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.