It's a scramble, marked by the unruly variety of visual strategies Lee prefers.

21 isn’t pretentious, exactly, but it’s damn close, and in trying to whip up a melodramatic morality tale the film becomes an increasingly flabby slog.

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

The aftereffects of watching Lockout include an inability to focus or to complete a simple declarative sentence without an ill-timed cutaway in the middle.

It's junk, and it's excessively violent, which is a given. Approach it as a Stallone movie (which it is) or as a Hill movie (which it is), but it's more interesting as a Hill movie. If it gets this director back into the hard-driving action game, then it will have done its duty.

Rarely has the question of a documentary's artifice mattered less. I genuinely hated this picture, almost as much as I've admired Phoenix's work in everything from "Gladiator" to "Walk the Line" and even the hackneyed but affecting "Two Lovers."

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

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

Twenty or 30 minutes into Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium the urge to flee may rise within you like an oceanic tide. But stick with it. The film is very sweet--in fact it represents the dawn of a new sport, Extreme Whimsy.

I wish it were truly special instead of an interesting near-miss.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Hedges is a determined romantic and a bit of a saphead. He's also humane.

I like the end-credits sequence best, which has nothing to do with hoary complications or the miseries of stardom or the magical spellbinding powers of a cheap wig.

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.

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).

A satisfying and movingly acted story.

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.

Kasdan has inherited much of his father's surface skills; he knows how to round out a scene and keep things on story point. But In the Land of Women doesn't for a moment feel messy and chaotic where it counts.

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.)

Timberlake is not afraid to make himself look like an idiot. He is, in fact, already the comic actor Diaz may yet become: a looker who knows how to use his looks to get away with murder.

This is the sort of film where a character says “Here we are, having a high-minded debate ...” and you wonder if countless moviegoers will be rolling their eyes in unison.

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

Just about everything in the video-gamey World War I picture Flyboys rings false, although the planes certainly are terrific.

This one may be soft and derivative. But the actors establish a groove and stay on-message.

The eerily precise Heigl, who provided confident back-court support as the exile in Guyville also known as “Knocked Up,” has no trouble filling a leading lady’s shoes. She’s just snarky enough to be interesting, and she knows how to take a fall.

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

Dominated by Adam Sandler's D-minus Bela Lugosi impression, the 3-D animated feature Hotel Transylvania illustrates the difference between engaging a young movie audience and agitating it, with snark and noise and everything but the funny.

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.

The story is both a muddle and a drag.

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.

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

One wishes LaBute, a bleak satirist and, at his best, a crudely compelling dramatist, had taken the script and made it his own sort of twisted comedy instead of a routine thriller

"Relief" is the word for it. It's a relief to see Robert De Niro giving an honest, effective starring performance in a project that does not stink and that, in fact, rises to a respectable level of filmmaking proficiency. How long has it been?

Until a leaden third act, it IS reasonably entertaining.

It's quite thin, but at least Black Rock plays its "kills" for more than stupid gamer's diversions.

Unexpectedly sour, The Dilemma barely qualifies as a comedy.

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

They should've thrown everything away except the title and the outline. That's what the "Devil Wears Prada" creative team did, and that film turned out a lot richer than this one.

The best efforts of the performers cannot authenticate a plot that no longer feels inevitable. It feels contrived. And the audience stays at a remove instead of entering someone else’s nightmare.

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

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.

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.

The CGI is relentless and what you might call reverse-magical: The more we're hit with stuff, the less wondrous it becomes.

Next Day Air is sort of bracing, though it isn't very good: Its total lack of dramatic and comic bearings, to say nothing of a point, keeps you wondering about the next fatality, in a half-interested way.

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.

If it weren't for Kate Lyn Sheil, who has a couple of scenes as a blase Brooklyn waitress inexplicably ending up in the protagonist's bed, 'The Comedy' might well have qualified as the worst film of 2012.

It's relaxed without being sloppy, or patronizing, and in particular Witherspoon and Lemmon - sorry, make that Rudd - bring charm to burn.

You live in a free country, you put up with crud like Hostel Part II. It truly is crud, though.

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

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

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.

Turns out to be nothing special. Well, the music is. The storytelling is not.

Starts out wobbly but ends up quite nicely, primarily because Carrey has a wonderful acting partner in Zooey Deschanel.

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

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

Noisy, unsubtle, but it gets the job done.

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

Enough with the snatching, already.

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.

It is passable comic book stuff, dumb and loud. Loud. LOUD.

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

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

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."

This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.

It is a silly film about serious matters.

Full of interesting little grace notes, and the cast is excellent, yet it grows more and more frustrating.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, as some Albanian dramatist once said, but Taken 2 isn't good-cold, as in steely and purposeful; it's cold as in "lost the scent."

It boasts a generous exuberance and, as entertainment products go, it's surprisingly sweet.

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.

A genial, sloppy, minor affair, offering a smidgen of inside baseball, which includes a gag at the expense of the forgotten, late '80s Lucas-produced epic "Willow."

This film was not based on a video game, but that's the vibe and the aesthetic at work here: YEAH! KILL!, followed by a few muttered expressions of the horror, the horror.

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.

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?

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.

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.

All the astute acting in the world can’t bring such a preposterous story into the station on time and intact.

As a series of sights, which movies like these are, Oz the Great and Powerful is more like "Oz the Digital and Relentless." Certainly this is true in its final half-hour, which seemed to me to be all explosions.

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

The performances and Marcos Siega’s direction put a pleasing sheen on the material.

Why does “New Moon” basically work, even with its grave self-seriousness? A few reasons. Weitz lets the material breathe, and his actors interact. The film does not try to eat you alive.

The results are corny beyond measure. Yet there's something sweet about them, in part because there's something sweet about hearing the line "Congratulations! Why didn't you tell me you pledged?" outside the realm of comedy.

Unfortunately it’s all a bit dull.

A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy isn't just not funny, it's totally just not funny.

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

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

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.

While Brand manages a couple of effectively brutal bits of violence, Matthew Waynee's gassy screenplay is all premise and no propulsion.

A massive and rather tiring showcase for Bollywood action hero Akshay Kumar.

The movie is ALL revenge, all the time

To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better” is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.

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.

Routine cinema but rich history.

A surprisingly heartfelt father/son relationship, handled with restraint by director Todd Holland.

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

The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.

Making her feature-film directorial debut, Grant is going for an everyday conversational texture and a sense of life's curveballs. But the results wander and you never really believe them.

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.

The Vow is agreeable enough. It may be puddin'-headed but it's not soul-crushing.

The movie marches in predictable formations as well. But when Biel's rebel pulls over in her hover car and asks Farrell if he'd like a ride, your heart may sing as mine did.

Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax.

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.

Too much of the film is a muddle, and it feels like work, not play.

A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.

The heartbreaking thing about Meet Dave...is its occasional funniness amid a sea of pablum. If it were completely rank, it'd be less frustrating.

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.

The film moves along, in its paradoxically static way, at a pretty fair clip. I look forward to Green's follow-up.

The actors are strong, however, and Banks in particular shows some skill and wiles in keeping her rascally stepmother stereotype lively.

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.

Nothing in director Paul W.S. Anderson's schlock drawer--prepares you for the peppy, good-time nastiness that is Death Race.

The film is likable. Its messages, many of them Lord-oriented, are all equally heartfelt.

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

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

Unlike a few other well-drilled young actress-singers we could name, such as the one whose name rhymes with "Riley Myrus," Gomez knows how to relax on camera.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Stoopid fun, From Paris With Love doesn't do much for Paris or love, or your brain cells, but it flies like a crazed eagle on uppers and comes from the talented, propulsive schlocketeer Pierre Morel.

A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy.

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

Nothing elegant about Adams here, but she's terrific -- a sparkling screen presence. Her Earhart hoists this big-budget sequel above the routine.

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.

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.

Hinges on humiliation and vengeance, which makes it like most other modern horror titles. Its focus on sexual assault, however, puts it in a different, more primal league.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Arkin in particular can barely hide his lack of enthusiasm for the material. Some of the looks he shoots his co-stars appear to contain a secret code of some kind, deciphered as: 'Well, at least I'm in 'Argo.'"

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.

"Superbad” got a deserved R rating for its unmitigated and gleeful raunch. Drillbit Taylor is cleaner in mouth but far uglier in spirit. Wilson and Mann do what they can to tone it up, but their scenes belong to a different film, and a fresher one.

Toward the end, G-Force starts making no sense at all, neither tonally or narratively. It may not matter to the target audience, though the look on my son's face when it was over was pure Buster Keaton. He says he liked it well enough. Me, a little less.

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.

The nuttiest hunk of junk in many months.

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

With a less pedigreed international cast the whole thing would be a disaster, as opposed to a chilly new kind of disaster film.

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.

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.

With an uneven and overstuffed script you appreciate the corner-of-the-mouth comments as delivered by Steve Buscemi.

Once it gets going and commits to its time-worn inspirational formula, it's not half-bad.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu, confining his usual two-and-a-half-note vocal range to half that.

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.

Green just isn't the superhero color this year.

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.

Since I sort of liked “Step Up 2: The Streets,” I’m not surprised I sort of liked the remake of Fame.

Sloppy, grimy but quick on its feet, which puts it ahead of certain other (“The Hangover”) R-rated comedies (“The Hangover”) we’ve seen this summer (“The Hangover”).

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

As skillful and charismatic as Gere is, I never get the sense he's really in there, conversing with his fellow actor.

The movie begins with a tragedy and eases into a more interesting blend of drama and comedy than we've gotten in this genre lately.

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

So it’s one of those Hip, Now updates, albeit with jokes riffing on pop-cult artifacts that are already Then. I mean: “Jerry Maguire”? Moratorium!

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

It’s a little “Karate Kid,” a smidge of “Fight Club” (with none of the ironic ambivalence toward violence that David Fincher brought to that story), a lot of “The O.C.” (evil boy Gigandet played an evil boy on that series), and presto: probable hit.

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

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.

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.

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

Eragon is a bit cheesy, but I rather liked it. It's sincere cheese... The special effects -- which include glowing-eyed heroes and villains, and flights over the mythical land of Alagaesia depicted in "dragon vision" -- are refreshing in their slightly out-of-date air.

For an hour The Rite, as scripted by Michael Petroni, delivers the expected, but with panache.

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

The movie expresses honest concern for the plight of so many newcomers to America, legal or illegal. What it lacks is moment-to-moment credibility.

It's more or less a grown-up picture, and not bad at that, though its muted and patient style has both its merits and its drawbacks. Still, as I say: not bad.

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

Distressingly ordinary for such an extraordinary subject.

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.

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.

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.

Half the time I wasn't sure what Lee was going for in terms of tone, or style, or focus. It was a tricky assignment to begin with, because McBride's novel, and his screenplay, is part socio-historical corrective, part magical-realist folklore, part wartime procedural.

The film is half rutting goat, half preacher.

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.

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.

This script bumps along, good ideas jostling with weak, derivative ones, and Seftel doesn't seem to know which way he wants to handle the material. Also, with Cusack playing yet another soul-fried wiseacre running on emotional autopilot, the piece doesn't have much of an engine.

It's a soul-crusher, and when I say it may be the most dehumanizing experience since "Hostel: Part II" the comparison is not an idle one.

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.

Original, it's not. Exciting, it is. This jacked-up B-movie hybrid of "Black Hawk Down" and "War of the Worlds" is a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche.

At its best, it's buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.

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.

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

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

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

Are the results funny? In the margins, yes.

The most vivid aspect of The Eye is its poster image, that of a huge female eye with a human hand gripping the lower lid from the inside. The least vivid aspect is the way Jessica Alba delivers a simple line of expository dialogue.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It sticks in the craw. The whole movie does.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Nothing is harder and more elusive than successful slapstick onscreen. Nothing.

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

Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.

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

The film may as well be titled "Stephenie Meyer's Waiting Around."

The material may be formulaic, but the spirit of the piece is friendly.

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.

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

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.

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.

Dumb film; smart comedienne.

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.

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

This latest version is le pits.

A weak romantic comedy.

Despite my McConaughey resistance I got more guilty chuckles from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past than "Failure to Launch" or "Four Christmases."

My Life in Ruins will neither ruin nor change nor significantly impact your life.

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.

It's the knockabout biblical lark Mel Brooks never got around to making.

Numbingly gory when it isn’t just plain numbing.

Emmerich has no time for poetry or magic, even when the director and his digital wizards (here doing wildly variable work) are trying to dazzle. He’s a taskmaster and a field marshall, not a visionary. But I enjoyed 10,000 B.C. more and more, and more than just about anything Emmerich’s done before.

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

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.

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.

Clean enough to fly the Walt Disney Pictures flag, yet it's full of bimbos and cleavage and shots of Adam Sandler getting kicked in the shins by a dwarf.

The cast is enjoyable, with Jason Segel (as Gulliver's lil' pal, Horatio) and Emily Blunt (the local princess) a witty cut above for this sort of thing.

Snyder must have known in preproduction that his greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale wasn't going to satisfy anyone but himself.

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.

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."

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

The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it's not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so.

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

Not-funniest comedy of the year so far.

If you want a relationship comedy that feels like last year's stuff, doesn't go far enough in any direction and is made watchable only by an overqualified ensemble, there's The Ex.

By the end of this modest, strange venture, Leto made me believe it was worth being forced to hang out on the sidewalk with this man, if only to get a creeping sense of what that might’ve been like.

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.

G.I. Joe may not be beefier, but it’s cheesier and less aggravating than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," the summer ’09 headbanger it most resembles.

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.

The film's tone is utterly indistinct, beyond fatuous adoration of its subject.

Strives to be nothing more than easygoing and heartwarming.

I like its devotion to the drab outskirts of Sin City, and Buscemi's performance is right up his alley without being entirely predictable.

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.

I didn't half-mind Fired Up, but half a mind is more than it deserves.

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.

It lacks the rutting nuttiness of "Basic Instinct," even as it recycles much of that film's kiss-or-kill premise.

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

Pure, witless discombobulation.

Even with 87.5 years to go, the 21st century may never see a stupider comedy than That's My Boy.

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?

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.

The film is responsible, earnest, well-intentioned and, as it was in Sundance, maddeningly inconsistent.

With her arresting, off-kilter look of bruised desire, Michelle Williams ends up being the most interesting aspect of this somber corn.

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.

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

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

The film works a bit better than the 2004 "Punisher" installment, the one starring surly, dislikable Thomas Jane as Frank Castle.

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 slapstick is crudely executed. And the movie never makes up its mind regarding how nasty the ghost of Kate is going to play her revenge tactics.

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.

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.

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

As Premonition zigzags toward its solution it loses its head completely, packing a risible final reel with left-field religious disquisitions and heartfelt warnings against infidelity.

New in Town is "The Pajama Game" without the songs, the laughs or the bare-knuckled realism.

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

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.

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

Feels about 150 years out of date.

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

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.

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."

It's not just the sound of crickets you hear watching this movie. It's the sound of dead crickets.

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.

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

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

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.

Formulaic romantic junk.

In A Thousand Words the camera stays about two inches from Murphy's hyperactive face, and you start to see the strain and desperation in the actor's eyes.

The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell in hell.

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.

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

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

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