It looks slick, pricey and starry – Indiana Jones teams up with James Bond for a gunfight with space demons. But even Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig can't save a movie that's all concept, no content.

No matter Bateman and Reynolds make The Change-Up seem a lot better than it is. Each earns a star in my review. The movie would be literally nothing without them.

Our Idiot Brother comes off as a blueprint for a smart script no one really made. Now that's what I call dumb.

With Del Toro's name in the credits, standard chills aren't enough. We want imagination to run riot.

Killer Elite pretends to be fact-based and true to its 1980s period. Just know it's all baloney.

Sugar Ray Leonard helped with the motion-capture, and it shows. Good stuff. But the tear-jerking in Real Steel is as shameless as its product placement. We're being hustled.

One gut-busting death after another, terror giving way to tedium. Your call.

Footloose 2011 is harmless as far as it goes, but on the dance floor and off it never goes nearly far enough.

I fully expect Paranormal Activity 3 to be box office gold. But it's barely worth two stars, let alone two cents. As for future followups, I offer this plea: STOP!

Pretty cast. Potent premise. Piss-poor execution. And so dies In Time.

Say this for Emmerich, he's not stuffy. And he lucks out big-time with his cast.

So the sequel, A Game of Shadows, is more of the stupid same. It wouldn't matter so much if Downey and Jude Law, as the bromantic Dr. Watson, didn't look so ready to turn on the cerebral dazzle. Instead, Ritchie treats them like action goons out of his "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" basement.

The film version of Carnage hasn't just lost God from its title, it's lost the laughs from the play that brought it life.

Wahlberg could sleepwalk through this role, and does. See this movie and you'll surely follow his lead.

Lots of talented young singers decorate the scenery, notably Jeremy Jordan (late of Broadway's failed Bonnie & Clyde but soon-to-open in Newsies)who has vocal and acting chops that shine even in this bucket of Glee Goes Gospel cornpone.

You leave Red Tails thinking of what might have been instead of what is – a missed opportunity.

Worse, Safe House asks us to believe that Ryan Reynolds can outclass Denzel Washington in the art of being a hard-ass. Not on this planet, baby.

The Stooges were always better in short doses. And 90 minutes of PG nyuk-nyuk-nyuk can seem like an eternity.

Statham is still playing it safe in Safe, but vulnerability is showing through the cracks.

Cusack captures that desperation vividly enough to make you wish this was the real Poe story, which The Raven onscreen leaves buried alive.

I never rooted for them as a couple, never felt a chemistry in their bond. And in a romance, even one with tragic notes, that really is the end of the world.

Magic Mike slowly degenerates into a simplistic cautionary fable. I didn't see that coming from a sharp observer like Soderbergh.

Like the 2010 original, The Expendables 2 is all sound and fury signifying nothing, when at the very least it should add up to big, dumb fun.

This slapstick road movie feels tossed off by people on a raunchy bender. I mean that as a good thing. The trouble with Hit & Run is that it can't sustain its trippy effervescence.

The chance for delicious satire melts away quickly in Butter, a spoof without oomph.

It's Dead! It's Dead! By which I mean, It's Finished! It's Finished! Five movies have been squeezed out of four Stephenie Meyer Twilight books. All of them redefining cinematic tedium for a new century. And now, It's Over! It's Over! No more Twilight movies EVER! I'm so joyful that I might be overrating The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 by saying it's not half bad.

The actors can't perform miracles. Hot dogs are served in the final scene, but trust me, Hyde Park on Hudson is no picnic.

A dash of Tarantino might have juiced up Walter Salles' wrongheadedly well-mannered take on Jack Kerouac's 1957 Beat Generation landmark. Kerouac's semi-autobiographical novel comes to the screen looking good but feeling shallow.

In his screenwriting debut, Glee's gifted Chris Colfer, 22, proves he can lace a line with sass and soul. The downside of Struck by Lightning, besides the fact that Colfer's character, Carson Phillips, is struck dead in the first scene, is that Colfer hands himself all the best lines.

The script is too primly PG-13 to really go for it. Warm Bodies even suggests that true love can help the right zombie grow a new heart. That's a con job that makes Bodies lukewarm at best.

It's a bigger yawn than it sounds.

It's a bloodless, gutless piece of PG-13 fodder, geared to go down easy. That it does. It practically evaporates while you're watching it, lulling when you most want it to levitate.

There's no Judy Garland songs, no Scarecrow, no Tin Man, no Cowardly Lion. There's also no simplicity, no magic, no truth.

I'd see Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in anything, but this is pushing it. Admission is so slight that a breeze could flatten it.

Malick keeps pushing Affleck to the corner of the frame, as if he's more interested in the women. I found it difficult to maintain interest in anyone. If there's such a thing as a feather that weighs a ton, it's To the Wonder.

For all the bells and whistles – an electronic score by M83, a screen-busting Imax presentation and Cruise going full throttle – Oblivion feels arid and antiseptic, untouched by human hands. Bummer.

It's all a jumble and, worse, a damned impersonal one.

The comic screenplay...pivots on a toothless premise: Russ needs to get in touch with his inner child.

Hit-and-mostly-miss.

Director Gregory Hoblit ("Primal Fear") is merely arranging cliches in new patterns until the surprise ending blows enough pro-military fervor up the audience's ass to make Colin Powell call a halt.

In story terms, Dinosaur lays an egg.

The motor of the plot, involving nuclear terrorism, not only knocked Bad Company out of last year's release schedule due to 9/11 sensitivity, it stops Rock and Hopkins from sustaining a comic rapport. The waste is criminal.

Director Gary Fleder ("Don't Say a Word") pushes the same old cliches in "Blade Runner" packaging.

Except for Ashley Judd, who shows true grit as Vivi in her babe days, the effect is like being buried in molasses. For guys whose pain threshold is way low when it comes to the bonding of Steel Magnolias, Ya-Ya is a definite no-no.

Peet does it with a twinkle, finding class among the crass.

Does he (Hartley) succeed? Not with a movie this plodding, peevish and gimmicky. Is it fun to watch him try? Me, I'll take failed ambition over hack efficiency any day.

The "Citizen Kane" of flatulence.

Lawrence forgoes his knack for verbal comedy and replaces it with crude nonstop mugging.

Shot five years ago by director Michael Ritchie. No release until now. Uh-oh. Disaster? Pretty much.

Director Regis Warginer ("Indochine") lets his film degenerate into a turgid melodrama.

Built on a slender, one-joke whimsy -- and a tough one to buy into, at that.

Somehow, Lucille's plight is meant to comment astutely on the civil-rights movement. Now that IS crazy.

Tyler, a true beauty, gives the role a valiant try, but her range is too limited to play this amalgam of female perfection.

A promise unfulfilled.

Ephron, try as she might, can't give her codified champagne spin to a Resnick script that all too quickly runs out of fizz.

Branagh's take on the play comes right up to the edge of disaster but stubbornly refuses to leap in.

Plays like an unholy union of "The Natural" and "The Prince of Tides." Too bad...Build a movie as a shrine to baseball and they will come. Suckers!

Abandon all hope of logic, you who enter here.

What started as cute becomes cloying and bloated. Charm should never feel like it weighs a ton.

For the 148 minutes it takes "The Messenger" to deliver its message, being John Malkovich or Milla Jovovich is really no fun at all.

Director Mike Barber springs a twist ending that makes you sit up and stifle those yawns.

It's shocking, considering the talent involved, the The Perfect Storm looks and feels fake.

Slim pickings.

Self-importance sinks this one like a stone.

(Shelton) knows how to write pungent dialogue that covers a multitude of sins when the film goes off the rails.

An erotic thriller with flaws.

Walken is so funny, he almost makes you forget this flick is one joke stretched thinner than Calista Flockhart.

Quite a spectacle, but the movie falls flat.

Starting to feel sick? Just you wait.

Tries for deadpan laughs but is merely lifeless.

No dice...But no apologies are needed for Shannon--she earns her star spot.

Offers action in the Arnold Schwarzenegger style. Well, not right away.

Christensen is the only jolt of excitement in this turgid soap opera.

Distressingly shallow.

This black-comic assault on family entertainment is going to set a lot of teeth on edge -- If only his (De Vito's) material were better this time.

The film has no soul. An epic about this day of infamy should shake you to the core. But the real infamy about Pearl Harbor is that when you exit, you don't feel a thing.

A product that will delight car junkies and drive cinephiles to swear off film until fall.

Funny but perilously slight.

Verhoeven, who inflicted "Showgirls" on us, skips the provacative questions raised by invisibility and goes straight to rape and murder.

It's refried comic beans that smell stale and smack of desperation.

This new take on horror is more of the bloody same.

A sappy big-screen version of TV's "CSI."

Cringingly earnest, totally unremarkable fable.

Director Elie Chouraqui, who co-wrote the script, catches the chaotic horror of war, but why bother if you're going to subjugate truth to the tear-jerking demands of soap opera?

Potter gets the period details right, but the film itself has long since flown off the rails, miring good intentions in rank soap opera.

Just isn't enough.

Alleged family fun.

Satire in a blanket of bland.

Though saddled with hoary jokes, Goldberg at least pumps some funky life into the bland proceedings.

What the film lacks is suspense, surprise (the new ending is a dud) and passion.

A movie about death that stubbornly refuses to come to life.

Even director Carl Franklin, an artful purveyor of sterner stuff in "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress," can't prevent One True Thing from descending into chick-movie hell.

Con Air has all the signs of a hit. That's depressing.

This afternoon-TV special trying to pass as a real movie earns an extra half star solely for Samuel L. Jackson, who brings his usual fire to the role.

A borrowed idea -- hello, "Blade Runner," hi there, "Matrix" -- but an idea nonetheless.

It's not just that Jennifer Lopez looks lost and out of her league acting with Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman. That's to be expected. It's the drag-ass solemnity of this turgid family drama that makes you crazy.

The movie, however, is a crock.

Director Sydney Pollack zapped out a taut thriller in "Three Days of the Condor". But The Firm is mostly flab, in the manner of Pollack's elephantine Havana.

Political satire is so rare that it's a shame to watch the reliable Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland lend their talents to one that is blind to its own incompetence.

It's not so bad that it's good. It's so bland that it's boring. Not even worth a hissss.

Overthought, overwrought and thuddingly underwhelming, this high-profile misfire makes a congealed gumbo out of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winning 1946 novel and the Oscar-winning 1949 movie that followed it, sinking a classy cast in the goo.

Shopworn propaganda.

Offensive on multiple levels -- if only the plot had any levels at all -- Black Snake Moan leaves no "Tobacco Road" cliche unsmoked. Ricci gives it her all, and then some, but even her body and Jackson's blues can't heal a movie that rockets plum off its nut.

The film wants to make a case for Parker as the first modern woman. It gets the look and the attitude right, but it can't find her heart.

Veering between sentimentality and exploitation with a few misguided stops at raunchy sex farce, Reign Over Me never finds a tone to suit its purpose.

Kasdan has inexplicably reduced flesh-and-blood characters to cartoons.

Buffy isn't heinous, just disposable. As a friend tells Buffy while she eyes a fashion purchase, "It's so five minutes ago."

Stone calls this bile satire. But satire takes careful aim; Killers is crushingly scattershot. By putting virtuoso technique at the service of lazy thinking, Stone turns his film into the demon he wants to mock: cruelty as entertainment.

This big-screen Hamlet, pumped up to operatic scale by overkill director Franco Zeffirelli, exposes Gibson's shortcomings.

I laughed, then I wished it was funnier, then I just wished it would end.

Though Virtuosity connects all the dots to give audiences a roller-coaster ride, the movie begets nothing new: It's stillborn.

Me, I just think it blows. What does it matter if you spend millions on a movie - love the talking, battling bears! - if the effects are cheesy, the story runs off on tangents and after watching the movie fail utterly to be the next Lord of the Rings, you just want to go home.

By the end, Vantage Point is such a unholy mess of drooling sentiment and sloppy loose ends that you’ll hate yourself for being suckered in.

Penelope is dead on arrival.

Don't hammer this film for trying to get inside the head of Mark David Chapman before he shot John Lennon outside the rock legend's New York apartment on December 8th, 1980. Hammer it instead for failing to do so with any depth or insight.

If you don't see where this is going, you've never seen a movie. Sorry it had to be this one.

Questions: Did everyone involved in this botched thriller OD on speed? Does jimmy-legs director D.J. Caruso think if he slowed down the action we'd figure out how stupid the plot is?

Watching the stars try to out-cutesy the mutt is one for the puke bucket.

Here's a true S&M date movie. Only sadistic men and masochistic women could love it.

The money shots of the living tableau are padded with jokes that feel embalmed before the actors get them out of their mouths.

The infuriating cop–out ending reduces the premise to mush. I wanted to scream. Here goes: Arghh!

Will Ferrell and Danny McBride can find the dumb fun in anything. Too bad that Land of the Lost is so much less than anything.

Jammed with story threads that don’t cohere, Cirque commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It’s bloodless.

Jeez, did the "surprise" climax have to be this eye-rollingly stupid?

What have you done to The Wolfman, Hollywood? It’s got no kick to it. No fun either. And no real scares, which is more unforgivable.

No trite, tear-jerking cliché goes undrooled in the script by director Kirk Jones.

First-time director and screenwriter Hue Rhodes shows no discernible talent for dialogue, humor and, especially, pacing.

It's the Bay touch you feel in the way actors register as body count, characters go undeveloped, and sensation trumps feeling. A nightmare, indeed.

So why oh why is The Expendables such a limp-dick bust? Because Stallone forgets to include non-spazzy direction, a coherent plot, dialogue that actors can speak without cringing, stunts that don't fizzle, blood that isn't digital and an animating spirit that might convince us to give a damn.

A sappy-sweet romcom that seems to have been invaded by a screenwriter - one Geoff LaTulippe - with delusions that he's David Mamet.

I found myself wishing that Taymor would turn off the sound and fury and let The Tempest speak for itself. My wish wasn't granted.

It's damn hard to enjoy a thriller when you don't, won't, can't believe a word of it.

Patrick Lussier is listed as The Director, though I saw no evidence of anyone in control.

What Dick rendered potent, Nolfi renders preposterous.

Looks aren't everything. Case in point: Sucker Punch, a dazzling visual design that goes tone-deaf every time it opens its dumb mouth or makes claims to profundity.

The Vow is a sopping hankie of a romance for women who love to suffer and the men who love them.

A trio of appealing actors is trapped in an action-spiked romcom death-sentenced by a lack of humor, heart and a coherent reason for being.

There's no thrill in Gone because you can see every surprise coming. It lies there flapping like a dying fish. Skip it.

I've been told the movie plays best with very young girls. That's an insult very young girls should not be forced to endure.

Morning sickness afflicts most of the potential mommies. For me, the movie itself triggered the vomiting.

With that cast, we rightfully expect fireworks. What we get is the film equivalent of a wet blanket.

The movie deserves a stake through the heart.

Then there's the movie itself, which should be crazy, stupid fun but settles for just stupid.

Another January dud. Broken City drops hot-shot actors in a quicksand of clichés and watches them sink.

Magicians have been pulling rabbits out of hats for ages. And yet, with all this talent, no one can make a decent script materialize.

The Host basically comes down to a vote for Team Jared or Team Ian. I voted myself into oblivion about half an hour in. Niccol, who once added mystery and suspense to the sci-fi of 1997's "Gattaca," is no match for the giant marshmallow that is The Host.

What happened, bitches? Didn't the letdown of The Hangover Part II – basically Part I set in Thailand but minus the laughs – teach you anything? Guess not.

Slack direction fails to touch a nerve. Martin was scarier and funnier extracting Bill Murray's molars without Novocaine in "Little Shop of Horrors." Now that was one crazy dentist.

The kind of movie that TV stars do when they're on hiatus and trying to squeeze one in.

What DePalma has never made is a dull movie. Until now.

There's a strong movie in this life, but writer-director Leon Ichaso ("Sugar Hill") hasn't found it.

Trash.

Cruz is a dish, but her movie is as soggy and indigestible as Styrofoam.

Judd is slumming again in ths lame suspense yarn that could barely pass as a TV quickie without the bankable names of Judd, Tommy Lee Jones and director Bruce Beresford.

Even a search party would be hard-pressed to find a spark between Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas in Pollack's latest tear-jerker.

A fine case ... but none weighty enough to keep this fluff from evaporating as you watch it.

Makes you gag.

Plods along in the Oscar-winning, yawn-inducing tradition of "Out of Africa," making me yearn for something less "National Geographic."

For the first time, the Farrellys seem to be embarrassed by their own crudeness. For the first time, they should be.

It's soft-core pap for horny boys and their hornier dads.

Crossing "A Beautiful Mind" with "Sex Kittens Go to College," first-time director Stephen Gaghan (he wrote Traffic) causes a head-on collision.

Off the shelf after two years to capitalize on the popularity of Vin Diesel, Seth Green and Barry Pepper. It should have stayed there.

This mumbo-jumbo plays like The X Files on Prozac. No wonder the actors look narcotized.

The self-congratulatory histrionics of Williams, lower lip trembling as he triumphs over torture in the name of the human spirit, represents a trend in Hollywood to make accessible melodrama out of unspeakable tragedy.

Chockablock with things we're not supposed to notice: that Roberts is wasted; that she and Cusack have no characters to play, so it's virtually impossible to understand why she loves him or vice versa; that the script provides comedy without bite and romance without resonance.

For starters, it blows. Madonna continues to mistake a knack for striking poses with the interpretive skill of a real actor.

The true story of the LaMarcas, well told by the late Mike McAlary in Esquire, has been pounded into TV-crime mush by screenwriter Ken Hixon and director Michael Caton-Jones. Shockingly, the acting doesn't help.

Good-natured fun when it isn't stale, which is most of the time, this talky comedy set in a Chicago barber shop is a sitcom pilot disguised as a movie.

Something lazy, slow, shallow, stupid, amateurish, unfunny, unsuspenseful, uninformed, unspeakably dull and witlessly written, directed and acted (the special effects suck, too).

Contrived, manipulative and shamelessly sentimental, this film is notable for the courageous reach of Sean Penn, who gives a bold, heartfelt performance.

Even with sex, drugs, hip-hop and a murder, these four stories are dull, dull, dull, dull.

Rob Cohen, who last directed "The Skulls" --ouch! -- can consider this one another career-killing skid mark.

Slick-dick director Simon West, of "Con Air" and "The General's Daughter" infamy, continues to show no flair at all for blending action and character. Jolie and Lara deserved better. So did we.

It's sledgehammer whimsy, and it's not talking to me.

Despite melodramatic lapses -- the gripping action recalls Walter Hill's 1981 "Southern Comfort" -- this is Schumacher's most ambitions film since "Falling Down" in 1993, and it plays to his strengths with young actors.

You don't want to see this bilge. Director Milcho Manchevski, who was fired in midproduction, is the only one with cause to celebrate.

A two-hour search for a pulse... A miscalculation from a prodigious talent who has forgotten that you squeeze the life out of romance when you don't give it space to breathe.

A dreary film that's damn near torture to sit through.

It's a no-go. View From the Top boasts a first-class cast, but they're all traveling coach.

Feels fake, forced and indigestible.

Murphy looks comatose delivering the played-out poopy jokes.

Strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (both named Gerry) in a desert with little to say and do except lose themselves in an existential wasteland of doomed beauty.

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can stage action, but he can't save a trivializing, reactionary script featuring a Hollywood star (read America) as a global savior.

I'd prefer to think of Sandler in "Punch-Drunk Love," the one good movie of the three he did this year.

Director Michael Hoffman sprays on the tears like a toxic mist. Avoid like the plague.

"You're an awfully hard man to like, Hitler." Few serious films could survive a line like that. Max certainly doesn't.

Guy flicks can be just as galling as the chick variety. Here's Exhibit A in how to lose an audience in ten minutes.

If you ever admired Julia Stiles, Selma Blair and Jason Lee -- and who didn't? -- don't watch them crush their careers in this laugh-free romantic comedy.

It's too bad Martin already made “What's the Worst That Could Happen?” The title really fits this one.

The 'roo doesn't talk, except in a dream sequence…I'm dying here.

Grating.

The jokes? "Chicks are for fags," says Lloyd. The film is subtitled When Harry Met Lloyd. Believe me, you don't want to be there.

To shine in a turd like this shows Brody has the stuff that -- damn the Oscar jinx -- makes an actor last.

A triumph for the machines, more proof that we do indeed live in the Matrix.

Do you really need me to tell you how scary this horror show isn't?

A clumsy package of clichés.

What the filmmakers fail to recognize is that history on the page is quite different from what it needs to be onscreen, namely alive and visceral.

Except for Connery, who is every inch the lion in winter, nothing here feels authentic.

Something cold and mechanical has seeped into the sequel. The divas push so hard for fun, it kills the spontaneity that fun needs to breathe.

When a chick flick goes wrong -- and this one hits a dead end in hell -- it's a wipeout.

This third hunk of Pie is a worn-out gross-out, a remnant of a genre that now seems so five minutes ago.

The only people likely to get a kick out of Gigli -- the first screen teaming of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez -- are Madonna and her director hubby Guy Ritchie. Finally there's a movie as jaw-droppingly awful as their "Swept Away."

It's sad to see risk-taking director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Hotel) do a generic thriller for a paycheck and then not even screw with the rules.

"Your incompetence is most taxing," says the chief vampire (Bill Nighy). A line that pretty much nails this rusty Blade.

Even Cate Blanchett can't save this misbegotten horse opera.

Talk about your quick-buck exploitation.

Stupefyingly stupid thriller.

"Irritating" doesn't begin to describe Julia Roberts as Katherine, an art-history prof who arrives at Wellesley in 1953.