Keith Phipps

Why do Ewing and Grady feel the need to tip their hand by underscoring it all with creepy ambient music or by using Air America host Mike Papantonio as a Greek Chorus expressing the voice of reason?

Unfortunately, that story isn't particularly well told, and after a while, the strength of the two leads' work and the popping soundtrack can't hide the fact that Lemmons doesn't really have much to say about the material.

The Odd Life Of Timothy Green attempts to stage a modern fairy tale in Middle America. But in spite of an abundance of earnestness, the pixie dust needed to create magic remains out of the film's reach.

It's a strange, shapeless, rarely satisfying, but generally amiable movie in which everyone appears to be faking it as they go along, and almost-almost-getting away with it.

Mann reduces a legendary game of cat-and-mouse to the size of a standard police procedural. His refusal to mythologize Dillinger’s exploits is audacious, but too much of Public Enemies feels disappointingly smaller than life.

A filmed Sunday-school lesson that favors a dry, by-the-Book approach over even a suggestion of dramatic interpretation. It's more Christmas pageant than movie.

Vaughn opts for comic-book bigness—big fights, big laugh lines, big explosions—but without a Spider-Man or Batman at the front of the action, Kick-Ass’s heroes and villains look smaller-than-life in a larger-than-life world.

Its a stupid thrill for a while, but the high wears off, and the anything-goes approach gets headache-inducing.

It’s more a misguided, though occasionally retch-worthy, mediocrity elevated by its cast—Bening, as always, is particularly strong—and Nichols’ fluid camerawork. Those elements at times make it seem like a better movie than it really is, but it doesn’t benefit from scrutiny or thought.

Whatever its basis in fact, there's nothing to Young Goethe In Love's story that dozens of other films haven't done before, and better. But Fehling keeps his Goethe just on the right side of obnoxious, and Stein invests a lot of character and gawky charm into what easily could have been just "the girl."

Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.

That love triangle is Coastlines' center. Trouble is, it plays more like canned heat than blazing inferno.

What does a film called Hotel For Dogs need in order to avoid being a watch-checker for grown-ups? Whatever it is, Hotel For Dogs doesn't have it.

It's a film about teen angst that's too caught up in its characters' state of mind to see its way through to the other side.

The trick to staging Wilde is to hint at the gravity beneath the witticisms. A Good Woman barely even gets the witticisms out, though it does contain Wilde's line about people being either tedious or charming.

There's real triumph to Obree's story, and real adversity, too, but the film contents itself with the pretend versions of both.

Fire is designed to provoke questions and spark debate. Mission accomplished, but, despite a heartfelt tone that pervades its every moment, it doesn't do much else.

If only any of it were funny.

At least Dennis Franz, as a former angel, livens up his scenes, and Ryan is less intolerable than usual. Meanwhile, the always-interesting Cage does a good job pretending he's in a better movie. But he's not.

Much of the film feels like watching "Home Alone" and "Mr. Mom" on 12 different TVs at once.

Over in a breeze, padded out by a generous collection of outtakes, and filled with characters who disappear virtually unnoticed, View is an inoffensive comedy that feels like the victim of too much fiddling.

De Niro made the right choice in making this a film of cold, gray Leiters rather than dynamic Bonds. But he never makes us feel the chill.

Modestly entertaining by the low standards of spring blockbusters. As with "Transporter 2" and "The Incredible Hulk," Leterrier aims no higher than competence and achieves just that.

Moore's scenes with a miscast-but-game Harrelson offer a study in how spouses learn to handle even their partners' most destructive impulses, but in most other moments, Anderson fails to get beyond the surface of her characters' lives.

Rourke's hammy, eyeliner-enhanced acting alone almost makes Alex Rider worth a look.

There aren't a lot of laughs in Happy Endings, and those that sneak in are pretty wry. There's no comedic snap either, and while that seems not to be the point, humor might have helped with the film's often-sluggish pacing.

While moments indicate that not everybody working on the project was asleep at the switch, Quest For Camelot is strictly for bored toddlers and those breathlessly anticipating the completion of the Ferngully trilogy.

It looks handsome but seems infected by the idea of playing different roles; a comedy in one scene, it adopts a mood of a high seriousness the next and clutters the stage with minor characters that contribute little. In the end, this inability to make up its mind does the film in.

The film alternates sloppily executed sex gags with sentiment, as did its predecessors. And it's all just slightly more endearing and amusing than it has any right to be.

In spite of the unavoidable disappointment that comes from raised expectations (and lowered elevations), it's clumsy storytelling that ultimately keeps Warriors grounded.

Ice Princess will probably connect most strongly with kids who have yet to develop an awareness of sports- and family-film clichés.

When the halves of the film collide in the courtroom climax, it looks like a misbegotten pilot for Law & Order: Usury Victims Unit.

Ultimately, writer-director Joseph Cedar has created a film that resembles a subtitled very special episode of "JAG."

Titans forces all aspects of the movie except the spectacle into the background, and historical accuracy isn't much of a concern. It does feature a better-than-average cast, however, aside from uncharismatic star Harry Hamlin.

Though The Bread, My Sweet is never even a little bit better than this description makes it sound, writer-director Melissa Martin's stagy, unattractive-looking film should at least get credit for going all the way with its manipulation.

It's a must for those already enthralled by Rear Window, Vertigo, and the like, but a bit of a slog for anyone else.

There’s real craftsmanship to the film, but it’s in service of a story that can’t quite support it.

It's taken a while for Kane to make it to the big screen, maybe because fantasy barbarians and long-ago kings have more immediate appeal than pious, slouch-hat-wearing men with poor senses of humor, but Solomon Kane gives it a go anyway. The results suggest a compelling movie could be made from the material, even if it isn't this one.

Without Radcliffe at the center looking scared out of his wits, The Woman In Black would seem even slighter than it already does.

The ideal viewer of Accepted probably won't have seen any college comedies before. Or any slobs-vs.-snobs movies like "Caddyshack." For those who have, it's kind of a snore.

As historical speculation, it's clever enough. As a film, it glows with flop-sweat.

It’s nice to see a film unafraid to be quiet and sensitive, but one good gust of coastal breeze would blow this one away.

There’s promising raw material here, particularly in the early scenes. But the film’s second half seems determined to snuff out the promise of its first, making it hard to wish for this incarnation of the character, or any, to have more big-screen adventures.

For all the difficulties facing young filmmakers attempting to make it in Hollywood, many services are designed to aid their struggle. Film schools, for example, can help young visionaries hone their technical skills and expand their knowledge of film history. But more helpful than anything, if Ghost Chase is to be believed, are the ghosts of long-dead butlers who take the form of midget extraterrestrials.

While watching Gazzara, Huston, Kevin Corrigan, Rosanna Arquette, and others take things two steps beyond over-the-top is inherently compelling, it becomes embarrassing before long.

Romero’s second horror film, made after Night Of The Living Dead, Season Of The Witch looks significantly less impressive than its predecessor. Where Night Of The Living Dead sandwiched some undistinguished, talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill between the zombie horror, Season Of The Witch is nearly all undistinguished talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill. Frankly, it’s kind of a slog.

A Time to Kill embodies all that is wrong with Hollywood attempts to address important issues, raising questions of race and justice but refusing to deal with them on anything but the most simplified, manipulative moral terms.

It's unashamedly escapist, but a turn for the serious as The Vow nears the finish line only underscores its essential silliness and what a poor job the film has done making it seem like its characters need each other for reasons beyond looking good together.

After a sentimental opening sequence, he (Kang) scarcely lets the film pause to breathe, which dulls its effectiveness.

Plays like an undeserved victory lap for a series that only limped to the finish line the last time.

The holiday spirit feels real, but the film does not.

Oculus takes a potentially corny premise further than most could, but it keeps stumbling on the possibilities, never quite taking any of them all the way.

A situation of such inherent drama only suffers from the director's attempts to intensify it, and eventually, the scenes of professional and personal rejection begin to suffer from an overabundance of pathos.

It's a daring move, focusing on the isolated splendor and interior dramas, and letting the politics remain at most a distant rumble; Coppola deserves credit for offering a different, and probably truer, perspective on life as a royal. But the perspective rarely lends itself to compelling filmmaking.

The imagery eventually becomes the only reason to keep watching. This is the first of an announced trilogy, but it already feels as long as the 20th century itself.

Even at its best, the film plays like the comedy equivalent of a legacy act reuniting for a tour fueled more by nostalgia and goodwill than inspiration. It’s less sequel than encore, and it’s probably time to turn on the house lights and close this buddy act.

Less a film than a terror delivery system, The Grudge repeatedly shows off Shimizu's technical chops, but never gives viewers a reason to care about or identify with the victims.

Though staged with technical skill and unflinching brutality, it's an awfully familiar-looking slaughter filled with moments on loan from other movies.

Cheers and many happy returns to Garner as she makes her first starring film role. She's the real deal. But jeers to every other aspect of 13 Going On 30.

While Good Ol’ Freda will surely fascinate hardcore Beatles fans, there simply isn’t a feature-length story here.

The many shots of characters operating devices with remote controls will do little to quiet the complaints that the films have started to resemble video games, and the same can be said of the proliferating digital effects.

Directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin deliver some eye-catching fantasy sequences in the early scenes, but the film grows more mundane and the tone more uneven as it goes on.

There’s a wealth of information in My Father And The Man In Black, but Holiff’s directorial choices don’t always help in conveying them.

Beatty made a film with visionary elements but without a guiding vision.

For a film that depends so much on the interaction between words and passion -- and the drama of how each shapes the other -- the shortage of both leaves Possession looking like nothing more than an "Indiana Jones" in which card catalogs stand in for treasure maps, and footnotes for bullwhips.

Ritchie has made a film that's so busy, it starts to become boring.

Skillfully sketches the parameters of its small-town existence but never quite fleshes out the inhabitants of those parameters. Without the well-considered humor and strongly defined characters of "Chuck," only a good cast stands between Girl and some familiar stereotypes.

The best thing about the movie is its premise: It's a good idea, taken from before Allen's recent losing streak, but it's stretched too thin for its own good.

Whenever it features feet flying through the air, Brick Mansions is a pleasure. Asked to do anything else, it’s one stumble after another.

The monster effects, as designed by Stan Winston, are stunners, but after Twister, it should be obvious that it's not the quality of the effects that matter so much as the quality of the film in which they appear.

Without spoiling Normal’s central twist, suffice it to say that it leads to a lot of gunplay that allows Wheatley to off one character after another in violent, sometimes explosive fashion. It’s more wearying than shocking, but not fatally so thanks to a brisk pace, a willingness to shift gears with little warning, and, again, Odenkirk’s humane performance.

An advocacy doc constructed to make a clear political point first and function as a film a distant second.

As the bland, star-laden drama gets swallowed by fiery special-effects setpieces, it feels like one type of big-budget mediocrity giving way to the next.

What begins as an attempt to send up pop star self-indulgence finds its way to self-indulgence by another route.

“Wuthering Heights” looks great and it’s fun to wander around in it for a while, but it’s hard to shake the thought that Fennell’s film has been thrown together without much consideration for how all the rooms might fit together. It’s the cinematic equivalent of The House on the Rock.

Wilson's funny. Mann's funny. But paired together here, nothing works.

As a spectacle, The Polar Express looks remarkable. As a film, however, it's the equivalent of an elaborately wrapped Christmas present containing a nice new pair of socks.

There’s a strain of gross-out humor—most bodily fluids make cameos—that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the movie. But more bothersome is a tendency The To Do List shares with its heroine: mistaking checking items off a list for progress.

The members of its young cast (Jennifer Connelly, Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler) have all shown promise elsewhere, but don't really get to do much but look attractive and troubled here. They may be stars, but as long as they keep treading water in bland stuff like this, the world may never know.

The Amazing Spider-Man, helmed by "(500) Days Of Summer" director Marc Webb, doesn't put its own stamp on the material, which feels warmed-over in ways that don't help.

On the whole, the film is a shallow, shrill, and all-too-familiar marital roundelay.

Newell's film arrives loaded with problems. The most superficial, but undeniably distracting, involves the way characters age at different rates and under makeup of varying believability.

It never adds up to much. There's a fair amount of fine acting (with that cast, how could there not be?), but it's in the service of a story that bubbles without ever boiling.

This may be the biggest production in Korean-film history, but viewers should search elsewhere for a better sampling of what the country has to offer.

Though haphazardly put together, The Medallion stays fairly entertaining until it kills Chan off and resurrects him as an immortal being.

Fortunately, no one seems to have clued Bardem in on the game plan, and the fierceness and complexity he brings to his role nearly saves Mondays In The Sun.

It's an odd, unsatisfying combination that moves from mopey drama one moment to a reaction shot of a monkey smacking his forehead in exasperation the next. By the end of the film, viewers might understand the monkey's feelings all too well.

It almost goes without saying that the film looks gorgeous, but the filmmaking behind it feels unsure how to work on this grand a scale. Australia is big. But it never fills the screen.

It's got a few laughs and some impressive car chases, but mostly, it's just a puzzling jumble of gags and exhaust fumes.

The real struggle here isn't so much Chatagny's slow emergence into maturity as Lionel Baier's directorial struggle to balance artful and erotic elements.

Quickly devolves into another showcase for Gibson’s snorting-bull act, a routine he could happily have shelved during his time off.

While Luna and Tonatiuh play characters transported by movies, the film in which they appear never quite summons the same power.

Sweeney’s transformation is more than just physical. She’s convincing as both the scrappy kid no one expected to go anywhere and the swaggering superstar who began throwing verbal blows at opponents.

Fanboys has a lot of talent in its margins, including Jay Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Seth Rogen, and other usual suspects.

If director Brian Dannelly were interested in taking his film into the realm of camp, the gag might have worked, but as is, it simply gives the impression that he doesn't quite know what he's talking about.

A sophomore film major would be lucky to get a passing grade with such material.

What do you call it when someone pulls a gender reversal on someone else's movie? If that movie is "My Best Friend's Wedding," you call it Made Of Honor.

It's a tangle unknotted in the most predictable fashion by Aline McKenna's script, and with little flair from choreographer-turned-director Anne Fletcher.

Sometimes it’s fascinating, but just as often, it’s frustrating: It’s a film without a net, and it tends to land with a thud.

As a pretty, low-stakes bayou romance The Lucky One works well enough. When asked to carry any kind of dramatic weight, however, it collapses.

Some might even find the leisurely pace a nice break from the rapid-fire approach favored by most kids' entertainment.

The latter half, set in the less visited parts of New York's subway system, bogs down considerably, abandoning its hybrid approach and becoming content to simply clone Aliens.

One of the not-so-nice qualities of Real Women Have Curves is that it occasionally is as preachy as its title suggests.

You want cowboys and aliens in the same movie? This one's for you. If you want anything beyond what the title promises, look elsewhere. And that means even anything resembling a clever mash-up of established genres.

The great Hal Ashby (Harold And Maude, Being There) directs, but doesn’t make his presence felt too often. In the midst of the personal and professional problems that plagued him after his '70s heyday, Ashby mostly finds a few angles, hopes for the best, then edits it together with all the artfulness of a televised sports broadcast.

It's handsomely mounted, and its heart seems in the right place, but that's not reason enough to put on a show.

In the wake of T"he Passion Of The Christ," the three-hour chore takes on some positive qualities it wouldn't have had otherwise.

Seems to understand its source material, but has no idea how to improve on it.

It's virtually indiscernible from any other contemporary horror film except for, well, the fog.

Though star-packed to the point of absurdity--juror Luis Guzmán has little to do but nod his head every once in a while--The Runaway Jury doesn't know what to do with its players.

A lesser filmmaker, and a lesser actor, might have made American Sniper into an unthinking bit of jingoism. Eastwood and Cooper keep finding respectful complexities in Kyle’s story, until the film reveals itself as too simple to have much use for them.

The first time around, Wall Street felt like a warning about the perils of excess just as excess started to exact its toll. This one's little more than a reminder that we all got, and remain, screwed. Noted.

The perfect movie for 14-year-old girls having a slumber party, and a must for everyone else to avoid.

Roberts skillfully stages some memorable kills but, despite the unusual antagonist, Primate too often feels like a by-the-numbers slasher that expects the novelty of a bloodthirsty chimp will carry it.

Better than an opportunistic sequel has any right to be, but still pretty flawed.

There's nothing wrong with formulas when they work, but Eternal is neither scary nor particularly sexy.

Trouble is, the gags just keep finding new ways to make McBride's strip-mall sensei seem pathetic, and the few scattered laughs never justify the cruelty.

The ideas might sound good, particularly the synthetic Kryptonite that turns Superman into a boozing jerk, but they never get developed, while high-profile guest star Richard Pryor appears somewhat puzzled at his own presence in the film.

Somehow, Van Sant has made a film about life and death in which the stakes never seem higher than whether one insolent kid will stop being such a horrible mope.

Mostly, Dodgeball just feels off--never consistently funny, but also never dire. It's as if Thurber resigned himself to making a dumb, formula-bound movie with a dusting of smart gags instead of a smart movie in dumb-movie clothes.

Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann have a couple of sly moments as overworked career people, and Spader again proves he learned a lot by working with William Shatner for so long. But the bottomless slapstick and silly effects quickly grow wearying, as does a cast of young actors whose work can politely be called energetic.

It's corny, but the film might have worked anyway, had anyone brought a lick of conviction to the business. But Lopez--once such a promising actress--now does little but pose, and everyone else seems to have figured out that the film wasn't going anywhere before the cameras started rolling.

Egoyan's sensibility doesn't quite fit the material. His trademark stone-faced austerity never bends to capture the black comedy in the dissonance between his characters' public and private lives. It almost demands a trashier approach.

Director Mark Waters has done probably the best possible job translating the material to film, and the truly filmic moments work well, but with this dialogue-heavy material, it's like trying to translate Run-DMC lyrics into Old French.

Corny and uncool. Initially, it doesn't matter. Banderas is so winning in the lead that the film's early scenes are almost as persuasive as one of his lectures.

Perfect for bleary-eyed late-night viewing and pretty much unwatchable at any other hour, it does make for an oddly appropriate refresher course for life under a Republican president.

Even more sad is an embarrassingly shrill performance by Faye Dunaway, and an ending which insults the ability of the audience to watch a movie without having a conclusion spoon-fed to them.

As Pattinson nears the bottom - both of his fortune, and to all appearances, his sanity - Cronenberg has to take the film somewhere, emptying out into a confrontation between Pattinson and a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti) that never fully ties together all that's come before.

Sadly, only Hurt seems to recognize that the only way to make this material work is to play it with lunatic enthusiasm instead of grave seriousness.

If well done, a film like Letters To Juliet should need no surprises. But it does need more than the postcard-ready vistas against which director Gary Winick (13 Going On 30) frames much of the action.

The film spends so little time developing its characters, apart from all that expository dialogue, that it's like asking audiences to care for paper dolls. And Sparkle never delivers on the promise of its most famous song by giving viewers something they can feel.

While Bachelorette is admirably free of the normal formulas governing movies that revolve around women and wedding dresses, it doesn't offer anything more satisfying in their stead.

Russell Brand steps into the role of Arthur Bach for the 2011 remake, and while it's one of the more reined-in performances of his short, busy big-screen career, Brand's unvarying onscreen persona just doesn't do soulful.

Director Jeff Wadlow and his co-writer/producer Beau Bauman throw in a couple of gripping sequences, especially one set in a library sub-basement with an energy-saving lighting system, but for a film that's essentially one big logic problem, there's an unfortunate absence of logic to the way its characters behave.

Milos and Rossum are like Iberian "Gilmore Girls," only with an ocean view and without the clever dialogue.

It finds some fine comedic moments when it stops focusing on Affleck's never-ending angst and starts exploring small-town oddness.

Sometimes actors get parts so rich that they almost can't help but make meals of them. Playing a frosty, high-powered editor in The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep turns the role into a four-course dinner and shows up with her own dessert...But it's hard to care about what's going on whenever she's offscreen.

It’s a painfully minor movie that doubles as an accidental study in how pros handle themselves when given less-than-challenging material.

The film has virtually nothing to say about the man, or about much of anything, really. It's a sketchbook trying to pass as a tapestry.

In spite of some prominently featured green slime and power-beam weaponry, it won't make anyone forget "Ghostbusters" anytime soon.

Kids won't mind a bit, but adults accustomed to "Shrek" and Pixar will have no trouble spotting what's missing.

It works for a little while, but an Irons-narrated slideshow of the region would have worked just as well.

Andrew Davis ("The Fugitive," "Steal Big Steal Little") has made a technically competent thriller that's not only thrill-less, but dull.

Writer-director Audrey Wells never aims higher than postcard filmmaking, and Under The Tuscan Sun at least works on that level, by casting its little operetta of self-realization and remodeling travails against some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.

Director Blair Treu hails from Brigham Young University, and while there's nothing explicitly religious about Little Secrets, his primary influence seems to be those LDS public-service announcements in which nice people learn to become even nicer.

The film is smart enough to know that verbal humor isn't its strong point, but it doesn't offer much in the way of compensation.

Company almost seems like the product of a post-Sept. 11 world. Like a cartoon version of a real threat, the villains are terrorists of a non-specific nationality with an ill-defined anti-American agenda and a tendency to spout complaints too clichéd to take seriously.

In the end, it becomes the cinematic equivalent of one of the songs Tunney adores: enjoyable enough while it lasts, but so thin that its ingratiating charms seem as much a source of frustration as pleasure.

It’s not badly executed, but there’s nothing scary or clever enough to set it apart from similar films beyond the Faces of Death connection, a throwback meta cloak wrapped around a merely good-enough modern horror movie.

It’s at once smirky and tedious, and a missed opportunity to boot.

It’s a handsome disappointment, fast food masquerading as fine dining.

If Epstein and Kahn's plot mechanics were as fresh as the headlines from which they borrow, they might have been on to something.

The film feels more thrown-together than thought-through, but the best moments transcend such problems.

Even the best performers can only do so much to elevate mediocre material. In the long run, good or bad, the material always wins.

Outrage is compelling to watch until it becomes exhausting.

Though "extremely mediocre" may seem like an oxymoron, no phrase better defines Picture Perfect. Aside from wearing, with visual discomfort, a series of absurdly revealing dresses, Aniston does little to distance herself from her "Friends" persona with this slightly less likable character.

A few stray livers and severed heads aside, this is a monster too polite for its own good.

The action, while busy, never produces much excitement, particularly since Thanit never gives the audience any reason to care about the characters, beyond their underdog status.

In spite of a promising start, an unconventional setup, attractive photography, and game lead performances from Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, Salmon Fishing quickly turns into exactly the sort of wet cardboard box of a movie its title suggests.

Ultimately, it's an absence of personality that does the film in. The creatures remain beautifully designed and Narnia still looks like a colorful, inviting place, but it feels as lifeless as the fantastical anyworlds found on glittery unicorn posters.

A joyless trudge, particularly when compared to Fellini’s vibrant original?

The best parts come in the rare moments when the film decides to break from formula, as when old Zucker-team warhorse Leslie Nielsen returns as the U.S. President.

None of it is particularly novel or exciting.

Tries for that series' breezy matinee atmosphere but the results turn out far too forced.

However much the film may mirror the truth, dramatically it feels like a cheat. It omits the human spark that would make it work as a film, rather than a collection of dramatized issues.

Stahl quietly plays the straight man, giving the usually skillful Farmiga plenty of room to overact with abandon; she plays her character as one part Rosanna Arquette in David Cronenberg's "Crash" to two parts Natalie Portman's magical life-saving pixie in "Garden State."

It's okay to be manipulated, so long as you don't feel the strings being pulled. Here the tug is constant, and constantly distracting.

The film contains so many plugs for Warner Bros. movies like the "Harry Potter" series and "300" that it could almost double as an infomercial.

It's the material that stinks, failing to give even an old pro like White more than a couple of modest laughs.

Director Jacques Sarasin lazily relies on a talking-heads/archival-footage approach to tell Traoré's story, doing little to put it in context and assuming a lot more knowledge of Malian history than most viewers possess.

What almost rescues the film is Arterton’s performance.

The result: some intriguing moments, even more intriguing performances, and a film that doesn't quite work.

The overstuffed film lumbers across clichés of the heart and of history until it reaches a big, tune-filled climax that isn't worth the wait.

Where the first film kept insisting that drama and liveliness need not disappear in the golden years, its sequel feels almost like a rebuttal. Hopefully everyone involved will find something better to do before this unexpected franchise opens up a third location.

Two movies in one. That’s one more movie than it needs to be.

As a nail-biting thriller, The Siege is too confusing, and as a thought-provoking social drama, too confused.

Hartley's most ambitious film, but it's also among his most uneven, shifting away at moments when its characters should be allowed to connect, underemphasizing some themes, overemphasizing others, and letting a general clash of ideas stand in for momentum.

An ambitious undertaking, but not a successful one: It unfolds with the studied determination of a grade-school book report.

Shaw and Kingsley both create crisp, comic performances, but Sorvino remains a problem throughout. Her physical transformation falls short of the "Boys Don't Cry" standard, to put it mildly.

If its star were more consistently funny, it might have worked, but the film opens with a string of dreadful Sept. 11 gags and takes a while to recover.

Scott loses the humanity amid all the gods and kings. The setpieces, however, elevate the film around them.

The triumphs feel engineered, and the realizations overheated. Seldom has a globe-spanning, soul-plumbing search for what really matters looked so inconsequential.

But the parts of Foer's lively novel that didn't get cut in the script stage have died on the way to the screen. To be fair, it's not an easy novel to adapt.

Predictably, the best moments belong to Buscemi, whose performance is a model of understatement in a field of grotesques.

In spite of its cast and seemingly can't-miss premise, Wedding Crashers is at its best a succession of mild chuckles.

If Project Almanac didn’t bungle it all with a shrug of an ending, it would be easier to recommend. Maybe someone with a time machine should go back and give the movie a do-over.

Realized through old-fashioned camera mastery and newfangled special effects, it’s a stunning technical accomplishment, but one seemingly designed only to broadcast banal sentiments, when it says anything at all.

For long stretches, Is This Thing On? works better on a scene-by-scene basis than as a cohesive film. Arnett and Dern believably summon the off-kilter chemistry of a couple going through a rough patch in their scenes together and the lost-at-sea fogginess of the newly separated in their scenes apart.

A sweet, inoffensive, achingly laughless comedy.

It’s fun to watch the decades go by and the fashions change, but though Fresh Dressed takes its subject seriously, it ends up feeling superficial.

Goldstein and Poots play off each other well, creating the sense of a years-deep connection that’s suddenly threatened by what’s changed between them, but also by what’s remained the same. They’re convincing as two people who don’t know what to do. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a movie that also doesn’t really know what to do.

Annaud has given Seven Years In Tibet an epic scope, packed with beautiful scenery, lush costumes, and elaborate sets. Which would all be well and good if they didn't often seem like the reason the movie exists.

The film de-emphasizes plot and action in favor of lyricism and outbursts of magic-doing, but the results are more dull than enchanting, no matter how many people fly across the room.

The role needs a steely, inhuman reserve, and Garner's innate likeability works against her.

A garish mediocrity.

As a love story, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t really work. And given that much of the movie—scripted by Seth Reiss (The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang)—is concerned with telling a love story, that's a pretty big problem.

Turns a fond look back at the great Federico Fellini into an occasion for the kind of talky tedium Fellini's own movies would never have allowed.

The film owes as much to Caddyshack as to Capra.

The characters are funny and the cast's characterizations right on, but the movie repeatedly lets them down.

Drunk on its own ambitions and the permission to go as big as possible, The Bride! is seldom cohesive (and occasionally incoherent) but it’s also rarely boring, the sort of noble failure that’s more compelling to watch and discuss than a lesser success.

The story feels half-considered, the relationships thin, and the direction visually indifferent.

Pity any poor kid stuck in a house like that. Pity, too, anyone who has to stop by for a visit.

Martin attempts to present the whole oversized Chess story, but instead winds up reducing the lives and art that give it shape.

Beyond being unable to decide what kind of Musketeers movie it wants to be, Anderson's adaptation seems determined to underachieve as both heavy spectacle and light adventure. It's two mediocrities for the price of one.

For a film ostensibly about how life means nothing without adventure and unpredictability, Last Holiday all feels as preordained as the film-ending Emeril cameo.

The further Kelly bends his funhouse mirror, the more he loses sight of what it was supposed to reflect. By the end, the image has twisted beyond coherence.

Turns out it's hard to make one man swapping his sperm for another's seem cute, as much as The Switch tries.

Moves so sluggishly that someone must have been dosing the cast and crew with Nyquil.

As a comedy, it relies on Keaton and Latifah playing the same characters they always play, and Holmes overcompensating by switching into bug-eyed manic-comedienne mode. Her performance is part Lucille Ball, part overcaffeinated chicken, and it deserves some credit for daring, but none for execution.

It is, without a doubt, a striking debut. But it's also punishingly distasteful and disjointed almost beyond coherence, a repetitive heap of a film that feels disgorged rather than crafted.

Adapted (and significantly reshaped) from a young-adult book by novelist Alice Hoffman, Aquamarine has the tossed-off quality of an ABC Family TV movie. Its lessons come pre-digested.

While more grim than most Disney films, it's not bleakness that gets in the way of The Black Cauldron succeeding; unmemorable protagonists, annoying sidekicks, an awkwardly episodic plot, and animation that ranges in appearance from impressive to cheap to unfinished take care of that.

Offering memorable imagery and little more, it eventually devolves into distasteful gore for its own sake. It's far less compelling than its no less bloody but far more intelligent inspiration.

Winter Passing is full of nice dramatic turns, including one from relative-unknown Amelia Warner as Harris' former student-turned-nanny (and possible lover). What Winter Passing lacks, however, is a reason to exist other than as a dramatic exercise.

The politics of Stone's 9/11 movie lean right, if they lean any way at all. Mostly, the film sits up straight and just wants to be loved by all. There are more controversial Hallmark cards.

This is not a movie for anyone who's aged past the "Oh! Cute!" phase of moviegoing. It's paced for little minds with short attention spans.

Trudging through a thriller that would have felt warmed over in 1988, the pair investigate a serial killer.

The plot tangles until it seems irrelevant, the jokes can't push through the somber tone, and the most interesting moment apart from the action scenes involves one character using the corpse of one of the more famous cast members for a grisly ventriloquist act.

While the film deserves some credit for creating and sustaining a creepy atmosphere, it doesn't matter much when the plot doesn't go anywhere, and here, it winds toward the most arbitrary, nonsensical final scene in recent memory. But, hey, they're ghosts. They can do some pretty crazy shit.

Relentlessly plods from one dour moment to the next, coming to life only in a late-film car chase that takes the possibilities of a world filled with robots to an absurd extreme.

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes is a joyless retread that at least has the distinction of ending with the nuclear annihilation of Earth.

If Eragon proves anything, it's that not all dragons produce magic.

There are many fine works by and about Wilde, and if you haven't read them, you should. Nearly all are preferable to this one.

Only Sarsgaard shows a pulse, creating a self-destructive, omnisexual rogue who, for all his faults, would probably be great company. The same can't be said for the film around him.

Not only does Untraceable unmask its initially hidden killer with little ceremony, it's the sort of film that telegraphs every new development.

There's just not enough here for a movie. It's almost as if some ideas were meant to live for three and a half minutes each Christmas season, not to get stretched to the breaking point for 50 years.

The aerial sequences look an awful lot like X-wing-versus-TIE-fighter battles and the effects have the same not-quite-solid feel of the Star Wars prequels. When the heroes crash, they go up in blazes of digital glory that seem just as artificial as the plotting that brought them to their fates.

Trouble is, it feels like a film going through the motions, never finding mooring in believable human feelings.

In The Big Year co-stars Owen Wilson and Jack Black appear on the verge of succumbing to the same terminal blandness that's gripped Martin for so long.

Nobody feels anything they're not explicitly told to feel. Not even the audience.

While it may sound like pairing Murray with a pachyderm couldn't fail, Larger Than Life suffers from a stifling air of blandness.

It just grows darker and broodier as Stadlober grapples with coming out. That's not an easy thing, but someone should tell the poor guy that being gay doesn't have to mean being this lame.

Ultimately, the glacial pace kills Pulse. What was dreadful and trance-like in the original feels here like nothing-much-at-all sandwiched between some stock horror jolts.

Knowing frequently feels one Revelation quote away from turning into a chiding, fundamentalist-friendly end-of-the-world movie in the "Left Behind" mold.

It's too little premise stretched over too much movie, and while the cast gives it their all, Nolfi's characterless direction only makes the movie feel that much slighter.

Lacking the eerie plausibility and stylishness of Chainsaw, yet filled with dead dogs, terrorized children, and bound women, it never transcends its Z-grade origins. It's an interesting footnote, and will likely be of interest to hardcore horror fans, but those looking for a lost masterpiece will likely come away disappointed.

It also has enough nutty energy and oddball touches - "The Wire's" Andre Royo shows up as a gun-toting, faux-hawk-sporting badass - that it's never boring. Dumb, gross, gratuitous, and overly familiar, sure. But never boring.

Kudos to The Rite for thinking outside the usual goat/pentagram/black-candles box for its satanic imagery, but is a mule really the best it could manage?

"The Day After Tomorrow" was kind of stupidly fun, and 10,000 B.C. might be too, if it weren't so stupidly dull.

You can buy the special effects, but if that's all you have to offer, it won't amount to much.

There's probably a graduate thesis to be drawn from this, about what audiences want from horror films, and ways to make viewers uncomfortable with their own voyeuristic desires, but that doesn't make the thrills any less sour, or the end any less exploitative. (Or worse, dull.)

Purists will balk at a pointless--and boring--revamp of a major villain, but that's the least of the film's worries. Only a few isolated shots of the group striding together as a team make Surfer feel like a Fantastic Four movie.

As a study in insanity, Zookeeper is mildly interesting. But as a kiddie comedy, it's something to watch only once the little ones have worn out their "Dr. Doolittle" DVD.

The Beyond's first half-hour or so is extremely entertaining, alternating between genuinely frightening, gory shocks and hilariously awkward, atonal acting. After a while, however, it becomes as dull as its repetitive Italian prog-rock soundtrack, neither good nor bad enough to hold your attention for long.

Proven comic talents like Judah Friedlander and Ed Helms make up much of Murphy's crew, but apart from speaking in contraction-free spaceman-ese, the film doesn't give them anything funny to do.

Here's a great way to start savoring life: Don't waste it on pat manipulations like this.

It's crude in every sense: The film looks like shit, the characters are boors, and it's as sloppily put-together as the home movie it pretends to be. Project X's commitment to its crudity almost redeems it, though.

There's no right way to do an adaptation, particularly a difficult-to-adapt work like this, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Perry's film offers a casebook of things-not-to-do.

No Reservations is pretty much the dramatic equivalent of a burger and fries, however pretty the presentation.

It raises the question of who the movie is for in the first place: Kids have seen much better animation in other films, and it's hard to imagine too many grown-ups ready to smile and nod at yet more smirking takes on famous moments from "Scarface" and "The Silence Of The Lambs."

Opting for car chases instead of the thought-provoking ideas of its predecessors, the film looks like the work of, if not pod people, folks who gave up any kind of passion for the material long before the cameras started to roll.

Apart from Considine, the actors all deliver superficial performances beneath several layers of slathered-on Summer Of Love drag, and Woolley's use of multiple film stocks and flash-cut editing jumbles together a bunch of '60s filmmaking clichés without putting them to any particular use.

There must have been a reason why the real-life Rush could do so much with seemingly so little, but The Mighty Macs never captures it. It lets canned inspiration provide the uplift, instead of something more tangible.

When she's (Paltrow) singing, she can pass for someone who's been listening to Tammy Wynette since the cradle; when the music stops, she looks like a tourist.

Sadly, that thin premise snaps after a while, and when Wife takes a serious turn, it becomes apparent how little the director has to say.

An actress of magnetizing screen presence whose inability to land choice roles can only be attributed to her post-TRL age, Gershon easily identifies with her character, giving her performance an edge that this lazy, punked-up melodrama otherwise lacks.