Carina Chocano

Language this lethal has all but disappeared from the movies, and it's an unmitigated pleasure to observe Caine and Law attack it with such ferocity. Sleuth is nasty fun.

For all the time we spend watching Justin and Nicole negotiate their needs, we have no idea who these people are.

A few scenes are worth the price of admission for their inspired camp alone; Shaw happens to be in two of them.

If you can get past the Eurocentric focus, there are worse ways to pass the time than to see The Children of Huang Shi, if only because the glimpse into the time and place are captivating and the images are gorgeous.

The rapport between Allen and Johansson (pretending to be father and daughter) is lively, and the variations on the same old jokes are plentiful.

If the script isn't as well-structured as it could be, the dialogue is refreshingly natural. Kutcher is surprisingly well cast as the awkward, somewhat dorky Oliver, and Peet is charming and charismatic without being cloying or artificial.

Chicken Little, though it has its moments, mostly just feels anxious and overreaching. It tries to be all things to all people and fails to be anything to anyone.

By the time the movie introduces an element of ambivalence in the story, lecture hall ennui has long ago set in, and no amount of jittery horror movie conventions can change it. With nowhere for any of the characters to go, literally, the story becomes a tendentious exercise in belaboring a point.

If you're thinking of seeing it, and you're old enough to drive (or even read this), do yourself a favor and rent the original instead.

Martian Child would like to be "About a Boy (Who Thinks He's a Martian)", but, disappointingly, it doesn't even come close.

A plodding, squeaky-straight Time-Life tribute to the greatest generation, the movie plays like a commemorative plaque.

Among other things, the characters in A Love Song for Bobby Long really know how to turn a phrase, in itself a pleasure so rare it all but demands any flaws be forgiven.

Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker look and act, quite attractively, like grown-ups, and their easy rapport makes them convincing and appealing as an on-screen couple. So all throughout Failure to Launch, I found myself wishing they were in a different movie, maybe one as sophisticated as "The Philadelphia Story," which the movie references, but doesn't remotely live up to.

Redford and Carnahan would like us to ponder our role in their fate. And maybe we would, if the lecture weren't so dull and self-satisfied.

Despite an intriguing premise in which the architect of a housing project is confronted by a resident-turned-activist who wants his help in getting the place torn down, Matt Tauber's The Architect feels schematic and contrived.

The real reason to see it is its style, which sets an otherwise fairly unremarkable whodunit in a seedy, lite-Lynchian wonderland that's enjoyable to hang out in for a while.

27 Dresses dutifully privileges its formulaic plot over its stick-figure characters, slapping a happy ending on a setup that, say, "Happiness" director Todd Solondz could have gone to town on.

Tightly plotted and suspenseful enough to keep you guessing until the satisfying, unexpected end, which is worth suspending disbelief for. After all, as they point out in the movie, "It doesn't work if you don't believe it."

Taking a cue from David Lynch, Hopkins fractures the narrative from the first frame, but unlike Lynch he doesn't go far enough in establishing a context from which to deviate. If the story fragments we're watching spring from the same mind, in other words, it's not obvious.

The social bite of the popular novel fades into a generic chick flick.

Hindered by its own theatricality, Beyond the Sea feels at once hermetic, defensive and corny.

Doesn't aspire to be much more than a serviceable summer comedy, and the script displays the engineered precision of a theme park ride.

The film might have worked as a taut, topical corporate intrigue thriller; instead, for all its ambition, it's just a routine mystery, despite a solid performance by Christian Slater.

I'd be happy to see it listed in an in-flight magazine, but "Annie Hall" it's not.

Forces them (the cast) to reenact the entire unabridged Encyclopedia of Treasured Romantic Comedy Clichés and Chestnuts, Revised Second Edition.

A grim, shrill, deluded and incredibly depressing movie, so bewilderingly mean-spirited that the trademark Farrelly Brothers gross-out scenes feel like the sweetest.

So good-natured, and its cast seems to enjoy itself so thoroughly, that the total annihilation of disbelief it requires winds up feeling like a reasonable enough request.

For all of its class-act bona fides, Evening lurches between the morose and the sentimental, with occasional incursions into the absurd.

It's too bad that the satire is not more pointed, because Pretty Persuasion is outrageously funny in short blasts, mainly thanks to James Woods at his most gleefully depraved.

An unconscionably dreary and amateurish-looking thing, and the rote plot and annoyingly predictable script -- a compendium of bird puns, mostly -- don't work nearly hard enough to make up for the hammy awfulness of the images.

Grant's second coming as a rake and an egotist is the best thing to happen to his career since "Four Weddings and a Funeral." He is twice as enjoyable as the preening bad guy as he was as the bumbling good guy, and Weitz makes perfect use of the new persona.

What was presumably intended to play like a fable plays, instead, like an overly long car commercial crossed with a scare-mongering public service announcement.

Gives new meaning to "costume drama" in that it is a drama primarily about costumes. But the drama is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the temple.

The movie is as histrionic as it is ham-fisted, a bad combination that leads to scenes such as the one in which officers threaten to torture a baby to get their point across.

Loverboy is a grim little story, but it's leavened unexpectedly with humor and energy. A stylish and thoughtful director, Bacon marries music to image beautifully.

A mess of a movie -- but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience.

Personal and heartfelt, it's nevertheless bogged down by a lack of perspective on the material and a pointlessly frilly visual style.

As lovely as some of the footage looks and as committed as are the three lead performances, they serve only to make Rails & Ties play like an exceptionally well-acted and well-made Lifetime movie.

The movie is as side-splitting as it is creepy, especially when it ventures into surrealistic nightmare imagery.

At its best at its most absurd.

Too dark to be very funny, too mushy to be pitch black.

You get the sense that Kelly is too angry to really find any of it funny. It's easy to empathize with his position, not so easy to remain engrossed in a film that's occasionally inspired but ultimately manic and scattered.

A cast this charismatic is bound to make something of the situation. In short bursts, the movie is alternately sunny and charming, dark and weird, confounding and dull.

Despite slick camera work by Jonathan Sela and intense, naturalistic performances by Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles, The Omen retains the aura of ceremonious kitsch of the first movie, favoring a well-lighted, upscale Goth aesthetic punctuated with flashes of well-timed, cymbal-crashing shockers and giggly camp.

Ultimately, Youth Without Youth is more intriguing than it is satisfying. It hooks you, then lets you flounder.

Anyone who has seen the trailers for Freedomland, which don't exactly skimp on maternal angst, already knows this is going to be a sad-mommy story. What we don't know is that it may be a bad-mommy story as well.

That, after all these years of playing hard-to-get, the novel has made it to the screen in the form of a plodding, tone-deaf, overripe, overheated Oscar-baiting telenovela smacks of just the kind of deliciously ironic prank an 80-year-old Colombian Nobel laureate could really get behind.

The actors gamely keep up their spirits, but the male characters are too one-dimensional and the female characters too bizarrely divorced from reality to be at all engaging.

For an unabashedly silly spoof of a girly action flick, D.E.B.S. is unexpectedly fresh, thanks mostly to the sweetly exuberant love story at its center.

The sweetest thing about Fred Claus is that the message about filial love feels genuine. I wouldn't have expected that watching Giamatti tell Vaughn, "You're the best big brother anyone could ask for," would make me choke up, but it did.

For an action thriller based on a Dick story, Next is peculiarly low-tech and hokey.

It's always dispiriting to see children's movies succumb to desperate pandering to the coolness imperative, especially since, given the marketing muscle they tend to have behind them, the bigger trick seems to be in getting people not to see them.

Keaton and Ted Danson, who plays her husband, Don, are the comedic bright spot in the movie, not least because they are ridiculous.

One of those relatively rare comedies that's at once puerile, charming and very funny throughout.

As pared down, stylish and deceptively simple as the stark glass and concrete block inhabited by two of its main characters, La Mujer de Mi Hermano (My Brother's Wife) is an adultery drama that skips the big life lessons in favor of observing the mysteries of human interdependency and social behavior.

The final twist does more to unravel what's come before than to tie it all together, making what's come before feel like a cosmopolitan goose chase.

A giddy, gassy piece of lunatic fluff that recounts Jiminy's rise to fame. In interviews, Short has described Glick as a moron with power, and in Jiminy Glick in Lalawood, he takes us back to the early days, when he was merely a moron.

Running Scared is so desperate and surreally stupid that all you would have to do to see it as a brilliant sendup of everything that is corrupt, vulgar, sad, deluded and bad-for-you about Hollywood is squint.

Every adult in the movie is a caricature: Close, Janney and Wilson are compendiums of such broad, unattractive traits they make the ladies of "Desperate Housewives" look complex. The men, meanwhile, are weak, clueless and preening, with the exception of Fiennes, who's nuts.

Derailed seems to want badly to be described as contemporary noir. But it's just pitch-dumb.

The real problem with "Phantom" is the problem with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals in general. It's a slow-moving orgy of lowbrow grandiosity that's as tedious as it is overblown and pretentious.

National Treasure is as doggedly hokey and ham-handed as a Disneyland ride.

A pompous, overwrought and itchingly claustrophobic psychodrama.

Chopped into episodes headed by typewritten dates, Provoked turns the case of a lifetime into something straight out of Lifetime.

First-time writer-director Matthew Parkhill prefers to lean on clever plot devices, amp up the roles of the movie's sideline jesters, crank up the static noise and fail to notice that his engaging little romance has broken with reality and veered into hollow pastiche.

You could go see P.S. I Love You, or you could hit yourself on the head with a meat mallet -- it depends on the amount of time and money you want to devote to what amounts to roughly the same experience.

The movie suffers from a malady common to tiny indies of the let's-put-on-a-show variety -- it strains for irrepressibly nutty, but lands squarely in annoying.

Though atmospheric and occasionally suspenseful, its gimmickry keeps it from being transcendent.

Feels like the cinematic equivalent of being stuffed with fruitcake and doused with a gallon of egg nog, so if that's the sort of thing you go in for around the holidays . . .

The best thing about the replica is how wholeheartedly Martin throws himself into the physical comedy, which is uniformly hilarious.

On the whole it feels genuine. Lautner and Dooley are compelling as the sullen, instinctual Sharkboy and the radiant, hot-headed Lavagirl, and it's easy to see why they dominate shy, hesitant Max's dreams.

A stew of cheap irony, ponderous but meaningless allegory, violence and pretension, the movie is all borrowed style and calculated pandering. It does, however, get more ludicrous by the minute. So in that sense, it's good for an occasional laugh.

The anesthetized, deadpan performances -- except for Meat Loaf as Anna's gangster boyfriend, who's so over-the-top it appears he stumbled in from another movie -- and dull storytelling result in an unsuccessful mix of screwball comedy, melodrama and noir.

Carell is lovable as God's unwilling disciple. But the comedy is less than divine.

Somehow, what starts as a series of cheap shots in a barrel develops into something more, thanks largely to warm, engaging performances by Cusack and Tomei. War, Inc. is both right-on and somehow off, but it gets points for trying.

A self-consciously zany dysfunctional family comedy, When Do We Eat? strains so hard to be outrageous that it sacrifices characters for caricatures. They might have had something if they'd let everybody relax, be themselves and enjoy dinner.

The fakeness of it all overwhelms, dampening any real excitement. It's hard to care about characters so stiff and one-dimensional they out-cartoon the cartoon originals, and it's hard to watch them bop around like avatars in a flat, airless, digital world.

Hokey and forced as it is, What Happens in Vegas eventually settles into a rhythm, maybe because Diaz and Kutcher actually look like they have fun together.

Little more than an extended excuse for a soundtrack.

Isn't a remake, really. It's a "reimagining," which is a sparkly word for what happens to a beloved TV hit of yesteryear when it's cannibalized by committee.

It doesn't help that Wahlberg, whose work usually ranges from solid to inspired, is bewildering off-key here, though it may have something to do with playing off Deschanel, who reduces the whole marriage story line to a parody.

No fun at all.

Isn't so much a movie as an extended sitcom -- it looks like one, it acts like one, it reduces everything to the lowest common denominator like one.

Winds up an oddly depressing, lost, little movie that eventually caves in on itself.

John Leguizamo steals the show as its sleazy trainer -- not that there's much to steal from John Schultz's joylessly schematic paycheck.

All I could think about while watching Jennifer Lopez prance through Monster-in-Law was how cool and poised she was in "Out of Sight."

The movie straitjackets Keaton into a humorless, table-pounding role.

It's a big, cheesy, familiar bore. With its garland of set pieces featuring Matthew McConaughey in mortal danger strung together by beach-groovy musical hooks, Fool's Gold feels at times like a third-rate Bond movie set to a Jimmy Buffett album.

The movie is a tortured marshmallow.

The performances by all three children are scarily convincing. Still, it's a taxing bit of exploitation, which, although you're glad to know it's a work of fiction, doesn't exactly make a case for itself as art.

Not so much phoned in as it is auto-dialed with a text-to-speech prerecorded message in one of those creepy robotic voices.

What we may very well be looking at here is another "Showgirls," a drag camp-fest for the "Baby Jane" crowd, fabulous fodder for future cabaret acts, and a pleasure probably best enjoyed in a crowd -- preferably a vocal one. Dead serious and stone idiotic, the only basic instinct in evidence here is desperation.

Deeply silly and tendentious.

A flat parable about the virtues of homespun conformity and the perils of defying family tradition.

The only thing remotely resembling parody in this depressing waste of time and money is Jennifer Coolidge's sendup of Barbra Streisand as an over-the-top string of Jewish mother clichés.

Too sophomoric to be believed.