J.R. Jones

Jaglom's 14th consists of his usual weakly improvised relationship comedy.

This might have had some potential as a German exercise in self-examination, but as a tony BBC Films production, with the actors all speaking British-accented English (including Jersey girl Farmiga), it reeks of self-righteousness.

The action plot is lousy with cliched suspense scenes of back-road executions halted at the last possible instant.

By now the hypocrisy of simultaneously condemning and exploiting the audience's sadism has become so commonplace in American movies it hardly seems noteworthy.

The scenes in which Charlie plays catch with the ghost of his Red Sox-happy brother are only the most mawkish in a movie whose every element is calculated to set a 12-year-old girl's heart thumping.

The plot of this PG action thriller, a remake of the 2002 Danish film Klatretosen, is so full of holes that even middle schoolers might give it the raspberry, but a bigger problem is the three leads' lack of on-screen chemistry.

The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, takes a few vague pokes at Wall Street and the financial elite but mainly revives the ponderous psychodrama of the first movie.

For a filmmaker like Julie Taymor, Shakespeare's language isn't nearly as enticing as Prospero's violent manipulation of the elements, and this screen adaptation of the play-like her egregious Beatles movie "Across the Universe" (2007)-is primarily an exercise in eccentric (and, I would argue, empty) spectacle.

Abysmal thriller.

Brain-dead adaptation of a popular video game.

Excruciatingly narcissistic.

If a bullet hadn't killed John Lennon, this Beatles-scored musical might have.

Having defused the fairy tale, first-time screenwriter Leigh Dunlap pads this out to 96 minutes with stale high school politics and the usual claptrap about believing in yourself.

A watered-down satire of the pharmaceutical industry.

The resulting movie (2005) covers seven years and touches on some of the same social issues that gave "Hoop Dreams" its epic sweep, yet Serrill fails to treat any of them adequately, and the narrative loses its shape as events unfold.

A dearth of game footage and a wealth of inspirational platitudes contribute to the sense of a powerful tale having already faded into yellowed newspaper clippings.

A flimsy setup dooms this from the start, though its sheer awfulness is something to see.

By the end of this 124-minute drama I'd have settled for ANYONE else, but like most visits with irritating people, the movie lingers, sharpening one's judgment.

Rodriguez retreats into gruesome violence and flaccid comedy, grasping feebly for topical relevance by referencing the current immigration fracas.

Watching Allen fart out a story when he has no characters is always painful, as people are defined through clumsy expository dialogue and ranked according to their cultural accomplishments. But the script here is lazy even by his standards.

Pretentious and overconceived, the movie purports to celebrate self-determination yet squashes it at every turn.

As creator and head writer of "The West Wing," Aaron Sorkin had a gift for making policy debate seem sexy, but what worked in the context of that liberal fantasy founders badly amid the realpolitik of this cold war drama.

The witty title aside, this is a miserably dull exercise in stingy-Jew humor and post-Jarmusch nonreaction.

Jarmusch makes some effort to deliver on the promise of suspense near the end, with de Bankole stalking despicable businessman Bill Murray at his fortresslike compound in the hills.

Unfortunately, as the opening title might suggest, the filmmakers have punted on the hard cinematic work of making the incredible seem credible; instead they've turned Russell's story into a broad farce with one wocka-wocka gag after another.

Big, cruel, stupid actioner.

The novelty wears off almost immediately, leaving this a real chore to watch; there's something bizarre about low-budget spontaneity being replicated in such a labor-intensive medium.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon isn't so much a history of Lennon's pacifism as a continuation of it, the last bed-in, so to speak, with contemporary figures like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky on hand to connect Vietnam with Iraq, President Nixon with President Bush, and the FBI's spying on Lennon with the current administration's domestic surveillance.