The first hour of The Tomorrow War is really quite dumb fun. The second half pumps the brakes on the wacky sci-fi and just goes in for gross-out action.

On the positive side, Coscarelli makes ingenious use of the clips from the original film, and comes up with the occasional creepy moment. But more often, PHANTASM: OBLIVION is extremely slow-paced and works only on a scene-by-scene basis rather than as a coherent whole.

All the performers either overact laughably or underact to the point of just standing in place and speaking lines in a monotone. Whether the film ever stopped anyone from smoking marijuana is doubtful, but it certainly turned out to be a greater success than its producers ever dreamed.

Somehow the filmmakers managed to take the subject of the mistreatment of migrant workers and turn it into a vehicle for displaying Bronson's violent heroics.

CHAPLIN is the cinematic equivalent of a whistle-stop tour of Europe--the kind that takes you to ten cities in five days at such speed that everything melts into a vaguely entertaining blur.

Our favorite parts, though, were the moments of unintentional humor, mostly courtesy of Ms. Archer. Her insufferably goody-goody performance makes you wish Glenn Close would show up brandishing a kitchen knife.

William Rose, with a stilted screenplay, and Stanley Kramer, make this dinner hour stand still--a really safe, lame melodrama.

While the slapstick comedy antics are frequently amusing and, on rare occasions, even hilarious, HOT SHOTS!, like so many other cinematic parodies before it, tends to lose sight--or control--of the plot, such as it is, in favor of more jokes, more visual gags and more dialogue puns--all hurled at the audience at a rapid-fire pace.

Intermittently amusing, forgettable action spoof showcasing Whoopi Goldberg and helmed by Penny Marshall.

Clearly designed as a cult film, this messy trifle is not without its charms. These include the affably weird Goldblum, Lithgow's deliriously overstated mad scientist, and a band of alien invaders who are not emissaries of a vastly superior race, but beer-swilling mediocrities in Hawaiian shirts.

At the end of the day, people who want to see this movie aren't looking for something original. There's a certain familiarity that makes the romantic comedy a perennial favorite among audiences.

Your ability to enjoy G-Force will correlate directly with how funny you find the idea of guinea pigs as action heroes.

For a teen film to resonate, it has to feel honest, and I Love You, Beth Cooper simply comes off as too paint-by-numbers to achieve any level of emotional authenticity.

Should be shown in theaters that offer seats with tissue dispensers built right into the arm rests.

Bullock playing against type is the only original thing going on in the whole film.

A benign, mushy gruel that tries desperately to maintain the sticky sweet consistency of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" but ultimately ends up coasting on the "kefi" of that previous success.

If director Brad Silberling had taken this cast to their natural extremes, he might have delivered a raucously funny sci-fi comedy -- think "Anchorman" meets "Jurassic Park." Instead, Land of the Lost is an utter misfire -- not bad enough to hate, not good enough to remember.

Without Azaria's comedic gifts, the movie would be close to unendurable.

With the exception of one breathtaking sequence in a helicopter, the action in Terminator Salvation is astonishingly dull.

Whatever Howard's reasons for keeping things so stale, it was a bad choice, but lucky for viewers, some stories are just too crazy for even the dullest storytelling to completely ruin the fun.

Sadly, Management is formulaic indie romantic comedy at its core.

The right combination of goofy character behavior, action set pieces, and narrative drive to keep the movie from ever being boring.

It's the movie equivalent of fast food -- nobody needs this to be good, just adequate. And Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is nothing if not thoroughly adequate.

It's not as if Fighting is terrible. The acting is well done, as is the unique look at the underbelly of the Big Apple.

The result is a glossy, engaging suspense film that jettisons much of its predecessor's sadism and subtext in favor of crowd-pleasing revenge violence.

It's not an openly meta take on the genre like "Scream," but it's a slasher movie for people who love slasher movies, and if your heart will flutter when a woodchipper casually appears in the first act, it's probably worth watching.

There's tons of professionalism in He's Just Not That Into You, but it lacks passion -- they should have called it "Like, Actually."

Despite all the points it gains for furrowed brows and kick-ass gunfights, the film loses quite a few for being dry as burnt toast.

While it may not be "Citizen Canine," Rise of the Lycans tells its tale competently and without the derivative nature of its predecessors.

It's not that Bedtime Stories is bad, it's just entirely and thoroughly adequate.

As a modest little dramedy about the everyday adventures of starting a family, Marley & Me is pretty solid, but as a movie about the joy and heartbreak of owning a dog, it goes straight for the jugular.

The notorious action star keeps his bombastic persona remarkably reeled in, and the resulting film is earnest, somber, and extremely modest -- almost to a fault.

Yes Man isn't without a few simple charms, but it ends up being about as funny, profound, and memorable as the average bumper sticker.

Pretty good as science fiction thrillers go, but sadly, there isn't much more to say about it.

While it is true that nothing all that original happens during the funny parts of the movie either, the family's Puerto Rican heritage gives the movie's comedy a unique spin.

Whether the source material or Hare's tinkering is to blame for the fact that the story keeps the viewer at arm's length, the end result is still the same: A film that's technically superb, yet still falls short of true greatness.

It's well acted and it's entertaining -- and who can resist a movie where Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are brothers, and Robert Duvall is their dad?

This rare direct follow-up hopefully will put to rest the leftover emotional baggage of the character and leave Bond open to a bit more familiar interpretation in the future.

The movie suffers from a serious case of unoriginality.

The resulting film is compellingly watchable and consistently entertaining, even if it does feel somewhat disingenuous, given the pedigree of talent involved.

This is first Lee's first attempt at a war epic, but it feels like it's his very first film: What should have been an eloquent answer to the likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood -- with whom Lee justly took to task over the total absence of any black soldiers in "The Flags Of Our Fathers" -- is instead a patchy war-time drama.

Tediously predictable thriller.

A handsomely produced but unintentionally risible film that mistakes high grotesquerie for high gothic.

The entire movie is one big build-up to a twist that, while not exactly cheating, plays is an awfully cheap trick.

Has a certain weird charm, but it's too seamy for children and too simplistic played for adults.

Essentially an extended trailer for the 2008 Cartoon Network animated series.

Shane West does a pretty impressive impersonation of the on-stage antics of Darby Crash...Unfortunately, little else in this clunky, half-baked biopic rings very true.

Still passable popcorn fare, even if you'll barely taste it before swallowing.

Though inspired by Weiland's own childhood, the film's plot sticks close to the underdog's coming-of-age formula and is marred by young Bernie's gratingly self-pitying voice-over.

Painfully undermined by its central characters.

The direction is slack -- it's Lloyd's first feature film and it shows -- the choreography clumsy and every ten minutes there's yet another gratuitous showstopper shouting in your face and insisting you have a good time.

Features some strikingly intimate footage of Noonan's extended family, but lets Noonan himself drives the show and his colorful tales of villainy that cry out for more context than MacIntyre provides.

There isn't enough by way of a story here to keep director Rosser Goodman and writer-star Brent Gorksi earnest but lethargic drama about a romantically stalled Angelino from petering out as well, but some decent performances from the likeable cast may be enough to hold your interest.

The result is an inconsistent, incoherent anti-superhero action-adventure comedy.

Has everything one could ask of a true-crime expose.

It's a mainstreamed, big-screen version of the bowdlerized, endlessly syndicated version of the show, not the raunchy original.

The trouble with this satirical take US involvement in Iraq, penned by Mark Leyner, John Cusack and Jeremy Pikser, is that the real thing is equally absurd and only marginally less funny.

It's hard to say whether the Wachowski brothers' live action take on the Japanese Speed Racer cartoons is more irritating because it looks like a Hot Wheels video game or because the brothers seem to think that there's a powerful family drama humming away beneath the flashing lights and spinning wheels.

Even Stevenson, a singularly accomplished and versatile actress, can't do much with Julia's early scenes, in which she's forced to dither around like a complete idiot.

Cameron Diaz is the ideal guy's gal and Ashton Kutcher is, well, a guy. Together, they're a zero.

Broomfield's film is didactic, awkwardly acted by the cast of former Marines who are meant to lend the film credibility, and clumsily inflammatory.

It's sad to see such subtle, wrenchingly emotional work expended on such trifling material.

Formulaic to the core, this reworking of the fondly remembered high-school slasher picture works surprisingly well on its own terms.

There are two kinds of police officers in David Ayers and James Ellroy's convoluted, ultraviolent tale of corruption within the LAPD: dirty cops and dirtier ones.

Atonal romantic comedy.

A screwball comedy without a charismatic, smart-talking dame is no screwball comedy at all.

Smith has changed a few plot points around to keep readers who already know the secret of the ruins guessing, and to some extent the strategy works. There was, however, no reason whatsoever to change the book's perfect endings.

The film's bright spot is Irish comedian Dylan Moran, who plays Libby's charmingly dissolute cousin and who also happens to be Dennis' best friend. He's fresh, unpredictable and genuinely funny -- everything the film isn't.

How engaging you find this loosely structured road movie will depend on how charming you find the over-aged slackers played by Josh Alexander, who also wrote the screenplay, and Robert Bogue.

The film's 85 minutes drag by painfully slowly, because there's no respite from Chapman's tedious, self-pitying reveries.

A disappointing hodgepodge of rehashed clichés.

The film is merciless in its depiction of death and suffering, Pitt and Corbet are perfectly cast, and Watts, who also served as executive producer, gives a disturbingly raw performance.

Green and his regular cinematographer Tim Orr have a feel for the sad, generic landscape of small-town America, but rather than adding to an overarching melancholy it only reinforces an already drab, at times bizarrely comic tone.

The prodigiously talented Allen, Bates and Lange give it their all, but there's a limit to what even they can do with platitudes and prefabricated homilies.

The humor is mostly visual -- 70s relics like Pong, Shasta and men's platform shoes compete with the sight of Ferrell squeezed into tube socks and short shorts.

The whole film has a rag-tag, purposefully shambolic feel -- but this communal commitment to a DIY aesthetic is also his undoing, particularly when he allows an irritatingly manic Jack Black to run wild and virtually hijack the movie.

At a certain point, its sheer can you top this excess, and credibility files out the window three's no reason to continue paying attention.

The film LOOKS great, but at a brisk 88 minutes, there's no time to fill in back story, from the epic history of paladin persecution to the deeply personal mystery of David's mother, and the cliffhanger ending is so abrupt that the movie seems bizarrely truncated.

The obvious product of a corporate search for the next great fantasy franchise, this adaptation of the first in a series of popular children's books by the writer-illustrator team of Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi is a lump of leaden whimsy.

The stepping is terrific and the climactic sequence, a knowing nod to the infamous Bollywood "wet sari" number, is a knock out. But the united colors of we-can-overcome cuties, predictable class conflicts and sanitized keeping-it-real bluster bring the story's intensely formulaic nature into the.

Even worse than its hypocrisy, gratuitous homophobia and cheap proselytizing, the movie is dull.

The film's mix of cheap gags, macabre coming-of-age story, social satire and Cronenbergian body horror is apparently meant to gel into black comedy, but it never quite does.

An efficient but shallow fright show.

The actors -- especially Klein and Bernthal -- deliver startlingly powerful performances.

Once the star of some of the finest movies of the '70s and '80s, Keaton has begun making just this kind of chick-flick comedy with increasing regularity at least since 1996's "The First Wives Club," and it's gotten so she's not even trying to get into character anymore.

Light, formulaic and soft around the middle.

The result is yet another tired, ultimately incoherent horror movie that undoes the promise of its pretty good premise and potentially interesting story structure with dull scares, sloppy ending and a pair of unconvincing, leaden lead performances.

Polished, pokey and cloyingly formulaic, Denzel Washington's directing follow-up to "Antwone Fisher" is a Harpo -- as in Oprah spelled backwards -- Production all the way.

It shares all the original's shortcomings —--it’s too long and too loud and filled with historical disinformation -- but none of the snap that made "National Treasure" fun for kids and a guilty pleasure for some adults.

Freakies fans will swoon.

They’re baaaaack.

In real life the opportunity to make amends is rare, though the attempt may produce great art. In The Kite Runner, we get neither.

Coppola's awkward screenplay never finds its tone -- or perhaps it deliberately evokes the pulp conventions of WWII adventures, horror films, weepy melodrama, psychological mysteries and superhero origin stories as a way of evoking the fundamental artificiality of the cinema. Either way, it never comes together into a cohesive whole, and is seriously undermined by Roth's morose performance.

Jamal's comedy of family dysfunction is essentially a sitcom episode writ large; it's not subtle, but it's good-natured and hits its marks with ruthless efficiency.

For all the complicated backstory, weighty themes, action set pieces and fanciful production design, the film is oddly unengaging.

With its flashy, music-video style edits, rock-scored montages and septuagenarian cast, it’s hard to say who, exactly, is the right audience for this unusual comedic drama.

Though ultimately flawed, the film's depiction of velvet-gloved cruelty and matter-of-fact betrayal is surprisingly potent, and it's pure pleasure to watch Bacall prowling the corridors of power, tossing her golden mane and tossing off world-weary observations in a voice pitched somewhere between a purr and a growl.

This violent action is stylish but painfully formulaic, even by the undemanding standards of video-game narratives.