Connie Ogle

Turns out to be a more disappointment than joyful reunion, a tedious and desperately drawn-out affair that tests your patience even as it brazenly courts (and often earns) your contempt.

The Age of Adaline is a modern romantic fairy tale set in San Francisco, marred by bad narration and an unnecessary desire to overexplain random magic.

Late Marriage's stiffness is unlikely to demonstrate the emotional clout to sweep U.S. viewers off their feet.

A well-acted, well-crafted but excruciatingly tepid romantic film about a subject that will attract poetry lovers and yet test even their considerable patience.

On the Line's cutesy premise is no more ridiculous than that of most romantic comedies.

Better than you might expect despite its awkward, slow beginning, drawing you in gradually and paying off in surprisingly effective and bittersweet ways.

For most U.S. audiences, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, is going to feel more like a history lesson than a movie.

As it spins along at a reasonably good clip - no one is going to mistake it for the slicker, more action-packed "Salt" - The Double unravels its secrets, which prove to be its undoing.

The overwhelming sensation of deja vu is exhausting and disorienting. You really HAVE seen it all before.

One of the problems with Rampart is that we've seen guys like Dave in movies and on TV for years now. The bad cop psyche has been delved into pretty deeply on all fronts, most notably in FX's brilliant series "The Shield."

What The Bank Job ends up stealing is all your precious time.

If you're making a movie that purports to be about real love, at the very least, you have to make the audience care whether the lovers work out their problems.

Unfortunately Miracle is long on cliché and short on originality.

Watching A Late Quartet feels more like sitting through a Classical Music 101 lecture than entertainment.

Joyful Noise is too tone-deaf to put its few blessings to good use.

The good news is, The Vow is not excruciating.

A slightly dull film by photographer Sam Jones.

The film isn’t overlong. But it tries to fit so many themes into its brief running time — that it merely touches on most conflicts instead of exploring them in depth or with any delicacy.

The Great Debaters keeps things on the surface and pushes the obvious buttons, hoping you won't notice its distinct lack of depth.

The film hardly aims to be serious entertainment, and, to its credit, it's never uninteresting visually.

The idea of cracking a secret message from the enemy during war is thrilling; making the process interesting to watch is more problematic.

Freedom Writers is prone to throwing in unnecessary plot developments, so it never quite succeeds as anything more than "Dangerous Minds" Redux.

Soon settles down into a drizzle of steady mediocrity, never living up to all the frenzy of those first few moments.

Comes off curiously flat.

Shakespeare's rich language does not fit soundly inside every mouth.

The film's opening credits are terrific, and the first 10 or 15 minutes -- in which Ford and Arthur speedily load up on beer at the local pub -- are absorbing and funny. It's such a promising start that it's doubly deflating to realize that once they land on Zaphod's spaceship, the humor vaporizes.

Chéri never fulfills its emotional promise.

Feels more like a lecture you've already heard than a galvanizing call to action.