The chief casualties are the good actors, who are forced to turn themselves into cartoons.

It's evidently important to Allen to work, work, work, but he's starting to make his movies by rote instead of passion. Could he handle -- psychologically -- a year or two off? Could he afford -- creatively -- to keep grinding them out?

iIt's far less sickly than plenty of yuletide offerings, last year's "The Family Stone" being one shudder-worthy example.

Black Snake Moan morphs into a wacky intergenerational bonding movie, something closer to "Harold and Maude" or "The Karate Kid" with a dusting of Southern grit.

Ultimately The Switch can't escape the constraints of its own formula.

Con Air is boring to the marrow.

The film, scripted by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, and Ryan and Kaz Firpo, weaves plenty of jokes in with long stretches of intergalactic hocus pocus and equally long action set pieces. But the parts only sporadically cohere into anything like a whole.

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.

Succeeds in dramatizing the resentment and guilt on all sides without just adding to the noise.

A wee, breezy thing with painterly cinematography (by Jean Yves Escoffier) and with actors who are mostly fun to watch. It sails by in 103 minutes and the clunky stuff isn't painful, which makes a change from LaBute's usual grueling studies in human callousness and depravity.

Where Charlie’s Angels really falters, though, is in the jokes, as Banks is the only actress on screen with any real comic chops. One can’t help wondering what might’ve been if she’d concerned herself more with being her weird self and less with trying to make every woman in the audience feel validated.

Salles brings an explorer's eye and breathless curiosity to this fetid milieu, and he gets the most brilliant performances imaginable for this sort of movie.

It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged.

To the disappointment of this once-enthusiastic ogler, Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails to capture the eponymous magic of the first two very different but both delightful movies.

By turns cruel, self-pitying, and mordantly witty, Bening makes living with a delusional psychotic seem like the adventure of a lifetime.

The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles.

Congratulations to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald for being the first flat-out terrible product of the Harry Potter expanded universe. The first two movies were not good movies, but no matter how sludgy and overlong Chris Columbus made them, they were salvaged by the truly magical origin stories they told.

By the time the great vampire showdown finally got started, I was good and done with Breaking Dawn, Part 2. But the big action scene is so campily over the top - with one twist so unforeseeable - that it sent me out on a burst of grudging goodwill.

Lines that should be funny are sacrificed to the breathless exigencies of the plot. The movie starts to feel like a slow suffocation.

An unambiguous celebration of the state of preadolescent fixation. The movie is perhaps best understood as a 12-year-old boy: You want to give it a hug and then yell at it to pick up after itself.

It's deeply committed to its own weird conceit, diminishing returns and all.

300 will be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

Craven guides us expertly down a series of blind, bloody alleys, a journey that's more pleasurable than frustrating. On account of his steady hand, the last act is as good as could be expected: skillfully conceived and entertaining in its preposterousness.

Yes, this is the kind of movie you could imagine seeing with your grandmother at a suburban mall, but does everything have to be edgy and dark and genre-reinventing?

There are no real people in The Producers --only actors laboring to dispel whatever magic they once were thought to possess. The director, Susan Stroman, has brought the Broadway smash to the screen (where it began, almost 40 years ago) with cataclysmic results.

Sputters to an ignominious halt in the first 20 minutes.

The film that Nicholas Hytner has directed (from a screenplay by the playwright Wendy Wasserstein) is slick, sweet, and disastrously unmoving -- even people who live to cry at the movies will find themselves depressingly dry-eyed.

This is an extraordinary -- and unfathomable -- piece of whitewashing: a true snow job.