Andy Klein

Instead of gags, we’re treated to endless observations about love, commitment, romance, parental responsibilities, and other well-trod subjects. None of this is particularly insightful or interesting.

In the end, it's all just too damned much. It's more exhausting than edifying.

But by the end the audience, along with Clayton, has been jerked around so many times that it's almost too exhausting...By then, it's almost impossible to care.

May display an energetic and promising talent, but it is also uncomfortably close to being a 105-minute music video, with all the problems that suggests.

So uplifting, it's almost...gross.

Despite the generally likable characters and the abundance of clever ideas, Lustig mucks it all up with her "trick" editing.

Sad to say, the story is simply too slight to sustain the film.

On the up side, there are some genuinely funny jokes, and Oedekerk has been wise enough to keep the running time down to 82 minutes, including the eight-minute closing credit sequence (which is worth staying through its entirety). But Kung Pow! is no "What's Up, Tiger Lily?"

The muddiness of the basic concept and the thinness of its execution eventually defeat even Witherspoon's talents.

This is quintessential "family entertainment."

Fact is, there is nothing feloniously awful about the whole thing, but the laughs are tepid and too infrequent.

In the end, the performances and the basic strength of the premise make Shadow of the Vampire a relatively diverting ninety minutes. But there is the inescapable feeling that it is a shadow of the great film it might have been.

It's refreshing and unusual to see clever strategy trumping ritual honor in a film of this genre, even if one of the tricks seems gratuitously brutal.

It's hard to know just how much to trust Titanic Town.

The redeeming features of All Over the Guy are the consistently engaging performances and some genuinely funny dialogue.

Filled with sharp observations and interesting, often subtle, bits of visual trickery, much of it evoking the technique of Douglas Sirk's American domestic melodramas. Still, the very simple story seems too simple and the working out of the plot almost arbitrary.

The ludicrous casting of Hoffman is just the fatal bit of kindling on this Joan's fire.

It's nothing more than a very long movie about someone, literally and metaphorically, having to get back up on a horse.

The only genuine surprises on hand are the few moments when the film defies the expectations that have been programmed into our collective neurons by the past 25 years of horror movies.

Thankfully, the final, long action set piece, which owes a debt to "The Manchurian Candidate" among others, is free of such problems. Shiri manages to go out on its most exciting sequence. There are worse ways to go.

The texture is reminiscent of last year's "Suzhou River," but the basic material isn't as rich.

The cold distance that LaBute brings to the material keeps the viewer at arms' length.

Generally engaging.

Has an awkwardness that defeats whatever emotional involvement it tries to achieve.

Condensing, paring and shorthanding the story elements can be daunting, and, despite the efforts of Kasdan and Goldman, two masters at wrangling unwieldy source material into shape, there is some awkwardness and confusion in the result.

Handily in a league with its predecessor...as good a follow-up as one can imagine, given the built-in difficulties of sequels.

What's most disappointing is the almost utter lack of humor -- In the mindless action sweepstakes, however, there's still enough here to place The Transporter above big-bang gibberish like XXX.

What Ichaso does do is take us on a dizzying, constantly moving ride through an exciting decade in the blossoming of "Nuyorican" culture with its most flamboyant figure as our focus.