Director Mike Newell and screenwriters Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal should have uncorseted their own imaginations. The girls on display are all tightly stereotyped.

The film is based on a novel by Susan Minot--one of those books where the author doesn't deign to put dialogue in quotation marks for fear of dispelling the dreamlike mood. It works on paper, but Minot, who shares credit for the adaptation with fellow novelist Michael Cunningham, doesn't understand that screenwriting is the art of taking away.

It was probably hopeless from the start: The Warhol cosmos is too weird and complicated to lend itself to a conventional Hollywood biopic, and this one is conventional down to Warhol's first glimpse of his future "superstar" bouncing up and down vivaciously in tacky slow motion.

Extraordinary Measures has a soppy piano-and-strings score, but the primal fear of loss sharpens every scene.

The movie goes soft. But it has the unpretentious energy and charm of a good YA girls' novel.

Movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. The staunch heroics, frantic presidential huddles, and hairbreadth rescues all seem tinny and escapist, too Cold Warrior–ish, for what's really going on now.

The film is a hodgepodge, and it closes with a whimper. But along the way some lucid voices slip through.

It also comes as little surprise that she (Fonda) knocks the part out of the park, even if the film around her leaves something to be desired.

Luc Besson's Jumping Frog Action Factory looks mighty lame in Colombiana.

In any case, the last twenty minutes of Breaking Dawn are so harrowing that it's possible to forget that most of the acting is soap-operatic (the guy who plays Carlisle is aging to look like Liberace) and the dialogue from hunger. The movie's that primal.

It's hard to get past the primitiveness of Allen’s fantasies.

The director, Richard Loncraine, doesn't generate much tension in Firewall's first half...The standard-issue climax is pretty exciting, though.

If the movie were just these two (Costner/Hurt), bopping around arguing and offing people, it would have been better than the unholy mess it turns into.

To keep his satirist’s street cred, Weitz chases the sentimentality with sour slaps at the audience. But for all its supposed outrageousness, American Dreamz has a soft center.

It's a shame, though, that so many of The Possession's later scenes, particularly the exorcism stuff at the end, is mostly a grab bag of tired old scares. You might have convinced yourself, for a while at least, that this one was going to rise above the crowd.

I've never seen a film in which what was actually onscreen seemed so irrelevant.

It offers a deranged hodgepodge of tones and acting styles and strange mannerisms and affectations and narrative dead ends that feels like it was assembled by a committee of bipolar extraterrestrials.

An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.

The screenwriters go out of their way to prepare you for Taken 3: Serbedzija has more sons, and Kim's virginity is getting harder and harder to preserve.

You admire the movie for refusing to ever, ever slow down, but you also wonder what might have happened had Kahn dared to settle, even just a bit. Instead, what we get is a mad kaleidoscope of genre, with occasional glimpses into the mysteries of the exploding teenage heart.

It's a terrific performance-and terrifying. Owen Wilson is aging: Where goeth my own youth?

Probably the most garishly masochistic star turn since Mel Gibson's "The Man Without a Face." It could also be the most baroque chick flick ever made, the freakazoid spawn of "An Affair to Remember" and "The Matrix."

Seems tailor-made for an intelligent thriller in the Graham Greene mode, but in Jewison's hands, the dragnet that closes in on Brossard is lackadaisical, and the larger political overtones--especially concerning the complicity of the Catholic church in aiding Nazis--are spelled out over and over.

The Situation is, to put it kindly, a spotty piece of work. The script is by Wendell Steavenson, a reporter who seems to know everything about Iraq and next to nothing about screenwriting. The dialogue is flat, and the actors almost never rise above it.

Has its fun moments, and the dialogue, some of which was surely improvised, has a natural flow. But Soderbergh suffocates everything with stylistics. Soderbergh is exploring his navel.

Again and again the killers linger sadistically over the dead or dying bodies of the people they've dispatched. Did Carnahan think these sickening scenes would give Smokin' Aces a moral complexity that's generally absent from this genre? I think they make the picture seem even more morally bankrupt.

There is something sneakily gratifying about all this: Not since the days of "Earthquake" have Hollywood producers so indulged their fantasies of trashing the town.

A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.

Don't go to this movie on a full stomach. Better yet, don't go.

The emotional resolutions aren't pat, exactly. But they're not messy either, and for material this inherently volatile, that seems like a cheat.

Works only in spurts.

Aside from a trio of witches that can hold its own with Eastwick’s in the dishiness department, Oz the Great and Powerful is a peculiarly joyless occasion.

A Joyful Noise overcomes. The big numbers are a gospel-pop-funk fusion that made me think, Hmmm, this seems very processed - before I noticed my feet were tapping of their own accord. How can you resist that wah-wah funk guitar?

For all its agonizing true-life trappings, has the staying power of a grand-scale video game. Manhattan's sushi bars are in no danger of going dark.

It might seem as though there is nothing new to be done with the crime thriller, but The Code (La Mentale), directed by Manuel Boursinhac and written by Bibi Naceri, provides a new twist.

Weitz’s pacing is so limp you’re going to need the electricity generated by a live audience to keep from yelling, “Hurry it up!”

The new film stars The Rock, but The Wood might be a better description of his performance.

The dance he (Wang) ended up with is on the wrong lap.

Fred Schepisi, the great Australian director, had the thankless task of trying to turn Jesse Wigutow’s screenplay into something with a pulse, but his finesse is wasted on this steaming heap of dysfunctionalism.

Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged--a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.

It's a perfect fortune cookie of a movie, full of bland life lessons for everybody; would that there were some drama or style in it somewhere along the way.

The Village is a better movie (than Signs) --probably his best since "The Sixth Sense"--but it indulges Shyamalan's penchant for messianic uplift.

Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.

Too eager to please to be truly dislikable, and Roberts and Cusack have a fine rapport.

If you want proof that Will Ferrell is the most riotously funny straight man since Jack Benny, observe the way his utter sincerity (in the Ralph Bellamy role, as Wendell’s rival for Eva Mendes) lifts this two-ton piece of whimsy into the stratosphere.

Pain & Gain gives you a rush while at the same time making you queasy about how you’re getting off.

Palmetto is an unconvincing, paint-by-numbers pass at American noir by the usually ambitious German director Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum).

The drama is so muddled that Shakespeare seems to be getting in the way of Taymor's spectacle, the magic long gone by the time Prospera hurls her staff off into the sea.

Yet another remake no one needs is The Omen.

He's (Gandolfini) the true star of the film, and his stardom is achieved in the most honest of ways, through the sheer brute force of his talent.

Being a cultural icon is a time-limited occupation; after a while, the culture moves on, and if you don't move with it, you end up with a movie like Anything Else.

There isn't anything in this Total Recall to match the immortal Arnold Schwarzenegger send-offs, "See you at the pah-ty" and everyone's favorite alimony killer, "Consider this a divorce."

Plays out like "Cool Hand Luke" meets "Attica," and it's quite the silliest thing.

Thank God for Barrymore: When Beverly's water breaks and she looks down at her feet and cries, "This is so gross," you know how good this actress can be, and how good this movie might have been.

Half the time in the mystical saga Youth Without Youth, I had no idea what the movie was about, but I always felt that the director and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola, did, and that he was deeply in tune--and having a hell of a time--with the material.

How odd then that a film all about human connections manages to make none of its own.

Its focus--the children--are not even onscreen very much. But their ghosts are everywhere, and the pain of the film is primal.

Watching the impossibly dry and somnambulant Good Deeds, you actually miss that crazy side of Perry. It's sort of ironic: Here's a film about a guy who's being false to his true self, and you realize the director might be doing the same.

In the end, Powell thanks his doctor for sharing the journey, but audiences who sit through this zoologically daft back-to-nature clinker may feel far less charitable.

If you want your movie to blow up the right way, you have to do better than the paint-by-numbers story and characters presented here.

Brody doesn’t deserve this movie.

With Joe Johnston directing instead of Spielberg, who executive-produces, and a scrum of screenwriters, none named Crichton, the franchise suffers some negligence.

The necklace in this movie was crafted by the elite London jewelers Asprey and Gerrard -- out of cubic-zirconium stones. That's just about perfect. The Affair of the Necklace is a cubic-zirconium epic.

If the filmmakers had made a point of satirizing the new makeover culture in ways that went beyond camp jibes at décor and suburbia, they might have come up with a classic.

Morel will inevitably be compared to John Woo, whom he trounces. He has fewer mannerisms (no damn doves) and a keener eye; his fastest, most kinetic shots flow together like frames in a flipbook.

He's still a young guy, but all throughout Witness Protection I imagined Perry sitting glumly at a dressing-room mirror, like the aging Chaplin in "Limelight," forlornly rubbing makeup in his face - a tired, old clown stuck in a tired, old routine.

There's not much here for a great actor to sink his teeth into once, let alone twice.

Unfortunately, there's also a certain artificiality to the whole film, both visually and narratively.

There's a huge change that turns the nihilistic carnage of Craven's original into something suffused with old-fashioned family values, so that we can relax and enjoy watching the bad guys get beaten, skewered, dismembered by garbage disposals, and tortured with microwave ovens.

What I experienced was a lot of fetid experimental-film folderol perfumed by Chopin nocturnes on the soundtrack.

The film is sometimes gentle to the point of blandness, but it's never flimsy.

Sandler being Chaplinesque isn't pretty; he's just doing his smart-aleck slacker shtick with a moister eye.

Somehow both annoyingly overstuffed and depressingly thin.

That G.I. Joe silliness the first film embraced has been steamrolled into tentpole flatness this time around. It’s not stoopid anymore, but just plain stupid.

One of the more enjoyably terrible movies of the year.

Olympus Has Fallen is a disgusting piece of work, but it certainly hits its marks — it makes you sick with suspense.

As the cowboy-hatted wild man who cooks up speed in his motel-room lab, Rourke, who looks at home in his tattoos, is mesmerizingly grungy. He strikes a rare note of authenticity in this otherwise phony fandango.

If you can stay awake, you'll see a performance by ­Keaton that is radiant in its simplicity, all ditheriness shaken off. She's still ­peaking - ­someone give her a great role.

The period thriller Gangster Squad plays like an untalented 12-year-old's imitation of Brian DePalma's "The Untouchables."

Began life as a standard sci-fi horror script before mutating into the unfunny mess it now is.

But the real problem behind Paranormal Activity 4 is that its entire raison d'être has gotten old; producer Oren Peli, who directed the first one, even included some gentle digs at the found-footage genre in his superior "Chernobyl Diaries," released earlier this year.

In the movie's best moment, an American sniper takes out a bad guy by a pier while a pair of hands reaches out of the water to grab the body so it doesn't make a splash and alert the other baddies.

So even if Here Comes the Boom doesn't quite work as a comedy (it's not particularly funny), or a drama (it's not particularly poignant), it has an earnest charm that keeps us engaged.

In their move from 11-minute episodes on TV to 94 minutes, Tim and Eric have lost none of their hilarity or irreverence. But this time around, they somehow manage to be tedious, too.

Hopelessly amateurish, the troupe is saved by a remarkably pretty young blonde called Douce with a sweet soprano to match her angel face. The gifted, unknown actress-singer who plays her, Nora Arnezeder, also saves the movie, which would otherwise blur into a mass of droopy, mustached, big-honkered Gallic character actors.

As a film, it's overly tidy, and the surreal concentration-camp climax gave at least one viewer an inappropriate fit of giggles.

The film is a stodgy snooze, and Theron, who is about as expressive here as a porcelain doll, lacks all believability--she's followed her best performance (in Monster) with her worst.

Klaatu is a dream role for the beautifully blank Reeves, since he doesn’t even have to pretend to emote.

Butter essentially eats its own premise, then proceeds to bludgeon us with unfunny, unoriginal political satire.

Apart from having no particular reason to exist onscreen, especially at these prices, it's not half bad.

Together, Lopez and Caviezel make quite a pair. Sorrowful yet hip, they seem to be inventing a new mood: designer melancholia.

More a dark fairy tale about vengeance than the action-packed crime thriller it purports to be, the film is at times exhilarating, bold, and beautiful — when it’s not busy being ludicrous, fragmented, and just plain stupid.

It isn’t a train wreck--a train wreck would be memorable. What’s wrong is wrong by design.

At least The Green Hornet is likable, and a refreshing change from the heavy, angst-ridden superhero pictures so beloved by obnoxious fanboys.

Although that pairing (Martin/Latifah) alone may be enough to make this movie a hit, the material is thin and pandering and almost criminally negligent in bypassing opportunities for humor.

A pretentious and stilted but weirdly compelling blend of sins-of-the-parent saga and horror movie.

If all this sounds outrageous, and extreme … don’t worry, it’s not. Provocation coupled with ineptitude doesn’t reveal the ugliness of humanity; it simply reveals the ugliness of the filmmakers themselves.

In much the same way that Godard used heroines like Anna Karina or Bardot, Toback showcases Campbell's face as a placard of unknowability--a quality he recognizes as inherently feminine. The (inadvertent) question we are left with is, How much is there to know about her anyway?

As one of the few movies around not pushing state-of-the-art animation or Jude Law, Alexander is a damn good date movie.

The Sitter feels slapdash and quick, but you might not want to have it any other way.

Anyway, "Children of Men" this ain't, though the inert directing of Len Wiseman (who helmed the first two films and has a producer credit here) has thankfully been replaced by Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein, who seem to have a lot more verve and even some visual whimsy.

Efron's stopped-clock seriousness is more convincing on a melancholy loverboy than it is on a melancholy soldier. We can't quite sense the harrowing torment of lives lost before his eyes, but we can sense the sweet anguish of being around the woman you adore. It'll have to do.

From the look of this film, its prime appreciators will be heavy-metal futurist dweebs.

Resembles a full-length promo for itself. The action, virtually nonstop, is a series of can-you-top-this? set pieces.

In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games" and Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke’s film would win--but only because he’s working so much harder to be noxious.

If the movie didn't pander so madly to the audience for "Sex and the City" and "Legally Blonde," it might have been a comedy touchstone instead of a cringeworthy footnote.

It’s tough to be Tracy and Hepburn, let alone Doris Day and Rock Hudson, when you're trying to get your mouth around lines that wouldn't pass muster on a UPN sitcom.

To be fair, when the story is moving, it's okay.

Yes, I cringed at the casting, too, especially when, watching the trailer, I heard Parker deliver the narration in the same voice she used for Carrie in "Sex and the City." But Kate is funnier - less arch - than Carrie, and Parker reminds you what a dizzy, all-in, high-risk comic actress she can be when she's not too busy showing off the couture.

You would have to have been born yesterday to miss the switcheroos and reeking red herrings planted in this pulp.

Steve Martin can be a delightfully spasmodic clown, but his Clouseau makes no sense.

There are a bunch of other clunky immigrant subplots (the Jews get a comic one, the Turks a scary one), but it isn't until the massacre–cum–civics tutorial in the liquor store that Crossing Over crosses into the mythic realm of camp. What a waste. I still say it's better than "Crash," though.

The movie, written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, is desultory when it's not inept, but the set-up is so good that you can't help sticking it out to the (unforgivable) end.

It’s all so glancing and superficial that the movie doesn’t seem to have a present tense. It goes by like coming attractions. It is, however, a treasury of bad biopic dialogue.

A hapless comedy that already seems about ten years out of date, Be Cool is a curious failure.

Wrath at least has the good sense to try to have a little fun with its mince-myth premise. It's better than Clash, but it's still not particularly good.

Evan Almighty runs out of comic invention early, and the filmmakers fall back on what real politicians do when they exhaust their small stash of ideas: brainless piety.

When Lee isn't doing cinematic somersaults or mining for injustice, he doesn't seem to know where to put the camera. The logistics of the plot make no sense, and he has nothing to sell but the theme of our common humanity--in which, on the evidence, I don't think he believes.

Some of this stuff is uncomfortably close to minstrelsy. Bad Company closes on a patriotic note in a brief scene that pays heartfelt tribute to the terrorist-thwarting sacrifices of the CIA. Timing is everything, I guess.

As Willie Stark, Sean Penn demonstrates how a great Method actor can make the world’s most unconvincing rabble-rouser.

Compounds the problems of its predecessor, "Analyze This," while duplicating almost none of its humor.

Still, it's hard not to think that there's a darker, funnier movie in there waiting to get out. In the meantime, we'll always have the humping chicken.

Orgy, hell: The film is like a nightmare in which you're trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids. Based on an elemental but happily streamlined Japanese cartoon (an anime precursor), it's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.

In Arthur, the spectacularly grating remake of Steve Gordon's 1981 P. G. Wodehouse simulation (this time, Peter Baynham miswrote, Jason Winer misdirected), Russell Brand gives a career-killing performance.

The movie's a smorgasbord of horror, and, ironically, that takes the teeth out of it. We're not really in this villain's world, because we don't know what his world is, or what he is, or what he's trying to even do. It's like a nightmare designed by someone who's heard a lot about nightmares but has never actually had one.

Believe it or not, the delicate-featured, whisper-thin actress manages to (mostly) pull it off, but the abysmal movie around her lets her down.

What's odd about Lady in the Water is that for all Shyamalan's histrionics, he's overcontrolled.

Based on an interminable 1994 international bestseller by Louis de Bernières that I found impossible to make my way through. The movie duplicates exactly my experience with the book, although I must say I was thankful to be spared serial outbreaks of hearty Greek dancing.

Veering between tonal and narrative extremes, it's the kind of film that makes you long for the grim pomposity of something like "Signs."

Yes, it all gets kind of old, and yes, it's all over the place, but you'll probably find yourself laughing at least some of the time. Dick jokes, after all, can be pretty funny.

There's only one surgery scene, but it's the heart (and kidneys) of Turistas. The rest -- especially the incoherent action -- falls well below the mark set by the last Americans Abroad torture-porn picture, "Hostel."

Somewhere inside The Last Exorcism Part II is a very good thriller — a genuinely unnerving movie about possession — struggling to get out. But then the sound drops out, the music shrieks, a figure jumps out, and we’re back to the same old, same old.

At the end of Sphere, the three principals -- Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sharon Stone -- agree, for the good of humanity, to forget everything that has happened to them in the movie up to that point. This is a pact I can only rush to join, and with exactly the same motive.

Jumper is so in sync with the language of modern action movies that it’s possible to look past its soullessness and go with the quantum flow.

Beresford, can't bring this saga to life because Alma herself never fully comes to life; her contradictoriness, like the way she embraces Mahler only to rail against his "Jewish music," doesn't add up to a whole and complex human being.

Sordid Thelma & Louise-ish spree, which also has certain affinities with Breathless but would be better termed Affectless.

Identity Thief is funny enough, but it needed to be darker, raunchier, and crazier to live up to the promise of its casting.

It would take a filmmaker of truly astonishing versatility to harmonize all these disparate tones...But there are moments in Dreamcatcher when Kasdan gives you the giggles and the creeps at the same time, and that’s not easy to do.

Hannibal Rising is basically a Steven Seagal vigilante movie with a hero who eats the people he kills. At least it's ecofriendly.

Kidman is stuck in this pomo movie about the making of a TV-show remake. It’s "Being John Malkovich for Morons."

A high-toned revenge-of-nature horror picture, it's a little depressed, with only gross-out shocks (gushing jugulars, bodies run over by lawnmowers) to relieve the torpor.

John Herzfeld, the writer-director, attacks America's lust for voyeuristic sensationalism by aping the very tactics he decries.

You really have to screw it up to dishonor the memory of a movie as shitty as the original "Friday the 13th." Heads should roll.

In the end, 21 and Over is more exhausting — and exhausted — than funny or wild.

The movie’s not all bad. There’s palpable chemistry between Duhamel and Hough. The former particularly seems well-suited to this sort of thing: He has just the right amount of grizzled charm to be one of those wounded hunks Sparks likes so much.

The result: Characters we genuinely care about are lost in a movie that almost dissipates before our very eyes.

Sets up a cast -- and then proceeds to knock them down like ducks in a shooting gallery.

A stinker.

The captain narrates in a punchy, journalistic style that gives Elite Squad an air of sociological realism--it bears a resemblance to viscerally exciting seventies urban thrillers like "The French Connection."

The movie stinks to heaven.

The film is filled with actors you want to see -- just not in this thing.

If Rock ever comes to his senses, he can host Saturday Night Live and skewer this damp, gag-riddled civics lesson of a movie.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: Any movie featuring a quote in its ad from the poet laureate of Great Britain—“Deeply engaging!” -- is in trouble.

Spirit of Vengeance is so focused and, as a result, so impoverished that you actually feel bad for Cage. The actor tries to bring the weird (though at this point one wonders if he can even do anything else) but the film more often than not leaves him high and dry, saddling him with standard-issue action hero lines and boilerplate action set-pieces.

Another in a long line of middling movies for Travolta, who must have been so stunned to regain his stardom with "Pulp Fiction" that he hasn't stopped working since.

Life imitates art, except there’s precious little of either here.

The film turns into one of those indie parades of eccentrics that are hit-and-miss but mostly miss.

Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro have made any number of lame movies on their own, but there's a special wastefulness connected to their first co-starring vehicle, Showtime: It's lameness times two, and then some.

The gut-whomping, high-concept romantic thriller This Means War is not a distinguished addition to director McG's oeuvre.

The results are soul-corrodingly funny.

Love it or hate it, Milius's original Red Dawn looks like an Akira Kurosawa masterpiece next to this latest iteration, directed by Dan Bradley.

The reason to see An American Affair is Gretchen Mol. She has a mild, natural way of holding herself that's likably unactressy--in every film, she seems both smart and grounded.

Fanning is a child actor with a grown-up soul, and every move, every breath, seems mysteriously right.

The climax of Texas Chainsaw 3D is a bit more interesting and unpredictable than the usual horror-movie third act. But it feels like it's bred more out of desperation than anything organic; you can sense the gears turning in the screenwriters' heads as they try to figure out a way to breathe some fresh life into this franchise.

The Grisham-esque murder-mystery plot got so scrambled that, finally, it’s anybody’s guess what the filmmakers intended.

What a whorish film this is: Even the serial killer lectures the detective.

Is it possible none of these actors read the script before they signed on? Were New Line executives perhaps too hung up on hobbits to notice how whacked out this movie is?

Driven is recommended only to those gentle souls who want to know what it looks like to crash into a wall at 200 mph.

Isn't scary, funny-scary, or even just plain funny.

The Big Wedding isn’t terrible. De Niro is actually pretty good here — the script gives him plenty of raunchy one-liners, and, while they’re mostly lame, he delivers with conviction, which counts for something nowadays.

I Am Sam is about as connected to the real world as Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, from which its title is derived -- in fact, in the realism department, Seuss may have the edge.

For a movie that deals with rape, criminality, and even racks up a real body count, Hick is whisper-thin and instantly forgettable.

Spike Lee’s She Hate Me is his worst movie ever--even worse than "Bamboozled," his self-serving indictment of modern minstrelsy, which at least was worth arguing about.

As the film progresses, the actor fails to progress with it: As Charles Swan seems to become more aware of his loneliness, Charlie Sheen seems to become more protective of his Charlie Sheen–ness.

A Good Day to Die Hard is the opposite of a labor of love. It has no good lines, no crackerjack fights, and only one mildly orgasmic revenge killing. It will satisfy no one — high-, low-, or middlebrow. Die Hard is finally in its death throes.

The best part is Jemaine Clement as Benjamin’s grandiose genre hero, Dr. Ronald Chevalier. Even if you love him on "Flight of the Conchords," you’ll be unprepared for his genius--and charisma.

The most depressing thing about Sex and the City 2 is that it seems to justify every nasty thing said and written about the series and first feature film.

It's fascinating trying to separate the thirties material from the mostly maladroit additions.

His performance feels so disingenuous, so forced, that an otherwise perfectly acceptable high-concept comedy comes crashing down around him.

Stupefyingly lackluster.

He (Gibson) ramrods his way through the bugged-out hysterics as if he were appearing in a movie that actually made sense. What a brave heart.

Clumsy, obvious, preposterous, the movie will likely set the cause of woman warriors back decades.

Apollo 18, isn't egregiously inept. It just never lives. It's 80 minutes of dead air.

Hollywood movies are once again taking on the job that Andy Griffith–era TV sitcoms used to fill, touting homespun values in Never Land.

If the similarly situated "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" took itself too seriously, the problem with Hansel & Gretel is that it doesn't quite take itself seriously enough - which sounds insane, but it's not too much to ask that the movie go beyond its one and only joke. Instead, amid all the fake Sturm und Drang, all we hear is the movie giggling to itself.

On the reasonable assumption that no movie featuring an Elvis impersonator can be wholly bad, I was prepared for a high old time at 3000 Miles to Graceland, which exhibits a plenitude of Elvi. The exhibition does not last very long, however. Less than a third of the way through, the filmmakers jettison the premise and trash their own movie.

Wallows in its own muck.

It's rare to see a piece of sh** that actually looks and sounds like a piece of sh**. It's kind of exciting!

If you were expecting Ritchie to discover something in Madonna that no one else has, something like, say, acting talent, forget it.

It has been a long time since I've heard people - many people - distinctly yell, "Boo!" Usually they just growl or moan or hiss. They don't bother actually to articulate the word "Boo!" I second their statement. The ending reeks.

Even if the film were well done, it would still be a travesty.

Forget Pacino; it’s all those red herrings that reek.