Natalie might protest the whitewashing of New York by rom-coms, but Isn’t It Romantic trots out multiple supporting characters of color whose sole roles are to make the white protagonist look good.

As an allegory of racial conflict and mass immigration, District 9 never really goes anywhere: The appealing premise fades into the background before 20 minutes have elapsed.

Gorō is a talented director. The individual shots of Earwig are beautifully composed, the characters are delightful (the tiny demons who wait upon Mandrake seem destined to become merchandise hits), and the film’s flimsy plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the visuals sink the entire enterprise.

To suggest that a lone, brave soldier could have set things right with a little amateur sleuthing seems like cinematic wish-fulfillment, an insult both to the intelligence of viewers and to the troops.

One seriously sick little blockbuster.

There’s something sour and strained about this movie that’s at odds with the usual Muppet ethos of game, let’s-put-on-a-show cheer. Maybe that’s because of the inordinate amount of screen time spent on the rivalry between two villains who are as uninteresting as they are unpleasant.

Where Hiddleston seems perfectly at home in the digital trenches, gamely swinging at fiendish foes to be added in postproduction, Larson looks like she’s staring into thin air. That leaves us with the monsters, who are, to be fair, mightily impressive.

The movie, even at two-and-a-half hours long, can’t fit in as much as does the 800-page novel, forcing director John Crowley and screenwriter Peter Straughan to pare down a bit on details, characters, and plot.

For all the film’s best intentions — and a finely tuned performance from the ever-better Woodley — for me The Fault in Our Stars never entirely found its way out of Sparks territory.

Irresistible might be a movie for the moment before or the moment after, but it feels entirely out of step with the one it’s in.

I was all revved up to have a whale of a fascist good time, and S.W.A.T. left me let down and pissed-off.

Am I the only one who finds the substance of this movie repulsive?

Instead of merging the Western and the sci-fi genre to form some new, transcendent class of popcorn fare, Cowboys & Aliens just regurgitates the conventions of both genres. Double the high concept, quadruple the clichés.

Law gives a doozy of a performance: He's fond of bulging his eyes, curling his head like a gargoyle, and displaying a set of rotten yellow teeth. This is some of the most flamboyantly bad acting since Brad Pitt in "Twelve Monkeys" (1995). An Oscar nomination would appear inevitable.

Like a lot of Gilliam's movies it's too overloaded--antic, indulgent, overdesigned--to get off the ground for more than a minute or two at a stretch.

Flanagan is more faithful to "The Shining" than he was to Shirley Jackson’s "Hill House," but he ends each with a twist that functions as a smug reproach.

Unfortunately, that sharp-eyed domestic comedy is dwarfed by the far less well-written supervillain crime plot that surrounds it.

Once Were Brothers could have been a peacemaking gesture, a magnanimous work of reflection and tribute that would gather Robertson some belated goodwill, and the film’s first half makes some moves in that direction. But damned if that hatchet just won’t stay buried.

I have a certain affection for this movie, if only because of its conceptual simplicity.

What saves Zatoichi is that it ends -- for no clear reason -- with a foot-stomping ensemble dance number that is both delightful and unhinging: It sends you home with spasmodic giggles, convinced this Japanese imp has discovered a new path to your unconscious.

He does gorgeous work, but in Mission to Mars he's only going through the motions.

Given the silliness of the source material, The Da Vinci Code stood little chance of being a great film, but it could easily have been a fun one. Instead, Howard takes a strangely respectful approach to the overheated mysticism of the novel, turning the film into that most boring of genres: the pious blockbuster.

Branagh is more preoccupied with the challenges of keeping a movie set in a series of steel tubes visually interesting than he is in engaging its story.

If you’re a Biggie die-hard (I’m one), nothing in I Got a Story to Tell will trouble your conviction that everything you already thought you knew about Biggie Smalls is right. In other words, it’s fan service, a project that sees “what is this movie for” and “who is this movie for” as effectively the same question.

What ultimately brings down The Boxtrolls isn’t the film’s willingness to wade into grimmer, more gruesome waters than your average kids’ animated adventure. It’s the failure to anchor its often misanthropic story in a character or relationship strong enough to offer a glimpse of redemption—a place of respite in an ugly, cheese-obsessed world.

There's something cynical about Ayer's attempt to preserve Ludlow as a hero after scene upon scene meant to show, with heavy irony, how lawlessly he enforced the law. You can't lionize your "Dirty Harry" vigilante and expose his hypocrisy, too.

Like a drunk on a bender, Notorious seems to have given up even trying to moderate its dependence on cliché.

The film has no spirit of inquiry -- no spirit at all, really.

What director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman do with this opening murder — not to mention a bizarre subplot that appears designed to counterweigh it — exploits a ghastly real-life killing for a cheap shock, delivered without context or any clear thematic underpinning. It’s obvious they failed to fully reckon with what they’ve put on the screen, and the results are grim.

The Recruit is like vaudeville night at Bellevue.

McKellen's actions are queerly unpredictable (pun intended), but every plot other twist is portentously foreshadowed.

With The Fountain, Aronofsky has become the hero of "Pi," without the desistance or the humility. He not only wants to ask the big questions, he tries to tie it all up with The Big Answer. And that's worse than bad metaphysics, it's bad filmmaking.

It boasts (nearly) all the elements of a perfectly fine, even very good, movie, without ever quite becoming a movie at all.

After a bracing first hour, State of Play defaults on the most basic promise of the conspiracy thriller. Instead of luring us down an ever-darker and twistier path, it strands us in a tedious and ill-designed maze.

I think Levinson missed a chance to get something unique and audacious on screen.

Weds an epic, sometimes visionary, depiction of the afterlife to a script and story with fewer psychological layers than the average Hallmark card.

War Machine is unexpectedly flat and disjointed, and it’s hard to know whether to blame this on Michôd (an Australian director best known for his excellent 2010 crime melodrama, Animal Kingdom) or the general bad vibes around the project.

The visuals have so much intrinsic motion that it's too bad Robots is oppressively rollercoasterish.

Seems to suffer from low self-esteem. Why can't this movie see that it doesn't need a hulking meta-narrative apparatus to make us care about its story? It had us at hello--or would have, if not for the excess of high-concept trickery.

Hong Kong action fans hoping for spontaneous combustion from the American debut of superstar Chow Yun-Fat might want to turn their weapons on the producers.

The mere phrase "Brad Pitt as Jesse James" makes for a kind of mini-reflection on the evolution of celebrity culture. It's a shame that The Assassination of Jesse James never goes much deeper than that tag line.

It has a gritty feel and a tight, methodical, one-thing-after-another tempo.

If these developments sound slight and meandering, so is the movie. Everything Must Go has a spacious, under-inhabited feeling.

The most memorable element of The Winter Soldier, besides Redford, is probably Scarlett Johansson, whose dryly funny Natasha at times comes perilously close to being … a well-developed female character?

Despite across-the-board bravura performances (especially by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as dueling campaign managers), The Ides of March somehow remains static and lifeless, like a civics-class diorama.

The movie is a polished muddle, fitfully amusing but with no spine.

A day and half after walking out with a sensation, primarily, of physical relief—at two hours and nine minutes, Pain & Gain makes for a long, loud, relentlessly assaultive sit—I find that my thumb is wavering at half-mast. I’m still not sure whether to mildly like or mildly hate this movie.

The film is overnarrated and in spots overwritten, but Brooks, who's primarily a screenwriter, does well with actors, and he has coaxed an extraordinary performance out of the young Jordana Brewster.

Lion goes again and again where you expect it to, delivering little more than the awards-season equivalent of "Homeward Bound."

Geoffrey Rush is fine as a gay drug dealer who serves as an enabling Santa Claus to the doomed couple. But in the end, Candy is a little too sweet and not quite harmful enough to the audience's health.

Often plays like what it is: a clunky toga-and-sandals picture, with Hollywood compromises abounding.

Coarse and chaotic remake.

Doesn't really work but has a good cast and great craggy ocean-framed scenery.

I'd have a lot more respect for Scott if he were actually the virtuoso he pretends to be. "Gladiator" had lousy, disjunctive action, and Kingdom of Heaven is even more maladroit.

It's a clever setup for a spoof of the espionage thriller, but despite the film's intermittent pleasures (Pitt's gum-snapping dolt chief among them), the result is oddly airless.

This is not to say that it is bad writing, shooting, or acting: It would need to be more ambitious to be bad. It is simply the most mundane sort of behavior presented in the most mundane sort of way.

There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

As a non-South African, I can't speak to the accuracy of the movie's racial politics, but they feel insultingly vague.

It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal.

Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him -- even when you ought to be in stitches.

Milla Jovovich is not quite up to the task of playing a nuanced and thoughtful Joan.

In LaBute's movies, people are either clueless dupes or psychotic manipulators, while art is meant to rub your face in unpleasant "truths." And I think he takes a little too much pleasure in that nose-rubbing.

Thoroughly second-rate -- which is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic dinner-theater troupe.

A climactic twist that's among the stupidest I've ever seen-almost up there with another Costner movie, "No Way Out," and "The Life of David Gale."

Horrible Bosses doesn't quite qualify as a black comedy. Without the conviction to follow through on its own macabre premise, this underachieving little movie washes out to a muddy grayish-brown.

Albert Nobbs is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It's genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull - a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.

King Richard is a Will Smith vehicle, through and through.

It more or less works.

For everything the movie gets right--most notably the impressively pared-down script by Joe Penhall and the two truthful and fearless performances from Mortensen and McPhee--there's a corresponding painful blunder, like the overwrought score from Nick Cave.

Nobody does visually pleasing, occasionally funny escapist entertainment about goodhearted rich people trying their best to do the right thing better than Nancy Meyers.

All Is True does not work as a film, but as a memorial to a writer whose shadow we are still working in today, and an expression of yearning to know who he really was, it has an odd vitality that cannot be completely dismissed.

Swinton is good enough to take your mind off the not-too-compelling ambiguities.

At times, you could actually mistake Tears of the Sun for a blunt modern parable instead of an opportunistic mixture of up-to-the-minute atrocities and old-fashioned corn.

It’s not that I wish Aline took more advantage of its fictional liberties to mock or undermine Céline Dion. I just wish it had much more to say about something—such as child stardom, what it’s like to move from working-class margins to opulence, or the simultaneously reverent and condescending relationship that pop culture had with Dion at her 1990s peak

The first hour is evocative and creepy...But once the trajectory is clear and the squeamish New York intellectual Quaid has to stand up and fight for his homestead, the boringness seeps into you like the damp.

With this genial bunch, and the occasional good line, there's no reason not to see The Break-Up, but there's also no reason, assuming the date is going well, not to skip it and order dessert.

This is ho-hum, straight-to-video material. And yet, even at its most crawlingly linear, Jackie Brown is diverting. If nothing else, I was diverted by the director's gall at stretching out those vacuous scenes.

Brutally exciting and sometimes brutally inept.

In Last Man Standing, we don’t much care; Hill is too busy crafting a classic to pull us in. Apart from those high-impact action scenes, he leeches the movie of immediacy.

The parents are the casualties of Mills' misplaced sincerity, which makes Thumbsucker the quintessential misadapted head-scratcher.

Barry is the closest thing Tom Cruise has played to a regular Joe in more than a decade, and the part isn’t a snug fit.

Michael Fassbender's portrayal of Brandon, the rootless Manhattan sex addict in Steve McQueen's Shame, may lay claim to this year's title of most outstanding performance in a mediocre movie.

Beatty made a film with visionary elements but without a guiding vision.

You have to admire a movie that endeavors to moosh together every successful cross-cultural action picture ever made.

Limitless is frustrating, in part, because it could have been much better.

The new movie of Selena's life ponderously carves each element of the myth in stone, as if this 23-year-old were a bust to be included on Mount Rushmore.

This Brighton Rock doesn't live up to the greatness of the novel (or even, really, the very-goodness of the 1947 movie), but it doesn't betray Greene's book either, which may be all a reasonable reader and filmgoer could ask.

The movie becomes more and more lugubrious, finally ending on a note of high-tragic operatic bathos.

This is a bleak, unresolved film, with no release. What keeps it from being a mortal bummer is the music-exquisite sacred choral works, plus Mozart.

The film is too metronomically paced for Kilmer's routines to develop any rhythm. The direction by Phillip Noyce is fluid but impersonal. Endless studio tinkering seems to have dissolved its spine.

Ultimately, Inland Empire left me angry at David Lynch, but it was the kind of intimate anger you feel when disappointed by someone you love. If you can tolerate its lack of narrative cohesion, Lynch's film will continue to reward you with visual and auditory surprises right up till the end.

Less a movie than an extended re-enactment from a History Channel documentary, the movie is stagey, preachy, and long on exposition.

The only moments of conviction come from an Asian-American dominatrix called Pearl (Lucy Liu), who brings far more glee to the task of beating people up than the picture's star or director. If the audience could have half as much fun as Pearl is having, Payback would be a kick.

Johnson rips off a lot of "Batman," especially in the cathedral climax, but that's not so bad: The movie looks best when it looks like other, better movies.

Cars 3 is still lower-tier Pixar.

Sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy.

The movie coalesces into nothing: It's one of those films that makes you say, "That was powerful. Now what the hell was it about?"

A peripatetic comedy about two comedians on a jaunt around the north of England, alternately amuses, bores, and annoys, just like its two hilariously intolerable protagonists.