Keith Phipps

Henson's characters maintained an essential innocence while sending up the very idea of entertainment. They put on a show with quotation marks around it, but the irony never felt cynical. When it isn't getting bogged down in unearned sentiment, The Muppets gets that right.

Considine directs with the confidence of a veteran, giving his actors room to work while letting an ominous, overcast mood hang over almost every scene.

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."

It's as dull as it is brainless, the work of creators who've spent far more time concocting silly stories about Shakespeare than learning from him.

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.

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.

Without "The Wire" and its like as a point of comparison, Texas Killing Fields might seem the natural heir to a gritty '70s cop drama. But with great contemporary TV around, it seems strangely incomplete.

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.

Made with affection and access but not enough structure.

The first Human Centipede had audacity on its side. Human Centipede II has only excess.

The original was repulsive but impossible to shake. This remake is pure applause bait, which makes it barbaric in ways Peckinpah would never have dreamed.

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.

Soderbergh creates an unnerving mosaic from the smaller pieces, a vision of a world that's simultaneously tightly knit, delicately balanced, and prone to breakdown, whether due to disease, bad ideas, or unenlightened self-interest.

Unpleasant when it isn't dull, Apollo 18 never sells the lost-footage illusion, and never compensates for it with scares. Jolts, sure. Like so many lazy horror directors, López-Gallego knows how to startle, but not how to frighten.

Rowan Joffe (son of Roland Joffe) provides busy, if never particularly distinctive direction, but it's the leads that continually threaten to sink the film.

It shouldn't, in other words, be that hard to make a good Conan movie. John Milius did a half-decent job with "Conan The Barbarian" in 1982, but this new film of the same name feels like a half-hearted revamp of virtually any of the Conan rip-offs that clogged up video-store shelves in the '80s.

The film's greatest pleasures come from Noxon's script - which puts the sexual chaos created by Farrell's attractive bloodsucker front and center - and from the performances.

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.

Wyatt brings a light touch to the potentially grim material - too light when it drops in some groan-inducing references to the original film - but he keeps the action compelling whether focusing on apes as they run amok or as they quietly contemplate their next move.

Focusing the film on Gleeson was certainly the right choice. His performance is equal parts funny and unnerving, and he keeps viewers guessing about what drives the man and what he'll do next.

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.

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

The American romantic comedy has grown distressingly moribund lately, but anyone looking to freshen up the genre a bit need look no further than Michel Leclerc's The Names Of Love.

The tone and subject at times recall David Lynch's "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Dr.," but the approach is Hellman's own.

Its pleasures are borrowed, but durable.

An unassuming wisp of a movie, Midnight In Paris finds Woody Allen penning a love letter to the City Of Lights, albeit one whose sentiments could easily fit on a postcard.

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.