For all its video-game bedazzlements, Attack of the Clones suffers from severe digital glut, periodically relieved, if you can call it that, by amateur theatrics.

Whatever the cause, the movie turns sour when the singers aren't singing. And the first-person accounts don't work at all, even though much of their substance comes from the show.

This movie needs a star performance at its center, and the director, Joe Johnston, doesn't seem to know it. His closeups dote on Mr. Mortensen's striking face, and on the actor's interesting inwardness, but he doesn't ask for, or find, the sort of zest that could turn laconic into romantic.

Oh, what awful voices -- clumsy words as well as cheesy accents -- come out of the actors' mouths! Though I wanted to appreciate the human story, and the lavish spectacle, I couldn't get past the clangorous echoes of Charlie Chan.

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

Seeking spontaneity and release for her character, Ms. Streep gets stuck in a laboriousness that I don’t want to belabor, since her efforts are gallant — she does her own singing and playing — and there are fleeting moments of real fun. Still, it’s hard not to wonder why so much in the movie went so wrong.

It's just a little film that strives to be likable, and is less so than it might have been.

Jakubowicz has made a muscular, messy and vulgar film based on a life that has been all those things.

Unconcerned with context or tonal nuance, it frames itself as an action thriller with a signature moment that could have been lifted from an old western.

Full of entertaining vignettes that eventually make a happy mockery, as they're meant to do, of the tragedy vs. comedy dialectic.

Not many performers can please an audience as much as Mark Wahlberg, but the pooch comes close.

Mostly, though, there's the endlessly resourceful, endlessly inventive, bedazzling Mr. Coogan. Hamlet Schmamlet. Not since "Death of a Salesman" has failure been quite so entertaining.

Here’s the bad news: Brüno is no "Borat." Here’s the worse news: Brüno crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously to genuinely awful.

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.

Strays is wildly inappropriate. It’s also wildly funny.

Rather than the laugh a minute promised by old comedies, Get Smart generates approximately one laugh per hour, and I can't remember either one.

Ambitious, visually stunning and hugely accomplished.

The film too often feels like the plodding presentation of a sad story. And it gets sadder still, though as the plot goes on the movie tends to skirt genuine awfulness, reaching instead for the inspiring flashback, the righteous moment of justice or the happy, improbable surprise.

A shamelessly fictionalized biopic.

The film should have been cleverly dark and dripping with insider takes. Instead, it’s boringly schematic.

Wittily written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who directed but did not write the first film, the follow-up is notably clever, amusing, ambitious and densely plotted. Unlike its predecessor and most works from the horror-thriller production company Blumhouse, it combines a high-concept premise with a highly complicated story.

Tests your patience to the breaking point -- maybe beyond.

If there’s anything more you need to know before deciding whether to watch this, I should tell you that it’s nothing like “Eighth Grade,” “Booksmart,” “Clueless” or “Election,” all astute studies of the high-school scene. The calculations of this screenplay, adapted by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer from a young-adult novel by Jennifer Mathieu, are naked enough to qualify as nude scenes.

Like Seberg, too, Ms. Stewart is able to distinguish herself when encumbered by fairly feeble material. That said, Seberg is a bit much to ask of anyone.

The mystery posed by Oblivion as a whole is why its mysteries are posed so clumsily, and worked out so murkily.

Greta is petit Guignol trying to pass for Grand, a horror flick made by people who forgot to have fun. One of them, the director, Neil Jordan, made a memorable film called “The Crying Game” almost three decades ago. This is the groaning game, an inept tale of danger, entrapment and dismemberment.

Camp X-Ray isn’t anti-American, despite much of Ali’s rhetoric. It is about the evils of ignorance, wherever it rears its ugly head.

The title is by far the most noteworthy element of this lumpy horror-comedy.