The character of Roy Miller is so quintessentially Cruise-ian that he skirts the edges of self-conscious parody.

The acting in this movie is unusually bad--atrocious, even.

Coarse and chaotic remake.

A day and half after walking out with a sensation, primarily, of physical relief—at two hours and nine minutes, Pain & Gain makes for a long, loud, relentlessly assaultive sit—I find that my thumb is wavering at half-mast. I’m still not sure whether to mildly like or mildly hate this movie.

A piece of exploitive schlock.

A riot of sleazy camera moves, bad acting, and maladroit profane dialogue.

Movie audiences today may want a little more, and the fundamental problem with the movie is that there is nothing in the story, as Rice and Lloyd Webber have designed it, to engage our feelings.

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.

Most disheartening of all is that, after shooting four films in a row abroad, Allen seems to have lost his feel for New York locations.

Fraser and Ford are both actors of limited range who can be extremely appealing in the right role, and here, they're both ideally cast.

Crowe gets to use his real Aussie voice, which works better with that poker face, and his underplaying at times has a psychotic intensity. But Ryan looks dopey when she's supposed to be stressed-out.

With his goofy interview technique and easy laugh, Spurlock has a way of putting his subjects at ease even as he tests the audience's patience.

It's miscast, underwritten, muddily shot, and slackly paced, but there's something captivating about its unabashed shittiness.

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.

One seriously sick little blockbuster.

One of the many disappointments of Firewall is how it squanders its own cast. Good character actors, including Robert Forster and Alan Arkin, are wasted--literally, in some cases, as the body count piles up.

I'm genuinely of two minds about the picture. I want to say it's subtle, but I also want to say it's heavy-handed. I want to say it's incisive, but I have too many problems with its psychological elisions to let it off the hook.

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.

As a political statement, American Dreamz is overly didactic and liberal in a read-too-many-blogs sort of way.

For a series so steeped in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, Pirates of the Caribbean displays remarkably little sense of wonder.

Click manages to sneak some surprisingly moving moments in between the gross-out gags and the schmaltzy resolutions.

If you go in fully prepared for the cinematic equivalent of a grocery-store novel, this unnecessary sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) has its pleasures.

Preposterous plot devices, leaden acting, and clunktastic dialogue are acceptable in a dance movie, but bad choreography is not, and it's during the dance scenes that Step Up 3D fails.

Hall Pass is about two guys trying to recapture their youthful mojo, but it also appears to be made BY men who fit that description.

It's no wonder that Crowe can't generate any real feeling. The narrative is alien to him on every level. The ear-grating dialogue is a good indication that he didn't know what he was doing; he's usually pitch-perfect.

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.

Eastwood and Blyskal can’t seem to decide whether they want Stone et al. to be ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation or whether they were destined for greatness, so they waffle between foreshadowing and simply biding their time.

Surprisingly, though, while you’re waiting for Snatched to appall you, it turns out to be a pretty darn enjoyable movie, one that’s winning, sweet at times, and consistently very funny.