A blandly middling crowd pleaser.

Dull and repetitive, even by the standards of an already repetitive genre.

If it's art, it's only mildly interesting.

Even if a good phone-sex movie does exist, For a Good Time, Call . . . is woefully, definitively not it.

Isn't as novel as it hopes to be, but it gets the job done.

Those nostrils do a lot of Momoa's acting, to be honest. As right as he is looks-wise, Momoa falls short in attitude.

It's a performance in search of a movie.

If director Michael Dowse took Matt and Tori out of the equation - which is to say, if he took out the main storyline - the whole event could have been a lot more fun.

In Faster, it's a car, not actors, that drives movie.

It's a bloated, shockingly tedious trudge that manages to look both overproduced and unforgivably cheesy.

While I Am has its boogeymen - especially the rich, the racist and the ultra-competitive - Shadyac implicates himself whenever possible.

Everything about it screams mid-20th century. Rather than refresh the cast with new actors, the producers would have done better to just digitally reanimate Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper, the stars of the 1949 adaptation of Rand's "The Fountainhead."

A dog-frequency movie: enjoyable only to those tuned in to its particular register.

And the action? It's especially hard to determine who's fighting whom in "Legends," because, well, because they are a bunch of owls.

Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies. A lot of movies.

First-time director Anne Sewitsky may intend Happy, Happy as a Chekhovian chamber piece or romantic bagatelle, but her smugness about racism - and her glib symbolic resolution of the conflicts she raises - suggests an ambition that far outstrips her ability, at least for now.

Most of the comedy, however, is unintentional. House At The End of the Street may not draw much of an audience during its initial run, but the movie's preposterousness certifies it for future midnight screenings, where the story will get the jeering it deserves.

There's no sense of perspective here.

I spent most of Johnny English wondering whom the filmmakers were targeting. While childish and silly, it's far too violent for young kids.

So why bother with this earnest but imperfect impersonation when the original artists are readily available on VHS and DVD?

This "Holmes" is just about as silly as it awesome. At times, Ritchie and company try so hard to make sure this isn't your father's "Sherlock Holmes" that it comes across as, well, cartoonish.

Enjoy it, in moderation. It's your recommended weekly allowance of schlock.

It all amounts to a missed opportunity considering how many female athletes and sports fans would probably flock to the first film that targets their demographic since "A League of Their Own" nearly 20 years ago. The people behind The Mighty Macs could learn a lot from that film, especially that following formula is fine, as long as you don't skimp on the details that complete the portrait.

When all is said and done, Mike proves to be not only peripheral to the main thrust of the movie, but a drag on its momentum.

Here's the thing about the new The Thing. It isn't as satisfying as the old "The Thing." And it's nowhere near as enthralling as the vintage "Thing," which inspired every other "Thing" to follow.

This fitfully funny but mostly dull misfire defines exactly where the line can be drawn between truly subversive humor and lazy cynicism.

So light and airy, it almost floats away on its own breeziness.

There Be Dragons is like fine wine, served in a Big Gulp cup. A little is very nice. A lot is way too much.

It's just that Pattinson's performance is so enervated that his Georges Duroy comes across as something of a cipher. He's not quite alive, yet also clearly not dead, given the amount of sex he has. He's undead, or at least uninteresting.

It's like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Catskills.

The "Twilight Saga" hasn't matured along with its heroine. In fact, the latest movie regresses a bit, delivering more filler, less feeling and crummier CGI than last year's "Eclipse."

Blackthorn feels less like a proper sequel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which it purports to be, than a coattail rider.

With summer comes theaters filled with superheroes, sequels and forgettable family fare. In the last category, we find Judy Moody.

Thank goodness for Tasha Smith's character, Shonda. She supplies the only reliable laughs as Pam's fun-loving best friend.

A jagged little pill of a movie from baby boomer avatar Edward Zwick.

It's heartwarming. But the film never really takes fire.

For all the wacky, taboo, parodic situations that MacGruber plunges into, the film seems content to simply point at its hero, yell "What a schmuck!" and leave it at that.

Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is nearly as stilted, didactic and simplistic as Rand's free-market fable.

Director Scott Hicks lavishes good taste and sunsets on a story that - devoid of genuine tension, conflict or combustible chemistry between its two stars - just prettily sits there.

In the final scene, the filmmakers nearly succeed in turning Suu Kyi into an Asian Eva Peron, down to the outspread arms, tossing an orchid to her worshippers.

In the end, Daybreakers doesn't really want to make anyone think too hard. If that were to happen, they might stop to wonder why all the human survivors out there hiding in fear of their lives don't just become garlic farmers and call it a day.

Something Borrowed clinches it: It is not okay to sleep with the fiance of one's best friend. What's odd, and ultimately icky, is how enthusiastically the film attempts to justify doing so.

Planet 51 is cute, but it's no "Shrek."

Director James McTeigue was much more successful capturing graphic novelist Alan Moore's mood in "V for Vendetta" than he is conjuring the bone-chilling suspense of Poe. But viewed as simply another Hollywood thriller, The Raven builds up a decent head of steam as time runs out for our hero's imperiled fiancee.

Nothing more than an action-packed bagatelle masquerading as history.

There's very little that's even kind of funny in It's Kind of a Funny Story, which can't accurately be described as a comedy but isn't a true drama, either.

As this sloppy, scattered, utterly synthetic piece of Hollywood widgetry unspools, it becomes increasingly clear that the romantic tension at play exists mostly between the men in question.

Ten minutes after you leave the movie, all the battles will have blended in your memory into a ceaseless muddle of sliced-off appendages, jets of blood splashing artfully on walls, gurgling screams and flashing swords.

Michael Caine delivers a stunning performance in Harry Brown, a rancid little revenge fantasy that probably doesn't deserve him.

The swells of inspirational storytelling sometimes threaten to swamp the underlying inspirational story.

It's a highbrow romantic farce, without the laughs.

A well-acted but narratively limp indie that's undermined by a failure to connect emotionally with its audience.

That Winterbottom has delivered a dud makes Trishna all the more disappointing, a rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career.

The Awakening is nonsense, but with its posh British cast and colors drained to near-gray, it's very solemn nonsense.

If nothing else, the movie reminds filmgoers just how difficult it can be to pull off the multi-thread approach. Sometimes it's possible to take a spool of yarn and, with care and consistency, knit a stunning creation. 360 looks more like what happens when a cat gets ahold of the ball.

There's only so much an actor can do with lifeless dialogue. It's hard to blame the cast for looking less than committed; they all realized too late that Shepard created a monster.

The problem is, the movie doesn't really care if we are laughing with it or at it.

Disjointed drama filled with one-dimensional characters and melodrama so Lifetime movie-esque that it careens into unintentional comedy.

There's a nagging question at the heart of Chernobyl Diaries. It isn't what, or who, is stalking these kids. After awhile, the answer becomes apparent, leading to a denouement that, while mildly exciting, feels like a ride you've been on before.

For those with no vested interest in this protracted and supernatural soap opera, but who do care about cinema, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 2 will be, unsurprisingly, a silly and somewhat cheesily made waste of time.

The war-movie cliches are as abundant as the antiaircraft fire, and the dialogue as wooden as a balsa glider. The leading characters are issued one personality trait apiece, and some don't even get that. Cuba Gooding Jr., for example, plays Maj. Emanuelle Stance as a man who smokes a pipe.

The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.

If Shutter Island, a gothic thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, were put to a free association test, the word most likely to come to mind would certainly be "weird."

The film's real problem is that it can't seem to make up its mind about whether it wants to frighten us or make us laugh.

The argument in Amigo is so heavy-handed - and its execution so crude - that by the time the movie winds its way to a predictable but uninvolving conclusion, nobody will be listening anymore.

There's so much pluck and gumption on the screen you can smell it. Flesh and blood? Not so much.

Paranormal Activity 3 just uses new technology to deliver the same old ghosts-and-goblins hokum.

Things really slow down during the movie's ill-advised forays into drama.

One of the weaknesses of The Sitter is that Hill doesn't develop much comic chemistry with the children.

Here's a better title for Griff the Invisible, a well-meaning but unengaging love story about two 20-something misfits: "Griff the Implausible."

Worse yet is the insincerity of the film's central performances. Too cool by half, Glodell, Wiseman and Dawson speak every line as if it had air quotes around it. In fact, the entire movie feels as though it has air quotes around it.

The books-trump-movies camp knows where this is headed: The film version - contains two characters and one narrative too many.

Jonah Hex may not be the longest 81 minutes you ever spend, but it might well be the most tedious.

Dark Shadows doesn't know where it wants to dwell: in the eerie, subversive penumbra suggested by its title or in playful, go-for-broke camp.

The biggest problem, then, is the characters who populate the film. For the most part, they're one-dimensional caricatures.

I've got another portmanteau word for the movie: unbelievaballistic.

The story is maddeningly oblique and incomplete, despite paying what at times feels like excruciating attention to the minutiae of a dying love affair's final hours.

A cautionary environmental tale with a thin veneer of entertainment on top. With its cotton-candy-colored palette of orange, pink and purple truffula trees, it looks like a bowl of fuzzy Froot Loops. But it goes down like an order of oatmeal. Sure, it's good for you. It's just not terribly good.

H.G. Wells did it better. This movie spends so much yawn-inducing time on variations of the same combat scenario that its final showdown feels rushed.

It's all too predictable and by the book. Even with a few plot twists that aren't in the original, I was hardly shocked or awed. While it's sleeker and more sophisticated than the Chaney version, this new Wolfman isn't any scarier.

Largely relies on stale gender stereotypes and tired comedy routines that don't elicit much laughter.

As Balthazar, Cage doesn't disappoint. He's just manic enough to keep the character from becoming too predictable.

The action and dialogue find the same squalid level in time for the climactic scene, the cruel humiliation of a central character. That's when sensitive viewers should do what the bloody-minded Joe could never imagine: Walk away from the mess he has made.

An aggressively crass - and not especially funny - trip down memory lane, an attempt to recapture the sweetly ribald magic of the earlier film. As anyone who's ever attended a class reunion can tell you, it almost never works.

Man on a Ledge has its diverting moments, but by the time it has reached its too-pat final twist, it turns out to be a title desperately in search of a movie.

Cinema-as-shoplifting is okay, as long as you still get the feeling it's for a greater good. But that's something The Tourist is sorely missing.

With the raunch of "American Pie" and the heart of an after-school special, the comedy turns out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts.

A giant disappointment. It's as bustling as its titular city's piazzas, but it goes nowhere.

Rock of Ages gets too mired in plotty cul de sacs, manufactured setbacks and numbers that are all staged as show-stoppers. In the words of the Journey song that serves as a climactic singalong, it goes on and on and on and on.

You can't criticize it for false advertising.

Eventually MacFarlane's formula -- consisting of filthy, ethnically offensive jokes, scatological humor, tacky pop culture references and random cameos -- begins to wear thin.

Jack Reacher is a wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise's virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher's alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.

A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.

Anne Fletcher's lifeless comedy about an overbearing mother and her exasperated adult son, has no flawlessly delivered punch lines. It doesn't even have a hangnail.

Conceived and directed by Madonna, W.E. is a gorgeous mess.

Gerwig remains one of the most captivating new stars to hit the big screen, but she's still looking for a movie that deserves her.

It's a curio, ripe with dreamy atmospherics and intriguing mysteries, but little else.

Charlie St. Cloud, like its star Zac Efron, is a gorgeous, unblemished thing. Both would be much improved with a tiny flaw or two.