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.