The melodrama is tiresome, overwrought and clichéd.

Sadly, the documentary just doesn't have enough coherent passages to make anything about this now seemingly ancient journey compelling for contemporary audiences.

A chick flick for do-gooders, The Help suffers from a malady common to the discrimination drama: its treatment of inequality is more condescending than the prejudice it aims to remedy.

The bigger problem is that the action literally bleeds together and there's no sense of pacing.

Garbus' over-reliance on interviews that state rather than dramatize Fischer's excellence makes this a portrait that too often seems more overheard than inhabited.

If Peckinpah's original was a rotten plank spiked with rusty nails, Rod Lurie's redo is something closer to a nicely carved Louisville Slugger.

Puncture is rarely more convincing than the usual legal saga.

Leigh certainly has a sense of cinematic style and Emily Browning possesses a fragile beauty that hides a remarkably resilient interior. It's a pity, however, that Jane Campion did not exert a more powerful sway on the result.

As tales of troubled families go, it may have aspirations to be like "Ordinary People," but it falls way short.

The results are perfunctory, lugubrious and historically questionable.

Offers audiences a similar-but-not-the-same mix of effects, existentialism and creepy body horror while forgetting the things like character, humor and tension that made Carpenter's take on the same material so memorable past the initial fearsome fluid flesh sequences.

Segal's film tries to straddle the line between darkly funny and just plain dark, but even with a game cast and an offbeat premise, Norman is a disquieting outing with little in the way of honest payoff.

The second half, though, simply descends into chaotic banality as the sisters await their fate.

Too silly to be confusing and too flaccid to reach potboiler status, the convoluted spy-thriller The Double is a tossed-off theatrical release that lands with a resounding thud.

Void of subtlety and the gritty realism that's trademark for many Sundance dramas, Another Happy Day, from Mandalay Vision, may fail to win over many critics due to its histrionic storytelling.

Jack and Jill is a barrage of fart jokes and fat jokes and mean jokes that sincerely thinks it deserves to end with a hug. It doesn't deserve awwwws - and it doesn't deserve your money.

Sex and abortion are the main topics of this installment, which tips between dullness and total camp.

An uneven mix of middle-age anxiety and family comedy.

Even with a big name cast that includes three Oscar winners - Halle Berry, Robert De Niro and Hilary Swank - New Year's Eve is at best a pleasant diversion.

Director Steven Spielberg doesn't have a steady grip on War Horse's careening tone, but he'll be damned if there's not 15 minutes in there for everyone.

A thing of endless contrivances. Jolie's phony plotting and graphic depictions of sexual assault and murder are transparent attempts to bluntly convey the war's atrocities.

The mother/daughter drama should have played a bigger part in this film as the 87-minute runtime passes quickly and leaves us feeling utterly short-changed.

This is admirably ambitious, but Carnahan's not nearly good enough a writer or director to pull it off: the results are portentous, muddled and not nearly as entertaining as Neeson's usual face-punching antics.

A credible suspense story with a surprisingly bold ending, The Woman In Black is a solid step away from Harry Potter for star Daniel Radcliffe - while it, too, is British and fantastical, the tone is sinister, adult and bleak.

The Vow proves that love can't conquer bad writing.

Shows remarkable access to military materials and personnel but, as a film, is unremarkable every other way.

Gone starts off as a character study about a woman struggling to regain control of her world in the wake of a horribly intrusive event, but that sort of thing doesn't make for a fun night at the movies, so it quickly concedes to a Hitchcockian "wrong woman" riff, in which sexually motivated abduction serves as the worst MacGuffin in movie history.

The film's strength isn't its shock tactics - it's the rapid-fire, party montage editing that finds a million natural ways to put mundane actions and moments up against each other for comic effect.

Silent House is undeniably built on its "one-shot, real-time" gimmick. And while it works reasonably well - especially in the first half of the film - it's still just a gimmick trying to gussy up a common horror flick.

While A Thousand Words features some reverent flashes and even has the potential to touch audiences (a moment involving a mother with Alzheimer's particularly hits home), it suffers from being too broad.

Wrath of the Titans delivers blockbuster bluster with single-minded blandness.

The emotions are flat, predictable and forced when they ought to be romantic.

It's the sheer lack of investment one feels for the couple that truly sabotages the film.

Likely to disappoint both literary aficionados and action-thriller fans, the film neither captures the creepy atmospheres of Poe's influential writing nor works on its own.

It has its moments, although the charmless main character Julio (played by Diego Noguera) begins to get on your nerves, as he seems incapable of extricating himself from difficult situations.

This archly self-aware coming-of-age tale fizzles, as the targeted Latino audience is upstaged by a culture more firmly rooted in the film's soggy Seattle setting.

It seems impossible that a sequel to a movie as ridiculous as "Piranha 3D" could disappoint but Piranha 3DD stops at mediocre before arriving at gloriously bad.

Lola Versus arrives with a pedigree that suggests it should be better than it sounds. It isn't.

That's My Boy has the same freewheeling appeal and potty-mouthed, go-for-broke mania of Sandler's earlier comedies. But there's a new undercurrent of energy that's likely the consequence of Sandler separating from his usual collaborators.

Perry's latest is crudely assembled and mostly emotionally unengaging.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is the kind of movie whose cool-looking trailer entices you to midnight screenings, but the film will bore you so profoundly you'll fall asleep halfway and wake up disoriented during the closing credits.

Part of Me strains so hard to make Perry seem at once triumphant but totally relatable that it veers toward a self-seriousness you won't find in her music, image or Hershey's Kiss bra.

Killer Joe isn't as outlandish in premise as it is in execution, which is saying something.

Hardcore genre fans will likely be quite disappointed to find a film that trades vision and originality for something best described as bland and inoffensive.

ParaNorman is easily one of the most charming, imaginative and quirky comedies to come out of Laika Entertainment (Coraline), but for all its cleverness and urbane wit, it's in no way appropriate for kids.

The Words is a movie for people who buy their novels at Starbucks, made by people who write their novels at Starbucks.

The soulless-ness of their empty plot of track homes and super-store existence invokes both "Poltergeist" and "Employee of the Month."

A movie whose confusing narrative and at times intriguing parts are at war with each other, and never quite gel.

Tsui Hark's films aren't famous for their coherence, but Flying Swords of Dragon Gate is such a wantonly incomprehensible experience that it occasionally feels like an epic piece of outsider art.

Paco Plaza turns his [REC] franchise on its rotting head with [REC]3: Genesis, switching up the series' blistering first-person-perspective terror for a more conventional, jokey and-much to the film's detriment-self-conscious approach.

Fun Size isn't good enough to ascend to those John Hughesian ranks, and its small holiday window means it won't scarf much box office. But at least first time feature director Josh Schwartz can expect a minor slumber party hit on DVD.

In 1994, 16-year-old surfer Jay Moriarity braved the biggest waves ever seen off the coast of Northern California. His biopic, Chasing Mavericks, gets that fact right but changes everything else about his life in order to bowl audiences over in a saccharine tsunami.

The Hobbit is just good enough to make you aware of how it could have been much, much better. If you take your kids-while shielding them from various nonhuman bad guys getting decapitated both repeatedly and, worse, bloodlessly-they'll have a good time. Bilbo Baggins' quest for adventure and Warner Bros' quest for cash will take him through three films. But your quest for epic, truly entertaining filmmaking will be more successful if you just stay home.

This NYC-stamped film may claim street cred because it set-up shop along No Man’s Land, Brooklyn, late at night, but its drowsy work and parlor tricks suck the life out of what’s supposed to be a sleepless city.

Poor word of mouth should doom it for a quick ride to DVD oblivion.

Letters to God is far too simplistic and pandering to find success outside of the targeted church-going family moviegoers it’s hoping to reach.

The compellingly awful thriller, In My Sleep--in which Melrose Place meets imitation Hitchcock--is so unselfconsciously derivative that you have to admire it…or, if you don’t admire the movie itself, than admire the jejune chutzpah of writer-director-producer Allen Wolf.

Conceptualized and re-conceptualized, written and re-written, shot and re-shot, cut and re-cut, the final product is the world's longest short film.

Unlike "The Lost Boys," there are no bloodsuckers in Twelve. Instead, it just sucks time: 98 minutes to be exact that you can never get back.

As if a string of bad jokes wasn't enough, Vampires Suck is full of distractingly forced pop culture references and shameless product placements (the actors practically mug for the camera while holding various products).

A mess of a horror movie that spent several years sitting on a shelf and should have remained there living up to its fullest potential as a dust magnet.

Fans will presumably get what they came for; what anyone else gets out of it is hard to say.

Robert Young's Eichmann feels the burden of history so heavily that it's effectively smothered by it.

The case may be plausible, but Gibney's method - a singularly unimaginative trawl through archival footage and listlessly edited talking heads - is life-sapping to watch, and his editorial contributions laughably literal-minded.

American viewers are unlikely to be interested.

Even when presenting itself as a goofy trifle, the film never gels to that minimal standard.

What's most memorable about this plodding thriller are the copious amounts of foundation and lip gloss.

Tackling his own original screenplay, Zack Snyder keeps his reputation for outlandish visuals intact but strikes out as a storyteller.

Lifeless as entertainment and incoherent as ideology.

Dylan Dog feels like its ideas were stolen from western entertainment-a mash-up of sexy vampires, burly werewolves, and comical-gross zombies-which Hollywood then stole back from the Europeans, forgetting that other movies have explored that evil terrain thoroughly, exhaustively and better.

All of this is silly, none of it is funny and it's not long before the whole film stops making sense altogether.

All you need to know about this low-budget farce is that Amy Sedaris costars (yippee!) and New York pol Anthony Weiner would feel right at home with the sexting subplot (eeeuw!).

Too dull for camp and too bad to be taken seriously.

In this case, boredom is the deadliest sin.

The movie is a bit of a departure for the mumblecore pioneer, one that does not play to his strengths.

The dismal reality is that this romantic drama is a disaster, a dour "When Harry Meets Sally" that tries to jerk tears out of the story of a man and a woman who go from friends to lovers.

A squishy Hallmark Channel-level melodrama that rarely bothers to mask its propagandistic intentions.

We all have to make jokes around the water cooler, and if enough people bother to see Killer Elite, its silly nonsense could make for a great comedy routine by Greg from IT.

A surprising follow-up to Doremus' low-fi but equally concept-driven 2010 Sundance feature "Douchebag," Like Crazy has appealing performances, a notable tone of realism in the acting and so many borrowed mannerisms from better or more interesting films it feels like a YouTube mash-up made by a Wes Anderson junkie who's studying Sophia Coppola movies while writing a term paper on "Garden State."

The Sitter clocks in at a slim 81 minutes, but it feels significantly longer, as there is almost no fluidity between scenes, with the entire outing feeling slapped together at the last minute.

A well-meaning production that consistently fails to deliver on even the most basic of cinematic expectations, all while covering up stunning ineptitude with bloated song-and-dance numbers.

Kate Beckinsale can still fill out a skin-tight leather bodysuit, but with Awakening, the vampires-vs-werewolves Underworld franchise has finally decayed beyond the point of repair.

Tyler Perry has finally achieved an odd kind of equality that heretofore eluded him: he's now just as mediocre and middle of the road as any other reliable hitmaker in Hollywood.

Stolidly maudlin, this enervating sub-middlebrow pic is doomed to well-deserved commercial obscurity.

Its endless parade of explosions, battles and general mayhem makes Michael Bay seem like Ingmar Bergman in comparison with Battleship director Peter Berg.

If this horror movie cashes in on the audience that echoes its character's awareness ("That's where the nucular thing happened, right?") then we're about to learn how low our national academic standards are.

This movie will not find an audience. It's got likable stars, a reliable commercial genre and a decent supporting cast, but nobody will turn out to see it, even if it was a labor of love.

Even if 2016 is preaching to the choir, its fanbase is eager to tithe - it's spent this week as Fandango's #1 ticket seller.

Apatow has drifted further and further from comedy with every film, but This is 40 is the first where he hasn't even bothered to write any jokes. Instead of snappy dialogue, we get lazy exchanges.

If "Midnight Run" and "His Girl Friday" had an unwanted, mutant baby, it would be The Bounty Hunter, a romantic comedy where the jokes sputter and die immediately after exiting the character’s mouths.

Should be immediately screened in film schools across the world as a shining example of everything that is wrong with the American studio system and the increasingly dreadful junk it produces.

A pathetic thriller and lame social satire that suffers from abysmal writing, poor pacing and terrible acting, even from the normally reliable Sean Bean.

The movie's simple-minded lesson that forests are good and development is bad is undercut the minute one pauses to think about how many natural resources were wasted on this sorry excuse for a motion picture.

Very small children may well take a shine to the big, goofy dog and his furry friends, but parents and older siblings will be left squirming in their seats at a bland, predictable blend of bad comedy and sentimentality.

Burzynski may have credibility in the eyes of some, but the movie about him has no credibility, so no one will be receptive to its message.

After this bomb, Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher may qualify as two of the most attractive and prematurely washed-up screen actors Hollywood has ever produced.

This is the kind of movie where the audience of extras orgasmically react after every song as if they were at a Bruce Springsteen concert instead of watching a bunch of kids who wouldn't make the cut in a junior high production of "Bye Bye Birdie."

Fails to deliver enough clever gags, emotional warmth, or eye-popping 3D to compete with recent family releases.

What helps salvage the film (much to the surprise of director and co-writer Lussenhop and his fellow writers Peter Allen, Gabriel Casseus and Avery Duff) are the unintentional laughs generated by the film's outrageous gun battles, childish dialogue and an action chase featuring Brown that seems to go on forever.

To say that Marshall's technique is so low-brow it may as well be a moustache is being kind--at best this is the sort of lazy, ambitionless hackery that can lead both filmmakers and audiences to write off a genre for dead--or at least until a more skilled storyteller is able to do it right.

Everything about this film is fairly offensive, including its racial stereotypes, homophobia, misogyny, generally bad writing and amateur filmmaking.

Kalamity is a real klunker.

Even the presence of Dan Aykroyd as Yogi and Justin Timberlake as his pint-sized straight man Boo Boo, couldn't save the movie.

Inside the dreadful action comedy Cat Run, there are about three terrible action comedies struggling to get out.

From its baldly overwritten dialogue to its claustrophobically stingy use of locations, Dragons is underdone in every way.

There hasn't been such an egregiously self-congratulating piece of Communist propaganda since, arguably, the peak of '60s Soviet musicals, but Revival is so repetitive and po-faced that there's no kitsch value to be had.

The Undefeated says less about Sarah Palin than about the political and cultural environment that made her big screen beatification possible.

Looking at the obnoxious TV ads for The Smurfs, it's easy to dismiss the film as a shrill, joyless exercise in special effects without substance. It's even easier after actually seeing it.

The big event plays in the same cartoonish key as the rest of the film.

A thoroughly shabby attempt to piggyback on the success of last year's "Piranha 3D," Shark Night 3D embraces convention with a voraciousness matched only by its predictability, amateurishness and all-around tameness.

Apollo 18 is a drab horror that tries to plant fears about untrustworthy authority (Nixon, NASA, etc) that are as stale as a freeze-dried peas.

Falling to pieces almost immediately, and then somehow discovering new ways to devolve into outright ludicrousness, it's a horror effort of such silliness that it's likely to be greeted with apathy at the box office before making a swift, deserved trip to the local video store's bargain bin.

Of course, Bucky Larson isn't one of the year's worst films because its laughs are poisoned and problematic - rather, it's one of the year's worst films because there aren't any laughs at all.

Ugly characterizations and simplistic preachiness negate the terror in Red State - a film that eventually proves horrific in ways unintended by writer/director Kevin Smith.

Between Eastwood's direction and Dustin Lance Black's screenplay, what you feel leaking off the screen in every scene is missed opportunity.

Chipwrecked is the sort of Sunday afternoon trifle that will mollify children and mortify their parents, an eyesore that auto-tunes its strong cast into anonymity and undercuts its convincingly rendered CG leads by confining them to hideously cheap environments.

Fischer and Messina may make a cute pair, but amidst such contrivances, they're powerless to make this RomCom seem like anything more than a creaky retread of obvious indie clichés.

Slapdashly assembled and lacking in dance thrills, the poorly promoted Battlefield America will drive away the few audiences that show up.

The film's length and muddled message will likely keep it from reaching much of an audience, even within the presumed Latino faith-based target.

The more pressing affliction in Pascal Laugier's film is the absence of chills, logic and coherence.

Sinister is pretty much everything to hate about modern horror in one mixed bag, a ramshackle teardown of jump-scares and creaky tricks, saw-it-coming "surprises" and the lead-footed thud of inevitability as it tediously places one clumsy foot in front of the other, plodding towards a finale that comes far too late.

A crime saga cobbled together from scraps of genre predecessors, Deadfall's unbelievable silliness escalates at every turn.

It’s a crock to believe a film’s worth a twirl because it has a saucy title.

Starved of humor and energy, the interminable Big Mommas: Life Father, Like Son could force Lawrence and co-star Brandon T. Jackson undercover for real.

So thuddingly awful you won't crack a smile.

The barely coherent Footprints seems bent on erasing any nostalgia one might have for Hollywood's heyday.

The new film Abduction has a lot of problems, but the biggest is the fact that no one gets abducted. Ever.

The real problem is, when the film blindsides us with a mystery we didn't know existed, we're already too busy not caring about mystery we knew was there.

Nasty and over the top, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) feels like a horror movie that hates horror fans.

The Darkest Hour isn't just a dark horse contender for the year's biggest joke, it's the darkest.

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is the nadir of senseless seasonal cinema. But while Bassett's film struggles to say anything coherently, it gets the most important message across perfectly well: "Do not go to Silent Hill!"

And so, nearly four years since it rolled cameras, the sun rises on another Red Dawn, which supplements the irresponsibility of the original with an incompetency all its own.

A broadly promising premise and well-matched stars prove no match for an abominably unfunny screenplay and the work of the poisonously untalented Shawn Levy--arguably the worst director making big-budget studio films today.

For more experienced viewers, the tired terrain is badly shot and haphazardly assembled into an audience-testing feature that appears to have no idea how unlikable or unprovocative it is.