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

Boasting a plot that's heavy on the magical shenanigans, this pretty and poetic adaptation of Shakespeare's play is a fantasia for the smart set, a literary novelty for anyone who wants to have fun without giving up food for thought. On that score, at least, it delivers, in spades.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

You can't criticize it for false advertising.

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

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.

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

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

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 "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."

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.

You can't fault the filmmakers for reshaping a diary into a cohesive film. You can however, fault them for taking one of the great antiheroes in preteen literature and turning him into, well, an even wimpier kid.

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

As it is, the audience must content itself with baby poop, naughty words and the female anatomy at its pneumatic extreme, while Bateman and Reynolds's search for transcendence continues.

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

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

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

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

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.

The movie's self-importance is further inflated by the usual pseudo-Wagnerian score and occasional narration by John Hurt.

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.

A blandly middling crowd pleaser.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

This third outing climaxes with a dark and melodramatic twist that, while adding a layer of nuance and back story that the previous two films never had, also feels wildly out of sync with its audience's expectations.

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.

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

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.

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

There's no sense of perspective here.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but J. Edgar instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. They bring a rich expressiveness and sense of complex inner life to their characters. It's the movie - and its placard-sized message - that is more two-dimensional.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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

There's something dead and rotting at the center of Mama, and it isn't the ghost of the woman who lends the horror film its title.

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

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

Halloween is a stab at a derivative minor classic. It's apparent where Carpenter got his horror devices - and a minor misfortune that he hasn't been able to synthesize them in a fresh or exciting way.

Ultimately, the movie just doesn’t justify its outrageous bid to turn a solemn tale of self-sacrifice into swaggering global-marketplace entertainment.

The Dark Tower isn’t frightening, or even, despite some serviceable action and special effects, very interesting, except perhaps for viewers too young to know better, or for Stephen King fans especially susceptible to outright pandering.

A rarely funny spoof that's heavy on bone-crushing and blood-gushing.

Too scary for very young children, yet too silly for most older fans of director Bryan Singer’s earlier forays into the Superman and X-Men franchises, “Jack” seems designed to appeal to a very narrow, and possibly illusory, demographic: the mature moppet.

For a movie about the Great Communicator, “Reagan” communicates surprisingly little.

Although “G.I. Joe” is merely a movie based on Hasbro toys, the action -- the real point of all this -- feels just as lifeless.

Safe Haven is one of those Valentine’s Day confections that satisfy your sweet tooth until you get to their weird, off-putting center. The problem with movies is that you can’t put them back in the box.

Snyder tries to up the spectacle ante with ever more explosions, crashes, thermal blasts, topological realignments, gunfire and mano-a-mano fistfights. But the result is a punishing sense of diminishing returns and a genre that has finally reached the point of mayhem-induced exhaustion.

It’s a mushy and unsuspenseful melodrama.

Even the susceptible softies, who always cry at weddings, will probably leave the theater dry-eyed, not to mention feeling a little empty inside.

Like an elaborately decorated wedding cake, the kid-friendly Walking With Dinosaurs 3D may leave you wondering how something so stunning could end up being so bland.

Cute without being especially clever, Warm Bodies is almost as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero.