Jan Stuart

A tedious experience.

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

A disposable sports drama.

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

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

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

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.

It's the perfect image for a smelly and instantly flushable comedy that telegraphs punch lines in advance like a boorish dinner party guest.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

88 minutes of desperate gyrations intended to simulate humor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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