Carina Chocano

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

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.

In the end, his (Patrick) disaffection make him a singularly uninvolving character, and his disengagement makes him seem alternately shallow, selfish and perverse.

By the time you've gotten through it, you feel spent, loaded down and more than a little disoriented. Part of the problem is that the movie's big concepts - violence begets violence, absolute power corrupts absolutely, everything is connected, my terrorist is your freedom fighter, etc. - are pithy, brief and irrefutable enough to embroider on throw pillows.

Feels terminally generic and tone-deaf.

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.

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.

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

In bringing Heller's book to the screen, director Richard Eyre ("Iris," "Stage Beauty") and screenwriter Patrick Marber ("Closer") have tossed the book's subtlety out the window, along with its psychological complexity, its running theme of self-deception and its dark, extra-wry sense of humor.

The movie loses some of its initial atmospheric tension as paranoid thrills give way to Rambo high jinks.

There's no real jeopardy. The stakes are low. It's a bee movie about nothing.

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.

The super-hip style is groovy but doesn't mask the fact that Son of Rambow doesn't really go anywhere special or say anything much. For a film about falling in love with the movies, its insights on them are next to nil.

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

So, while the movie at times warmed my own middle-class, private school-educated cockles to a toasty complacency, there's an undercurrent of friendly fascism running through it like a nasty draft.

A technically inventive, thoughtful, but otherwise not particularly earth-shattering movie.

The movie is at once a flagrant piece of kitsch and an unexpectedly affecting story about an individual overcoming personal tragedy and brutally restrictive circumstances by talent and force of will.

Pure, unself-conscious macho camp, but it's not like Pacino and McConaughey don't know it. They're pitching tents and romping around in the grass like Jerry Maguire on steroids.

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.

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

For the most part, it's an uneven if amiable and occasionally inspired comedy about getting through adolescence that hits some false notes along the way.

For a relentlessly violent and exploitive noir knockoff, Sin City is mystifyingly flat and static - cartoonish, even, if you want to get tautological about it.

The movie suffers from the same malaise Romero diagnoses in society. It's just too mediated to be scary, despite its zeal for gore. You can't feel the characters' fear, and they don't seem to feel it either.

What begins, rather promisingly, as a visceral yawp against class difference in contemporary South Korea slowly devolves into a prolonged exercise in pointless sadomasochism.

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

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.

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

As it turns out, spending a couple of hours with emotionally arrested, socially moronic characters is not a whole lot more fun than spending a couple of hours with actual emotionally arrested, socially moronic people.