I certainly admire the relentless energy and dedication it must take for Woody Allen to make a movie every single year, but sometimes I wish he'd take just a little more time. To Rome with Love is occasionally hilarious, seldom charming, and mostly stale, undercooked, and entirely scattershot. Allen brings together a dream cast and woefully squanders their talent on a series of vignettes that are barely connected, poorly paced, and mostly rehashes of plotlines Allen himself explored to the…

X-Men: First Class feels like a good first draft of a film. Everything about the secret Cold War history origin story seems like it should work on paper, but on screen, the film is a jumble of half-developed characters, gaping plot holes and sheer illogic. I bet it makes a killer outline, but the script is a mess.

I was willing to follow the film on a campy 60s adventure, or on a tense, dramatic one, but the film can't…

Jim Emerson said: "A horror or science-fiction movie without subtext is like Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory without electricity. The inner metaphor is what gives it life and resonance. Otherwise, it's just a story about stitched-together people parts."

It was hard not to think about this quote while watching Tron Legacy. It's a movie with such a seemingly obvious subtextual metaphor that it's overwhelmingly disappointing when the cyberspace setting is used as nothing more than a magical fantasy land where our hero…