Amy Biancolli

Even within the rules of its own peculiar world - a world well stocked with talking savanna denizens and monkey-powered superplanes - the film is completely irrational.

A road trip into the heart of that bumpiest of territories, the adolescent id.

Every last joke in the movie - verbal gags, visual gags, musical cues, camera moves - is crushingly literal.

The third and most uneven film adaptation in the series.

A tonally confused, fitfully entertaining film about a pathologically two-faced man.

Despite bursts of hilarity and an A-list cast, this is a dark, difficult, weirdly existential film - like some seriocomic spin on "I and Thou."

The film's editing and pacing are appealingly straightforward, not to say blunt, and the humor runs from dry to bone-dry to parched.

The film is often funny and even more frequently vulgar, exploiting every last chance for raunch in the full-chassis exchange of two grown men. The only thing missing: male nudity.

Rodrick Rules has a brighter comic edge than its predecessor - and a bit more spunk.

For all of its transgressive plush-toy sex and screw-'em humor, the plot is pretty standard stuff.

Catherine Hardwicke's prettified movie is a strange adaptation because it supplants the woodsy horror of the original fairy tale with two new elements: a romantic triangle and a witch hunt.

The less-good stuff: the pirates, who are so blandly and predictably drawn that they sap all the personality out of Peter Dinklage (as an ugly ape skipper), which isn't easy. And the plot, which just barrels forward with very few surprises.

An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."

Another innocuous film about another unusual girl.

If, in the end, the movie fails to generate much beyond several crackling jump scares and a nicely gothic mise-en-scene, it has enough mood, and enough Radcliffe, to carry us through the mist.

Melissa Rosenberg's screenplay is faithful enough to Meyer's soap-operatic inclinations, but I kind of wish it weren't.

All in all, the 3-D animations wow without gimmickry, Banderas purrs without peer - and it's a cheerful movie.

So if you don't mind, I'll just go back to believing that someone named Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote Shakespeare's works. And I'll just go back to regarding them with awe.

For what it is, it's well done, well filmed, well outfitted with ordnance and, well, exciting. However, in script, characters and plot, Act of Valor offers only the barest minimum.

It's really strange, and it's really subtitled.

Apart is an attractive-looking piece of work, and I'll always admire any genre film that errs on the side of understatement.

The combative, off-putting Dark Horse features many of writer-director Todd Solondz's usual preoccupations: misery, complexity, stunted emotions, misplaced dreams.

All of this amounts to so much stylish nostalgia - not half as repulsive as the splatterific torture porn currently dominating the horror genre, and not half as cynical, either.

In creating his modern homage to the classic film, Im has twisted all the heated melodrama into a satiric - and in the end, surrealist - attack on the terrors of the polished upper class.

Richard Attenborough nailed that purity 64 years ago, and Sam Riley nails it now. His Pinkie is a slim, mesmerizing package of immaculate and undiluted evil, clear as a stick of Brighton Rock candy.

There are pros and cons to this Green Lantern, a half-campy, half-compelling adaptation of the superheroic DC comic books.

Given the number of real-world cults that have ended in major bloodshed, there's some irony - and no small narrative coquetry - in any drama on the subject that ducks out so pointedly at the finish.

Coiro, who directed and co-wrote the film with Ritter, has a firm hold on snappish humor and bookish references, but the whole thing sags under a creaky narrative structure.