falsely fattened-up entertainment and a picture that just might have possibly been made by a person with a brain -- a scrambled one, but a brain nonetheless.

Bits of the picture are fascinating to look at, but eventually, exhaustion kicks in, to the point where we're not sure what we're looking at, or why.

The hectic, sprawling Fanfan la Tulipe eventually feels like too much -- too many goofy asides, too much Comédie Française hambone acting, too much gallantry and villainy, too much forced good cheer.

The Incredible Hulk suggests only that we've bottomed out on special effects: They're not necessarily getting better -- they're just getting bigger. Technically, Leterrier's Hulk is as realistic-looking as a rampaging green giant could be. But that doesn't make him credible.

A picture that's dramatically compelling in some places and plodding and didactic in others.

It's a two-hour episode of the show, except with better production values and a nicer wardrobe for Scully.

Million Dollar Arm is not just a Disney film, but a Disney film that could have been made, with minor elisions and different character names, in 1963.

So the rhetorical strategy of The Armstrong Lie is both a strength and a weakness. Gibney’s films have always been about truth, lies and power, but for the first time he finds himself in the ambiguous philosophical terrain of Errol Morris, exploring the lies we tell ourselves.

A middling little movie that tries to trespass on Bergman-Renoir territory and simply isn't adroit enough to pull it off, and because in its weaker moments it's overheated and silly.

There's no buildup, just emotional peak after emotional peak.

It's a glimpse into a world most secular, metropolitan liberals never see, and it's likely to induce howls of both terror and hilarity from big-city audiences.

Far from unwatchable. It's not a good movie but at least, on its own schlocky terms, the story makes sense (which is a lot more than you can say for "The Sixth Sense").