Joe Leydon

Riveting portrait of a straight-talking, tough-loving Benedictine nun in charge of a South Bronx home for recovering substance abusers.

Perfectly harmless, often humorous, featherweight confection -- think "Serendipity" re-imagined as a teen-skewing Saturday morning sitcom.

Earnest but prosaic.

A slackly paced but modestly diverting trifle, with cameos by recording artists Beck, Beth Orton and Hank Williams III to elevate the hipper-than-thou quotient.

Hot-wired, white-knuckle thriller.

This Dog won't hunt. Although well crafted and handsomely mounted, pic lacks sufficient sizzle.

It's obviously intended as a star vehicle, but Broken Bridges turns out to be a rattletrap jalopy for country music performer Toby Keith.

Grotesquely smutty and obnoxiously overbearing, this is a pitiful excuse for a comedy.

A clunky and cheesy disaster.

Despite these flashbacks, however, God Spoke never really delves into the reasons and/or motivations behind Franken's transformation from monologist and sketch-comedy performer to political pundit and liberal activist. Indeed, even during intimate moments, Franken rarely comes across as someone given to explaining himself.

Since the new pic contains little that's genuinely amusing or minimally original, it likely will fail on its own merits.

A lightweight but likable fantasy that offers a playfully feminist twist to Arthurian legends.

Quickly devolves into a standard-issue crime drama laced with routine martial artistry.

Admirably ambitious but ultimately frustrating musical dramedy.

Despite game efforts from a first-rate cast and acres of impressive production values, Event Horizon remains a muddled and curiously uninvolving sci-fi horror show.

Manages to amuse as a cleverly concocted hybrid of conventional romantic comedy and mistaken-identity farce.

Well positioned to slake the thirst of action fans for world-class, slam-bang rough stuff.

By turns defiant and apologetic, gleefully raunchy and anxiously defensive.

Most successful when it is engaging, not uproarious. Glossy amusement is an updated remake of a well-regarded 1950 Brit comedy-drama starring Alec Guinness, improbably retrofitted as a star vehicle for Queen Latifah.

Lightweight but likable romantic comedy about two mismatched gay singletons who are, of course, made for each other.

Toddlers and pre-teens will be entertained, and parents will be pleasantly surprised, by this more-than-just-bearable musical road movie.

At once annoyingly hyper and underwhelmingly dull.

The documentary works best when it simply offers a concise and cogent account of epochal events.

The tone of Reel Injun is respectfully serious, though well short of angry, while focusing on how the stereotypical depictions of marauding redskins affected the self-images of Native Americans.

Trendy influence of insidiously creepy Japanese horror pics is felt in almost every frame of Boogeyman. The effectively atmospheric and unusually involving thriller tells the story of a distraught young man's protracted duel of wits with the eponymous evildoer.

Much like a botched souffle that fails to rise, Simply Irresistible is a bland confection that remains doggedly earthbound while attempting flights of romantic fantasy.

Might be extremely effective while preaching to the converted, but it's no great shakes as secular entertainment.

A genially haphazard but frequently amusing neo-stoner comedy that plays like "Cheech and Chong Go to Animal House."