Amy Biancolli

Is it good bad? Nah. It's just bad. It's so bad it makes "Machete," the other movie based on a mock trailer from "Grindhouse," look like high-gloss Kubrickian satire.

This dark and seedy follow-up to 2009's blockbuster comedy has a quite a retro message - suggesting that civilized men carry inside them a monster, a "demon" within, that requires constant taming.

For all of its brutal flashbacks and heavy-handed devices, The First Grader works best when it works quietly.

Nostalgia for the Light is a strange and stunning work of art: a poem disguised as a movie about astronomers in the Atacama desert of Chile.

A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.

A crappy 3-D conversion job mars this otherwise competent, energetic and cheerfully hambone Marvel adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh.

In style and structure, it mimics an old-style studio effort, a culture-clashing comedy of manners that's tinged with melodrama and filmed in a smart progression of medium shots.

As a runner, the robber is dogged; as a robber, the runner is efficient, explosive and fast.

Some movies are in-between and inoffensive and harm absolutely no one. Prom is one of those.

Like its protagonist, Ceremony is as smart as it is exasperating.

May be Disney's most pointedly feminist effort since "Mulan."

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

The humor's a little strange, and the action's a little frenetic, but all of it whooshes past in a swirl of tropical color and pseudo-South American bonhomie. Gorgeous scenery meets oddball characters and mild ethnic stereotyping.

The film about violence and retribution is a tough piece of work, subtle in some ways, obvious in others, viscerally affecting throughout.

The chief problem with Your Highness is its lack of imagination - its misuse and overuse of language and visual riffs that are only marginally amusing at best.

Rubber has its share of jollies, at least when it isn't boring us to death with the fourth-wall-busting monkey business. Although I appreciate Dupieux's efforts at satire, the audience-interaction subplot goes nowhere fast.

Rendered nearly unwatchable by overblown close-ups and an unrelenting shaky-cam.

The effect is an endearing and plainspoken clarity that stops just short of naturalism; the people in his movies don't seem real, exactly, but we end up caring about them as though they were.

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

The story gets away from itself as it barrels forward. The tiny bit of sense it makes at the beginning is quickly sacrificed in a conclusion so facile, illogical and cheap that it could use a dose of NZT itself.

A smart, juicy entertainment, but it's the kind of straight-up legal drama that hinges entirely on crafty storytelling and across-the-board solid performances.

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."

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.

It is, all in all, off its rocker. But it's gorgeous.

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

This is a terrible movie. It has no business being as terrible as it is, because it boasts a perfectly acceptable horror premise and a perfectly acceptable cast.

Best reason to stay home and rent "Disturbia": I Am Number Four is a little better and makes loads more sense than "Eagle Eye." But neither has the sass and pluck of "Disturbia."

As weird as it sounds.