Chuck Wilson

Never-hilarious but often-quite-amusing film.

What they don't do often enough is battle anacondas. It's all tease and no payoff.

Wise and moving.

The only time the actors appear to have accelerated their own heartbeats is in two paintball scenes, as well as -- professionals all -- the fart-lighting contest. It's pretty pathetic.

This is efficient, soul-numbing moviemaking, diverting enough for blistering September afternoons when what's onscreen is secondary to how high they've cranked the air conditioning.

In the 17-million-copy land of "Twilight," the calling card isn't blood and fangs, but the exquisite, shimmering quiver of unconsummated first love. By that measure, the movie version gives really good swoon.

Marshall isn't exactly a cinematic poet, but he does a fine job delineating each individual dog's personality, as well as the shifting hierarchy of power within the pack, which is why it's so exasperating that he and first-time screenwriter Dave Digillo are forever cutting away to dull Jerry and his stateside quest for rescue-mission funds.

Screenwriters Melissa Carter and Erica Bell (Sleepover) have given Murphy -- perhaps the twitchiest actor of her generation --cutesy quirks to play in lieu of a character.

Powerful war satire.

Has there ever been a more inept trio of big-city caseworkers? Go ahead, Lilith. Unleash the hounds.

This is one of the few treatments of the macabre in animation that is authentically unnerving, rather than merely gross or campy.

To describe the novelist's final days, Bachardy opens a drawer and begins pulling out the magnificent deathbed drawings he did of Isherwood -- a fusion of art and love that's deeply moving.

That decade-spanning finale allows the three leads to age onscreen and demonstrate their impressive range, particularly Liu.

Madea's a riot, but what makes this richer, more textured follow-up to "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" so fascinating is the way Perry - a first-time director adapting his own hit play - shifts on a dime from a silly fart joke scene to one of intense, Sirkian melodrama.

Much meaner remake, starring Ryan Reynolds (quite good).

It’s hard to know what’s more depressing -- a senseless remake or the idea of a once-great director doing such shockingly slack work.

Gradually, and with a kind of inquisitive generosity, the filmmaker's scope expands to take in Casim's parents and two sisters, whose public shame and private despair at having the only son move in with a “goree” - a white girl - is made palpably, wrenchingly real.

After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that, in turn, leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable.

Writer-director Mick Garris has a real feeling for the horror master's melancholy worldview - love is loss - but he's too reverent toward the original story, the ending of which, both on the page and, now, on the screen, lands with an overly elegiac thud.

Diaz and Collette are believable as sisters, but their performances rarely surprise -- in a more interesting movie world, they'd have switched roles.

Like the film's characters, the city of Paris has been made faceless, as if it too were merely the pawn in a representational hell where light and color and shading are forbidden.

The last-minute details of plot can't compete with the frightening intensity of Kiberlain's and Garcia's performances, which trace, with brilliant precision, the exhausting mix of brutality and grace inherent in the mother-daughter relationship.

The best news here is Adrienne Barbeau, the 1970s TV star and B-movie queen (Swamp Thing), who invests the role of Anthony's aunt with a worldly-wise sensuality that suggests a long-lost cousin of Tony Soprano.

Nearly drowns in languor, only to be saved by Milos and Isaacs, who are sexy, movie-star talented and, together, really good kissers.

As in all his films, there's a sense that honest human emotion bores Fleder, but he gets points for packing the trial with fine character actors.

The glitch, beyond the rote story, is that while she's an infectiously upbeat screen presence, Latifah is not, inherently, a major laugh generator, and neither, it would appear, is Fallon.

For the first time in years, De Niro digs deep emotionally, perhaps because he's been stirred by the powerful work of his co-stars, including a subtle Frances McDormand and a ferocious Patti LuPone, as well as the heartbreaking (and achingly beautiful) Franco.

The nonstop jumping around undercuts Meily's momentum, especially in the film's overly languorous final third. Still, there's a refreshing optimism fueling his take on working-class life, as if Meily views friendship and neighborly generosity as currencies equal to cold, hard cash.