Has a welcome message of personal growth and racial tolerance. And it's ably made, with evocative Memphis locations. But in the final sermon, it proffers some plot twists that are supposed to be miraculous but may strike a doubting Thomas as lame.

Mars Needs Moms is dark for a Disney movie.

The so-so film isn't nearly as good as any of the movies that may have inspired it, or even its own knockout trailer.

Rooted in empty materialism, but it never evokes the heady rush of a guilty pleasure or the precipitous payback of a thriller.

An inconsequential mess.

A medical drama that pays lip service to the healing power of music but never finds the rhythm.

With such a thin excuse for a leading man, Arthur is a dud.

Instead of entertaining us, director Robert Redford offers us a handsome history lesson that's as dry as a hardtack biscuit.

The few Jewish characters are cartoonishly evil, but even the Palestinians are sketchily dramatized or, in the case of a terrorist, clumsily legitimized.

The most rewarding way to watch Water for Elephants is to focus on the sideshow of costumes and craftsmanship, because the romance in the center ring smells like trained animals going through the motions.

Because we don't know or care much about the characters, this Israeli film never fulfills its potential as either an absurdist comedy or a humane drama.

Fast Five represents Yankee ingenuity of the brutally stupid kind.

Mostly "Hoodwinked Too" is playing to young video gamers, with overblown action sequences and slangy 'tude.

Doesn't break any new ground, but it is a decent way to spend a girls' night out.

Amid other wedding movies crowding screens these days, not to mention Perry's "Madea's Big Happy Family," Jumping the Broom feels instantly familiar. And tired.

There Be Dragons is tethered to the earth by a tangled plot, wooden acting and the heavy burden of healing old wounds.

It's clear that Phillips is betting heavily on funnymen Jeong and Galifianakis to hide his creative bankruptcy.

One small step for action movies, one giant leap into the abyss of mindlessness.

Spacey evokes memories of other movies in which he's played a shark, and it's inherently fascinating to hear Aniston talking dirty and to see Farrell with a combover, but nothing in the film is genuinely provocative.

It would have been nice if Cowboys & Aliens had come come up with the right equation to balance originality and homage. But in the end, it all turned into trigonometry.

Once we've quickly digested the fortune-cookie message that modern women are as bound by obligations as their grandmothers were, all we can savor is the scenery.

Here, the scattershot spoofery never rings true.

30 Minutes or Less could have been a guilty pleasure, but the crusty caper is half baked.

This is another one of those phony movies in which a character burrows into someone else's life without telling them she's an axe murderer, a man or a vampire. Not only that, we're supposed to hope that they get it on. I was hoping that everyone involved would get hit by an asteroid.

One Day fails to make us care about the young couple at its center.

Despite the oddly literate title, Vincent Wants to Sea never deviates from the predictable bonding-through-misadventure script, and it has little to teach us about the nature and treatment of the traveler's respective maladies.

A documentary that clearly aspires to the highest standards of cinematic muckraking but makes for a frustrating experience.

Like its main character, I Don't Know How She Does It tries to do everything, but it doesn't quite succeed.

Struggles heroically, but unsuccessfully, to strike a balance between whimsy and pathos.

What it lacks is the human element. Charlie is more of a rat than a rascal, and instead of working hard to build and operate his robots, he's literally going through the motions.

Footloose poses as a bold update, but it's shockingly out of step with the times.

The Big Year puts the focus on people who aren't inherently interesting - or funny.

After a nifty setup, In Time mostly fails to deliver as it gets lamer by the minute.

Back when it was planned as an African-American "Ocean's Eleven," this project might have been edgy, but the script has been whitewashed into a generic caper comedy with pretensions of timeliness.

J. Edgar is the kind of prestige production that apologists will call polished, but even the technical attributes are tinny. In the gay-geezers scenes, Hammer wears terrible old-age makeup, and the entire film is bathed in sepia tones as weak as its convictions.

Twilight fans who have followed the series will want to see "Breaking Dawn," and like Bella and Edward may find brief moments of pleasure.

On its own terms and against all odds, "Outrage" is adequately entertaining, with more than enough cringe-inducing violence and cruel humor to please the average American moviegoer. But true Kitano fans will find its title sadly ironic.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is supposed to promote healing, but as they say in New York: close, but no cigar.

As in the mindless Man on a Ledge, the hero is never really in danger, we're the ones who are trapped.

Even by the standards of light entertainment, This Means War is meaningless.

It's hard to hate a movie that escorts us to such lovely locales, but instead of marking the territory as her own, Madonna has directed a potentially provocative story like a virgin.

Considerably better looking than its predecessor, but it's spewing the same old gibberish.

Episodically structured and lethargically paced, the new film attempts to convince us that there's something incredibly charming about an old guy who makes a habit of ogling young women. Actually, the whole scenario is pretty creepy.

Damsels in Distress is shockingly tone-deaf. Stillman is still capable of a few amusing quips, but his storytelling is sophomoric.

Proficient director Peter Berg ("Hancock") keeps the noise so deafening we can't think about how preposterous it all is.

As a sex-education comedy, Hysteria is flaccid, forced and unfunny.

The only edge in the movie is represented by Russell Brand, who actually lived the lifestyle, but he's muzzled by a bad Liverpool accent and a gay subplot that's as insincere as the swaggering anthems by fatuous hacks like Foreigner, Starship and Journey.

Pine and the always-watchable Banks make the best of a bad screenplay, but People Like Us gives us nothing that we can relate to.

The film is constructed from four flimsy vignettes that are artlessly overlapped.

Snark is not art. In the evolutionary spectrum of cinema, Natural Selection is like the duck-billed platypus, pretending to be warm-blooded but more than a little fowl.

If this movie wanders into your neighborhood, the only watch that will hold your attention is the timepiece on your wrist.

People over 60 are as sexual and complicated as their grandchildren, and there ought to be more movies about them, but only an audience as constipated as these characters could mistake this lukewarm stream of pablum for a hard nugget of truth.

The delivery pouch for Premium Rush promises a white-hot thriller from the bike-messenger subculture. But what's inside the package seems like a lukewarm action-comedy from the pile of scripts that Matthew Broderick rejected after "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

The fatal flaw of this screenwriting term paper is that Cooper's character is a boring jerk we're supposed to regard as a nice guy who made an honest mistake.

Everything about Trouble With the Curve is as streamlined and hollow as a Wiffle Ball bat.

While the cast is filled with award winners, writer-director Daniel Barnz is a dunce who can't construct an argument without employing flimsy logic and cardboard characters.

A movie with no surprises at all, a streamlined chase flick that is running on the fumes from recycled fuel.

While it claims to be exported from New Jersey, The Oranges is peddling an alien motto: When life hands you lemons, fuhgeddaboudit.

It's as if there's a missing reel of film that could tie the story together and give it the emotional impact it takes for granted.

War of the Buttons is handsomely crafted and it's touting tolerance, but as long as we open the gates to the Trojan horse of historical simplification, there's a danger that Hollywood could attack us with "The Goonies Go to the Gulag." Be vigilant!

For his complex portrayal, Day-Lewis is likely to have roses thrown at his feet, but for the dreadful film in which he's enslaved, emancipated onlookers will reach for the grapes of wrath.

There are a few beguiling moments in Holy Motors, particularly a martial-arts sequence and an erotic dance while Mr. Oscar is dressed in a motion-capture body suit, but the road between those moments is so strewn with stalled ideas that audiences who care about character and plot are liable to take the exit to a movie that makes sense.

Fans of the franchise will greet Les Misérables as a feast for the senses, but the rest of us are left with crumbs.

If you're a zombie purist or a fan of "The Walking Dead," Warm Bodies is not for you.

This is a brutal and stupid movie.

All that complexity backfires at about the midpoint, leaving viewers with a standard yarn about a popular guy who makes a grossly insensitive wager after his trophy girlfriend drops him. After that, it is all a case of "been there, done that." [29 Jan 1999,p. E3]

To paraphrase a classic of Reagan-era cinema, A Good Day to Die Hard is a bad day to stop sniffing glue.

The derivative script and skimpy effects don’t convey either the power or the problems of being a young witch.

Hallstrom (“Chocolat”) makes the mishmash palatable, and romance mainstay Duhamel provides some sweet-and-salty charm, but there’s not much they can do with Sparks’ canned dialogue and Hough’s undercooked acting.

The verdict on Snitch is that Johnson has attempted a career detour on a street marked Do Not Enter.

The more suitably antic Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp were considered for the part before Franco wandered into the picture with his stoner grin.

Admission is one film you may not want to get into.

As long as Hollywood keeps hitting us over the head with empty spectacles like G.I. Joe: Retaliation, regular Joes will be too numb to fight back.

"Star Trek V'' begins and ends well, but is something of a muddle in the middle. [9 June 1989]

This time around, the story seems old and tired as well. The result is a routine space opera, an only moderately entertaining finale to a series that has had some great moments. [6 Dec. 1991, p.3D]

The wrinkles between reality and illusion soon become irritating.

The questions raised by Oblivion aren’t especially deep, but the movie does answer a puzzler that has troubled humankind for generations: Can Tom Cruise build a concept so big that he himself can’t lift it?

Judged solely in comparison to its corporate cousins, Iron Man 3 is a defective model. It’s lightweight but slow, padded with cheap jokes to disguise how hollow it is.

The clichéd script doesn't develop the secondary characters or the critical theme of the mutants' alienation.

In getting so many of the Midwestern details wrong, worldly director Bahrani (“Chop Shop”) teaches an inadvertent lesson to aspiring filmmakers who want to follow his footsteps to the festival circuit: Grow where you’re planted.

Offers about as much flava as a Dr. Pepper commercial and about as much drama as a “Sesame Street” rerun.

This amateurish action flick is so lacking in personality or punch, it ought to be titled "V for Video Store Discount Bin."

Old Dogs is so oafish, when it tosses us a biscuit, it feels like we've been smacked with a newspaper.

Here most of the punishment is inflicted on the audience, which gets nailed to a cross of boredom.

Director Rick Famuyiwa did much better when focusing just on African-American culture in films such as "Brown Sugar" and "The Wood." Here, in bringing together two cultures, he does neither any favors.

In the new Clash of the Titans, the effects are computerized, the hero is questionable and, instead of an owl, we get a turkey.

Sadly, The Last Song is badly out of tune with real filmmaking.

Whether you're betting on action or laughs, this is a lose-lose scenario.

With movies like this, Lopez might want to start leaving low-end romantic comedies alone and look at her movie career's backup plan.

The message that needs to be posted at the theater door is "No trespassing."

A bland family-feud potboiler with no sign of the cook.

Nobody escapes unscathed, except, of course, for Sandler, who co-wrote the infantile screenplay.

A toxic potion that will put children to sleep and kill his (M. Night Shyamalan) career.

It's more like a shelved episode of "Touched by An Angel." The sappy script is a disservice to the naturally effervescent Efron, whose character is so mopey he makes Robert Pattinson seem like a song-and-dance man.

If The Virginity Hit had been filmed as a straightforward sex comedy, it could've been a riot.

An utter shipwreck, a would-be adventure with meager rations of magic and a listless crew.

If instead of story and characters, your movie wish list includes projectile vomiting and erection gags, this lump of coal has your name on it.

Loosely - very loosely - based on the classic Jonathan Swift story, "Gulliver's Travels" begins promisingly but quickly loses its way.

The cheap, indifferent, teen-alien thriller I Am Number Four delivers none of the spectacle of a competent sci-fi film, none of the emotion of an effective teen romance and none of the giggles of a kitsch fiasco.

Like the middle-aged dads in this flaccid fiasco, Hall Pass is a decade behind the curve of what's happening.

Such a sorrowful attempt to resurrect the marketing magic of "Twilight" that it ought to be titled "Career Eclipse."

It's supposed to be sweet, but Hop is a headache waiting to happen.

Given the creator and the cast, "Morgans" is as drearily predictable as a plague of locusts.

On Stranger Tides has the fishy smell of something washed ashore and sold as new. But this shipwreck isn't worth a wooden doubloon.

The spectacular collapse of Green Lantern is bound to be blamed on Reynolds, but the villainy has its origins in an injustice league of TV-trained screenwriters and tin-hearted studio suits.

The result is more like a long commercial than a cohesive movie, and the omissions are glaring.

For anyone expecting the second coming of Clouseau, Johnny English Reborn is a karmic catastrophe.

The best thing you could say about Happy Feet Two is that it doesn't have any product placements or potty jokes. Other than that, this charmless Antarctic cartoon is what it looks like when hell freezes over.

As in the first "Sherlock Holmes" movie, there are plenty of pratfalls and bare-knuckle brawls but no sleuthing for us to share.

Nothing more than uninspired mushiness.

Anyone old enough to have read Jules Verne or seen the way his work was successfully adapted in the past will suffer worse than the kids in the audience who just came to laugh.

In matters of personal taste, there is no right or wrong, so if erasing brain cells is your idea of a good time, That's My Boy could be your cup of turpentine.

Ted does not only break before it ends. It snaps back so violently that it very well may knock out of your mind any recollection that the movie is fairly entertaining for about 30 minutes.

With this unfunny fourth installment, the "Ice Age" franchise has skidded so far into kiddie land that adults who tread there risk extinction.

Where the original play "La Ronde" was a social satire about the transmission of venereal disease, 30 Beats is a sickly stepchild.

Kids are too smart to fall for it, and any grown-up who thinks that The Odd Life of Timothy Green is funny or heartwarming has a head made out of cabbage.

Loud, incoherent and unfunny, Here Comes the Boom is the sound of American culture imploding.

This world is divided between the makers and the takers, and after just a few minutes of Red Dawn, you'll realize there's not much more you can take.

While the cast includes Luis Guzman (as a buffoonish deputy) and Johnny Knoxville (as a local gun nut), there's no sense that these are real people in a real town, and Schwarzenegger's Sheriff Owens has the weakest backstory of all.

Dare we say it? Even the acting is atrocious, with pop-eyed Pacino chewing the scenery like a geezer gumming his oatmeal.

Suffering through this felonious farce could only inspire a prison riot.

The film makes a few starts in many directions but doesn't go very far in any, and that's disappointing to those of us who thought so much of Soderbergh's previous effort. Oh, well, everyone's entitled to a clunker now and then. [7 Feb. 1992, p.3F]

It’s nearly tragic to see America’s Greatest Living Actor on the guest list for The Big Wedding, the latest limp comedy about seniors behaving badly.

Comedies about privileged princesses and unsuitable suitors come in all colors, but Peeples is only palatable on a double bill with pink antacid.

A vigilante/torture-porn potpourri, is particularly toxic because it's scented with phony importance.

Perhaps tracking down the folks responsible for this film should be Milo's next assignment.

"Beverly Hills Chihuahua," we owe you an apology. Among talking-dog movies, Marmaduke is the runt of the litter.

Even by the sloppy, soulless standards of hit man movies, The Mechanic is a mess.

For the rest of his life, Spencer Susser can brag to the other ditch diggers that he persuaded two of the best young actors in Hollywood to star in one of the worst movies ever made.

Sitting through A Good Old Fashioned Orgy is like being monopolized by the most irritating person at a really boring party.

The movie inspired theater critic Judith Newmark to write a sonnet in response.

The sanitized setting and sappy script are so littered with cardboard characters and crass product placements that you'll mourn for the muggers and porno theaters that De Niro cursed in "Taxi Driver."