Chuck Wilson

At only 84 minutes, Phone Booth's brevity turns out to be its only saving grace.

Mitchell's unwillingness to define the parameters of the specter haunting Jay leads to a finale that's muddled and confusing, and definitely not scary.

The director pulls back from the hotel, placing it against the skyline of our beautiful city, which appears to be waiting, patiently, for a more original exploration of its inhabitants.

[An] uneven but intriguing found-footage horror flick.

This low-budget horror comedy arrives via a lively trailer and a witty print ad, yet the film itself never quite takes off.

The film moves in fits and starts, and is way too long, but it may prove memorable, if only for the sweet, marvelously inventive performance of Kevin James.

Eventually it all starts to feel like an extended European perfume ad: pretty but eye-rollingly pretentious.

This film is lean, tight and irredeemably vile. People are gonna love it.

The finale goes on and on, but the movie is nicely photographed (by John Bailey) and duly empowering, and should please the vast teen-girl audience for which it's intended.

Devotes too much time to a shrill, unfunny security guard who's pursuing the girls, but he does stage some zippy sequences, from the red-clad Julie's skateboard dash home to witty bits involving an energy-depleted electric car.

In supporting roles, Ellen Barkin and Marisa Tomei are marvelously light-footed.

With a dream cast that also includes Patricia Clarkson and, in a cameo, a tattooed George Clooney, fullness of narrative may not have struck the filmmakers as key, and their film feels slight, as if it were an extended short, albeit one made by the smartest kids in class.

Pinned down and smelling death, the men grow into fully realized human beings, which makes for some fine performances, but doesn't exactly propel this epic, richly detailed film forward. The battle, when it finally comes, is brief, admirably non-gory and rather dull.

[A] slightly uneven yet deeply affecting documentary.

At its best, there's nothing gushy about Dennis Quaid's portrayal of Morris, and more than anything it's his beautifully modulated reserve that holds this film in emotional check.

On the surface, this coming-of-age tale feels slight and unremarkable, yet the director's final close-up of Frankie packs a punch -- a testament to the power of a gifted young actress happily lost inside her first big role.

Only Chris Klein, as the lovesick live-in boyfriend of Becky's sister, is given anything like an active emotional arc to play, and he runs with it so beautifully that he steals the movie.

A movie with a premise and an ad campaign promising sexual outrageousness, Sleeping Dogs Lie turns out to be rather tame.

Rose Marie was — and is — a fabulous talent, but this off-kilter documentary doesn’t completely make the case.

At its best, this uneven film by writer-director Dave Boyle suggests that going a bit nuts is a good thing for the rigid paterfamilias.

A tougher, more experienced director may someday force Holmes to surprise first herself, then us.

His is a valiant story, though it doesn't quite work as a nearly 90-minute documentary -- the Cadigans simply don’t have enough material.

It's short, this movie, an attribute Sandler himself might take heed of, and if the teenagers in the back row are laughing harder and more often, you might at least find yourself smiling (guiltily) every few minutes.

Watermark is a documentary filled with images both beautiful and wrenching, yet the film as a whole is a disappointment.

It’s a good story, and Uekrongtham, making his feature debut, captures the camaraderie of camp life and the subsequent matches with the panache of a veteran studio hand, but the insights into Toom's psyche never extend past the fun he has applying powder and eyeliner.

Scenically beautiful, rhythmically uneven comedy.

In her charming debut feature, writer-director Alice Wu works hard to sidestep both pathos and antic comedy, an admirable ambition that makes for a relentlessly low-key film that nonetheless builds to a third act rich in surprising turns of character.

Promising yet problematic.