Jessica Winter

Scott Elliott's palsied directorial debut, from a mine shaft-ridden script, is a sick joke, and Weaver's part in it screams of temporary insanity.

"Legally Blonde" director Robert Luketic bumbles along with typically clumsy blocking and framing, and the misogyny inherent in the three-ring spectacle of bitch slaps, barbiturate covert ops, and wedding plan hysteria does rankle.

Solid raw material, but the execution is overcooked.

Money can't buy happiness, but as Bride and Prejudice teaches us, it can get patience in bulk from a smart young woman of a practical mind-set.

Studiously harmless, Disney's long-in-development film rendition pasteurizes the book's renegade verve with typical means.

The movie is a technical marvel from its lysergic cinematography (by Decha Srimantra) to its pulsing-vessel sound design, but it has no identity apart from its influences, however dazzlingly they're deployed.

The Road Home is foremost enthralled, however, with its lead actress -- wide-eyed and pigtailed, revered in close-up after stunned close-up.

Like a loud and intermittently charismatic drunk at a dreary dive bar, Intermission grabs your attention, but in no time you're looking for the nearest exit.

Brady and Cunningham share a volatile, symbiotic chemistry, sketching in elegant shorthand the rhythms of a lusty, combative marriage.

Like grieving itself, the film is awkward, messily honest, and sometimes darkly funny.

Most frustrating, Stage Beauty fumbles XX/XY politics at every turn.

A discombobulating mix of blood-and-grit docu-realism and moony multiplex contrivance.

John Corbett shuffles in for yet another tour of duty as the bland requisite love interest.

Having already looted the Peckinpah and spaghetti-western archives, the director now quotes his own quotations, in service of not a sequel but a vociferous reiteration.

A series of moments that don't quite add up to a movie...one bland, maundering stroll.

The script offers neither a sustained narrative arc nor strong characterizations.

A startling letdown after (Léa Pool's) plaintive, understated coming-of-age tale "Set Me Free."

The film is so grindingly predictable that I was writing out a full plot synopsis in my notebook before it was half over, though the thick grains of Terry Stacey's photography and Deschanel's understated performance add a little kick to the family-dysfunction paces, and Ferrell's dive-bar rendition of the Eagles' "I Can't Tell You Why" is positively riveting. Winter Passing should have been a musical.

Can any American filmmaker other than the Farrellys make a rom-com in which the principals engage in activities apart from the tiresomely tireless dissection of rom?

Sahara is many things, but it is not a movie. It is the skull-splitting cacophony of 21 producers and four screenwriters (that we know about, anyway) standing in the same room shouting into their cell phones.

Ms. Cruz...once again proves her inability to give a bad performance even under the worst of circumstances.

The film allots far too much time to the cultural exchange program between the fugitive and his aide, in which Otomo can recap his sorrowful biography to a sympathetic audience surrogate.

Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."

Mona Lisa Smile's only mysteries are the result of frenzied corner-cutting as Newell & Co. speed through the last reel, an exhausting cram session of hair-trigger speechifying and identity transformations bordering on the science-fictional.

The Wedding Planner achieves the dubious but perversely impressive feat, for its 90-minute duration, of neutering Jennifer Lopez.

Arriving just after the best year for animated film in recent memory, Fantasia 2000 doesn't play like a celebration. In its sentimental yearning for a golden age when another one's upon us, it feels a little like a rebuke.

Slack, saccharine script.

High-buffed, low-rack pulp.