Hopkins isn’t awful in The Virtuoso, but the movie that surrounds him is.

Feels larger in scope yet sorely lacking in originality.

The narrative is so predictable that, when an outburst of trash-talking doesn’t escalate into a barroom brawl, it’s not just surprising, it’s pretty close to shocking.

As impressive as the CG elements are in "Chipwrecked," they're a mixed blessing: The more lifelike the techies make the critters -- Alvin (voiced by Justin Long), Theodore (Jesse McCartney) and Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler) -- the more we're reminded they're rodents.

Certainly, there’s nothing to be said for the acting, direction or story, which is monumentally stupid, dependant throughout on a frail girl to kill and carry the bodies away so they can’t be found, taking time out along the way to dog up a casket and haul away the contents. In her film debut, Melissa Sue Anderson clumsily carries the suspense of whether she is or isn’t the killer, with director J. Lee Thompson helping her with clouds of confusion that just get dumber and dumber until the fitful finale.

Overplotted and underwhelming, Breaking Point is the type of movie that finds it necessary to invent a far-reaching legal/political conspiracy just so one guy can redeem himself by overthrowing it.

[A] ponderously paced, needlessly convoluted and altogether unexceptional thriller.

A queasy but strangely gutless exploitation pic.

Kevin James is at once the film’s most obvious brand signifier and its most surprising asset: As a heavily fictionalized Payton, his surly hangdog energy gives this corndog of a movie what flavor it has.

This undistinguished picture qualifies as an endangered species. As a digital babysitter, however, it may prove sufficiently efficient to generate fair-to-middling homevid sales.

Rude, crude and, uh, cosmopolitan, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo waves the flag for R-rated politically incorrect studio comedy but doesn't top the laugh ratio of the first Deuce misadventure.

By the end of Collateral Beauty, you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played.

There’s a lot happening on the surface of Alfredson’s perplexing winter wonder-why, but considerably less going on inside.

Directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil offer ideas of subversion that feel both long-outdated in concept and completely dull in execution, to the point that merely describing the film feels irresponsible, lest its premise accidentally lure curious viewers to the cinema.

Yet the picture's general stupidity, careless direction and reliance on a single-joke premise that was never really funny to begin with are only the most obvious of its problems.

Those involved got to spend weeks at a Bora Bora luxury resort; all we get is this not lousy but unmemorable tropical-vacation comedy.

Smoothly maneuvering within the limitations of genre conventions, Bats emerges as a vigorously paced and surprisingly satisfying piece of work.

At its best, in its early, more subdued passages, Poor White Trash provides a couple of pristine comic moments. At its worst, it spirals uncontrollably into an unfunny void.

Enough to keep pic entertaining, though not enough to ultimately make it more than a routine genre effort.

Once all the toasts are made and the rice is tossed, Bride Hard proves an entertaining marriage of something borrowed (the plot) and something blue (some of the jokes).

Isn't an embarrassment. Rather, it's an acceptably executed, thoroughly routine time-killer.

Rates a notch below the KISS-centric "Detroit Rock City" and a couple above Jerry Springer's "Ringmaster" -- in other words, closer to stupid-fun than stupid-toxic.

A low-budget potboiler with an overblown score not loud enough to drown out the hackneyed dialogue.

Michael Polish’s film gamely tries to compensate for unspectacular production values with a lot of action — but its staging is pedestrian at best. Alexander Vesha’s script never convinces, and the competent actors fail to spark, despite Sylvester Stallone’s presence as a reluctantly reunited former colleague.

Besides its compelling storyline, Turk 182! features outstanding performances across the board, with Hutton perfect in the role of the determined unassuming hero.

This risibly long-winded drama is perhaps above all a profound cultural insult, milking the lush green scenery of Japan’s famous Aokigahara forest for all it’s worth, while giving co-lead Ken Watanabe little to do other than moan in agony, mutter cryptically, and generally try to act as though McConaughey’s every word isn’t boring him (pardon the expression) to death.

A tone of fanciful absurdity is maintained throughout.

There's an appalling amount of talent at waste up on the screen, starting with Jackson and Carlyle whose tall/short, silent/motormouth double act never clicks.

Nonsense, hysterics and many cuppas spill in Caffeine, an ensembler that serves up a menu's worth of forced and trite situations.

Picture aims for nonstop thrill ride, but for all its brainless brawn, it has plenty of stops and few real thrills.

There’s a story, and a mythology, and a prestige actress who knows how to push moodiness to the point that, in this series, it’s just about her only mood, but none of it, in the end, gets in the way of the splatter.

Celestine Prophecy demands all skepticism be left in the lobby. That's a leap few may be willing to take -- few beyond those millions who bought the book, that is.

Formulaic and forgettable.

It's an instantly disposable and shamelessly derivative piece of work -- call it petit guignol, and you won't be far off the mark -- but first-time feature helmer Jonathan Liebesman shows a savvy flair for atmospheric visuals.

There's no particular reason to see this disappointingly trivial picture on the bigscreen.

A romantic-comedy melodrama that’s too gentle by half.

Even a brisk running time, barely topping 80 minutes, is too long to ask audiences to stay in the company of these characters and their terrible self-inflicted predicaments.

In recent years, Steven Seagal has been steadily losing any firm standing as even a B-grade actioner icon, and by the genre's most basic standards, he now displays a visible fatigue and lack of interest that proves deadlier than any of his hero's skills.

This is a dark, vulgar, brooding turnoff of a movie, minus the steady laugh quotient needed to appease Sandler's core constituency.

The road to hell is paved with well-intentioned clunkers like I’m in Love with a Church Girl, a strenuously sincere but tediously schematic and heavy-handed attempt at cinematic proselytizing for Christianity.

It's a murky sea that surrounds Dark Tide. A soap opera with shark attacks, picture contains a few alarming sequences but loses its grip on its material -- and the viewer -- in a swirling vortex of visual confusion.

This somnolent supernatural thriller is a low-energy wash from start to finish.

The result is a slow-motion zeppelin crash that starts as a dull-edged fable, and then spirals further and further out of control without ever growing more exciting or interesting.

If it’s true, as Kevin Smith noted in his lengthy introductory remarks at Sundance, that “failure is just success training,” then he should be in the best shape of his career after Yoga Hosers, an imbecilic, strenuously wacky helping of see-what-sticks juvenilia.

Lacks the comic style or abandon to make its cynical turn on male-female relationships anything more than a short-lived stunt.

Drearily pretentious, ultra-stagy exercise in middle-age self-loathing.

Grotesquely straining to ridicule and validate its hero simultaneously, A Novel Romance will disappoint even Guttenberg diehards.

While the film rarely provokes any strenuous eye-rolling, it also can't drum up even the slightest interest in the fate of its characters, let alone suspense.

Slick but derivative and forgettable on all levels.

It's an easy watch that nonetheless consistently feels like a grazing blow rather than a knockout.

A malformed, would-be horror shocker with a deliriously deranged performance by Dennis Quaid, who unfortunately seems to be the only one onboard who thinks he's in a comedy.

The film continually resists coherence or synthesis, with puzzles left unresolved amid multiplying possibilities and highly repetitive flashbacks, yielding a mystery that wearies rather than intrigues.

This dire battle-of-the-exes action-comedy severely tests audience goodwill by running an indulgent 110 minutes, crammed as it is with half-baked thriller subplots and aimless supporting characters, as if to distract from the central duo's nonstop bickering.

A quasi-metaphysical revenge Western that remains as elusive as a distant mirage on a long, dusty trail.

This is hagiography, not history. If you accept it as such, you may find yourself mildly engrossed from scene to scene, regardless of your political persuasion, without ever viewing “Reagan” as anything more substantial than a small-budget docudrama series on cable TV.

This crude, shrill day in the life of three ill-matched Manhattan women will prove as irksome to most viewers as it is to the protags.

Father Figures...is a limply spritzing fountain of unconvincing (and unfunny) tricks out of the how-to-write-a-comedy-hit manual.

Kind of a drag when it resorts to frantic slapstick and tired action-comedy tropes, but modestly engaging during stretches that suggest the project would have worked better as an exuberant musical.

A profoundly disappointing attempt to reinvigorate the animal movie genre with the classic ingredients of physical poetry and mythical storytelling.

The question isn't where is the love but where are the laughs?

Misbegotten, unimaginative buddy pic.

Vanquish isn’t bad so much as inert — nothing here is convincing, tense, kinetic, outrageous, or silly enough to give the movie even fleeting life. The script is so by-the-numbers, the performers can hardly hide their disinterest, a feeling soon to be shared by viewers

It’s hard to imagine that even the least demanding of tykes will ask for a second sampling of this thoroughly second-rate animated feature, which has all the charm, and twice the volume, of a barking dog.

A virtual remake of the 1972 original, without that film's mounting suspense and excitement.

As it stands, there are only enough comic ideas here, most of them bad ones, to reach 82 minutes; the other 11 are taken up by a postscript scene, a blooper, and closing credits that move, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as slow as molasses in January.

Lowbudget in the worst sense – with no apparent talent or intelligence to offset its technical inadequacies – Friday the 13th has nothing to exploit but its title.

Spies is not very amusing. Though Chase and Aykroyd provide moments, the overall script thinly takes on eccentric espionage and nuclear madness, with nothing new to add.

[A] drearily lame time-waster.

If Redemption Day were any more generic, the first thing you’d see on screen would be a bar code in place of the opening credits.

Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.

The series' quest for different and challenging Pokemon reaches a nearly absurd endpoint this time.

Watching Revolution is a little like visiting a museum - it looks good without really being alive. The film doesn't tell a story so much as it uses characters to illustrate what the American Revolution has come to mean. Despite attempting to reduce big events to personal details, Revolution rarely works on a human scale.

It's debatable whether the original 1974 "Black Christmas" is, as its most rabid fans claim, the mother of all slasher movies. But there can be no argument regarding the scant merits of its slapdash, soporifically routine remake, suitable only for the least discriminating of gore hounds.

Can't decide if it's a cautionary tale or a lifestyle catalog.

Few of the plot strands connect to one another, much less resolve themselves with any degree of wit or daring.

Rarely has so much talent been used to so little purpose.

This anything-goes exercise isn't dull -- one just wishes the outrageousness were more consistently funny.

Heigl’s performance as a coolly murderous model housewife is the only real reason to even consider watching Home Sweet Hell, an otherwise flailing and risible tale of adultery, extortion and suburban malaise that suggests a poor woman’s “Gone Girl” — one stripped of all tension, style and subtext, and instead rendered with a level of over-the-top gore that would give even David Fincher pause.

A pointless and pretentious drama.

A disastrous stab at contemporary farce.

Perversely eccentric and frequently inert, screenwriter Mitch Glazer's directorial debut, Passion Play, will benefit from some of the well-known names attached, but the near-painful hipness of the production will yield poisonous word of mouth.

Lutz’s acting muscles aren’t nearly as well developed as his pectorals and deltoids, and while the role may not call for a master thespian, it at least begs someone who can emote without looking like he’s straining to execute a dead lift.

Easily one of the dopiest major studio releases since Elie Samaha got out of the business.

When all its threads are finally pulled into place, Do You Believe? proves about as spiritually enlightening as a Kmart throw rug.

It doesn’t strike an assertively comic tone either, resulting in a superficially colorful but hollow pile of contrivances that are neither clever nor convincing enough to achieve more than time-passing diversion.

Unlike his "Snakes on a Plane," director David R. Ellis' sharks-in-a-lake thriller displays little sense of its scenario's camp potential. Gore, too, is in short supply on account of the pic's PG-13 rating, which renders the attack scenes nearly toothless.

A few minutes of good snowboarding footage -- all in the first reel, alas -- after which it's strictly downhill, bunny-slope style.

Bloody, barely coherent and about as fun as having your face dragged across asphalt from a moving SUV.

Like an Iraq-war mirror image of "Life Is Beautiful," actor-director Roberto Benigni's The Tiger and the Snow re-runs the successful structure and comic persona of the 1998 Oscar-winning film in a trippy fantasia about a poet who follows his love to hell and, in this happier ending, back.

Dramatically speaking, God’s Not Dead 2 operates at the level of your average middle-school play – except with far greater levels of upside-down logic and bald-faced intolerance for anyone not enraptured by the New Testament.

Fans of the original will no doubt tune expecting more high-grade guilty-pleasure fun, only to get way too much of a no-longer-very-good thing instead.

Central premise of a secret romance between Michael Caine and the love-smitten daughter of his best friend (Joe Bologna) while the trio vacations together in torrid Rio may be adventurous comedy. Zany comedic conflict, however, is offputting, even at times nasty, in this essentially dead-ahead comedy that sacrifices charm and a light touch for too much realism.

Emerges as a formulaic thriller that plays more like direct-to-video fare than a megaplex-worthy feature.

Ultimately something of a softball satire, its climactic evocation of the "true meaning" of the holidays is surprisingly touching.

If the film had a loopier or more fable-styled atmosphere, the concept might have seemed easier to swallow. But Fleming treats Stephen Zotnowski’s script with a glossy literalism that doesn’t do it or the actors any favors.

Veering from broad small-town comedy to heavy-handed vigilante dramatics, and marbled with the sort of spiritual epiphanies typically mastered in Sunday school rather than seminary, this Canadian indie seems unlikely to galvanize the faithful.

Tedious enough to serve as a cautionary example of the pitfalls of DIY filmmaking.

The finished film plays at times like an out-of-control pitch meeting, lurching from one ostensibly clever idea to the next without having taken the trouble to connect the dots, or even to remain consistent with the two simple rules it sets out for itself.