Something has been lost in the translation, and it's not just the script.

The film's biggest miracle is the straight face Nick Nolte maintains in his role as Socrates.

Butter dearly wants to be a hot-button social satire that plays rough with sacred cows: Midwestern power-moms, the religious right, race, sex, you name it. Mostly, it wants to be an Alexander Payne movie from the 1990s. "Citizen Ruth," say, or "Election." Instead, it's a shrill, cartoonish mess.

Before this urban revenge melodrama falls apart in a clatter of plot absurdities and pretensions, it has its loopy charms.

The results are -- there’s no other word for it -- a disaster.

Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.

It's off-putting, rude, misshapen, and more often than not hysterically funny. The second half, sadly, is an ear-splitting train wreck.

The dialogue is brightly self-conscious, and sometimes it clicks. Just as often it curdles into an entitled whining.

It's coherent, well shot, and tartly acted, but it wears you down like a dinner guest showing off his doctorate.

There are about 15 minutes of genuine, bust-a-gut comedy in Bringing Down the House, and, surprisingly, they belong to Steve Martin, who hasn't been funny on film in years.

Life as We Know It gives bland and predictable a good name.

A "great poet" movie, the poet in this case being Dylan Thomas, and it's utter bollocks.

There's an interesting movie in here, too, about the isolation of Indian brides brought to a new country by strange new husbands and mistreated, but Provoked rarely ducks below its glossy surface to go there.

Like most family movies these days, "Alvin" is torn between the glitz that sells and the homilies that endure. It's a load of Ting Tang Wallet-Wallet Bling Blang.

One walks out of Man of the Year aching for the squandered opportunities.

You'll come away from Legendary with no sense of what amateur wrestling is about.

The Sitter pushes the envelope with such sloppy gusto that you have to give in occasionally, and its comic timing finds its rhythm about every fifth joke.

Watching Arthur and the Invisibles is like sticking your head in a Gallic pinball machine: It's hectic, technically impressive, and your skull starts to pound after a while.

This is quite enjoyable as creature features go, and Bale continues to demonstrate his curious under-the-radar appeal. As for McConaughey, let's just say a star is reborn. Suddenly that whole naked-bongo-playing incident makes a lot more sense.

Young children and adults with high pain thresholds will enjoy the movie during its brief pause on the way to your On Demand menu.

For a movie that's sexist, racist, and possibly the most deeply closeted gay love story to be released this year, After the Sunset is reasonably entertaining.

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

Like everything in this humorless new genre, "Chronicles" comes with its own snap-together mythology.

Note that it took six writers to come up with the script for The Jungle Book 2. Note that Rudyard Kipling isn't one of them.

An American Haunting sets the bar at a new low: It makes ''The Blair Witch Project" look like a masterpiece of world cinema.

Invites us to both hate King David and admire his style, and there will probably be some hand-wringing about that.

Gigantic plays like a Sundance movie with half the nouns removed; fetchingly cryptic for a while, it's ultimately just obscure.

The movie's primary pleasure is Hopkins, who manages to take the role of Father Lucas seriously without being serious about it at all.

Works so hard to be inoffensive that you may well be offended.

The producers - Fox Films and the usually reliable Walden Media - have tried to gin up the story for multiplex audiences. They've succeeded in making a movie for no audience at all.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

The movie equivalent of a box of generic macaroni and cheese: bland, easily digested, comforting, forgettable.

One of the prime laws of the multiplex states that any action or horror movie series will devolve into ritualized violence, self-mocking camp, and egregious silliness by part three. Blade: Trinity is right on schedule.

As B-level suspensers go, though, The Return isn't actively awful -- just slow and cursed with a lead who acts with her t-shirt.

One could forgive a budget this threadbare, performances this amateurish, a plot this tortuous if the 3-D effects passed the cool test. Sadly, watching ''Adventures" is an experience akin to seeing the world through dung-colored glasses.

In Made of Honor, the leads are beautiful and everyone else is a freak. So where does that leave us?

Inside Amelia is a sharp idea struggling to get out: How does a woman marketed to the public as a star turn herself back into a human being? And at what cost?

There are really only two kinds of big-budget action movies: stupid, and good and stupid. Surprisingly, XXX: State of the Union is good and stupid, which makes it an immediate improvement over 2002's meatheaded "XXX."

I'm not the first observer, or even the second, to liken the star's (Penn) portrayal of fictional Louisiana governor Willie Stark to the late John Belushi's impersonation of Joe Cocker.

All that's missing is coherence. Call it Blunderbuss Satire.

That this witless, formulaic sequel to the hit comedy Analyze This even dares to spoof ''The Sopranos'' is embarrassing. It's like Freddie Prinze Jr. slamming Gene Hackman as a bad actor.

The Duke is not only name-checked in passing, but Eckhart (who's excellent) even bears a squinty resemblance by the final scenes.

The film is a disquieting and often very funny examination of yuppie unease in the country. The problem is, it's disguised as a dopey suspense thriller.

The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.

The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier.

W.E., her second effort after 2008's "Filth and Wisdom,'' tries awfully hard. In the end it tries our patience.

Abandon is this CLOSE to being good, juicy, bad-movie fun.

When all is said and done, the movie's a steaming plate of corn -- and, indeed, that's part of the pleasure. Myles, though, delivers a fine comic performance with no strings attached.

Short, cheap, weird, and passably diverting.

If the director had brought any toughness of perspective - or at least the self-lacerating humor of 2002's "Igby Goes Down,'' still the reigning champ of screwed-up-Manhattan-prepster films - we might be able to digest George's follies without cringing.

Fly Me to the Moon is a crummy movie for kids, yet it still holds out the prospect of past wonders and future marvels. It's one small step for a housefly, one giant leap for 3-D.

Perhaps because Campbell is a purist at heart, My Name Is Bruce is as awful as anything he has done - a broadly silly gore comedy in which no gag is too cartoonish to be indulged in at least once and preferably three times.

As for the movie itself, it's tolerable.

"Prison isn't all that different from a nightclub,'' comments Alig toward the end. Funny; this movie isn't all that different from prison.

It's another one of those loud, penis-obsessed bro farces, lazily written (by actor Seth Rogen, among others) and haphazardly directed.

Old story, new beat: That sums up Feel the Noise, an acceptable if resolutely average low-budget drama set in the New York/Puerto Rican musical melting pot known as reggaeton.

A well-made, reasonably diverting night at the multiplex that will seem overly familiar to everyone except teenage girls.

A fully felt, decently crafted teen B-movie melodrama, plenty preposterous in places but alive to the vibrant miseries of being young and misunderstood.

Nothing in How to Lose Friends feels fresh or on target.

For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt isn't naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night at the movies. It's an obscenity.

2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture.

The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.

Isn't for the kiddies. It probably isn't for anyone not interested in the darkest corners of the human psyche.

We haven't had a good Frankenstein, Dracula, or Wolf Man movie in a long time, so here's one where the whole gang shows up. One catch: It's not good.

Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.

The longer it takes for the eldritch glop to hit the fan, in fact, the less true the movie may be to King. For better and for worse, Dreamcatcher is true to King.

At nearly two hours, Mirrors is overlong for a summer horror toss-off, and the movie's three or four false endings make it seem even more of a haul.

There have been plenty of movies adapted from video games before, but Hitman may be the first one that actually feels like a computer wrote and directed it.

Primeval is a hoot if you're in the mood, though, and it gets points for trying to stuff a little globo-think into the minds of Friday night mayhem fans (who will probably rebel, since only one skull pops like a grape).

Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

Picture Timberlake in the booth recording his lines and you have the best joke in the movie. Everything else is actively painful, a frenetic, unfunny mix of action, romance, dud dialogue, and icky things popping out of the screen.

Bewitched presents a phony and cynical look at how Hollywood might make or remake a television show. It's as grating, laughless, and narcissistic (though, to its credit, not as cruel) as that new Lisa Kudrow show-within-a-show-within-a-show, "The Comeback."

The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

Ghosts is better-than-average McConaughey swill, but not by much - that's its pleasure and its curse.

You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career.

It is spectacularly average. Neither an inspired reimagining nor a painful dud,

Any good will the movie generates, though, is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.

Noisy, silly, gratingly upbeat, and piously sentimental, 'Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is what passes for wholesome family entertainment these days. It's the sort of movie to send small children and grandparents out of the theater hugging each other and strong men in search of bourbon.

Completely unnecessary but painless, like dentistry performed by mimes.

So, yea, it is a stinker. But it is prophesied that in six months time you shall come across 10,000 B.C.’ in the land of Pay-Per-View. And you shall say: ‘‘Pass the popcorn.’’

In Undead, sadly, rigor mortis has set in.

Equilibrium just happens to be a really bad comic book.

As such things go, it’s not bad: slick and proficient, The Stepfather 2.0 gets the adrenaline pumping, but the original has the brains.

It's a disappointingly limp small-town farce played several shades too broadly by a cast that has done better work elsewhere.

It's a surprisingly joyless mash-up of every bit of fanboy flotsam floating around in its maker's cranium.

One of those sticky dramas.

Flatters its audience by dividing the grown-up world into mean idiots and nice idiots, which might be interestingly subversive if the movie had anything on its mind. Instead, it's just a Hollywood crash course: Heist Films 101.

RV has teeth -- more teeth than the last few Steve Martin films, anyway -- but it's terrified to bite down, knowing that the paying audience would feel it more than anyone.

Watching the movie is a little like picking up issue #42 of a comic book after you've skipped the first 41: There's an entire back story mythos hovering in the background like a phantom limb.

How can you tell the target age for Superhero Movie is exactly 13 1/2 years? Because most of the jokes are Internet-related.

The feel-bad movie of the summer.

In a better movie -- a much better movie -- LaBeouf might make the same sort of impact Dustin Hoffman did in ''The Graduate.'' But the kid's young. There are movies to come.

Taking wobbly aim at our country's complicated love affair with guns, the movie's the very definition of a cheap shot.

Dreadful.

The film eventually collapses under the weight of its no-budget arrogance, but it goes some interesting places beforehand.

Panettiere, I’m sad to report, is a dud as the title character, a supposed wild thang who never rises above the level of runty, obnoxious mall chick, down to the roll-on tan.

A loud but proficient slab of explode-o-rama summer blockbuster nonsense, perfectly entertaining if you like that sort of thing, extremely skippable if you don't.

The bad news, for those looking forward to The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause with anything like enthusiasm, is this: Bernard the Elf is history.

The exact cinematic equivalent of a classic Bob Dylan song. It's also proof that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another.

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.

Genially terrible, Lost is lazy, sloppy multiplex filler, good for a few solid giggles and not much more.

This third go-round for the "Wolf Pack" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, the new movie heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad.

After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?

The most painful movie so far in a year that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel, Your Highness is a tedious, dung-colored misfire that sullies the genre of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "The Princess Bride."

A weirdly airless disaster, a turkey so insistently DOA that the dialogue serves as its own epitaph.

Despite exotic locations, epic cinematography, and much spectacular crash and bang, this "Mummy" feels like a threadbare toss-off.

If most December movie releases are epic-length and Oscar-ambitious, then Punisher: War Zone has to be considered Hobbesian counterprogramming: It's nasty, brutish, and short.

The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.

JUST worth your children's time, and hardly worth yours.

Has the distinction of being much dumber and pulpier than the comic book on which it's based -- the ink practically comes off on your fingers as you watch it.

Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.

Teenage boys will be in heaven. All others: Check, please.

Stands to delight small children while probably causing their parents' heads to cave in.

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

The bottom line: Any movie that gives Jonathan Winters work is doing something right.

A dull little PG-rated spook story for tweener girls.

Earnest and predictable, Crossover deserves more than the horselaughs that will probably greet it in theaters -- but not a lot more. The movie is harmless, which is both its strength and its weakness.

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

Faris is delightful, in fact, and she steals the movie right out from under Schneider.

You've seen New in Town before, and you've seen it done better. Still, it's a sweet-hearted bit of anemia, pleasant and obvious, and there are a few honest laughs to it.

The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.

This is one schlockfest that may be enjoyed more by casual viewers than by hard-core fans, since writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson breaks with the established mythology of both properties whenever he feels like it. Like it matters.

A laughably inept series of adolescent poses trying to pass itself off as a movie.

Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.

Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''

Reasonably painless if you've never seen a comedy about the travails of newlyweds.

If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.

A pallidly "hip" revision of classic fairy tales that would be better told straight up if anyone had the nerve. It will divert small children, but so will a brightly colored object if you twirl it.

The actor/walking disaster known as Charlie Sheen gives a perfectly credible performance here. It’s the rest of the film that tries your patience.

There are two problems with A Good Day to Die Hard: It’s terribly filmed and nothing in it makes any sense.

The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").

A comedy that can’t even admit to its own overwhelming sense of disgust.

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

A dunderheaded comic melodrama with clothes to die for and dialogue to shrink from. It’s downright depressing.

A pleasant, thin, hammerlocked movie about the pleasures of breaking free - it's the Cliff Notes version of anarchic classics like ''Bringing Up Baby'' or ''What's Up, Doc?'' Should you want to take the graduate course, you'll find those films at your video store.

The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.

The Heart Is Deceitful wants to cauterize us into feeling something -- anything -- but it's far too heartless to know what.

The film’s so formulaic your 6-year-old will be ticking off the plot points as they lope by.

This new Fog floats in on the fumes of the 1980 John Carpenter original, but the surprise is that it's arguably better.

It's a remarkably laugh-free comedy that takes on a dark subject and skitters along its surface.

Who on earth is this embarrassment -- easily the worst film of the year to date -- aimed at?

Is there a statute of limitations for how many good actors can be wasted in a bad movie?

Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.

The accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,

Pure Saturday matinee kiddie fodder and this close to going straight to DVD.

Slightly better than it should be. For Tucker Max, this possibly represents a triumph.

Worst of all, the movie's simply not very shocking. Madonna has made a career out of toying with image and ego, but this is a vanity project in the smallest sense possible.

The movie isn't THAT bad -- it's just made-for-TV historical treacle that has somehow found its way to the big screen (and barely that; if you want to be moved or outraged by the film, you'll have to travel to Danvers or Revere).

For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

Harmless in the extreme and it'll mute your kids for nearly 80 minutes, but why not just treat the little yard apes to the real deal and take them to ''Spirited Away''?

A chick flick that makes its chick characters - and by extension its chick audience - look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

The result isn’t art but it is an improvement: a scurrilous, lowdown, sub-Tarantino action comedy that, unlike the original, doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. How’s that for praise?

Vengeance has the odor of court-ordered community service. The jokes never rise above the groin. The trees look plastic, the characters more so.

Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.

Bloody and bloody funny, and Jackson and Carlyle make the best salt-and-pepper team since Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte knocked heads in ''48 HRS., '' but ultimately the movie can't find a way out of its own dead end.

Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.

Kranks is a feel-good movie in which every character is hateful (except, sigh, the cancer lady), and a Christmas movie too chickenhearted to mention Jesus.

''Health Inspector" hopes to do for Larry what ''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" did for Jim Carrey, who in this context looks like Noel Coward.

A live-action film based on a line of dolls, it's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow, purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my brain stem shrivel up as I watched it.

Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.

You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.

The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.

If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.

Saved from total puff only by the obnoxiousness of its star, who seems to be laboring under the delusion that he's the next Eddie Murphy.

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, and in Old Dogs, we have the season’s blue-ribbon gobbler.

The Covenant is dopey, formulaic stuff for the Friday night fright crowd. Worse for them, it's never remotely scary.

The line between gross-out humor that's inspired and the kind that's witless is fine indeed, and Movie 43 obliterates it with poop and movie stars.

An overlong, joyless, and inconsequential affair, full of dead air, and possessing only a few moments of jaw-dropping bad taste. It's a dull disaster.

How inept is Serving Sara? It makes even Elizabeth Hurley seem graceless and ugly.

This is first-degree cultural homicide.

Generic teen dice-and-slice with interior design by way of ''Saw." The movie's tight and reasonably well shot, though, and there are flashes of nasty invention between the ritual guttings.

Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock’s entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.

Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.

It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.

An intensely unpleasant killer-thriller mystery.

Will parents be able to sit through Kangaroo Jack without plunging sharp sticks into their eyes? The short answer? Yes. Barely.

House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.

Innocuous amusement for 5- to 8-year-olds and other people stuck in the anal stage of development.

By far the funniest part of Strange Wilderness is the trailer for "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" that's running before it.

A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.