Ella Taylor

Like most of LaBute's work, Some Velvet Morning ends as it begins, more clever than wise.

True, Escape From Tomorrow, a handsomely mounted gallery of Mouse House cuteness inverted into grotesquerie, looks a sight more artful than do most home movies. But as an expose of Disney's manufactured happiness, and by extension the sins of corporate capitalism, it's pretty stale news.

Awkward, incoherent and plodding.

To begin with, how painful is it to watch actors as intelligent as Naomi Watts and Robin Wright mug their way through the story of two hard-bodied middle-aged Australian besties hitting the sack with one another's teenaged sons?

Even as a fantasy about where a lack of transparency might go, left unchecked, it's storytelling informed by sloppy, absolutist thinking, and it lends one more uncritical voice to the many who seem unable to distinguish between kinds and degrees of evil.

If Drinking Buddies is meant to be his ticket into mainstream comedy, it feels mumblecore-ishly vague and rambling in its construction, like "Hannah Takes the Stairs" without the raffish charm.

Austenland, a clunky broadside aimed at the cult of Jane Austen, is worth seeing primarily for its end credits, a mix of pop oil and water so joyfully dippy it might have produced a stifled giggle even in Herself.

A raucously funny comic romance that's deaf and blind to the blithe spirit of romantic comedy.

Almodovar is in party mode here, and if you liked his 1990 comedy "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" you'll probably love I'm So Excited! for its candied pastels and its impishly clever design, which transforms the plane into a theater and its galley into a staging area for those three theatrical stewards.

Cumming always gives good value, and his regular bursts into cabaret numbers are certainly an added bonus. Yet this instinctively ironic actor doesn't seem best suited to play the movie's most sentimental creation. A mouthy, heart-of-gold construct, Rudy dresses like Ratso Rizzo and comes on like The Fonz.

Save the Date has the vapid, beige feel of an off-the-peg product made to exploit a niche market rather than a film with something on its mind about what it means to make the jump from youth to adulthood today.

The film never coheres. Trying to carve out a space between black comedy and straight evocation of a difficult but rewarding marriage, the movie never settles on a tone.

War of the Buttons deftly folds France's unsavory collusions into a rather more rousing tale of resistance. I don't doubt that some of these heroics happened. But the way they're framed conveniently takes the edge off saying sorry.

Worst of all is the hitching of all this extravagant suffering to an inspirational ending filled with sweet regret, healing hope and some picturesque nestling in the titular oaks with the next generation.

The Words founders on a spurious dichotomy between love and art. Which is a pity, because the movie is smart and persuasive on the casually incremental way in which plagiarism becomes an option for people like Rory - and perhaps for anyone.

Long on hero worship and woefully short on insight, Lula: Son of Brazil oozes good intentions, but it wouldn't look out of place in a retrospective of early Soviet workerist cinema.

One Day ends up fatally compromised by its glib recourse to death and cancer as moral wake-up calls.

The script groans beneath a mass of symbolic winking and declamatory exposition that has the unfortunate effect of turning the villagers into credulous simpletons, ready to blow with any wind that carries them.

Though it's a big thrill that the world's finest character actor has his very own lead role, one wishes there were more meat on the elegant bones of Meeting Spencer to justify his cheerfully offhand wit.

Slick moralizing grows exponentially as the plot, wrapped in travelogue photography, transparently expository dialogue, and cheap thrills, drives home spurious parallels between the first and third worlds.

Chugs along inoffensively enough.

Alas, the hopelessly miscast Green is too darn French, lacking the voraciously loony brio it takes to play Miss G.

Tapa's poetic neorealism is less a stylistic intrusion than a keeping of faith, through the film's deliberately uneven pacing, with a life devoid of rhythms to count on.

You get a bargain two high-concepts for the price of one in this amiably lame offering from Stephen Herek, who, once upon a time, cooked up an excellent Adventure for Bill and Ted, then veered off into inspirational goo with "Mr. Holland's Opus."

Barney's Version misses every opportunity for raucous picaresque fun that the book throws its way, while squandering a wealth of transatlantic performing talent led by Paul Giamatti.

Young's well-intentioned dramatic re-enactment of their encounters is burdened by sepia-period accessorizing, laborious flashbacks, spurious comparisons between the two men's domestic lives, and the downright bizarre casting of Franka Potente as Less's ailing wife and Stephen Fry as an Israeli pol who wants the case wrapped up in five minutes or less.

Though Hausler's sincerity is palpable, his efforts at world-weary ennui seem premature, and his wisdom about what motivates random violence in the youth of today proves too callow for a satisfying climax.

Estes never really completes a thought about this sorry group's moral dilemmas.

As a performer, Robin Williams has a wonderfully volatile range; as an actor, he commutes uneasily between over-sincere and over-sinister. Both modes are on full monochromatic display in this stolid noir thriller.

The only decent actors in Entrapment are high-tech tools of global robbery.

Meant as a return to the form and substance of Allen's far superior early work satirizing the equivocations and betrayals with which we ruin our lives. In fact, the movie only comes alive as a hostile critique of psychoanalysis.

While it's true that most of us make our way through life without a plan, the studied arbitrariness of Page's accommodating ramble from Hicksville to Smutsville doesn't make for thrilling cinema.

IMAX magnifies everything, including flaws, which are legion in this listless, awkward prequel to the 1979 movie based on the novel by Walter and Steven Farley.

Sweet, innocuous and about as fresh as yesterday's lettuce.

The movie is calamitously miscast.

The movie gives every cheerful appearance of having been shot with no time and less money, and it doesn't have much on its mind, unless you count the moral integrity supplied by local Apaches more by way of Mel Brooks than Howard Hawks.

I hope to God that Patrick McGrath's novel Asylum, about a bunch of repressed Brits manipulating the stuffing out of one another in a 1950s psychiatric hospital, is better than the shallowly competent exercise in nastiness that British director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Patrick Marber have made of it.

Patriot reflects on nothing, except perhaps that the American Revolution was a golden opportunity for Mel Gibson to go postal.

Stephen Campbell Moore is miserably out of his depth as the playboy trying to tempt Scarlett, leaving poor Tom Wilkinson to sound a lone note of sophisticated intelligence.

Falls prey to the lazy assumption that a parade of whiz-bang CGI will cover for the absence of a muscular story.

Doubt is only marginally, and tendentiously, about moral uncertainty--it's more about the sins of a nosy old biddy who pulls out all the stops when going through the official channels of a male-dominated Catholic Church would get her nowhere.

Without the actor’s name and amiably demented grin, Go Further would be an unspeakably tedious and preachy travelogue. With them, this insupportably long home movie, unremarkably directed by Ron Mann, is merely dull.

As a thriller, People I Know -- which has languished unreleased since 2001 -- is barely plausible. As a critique of the meshing of power politics between East and West coasts, the movie is more smart-alecky than wise.

In the final act, the movie dons a more human face and commits to an absorbing tale of crime and punishment, albeit pushing the fatigued message that you can't always tell light from dark these days.

The clash between a winning cast, a witty script and Lansdown's technical weaknesses produces a pleasant, if not memorable, film blanc.

Set against a production design seemingly inspired by the American flag, director Kenny Ortega's choreography is industrial and efficient, if haplessly stranded somewhere between Michael Jackson and the Village People.

Where else could this flabby excuse for a women's movie go? Straight to the Oxygen Channel, if it's lucky.

By herself, Bullock isn't enough to hold up this enervating movie, which lumbers along ponderously until, at the end, it takes a giant leap into the suspension of disbelief that lost me altogether.

The movie has a script (by Paul Pender) made of wood, and it's relentlessly folksy, a procession of stagy set pieces stacked with binary oppositions.

In the sense that everyone is interesting once their lives are sufficiently unpacked, Burt and Linda's story is not boring -- but beyond its tabloid sensationalism, it's not especially significant either.

In his capable, yet only mildly exciting, adaptation of Charles Dickens’ third novel, Douglas McGrath (Emma) keeps reminding us that what we’re seeing is theater. This feels gratuitous.

A maddeningly uneven triptych.

On a Clear Day is in most respects "The Full Monty," only with swimming, not stripping, and no bursts into song or dance - only the usual canny sequencing of tears and laughter, interspersed here with fetching underwater photography and father-son issues up the wazoo.

If nothing else, Chuck & Larry should open up a whole new career path for the ineffably funny, unselfconsciously buck-naked Ving Rhames as an übermacho firefighter who’s been sitting on a little secret of his own.

The director is Christian Volckman, whose skills as an animator greatly exceed his grasp of an idea worth pursuing.

Basic Instinct 2 pushes diligently along in a murder-and-mayhem-stuffed effort to demonstrate that (a) a sillier and more hackneyed movie than "Basic Instinct" is possible and (b) that shrinks have ids too, by golly.

Joan Cusack and Kim Cattrall bring some nice ambiguity to their thankless roles as the mothers, while pintsize Kirsten Olson and punked-out Julianna Cannarozzo, both professional skaters, leaven this Disney sugarplum with much-needed wit.

A disappointed meditation on the '60s.

If you're a Cole Porter fan you might like the songs in De-Lovely, but as a portrait of an unusual marriage it's de-lumbering, de-liberate and de-cidedly flat.

For a movie with a lesbian theme, My Mother Likes Women is absurdly coy about gay sex. It may be the most heterosexually minded film about lesbians ever made.

Stephen Frears has had more downs than ups of late, but I would never have thought the man responsible for "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Grifters" capable of stooping to pap as pappy as this unbearably chipper take on the real-life story of Laura Henderson.

The less rosy message of Catch a Fire is that aggression breeds aggression.

Withdrawal From Gaza lacks both the nuance and the muscle of Yoav Shamir's excellent 2005 "5 Days," which probes far deeper into the relationship between settlers and the soldiers who came, on the orders of supersettler Ariel Sharon, to remove them.

Surprisingly wan film.

It ends up sagging into a pleasantly undistinguished pudding. The big news is that Matt Lauer, playing himself, can act. A little. Hardly at all, really. But he’s a jolly good sport, and quite handy with a fire extinguisher.

Lacking energy and pace and enslaved by a ghastly score, this tepid movie left me longing alternately for David Lean's thrillingly grim 1948 masterpiece, and Carol Reed's chipper 1968 sing-along, with pretty tunes by Lionel Bart.

A capable, soulful thriller with a love story as steamy as is possible when its lead characters are Orthodox Jews.

You'd have to be either an avid New Ager or willing to see Nick Nolte in absolutely anything to get fully onboard for this visually overexcited tale of salvation-by-gas-station-guru.

Garner is no more than serviceable as the tightly wound Gray.

Our traumatized soldiers deserve better representation than this irretrievably ridiculous drama, which will do nothing to revive the flagging fortunes of the man whose career lay down and died after "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection."

Against the odds of this wheezy material and Michael Browning's fitfully funny script, director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Dave), a master of timing, contrives to spin a likable romantic comedy.

The movie’s glib trafficking in illness, death and pinched little faces to jury-rig our emotional responses (Gibb was inspired by the equally likable, equally pandering Czech film "Kolya") lost me at hello.

Excusez-moi, but I'd rather see Omar Sharif punching out croupiers in a casino than dispensing comfort and joy in this sugared-up tale.

Something there is about the '60s that undoes the most intelligent of filmmakers.

Lunacy feels programmatic, the repetitive working through of an idea that had me checking my watch.

Loses focus and sags into a how-we-got-through-it family procedural.

Not especially lively filmmaking, but Zilberman has unearthed some terrific footage of the club in its heyday.

Too sensitive for this world or any other, this stifling portrait of a family stuck in bereavement offers the painful sight of at least two highly accomplished actors frozen for lack of direction from novice writer-director Josh Sternfeld.

Anemic.

What the movie lacks is a point.

Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.

(Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.

Raising Helen is the kind of movie you watch on a plane while muttering “utter crap” under your breath -- and then burst into tears.

Pretty good going for a ton of moisture.

That You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is not more dull is due in large part to the adorably flamboyant Punch (late of Dinner for Schmucks and Hot Fuzz).

This Rob Reiner comedy jogs along pleasantly enough to the finish (Costner is charming as always in over-the-hill-ruin mode), which entails a less-than-shattering insight about love and marriage.

Though hardly a major work, The Burial Society has going for it something that many of the snickering noir comedies currently littering the field lack. Underneath its cheeky amorality, there beats a heart.

Precious little history of any kind shows its face in Marie Antoinette. The omission is strategic.

My own view is that, like me, the LAPD was defeated by the movie's incestuously proliferating plots. I've seen Dark Blue twice, and I still don't have a handle on all its comings and goings.

Under Peter Hewitt's phoned-in direction, Garfield chugs along like the slow train to Chattanooga, with only Jennifer Love Hewitt, as the local vet, twittering pertly in a desperate effort to raise Jon's feeble pulse.

The question is not how bad this excuse for a domestic comedy is (medium cringe), but how the gifted Fred Schepisi got suckered into directing a vanity project.

It plays out more like a 12-step program than a human drama.

Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.

The famously lovely mug of Tilda Swinton (cast as Kurtz’s wife) merely distracts, and I couldn’t help feeling that this potent story would have been far better served by a straight-ahead documentary.

Might have something interesting to say about cultural ambivalence by and toward the maternal impulse if only it had a spark of originality or verve.

Compared to the glib, pandering rosiness of most current chick-flicks, Anywhere but Here is a class act.

Too long, too slow, too self-consciously chatty and too much at the mercy of a slim premise that doesn't wear well under endless repetition.

The movie is loaded with good intentions, but in his zeal to squeeze the action and our emotions into the all-too-familiar dramatic arc of the Holocaust escape story, Minac drains his movie of all individuality.