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).

Chloe remains engaging for longer than any movie this schlocky and overwritten has a right to be. But the movie loses what little goodwill it's managed to build up by the last act, which feels clumsily grafted from a completely different film.

The premise cries out for take-no-prisoners, Terry-Southern-style sick humor; it gets instead a lot of clunky, self-congratulatory in-jokes, and Pacino is left to ham in a vacuum.

Politically noncommittal and dull. But that's exactly the problem with this 90-minute piece of cinematic trompe l'oeil.

Howard and his writers are so in love with their own hip self-consciousness that it's a wonder they don't feature film critics discussing their movie.

2012 isn't a bad movie that, out of sheer boredom, you might snicker at once or twice; it's a two-and-a-half hour laugh riot that plays on our expectations of the genre by anticipating and exceeding them.

It’s a relief to see an autistic woman played as more than simply a bundle of symptoms.

A high-concept comedy about the domestication of a work-obsessed woman that nonetheless managed to win me over.

Tron: Legacy is the kind of sensory-onslaught blockbuster that tends to put me to sleep, the way babies will nap to block out overwhelming stimuli. I confess I may have snoozed through one or two climactic battles only to be startled awake by an incoming neon Frisbee.

A fun ride. It's loud and obvious, but it's also the first high-tech, sci-fi thriller to think through some of the implications of cloning and capitalism.

The screenwriters seem to have meticulously researched the inner workings of the White House by watching DVDs of "The West Wing," but, despite their hard work, casting sinks the film. With Longoria and Sutherland onboard it feels like an uneasy marriage of "24" and "Desperate Housewives."

It’s the (Russo) brothers’ touch with comedy (they collaborated on the wisecrack-rich script with their former Marvel co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) that sets this hyper-violent, stylishly shot thriller apart from your average espionage-themed bone-cruncher.

Owen, Giamatti, and Bellucci--all fine actors at the peak of hireability--must have been coming off a collective coke bender when they agreed to be in this murky, straight-to-video-looking piece of crud.

The movie's curious capacity for self-erasure makes it a tough one to write about; less than 24 hours later, I recall it with all the clarity of something I half-watched on a plane with a hangover in 1996.

I don't know if Howard had fun directing, writing, and starring in this thing; but he had to have gotten more masochistic pleasure out of it than the audience does.

A good summer movie isn't just an uninterrupted crescendo of cacophony. You need stuff IN BETWEEN the fireballs and the cyborgs.

There isn't a mummy at the center of The Mummy, exactly, but a mutating Industrial Light and Magic Special Effect.

If Bohemian Rhapsody’s superficial gloss on the band’s rise sometimes feels like a useful feature, the hackneyed way it treats Mercury’s life and fall is close to fatal. And after you leave the theater, you may find that first part isn’t such an asset after all.

The climax, a multipart showdown in the corridors of a hospital, is unforgivably manipulative. What self-respecting director still cuts away to shots of a heartbeat monitor flat-lining? Hancock isn't the only underachiever on the premises--the talented Berg settles for far less than he should.

The last 20 minutes are horrifically violent, relentlessly claustrophobic, and irredeemably pointless. Von Trier has us on the hot seat, and he's going to walk us through his most primitive sexual nightmares--not because they'll bring us to a greater understanding of madness or love or grief, but just because he bloody well feels like it.

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.

The most shocking thing about I Think I Love My Wife isn't the language, the sex, or the racial humor. It's the fact that it's not a funny movie. At all.

If it isn't the worst sequel ever made, it's only because it has too much competition: Impersonal and frenetic, it's a landmark Hollywood disgrace.

Even when engineering a howler like this, De Palma does it in such high style, with such a confident swagger, that the movie is half over before you realize how little is there.

A disgusting piece of work; I still can't believe how much I loved it.

This kind of movie is superfluous yet strangely compelling. We don't need to see Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman sing a duet next to a Roman fountain any more than we need to see an elephant pirouette in a tutu, but wouldn't you be crazy to pass up the opportunity to see either?

Thoroughly second-rate -- which is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic dinner-theater troupe.

30 Minutes or Less is a second movie that feels more like a first: slipshod, derivative, and unsure what tone to take toward its own sometimes distasteful subject matter.