A benign slice of life about suburban angst on Long Island. It's not much, but thanks to the noble efforts of a very good cast, I've seen worse.

Cowboys & Aliens is one of the silliest movies ever made, but so many otherwise serious people have attached their names to it that, as Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid.

Gun Hill Road is worth seeing for the acting. The great character actress Miriam Colon makes a brief but memorable appearance as the strong matriarch of the household, and Ms. Santana, a true transgendered teen who has never acted before, is especially wrenching.

Senna's accomplishments are impressive, but his story seems more suited to an ESPN special than a feature-length film.

If you can suspend your disbelief that a cute 22 year-old had the power to succeed with civil rights where Martin Luther King and President Kennedy failed, The Help actually has a lot to offer.

It's a sweet, harmless, meandering tale with an engaging gimmick, but a great love story - or a great movie - it's not.

In the end, 30 Minutes or Less is a tidy, entertaining nerd action movie that should provide a good distraction for viewers this summer.

The two-handed duet at the center of Love Crime radiates, but the parade of easily parodied men who stomp in and out of their corporate offices just seem like script rejects from "Mad Men."

Like any good cautionary tale, Puncture tells a suspenseful story responsibly, creating food for thought and leaving the audience both enlightened and entertained.

A 2½-hour art film that is something of a well-intentioned mess.

In case you think Sarah Palin-You Betcha! is a hit job on an easy subject, see the movie and learn something. It's terrifying, but in all fairness, no disgrace, no rumor of extramarital affairs in office, no broadside is explored unless it can be substantiated.

Dirty Girl is a bad movie with no insights that is broadly drawn and genuinely plagued by filthy dialogue. You don't laugh. You just wince, and wonder how the whole thing ever got financed.

Surreal but disappointingly drab, it's still not the best Almodovar in years. Despite the usual Almodovar plot twists, kinky sex and themes of sexual identity reversal, gender bending and mad desire, the cult auteur has gone off the tracks and lost his compass.

I wish all the agony in The Big Year was leading up to something fascinating in the end, but the most inviting thing in the movie was the exit door.

Johnny Depp is dismally miscast as the alter ego of the rebellious author with the "screw you" attitude.

As agreeable as she is to watch, the disappointing thing I feel is that she plays everything the same way. For a film about one person that reveals so little about the subject, 94 minutes is longer than it sounds. My advice is to wait for the DVD. This is definitely a movie to watch with a remote control.

I expected more from a movie about the most feared man in America for half a century. Whatever else you think about him, in retrospect, he had balls of brass - an essential quality replaced in J. Edgar by dull indifference.

I can't imagine what attracted these two megahunks to such a bore.

Director McQueen shares no primal truths, offers no resolutions, and the movie seems pointless. It seems almost wicked to spread on all that enticement and titillation, and then throw the sandwich away.

It's a fatiguing, low-key character study that drags along annoyingly and pleads for patience, but stick with it and you'll find the engrossing centerpiece performance by Ms. Theron a captivating reward that is well worth the effort.

Let it be said that Ms. Streep is galvanizing, even as the film slogs through too much information and not nearly enough illumination.

A middling attempt to peek through a lace curtain for a glimpse of the other Upstairs/Downstairs staff members only leads to too many distracting social functions that fail to relieve the film's otherwise solemn pacing.

The Innkeepers, a desultory indie-prod poorly written and lamely directed by Ti West, and filmed on the cheap at the actual location, is a poor-man's rip-off of Stanley Kubrick's hotel spookfest, "The Shining," promising paranormal horrors to all who dare to enter. Where is Jack Nicholson when we need him?

Boring and sedentary, not to mention only occasionally coherent, this creaking-door mystery is not much of a vehicle to display young Mr. Radcliffe's range and charm.

Too small and dark to appeal to a large audience, it's not a movie to cherish.

The movie is not about the dog. It's about the people who find love, settle their differences, and get their priorities straight while searching for him. Still, when all is said and done, the dog is the only thing you care about in Darling Companion.

As good as Citizen Gangster is, it would be even better if you could understand the dialogue.

Battleship is dopey, preposterous and unintentionally hilarious in all the wrong places, but as directed by Peter Berg, it is also energetic, fast-moving and bracing.

This three-hander has an honesty and a momentum that I found grudgingly rewarding.

To Rome with Love has moments of isolated charm, but it's only moderately entertaining, it isn't very funny, and it's entirely too long.

The actors are so good, though, that they make you want to see what they could do in a better movie than this tedious acting-class experiment.

When this sick, ludicrous cocktail of sex, violence and mayhem was first unveiled a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, one wag aptly described it as "the ghost of Tennessee Williams meets the spirit of Quentin Tarantino."

Ms. Farmiga is the only one who seems to be having any fun, as an aging flower child stuck in an earlier decade and addicted to healing vortex workshops and primal screams. Mellow, but very much a work in progress, Goats has a bland but overcrowded menu that could benefit from a little feta.

In the often illustrious career oeuvre of Clint Eastwood, Trouble with the Curve is a minor entry, a cinematic footnote.

James Franco's role hardly exists. He's a doped-up cipher who attends museum openings and drives his car into a cement wall, looking as bored and out of place as he did hosting the Academy Awards.

The film is worth seeing for the excellent ensemble work by a cast that, although diligent and appealing, remain somewhat less than thrilling. They do their best to plumb the depths of domestic dysfunction, but in the end, The Oranges does not quite deliver the goods.

The film was shot in Louisiana, which looks nothing like Iowa. Nobody along the way seems to have a care in the world about cholesterol. And it's the first movie in history that makes Hugh Jackman look repulsive.

The film's weakest link is Rufus Sewell's rumpled gumshoe, inarticulate and mumbling to the point of madness.

It opens our eyes to a subculture about which most of us know very little, but it is so unsteady in its focus that interest wanes.

Lincoln is also a colossal bore. It is so pedantic, slow-moving, sanitized and sentimental that I kept pinching myself to stay awake - which, like the film itself, didn't always work.

In this overly familiar and ultimately meandering exercise in tedium, Mr. Burns also plays the lead.

As a realistic political thriller about Americans in harm's way it is not half as suspenseful or entertaining as "Argo." We may never know the truth about how we found bin Laden, but I still believe what we do know makes a strong enough story on its own without Wonder Woman.

It is to her everlasting credit that a famously exasperating perfectionist like Barbra Streisand could survive a limp noodle like The Guilt Trip.

Trading in her red locks for kohl-lined eyes like a raccoon and the vampire look of Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, [Chastain] is the spookiest thing in Mama. Everything else is cable television.

Ultimately, everyone in the movie is wasted, including Catherine Zeta-Jones, who provides great eye candy but has nothing important to say or do. Most of the roles are so ambiguous you end up scratching your head in the final reel, and some of the loose ends are so irrelevant they seem to have ended up on the cutting-room floor. With Russell Crowe, it really helps if you can read lips.

It reminded me of everything from "Ten Little Indians" to a low-budget take on Neil Simon’s "Murder by Death" without the laughs. It’s diverting for people who love games, but not for the squeamish.

As the narrative builds, the movie shows how the harassed and impatient Chinese-American finds tolerance, acceptance of others, inner salvation and love. A lot for one movie to negotiate, not always successfully, but the enjoyment factor is obvious.

The movie doesn’t know if it’s a teen fantasy-romance or a more sophisticated satire that the material can’t support.

This one blends the scented candles of a daytime soap with the tamer aspects of a middling thriller. Some folks will bring Kleenex. Others will need NoDoz.

To be honest, I can rarely recall any film, on any subject, that made less sense.

There are some lovely and moving things here, but over the long haul it’s more like watching an hour and a half of someone’s weekend trip to Knott’s Berry Farm.

My boy Viggo is always fascinating, but the movie is a concept searching for a story.

Liam Hemsworth, the Ben & Jerry Flavor of the Month, is a sexy Australian centerfold without a trace of an accent who can actually act. His love interest is Teresa Palmer, a fellow Aussie who recently starred in the zombie flick "Warm Bodies." They may be camera-ready smoothies who take their clothes off often enough to keep the teen dweebs drooling.

The result is not without a few moments of exhilaration, although the overall effect is more like the Bard of Avon meets "Glee."

Empty, pointless and stupid, the barrage of gunfire called Welcome to the Punch is another unappealing entry in the overworked British gangster genre.

Far from the offbeat satire on the American dream gone sour it aims to be, The Brass Teapot is more like a dark flirtation with the American nightmare that backfires.

Two lost souls on the highway of life — that’s what a well-acted but benign little trifle called Arthur Newman is about.

The dependable Australian actor Guy Pearce is always welcome, even in a well-meaning dud like 33 Postcards.

Speaking of afterthoughts, Olivia Wilde has a bit part as a single mom who unwittingly aids and abets the Brennans in their escape, and Brian Dennehy lurches silently through a number of scenes as John's working-class father. It's jarring to see such big-name actors in such thankless roles.

I'm not sure what went wrong with this picture. It could just be bad judgment on the part of screenwriter Steve Adams, who for all we know finds stalking adorable.

It just goes to show, no matter how burnished your backdrop or splendiferous your setting, if your script is crap, you're stuck with a total dud.

It might be time for Johnny Depp and Tim Burton to start thinking about seeing other people. Alice in Wonderland, their seventh film together, is so thoroughly soul-deadening and laborious that the prospect of an eighth collaboration feels like the sword of Damocles.

It’s a romantic piffle stuffed with so much candy that your skin could break out.

A vulgar, happy-as-cancer aberration that takes the dysfunctional family idea to a new low. Whimsical, yes. Happy, never.

There is no hope on the horizon for movies as leaden as The Exploding Girl.

A ludicrously pretentious train wreck masquerading as a movie.

After.Life, with a pretentious point between the two words in the title for no explainable reason, is a horror film with a macabre style but few of the creepy chills of cheaper, cliché-riddled thrillers that are a dime a dozen these days.

Staying awake during this ordeal of incompetent, incomprehensible stupidity is not difficult. It’s so noisy that you can hear it in the next town. Staying interested is something else entirely.

Instead of the feel-good comedy they intended, you are left with the suspicion that the movie is really about a man suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness for which there is no cure.

At a time when every penny counts, where do they come up with the money to finance a movie this boring?

As the film builds to a feverish hysteria, you have to work hard to keep from laughing.

It still has a long way to go before the term Mumblecore (which sounds like a Harry Potter major at Hogwart's) can be confused with the term Class Act.

Salt is about as believable as a secret training program for military pilots consisting entirely of kangaroos in flight helmets. But it must be said that the star carries her load admirably.

I'd like to tell you just how bad Inception really is, but since it is barely even remotely lucid, no sane description is possible.

Even Helen Mirren on a bad day is better than nine out of ten American film queens polluting movie screens on any given Sunday, but really, this is one time she should have stayed in bed.

Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot.

The film knocks itself unconscious trying to be whimsical and offbeat, but is so contrived that it is as embarrassing as it is unfunny.

Instead of originality, The Romantics recycles the same material with a lot of noise masquerading as style, and no substance whatsoever, producing a grotesquerie of caricatures from central casting that are dead on arrival.

Burlesque is the celluloid equivalent to a Big Mac attack, and any resemblance to a plot is purely coincidental.

The original western won John Wayne a puzzling and undeserved Oscar for finally falling off his horse. Don't expect the same miracle for Jeff Bridges. In the numbing hands of pretentious filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, history does not repeat itself in any way whatsoever.

The bottom line is, whether you worship God, Satan, Xenu or Ron Paul, The Rite gets it wrong.

Unknown makes no sense at all, so you not only worry about Liam Neeson's judgment in movies, but you begin to wonder if he's forgotten how to read.

Who goes to the movies for 104 minutes of punishment? Where is John Wayne, now that we need him?

Contrived, pretentious and not worth seeing even for the perverse pleasure of watching first-rate talents make second-rate fools of themselves.

Only the great Piper Laurie delivers dollar value. Otherwise, Hesher is to movies what graffiti is to a rotting fence.

The movie knocks itself unconscious trying to be offbeat, but instead of cinematic heart, the director self-indulges in cinematic art, drowning the whole thing in freeze frames, slow-motion and color-coding, owing everything he knows to the worst of Jean-Luc Godard and Wes Anderson.

The Trollhunter writers either have an abundance of imagination or they've been smoking a controlled substance.

Even as a prime example of rotten summer silliness, this is a paralyzing experience.

This is bargain-basement moviemaking, and looks it. Here's wishing Mr. Pierce a vigorous movie career, and better luck next time.

Congenial is the word for Larry Crowne, but it's as flat as an ironing board.

It's a stupid farrago of aborted ideas, misguided actors, lame direction, submental writing and follow-the-dots plotting that never comes anywhere within a 10-mile radius of what I used to call coherent filmmaking.

What to say about an uphill slog called Crazy, Stupid, Love? It's not nearly crazy enough to clear the clogged arteries of summer comedies, and when the love appears, it's in all the wrong places. Oh well, at least they nailed the stupid part.

The charm, versatility and charisma of Jason Bateman and the camera-ready good looks of Ryan Reynolds should add up to more than a piece of crummy, amateurish junk called The Change-Up.

By the time the end finally comes, there's no relief. You're left with the vague recollection of an interesting movie you were watching before you got kidnapped and subjected to over an hour of torture porn starring a fat, sadistic clown.

Artificial, irresponsible, filthy and forgettable, it knocks itself cross-eyed trying to make you roar with laughter at chemotherapy, with the nauseating Seth Rogen milking most of the yuks. But a stoner comedy about cancer? I don't think so.

How many ways can a film go wrong? Too many to list, and Trespass finds them all.

As a movie, it's so tightly framed you gasp from claustrophobia. As a film of cryptic boredom, I cannot believe the actors were able to say their lines without cue cards.

Rarely has Mr. Gere walked through any movie with so little energy and so much indifference. I've seen more fervor on the face of a man parking a car.

Movies like Sleeping Beauty are as sensual as cottage cheese, not to mention passé.

You anticipate every scene before it happens and figure out every secret before it's revealed.

Haywire makes no sense whatsoever, which should come as no surprise. It's the latest brainless exercise in self-indulgence from Steven Soderbergh, whose films rarely make any sense anyway.

And there is Ewan McGregor, who makes entirely too many movies and only occasionally makes an effort to speak the kind of English anyone can understand.

Ms. Cardellini plays it like a zombie, and she isn't helped by all the loitering camera angles and repetitive close-ups of her head framed against car windows. It's a worthy subject, ploddingly explored in a film that is too modest for its own good.

All of which makes me sad about Denzel Washington's disillusioning participation. I forgive him if the money was irresistible enough to pay off a mortgage or put his kids through Harvard, but Safe House is total junk, and he is one of the producers.

Gifted and sincere as she always is, there's not much Ms. Seyfried can do with this tripe.

Detachment drives a coffin nail through a noble profession with such ruthless virulence that it makes no point at all.

He (Owen) doesn't fail the movie. The movie fails him. As his wife, the superb Carice van Houten has so little to do or say - so peripheral a relation to everything else in the movie - that she seems to be an intruder herself.

A creepfest so stupid it makes trashy slash-and-burn epics like "Humans Versus Zombies" and "I Spit on Your Grave" seem like Molière and Proust.

The result, in the case of Moonrise Kingdom, is what I call transcendentally brainless - an after school special aimed at asinine adolescents over the age of 40.

A nasty piece of work that's been hanging around for two years looking for an audience.

Red Lights goes astray on so many levels that I gave up trying to figure it out before the end of the second reel.

These are neither good people nor interesting savages, and they're not worth caring about. Neither is the movie.

Halfheartedly, I give The Dark Knight Rises - the third and final Batflick in the Nolan trilogy - one star for eardrum-busting sound effects and glaucoma-inducing computerized images in blinding Imax, but talk about stretching things.

Director Lloyd leaves it all to the imagination, but in a movie this slow and indecisive, the imagination is no longer enough when we've seen stronger stuff elsewhere.

The script is breezy, but neither of the two leads have the heft or charm to carry an entire feature-length film - separately or together.

Call The Master whatever you want, but lobotomized catatonia from what I call the New Hacks can never take the place of well-made narrative films about real people that tell profound stories for a broader and more sophisticated audience. Fads come and go, but as Walter Kerr used to say, "I'll yell tripe whenever tripe is served."

The actors are all completely wasted in this dumb travesty of fumbling, unfocused, oversexed numbskulls who work in the movie business. Everyone connected with Nobody Walks should have done just that-early and quickly.

Almost three hours long, a lugubrious sludge of mud soup called Cloud Atlas deserves a limp nod for pure guts, I suppose, but what I'd really like to do is burn it.

A filthy, pretentious, brutally violent and utterly pointless load of rubbish called Killing Them Softly.

Jack Reacher is mostly grim, violent and stupid.

In an age of zombies, werewolves and oversexed vampires, teens won't be shaking in their Uggs over ugly women with bad teeth flying around on brooms, and with its graphic depictions of tortures, mutilations, gang rapes and myriad examples of child abuse, it's no longer a fairy tale suitable for children.

For an old-fashioned crime thriller, you need real pros. Mr. Statham is to acting what Taco Bell is to nutrition.

What it turns out to be is a preposterous puzzle that fails every test under scrutiny, leaving the spectator with a “Huh?” that is meant to be uttered only while chewing gum.

Identity Thief is so bad it’s hard to believe it wasn’t directed by Judd Apatow or the Farrelly Brothers.

Mostly it just redefines the word “asinine.” Marcia Gay Harden never makes a wrong move, but this movie is so futile, one goes away convinced that the moves she makes are hardly worth making.

Blame who you must, but whatever went wrong with 6 Souls, God had nothing to do with it.

This one is so bad it’s hilarious. Sheri Moon Zombie is no Mia Farrow, Rob Zombie is no Roman Polanski, and The Lords of Salem seems to have been made by people on the rubber bus headed for a rubber room with bars on the windows.

Well photographed, lurid enough to cause concern for the teen market it aims to captivate, and with enough blood to refurbish an abattoir, Kiss of the Damned creates an eerie, foreboding anxiety that comes uneasily close to terror. Too bad they seem to be making it up as they go along.

I love the publicity quotes by Baz Luhrmann stating that his intention was to make an epic romantic vision that is enormous. Also: overwrought, asinine, exaggerated and boring. But in the end, about as romantic as a pet rock.

The actual Chilean earthquake killed 300 people and turned thousands more homeless, but this movie distills everything for comic effect. Everyone gets robbed, raped, impaled, mutilated, decapitated or burned alive. But that’s not all. Crawling through the blood-drenched debris, here comes the tsunami!

Sightseers is a morose, unsettling blend of pathology for sport and murder for laughs.

All we know is that the only sure way to avoid the loss of any more I.Q. points in the world today is to stay away from movies like Erased.

Despite the sight of so much cheesecake romping naked through the woods like the girls have never heard of poison ivy, it’s the usual disreputable grindhouse schlock.

The latest calcified bore by Sofia Coppola is less pretentious than "Marie Antoinette" but every bit as inertly stupefying as "Lost in Translation."

We all know how rotten today’s movies can be, but even at the bottom of the slag pit, you won’t find a load of garbage any smellier than From Paris With Love.

With so much junk littering the screen these days, the movie business looks like a garbage strike, and it’s beginning to smell, too. The latest pollution from the celluloid dumpster is sub-mental horror called Cop Out.

What some critics praise as astute and compelling, I find juvenile and fraught with hysteria. There's no arc here, no real pathos, and the direction is like watching snow melt on the side of a road.

Lena Dunham makes a 98-minute home video seem like 98 days of hard labor.

Not only disgusting and unendurable, but filthy and boring, too.

Quite the most appalling piece of junk I have seen lately, Hobo With a Shotgun just lies there like an autopsy.

With eyes closed and jaw firmly set, concentrating hard enough to break a blood vessel, I cannot think of a movie more incomprehensible, moronic, pointless or abominable than a load of trash called The Big Bang.

Cheap, preposterous and mind-bendingly dreadful.

The movie is so clueless and time-warped it could be comprised of outtakes from "Father Knows Best."

Every once in a while a movie comes along that is so bad it makes you feel terrible for everyone involved. Flypaper, a new indie that's little more than a haphazard assemblage of clichés, clunky camera tricks and cringe-worthy dialogue, is just such a film.

Melancholia is his latest pile of undiluted drivel, nauseatingly filmed by a wonky hand-held camera and featuring a crazy, mismatched ensemble headed by Kirsten Dunst, who won an acting award in Cannes last year for looking totally catatonic.

This is the most unwatchable horror movie masquerading as social comment I have seen this year.

A disastrous catalog of flaws, all accentuated by dilated, out-of-focus cinematography. The coke-snorting, booze-guzzling and vomiting add up to nearly two hours of frustration, anesthesia and pointless, self-indulgent excess. They should have called it "I Vomit With You." There's plenty of that too.

Expect the dregs for weeks to come, but I can safely say with absolutely no trepidation that it is unlikely to get worse than a lurid, lewd and loathsome shockfest called The Divide.

The result is 98 minutes of moronic stupidity already being labeled on the Internet as "the worst movie of the year."

I haven't seen a movie this bad since "Battlefield Earth" and "Howard the Duck."

This raunchy dreck, cut from the same disposable toilet tissue as the recent trailer-trash creepfest "Killer Joe," is a leap downhill from "Precious."

The result is a twitching convulsion of vicious drivel passing itself off as a movie, which can be best appreciated by the kind of people who dig "Showgirls," the "Saw" franchise and Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman flicks.

The resulting mayhem and slaughter is vile and disgusting.