Jan Stuart

This round-robin of marital malaise has a lot more integrity than one might anticipate from its meet-cute beginnings.

A tedious experience.

88 minutes of desperate gyrations intended to simulate humor.

It is chockablock with brutality, but the violence is of the high-minded, self-congratulatory sort that indicates without actually showing.

Mortimer gives a terrifically keyed-up performance that is nicely complemented by the wholesomely chipper Harrelson, who seems to be drawing inspiration from Fred MacMurray's gallery of Disney dads.

Audiences who feel battered by Hollywood's usual hard-sell approach to farce may be disarmed by Koepp's soft touch and inclined to credit blandness as understatement.

If you let it be what it is, Donnie Darko will knock you flat.

A funkadelic fun ride that shrewdly reinvigorates the eye-popping styles and pulpy veneer of '70s blaxploitation flicks.

Bracing and remarkably compact drama, which invests some standard movie tropes of rough-and-tumble urban life with deep feeling and urgency.

In the role of dramaturge, Rogen and his co-scripter Goldberg lack Apatow's discipline and deft hand for peripheral characters; the writing in Pineapple Express gets lazy whenever it strays too far from its central axis of players.

It's borderline parody of a kind of fey filmmaking popular at crunchy-granola festivals, but the counterfeit aesthetic is ultimately outshone by the life-affirming message.

What makes Comedian more than just another documentary about the comedy club comeback of a sitcom prince is that it contrasts his struggle with that of just another stand-up climber, Orny Adams.

Brick Lane has been whittled down from Monica Ali's expansive 2003 novel into a glossy but overly efficient drama that, like Nazneen's husband, is ultimately too ineffectual to make much of a dent.

If you're willing to suspend a barrel or two of disbelief, then Happy Accidents has its moments.

The Irish-pretty Cyrus exudes a goofball vitality and sunny work ethic that ultimately wins you over, despite the slickness of her vehicle. The 3-D camera throws drumsticks and confetti in our faces, but the technical effects seem superfluous to the star's bona-fide energy.

The French are very good at taking sit-commy setups and cloaking the machinery with charming and surprisingly resonant comic nuance.

High-grade lampoon, at once more consistently on-the-money and less patronizing than anything off the Christopher Guest conveyor belt.

Lacks any sort of urgency or inner propulsion; the actors do their little goofs, then hand them off to the next, lending the jest the frolicking but ultimately monotonous quality of a game of tag.

Ultimately, Journey to the Center of the Earth's minor-league visual pleasures will be most enjoyed by those with the smallest number of celluloid reference points, preferably those who have started going to the movies after "Jurassic Park" or, better yet, the Harry Potter films.

The result is stylish but awfully slim.

Seems to have been tailored to its designated R "for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use."

All of the actors convey the ebullience of old friends convening for an on-the-cheap reunion. The shared good spirits result in a diminutive comedy with a bounty of charm and shrewd humor.

If Lonesome Jim feels like it's perpetually on the verge of evaporating, Buscemi brings to the material the boundless empathy for misfits and screw-ups he displayed in "Trees Lounge."

There is very little about the hoary conventions of The Mothman Prophecies that couldn't be improved by a little levity, a little more sunlight and some judicious cutting.

Just to shake things up a little, I guess, the creators of the laughably over-the-top Doomsday thought it might be fun to turn the survivors of a deadly epidemic, rather than its victims, into maniacal murderers.

While all of the actors are excellent, we sat up whenever Gabrielle Union walked on screen. As the ever-sensible woman who disrupts Jackson's bachelorhood, she projects the pluck, gravitas and beauty of a younger Alfre Woodard.

Lurie undermines his high-wire act with the melodramatic carryings-on of the diner patrons.

a freefall into urban hell that doesn't give us The impetus to jump or the awful gratification of the ride.

The Good Night has flashes of bookish wit but never quite recovers from the metronomic monotony of its first half, which ticktocks between scenes of Paltrow braying and Cruz voguing.

Even at its stride, "The X-Files" was a load of malarkey. But it was thoughtful malarkey and compulsively watchable. One could say the same about the first two-thirds of The X-Files: I Want to Believe before it spins out of control and into a delirious plane of awfulness.

This new romantic comedy from the U.K. lands on an emotional gold mine only to spin it into synthetic straw.

Any charm and character ascribed to Carl Hiaasen's bestselling book have been homogenized in Wil Shriner's flat screenplay and direction.

Sydney White is a carnival of ethnic and social stereotypes that are rising up against the lily-white status quo. In Hollywood, blond princesses and fairy tales die hard.

SomeBody reclaims well-trodden territory with an innovative hand that feels fresh as tomorrow.

The impulse to shtick it up to burlesque-level inanity is encouraged at every turn.

Isn't it amazing to see just how low some people will stoop if you pay them enough?

Exceptionally user-friendly for the technologically challenged among us and rides over its less inspired patches on a wave of cheeky humor.

There is even less going on between Ricci and Depp here than there was in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," mostly because Potter gives them nothing to play.

A disposable sports drama.

The whole trippy experience is like being held at gunpoint by a Jehovah's Witness at the front door while George Gobel holds forth in the living room on Nickelodeon.

Where there was a modicum of charm to Mick Dundee's earliest exploits in New York City, the joke has withered as markedly as Hogan's face.

The rest of Seven Pounds feels like a half-hour "Twilight Zone" script that has been pressed onto a gob of Silly Putty and stretched to the sinking point.

Screenwriter Dan Schneider and director Shawn Levy substitute volume and primary colors for humor and bite. Granted, it's a kids' flick, but kids today have enough savvy about the movie industry to report for Variety.

While there is the requisite amount of shorn limbs and splashing blood one might expect from the director of "Saw," Wan should be saluted for putting the coup de grâce off-screen.

A ditsy and dizzying spook-house thriller in high-tech, high-hemline gear.

Trashily in-your-face thriller, which leans heavily for its effects on intense sympathy pain, improbable reversals and the mystifying star appeal of Jessica Alba.

It's not awful, but the high cost of a movie ticket these days seems like a steep price to pay for 90 minutes of air conditioning and production design.

Fat, homely men who feel they have been wrongly underrepresented in underwear ads should flock to The Last Man.

Works up a decent amount of solid, creep-show atmosphere in its first act before making some absurd decisions of its own in its second.

Droopy remake.

Li's far too unthreatening a presence to cause much of a stir amid the din of hard rock music and the pall left by fight choreography that has had every last bit of life digitally drained away.

Lacking a real actress, director Michael Apted is called upon to fudge the facts and make Slim's ordeal as taut as possible. He gets the job done, but the suspense scenes have a generic fright-by-numbers feel that tell us he's wearing his professional hat and knows it.

The film's sunniest moments occur whenever song preempts all the fighting and smirking. Myers leads the cast in sitar-accompanied covers of such Bollywood favorites as "9 to 5" and Steve Miller's "The Joker," revealing a glimmer of the cross-cultural romp that could have been.