Jessica Winter

B. Monkey is crawling with smart actors saying things they don't quite mean.

Indeed, remake hack Charles Shyer (who processed the Parent Trap and Father of the Bride updates) plays coy with most matters sexual -- an odd and puritanical approach to a character who molds his entire existence around the procurement and enjoyment of sex.

Slack, saccharine script.

Amid the awkward pacing and gaping plot holes, the film's chief point of interest is Goldblum's morbidly fascinating performance: equal parts Walter Neff and Captain Kirk.

Achieves inadvertent pathos via its own obscene irrelevance.

The overdetermined approach preempts character shadings or social subtext-just compare Hideo Nakata's original "Ring," which tapped its dread from viral-replicant mass culture and its pathos from a broken home, or Nakata's "Dark Water," which channeled the sorrow, guilt, and paranoia felt by a young divorcée mired in a custody battle.

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

As the tourist on a time budget, the usually brilliant Coogan merely mugs and flails (we can only imagine what Johnny Depp would have done with Fogg), while he and able straight man Chan enjoy scant opportunity to develop any comic rapport.

It's dispiriting to watch him (Murphy) stand patiently by and concoct reaction shots for quipping raccoons and dancing bears.

The loud, musty production design -- steeped in lime greens and tangerine oranges -- smells of recirculated air and enervated ambition, but unfortunately, so does the movie itself.

The best that can be said about director Christine Lahti's feature debut is that it doesn't fall into any ready category.

A story that splits at the seams with plot holes and bloat.

A show about nothing—its jokes based on stick-figure stereotypes, its lunges at humanism premised on imbecilic pity.

Pola Rapaport's slender documentary-cum-reconstruction Writer of O disappoints in its workmanlike approach to such fragrant material.

This is more than self-amused irony; this is kitsch as religion.

Begins with the same deathless question that has bedeviled generations of teenagers: how to fill the space allotted to graduating seniors for memories and shout-outs at the back of their yearbook?

Heartbreakers gives redemption a bad name, but gives conniving misanthropy a worse one.

Creaky in its mechanics and numbingly protracted, this is basement B horror that fancies itself a prestige chiller.

[Rhys Meyers] remains trapped in an enervating road movie - shelved so long that Rhys Meyers still appears to have baby fat - summed up when Finbar, who turns up in Finland (natch), asks whey-faced Danny, "You couldn't find anything better to do than to come find me?!"

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

The contortional physical shtick familiar from Lawrence's sitcom, laden with a dollop of Three Stooges violence, should keep the boys happy.

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.

Willing's confused procedural -- derived from a novel by Madison Smartt Bell -- is a hasty throwback to the sado-medieval Exorcist descendants of the turn of the millennium (Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, Lost Souls). The somnolent cast can't keep the faith.

Not a movie that can afford to take itself seriously.

Martin seems uncomfortable and oddly waxen (the orange Al Gore makeup doesn't help), injecting Frank with neither restless anger nor wry humor.

The Kid's denouement resembles the nightmare that would have transpired had execs foisted a toupee and a happy ending on "12 Monkeys."

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.

All solipsistic jaded-Cosmo patter.