Jason Clark

Paddington is fast-paced yet unhurried, serving up surprisingly subtle ideas on melting-pot urban diversity—Paddington is a stranger in a strange land, after all—and rich visual tableaux, including a gorgeous recurring shot of the Brown home as a living dollhouse.

Aside from an unintentional homage to "Zoolander" that is so tone-deaf it'll make you guffaw, Annie goes out of its way to make viewing it a hard-knock life...for us.

Even if Robin Williams were still among us, the limp, drearily derivative A Merry Friggin' Christmas would feel like it had a pall cast over it.

The ultimate sad realization is not that Dumb & Dumber To doesn't match the original's good-time quotient, but that it might not even be as good as—yikes — "Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd."

Even with lowered expectations toward escapist fare taken into account, the film is a long slog, with Marsden and Bracey conveying little but Crest smiles and smolder, while Liberato and Monaghan are stuck doing endless cry-face.

This is innocuous, heart-in-the-right-place family fare, but its well-earned points about animal rights and preservation would be better taken if the relentless sentimentality didn't force viewers into flippers-in-the-air submission.

The utter lack of originality eventually sinks the movie.

The overall effect is less titillating than numbing.

If Let's Be Cops were content to be simply an unfunny genre exercise, it would be easy to dismiss it and move on. But the sting of astoundingly ill-advised sexism and homophobia is harder to shake.

Braff, who co-wrote the film with his own brother, is clearly attached to the semiautobiographical material here and still has a knack for sweet two-person scenes.

With an ace troupe like that, there are affecting moments, to be sure. But the movie criminally wastes Sam Neill and Rosamund Pike in barely there supporting roles, and the picture has exactly two tones: grim and gooey. They do not coexist harmoniously.

Nearly every scene is a jazz-tinged, virtuoso actors’ duet.