Considering the gravity of the subject, and its immense potential, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is not just a letdown, but something more like an insult. The film will do less damage to Mr. Putin’s reputation than to those of Mr. Assayas, Mr. Law and Mr. Dano.

A remarkably ill-advised remake.

The only reason to see it is Riz Ahmed's performance as Omar, the supposed brains of the operation. Mr. Ahmed reminded me a bit of Robert Carlyle. He's dynamic, quick-tongued and intense. And much too classy for this tatty room.

The brightest touch in the whole tale is a transvestite hooker’s little papillon, decked out in a DayGlo pink vest, but even the pooch seems glum, pricked-up ears notwithstanding.

The potential for an interesting sci-fi spectacle is there, at least at the start, but Tron: Ares does nothing with it.

Depressed and depressing drama.

Men, Women & Children touches many nerves, but then pinches and twists them with its ham-handed approach to social commentary. I worry about Mr. Reitman, a filmmaker of consequence who is still too young to be so cosmic. Time to lighten up and come back down to Earth.

The denizens of Judd Apatow’s Funny People have been pulled every which way to fit a misshapen concept, yet they remain painfully unfunny, and consistently off-putting.

The basic problem is the script, which is credited to three writers plus the director - seldom a good sign. Never mind that it's a retread of "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" minus the trains, and minus John Candy.

A shamelessly fictionalized biopic.

As a comedy “Killing” is simply dead.

Not a pretty sight, any of it.

If you go to see this sloppy sitcom, in which Mr. Martin plays a divorced, repressed lawyer named Peter Sanderson, do expect to be surprised, seduced and entertained by Queen Latifah.

Mr. Statham, the specialist in English tough guys who was so affecting in "The Bank Job," has more to offer than The Mechanic has the grace to receive.

It has its moments, several of which are provided by Ms. Rudolph, putting a spin on the girl-friday role. She has one scene of utter hilarity that shouldn’t be spoiled, and can’t be printed anyway, but may lead to “pilafing” becoming the word of the year on Urban Dictionary.

Ms. Wynter's performance is only one of many failings in a heavily accented costume drama that Bruce Beresford has directed turgidly from Marilyn Levy's amateurish script.

Maybe there’s no such thing as an innately bad dog — or, who knows, maybe there is. But there are inherently bad ideas for dog movies, and one of them has just manifested itself in The Art of Racing in the Rain.

Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one’s own infant ever seems to occupy anyone’s attention.

The video-game sequences are impressive, but you know that a 'toon is in big trouble when its most powerful theme is planned obsolescence.

You're tempted to keep watching, even though the running time is a bloated 154 minutes, to see if anyone, or the movie itself, turns remotely likable. The answer to that, alas, is no.

The movie on the whole is joyless. Whatever Works doesn’t.

In a movie that rings false at every turn, Ms. Redgrave's Elizabeth is truly and infallibly regal.

I feel for the marketing person charged with devising a tagline for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a fantasy whose turgid pretensions defy the very notion of marketing.

Nothing stands up to scrutiny -- least of all the lethargic acting and the clumsy script. I was hot to trot for the exit halfway through, but a dogged sense of duty kept me stuck in an endless present.

There’s laying it on thick, there’s laying it on with a trowel, and there’s laying it on like A Man Called Otto.

Basic Instinct 2 is pretty awful. Rarely has a meaningless thriller had so many meaningful glances, or such arch acting by good actors who know better.

Operates in a dead zone roughly equidistant between parody and idiocy. You do get the connection between tongue and cheek, but much of the humor still goes thud.

The most surprising thing about the production, which was written and directed by Simon Kinberg, is how grindingly dumb it becomes after a promising start.

Joyless and largely witless sci-fi fantasy.

An experience that’s like being slowly asphyxiated by puffy clouds of baby powder.

A guaranteed downer that's devoid of any upside, and free of dangerously entertaining side effects.

The movie is a minor crime, a meandering misdemeanor that’s neither soft-core nor hardcore but no core, with no consistent style and minimal content.

A slow and lugubrious film about the impact of adoption on the lives of three women.

Country Strong comes to spontaneous life from time to time, despite maudlin devices and manipulative set pieces.

The script is dead in the water, and most of the misanthropic repartee rings resoundingly false.

Mr. Goldsman, a first-time director though a veteran screenwriter, has been done in by the source material. Either he climbed aboard a horse that was too much for him, or the universe gave him a bum steer.

The director was Baltasar Kormákur, a gifted filmmaker from Iceland who shouldn’t be blamed for a case of industrial filmmaking gone wrong — the culprits in elaborate clunkers like this are usually the producers and the studios.

By most standards of conventional film narrative, this movie is a mess. [25 June, 1987, p.22(E)]

Fewer and better-drawn supporting characters would have helped give some substance to Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s script, but as it is the movie centers on the chatter of the two principals, creaky one-liners and blowout action scenes that mistake frantic editing for excitement.

It's long on Viagra jokes and whorehouse scenes, and comes up short on plausibility.

An excruciatingly embarrassing display of ego and ineptitude.

The film’s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since “Last Year at Marienbad,” and its actors’ shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.

Ever so slightly defective in the area of coherence; it plays as if it should have been written by a committee but they didn't bother to convene one.

Mr. Beall, a former LAPD cop, has written a script so devoid of feeling that the cartoons blur into thin line drawings, while what's been done with the marvelous Ms. Stone - i.e. next to nothing - is downright criminal.

All of the nonsense piled on nonsense does provide some measure of pleasure. Unknown gets better by getting worse.

Go right ahead and skip this one at the Cineplex. You've got my word: It won't be on the final.

In The Hunger Games it's both a feast of cheesy spectacle and a famine of genuine feeling, except for the powerful - and touchingly vulnerable - presence of Jennifer Lawrence.

An experience best likened to being battered by hurricane-force winds generated by an organ with all stops pulled permanently out.

Unfortunately, Ms. Faris has neither an adroit script -- House Bunny is a stale collection of dumb bunny jokes -- nor Ms. Witherspoon's wily charm. And the filmmakers do Ms. Faris no favors by inviting comparisons to Marilyn Monroe.

Ms. Hudson makes the most of her role, even though that's not saying so very much -- the writing is terribly thin -- while John Corbett gives an unaccountably clumsy performance as a romantic pastor. Joan Cusack gets the funniest lines as Helen's sister, a model of boring mommyhood, but she also stops the movie dead in its tracks every time she plays a scene.

It's impossible to say who's more unhinged: Darwin, caught between faith and reason, or the filmmakers.

I defer to no one in my admiration for Ms. Pike and her fellow cast members, but it’s no fun watching them soldier on through this heavy-handed and mean-spirited charade. I Care a Lot is a good title for the film that might have been. In the film that is, you can’t find anyone to care about.

Ms. Macdonald works modest wonders within these constraints -- she's a lovely actress, and a skilled one -- but too much is asked of her; Kate's innocence finally wilts beneath the camera's fixed gaze.

The big-horned heroine is played once again by Angelina Jolie in this dull sequel to the not-so-sparkling 2014 original.

Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

Mr. Kamiyama has sent into battle nothing but armies of clichés.

In Troy, and in overreaching, underachieving productions like it, digital imagery is fast becoming both a Trojan horse and Achilles' heel.

I've been a Vanessa Redgrave fan for such a long time that I would have been happy to watch her beautifully weathered face without much happening around her.

Mr. Powell remains one of today’s most promising leading men, but he’s running in place here.

If only Brotherhood of the Wolf had the wit and grace to match its exceptional physical beauty.

Cowboys versus aliens is a concept that may make you smile in anticipation, but wipe that smile off your face before buying your ticket.

As Tiberius, who seems not to have been based on any Tiberius of history, Mr. Brody brings to the film a combination of heroin-chic and Basil Rathbone. Also, an extraordinary level of sadistic cruelty. People are burned alive, crushed like insects, hurled from rooftops. They may not deserve all this. But neither do we.

I tried to buy into the characters, to enjoy the performances on their own terms, but no dice. I saw only performers who, with one conspicuous exception, were working hard to ignite a glum drama that declined to combust.

Every joke is leaned on, as if it were some Shavian gem; every pregnant pause eventually aborts.

This production is a mess for many reasons, most of them having to do with its frantic efforts to be funny.

All that's missing is wit and humanity.

Universal conscription for every able-bodied man from 18 to 40 is about to be instituted, and the events of this shallow, cheap and corny story seem unlikely to offer much in the way of comforting memories for those who get sent to the trenches.

What's new here is a severe deficit of style, or even craftsmanship, both in the action sequences and what passes for human interludes.

This dreary drama telegraphs every punch, emotion and plot point with a dedication that would have done the old Western Union proud.

Labor Day, adapted from a novel by Joyce Maynard, is the kind of movie that turns clarity into stultification; everything is perfectly clear and almost everything — pie-making excepted — is perfectly lifeless.

A turgid recycling of Mr. Carpenter's remake of "The Thing."

It’s hard to believe that human minds conceived the story line of Godzilla vs. Kong—not because it’s so intricate, elegant or spiritually elevated, but because it’s so incoherent and idiotic.

What's worse, some mysterious movie curse has turned the three once-lively adventurers into wood.

I’m not sure I’ve ever before come across an original feature with a screenplay credited to 11 writers (not to mention four “story consultants”), and yet nobody in this mirth brigade brought any operational comedy ammunition.

Mr. Liman handles each plot beat maladroitly, piling one utterly absurd contrivance or coincidence upon another.

Still, Eat Pray Love preaches a sermon it doesn't practice-the need to open one's self to the world. In a pictorial sense this is exactly what Liz does; she vacuums up the transformative essence of three continents. Yet the world gets weirdly short shrift because this transcendently narcissistic movie is, in a narrative sense, almost entirely about Liz and the movie star who plays her.

The essence of this grindingly violent movie can be summed up by what Parker says of his handgun to a terrified clerk at a check-cashing service: "It's small, but it hurts."

This time the filmmakers seem to have forgotten everything they knew, and have endeared themselves only to Ms. Moore, who walked away from this ghastly fiasco with more money than most people could earn in two lifetimes.

Mr. Woo’s frenzied love of operatically heightened violence may have influenced some talented younger directors, but without an interesting screenplay to work from his movies sink into mindlessness. “Silent Night” is nothing to shout about.

This horror-free horror flick sent me wandering through my own memory warehouse, where, at every turn, I bumped into images from similar -- and mostly superior -- entertainments.

The screenwriter starts to seem like a sweaty basement-of-the-coffee-house magician who keeps sawing ladies in half long past the point of diminishing returns.

The charming, gentle simplicity of the book, with its childlike art, has been displaced by a mania for digital images and frantic attempts to be funny. This crayon should have been left in its box.

The failure lies not with the film's director, Marc Forster, nor with its impressive star, Gerard Butler, but with Jason Keller's dreadfully earnest script, which charts the hero's spiritual journey, and his Rambo-esque exploits, without offering a scintilla of mature perspective on his state of mind.

Whatever the charms of the book, they are entirely absent from the dull and listless film.

A good subject has been ill-served by Ms. Greenwald's cliched script and clumsy direction.

Tiresome, pretentious.

This Transformers is a pile of glittering junk.

As the hilariously foul-mouthed, sweet-souled Dr. S, he (Wayans) slaps Marci X to life every time he's on screen.

Superb as Ms. Kruger is, there’s nothing she can do to keep the taut, heartfelt narrative from going off the rails.

Like the high desert that provides its main setting, William Monahan’s Mojave is dry, often windy and full of hot air.

Mr. Boyle has made more than his share of memorable films, but he has also delivered some stinkers and unfortunately his new one carries the fragrance of a zombie underarm.

Horrible Bosses has preposterousness to burn, but no finesse and no interest in having any.

The film almost suffocates on overripe dialogue (“We are messing with the primal forces of nature here”) and finally loses its way in the logical contradictions — or the nonlogical implications — of time travel.

The most annoying tactic in the script is its repeated, strenuous attempts to convince us that we’re in the rarefied air of serious literary discussion.

Bring Zoloft and a tank of oxygen to Closer, an airless, ultimately joyless drama of sexual politics.

It's really dumb, even though it starts promisingly and continues, in a self-infatuated way, to consider itself quite bright.

Still, the action is ponderous too. Mr. Morel is no Kubrick, or Tarantino, just as Mr. Travolta's caricature of John Travolta is no Travolta.

Mr. Snipes and Mr. Rhames get credit at least for doing their own stunts. By the middle of the film, viewers will take a certain satisfaction in each punch that lands on either of them.