Fast and funny and brings back some of the wonder to the series.

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.

The best thing I can say about it is that the costumes and the hambone acting keep it from being a deadly bore.

Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald -- his previous feature was "The Hanging Garden" -- has managed to make a comedy about assisted suicide that hardly feels black at all.

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.

The sort of thing you can't believe anyone would want their name attached to.

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.

Any moron can make a bad movie. But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.

Fred Claus does feature some very nicely groomed reindeer, a far cry from those patchy, depressed-looking creatures you see every holiday season at the petting zoo. They're prancing and dancing as fast as they can, but they can't pull Fred Claus from the rut it's in.

Both mean-spirited and self-conscious. It's all style and no soul, which wouldn't be a problem if its style at least gave us something to look at, or to laugh at. But From Paris With Love, filmed on location in Paris, has a raggedy, greasy, dingy look: It's the movie equivalent of an unbathed, unshaven French boyfriend (the bad kind). It thinks it's suave, but it just smells bad.

The funny thing about all this is that a half-hour into Underworld I couldn't wait for it to be over. When it really was over, I couldn't wait for the next installment. Go figure.

As a performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment, it's magnificent.

A dreary, ludicrous thriller.

There's definitely some empty-calories, summer-movie fun to be found in this ludicrous genre mashup, most of it courtesy of maniacal Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, who stages hilarious, imaginative, almost free-form action sequences like nobody in the business.

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

Next is clearly an attempt at a puzzle movie, one of those brainteaser pictures that lures viewers into another dimension, but it doesn't have the momentum, the quick-wittedness, to keep us wondering what's going to happen next.

Horror fans should see this, at least in geeky admiration for what it pulls off, but in the long run it's no more than a crisp footnote to genre history.

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.

It's a concept not without its sweet appeal -- if only it were a little wittier, I might actually be convinced.

The Replacement Killers has a plot -- barely -- but no story.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a failure to be sure, but if it's not exactly a brave one, it's one whose foolhardiness deserves at least half a salute.

A cryptic and unsettling film.

If Alex Proyas' Knowing were reasonably entertaining -- instead of just dour, pointless and tedious -- it would be a camp classic.

I'm not quite saying that the unabashed squareness and silliness of Larry Crowne are negatives. They're almost admirable in themselves, and certainly constitute a selling point.

The picture has no legs, no style, no sense of movement other than the meandering, dawdling kind.

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.

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.

Ultimately I’m going to vote with my heart and say you should see it, largely for the brooding, physical performance of Tom Hardy, an actor still a shade too peculiar for Hollywood stardom, along with the ominous evocation of Stalin’s Russia on the cusp of change. But that recommendation comes with many asterisks, and in various respects Child 44 is a lost opportunity or, as they teach us to say in film-critic academy, an “interesting failure.”

Just a string of cute gags and pouting on Isabella's part that's supposed to signify soul-searching.

Warchus seems as at ease with the complexity of the style as he is with directing actors.

If there's any reason to bother with Meet the Fockers, it's to see Hoffman and Streisand.

First Sunday is simply a case of wasting gifted performers on material that feels slapped together and unshaped.

The film has an odd and striking energy, and the chemistry between Scodelario and Biel has an electrical charge to it. There are a couple of genuinely creepy moments, and Gregorini keeps us on an emotional knife edge.

Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys -- I hope it was a growth experience.

The biggest problem with Spun is that it's really just about speed (and editing). And speed, like most other drugs, is in and of itself boring.

Owen Wilson doesn't have a single good line in the dismal Drillbit Taylor. So how is it that almost everything he does is funny?

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

I'm always grateful to practice a little affirmative action on behalf of grade-C sleaze movies with a budget you could probably locate in your sofa cushions or your dryer, and Tim McCann's digital-video opus Nowhere Man is a fine example of the species.

In Crank: High Voltage, Statham just looks miserable, as if appearing in this lousy picture just sucked all the heart right out of him.

Bening's prickliness is pure delight, but there's only so much she can do. It's a terrible fate for an actress to be upstaged by a humming p----.

To say that the film is unpleasant would imply that there's an emotional reaction to be gotten from it. I'd have to believe that there was someone, somewhere, who would actually care.

An intermittently engaging thriller.

It's lower on the food chain than a mere exploitation picture because it clings so desperately to the notion that it's a serious movie about violence; it doesn't even have enough integrity to serve up cheap, sick thrills for their own sake.

It is as deeply satisfying as only the yowling, primal trashing of several rental cars and hotel rooms while in the grips of a hopelessly depraved ether jag and several sheets of blotter acid can be... A cinematic masterpiece.

Gordon's best not-so-secret weapons, though, are his two stars: Vaughn and Witherspoon are an inspired pairing, not least because they're such a mismatched set of salt-and-pepper shakers.

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.

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.

The doggie in Darling Companion is a big, warm bundle of puppy love; his owners are lost forever in a big chill.

Paris Hilton is the big draw in Jaume Collet-Serra's not-really-a-remake horror-slasher thriller House of Wax, and she'd have to be: There's so little else going on in it that you find yourself waiting for her few brief scenes.

It's an A-list movie for the most brain-dead elements of the action-movie crowd.

The Invisible Circus isn't junk. It's carefully, competently made, though with no particular feeling for technique or rhythm.

As a capable imitation of better movies by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and Roman Polanski – it's reasonably successful entertainment.

Proceeds at such an amiable pace and features enough creepy-crawly effects that many viewers won't quite notice or care how rickety and second-rate it is.

Wears off in about 10.8 minutes.

A sustained piece of showboating mythmaking, and something of a snow job.

Decadence is supposed to be fun, surely, or at least more fun than the desperate, sludgy, frantic mess of Suicide Squad.

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

A giddy madcap classic, one of the wildest and funniest American comedies in years.

Takes plenty of twists and turns, each so implausible and silly that you have no interest whatsoever in finding out what the next one will be. The director, Paul McGuigan, is fond of fancy split-screen effects and stylish, snappy cutting, but he can't tell a story to save his life.

In this classy, taut white-knuckler – largely shot inside a real-life decommissioned Soviet sub – Robinson asks us to consider more than the hypothetical possibility that the world nearly ended in 1968. He reminds us that we have no idea how many other near-misses may have happened in the behind-the-scenes history of the modern age and also, more troubling still, that long after the Cold War has faded into memory we continue to have difficulty telling the crazy people from the sane ones.

Fantastic Four doesn't expand on, or even illuminate, anything much beyond the most basic theme of what it feels like to be an adolescent misfit. This is a comic-book movie that actually makes an effort not to go over kids' heads.

There's loads of suffering in Sleepwalking, piled on until the picture almost becomes an unintentional comedy.

Never have a great historical hero's accomplishments seemed so inconsequential, or so damned hard to figure out.

Lightweight but delightful martial-arts romp.

What Clockstoppers achieves in acting and decent special effects, it undermines with weak dialogue and directing. The movie isn't bad; it just makes you wish that certain scenes could be hypertimed into oblivion.

Jon Voight shows up as Ben's daddy, and Harvey Keitel plays a devilishly goateed FBI agent: They're the only two actors who seem to have a sense of how ridiculous National Treasure is, but there's not enough of them to carry the picture.

Shrink offers a roster of wonderfully eccentric characterizations, shoehorned into a dramatic structure that's just a little too formulaic.

No wonder Arlene (Hunt) keeps a bottle of vodka in the chandelier. You would too with this demonic, passive-aggressive, New Age munchkin (Osment) trying to run your life.

It's fun, but it isn't believable for a minute.

It has the kind of jumbled, pseudo-spectacular, overdecorated digital design that the eye and mind can’t really take in. Individual shots can be gorgeous, but there are just too damn many of them, and the overall experience is the visual equivalent of eating an entire wedding cake.

A haunting and terrifying film. It's also a film of wonderful spaces and silences.

Deep Impact is the work of someone crass enough, and in some essential way mad enough, to try to turn the apocalypse into a tear-jerker.

A movie that's dazzling as you watch it and immediately unsatisfying afterward.

A jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode.

If The Cell were six minutes long it would blow your mind. At two hours, it's a disordered muddle of hellacious highs and pedestrian lows.

A simple entertainment that's by and large carried on the backs of its actors, some who are wonderful and others who are merely likable.

The problem with “Wolverine” isn’t that the mythology is detailed and potentially confusing — you could say that about any number of movies based on comic books, even some of the good ones. The bigger issue is that “Wolverine” is so uninvolving that you might not care whether you remember what happened 10 minutes ago.

For all the CGI action sequences and butt-rocking Dolby sound effects, in fact, Green Lantern is most satisfying when it sticks close to stodgy comic-book archetype.

Doesn't work at any level, but the total lack of chemistry between its central couple is fatal.

It's occasionally funny and a lot painful.

The plot construction here is especially lazy. The whole movie is built toward the dance competition.

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.

Entirely watchable and often pretty fun, in a mishmashed, patchy kind of way.

It's long. Long movies almost always mean the audience member has time to think, and in this context that's not a good thing.

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

The movie around Lane and Gere is unreal, a tortured construct, but they open a breathing space in its center.

It's a comedy, a political thriller, a love story: Barry Levinson's Man of the Year tries to be all things to all people and fails on every count -- a little like the generic, ineffectual politicians it's pretending to excoriate.

It’s clearly a directorial accomplishment to assemble this level of acting talent in one movie and come away with something so – well, “bad” is not sufficient to capture the idiot glory of this motion picture.

One of those comedies that "thinking" people tend to stay away from, but if you look beyond its admittedly aggressive marketing campaign, you can see that it was made with care and intelligence as well as a sense of fun. The pleasures it offers may be modest, but they're not negligible.

Toback has hit a new low. The candor and shrugging good humor Toback, at his best, used to show has been replaced by a repellent slurpiness: The whole picture seems coated with a slimy sheen of drool.

It's hard to remember a movie that has asked us to care, without giving us reason to, about a character who is so thoroughly and relentlessly a prick.

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.

Even with the outlandish characters, gaudy colors and gay satire, this smug John Waters knockoff can't stand up to the real thing.

Let’s be clear right up front that The Maid’s Room doesn’t quite work, intriguing premise and all, and that the fault lies with Walker’s labored script and wooden characterization.

Dragons torch the earth as manly men with weird hair battle them in this colossally misconceived dud.

Sells itself as a traditional Hollywood riches-to-rags comedy -- overdressed brat gets taken down a peg, falls in love with a hunky prole, and learns that love is more important than shoes...So why is Hollywood returning the favor by making such dreadful movies for Latino audiences?

A breezy, uncomplicated, unapologetically broad comedy.

Jolie is far too good for this tripe but she does give the film its only believable moments, and for the first half, her concentration makes you watch her intently.