Hank Sartin

The action is exciting, but the rapid-fire narration jumps around too quickly, making it difficult to keep straight the personalities meant to hold the film together.

A talented director might have made Bullock seem like a comic genius, but Phil Traill has no control over tone, leaving the audience unsure whether to laugh or cry.

Though the story drags for the first hour, this becomes a solid character study once the principals arrive at their hiding place.

Everyone in the cast conveys that messy mix of teen self-consciousness and bravado, but Josh Peck is particularly nuanced as the bully.

Director Zak Tucker is a bit too fond of jump cuts as signifiers of edginess. Still, when the material doesn't get in the way he's pretty good at getting across the emotional content.

All the male pulchritude can't make up for a muddled script.

The intense focus on this trio makes for good portraiture, but it left me hungry for more about the social context that shaped them.

Crudup takes a riskier path: his architect isn't very nice and is possibly irredeemable. His performance is subtle, complicated, and fresh, and it's a shame the movie doesn't live up to it.

"Friday" had moments of stoned charm and telling neighborhood detail; this second sequel never gets beyond the angry, cruel, and misogynist.

Entertaining but forgettable action flick.

Kids used to watching him on TV might find it all perfectly normal, but for adults it's almost an acid trip.

We're never allowed to feel much of anything for these characters, and as a result their agonizing over their lost past and uncertain future seems like whining.

This film by Julio Medem has dreamlike visuals, lush sensuality, a gorgeous cast, and a plot built on elaborate, self-conscious coincidences.

Director Frank Nissen strikes a nice balance between slapstick and sentiment, and I'll admit to getting a bit choked up at the appropriate moments.

The result is both thrilling and thoughtful.

Fascinating group portrait of soul and R & B legends who are still touring 40 years after their original fame, enduring even after they've been relegated to the nostalgia circuit.

The women, many in their 70s and 80s, are still tough and proud--and nursing grudges that go back decades, something Leitman plays up by crosscutting between rivals' accounts.

Cohen and a crew of script doctors have thrown in some of the oldest cliches in the book.

In this eerily tranquil psychological thriller, Nicole Kidman's placid countenance is like a Rorschach: you'll project onto it what you want to see.

Never quite settles on a tone, veering from wacky comedy to earnest sports drama to romantic farce. The results are predictably muddled, if mostly harmless.

Nothing's quite so painful as failed comedy, and this atrocity is equivalent to a compound fracture.

This Hamlet elevates plot to a height that retains the play's atmosphere but squanders its thematic richness in a welter of "Mommy, how could you?" melodrama.

The result is that virtual oxymoron, an intelligent family film.

Jones's script leans too heavily on the familiar device of blurring illusion and reality, but his view of the urban landscape is beautiful and distinctive.

Kidd has a great ear for dialogue, and he throws in a few unexpected twists. But the real fun is watching an established pro and a newcomer run with the script.

Borrowing heavily from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Shyamalan tries to lighten his trademark gloomy tone -- and almost kills the suspense he's working so hard to achieve.

The full-throttle approach of director Doug Liman (Swingers, Go) is impressive.

The film never quite achieves the sharp edge satire demands, largely because director Andrew Niccol, who was so good at managing tone in "Gattaca," can't decide whether to go with nasty or hilariously farcical.

I expected this to be much funnier: Latifah coasts on her charm and Fallon seems incapable of playing an actual character.

Argentinean writer-director Daniel Burman uses a shaky handheld camera and voice-over narration to take us inside Ariel's head, which gets a bit exhausting, even in the more emotionally satisfying second half.

Hits the ground running and never looks back. But after an hour of propulsive pacing the shock value wears off, and all that's left is pop-up carnage.

Has an affable charm, but the script is paint by numbers.

This is both melodramatic and overly tidy in its plotting, but its odd personal relationships are utterly believable.

Reasonably entertaining but predictable.

Every eerily tranquil shot, weirdly elliptical scene, and peculiar line reading contributes to a mood of detachment rather than creeping dread.

As hard as the film tries to pander, the kids at the preview screening seemed a bit disengaged.

The animation is remarkable, except for the stiff, marionettelike humans.

There are a few witty touches (POV shots given to the urn holding the mother's ashes) but the mood swings erratically and ineffectively from deadpan drollery to heartfelt romance.

There's an uplifting message about heroism, dispensed in dialogue so familiar you can practically lip=synch it.

Desperately wants to be whimsical and charming. But whimsy isn't easy to carry off, and director Alan Taylor, who has directed mostly television dramas, has a heavy hand -- scenes meant to be comical are destroyed by leaden pacing and a puzzling mix of tones.

At times Hirsch seems afraid to trust the material's inherent drama and becomes unnecessarily manipulative, staging performances in striking landscapes and playing the footage in slow motion.

All in all it's pretty lurid, but it delivers what it promises.

The concert footage is generally quite good, and Joplin is astonishing, but with so many hours of footage you'd think there would be more unexpected moments.

It's a bad sign when you can't name or differentiate any of the Lost Boys.

This bleak little drama started as a play, and I'd bet that even onstage it felt contrived.

This harmless comedy by Steven Mallorca comments wryly on America's weird hybrid culture, but the characters are too broadly drawn and the story drags in the last third, just when it should be hitting comic warp speed.

Every joke is stretched to the breaking point, and no one seems to be having any fun.

The audience is subjected to a series of emotional contortions, encouraged to experience them voyeuristically, and then scolded for doing so. The bathetic music Kim favors is profoundly at odds with his chilly attitude toward the characters.

Episodic but entertaining fantasy.

Uekrongtham handles the material with reasonable restraint, and you can't help but cheer on the hero.

Wacky mix-ups and a stunningly unfunny climax.

The result is your basic Bruckheimer action spectacle plus lots of leather, shaggy haircuts, and Celtic tattoos.

Be forewarned: this comedy bears only the faintest resemblance to the classic book and film of the same name.