Ultimately, though, even the company of these brilliant actors can't compensate for the limp, shapeless plot. With nowhere to go dramatically, the last third dissolves into a haze of flashbacks and fantasy sequences.

Like Cooper's lady-killing character, Face, The A-Team is utterly convinced of its own lovability even as it strains our credibility, abuses our patience, and punishes our eardrums.

This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith.

There's something endearingly bookish about a movie whose single most frightening shot involves the possibility of an ax being taken to a typewriter.

Sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy.

The only moments of conviction come from an Asian-American dominatrix called Pearl (Lucy Liu), who brings far more glee to the task of beating people up than the picture's star or director. If the audience could have half as much fun as Pearl is having, Payback would be a kick.

Remember that scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when a swastika-stamped Nazi crate explodes for no good reason (beyond the fact that the Ark hates Nazis)? Red Tails is like that, only less awesome, and considerably longer.

The film, smoothly directed by David Dobkin, has a neat farcical structure but is too in love with its overly tight-lipped protagonist and deadpan pacing.

Watching the movie is a nonexperience--like the Upper East Side apartment where most of the action takes place, it's lavishly appointed but joyless.

The kind of movie that moves you to tears even as you resent the manipulative mechanics of the story.

Lyne has created, from a screenplay by Stephen Schiff, an earnest movie about a man who, by falling in love with his emotionally immature stepdaughter, ends up destroying himself.

Mirror Mirror is an odd little fantasia of a movie - part jaunty adventure, part broad romantic comedy, part auteurist spectacle. Half the fun is figuring out what the hell you're watching.

Apart from Caroline Aaron's turn as Darin's overbearing sister...Beyond the Sea has nothing to recommend it.

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

Something about Wilson is just so comfortable, so loose, that he can make the most pointless movie seem, by moments, as if it deserves to exist. But even the presence of the Butterscotch Stallion can't sweeten this bland compendium of rom-com clichés.

Glossy, handsomely mounted, with ample footage of mist-swathed Cornish cliffs, this adaptation is all still waters and no depth.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Manderlay is how poorly von Trier treats his actors, who are so bludgeoned by the concept and the format they can scarcely breathe.

Brooks has given us the rare contemporary rom-com that's by turns (if intermittently) thoughtful and funny, and that doesn't feel focus-grouped, cynical, misogynist, or mean. It seems ungenerous not to cut such a generous movie a break.

King Arthur is profoundly stupid and inept, but it's an endless source of giggles once you realize that its historical revisionism has nothing to do with archeological discoveries and everything to do with the fact that no one at Disney would green-light an old-fashioned talky love triangle with a hero who dies and an adulterous heroine who ends up in a nunnery.

It's a charcoal draft of a movie -- magically allusive on some levels and utterly opaque on others, a strange combination of the overexplicit and the unwritten.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy.

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.

Gorō is a talented director. The individual shots of Earwig are beautifully composed, the characters are delightful (the tiny demons who wait upon Mandrake seem destined to become merchandise hits), and the film’s flimsy plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the visuals sink the entire enterprise.

Profoundly unnecessary -- cluttered, padded even at 90 minutes, indifferently narrated by Anthony Hopkins, and consistently misdirected by Ron Howard.

I like my God, though, like I like my comedies: ruder, cruder, and able to show me things I haven't seen before. Bruce Almighty is sadly miracle-free.

You can see the potential, and you can also see the places where Allen didn't (couldn't?) rise to the occasion.

Less a classical narrative than an ingenious machine for inducing terror, rage, and paralyzing unease.

By any reasonable measure this is a terrible movie, too long and too self-serious and way too dramatically inert, a regrettable waste of its lead actors’ boundless commitment to even their most thinly written roles.