Isn't assaultive or dumb, just slack and de-energized, as if its batteries start running down in the first frame.

May be very much about feelings, but it's made with a drab, juiceless, tasteful efficiency that distances us from the characters instead of drawing us closer to them.

Any film that begins with one of those fake-news montages, where snippets of genuine CNN footage are stitched together to concoct a feeling of semi-urgency around its hackneyed apocalypse, already sucks even before it gets started.

Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn't be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack.

There's so little love to be found in Dreamgirls. It's a product that promises magic, and yet gives us nothing to live on.

Lacks any layers beyond its own amiable inconsequentiality. It needs the spark of the distinctively American slapstick craziness that has distinguished Frye's previous work.

A limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form.

Utterly predictable, thoroughly sentimental and -- worse -- not all that funny. It makes your average episode of "Third Rock From the Sun" look like the edgy mutant offspring of John Waters and Ingmar Bergman.

James Cameron disgraces those who died on the Titanic -- again.

It's hard to care about a valiant groping for accuracy when a story is so badly told you can't tell what the devil is going on.

Ultimately feels somewhat overprocessed, and its humor is a little too broad at times -- it probably crosses the acceptable threshold of penis and boob jokes.

I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is big, brave, crude and contradictory, very bad in places and very good in others, and every American should see it.

Despite its clichéd elements, Dallas Buyers Club is a fierce celebration of the unpredictable power that belongs to the outcast, the despised, the pariah. That’s not a story of the ‘80s, it’s a story of always.

Excessively intricate and extremely dull, the latest example of a filmmaker giving us a disjointed, overlong movie that’s unnecessarily confusing to follow.

Watching The Producers is simply exhausting.

You can choose to understand The Force Awakens as an embrace of the mythological tradition, in which the same stories recur over and over with minor variations. Or you can see it as the ultimate retreat into formula.... There are moments when it feels like both of those things, profound and cynical, deeply satisfying and oddly empty.

The picture is mildly entertaining and stringently unoffensive (provided you're not a supersensitive upper-crusty type from Connecticut). Yet it has problems from the start.

Too bad it's not so funny. Almost every gag in Black Knight feels forced and contrived, as if the movie is desperate to squeeze laughs out of us.

This initial “Mortal Instruments” picture has the vibe of a straight-to-video release from the mid-‘90s, except with a $60 million budget and considerable special-effects expertise.

Its spectacular special effects threaten to swallow characters whole, and there are times when overwrought and clumsy dialogue... nearly pitch you right out of the movie's mood.

Works neither as an exuberant rock 'n' roll picture nor as a heroic fable. It will rock you --straight to sleep.

The problem with contemporary Hollywood isn't that so many of the movies it's churning out are based on formula; it's that so many directors take perfectly good formulas and wreck them with bad filmmaking.

Parker IS to blame for the self-consciousness of her performance. She spends much of the movie swanning, not acting: Nearly every movement, every gesture, seems conceived for the benefit of the camera, as opposed to the truth of the character.

The Devil's Own isn't the disaster its bad advance publicity might lead you to expect. But it's a disjointed, sluggish picture.

So ends this enormously important, and enormously extended, chapter of pop culture, with a combination of bang and whimper.

I don't think any of it really hangs together as anything resembling drama, or that Michael is ever a remotely likable character, before or after his day of reckoning. But Adam Sandler didn't get where he is today by making movies for me and Roger Ebert to like.

The problem is that the charm and good spirits of Amélie feel calculated rather than natural.

Unless you like boob jokes and preachy sentimentalism, this comedy isn't funny at all.

When has Woody Allen ever been interested in anything besides Woody Allen? He has no interest in bringing out new sides of his actors. Jim Henson's casts had more spontaneity.

This film's dithering, handsome, morally ambivalent Hamlet, is a profoundly unsatisfactory character.

Feels like every other action thriller we've seen in the past three years, only it's more annoying -- and, in some cases, more appalling -- because it's trying so hard to distinguish itself.

What's missing -- apart, of course, from a plot -- is any character development.

What's offensive in Bringing Down the House is the way the jokes have been calculated not to offend.

Sodden and glum, even in those moments where it's supposed to feel funny and light. It makes you feel trapped and flailing as the minutes tick by. If it encapsulates anything, it's the experience of drowning, not waving.

Feels deeply calculated rather than genuinely crazy.

More of a women's-prison movie than a supernatural thriller, and not a very good one at that.

Pontypool is something like a claustrophobic, locked-in-the-barn zombie movie, only almost without zombies.

The bitterness of her new comedy, Loser, comes as a shock. It's not a mean-spirited movie.

Sometimes movies make sense in a logical way; sometimes they make only emotional sense. No Reservations makes no damned sense at all.

Thinking back on watching these performers, I see them mostly as an arrangement of bewildered actors awaiting orders, as if Ritchie hasn't bothered to tell them what he needs them to do. He’d sure make a lousy Mob boss.

High Crimes does offer good, often sharp and funny work from its two stars. But you can't fake excitement, and it's a lousy feeling to know that the best commercial movie I can point you to right now is this shallow, self-erasing nonsense.

Before long, El Cantante disintegrates into a stylized jumble -- even a straightforward jumble would have been preferable.

The groom is a doofus, the bride has genuine screwball talent -- It's too bad that the movie is so disappointing.

Couldn't be more unhip -- it just never hits the groove.

What we really need from Stoned, the very thing that it fails to give us, is a sense of Jones as a human being.

It's occasionally funny and a lot painful.

The visual originality of The Saddest Music is deceiving: Narratively and spiritually, the movie is bankrupt, even though it's so packed with stuff (including a set of shapely prosthetic glass legs filled with dazzling, fizzy beer) that you can hardly bring yourself to believe that it all adds up to nothing.

Gordon's film is an art-house curio, visually ugly and emotionally and narratively dissonant. Its cheapness and poverty of imagination consistently undermines its ambitions and reduces its complexity to by-the-numbers Freudianism.

What makes The Internship especially unfortunate is that there are pieces of a better, funnier movie lying around here, pretty much unnoticed.

Cassandra's Dream, an earnest meditation on greed, desire, murder and class struggle, is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies in years -- except Allen doesn't know it.

So bad it's almost like performance art, or those cheap records from the '60s, where the Chipmunks sing the Beatles' greatest hits.

There’s enough craft and intelligence at work here that you can’t dismiss Raze as meaningless sadism, but not nearly enough to make it worth the unpleasantness of actually watching it.

Such an inept bundle of work -- crying out for the filmmaking equivalent of Ritalin, but still sluggish as syrup -- that it doesn't even provide an opportunity to ogle properly.

The pacing is off, the emotional tone is wobbly, and none of the actors seem to be acting in the same style or the same movie.

With The Good German, Soderbergh -- generally a terrific and creative filmmaker -- apes a style, and a way of seeing, that he clearly doesn't understand. It feels like a hit to the stomach.

Anything Else isn't just the latest Woody Allen movie; it's also the smallest. His pictures seem to be getting tinier and tinier, and after you've seen them they leave nothing but a tinny echo and a bad taste. Anything Else is misanthropy writ small. Allen is too stingy to be generous even with his contempt.

For all the filmmakers' talk about reinvigorating the franchise for a new generation, and all their attention to technical details, this is a sloppily conceived remake with no passion for the genre or this story behind it, a movie that assumes its audience is brain-dead and likes it that way.

Year One sets prehistoric comedy back at least 20 years.

You would never have predicted it from the breakout success of "Pretty Woman" nearly a decade ago, but it turns out that the pairing of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts has ripened over the years into something resembling month-old brie.

It's a little bit Tolkien, a little bit Lucas, a little bit "Matrix," a little bit "Dune" and rather too much Philip Pullman, all stuck together with some powerfully expensive effects and lots of cute kids doing tai chi.

I hated this movie; I wish I could unsee it and will it out of existence. But that’s not the same as thinking it’s worthless or corrupt or entirely inept. It’s more like a massively self-indulgent prank, inflicted on the world by some reasonably intelligent young men, which makes it the most bro-tastic project of all time. Mo’ bro than this, no es posible, amigos.

There's not enough fast and even less furious.

The picture starts off slick and amusing, gets convoluted, draggy and strange round about the midway point, and ends up just plain ludicrous.

This might be the edgiest film of the year -- if the year were 1982.

By the movie's numbingly predictable end, the notion of a visually unleashed cinema seems like a monstrous mistake -- we've handed over the atom bomb to the Teletubbies!

For a movie that's supposed to be about speed and movement, Torque is a peculiarly slow kind of torture. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition -- especially not in an action movie.

It's mostly terrible. The movie has no sparkle, no charm, nothing to sweep us off our feet.

A dreary, ludicrous thriller.

An academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.

Sayles speaks the language of cinematic formula so automatically -- his reunited lovers slow dance to a jukebox in a dark, deserted cafe and wait unannounced outside each other's workplaces when they want to talk -- that he's forgotten that real people don't do this stuff.

Unlike the original -- which, in a crazy stroke of genius, allowed Shakespearean thespians like Claire Bloom and Maggie Smith, plus Bond babe Ursula Andress, to mix it up as jealous goddesses -- the new Clash of the Titans is frightfully low on babes.

Cinderella Man is ostensibly the kind of old-fashioned drama that sends audiences home with a satisfied glow. But like so many of Howard's movies, there's something canned and phony about it -- it left me feeling cooked and dehydrated, as if I'd fallen asleep on a tanning bed.

Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Season of the Witch claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema.

This is a love story, all right, but it has less to do with the flaws of capitalism than it does with Moore's unwavering fondness for the sound of his own voice, and for what he perceives as his own vast cleverness.

A vehicle for teen singing sensation Mandy Moore. As vehicles go, it's an Edsel.

The direction on Johnson Family Vacation is numbingly slack; the synapses between the scenes don't spark effortlessly, as they should, and the whole enterprise feels dragged-down and belabored.

Boring at best and insidious at worst.

A well-intentioned, profoundly silly and borderline insulting movie.

A pallid, mediocre tale that treacles its way through well-worn channels.

When the enchanted crab is the most appealing character in a movie, you know you're in some serious metaphoric hot water.

The film is a plodding, earnest adaptation that strips the source of its richness and ambiguity.

You'd have thought, in his infinite wisdom, the Lord would at least send stinkers like this direct to video.

It pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic .

One of those movies that you continue to pull for even after it becomes clear that it isn't very good.

A 3 hour fusillade of cliches.

It's not much fun, and it's not particularly edifying. Even people who are curious about Holmes (he was better known by his screen name, Johnny Wadd; here, he's played by Val Kilmer) won't find out much about him.

It’s not just that Chappie is a mishmash of familiar ingredients whose story quickly slides off the rails into a swamp of action-movie clichés, or another misbegotten project from the Land of Intriguing Premises. It doesn’t have an intriguing premise in the first place. It’s cluttered, goofy and incoherent from beginning to end, and much too long.

This alleged thriller, which might be described as "'Gaslight' Goes to College," is one of the most incoherent features in recent memory.

This film "Phantom" takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat.

A movie that's laughable without, alas, even being enjoyably awful.

It's a flat, clumsy piece of filmmaking. When Phillippe and Ward are in bed, the shots are so badly matched that I believed they were having sex, just not with each other.

It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.

A humorless picture, a somber, arty exercise in deep denial of its exploitation roots. The dialogue is stiff and mechanical and the performances are too.

Instead of effervescent and mercurial, the movie is simply muddled. Lee has far too much skill to be delivering work that so often degenerates into incoherence.

Stay away from this cautionary tale about the gay porn industry -- it blows.

No director in the history of moviemaking has expended so much effort in the service of drying up and blowing off the landscape.

Spends a lot of time advertising how exciting it is, without actually being exciting.