The movie itself is not unsatisfying, though it’s less fun than previous Jackass films, and has a worse title.

The movie's energy peters out in a series of book-club conversations about divine will, the power of storytelling, and the resilience of the human spirit. The ending's pious dullness is enough to make you wish you were back on that lifeboat, where the most pressing questions weren't spiritual but gastronomic: What's on the menu for lunch, and what can I do to make sure it isn't me?

Heartfelt but muddled film.

A vast, lumbering white elephant of a movie--but I sort of love it.

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

I wouldn't recommend Hitchcock to cinephiles seeking a bold new take on the master's life or work, but if all you want is to while away the afternoon in the company of some excellent actors in plummy period costume, Gervasi's film is not without its pleasures.

Great(ish) ideas and terrible ones sit cheek by jowl, original notions and blatant thievery corralled together with no discernible logic. It’s a horror movie one moment, a comedy the next, as if Netflix were streaming several different titles at once.

Hyde Park on Hudson has little more on its mind than hot dogs and hand jobs - which, come to think of it, would have made for a much catchier alliterative title.

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.

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

I can understand wanting to skip Ender’s Game as a matter of moral principle, but you can also feel free to blow it off just because it’s not that good.

Unlike your average comic-book blockbuster, The Hulk isn't a bad cartoon. It's a bad modern Greek tragedy. It's a swing at the moon that looks (and smells) like green cheese.

Half inspired and half eye-rollingly terrible.

I really hope Evan Almighty doesn't become a surprise hit with a niche audience (Christian, environmentalist 8-year-olds?). Too much worldly success might tempt Steve Carell away from the righteous path of making movies as dark, weird, and funny as he is himself.

Prometheus is more interested in piling on big questions than in answering them. It's deep without being particularly smart, although the dazzling design and special effects keep you from noticing that basic flaw until at least an hour in.

You could get high on this movie's technique, dizzy on its storytelling. Yet it's one of the most lucid bad trips ever made.

In any case, the best performance is by Bridgette Wilson-Sampras as the conniving but peppy slut at the perfume counter. Her big scene--farcical, filthy, surprising--is also the best in the movie. Otherwise, Shopgirl is sadly vacuous, with a sadly vacuous center.

The Nutcracker’s onslaught of wholesomeness also lays waste to anything that might stand in its way, leaving it crushed under the boot heels of its tin soldiers.

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

The dad minds behind Bad Moms don’t seem to understand, or be terribly curious about, the minds of mothers.

Say this for actors: Too self-centered to be embarrassed, they can be existential heroes of a (moronic) sort.

Using R.E.M.'s impassioned "Everybody Hurts"--written by Michael Stipe after the suicide of Kurt Cobain--to underscore shots of Kidman and Ferrell feeling blue about their inability to pair off is an aesthetic crime. The Ephrons should be fined and forced to do a few hundred hours of community service.

The Help is a high-functioning tearjerker, but the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient, a Barbie Band-Aid on the still-raw wound of race relations in America.

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

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.

Cassandra's Dream is not unredeemably bad. MacGregor and Farrell hack away at their implausible dialogue with admirable intensity (though when Terry starts to descend into mental illness, Farrell touches his limits as an actor).

Isn't bad as these things go, although these things go nowhere a healthy individual should want to. Having never claimed to be a healthy individual, I found it tolerable.

In his defense, the kid is saddled with a task that even a more experienced actor might have trouble pulling off: He must carry an entire action movie on his slender shoulders, given little more to act opposite than a succession of green-screen predators. Even with his charismatic dad in his earpiece calling the shots, Jaden can’t turn himself into a movie star by sheer force of Will.