Kevin Crust

For much of its duration the film is a case of intense fare done with an undeniable effectiveness and ingenuity -- until it lurches into a deplorable surprise twist.

What might have been a complex story dealing with greed and high-stakes betrayal among the young intellectual elite in America's gaming playground is instead treated as a slick, glossy romp.

The film’s higher aims never take hold. The breeziness feels at odds with implied gravitas.

Though the film aspires to the epic with pretensions of deeper philosophical meaning, it ultimately settles for being the "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" of historical romances.

Everything has been significantly amped up -- bigger, louder, further removed from reality -- but it also feels that much more forced. Cage and Kruger seem like they're not having much fun this time around, and Bartha still gets the best throwaway lines.

Sweet but dramatically inert.

Despite striking a chord in terms of sibling politics and the inelegant ways we deal with death, Two Weeks too often feels as if it's destined for heavy rotation on the Lifetime Movie Network.

Reinforcing the adage that looks aren't everything, the live-action animal drama Arctic Tale arrives in an impressive visual package and even boasts a timely message, but its undistinguished storytelling is a big letdown.

Paxton and Frost lay the schmaltz on thickly, but the deal-breaker is the overuse of special effects, which make the game in question look more like pinball than golf.

The film’s themes of extinction and survival are worthy of thoughtful treatment, something that eludes the ambitious movie as it succumbs to a schematic and sentimental telling that overreaches for a grand gesture and obscures the more meaningful ideas.

Lucky Number Slevin is an attempted cinematic sleight-of-hand that has its moments, but is finally just plain annoying, wearing its influences too broadly on its sleeve.

Breck Eisner, son of former Disney mogul Michael and something of a protégé of Steven Spielberg, for whom he directed an episode of the miniseries "Taken," guides Sahara's big action set pieces with assurance, but would have been better served by a tighter script.

While endearingly heartfelt and G-rated to boot, its storytelling suffers from a lack of locomotive force and characters that feel disappointingly two-dimensional.

The movie leans too heavily on quirk to express character and we are left as annoyed at Timmy’s antics as the adults in his life or the kids in his class (save the one girl who finds him “fascinating”).

Instantly forgettable.

Once the movie shifts gears, it’s less about the working man and more about the human. That sounds like a good thing, but the further Working Man creeps into emotionally over-calibrated basic cable territory, the less real it feels.

The overly familiar plot points also make the film feel a little dated.

Wilson is as sincere as ever at being insincere, though the sweet minor notes of his trademark melancholia seem here to be in search of a more boisterous presence -- say a Vince Vaughn -- to riff with.

Never quite works as a film. The failure to create appropriate cinematic metaphors reduces it to "happiness is a warm puppy" superficiality.

The strongest scenes are those between Elliot and Richard, which give Second Best a verisimilitude lacking in the rest of the film. The truest thing here is that these two guys have been friends forever and always will be.

The feature debut of music video director Ninian Doff is probably best viewed late at night under the influence of a mind-altering, preferably hallucinatory, substance.

The result is that they never truly find the innate drama in Pimentel's story, instead simply recounting four or five decades' worth of events that shaped the man.

Witt injects the film with plenty of razzle-dazzle on the visual side, but the pace deadens whenever the zombies are offscreen or the characters open their mouths long enough to do anything more than grunt.

The twists and reversals that pile up, stirred by greed, friendship and betrayal, fail to register any meaning, simply accumulating -- so that ultimately Autumn is as dry and lifeless as the leaves that fall to the ground in its opening images.

Hurting the film is the fact that the central character, Anthony, is so self-absorbed.

This family adventure about a team of sled dogs abandoned in Antarctica naturally invokes the traditional shout of "Mush!" urging the canines to go faster, but it's also an apt descriptor of both its shameless sentimentality and ineptly structured story.

Most successful in capturing the emotional elements of its story, the film relies on its excellent cast to balance out sketchily drawn characters and the unfortunate obviousness of its plot.