Kevin Crust

It takes some big swings at a big subject and almost — not quite — pulls it off.

Muddled tale of faith and reason.

Within the confines of a straight-ahead, handsomely designed and photographed biopic beats the heart of a more adventurous presentation of Holiday’s tragic life. It’s hinted at in Day’s performance, the dreamlike memory sequences and a cheeky, meta-coda that plays out during the end credits but never quite pierces the film’s more varnished surfaces.

Despite the tired premise, Kenan Thompson -- is actually very persuasive as Fat Albert.

The force of the film is not as profound as Shakhnazarov clearly intended, and The Rider Named Death is easier to respect than enjoy.

Not as bad as Bobby's mother's lasagna, neither is Brooklyn Rules anywhere near the best you've ever had, though at times, it may remind you of it.

Barker and Borten have chosen to retain the documentary’s framing device of the rescue attempt. In the nonfiction film, it served as a propulsive engine, carefully balanced against the interviews that told Vieira de Mello’s story and its tragic conclusion. Here, it feels abstract, disjointed from the scenes with him and Carolina, thus weakening and muddying the story.

As good as the leads and the supporting cast are, and as much action as gets packed into the film's relatively brief running time, none of it draws us in dramatically.

There are a number of sharp political and philosophical points made, but they are undercut by “The 11th Green’s” overload of history, speculation and fantasy that strands it in a narrative Bermuda Triangle.

Outdoes recent releases such as "Boogeyman" in the fright department, but the "Dawson's Creek" sensitivity and unsatisfying effects undermine the lupine anxiety.

A threadbare comedy glomming onto the ample talent of its star, Will Ferrell.

There's precious little that is fresh or new about the movie.

Liman, who has a reputation for reviving troubled productions and salvaging films in postproduction, excavates an hour and 48 minutes of relatively engaging action-thriller material. It moves quickly enough to gloss over plot holes but leaves the impression that the novel was stripped for parts.

Fails to be anything more than a mild summertime diversion. Based on the Marvel comic book, it's a prototypical air conditioner movie.

My Boss's Daughter is not awful. It is a genial youth comedy that serves Kutcher well as a vehicle. That's it. That's all it tries to be

The disappointingly pedestrian computer-animated Over the Hedge will be more entertaining for little tykes than their older siblings and parents, and would not seem out of place on Saturday morning television.

Jumper is all high concept with little invested in characters or story.

The film’s initial non-judgmental perspective eventually sounds more like a public service announcement for Louisiana’s nutria control program.

Strictly for the very young who will find giggles in the anthropomorphic mash-ups and won't be too distracted by the predictably mawkish sitcom plot.

Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan milks the film's one joke for all it's worth - which isn't much - before settling into the rote rhythms of a buddy picture.

The teenager's journey through a nightmarish reverie presents hallucinogenic imagery that simultaneously dulls the senses and hot-wires the imagination, but it never fully engages emotionally.

The film never finds its groove. Whatever point Van Peebles is trying to make gets lost in all the noise.

The cartoonish movie might have made for a funny half-hour short or sitcom pilot but runs out of track well before its conclusion.

The movie unravels pretty quickly as Caleo almost immediately gives away the "what" but remains marginally entertaining as he manages to maintain some suspense in the "why" and the "how" before blowing the genre completely by going soft in the resolution.

Cohn, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, likely was aiming for subtlety, but these are not subtle times. Trying to get a spark from a damp match is a lot harder than holding a flame to dry kindling.

Fails to deliver on its main promise of big laughs, which is the film's truly unforgivable sin.

Has little to offer in the way of entertainment or originality.

The film strives for some type of a girl-empowerment message that equates trading one type of conformity for another with self-determination but muffs the dismount and stumbles on the landing. In other words, it fails to Stick It.

Arcan wrote prolifically about beauty and female identity in essays and articles, as well as her books, and Émond uses those words extensively in the film. But what may have been profound and poetic on the page feels redundant and banal on screen. It’s a sad tale that never manifests much more than that singular emotion.

The resulting film is a muddled, melodramatic, sort-of remake of "The Graduate."

In a film with several over-the-top characters bordering on camp, Timberlake's Frankie is the only one who approaches three dimensions, adept at convincingly dishing out some of the movie's disturbing violence as well as registering subtle shifts in Frankie's allegiance.

Walker-Pearlman's strengths lie in these characterizations and his ability to draw subtle performances from his actors. However, the powerfully understated moments are undercut by the film's unwieldy structure. Any emotional momentum that builds is lost with the interminable flashbacks.

The whole movie could be clipped by about 95 minutes and it would make a swell little video for Simpson's performance of the title cut from the soundtrack.

It's a grindhouse-inspired concoction that may not contain a shred of originality, but it is executed with unbridled bombast and glee.

Not only screams out to be a midnight movie, but one in need of, shall we say, an herbal supplement, and we aren't talking ginkgo biloba.

A shaggy dog tale in more ways than one, the campy comedy Wasabi Tuna is the kind of film that can give dumb blonds a bad name.

The campier aspects of the film are not enough to make up for its lapses into melodrama and just plain silliness.

In essence, you get "It's a Wonderful Life" meets "Wings of Desire," swapping out the substance for self-help platitudes. If you can get past that, you can enjoy it as a 90-minute look at a lovely postcard.

The film is haphazardly structured, undercutting its potential power.

This logic-challenged dive-bum thriller directed by John Stockwell, who did the equally silly surf movie "Blue Crush."

Recycling is alive but not well in the outmoded teen comedy Dirty Deeds, with a result that is more toxic than intoxicating.

The Negotiation unravels from the inside out, lurching from improbable to implausible to just plain ridiculous, and writer-director’s Lee Jong-Suk’s by-the-book filmmaking does little to raise the stakes.

As clumsy and awkward as his previous films were stylishly silly.

An initially promising horror film that turns exploitive, Wolf Creek fails to deliver the requisite payoff considering its leisurely pace.

Evans and Gideon never really succeed in selling the idea that serial killing is a disease -- which would require a degree of realism that the slick, over-plotted Mr. Brooks doesn't otherwise aspire to. They seem to be content with occupying the audience with a series of twists and jolts.

The film aims for a light social satire but mainly falls flat. It feels more like a long-lost pilot for some never-aired 1970s sitcom or a misguided sequel to a Billy Joel song.

It's an ambitious film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that, despite the energy provided by its title icon via archival footage, falls flat dramatically in nearly every other way.

All three look great and the filmmakers deliver a certain artiness, but their overall triviality and the unpleasantness of the first two make for an extremely distasteful experience.

Dreary, spectacle-driven adaptation.

A near continuous assault of clichés, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins doesn't become truly bothersome until its denouement, when it attempts to wring unearned sentiment from the inevitable, awkwardly staged family rapprochement.

The bulk of the movie is a series of sight gags and set pieces that wreak much havoc but little else.

Crass, vacuous exercise in grind-house stylistics.

This is not a “but the book was better” argument. It’s simply that by abandoning the original character and cobbling together broken story shards and spare parts, Branagh and company have produced something off an assembly line: safe, generic and utterly disposable.

Blackmail Boy reaches for tragedy but settles for soap opera.

Where Fabled flounders is when it attempts to reconcile the many contradictory story elements.

Benefits from Caviezel's ability to project earnestness better than nearly any actor currently working, but its near-comic predictability, "What else could go wrong?" plotting and cliché-ridden screenplay sink it.

Shot in just 24 days, the film staggers under the weight of stale gags and a meandering plot.

Whereas the original film is gleefully crass and energetically paced, the movie musical, weighing in at a robust two-plus hours, is bloated and self-satisfied. Whatever spectacle the stage musical possessed to make it such a box-office behemoth fails to transfer to the screen.

Though Black Snake Moan is unadulterated deep-fried silliness from "Hustle & Flow" filmmaker Craig Brewer, Jackson makes it indisputably more palatable. It's still not a very good movie, but it's intermittently entertaining (and sometimes unintentionally funny).

The filmmaker captures a certain exaggerated verisimilitude, but the comedy is surprisingly flat. The cast sells the occasional one-liner, but a Reynolds smirk can take you only so far.

Maddeningly exploitative, the film takes a provocative subject -- pedophilia -- and wraps it in a sterile, vacuum-sealed package, devoid of meaning.

For what is essentially a screwball comedy, Over Her Dead Body is surprisingly uninspired, a frothy concept that offers little satisfaction in the way of execution.

For fans of Nunez's previous work, it's almost as if he put in all the clichés he would normally avoid and left out the wonderfully textured internal moments that made "Ruby" and "Ulee's Gold" unique.

Fans of the band will likely be disappointed (its music is represented by a handful of covers), and younger audiences will wonder what the fuss is about.

Despite a fine cast, the film feels as lost as Howard, unsure of its direction or tone.

Related to the 1953 Vincent Price film in name, embalming technique and Warner Bros. pedigree only, the new House of Wax is a dreary, predictable tale.

A bust. As murky as its release print, it is a stale, incoherent spy caper.

The result is a film that's main crime is inducing stupefying boredom with little payoff in the end.

A jumble of genres including mob melodrama, bodyguard romance and interracial love story, none of which is handled in a remotely satisfying manner by director Ron Underwood. The film's tone shifts with all the grace of a car with a balky transmission.

An unsuccessful concoction of sincerity, camp and crassness that is more interested in its parade of D-level celebrities than developing its characters.

The film is strictly straight-to-video action movie stuff, albeit with dialogue in iambic pentameter.

It’s competent filmmaking in the service of lousy storytelling.

It's more like "That Girl" on speed than anything else.

Unless you're a connoisseur of movies that are so bad they're good, Hide and Seek is one game you're not going to want to play.

In some ways, The Man plays like a sequel to some terrible movie that was mercifully destroyed before it was ever released.

In the parlance of "The Player," Katrina Holden Bronson's Daltry Calhoun would be pitched as "Because of Winn-Dixie" meets "Napoleon Dynamite," and that is definitely not a good thing.

The movie is a pastiche of tortured slapstick, groan-inducing dialogue and a lethal dose of treacle, apparently awaiting one of Williams' trademark sprees of riffing and vamping to save the day. That moment never comes, however.

Unfortunately, the film lacks the suspense and drama to carry the psychological burden placed on it by its makers. Plot strands are dropped like so much lint, and it ends so abruptly that you wonder whether the filmmakers ran out of money, ideas or both.

The bedraggled movie limps along to its phony hogwash of an ending, adding the ignominy of sentimentality to its previous sin of being so derivative.

Andreas is way too low-energy to hold the screen as the film's lead, but he was wise to surround himself with a talented cast. Unfortunately, the wooden dialogue and overall shallowness of the writing keep the film from being even an amiable diversion.

A comedy so inane and tedious that it buries its premise and its various worthy points under too many arch and improbable shenanigans and endless dialogue, much of it seriously under-inspired.

Devoid of verbal wit, instead relying on a relentless stream of Looney Tunes-inspired violence.

There is something bizarrely compelling about the movie. It's slower than watching a train wreck but invokes that same level of disbelief.

Despite the presence of funny guys such as Zahn, Garlin, Justin Long and Jonah Hill, along with veteran character actors Ernest Borgnine, Joe Don Baker and Robert Patrick, the movie fails to be even passably funny.

Faith comes naturally, but complexity does not for Ty Manns’ script, which plays like a first draft, one written from a manual and riddled with two-dimensional characters and on-the-nose dialogue.

Lifeless and laughless.

Originally titled "Fast Track" when it was scheduled to open last January, neither the wait nor the new title makes it worthwhile. The only fast track here is the one to home video.

It's astonishing how dull a movie that packs so much visual overstimulation into its frames can be.

Its biggest failing -- and the ultimate one for a lightweight entertainment such as this -- is that it's a deadly bore from start to finish.

Billed as a romantic comedy but really a farce, The Perfect Kiss is the perfect example of a movie that is so bad it’s … no, not good, just terrible.

Carl T. Evans' tedious drama Walking on the Sky serves primarily as an acting exercise for its cast and a showcase for its primary location, a scenic Manhattan rooftop.

A stupendously torpid thriller without a single redeeming quality.

It will surely yield nominations for worst picture.