What's left is a wan and impersonal whodunnit -- a movie that never gets into your blood.

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

Cameron has never been known for his dialogue, but Titanic carries some stinkers that wouldn't make the final draft of a "Days of Our Lives" script.

The effects are breathtaking, and much of the action is choreographed with energy and wit. (A chase sequence on a cliff uses visual gags that defy the laws of physics, Wile E. Coyote-style.) But all of these moments bob on the film's slick surface like so much flotsam. Without a beating heart at its center, this Chest feels empty indeed.

The movie seems to love its main character without bothering to understand her.

Where "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" frolicked on the beach, this amiable but underachieving comedy just sort of blobs on the couch.

There are no comic highs, as in a Mike Myers parody, but no action highs, either.

I spent much of Vice trying to work out why the same narrative strategies that worked so well in the raucously entertaining "The Big Short" suddenly felt smug and even propagandistic.

The Other Guys actually suffers by comparison to its own madcap opening sequence.

The villain comes back more times than Wile E. Coyote. I found it tiresome and witless and numbingly repetitive, but action mavens won't feel cheated.

Midnight Special eventually sputters to a conclusion that confuses vagueness for ambiguity. The most compelling questions it leaves behind don’t have to do with its plot but with its creator: How much time should a young director have to make good on his potential?

Skyscraper is like the last stage of a national trauma, the weakened form it takes before it passes out of the body politic for good.

Quips alone do not a popcorn-movie star make. In this age of post-steroidal leading men, you don't need to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to carry a movie, but you do need to have some presence.

A passably diverting entry in the Tarantino genre of splatter and yuks and soulfully bumbling hit men.

It’s Pitt’s wry presence, and his playful relationship to his own movie-star persona, that provides a still center amidst the CGI-smeared chaos and keeps this train from (metaphorically at least) going off the rails.

There’s something unseemly about singling out this story, about the seemingly narrow scope of racism and how easily it can be undone. Green Book decries those cultural pockets designed to make white people feel good, often at people of color’s expense. But that’s about all it does, too.

If The Lovely Bones, at least for this critic, fails, it's certainly not for lack of metaphysical gumption...It's when the movie returns to earthly life, the prosaic world of suburban cul-de-sacs and family relationships, that it falters.

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.

Neither Alex Murphy’s internal moral conflict nor the larger, vaguely satiric portrait of a global culture dependent on high-tech law enforcement seem to be the main point of this Robocop remake, which raises the question of what is meant to be the point.

This is one of Penn's punishing, single-dimension performances, and it seems to be even more whiningly masochistic than what's called for in the script.

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.

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.

Baby Mama is the most disappointing movie of the year so far--which, granted, isn't saying a lot in mid-April.

A second-rate but bearable black comedy.

With The Fate of the Furious, it feels like the movies have gotten as big as they can get, and the gleeful absurdity that drove them is losing ground to the specter of obligation.

The title is so genius! My standards were so low! All this movie needed to make me laugh were four guys in a Jacuzzi, a fuchsia/turquoise color palette, a steady stream of dumb jokes, and a little bit of heart. Unfortunately, the missing ingredient is the last.

Not even the actress' soulfulness can save the generic climax, in which she tussles with the badder bad guy on a collapsing terrace above a crashing surf. As a colleague muttered, "Murder by numbers is right."

Howard might be a major actor. His DJay, though, is a major character in search of a major author.