But in shaping their tale for the screen, shouldn't he have honored their courage--and, yes, inventiveness--with something other than cliches?

I can't deny I did feel fonder of my own family afterward, mostly because I know none of them would ever make me sit through Parental Guidance.

By the time I got to the end of Captain Marvel...I heard the voice of my own inner superhero, Peggy Lee, whispering in my ear: Is that all there is? The most heinous supervillain of all is Boredom.

And yet, all three women are less watchable and amusing that Nicki Minaj as Carly’s legal assistant Lydia.

The result is tiresome and tone-deaf and a disappointing comeback for Bogdanovich.

Swing Vote falls from agreeable fable into wan satire.

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a bleak book, but it’s not an ugly one: beneath its cloud cover of misanthropy, there’s feral, wildflower grace. Fennell has tossed all of that out, substituting her own unimaginative vision, plus a bunch of crappy dresses.

This is a movie that seems to be striving to please a crowd, but its cornpone humility only becomes wearying.

Yet in the end the self-conscious importance of the film produces a rather queasy feeling, for really this story is no more than a crude exploitation — decked out with our latest scientific finery — of what amounts to a penny dreadful fantasy. If you stop and think about it, even if there were a nest of Nazis hiding out in South America, most of them would be pushing 80 by now, and quite incapable of the exertions required by this farflung, not to mention farfetched plot.

The Gray Man inadvertently pulls off a mission you’d think would be impossible: rendering its stars nearly invisible, or at least just people you can’t wait to get away from.

Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy.

A movie gaudy enough to make Dancing with the Stars seem dignified.

Finding Neverland takes a big, brave leap and lands splat on the sidewalk.

By the time all the bets are in, Cincinnati Kid appears to hold a losing hand.

Not till the very end of the film, when King Richard pops up, portrayed, in a surprise appearance, by an actor who has launched many a grand movie adventure, will audiences get a glimpse of epic star quality. Then, like the Merry Men, they will unleash a hearty ho-ho. The rest of this Robin Hood merits only a ho-hum.

Thor: Love and Thunder is packed with gags and jokes, advertising itself so loudly as “Fun!” that it ceases to actually be fun. This is the way with Waititi, a gifted director who, now that he’s no longer required to wield a light touch, seems to have forgotten how to do so.

Arcand has a gift for witty dialogue but a weakness for force-feeding his story with sentiment. References to ancient holocausts and to 9/11 simply expose the intent of a director who will do anything to touch his audience -- with a sweet gesture or a cattle prod. And in a comedy of manners, that behavior is very impolite.

With the exception of Zohra Lampert's subtle and knowledgeable performance, no one in the cast has enough substance even to be considered humanoid. And after the first reel, the vampires seem to have lost their bite.

When he had started playing this game of Save the Planet—when he was roguish Sean Connery and the world was so much younger—Bond had been a kind of role model for people of a certain class and ambition. Savoir-faire meant the aristocracy of style: which wine to decant, which brand of cigarette to smoke, which automatic weapon to carry under the armpit. Now that he was Roger Moore, 20 years later, Bond had degenerated into a male model, and something of a genial anachronism.

It tries to be sexy but isn’t; it strives for screwball energy but only ends up being insufferably madcap; it works hard to serve up lashings of black humor, in the tradition of older Coen Brothers movies like Raising Arizona, but you can hear the wheels whirring behind every joke.

What is left, besides a lot of pretty dolphin footage, is some bad intercollegiate-revue satire, a shadow of Sea Hunt, and a calculated sentimentality that evokes memories of Lassie Come Home.

When an unknown director turns out a suspense melodrama as dreary and unconvincing as this, moviegoers revel in the thought of what it might have been if Hitchcock had done it. It is disconcerting to come away from Mamie feeling precisely the same way.

Studying the topography of decay in a veteran actor’s face is one of the few worthy pursuits for moviegoers sitting through the epic-length, belligerently inconsequential The Expendables 3 — a picture whose very title proclaims its redundancy.

Frantic and rote by turns, mislaying the power of the central love story and piling on the mutant adversaries. For at least this installment, Spider-Man is Amazing no more.

Bewitched means to be a civilized entertainment, which occasionally it is. But the gentility of this antique sitcom cannot be recaptured at this late date.

The film causes no tremors, only a hemi-Demme-semiquaver.

Filled with competent but unexciting performances and, like its protagonist, is strangely lugubrious.

When Eastwood, who also directed the picture (from a Michael Butler-Dennis Shryack script), faces off against Russell's Maleficent Seven, viewers may get an old-fashioned western tingle. But Pale Rider does nothing to disprove the wisdom that this genre is best left to the revival houses. A double feature of Shane and Eastwood's High Plains Drifter will do just fine, thanks.