Carina Chocano

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.