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.

Life in the Bronx is hard, all right. Getting through a movie shouldn't be harder.

Another Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay demonstration of spectacle -- noise, stunts, the aforementioned incoherent editing -- taking precedence over story and character... by far the most brutal American picture released this summer.

Intended as nothing more than a here-today, gone-tomorrow zany entertainment, and at the very least, it has a good-natured, slightly raunchy spirit about it. But ultimately, it's a hollow enterprise, all ping and no pong. It doesn't bounce; it splats.

A loud, garish and very untimely romantic comedy.

If it's a nonsensical patchwork quilt, it's mostly a watchable one.

This is a parlor trick, but it's a hell of a good one.

If a couple who belonged to the Christian Coalition, or your maiden aunt, or George and Laura Bush were looking for a reassuring night out, Raising Helen would fit the bill nicely.

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").

It's a terrible movie, stuck in plot idiocies and big, noisy set pieces like a tire mired in mud.

The major drawback of I Don't Know How She Does It, however, is Parker herself. She seems pathologically drawn to characters who don't possess believable flaws or complications -- just annoying tics.

There are five writers credited with the script for The Medallion, and between them they don't come up with a single original or amusing or clever idea.

A stupid, brutal and nonsensical picture.

All noise with very little fun, and almost no restraint.

With Men, Women & Children and the equally laborious “Labor Day,” Reitman has gotten trapped amid the crumbling edifice of Hollywood. It’s turning him old before his time.

A disappointing picture that suffers from all manner of ills: Both the direction and the dialogue are stiff and awkward, and Kramer -- who also wrote the script -- crams too many not-believable-enough subplots into the movie's "Crash"-style construction. Yet Crossing Over is an interesting failure.

Sandler deserves to be damned to the pits of hell for this witless masturbatory comedy.

Marginally romantic and only the tiniest bit thrilling.

Essentially dumb and sadistic, but it's not like that's something new for pop culture. What we've got here is a solid, grade-B genre sequel, not as scary as the original but a bit funnier, and with a nasty little sting in its tail.

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

There's no energy, no spark, in Made of Honor. Even its clichés -- including a dashing rescue on horseback -- are trotted out with bland indifference.

Ben Affleck provides a charismatic star turn, but John Frankenheimer's out-of-season heist thriller is dead on arrival.

Amelia is a stunted epic, an ambitious and handsome-looking picture that tells its story in the dullest, most confusing way possible.

Can someone explain what Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman are doing in a chaotic and sadistic home-invasion thriller, shot in digital colors so radioactive they appear to have leaked out of the Fukushima nuclear plant?

Like so many disappointing movies, it's peopled by performers who do their damnedest to make the whole thing work.

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

This is a pale simulacrum of those high-style travel-porn thrillers of the '60s and '70s, which only serves to remind us that those aren't as easy to pull off as they look, and also that maybe they weren't so great in the first place.

I don't know when a bad movie has made me laugh as much as this one. Most of the gags are vintage silliness: foreign double talk, characters donning funny costumes, well-timed profanities.

The picture is an exercise in exploitation joi de vivre, and your enjoyment of it will depend on your tolerance for shameless, reckless, unredemptive violence with relatively little artistic or spiritual value. After all, there's a time and a place for everything.

If anything, it’s overstuffed with imagination and ideas, and when it comes to Hollywood movies I very much prefer that to the default setting. See it with an open mind, and you may well be surprised.

Carell is on the fast track to becoming Robin Williams, a guy who lost the plot far too early on and began pouring his considerable comic gifts into brain-dead heart-warmers.

Seven Days in Utopia is flawed in so many ways -- the editing, writing, acting and Matthew Dean Russell's direction are uniformly weak -- that this well-intentioned film does its positive messages a disservice.

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

This cookie-cutter spy thriller depends on the chemistry between Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock. Um, wait, there isn't any.

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

With its tepid gags and faltering pacing, may not be a very good movie. But at least, within its clumsiness, it strives for some kind of solidarity.

Inside of five minutes I felt an urgent, blinding hatred for almost all its grotesquely overprivileged characters.

Both the performance and the movie around it are virtually incomprehensible.

A trashy thriller of the kind that used to make up the second half of double bills in crumbling downtown theaters, circa 1977.

Unpleasant would be the word for Mercury Rising if "tired" weren't a more appropriate one.

The most surprising thing about the movie is the clumsiness of Harold Ramis' direction. Ramis has never equaled the work he did on "Groundhog Day."

Gloriously excessive, passionate and messy, A Life Less Ordinary is the kind of picture that's becoming more and more of a rarity in the landscape of American movies: a love story with a hard-on.

There's an entertainingly ludicrous movie lurking somewhere inside of the ludicrous, mediocre one this actually is.

Reasonably effective.

Feels very nicely made, at least until it falls apart: By its midpoint, you start to recognize that it has acute creepy-thrilleritis, which means that it promises us some things at the beginning that it has no intention of actually following up on.

Suspect Zero is loaded with cheap thrills for the expensively educated.

Fragmented and contrived, like a badly mapped-out scrapbook.

The most depressing movie I've seen all year; in fact, I'm hard-pressed to name a movie aimed specifically at women that has ever made me feel as insulted and disgusted.

This isn't a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it's so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it's a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, Speed Racer is an excess of nothingness.

You can't call W.E. a total disaster; it's too pretty, too nonsensical and finally too insignificant for that.

Overall Seven Pounds is too heavy-handed and maudlin to be comprehensible, let alone moving. The real shocker is that not even Smith can rescue it.

The disgrace of Steal This Movie isn't just that it fails to do justice to its subject, but that, as a movie, it's barely competent.

This clunky TV remake is stiffer than an iron curtain.

The movie can't distinguish between what's likable and human and funny and what's simply repellent. In that respect, it's just as indiscriminate as the reality TV it shakes its finger at.

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

Despite its problems, the picture still satisfies -- more than a lot of allegedly worthy "A list" movies do. In a movie world where heavyweight often means top-heavy, Against the Ropes shows some pretty fleet footwork.

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

There's not enough fast and even less furious.

There's not a single moment when you wonder what might happen next or when the spectacle simply leaps off the screen. You've seen it all before.

As a visual symphony, The Canyons is often masterful, and while it may be pornographic in places, it’s never campy. At the center of its cold, beautiful and half-dead world is the almost incandescent Lindsay Lohan, burning like a flawed diamond.

Generally succeeds. But with just a bit more effort the movie might have been funnier and a lot more fun.

As lousy as it is, Diary of a Mad Black Woman is weirdly fascinating.

It's kind of fun to watch Pacino and Liotta and Tatum and James Ransone, as Jonathan's foulmouthed partner, as they roar at each other and suck the marrow from the hambone. You can see why actors want to work with Montiel, but actors are notoriously bad judges of whether good scenes will ever add up to a worthwhile movie, which is exactly the problem here.

The plot is so convoluted that missing even five minutes at a stretch won't make any difference in your comprehension of the story.

An awkward and distinctly unsexy farcical misfire.

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

A grim, sour view of single life.

Despite how easy it would be to write off Righteous Kill as one sorry excuse for lazy filmmaking, there is still something utterly mesmerizing in the palpable chemistry between the two leading men.

Some viewers may find this movie sexist or misogynist simply based on its premise, but it's a mistake to take Greenaway's symbolic narratives too literally.

Challenges us to believe in the power of myth. But the big challenge here is surviving the tedium of Shyamalan's meandering inventiveness. What's supposed to be fanciful storytelling is really just audience punishment.

Unwatchable.

Sells ignorance as a refined evening's entertainment.

The movie's ridiculous good humor -- laced with just enough barbs to keep it from going soft -- suggest that it's been made with some thought and care. I often found myself laughing in spite of no one, not even myself.

Between the 12th floor and the 14th floor, boredom awaits!

It was boring and silly but not atrociously bad. No, that's much too glowing; allow me to back up and rephrase. It is atrociously bad, basically.

As it is, it's too restrained, too often -- too eager to gallop toward postcard sunsets on the beach when tequila shooters and lap dances are what the moment calls for. You'd think the combination of Diaz, Kutcher and Vegas would be good for at least a little sexy, silly fun. But don't bet on it.

One of the most dreadfully unnecessary movies in recent memory.

May be far from perfect, but those small, odd Hartley touches help you warm to it.

There's nothing unconventional or daring about On_Line, but considering how cheap it undoubtedly was to make, the acting, writing and direction all stand up pretty well; this is more intelligent and better structured than at least half the Hollywood movies I see.

Just slides off the screen and disappears.

Love's Labour's Lost is flawed, but Kenneth Branagh remains our greatest living interpreter of Shakespeare.

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

Mildly grisly, assaultively noisy and tremendously boring.

A wildly uneven and sloppily directed movie, full of clashing tones and undigested bits of superior films.

Gets more cluttered and confused as it moves along.

Though dazzled by its ultra-modern wizardry and the high gloss of its production values, one can also feel the globalist double standard roiling underneath the adolescent-kid fantasy plot. Jumper tells us that Americans fantasize about getting rich by stealing and going everywhere they want without restrictions; that they are materialistic, disrespect foreign antiquities, and remain blind to their own and to world history.

Revenge of the Fallen just comes off as a bratty kid showing how many swear words he knows.

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.

No serious film fan could stomach the cheap gags and farting contests in this goofball tribute. I laughed myself stupid anyway.

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.

A time-waster with some enjoyably empty zip.

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

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

Trying to figure out just what went wrong in the creation of a movie as dreadful as this may ultimately be as futile as trying to ascertain what might lie on the "other side" of a black hole.

It's kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

Van Helsing wears its price tag on its ruffled lamé sleeve. And yet it gives off an aura of what I can only call lavish cheapness.

It might be nice if Ghosts of Mars had more to offer than snappy repartee and shameless gore, or if it could borrow a little narrative tension from its Alien Chain Saw forebears.

Didactic, clumsily directed and abysmally acted, never lets go of its intellectualized approach long enough to deliver any real kinetic thrills.