Mojave’s real reason for existing is the wiry, woolly dialogue that Monahan has spun out for his actors.

Carr’s account is strongest in shining light on the early years of the conservatorship while elegantly steering away from the exploitative images of Britney—shaving her head, or getting strapped to a gurney—that sold magazines in the late ’00s.

It has a gentle if unenlightening message, namely that we should all take time off to reconnect - the soundtrack tends to the Bonnie Raitt but the movie seems to subliminally hum "slow down, you move too fast" - and Keaton and Kline have decent chemistry.

The movie is best seen as straightforward, sometimes harrowing melodrama, packed with mistaken identities, beautiful villains, a kindly tourist who can outrace the bad guys, and a lost little girl whom the film brazenly sends onto a highway full of speeding cars. It's as if Dakota Fanning had wandered onto the streets of Ronin.

There's a point at which movies become only merchandise, and the Paranormal franchise may be heading for that nexus, that nadir.

By our count, three of the core SEALs are maimed or dead by the end. A new baby is left without her loving father. The picture ends not with a parade but with a funeral. And that may be the toughest, most lasting image in this cockamamie, Pentagon-approved war adventure.

A scant hour and a half long, padded with clips from earlier Rocky pictures, adding nothing to his mythic, let alone human dimensions, it lacks even the primitive suspense and crude capacity to release underdog emotions that permitted its predecessors to conquer one's better judgment.

Crude gags mingle with squishy, underdeveloped messages about family and belonging and empowerment. And while self-abasement is part of the comedian’s toolbox, there’s something depressing about watching as a chortling Michelle airs her unmentionable area while spraying herself with self-tanner. McCarthy deserves better than this. She can aim higher.

Harley Quinn’s entrance is the best moment in Suicide Squad. After that, you can leave. Robbie is a criminally appealing actress, likable in just about every way, but that intro aside, Suicide Squad doesn’t serve her well. It serves no one well, least of all its audience.

The Goldfinch, director John Crowley’s prestige adaptation of Donna Tartt’s beautifully detailed novel, isn’t a great movie; it’s hardly even an OK one. Yet there’s something wistfully unfortunate about it. From its casting to its structure to its layering of visual textures, you can almost see how every good intention and carefully considered judgment call has somehow gone wrong.

If the movie had been content to replicate the Taken formula, and left the fatherhood angle as a subtext, it would be easier to take. Instead, even for Costner admirers, it’s a hard 2 hours to kill.

Inept works like Good, which remains, like most such works, on the anecdotal fringe of the problem.

If I had a daughter of impressionable age, I'd rather have her weeping over this mildly tasteless romance than the nonsense of "Twilight."

You can’t ask for more from a winter diversion—even if you wouldn’t wish for less.

It's because of AnnaSophia Robb's performance...I don't think you'll see a more fascinating and nuanced performance at the movies this year.

Makes for a long, lumpy trip with a charismatic guide and some brilliant detours.

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.

As rigged as a casino slot machine, preying on people's hopes but paying off only for the house.

The spies in The 355 approach their work, and the work of being a woman, with grim determination. Rarely has a spy thriller so much resembled a pile of ironing.

It's fun in a perverse way; the viewer gets to experience a vivid sense of what it feels like to occupy a pigeon-poop smeared piece of stone high in the sky.

It has some of ["American] Graffiti's" sweetness of spirit, but none of its style or depth of feeling; it has some of "Animal [House"]'s raunchiness, but none of its loony anarchy.

Suffice it to say that these morons have, quite simply, turned The Day the Earth Stood Still on its head and what's falling out of its pockets in that upended state is a stream of junk.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an O.K., not great, Marvel movie...Wolverine doesn't rise above the level of familiar competence.

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.

Apart from some spiffy visual effects, which create coherent, scary textures and architecture for outer space, Green Lantern is the most generic of summer time wasters.

The Change-Up tries so hard to be scandalous that it's a shame it doesn't do more to change up the formula.

As to the chief complaint about Clash of the Titans -- that the movie stinks -- what can I say? I liked it. This is a full-throttle action-adventure, played unapologetically straight.

The mix is not nearly classic but is congenial enough to warm up a January weekend and perhaps to stoke a sequel. Call it "The Green Hornet Strikes Again?" No: "Kato II!"