It’s a look that the parents of recalcitrant teenagers know all too well, that grimace that says, “You can make me go to this piano recital, but you can’t force me to look like I’m enjoying myself.” We get some version of that face quite a bit from Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in “Men in Black 3,” a sequel that seems to indicate that, a decade after their last onscreen outing, these two stars are strictly here for the paycheck.

Which is a pity, since there’s a zippy and clever movie going on all around the two lumps with their names above the title. Just like that piano recital, however, you’ll enjoy yourself more if you’re paying attention to what’s happening while ignoring the sourpuss in the corner.

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As a defender of the 1985 comedy “Clue,” I can’t automatically reject the idea of basing a feature film on a board game. But the game Clue comes with characters and a plot and a house. Battleship comes with a grid and boats and pegs.

All those things turn up in “Battleship,” a big, loud, stupid Hollywood movie that winds up looking all the better by virtue of not being as elephantine and deafening and moronic as a Michael Bay “Transformers” adventure. Peter Berg and writers Erich and John Hoeber aren’t interested in nuance or character or wit, but they imbue the movie with enough adrenaline and...

Oscar prognosticators were flummoxed when “Where Do We Go Now?” won the audience award at last year’s Toronto Film Festival -- previous winners like “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The King’s Speech” had turned the prize into an Academy Awards bellwether. But this Arabic-language film (with smatterings of Russian and English) didn’t exactly fit the mass-market profile of its predecessors.

Mainstream audiences heading out to see “Where Do We Go Now?” in its regular release may find themselves similarly confounded, but for entirely different reasons.

Director and co-writer Nadine Labaki has set out to...

The original idea of a Tim Burton-directed “Dark Shadows” certainly must have seemed like a good one on paper, with the master of mass-market Goth applying his imagination and a Hollywood budget to the infamously on-the-cheap, Dan Curtis-created cult soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971 on ABC before spawning various film and TV follow-ups.

And then, when early trailers revealed that Burton was making a comedy with humor springing from an 18th-century vampire’s confusion in the mini-skirted world of 1972, it appeared that Burton would be returning to his “Beetlejuice” roots, mining laughs from the supernatural.

But now we get the movie itself, which turns out to be not particularly funny and not at all scary, with characters so barely defined that they would work only in a spoof of the material. (Which brings us back to the “not...