Assuming your psycho-pigtailed-killer memories extend back as far as "The Bad Seed," Maxwell Anderson's play filmed by director Mervyn LeRoy in 1956, Orphan may remind you of the icon made famous by Patty McCormack.

The acting is quite deft, if extremely broad, but screenwriter Kundo Koyama seesaws uncertainly between jokes and grief.

The Proposal reworks "Two Weeks Notice" with the genders switched.

Extraordinarily raunchy, occasionally funny.

Distressingly ordinary for such an extraordinary subject.

The results are boring boring.

It is less a film than a puny trampoline -- an occasion, though a grim one, for this most fervently movie-mad of American directors to show off his love for the various pulp genres mooshed together by the 2003 Dennis Lehane novel.

The emotions and crises feel pre-sanded, smooth to the point of blandness.

Why isn’t the film better? Guggenheim doesn’t seem to have prodded his subjects in any interesting directions.

The script of Shrink, written by Thomas Moffett, plays like "Crash" without the angst or the perpetual racial conflagrations.

The movie’s partially redeemed by Seyfried, who makes her character more than a repository for audience sympathy. (Her make-out scene with Fox is handled with more suspense and care than anything else in the movie.)

Veers perilously close to the concept of poverty tourism.

Jackson has not cast himself well, though. He has slathered the imagery in the wrong kind of wonderment and hyperbole, both on Earth and in heaven.

While White plays it supercool, Tommy Davidson and Arsenio Hall (as Cream Corn and Tasty Freeze, respectively) swing for the fences, without much in the way of a bat.

A surer hand behind the camera might’ve finessed the jokes more effectively, or established a consistent and satisfying tone.

What are they trying to accomplish and is this really the best way to accomplish it?

The results feel a little harried, as if the focus issues were never really solved.

I truly wish Dear John were a better, less shamelessly manipulative movie, but a couple of the actors got me through it alive. One is Amanda Seyfried.

Suggests that this could be the start of something adequate. Something big would've been nicer, though the movie's limitations are less a matter of scale than of imagination.

In sum it plays like 12 landlocked episodes of "The Love Boat" rammed together, though without the same rate of intercourse.

DePietro struggles to reconcile the perceived demands of the romantic comedy genre (though his film is more bittersweet than most) and the tang and hustle and detail of real life.

Good actors and a talented director doing what they can to bring the truth to a script that's mostly bogus.

I laughed here and there at She's Out of My League, but I sort of hated everything it had to say about nerds and babes and the sliding scale of self-image.

The dialogue can drive you crazy with its self-consciousness.

Kids may love the movie, and even kids who love the books may like it. For me, though, an astonishing percentage of the books' appeal has vanished.

The Last Song is primarily for teenagers looking for something disposable to cry about for a couple of hours, though I did find it a tad easier to take than "Dear John."

Clean, precise and terribly sullen, After.Life is like its female protagonist. It feels stuck between worlds, or genres.

Duchovny and Moore have their moments; they're like two preening sharks working on commission.

By today's standards, it is only medium-bloody, though it's more than usually grim, its young protagonists sullen enough to qualify for the "Twilight" movies. Yet it affords precious little sadistic pleasure, partly because it "dares" to lay out more directly the pedophiliac demons plaguing Freddy the serial killer.

I enjoyed these characters more when they were rich, rather than obscenely rich, when their self-involvement and life crises had one foot on planet Earth -- and when they weren't all gussied up like Mae West in "Sextette."

Here's how you know Josh Brolin has become a movie star: Jonah Hex may not be much with him, but without him? Perish the thought. Perish it, throw an ax in its heart, then burn it to a crisp.

The only people humiliated, really, are older people and heavy people and nerds and vegans and black people and mothers who breast-feed their 4-year-olds. Everybody else gets a pass.

Agora has everything except real drama.

Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” but in “Cholera” he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.

More happens in Eclipse than in the previous "Twilight" zone, "New Moon," and yet it's duller

Predators, plural, starts well and ends poorly, and in the middle it's in the middle.

Who would have believed a film with this much skin and reckless, life-threatening excess could end up a rather dull muddle?

The very elements of Eat Pray Love that helped make it a success in 40 languages -- the breezy prose, the relentless sorting-through of dissatisfactions, a steady stream of intriguing sights -- turn the film into a travelogue with a little spiritual questing on the side.

At one point Rourke delivers a monologue about his time in Bosnia, and the conviction the actor brings to the occasion throws the movie completely out of whack. What's actual acting doing in a movie like this?

Too much of the contrasting comedy in Nanny McPhee Returns is shrill, laden with routine computer-generated effects and pounded into dust by James Newton Howard's shut-up-already musical score.

A dramatic true story has been made into a diffident biopic.

The story should have made for charming results on screen. Instead - and I truly don't enjoy saying so - co-adapter and director Rob Reiner's picture lands somewhere between synthetic nostalgia and the texture of real life.

It's outlandishly gory and bluntly political, the latter being more interesting than the former. It wears out its welcome, though, long before la revolucion and sequels are promised.

Legendary is so intent on paying heartfelt tribute to dogged young athletes that it neglects basic story needs.

Secretariat isn't bad but it's precisely what you'd expect.

Morgan and Eastwood are scrupulous in keeping their notions of the afterlife as general and inoffensive as possible. They have no religious or spiritual worldview to sell. As I say: Many admire this film to no end. I found its use of recent tragic events, including the London underground bombing, to be more than a little cheap.

A facsimile of a masquerade of a gloss on "Charade," and on all the lesser cinematic charades that followed in the wake of director Stanley Donen's 1963 picture.

Dwayne Johnson leaves his lovable self behind in the violent but bland Faster.

They put the "obvious" in "obvious."

The results impart that "trapped" feeling all too well. It's a sullen affair, dominated by a grim visual palette that intrigues for about 30 minutes.

She tackled "The Tempest" on stage, years ago. On screen I wish she'd (Taymor) adapted it with a freer hand, and then directed it with a more considered one.

My God is this script predictable. Each relapse and betrayal shows up announced, and then announced again, a little louder, by the dialogue equivalent of an aggravating doorman.

Unexpectedly sour, The Dilemma barely qualifies as a comedy.

Too much. Too numbing. Too coy. And ultimately too violent.

You've seen worse. The film industry is capable of better.

For many, this central performance will be more than enough. For others, the film will simply be too much.

Here and there an image of spectral beauty, assisted by the 3-D technology, floats into view and captures our imagination. But the script, which really should've been called "Sanctimonium," has a serious case of the bends.

I found the mythology of I Am Number Four vague and sloppy.

It's secondhand, vaguely resigned material. And while Sudeikis has some talent, he's not yet ready to co-anchor a feature comedy. He's no Ed Helms, in other words.

Seyfried's a good actress, but all the art direction in the world can't make this version of events the stuff either of dreams or of nightmares.

The cast is not the limitation here. The limitation, and I found it to be a drag on this aggressively audience-pleasing indie, relates directly to its premise.

The script avoids going full-bore as satire. Where it goes instead lacks a purpose, a reason for being, beyond the usual name-checking of "The X-Files" and the like.

I didn't laugh much, nor did my 10-year-old companions, but nobody had their soul crushed by the experience. This is the film industry's Hippocratic oath: First, crush no souls.

The movie isn't dull, exactly; the problem lies in the other, antsy direction.

Heartbreakingly average, director Robert Redford's The Conspirator errs in the way so many films do, especially films about unsung pieces of American history. It focuses on the wrong character.

Writer-director Silver, who trained in documentaries, appears flummoxed by the challenges of getting the audience inside the heads of these young men.

The glibness of Wiesen's freshman effort wouldn't be a problem if the wit was there.

Green just isn't the superhero color this year.

Lasseter's sequel smooshes the vehicular ensemble of the first "Cars" into a nefarious James Bond universe, heavy on the missiles and ray guns and Gatling guns and electrocutions. Sound peculiar? It is peculiar.

The gentle erotic undertow in the friendship of Snow Flower and Lily has been toned down, and replaced by … niceness.

This is the "Babel" or "Crash" of ensemble romantic comedies, with screenwriter Dan Fogelman mapping out several narrative surprises that throw you for little loops as they're delivered.

Some comedies have the knack for affrontery and shock value; The Change-Up, written by the "Hangover" team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, merely has the will to offend.

If more of the picture had the inventively grotesque payoff of the scene set at the gymnastics tryout, capped by a female character's inarguably poor dismount, we might have something to puke home about.

What proved tasty in book form comes across a little more like work in the movie.

It's mostly noise and splurch and, as I mentioned, aaaaarrrrggggghhhhh!

To my taste there's too much of everything. The soundtrack never shuts up with the wind, the murmurings, the shudderings. And while director Nixey has talent, his indiscriminately roving camera tends to diffuse the tension, not heighten it.

Although Joffe appears to be making a Brighton version of the seductively natty evil we find stateside in "Boardwalk Empire," this Brighton Rock remains muffled, half-formed pulp fiction.

Director Madden vacillates between treating the issues and historical context of The Debt seriously, and as the story demands, as pure, heavy-handed pulp. The cast does what it can in the service of this assignment. But some jobs simply resist satisfying completion.

Doesn't know how to do what I think it's trying to do.

The script is a mess. It's an object lesson in taking a nonfiction book ("The Feather Men," about a cadre of ex-British Special Air Service operatives) and making a hash of it.

Dumb film; smart comedienne.

I suspect a lot of what I found synthetic and sort of galling in Real Steel will work just fine with the target audience.

Here and there, the actor invests the kind of feeling that makes The Way come alive in human terms.

This is a gentle, diffident concoction. But it has barely enough pulse to power a hummingbird.

The result is a film that feels hidebound. And nobody ever called a dance-driven movie "hidebound."

It's not much to hijack. But playing a lovelorn version of himself, in love with Adam Sandler in a dress, a lisp and breasts, Al Pacino holds a gun to the head of the comedy Jack and Jill and says: I now pronounce you mine.

The sequel's themes of friendship and interdependency fail to generate much momentum.

The result is a picture that is baldly manipulative yet weirdly sentimental, and while Considine (a fine actor) can write, he is capable also of writing dialogue you've heard before.

I hope Green one day finds a way to bridge the style and rhythm of his early pictures (the ones that didn't make money) and the bumper-car approach of The Sitter.

I always enjoy Elizondo; he has a way of elevating some pretty lame banter, and thanks to New Year's Eve he has his way all over again.

I fear Spielberg and Jackson hitched their wagon to the wrong technological star here.

The movie's all right, if you can take its rampant artificiality - and I'm not even talking about Parton's face yet.

Red Tails squanders a great subject, reducing the real-life struggles and fierce heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen to rickety cliche.

All the movie has, really, is Tilda Swinton acting up a storm, which is more than enough for some. For me, given what's up with the rest of the picture, it's not quite.

The supporting players in Man on a Ledge bring more to the party than the leads, and my suspension of disbelief seems to have gotten hung up in traffic while attempting to cross the suspension-of-disbelief bridge from the Brooklyn side.

The action beats come straight out of the video game "Call of Duty." And when you have real SEALs placed in a picture that lives and dies on the same old first-person-shooter aesthetic, you have a film divided against itself.

You couldn't accuse the film of practicing what it preaches: careful stewardship of a precious resource.

John Carter isn't much - or rather, it's too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations - but it is a curious sort of blur.

A smooth but frustrating third feature with an extremely good ensemble cast.

More than anything Casa de mi Padre is an exercise - and to those who find it more clever than I do, a valid one - in tone-funny, as opposed to joke-funny.

This one's just OK, but at midnight, after who knows what, OK might be enough.

Settles for being simple, familiar and ineffective, though I suspect it'll warm a few hearts.

Now and then the movie rouses itself to deliver. If you go to American Reunion - and many will, if they harbor fond memories of the first one, and if they can find a sitter - you should stay through the end credits.

Absurdly brutal slapstick is a tough thing to sustain across a feature. I spent a lot of The Three Stooges staring, not laughing. For me this was a stare-out-loud affair.

The leads' chemistry in The Lucky One is more theoretical than actual. Still, the sunsets and sunrises and sunbeams through the windowpanes fall easily on the eyes.

The Raven squanders a promising scenario while half-burying Cusack's mercurial skills as a leading man with the wiles of a character actor.

Dark Shadows illustrates the fine line in a pop reboot between "relaxed" and "lazy."

The movie lacks wit.

Keener alone finds the truth between the lines of this routine affair. She can't do much about the lines she has to say out loud, but as all first-rate screen performers realize, words are only part of the story.

The movie, full of talented performers in search of a more propulsive vehicle, settles for workmanlike cover-band status, which makes this a cover-band tribute to a jukebox musical - a long way from true, trashy exhilaration.

It sounds fun. It's a little fun. For a while. But Bekmanbetov shoots every killing spree like an addled gamer, working that slow-down-speed-up kill-shot cliche like a maniac.

What it doesn't have is a way of making sense of its comic and dramatic strains, together, in the same movie.

A fine and moving film could be made from this story, which was inspired, loosely, by events and situations in the lives of Kurtzman and Orci. But the script sets an awfully low bar for Sam's redemption.

The movie strolls through its paces, sometimes amusingly, though by the end you've heard "Volare" and "Arrivederci Roma" reprised often enough to make you wish "Volare" and "Arrivederci Roma" had never been written.

You can find this clever, or you can find it lazy, and this is why MacFarlane is the biggest mixed blessing in contemporary TV comedy: He is both.

It's not as if Stone is above this sort of pulp. But as rejiggered for the movies, Savages has trouble making us care what happens to the beautiful people - the untouchables - at the center of the sun-baked fairy tale.

But even with the great good efforts of Wallis, the results, to some of us, betray a distrustworthy slickness reminiscent of a British Petroleum oil spill clean-up commercial.

It's not very funny, but your kids might like it.

It sticks in the craw. The whole movie does.

"The Bourne Identity." "The Bourne Supremacy." "The Bourne Ultimatum." And now, "The Pointless, Confused and Then, For the Last Half-Hour, Exciting Bourne Sequel, After a Fashion," more commonly known as The Bourne Legacy.

To say The Paperboy doesn't work is one thing; to say it's dull is a lie. This movie is berserk, which is more interesting than "eh."

The result is a placid tale of impulses running wild. Farino is a smooth operator, but he puts little on screen that feels like life, as opposed to a middle-of-the-road indie.

The sharpest five minutes in Alex Cross, by a considerable margin, belong to Giancarlo Esposito.

Many of the original film's booby-trap scenarios are repeated here, but without Milius' grandiosity and nihilism. There's less of both in the new Red Dawn. It's not a disaster. It's just drab.

By the two-hour mark the fun had oozed out of the movie for me. It's long. Or feels it.

More an argument than a fully fleshed-out drama ... The script is unconvincing; two key narrative twists, one related to the other, are deeply hokey.

The pathos: considerable. The sight gags, involving Crystal puking chili dog on a kid's face, or the grandson with an imaginary friend peeing and causing an X Games skateboarder to wipe out: artless. The results: tolerably amusing.

A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise.

I like Duhamel, and in her first straight-up dramatic role Hough does well enough, though her singing and/dancing career thus far has trained her to oversell, as opposed to sell, as opposed to act naturally.

When classy, pedigreed British actors go hog-wild under the flowering dogwood trees of a Southern Gothic setting, often the results are good. Just as often they're so bad they're good. And sometimes, as is the case with Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson in Beautiful Creatures, they're simply doing the best they can under the circumstances.

The film is ruled by sound and fury signifying an attempt to launch a new franchise.

Robinson is undone partly by his own workmanlike touch as a writer, and partly by matters of casting. I like Harris, and he's quite moving here, but every time Duchovny reappears the overall energy level sinks to crush depth.

This one's likely to vex both history buffs and those who require some drama with their drama.

Without a strong narrative engine, Upside Down ends up exactly where it shouldn't go: sideways.

Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.

The directive behind this sequel, clearly, was non-stop action. Let's think about that phrase a second. Do we really want our action movies to deliver action that does not stop? Ever? I get a little tired of action sequences that won't stop.

Evil Dead offers the core audience for modern horror plenty of reasons to jump, and then settle back, tensely, while awaiting the next idiotic trip down to the cellar beneath the demon-infested cabin in the woods.

Oblivion is odder and less conventional than your average forgettable star vehicle; at times it feels like a five-character play taking place in a digital-effects lab. But there's not much energy to it.

The movie's own brand of charm has its subset of smarm.

Much as I enjoy the actors I didn't buy a word or frame of Arthur Newman.

A chaotic headbanger, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is saved from pure flat-footed blockbuster franchise adequacy by six things, three of them on Hugh Jackman's left hand, three on his right.

Despite a few good ideas and the uniformly splendid production and costume designs by Luhrmann's mate and partner, Catherine Martin, this frenzied adaptation of The Great Gatsby is all look and no feel.

Doesn't provoke bittersweet inquiries regarding one poor actress' grisly fate. Nor does it stir up much provocation on the matter of why, as a popular audience, we're still taken with this lurid symbol of sex and dread and desire. Rather, the movie raises a much simpler question: Huh?

The film is a fancy-pants muddle in terms of technique. And if Bloom doesn't do something about his smirky tendency to troll for audience approval, his career may be severely limited.

Only the architecturally refined bone structure of Kristin Scott Thomas' face rescues Keeping Mum from full-on tedium.

Levinson has written and directed in many genres. But rarely has he made a film as indecisive and diffident as Man of the Year.

Despite valiant efforts from Czerny and from the fine stage actress Vilma Silva, who plays one of Walsch's many saviors, the result would qualify as a blandly inspirational amateur hour if the running time weren't closer to two.

Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald's ambitious but hopelessly inchoate AIDS drama is actually three separate, sequentially-told stories.

The stalwart American hero of Turistas comes off as a dislikable blank in the hands of Josh Duhamel, of the TV series "Las Vegas." More relaxed is Melissa George, who co-stars as the Aussie.

The Good German is just stiff. When Soderbergh tries one of those patented swoop-in-on-the-diagonal moves at a key dramatic moment, the effect is comic. And at that precise moment, the story starts dying a slow, oxygen-deprived death.

If the writers had the guts (and the jokes) to fashion a bittersweet comedy with a fully earned happy ending, Unaccompanied Minors probably wouldn't have been made. As is, it's a prefab slapstick-'n'-pathos stew that doesn't taste like anything.

Stranded in this charmless fantasy, Stiller is reduced to his old halting, squirming tricks.

A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.

Formulaic romantic junk.

Black Snake Moan strikes me as hogwash. It fundamentally does not work; its consciously far-fetched, out-there notions of the things damaged people do in the name of love are reductive and go only so far. It's as if the premise were tethered to a radiator or something.

Calling a sequel Are We Done Yet? is like calling it "Enough Already."

Ludicrous and overstuffed, it plows through the Big 10 of Biblical plagues.

A clammy little number that might've been funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

Most of the ingredients for a strong, tough film are there, and they have been sadly botched by a few key collaborators.

The line between cool and cold is a thin one, however. Cool isn't the word for "Thirteen"; it's just smug.

Carell's pal and "Daily Show" colleague Jon Stewart has a cameo as himself, one of a chorus of godless media star non-believers who do not see God's larger plan for Evan. Yes, well. At least "The Daily Show" is funny.

Williams' grimace is starting to look desperate. Then again, no one comes off well in director Ken Kwapis' handling of this greasy screenplay.

The film suggests Lohan probably (allegedly) should've gone after her agent the other night, not the mother of an ex-personal assistant.

It's all very "Scarface"--the De Palma remake of "Scarface," not the Hawks original. In other words, it doesn't feel modern at all. It feels about a generation late and 400 years short.

Freshman Orientation is not incompetently made. Nor is it badly acted. But there’s not a fresh idea in it, and everyone on screen seems to be in a different comedy.

Lapica isn't yet enough of a writer or director (or an actor) to make the dramatic arc unpredictable in any way. It may be effective for some as therapy. It is far less so as cinematic storytelling.

I find Lars and the Real Girl adorable in the worst way, bailed out only by most every member of its excellent cast.

All you want from a movie like this, really, is a little brainless fun, and it keeps holding out on you. Everyone looks fatigued. Even Cage’s toupee seems ambivalent about having signed on for a sequel.

Diane Keaton--now there’s a trouper for you. She will not be caught giving less than 110 percent, even in a drab little heist comedy.

CJ7 is roughly as grating as that “Flubber” remake.

The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.

Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.

The court scenes are rarely funny, either in the trash talk or the slapstick.

As generic as its title, College Road Trip feels like a first draft, the one the studio brings to the rewrite team that, in this case, never got hired.

Despite honorable work from Theron, Robb and Stahl, Sleepwalking makes good on its title in a not-so-good way.

Moving slowly these days, Reynolds does less than no acting in this role, and he’s still the best thing in Deal.

Dempsey's pleasant enough, but he hasn't yet learned how to play against a mediocre script's obviousness. Monaghan has, which is gratifying.

The screenplay by Dana Fox (she was one of the rewriters of "27 Dresses") devolves into a series of humiliating pranks that always give the upper narrative hand to the male lead. Talk about depressing. I mean, that's what male screenwriters are for--to unfairly stack the deck against the female leads.

Staggers and wanders and feels far longer than its 85 minutes, and it's best considered a calling card for better things to come.

After the insufferably dense mermaid mythology of "Lady in the Water," Shyamalan clearly wanted to keep things simple. He whizzed straight past "simple" to simplistic.

The Love Guru”does not bring out Myer's best, and aside from a deft early Bollywood parody, there’s nothing visually to help the fun along.

Not even Smith's charisma can mitigate the chaos that is Hancock.

The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over.

It wanders and putters and follows its main characters around.

The appeal of the film version, such as it is, relates almost entirely to eye-for-an-eye, severed-limb-for-a-limb vengeance, two hours and 41 minutes of it, with just enough solemnity to make anyone who thought "The Dark Knight" was a little gassy think twice about which superhero myth THEY'RE calling gassy.

It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.

The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.

Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.

It's rather sweet to think of Filth and Wisdom as Madonna's reconnection to her own boho Manhattan striver self a generation ago, and I did enjoy the last five minutes or so, when the movie essentially stopped and Hutz's band, Gogol Bordello, took over.

I enjoyed Eliza Dushku's mad poetess, probably for the wrong reasons, but with a project this meager, you take your artful sneers and scenic diversions where you can get them.

Seven Pounds has a heart as big as all outdoors. Unfortunately it's made out of high-fructose bull.

Bride Wars really does not capture the mood of the moment. It comes from a different time, a different planet.

This material is offensive. The film may end with a straight-faced reassurance that "no actual Torah scrolls were destroyed or damaged in the making of this motion picture," but it's perfectly willing to exploit the Holocaust for cheap, weak thrills.

Feels about 150 years out of date.

Astonishingly, Angels & Demons IS the same sort of lumbering mediocrity.

It's tough to get on board with these monsters. They don't get the banter they--or we--deserve, and the screenwriters lean on wearying stereotypes.

A coming-of-ager that nearly slaughters you by minute 30 with the relentlessness of its protagonist's voiceovers.

The movie's heart, of course, is with poor addled Mike and his kids, but 17 Again works only fitfully to make the Efron/Perry character worth a story.

Ferrell may well shoulder the blame for Land of the Lost, even if he doesn't deserve it. He did, however, willingly participate in this coarse, sloppy big-screen version of the old Saturday-morning time-warp adventure.

Fox's cleavage is the only camera object that catches Bay's attention for more than a millisecond.

Easy Virtue may be a bauble, as Larita's described at one point, but Coward's examination of hypocrisy demands real skill. The style should suggest "whipped cream with knives," as Stephen Sondheim once described "A Little Night Music." Elliott's film is more like curdled milk with a spork.

How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big.

The pacing throughout is languid. Your eye becomes fixated on the hideous 70s wallpaper behind them. If only the story's interstellar narrative developments had the intensity of that wallpaper. Rod Serling might've gotten a great hour out of it (the story, that is, not the wallpaper). It simply is not two hours' worth, no matter how many quantum leaps into the unknown Kelly takes.

I wish the movie made emotional sense, because it’s all about getting in touch with whatever’s holding you back, but it doesn’t.

It's a serious drag to see how Ritchie has turned Holmes and Dr. Watson into a couple of garden-variety thugs.

Not so much character-driven as character-dragged--against its will.

Numbingly gory when it isn’t just plain numbing.

There’s nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn’t fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story.

This is “True Lies” without the striptease or the Arab-maiming.

The scenery's nice. But once you've said the scenery's nice, you're no longer talking about a movie worth talking about.

The poster’s the funniest thing about the project: Johnson, sporting a pair of fairy wings larger than his forearms, glaring at the camera.

Certain scenes in When in Rome signify nothing less than the death of screen slapstick, but I’m hoping it’s one of those fake-out movie deaths where it’s not really dead, not forever.

The acting's not the problem, and it's a nice thing to find Moore playing a human-scaled human being, with a recognizable human touch. The material has a hint of it too. But only a hint.

We have to take the sexual tension on faith, as with everything in this formulaic glob of a script.

It may well be a hit, but me, I'm waiting for "Iron Man 2."

The film is perfectly mediocre, which is heartbreaking, not heartwarming.

A weak romantic comedy.

As robust and clever an actor as Cox is, he can't make Jacques any less of a blowhard; Kari's wit simply doesn't come through in English, at least with this script.

The tragedy is that the performance comes to nothing. Nearly everything else in the film is vile.

Knight and Day may well suffice for audiences desperate for the bankable paradox known as the predictable surprise, and willing to overlook a galumphing mediocrity in order to concentrate on matters of dentistry.

For me, the mechanics or even the (excellent) designs are not enough. Jeunet's archness keeps conventional empathy or engagement at bay, and by design maintains a tone of artificiality.

The Last Airbender (they couldn't use the series' "Avatar" title because another film got there first, without all the bending) is more about marshaling extras and interpolating tons of computer-generated effects and keeping the factions straight. It's a tough sit.

What could have been a juicy, pulpy noir, based loosely on the real-life 1976 Mustang Ranch love triangle involving Joe and Sally Conforte and Sally's boxer paramour, instead has the dramatic consistency of rice milk.

A remake for schlemiels, or at least easy marks when it comes to formulaic Hollywood comedy. But the film's peculiar sluggishness and nagging hypocrisy probably won't get in the way of its popularity.

Director Burr Steers milks them dry, like an overeager farmer at milking time, which is a paradox since this is the wettest picture of 2010, what with the sea spray and Efron's tear ducts and the general metaphysical mist.

It's reductive, insanely violent slapstick, but that's the phenomenon in a nutshell.

The choicest dialogue in Burlesque provokes the sort of laughter that other, intentionally funny films only dream of generating.

Aiming for a piece with the raw impact of "Precious," on which he served as executive producer, he (Perry) ends up with 134 minutes of misjudged intensity.

Their (The Brothers Strause) effects are pretty good, on a fairly limited budget. And that's about all you can say for Skyline.

The pathos really are shameless, arriving with killing regularity and false humility.

The sole memorable scene involving a little Focker in Little Fockers, though memorable doesn't mean amusing, involves Ben Stiller's male-nurse character administering a needle full of adrenaline to his dyspeptic and unhappily aroused father-in-law Jack Byrnes, played by Robert De Niro.

It is, for what it is, a work of considerable care and craft. And it's completely soulless.

Take Me Home Tonight, believe me, you've already seen.

On the whole, I'd rather be on Pluto, which isn't even a planet.

An exhaustingly pushy, phallocentric and witlessly smutty spoof of early '80s medieval fantasies such as "Krull" and "The Beastmaster."

Hanna presents the problem of the well-made diversion that is, at its core, repellent.

The wastrel Sparrow ends up both overexploited and underpowered in this fourth outing.

Hangover II is more like a spitball meeting, a series of ideas that might, in theory, be good enough for a sequel, than it is an actual movie.

Maybe this review is more about me than about Conan O'Brien, but I really couldn't get past the odor of self-congratulation emanating from nearly every scene in Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.

A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy.

The events of the movie may be a little bit true, or a lot, but hardly any of it plays that way.

The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.

Reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness.

If actors this good cannot overcome their material, then we can only say: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock … Max von Sydow, Zoe Caldwell, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman… thanks for your honest efforts in the service of a fundamentally dishonest weepie.

Hutcherson spits his lines out as quickly as possible, which you appreciate, because the way the likable Johnson wrestles with his lines ("It looks like the liquefaction has tripled overnight!") you think, well, it's a living.

Madonna stayed married to director Guy Ritchie just long enough to absorb his most grating cinematic instincts - shooting in every style, in an addled, shuffle-mode, falsely glamorizing way until all is chaos. And, astonishingly, boredom.

The storytelling proceeds in such a halting manner, with De Niro's speeches going on and on and on, that before long you'd kill for an easy scare.

Here and there, in the father/son scenes, you see a glimmer of an honest interaction. All in all, I'd rather watch a "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" rerun.

Because The Campaign tries to say something about truth vs. hogwash in election season, it's doubly sad the efforts of screenwriters Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell come to so little.

Hit & Run is pretty rancid as comedy. Worse, the chases are strictly amateur hour, all shortcut editing and no gut satisfaction.

Calling Dredd 3D a movie is sort of a lie. It's a premise, and there are levels to reach, and always there's another grimy hallway to stalk, and then you turn right or left, and then kill some more.

Davis, in particular, manages to create a fully dimensional character in the midst of a highly polemical screenplay.

Boasts one moment, perhaps three or four seconds in length, so delightfully intense and uncharacteristically juicy that the rest of the film - most of the rest of the whole series, in fact - looks pretty pale by comparison. Not vampire pale. Paler.

Only Biel and Greer lift it above the level of bleh.

The camera bobs and weaves like a drunk, frantically. So you have hammering close-ups, combined with woozy insecurity each time more than two people are in the frame. Twenty minutes into the retelling of fugitive Valjean, his monomaniacal pursuer Javert, the torch singers Fantine and Eponine and the rest, I wanted somebody to just nail the damn camera to the ground.

Gordon is lost, and his style of shooting - telescopic close-ups, which never give us enough space to appreciate the performers - feels wrong for comedy.

This is a fantasy grab bag in which nearly anything can happen.

Isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone serves as a reminder that everything in a film has a chance to go wrong before a film begins filming. In other words: It's the script, stupid.

It's Bay World. And after an hour of Pain & Gain, it felt more like "Pain & Pain."

Gordon, she of the Selma Diamond voice and mournful glare, is by far the most interesting aspect in a picture that might be termed unreleasably dull, if it weren't in fact in release at the moment en route to DVD.

Kathy Baker, as Burden's elegantly sodden mother, shows the only sign of interpretive life in this stiff-jointed enterprise. She has about five minutes on screen; she's lucky that way.

Rosenbush strives for a difficult blend of spoof and sincerity with Zen Noir. In the spirit of rebirth, let's assume that the next time he makes it, it'll turn out fine.

A half-silly, half-earnest indie with the soul of a John Hughes-era sex comedy.

Laughing at the freaks and then feeling bad about it is the sole reason for the existence of this pale little film.

Shottas exists purely in the realm of rasta-music-video fakery.

Writer-director Stewart Wade expanded his festival-circuit short film into a blobby, watery feature-length enterprise, unredeemed by its cast (though Sally Kirkland shows up as Todd's mom).

Watching Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh and a stridently adorable Alan Cumming do their wide-eyed, moony thing in the romantic comedy Gray Matters raises the question: Is it possible for a filmgoer to be twinkled to death?

Macy's character finds romance with the Madrid, N. M., diner owner played by Marisa Tomei. They're the only two people on screen who relate in any way. But there's no movie here. There is only a tired "City Slickers"-inspired idea for a movie.

Without the brute vigilante junk, this 82-minute picture would be approximately 2 minutes long.

It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.

Not-funniest comedy of the year so far.

Good Luck Chuck is this year’s low-ender to beat.

Monaghan’s comic timing saves this go-nowhere affair from 100 percent lousiness.

The preposterous 88 Minutes is a serial killer movie starring Al Pacino's festival of hair.

Sucks a whole lot of talented people into a wormhole of lousy. The film either needed to be a lot wittier to make up for the way it looks, or a lot better-looking to compensate for the funny it isn't.

A whopper this isn't. It's not even a Whopper Junior. It's the paper the Whopper Junior came in.

At what point might animators be arrested for doing work so ugly it causes aesthetic blindness in millions of younglings?

Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.

The vocal characterizations aren't the problem here; the script and the animation are the problems, and in feature animation, you can't arrange more significant problems than those.

Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster--it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie--is the presence of Mark Wahlberg.

As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.

This one's a certifiable soul-sucker, dining out on its characters' venalities while wagging a finger at the horror, the horror.

A funny thing happened to Larry Doyle's 2007 debut novel on the way to the multiplex. It turned into its own ring of coming-of-age comedy hell.

None of it is funny. It’s all pain and no funny.

Just the same auld same auld.

A buddy cop film in which one of the cops continually quotes dialogue espoused by fictional cops, in everything from "Heat" to "RoboCop," and not once is it funny.

Haven't we seen the oh-my-gosh-my-spouse-is-secretly-an-assassin-but-you-know-a-nice-one routine once too often?

The exhausting slapstick violence is the film's chief variation, and it's no fun at all.

Yogi Bear gives cheap hackwork a bad name. Which is a shame, because hackwork made this industry.

What's remarkable about the remake is its nastiness.

Offers only one point of interest beyond the breasts of its second female lead: Aniston's barely disguised disdain for her material.

This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.

As if by deliberate and vaguely sadistic design, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil leeches the fun clean out of the first "Hoodwinked" (2005).

It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.

It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….

This latest version is le pits.

Certainly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creations have suffered permanent damage thanks to Ritchie's films.