Connie Ogle

It's fitting. Valentin and Jane may be awakening from life's slumber, but mostly they're just putting us to sleep.

Mostly due to luminous writing, Baxter's novel evoked a sense of magic, but this Feast, though never completely uninteresting, leaves you hungry for enchantment.

Together (Hunter/Murphy) they're actually sort of fun to watch, and it's amusing to realize, not quite halfway through the film, that its most potent chemistry exists between them.

The real Guerin deserves a more complete cinematic tribute.

This movie couldn’t be more fantastical if dragons swooped down and incinerated London, Paris and the south of France.

It's a disappointing chapter in what until now has been a highly entertaining, even thought-provoking series.

While there are some genuinely creepy moments, it never truly ends up as more than an average "X-Files" episode.

Won't surprise you, but it's more tolerable than the grating, garish, millinery-challenged Cat. Besides, a cadaverous Terence Stamp trumps a glossy Alec Baldwin as a bad guy any day.

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

Something Borrowed commits the most fatal mistake of all: Its characters are so deeply uninteresting that the audience can't get invested in their eventual happiness.

There was, however, another question the screenwriter should have asked: Why does the script focus on the wrong couple?

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

Once in a great while, a film of insight and wisdom defines a generation. Step Up is not that film. Instead, it's the sort of mildly entertaining movie that comes along a couple of times a year.

Assassination Tango offers little heat. In dancing with death, Duvall stumbles a few too many times.

Just one more in the plague of weak Cinderella stories released in the past year. It's too sugary to be good for you, but in the end, its over-the-top sweetness won't kill you.

Assange is a compelling figure that merited a better effort.

Mostly, by story's end, we're just glad they and their unfortunate clothing are out of our sight for good.

The body part joke to alien joke ratio seems slightly skewed in favor of the former, which makes the humor more than a little repetitive. How many different ways can one film say: "Men are idiots"?

New Year's Eve is not unbearable. It's not bad, but it's not good, either. It delivers exactly what you expect: pretty faces, shallow romance and a mythical fanaticism about an event in a friendly Manhattan unblemished by hyper-vigilant security measures, obnoxious drunks or New York Jets fans.

An incredibly lazy movie -- but not an unbearable one, thanks to Aaron Eckhart's charm.

With more time and a dash more cynicism, the film just might have achieved the thrilling allure of Becky Sharp's perfectly icy heart.

Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a failure that should have at least been a magnificent mistake, a risky endeavor that showed a daring intent even if its brash vision didn’t quite succeed. Instead, the movie leaves you cold and weary and vaguely disgusted.

Right now, this goofy film is the best candidate for mindless, enjoyable laughs.

The bigger problem with the film, which is genuinely unnerving at times, is what happens when the cavers are not in immediate peril, because they talk.

Something of an overlong, overblown, disorganized mess, despite being slightly better than its predecessor.

In the end Secret Window asks too much, demands allegiance when only incredulity can be mustered.

Anything but light on its feet. It lumbers instead of dazzles, drags where it should feint and jab.

Allegedly it's based on a true story, which is believable only because the outcome is so unsatisfying it carries the dull metallic tang of real-life ambiguity. And that's neither scary nor stimulating.