James Berardinelli

Offers slim pickings for viewers, regardless of whether they're fans of Woody Allen or not. And I'm sure the French will love it.

Seen today, Going My Way looks and feels like a quaint, old-fashioned production that deserves to have been forgotten long ago.

Four Christmases is waste of time and a disappointment, but it's also relatively painless.

By aiming his film at children, director David Mickey Evans strips the movie of all potentially interesting elements, leaving behind material likely to appeal to only the least discriminating viewers.

Carrie is just a bad movie, with only Spacek's performance making significant portions of it watchable. And the film has not improved with age. It looks just as cheap, cheesy, and ineptly made today as it did when it was first released.

For those who do not consider themselves to be among the Sex and the City faithful, this is a painful experience, perhaps the longest 148 minutes likely to be spent in a movie theater this year. Watching grass grow is more dramatically satisfying.

The visuals of a blasted city are impressive but hardly reason to spend $10 to sit in a theater seat and watch a bunch of underdeveloped characters get chased by zombies for an inordinate amount of time.

The Pursuit of Happyness is long, dull, and depressing.

The Long Day Closes is very much the visual equivalent of a verse or a poem: beautiful images, but no narrative.

It's amazing how a lifeless, pointless remake can provoke pangs of nostalgia about a mediocre movie.

As high camp, Willard might have something going for it, but not as a horror movie.

Although Drag Me to Hell mostly fails as horror, it achieves sporadic success as a comedy.

Although not without its merits, it’s far from a standout even when one considers how lackluster the current indie/art house landscape has become.

Eastern Promises is a jumbled string of mob-related clichés that mesh into something that’s derivative and at times uninteresting.

Feel-good tripe: a string of clichés lashed together by a formulaic plot that features underwritten characters and sit-com style humor.

Haphazardly plotted, it not only falls prey to absolute predictability but chooses to have nearly every important conversation (except one) occur off-screen. That sort of laziness is unacceptable and results in a strong sense of audience dissatisfaction.

What Linklater does exceptionally well is open the door on an era seventeen years in the past. This is 1976, from the music and cars...to the people and their attitudes. You'd have to climb into a time machine to get a better view...However, this is light entertainment -- nothing groundbreaking or even especially noteworthy.

Someone please get director Ric Roman Waugh a tripod! Snitch might be a passable action-thriller but it's hard to say because every time an action scene comes along, the image shakes so badly it's impossible to keep anything in view or focus.

Those who love to cry at movies will doubtless get their money's worth from The Man Without a Face. Others, I imagine, will discover in this movie what I did: a curious mixture of scenes that work and situations that seem hopelessly contrived or overly-sentimental. I didn't hate the film, and after the jarring first half-hour, it kept my attention, but The Man Without a Face never strays far from familiar territory.

Like most unintended second installments, this one is superfluous – a remix of moments, scenes, and images from its predecessor infused with the need to make everything bigger and louder.

The film, which has the ingredients for a thoughtful, tense thriller throws away a compelling first half so it can descend into silliness and clichés.

In the end, however, it’s all a rather hollow experience (as is too often the case with existential horror).

Had Home of the Brave presented credible stories about believable characters, it might have been a powerful drama.

The Proposal follows a paint-by-numbers script, it fails one key acid test: it doesn't sell the romance.

Lazily written and indifferently filmed, this sendup of action/spy movies rarely works as a satire and becomes downright unbearable when it attempts to do things like character/relationship building.

Contains multiple ax murders, lesbianism, incest, a hanging, and a storm at sea -- yet, despite all of this seemingly enticing material, it's a bore.

This mean-spirited and unpleasant production is unlikely to find favor with many either inside or outside of Elvis’ fan base.

Kaufman once again reminds us that, without a Jonze or a Gondry to shape and prune the writer’s constructs, we’re destined to become stuck in a frustrating morass of eccentricity and self-indulgence.