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.