Andrea Gronvall

The little heroes and their families are surprisingly ugly, with faces resembling skulls, and the colors are so faded and muddy the movie feels tired and bungled.

Magic vies with technology in this exuberant adventure comedy, which unfolds achronologically in a series of zany, effects-laden vignettes.

Despite the exotic locale and the photogenic moppets, that's not enough for a satisfying movie.

Dramatization is often a questionable tactic in documentaries, but by picturing Leopold (Elie Larson) on trial like Adolf Eichmann, Peter Bate adroitly compares the colonial genocide to the Holocaust.

Writer-director Rob Hardy opts for family-friendly drama but tones down the conflicts so much that none of the story lines can rival the music.

Based on the novel by T.D. Jakes, this is a queasy mix of comedy, melodrama, and self-help spirituality; it's meant to be uplifting, but its profamily message is undercut by its virulently misogynistic treatment of the realtor and her mother (Jenifer Lewis), both too shrewish and controlling to be believed.

There's enough adrenaline pulsating throughout this bang-up Marvel Comics adaptation to erase 2003's Hulk from memory (Ang who?).

Not even 3D can save this third entry in the Fox animation franchise about a motley crew of prehistoric creatures.

The altitude, extreme cold, quicksand, and crushing poverty are potent dramatic elements, but of course there's no mention of China's complicity in the area's economic ills; instead writer-director Lu Chuan frames the story as a showdown between the head ranger and the leader of the poachers.

This 2006 drama is refreshing not only for its gentle comic touches but for director Wang Quanan's refusal to sentimentalize China's vanishing nomadic culture: life is harsh and no one's a saint, including his outspoken heroine.

The results are flat-out tedious.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) is the sinister operative dispatched to retrieve the ship's psychic passenger, who as played by Summer Glau kickboxes better than Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi combined.

Wain and Marino try to tie all this together with a framing narrative about an unfaithful husband (Paul Rudd), which turns into a clever parody of Woody Allen movies.

This heist comedy has a hackneyed introduction, and its feel-good ending lacks credibility, but the big, funny chunk in the middle marks writer-director-producer David E. Talbert as a talent to watch.

Amiable screwball comedy.

Director Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension, The Hills Have Eyes) keeps the suspense tight for most of the movie, only to fritter it away in an overblown ending.

Director Paul Morrison forfeits any meaningful statement about art for a pedestrian coming-out story, based in part on Dali's unreliable, self-aggrandizing memoirs.

As the imperious actress (and whore) Elizabeth Barry, the unlikely object of Wilmot's affection, Samantha Morton finds the soul in a woman who's hard as nails, and Tom Hollander and Rosamund Pike also provide excellent support. The haunting score is by Michael Nyman.

Early scenes of mayhem and destruction are marred by subpar special effects; those in the final reel are spectacular, but there's a long wait for them because the movie is so maddeningly, portentously slow.

Too slavish in its devotion to 50s sci-fi conventions to work as parody or camp, this indie comedy by "The X-Files" alumnus R.W. Goodwin sinks under the weight of its homage.

Walks a fine line between the quotidian and the absurd, but falls short of a satisfying payoff.

The gods, led by Sean Bean, are mostly stiffs; thank heaven for Uma Thurman, raising hell as a stylishly leather-clad Medusa.

Almost every note in this insipid comedy is strident or false, from the child's prodigious talent for deception to the jock's chaperoning her and her classmates at a Corolle doll boutique.

This narrative feature debut by Emmanuel Carrere, based on his own novel, is deliberately open-ended, but however one interprets the outcome, the film reminds us how fragile intimacy is.

Director Steve Bendelack and writer-producer Simon McBurney aim for the comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, relying heavily on sight gags and their star's pratfalls and facial contortions, but they vititate the comic payoffs by allowing scenes to run too long.