Carina Chocano

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.