The Lightning Thief is loud, scary, oversexed, and really unfun. All that would have been fine if my daughter liked it, but instead it left her and her friend stunned.

The picture has some fun slapstick set pieces and an inventively manic turn by Gibson.

Even if you find the satire in Josie and the Pussycats self-serving, you might still love the movie, buy the soundtrack, and surrender to the hype. That's what happened to me.

The Box plays like "The Pardoner's Tale" as retold by the conspiracy theorist haunting your neighborhood Radio Shack.

A second-rate but bearable black comedy.

The film is seamlessly made, its mood balanced dreamily between sexy-funny and sexy-scary.

Revolutions isn't as stupefying as "Reloaded"--and, of course, our expectations have been drastically lowered. But it's an abysmal anticlimax all the same.

A wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far.

From time to time, Bad Teacher gestures vaguely at the movie it could have been. Diaz slouches and snarls effectively through the early scenes. It isn't till we realize her redemption will be unsatisfying that the character starts to curdle.

Ought to have been called "Slugs for Snails," so leisurely does it creep toward its predictably bombastic conclusion.

Con-artist caper comedies are almost always piffle, but there's a fierce, cruel competition at the heart of Heartbreakers that gives it some bite.

The enthralling dance numbers-flashy spectacles with feathers and bras made out of pearls and netting-and the combined sass levels of Cher and Christina Aguilera gloss over the movie's weaknesses.

Sometimes the film’s frenetic pace works, as in a brutally efficient half-second fight in an airplane bathroom. But more often, it feels like cinematographer Oliver Wood and editor Billy Weber are feuding.

Swing Vote isn't exactly a toothless political satire. It's something worse: a satire with dentures.

I walked out of Choke feeling hustled, which is appropriate enough, I guess, for a movie that's a portrait of a compulsive hustler.

The movie is one dead, overcomposed scene after another.

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

When it comes to weaving personal stories in and out of the special-effects set pieces, the director has the most colossal antitalent since Ed Wood Jr.

Good as it is, The Legend of Zorro would be a hollow feat without leads who are drop-dead-gorgeous movie stars and spectacular clowns.

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.

There's something curiously off about The Time Traveler's Wife.

Gleefully pushes everyone's buttons...and that manages to exploit our own racial discomfort and envy in ways that leave us hungry for more.

No one rises above the material, though, except for Walken, who looks pleased with the paycheck and the top-shelf tequila. As a shady lawyer, Mickey Rourke is smooth and funny, but recognizable only by his familiar purr.

Takes off into the comic stratosphere in its first sequence and then slowly sinks to Earth, made logy by its noble means and Sayles' increasing inability to shoot anything but fat clots of undramatic talk in the most boring manner imaginable.

Oddly enough, it's when the action of Ong Bak 2 stops that this funkadelic freakshow shines. The screen is stuffed with a gallery of grotesques, some of Thailand's best character actors, who spend their time bleeding, bellowing, and slurping up eyeballs.

Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario.

The problem with the movie's semisupernatural crime plot, though, isn't that the resolution is completely outlandish; it's that the outlandishness is insufficiently grounded in pseudoscience.

It's bursting with goofy banter, Hollywood in-jokes, sexy love scenes, and chases that go on much too long but have the kind of madcap self-indulgence that makes questions of logic or credibility seem dull-witted. It's a great piece of mindful escapism.

Thanks to Hancock's evasive storytelling, it's never clear why Houston moved so slowly or why so few Texians came to the Alamo's aid. The middle of the movie is pokey and unfocused--and, given the circumstances, bizarrely lacking in urgency.

Kate gestures at being different, something fresh and subversive, but at the end of the day, it’s just reheating old clichés.

Ultimately, though, even the company of these brilliant actors can't compensate for the limp, shapeless plot. With nowhere to go dramatically, the last third dissolves into a haze of flashbacks and fantasy sequences.

Like Cooper's lady-killing character, Face, The A-Team is utterly convinced of its own lovability even as it strains our credibility, abuses our patience, and punishes our eardrums.

This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith.

There's something endearingly bookish about a movie whose single most frightening shot involves the possibility of an ax being taken to a typewriter.

Sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy.

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.

Remember that scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when a swastika-stamped Nazi crate explodes for no good reason (beyond the fact that the Ark hates Nazis)? Red Tails is like that, only less awesome, and considerably longer.

The film, smoothly directed by David Dobkin, has a neat farcical structure but is too in love with its overly tight-lipped protagonist and deadpan pacing.

Watching the movie is a nonexperience--like the Upper East Side apartment where most of the action takes place, it's lavishly appointed but joyless.

The kind of movie that moves you to tears even as you resent the manipulative mechanics of the story.

Lyne has created, from a screenplay by Stephen Schiff, an earnest movie about a man who, by falling in love with his emotionally immature stepdaughter, ends up destroying himself.

Mirror Mirror is an odd little fantasia of a movie - part jaunty adventure, part broad romantic comedy, part auteurist spectacle. Half the fun is figuring out what the hell you're watching.

Apart from Caroline Aaron's turn as Darin's overbearing sister...Beyond the Sea has nothing to recommend it.

I'd like to recommend it, but it's too silly. On the plus side, it's ravishingly well directed by Antonia Bird.

Something about Wilson is just so comfortable, so loose, that he can make the most pointless movie seem, by moments, as if it deserves to exist. But even the presence of the Butterscotch Stallion can't sweeten this bland compendium of rom-com clichés.

Glossy, handsomely mounted, with ample footage of mist-swathed Cornish cliffs, this adaptation is all still waters and no depth.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Manderlay is how poorly von Trier treats his actors, who are so bludgeoned by the concept and the format they can scarcely breathe.

Brooks has given us the rare contemporary rom-com that's by turns (if intermittently) thoughtful and funny, and that doesn't feel focus-grouped, cynical, misogynist, or mean. It seems ungenerous not to cut such a generous movie a break.

King Arthur is profoundly stupid and inept, but it's an endless source of giggles once you realize that its historical revisionism has nothing to do with archeological discoveries and everything to do with the fact that no one at Disney would green-light an old-fashioned talky love triangle with a hero who dies and an adulterous heroine who ends up in a nunnery.

It's a charcoal draft of a movie -- magically allusive on some levels and utterly opaque on others, a strange combination of the overexplicit and the unwritten.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy.

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.

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.

Profoundly unnecessary -- cluttered, padded even at 90 minutes, indifferently narrated by Anthony Hopkins, and consistently misdirected by Ron Howard.

I like my God, though, like I like my comedies: ruder, cruder, and able to show me things I haven't seen before. Bruce Almighty is sadly miracle-free.

You can see the potential, and you can also see the places where Allen didn't (couldn't?) rise to the occasion.

Less a classical narrative than an ingenious machine for inducing terror, rage, and paralyzing unease.

By any reasonable measure this is a terrible movie, too long and too self-serious and way too dramatically inert, a regrettable waste of its lead actors’ boundless commitment to even their most thinly written roles.

Rambo combines an unapologetic return to the grand action-movie tradition of blowing shit up (one explosion is so big, it leaves behind its own miniature mushroom cloud) with a "Saw"-era interest in close-ups of human viscera.

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.

The character of Roy Miller is so quintessentially Cruise-ian that he skirts the edges of self-conscious parody.

The acting in this movie is unusually bad--atrocious, even.

Coarse and chaotic remake.

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.

A piece of exploitive schlock.

A riot of sleazy camera moves, bad acting, and maladroit profane dialogue.

Movie audiences today may want a little more, and the fundamental problem with the movie is that there is nothing in the story, as Rice and Lloyd Webber have designed it, to engage our feelings.

For a movie about the tumultuous friendships among artists, musicians, and filmmakers during one of the 20th century's periods of creative ferment, Factory Girl is remarkably incurious about cinema, music, and art.

Most disheartening of all is that, after shooting four films in a row abroad, Allen seems to have lost his feel for New York locations.

Fraser and Ford are both actors of limited range who can be extremely appealing in the right role, and here, they're both ideally cast.

Crowe gets to use his real Aussie voice, which works better with that poker face, and his underplaying at times has a psychotic intensity. But Ryan looks dopey when she's supposed to be stressed-out.

With his goofy interview technique and easy laugh, Spurlock has a way of putting his subjects at ease even as he tests the audience's patience.

It's miscast, underwritten, muddily shot, and slackly paced, but there's something captivating about its unabashed shittiness.

I realize I am allowing this film to slide under a very low bar. As the better Marvel films have shown, you need a lot more than zippy repartee to make a superhero film feel heartfelt and thematically resonant. And this one, despite its Whedon-y patches, is mostly a senses-assaulting mess, an offense to good taste as well as basic narrative cohesion.

One seriously sick little blockbuster.

One of the many disappointments of Firewall is how it squanders its own cast. Good character actors, including Robert Forster and Alan Arkin, are wasted--literally, in some cases, as the body count piles up.

I'm genuinely of two minds about the picture. I want to say it's subtle, but I also want to say it's heavy-handed. I want to say it's incisive, but I have too many problems with its psychological elisions to let it off the hook.

Given all its World War II references and parodies, the best audience for Valiant would be addled, octogenarian ex-RAF pilots in the old folks' home.

As a political statement, American Dreamz is overly didactic and liberal in a read-too-many-blogs sort of way.

For a series so steeped in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, Pirates of the Caribbean displays remarkably little sense of wonder.

Click manages to sneak some surprisingly moving moments in between the gross-out gags and the schmaltzy resolutions.

If you go in fully prepared for the cinematic equivalent of a grocery-store novel, this unnecessary sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) has its pleasures.

Preposterous plot devices, leaden acting, and clunktastic dialogue are acceptable in a dance movie, but bad choreography is not, and it's during the dance scenes that Step Up 3D fails.

Hall Pass is about two guys trying to recapture their youthful mojo, but it also appears to be made BY men who fit that description.

It's no wonder that Crowe can't generate any real feeling. The narrative is alien to him on every level. The ear-grating dialogue is a good indication that he didn't know what he was doing; he's usually pitch-perfect.

For all sort of reasons, I was disappointed that there is barely anything of Bruce McGill as the family's hearty swindler. And there is too much of Sarandon, whose big scene--a speech at her late husband's memorial service, complete with jokes and a tap dance--is the movie's most egregious misfire.

Eastwood and Blyskal can’t seem to decide whether they want Stone et al. to be ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation or whether they were destined for greatness, so they waffle between foreshadowing and simply biding their time.

Surprisingly, though, while you’re waiting for Snatched to appall you, it turns out to be a pretty darn enjoyable movie, one that’s winning, sweet at times, and consistently very funny.

A viewing of The Hottest State is likely to conclude with a crosstown sprint of a different kind: As soon as the credits start rolling, you can't wait to get out.

One of the deadliest things I've ever sat through and which doesn't display someone's strange mind--only someone's predilection for sniggery camp.

Full Frontal could not be more opaque. I honestly don't have a clue what it's about; it went completely over my head.

To the film’s credit, nothing in Paint comes off as mean-spirited or patronizing, including the treatment of the town’s many less-than-sophisticated consumers of televised artmaking. But by the last half, the ambient niceness felt so pervasive and the film’s ultimate purpose so vague that, even when the performances and much of the dialogue remained sharp and funny, the movie around them seemed to dissolve into one of those happy little clouds.

Smokin' Aces is awash in ammo and carnage, but it chugs to the finish line with a tank full of sludge.

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.

It's totally implausible, and yet it gets at something unnervingly real: the way that people can blow a budding relationship by being too honest with each other.

The best thing in Burt Wonderstone, besides that final gag, is the second-sickest: Jim Carrey's performance as a David Blaine-esque street magician named Steve Gray.

A visually over-crammed, emotionally empty mega-spectacle on the model of Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland."

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.