Adam Markovitz

There's barely a trace of the magic of 1939's "The Wizard of Oz"; the bricks are still yellow, but the road doesn't lead anywhere special.

Director Richard Ayoade (Submarine) gets a huge impact from minimal expressionist sets, but the thin story — loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella — plays like a pale reflection of a more exciting tale.

The movie doesn’t grab you emotionally, but director Atom Egoyan (Exotica) teases apart the case’s details with grim fascination.

The jokes are flaccid, the acting is stiff, and the whole idea is such a boner, you have to wonder if the writer was missing another critical organ when he came up with it.

It's fun to watch at first. All that twirling and sliding is a nice change of pace from the usual seat-shaking pyrotechnics.

Heaven is for Real has lots of sweet, Rockwellian imagery of small-town life and family high jinks. What it doesn't have is dramatic tension.

There's an elemental appeal to watching these animals hunt and play in the Alaskan wildnerness, and the Disneynature team has mastered the art of capturing it.

Colin Firth smolders as the PTSD-riddled veteran (played in flashbacks by War Horse‘s Jeremy Irvine), and Nicole Kidman cries dutifully as his wife — but they’re both derailed by the movie’s tidy emotional resolutions.

Sit tight through the end credits and you'll be treated to a few off-the-cuff outtakes of the guys doing things much funnier than anything in the film itself.

When the movie occasionally does confront its hero’s foibles, its answers are disappointingly pat.

It would make for a pretty ghastly pageant if not for smart, understated turns by Watson and Geoffrey Rush as the charmingly Teutonic couple who rescue both Liesel and a stranded Jew (Ben Schnezter) — not to mention the movie itself — with honorable matter-of-factness.

Even the best player can only go so far with a bum hand.

Doesn't just wink at De Niro's history, it leans on it, hard.

You will still be astonished by how flat-out awful it is.

Sarcastic quips and cynical attitudes abound, maybe as a way for the movie's makers to telegraph that they know this is all just so much kid stuff. But if the characters can't muster genuine awe for their adventure, it's a tall order to ask us to do it for them.

PA4 develops the story ever so slightly (not enough to satisfy fans) and delivers a few good scares (not enough to satisfy newbies); mostly, it plays like a overlong prologue for the already-in-the-works PA5. Here's hoping this is just the tension-racking lull before the next big scream.

Cooper, who looks appealingly wolfish in his expensively tailored suits, plays the whole thing with a dutiful, earnest expression lacquered on his face, his eyes misting on cue at the exact same moments yours will be rolling into the back of your head.

All those twangy, homespun observations interrupt and annotate the narrative until Black and MacLaine's scenes start to feel as trivial as reenactments on a true-crime TV show.

You can almost smell the brine in the boat helmed by Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) on his quest to win Pirate of the Year.

Most of the movie's action-horror set pieces play like lame Gwar music video outtakes, and Cage's signature mix of irony and off-the-rails mugging only works when you can see the actor's face. In Ghost Rider form, his character is just a skeletal automaton with neither a tongue nor a cheek to put it in.

Trite lessons are learned. Plotlines play out in familiar arcs. A few blips of sex and drug use aim to make the movie feel more grown-up. Instead, they make it off-limits to the only age group likely to find any charm in its smug Britcom cutesiness.

Why are they fighting again? Never you mind. Just sit tight till the next action sequence (it won't be long), and get ready to laugh - with equal parts scorn and fanboy joy - as Beckinsale strikes another Rodinesque pose under a slo-mo shower of inhuman innards.

Good news: The shrill CG rodents, who last infested theaters in 2009's Squeakquel, are stranded on a jungle island with little hope of survival. Bad news: They've brought us along.

What saves Immortals as a moviegoing experience is the exuberant, kid-in-a-candy-store virtuosity of its director, former music-video wunderkind Tarsem Singh (The Cell).

A ho-hum series of kills and lulls so predictable that it doesn't even look like much fun for the sharks; when they open wide, they might as well be yawning.

They're all fascinating 
 subjects - or would be if Jig didn't dance around their personal stories in favor of overheated waiting-for-the-scores suspense.

Though it doesn't work as entertainment, this numbingly chipper rom-com (directed by Dermot Mulroney) might be of historical value someday as an A-to-Z guide to the genre's most overworked clichés.

Spectacularly poor judgment in everything from acting to costuming (Olsen's Harajuku-troll get-up is scarier than her curse) puts Beastly right on the cusp of the so-bad-it's-good Hall of Shame.