Kirk Honeycutt

As drama the film mostly serves to illustrate the two sides of this crucial social debate in Africa.

Obviously, Munro is reaching for something about how people allow themselves to get mired in the past. But his characters and situations are so exaggerated and dreary that his point gets quickly lost.

While the sadism doesn't stoop -- rise? -- to the level of the "Saw" horror-thrillers, Vacancy does have a name cast.

There are eight individual decisions to be made here, yet Beauvois never humanizes any of his monks. The film instead consumes itself with songs, communal prayers and nightly meals.

This is a slick studio production with a huge movie star and top professionals occupying every production role so that the polish of this well-made film makes even homelessness look neat and tidy.

This is a discouragingly limp movie in which nothing is at stake.

A dull actioner that looks like a bad video game.

Imagine Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" saddled with more sentimentality and sprinkled with a few more laughs and you pretty much have Last Chance Harvey.

A couple of rather Dickensian supporting roles by Robbie Coltrane and Maximilian Schell fall embarrassingly flat as they are more creations of costumes and makeup than actual flesh-and-blood. But then the same can be said for the entire movie.

Certainly for most audiences the viewing experience will prove not only tedious but bewildering.

So like much of this film, the viewer is turned into an observer. You never feel close enough to the action, either in the ring or in the kitchens, living rooms and tough streets where the story takes place. The characters engage you up to a point but never really pull you in.

Indeed, White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.

Think of Please Give as a finely tuned short story with every glance and gesture full of suggestive meaning. Drama is not high on the agenda here. There is a bit of comedy and, briefly, sexual mischief even though it doesn't look like much fun.

One's appreciation of this film depends largely on one's ability to be amused by a Dadaist prankster and interest in the Pop Art scene in the middle of the last century.

The story itself is silly and exaggerated.

Even the art house crowd will find the film off-putting not only because of its vagueness but because of its thoroughly unlikable characters.

An entertaining piece of supernatural nonsense whose sheer audacity disarms all (well, nearly all) skepticism.

This is a slicker, shallower exercise. It's hypnotic as it unfolds, but once the credit roll frees you from its grip, it doesn't bear close scrutiny.

A muted psychological mystery where filmmaker Hilary Brougher's interest in "solving" a possible crime is superseded by her investigation into matters involving denial, free will and the physical and emotional burdens of pregnancy.

The character and geographical jumps leave you in a muddle with thinly sketched personalities and confusing plot points. Worse, dialogue dense with nuance and shaded meaning flies by too quickly.

In the end, an audience has far too much knowledge about Gregoire's movie projects and finances and far too little about what makes anyone here tick.

The film does not stand up to the current crop of music/concert films like "U2 3D," which brilliantly uses 3-D to show the Irish band in concert so as to encapsulate its relationship to its fans, each other and their own music, and "CSNY: Deja Vu," which hones in on the political connection Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young have to their music.

A hit-and-miss affair. It has moments of unexpected, offbeat comedy, but most of the time neither the characters nor the situations engage the viewer.

The film does achieve moments of catharsis, but it can be heavy going.

As convincing as the manipulated footage of the President's death in Chicago in October 2007 is, the movie itself cannot be more unconvincing in its approach.

Making a vampire movie without any bite is like removing guns from a Western.

The movie does say a lot about female athletes and the changing role of women in American society, but in aggressively pursuing the formula, writer-director-producer Tim Chambers is prone to exaggeration and a moralizing tone.

The documentary is an act of political activism. Guggenheim and his politically conscious producers, Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and Scott Z. Burns, have no interest in either challenging Gore's viewpoint or giving opposing opinions equal time. The film is simply a conduit for Gore's message.

Lights will put in more appearances at festivals before achieving a brief theatrical window for Kaurismaki devotees to gaze through. Most will do so with discouragement.

It's all Kovacs for 94 minutes. Which means the viewer experiences a perilous tug-of-war between annoyance at the extreme artificiality of the conceit and admiration of the gutsy performance by an actress who must, literally, carry the movie. Annoyance wins out, unfortunately.

Maybe Humpday needed more characters and a less claustrophobic atmosphere. Maybe the film needed to be bolder and break a few boundaries itself. Maybe it could have better explained why these two men still need to be friends. Whatever the case, it certainly needed a better payoff.

By avoiding sentimentality, Millions emerges as a simple tale told with sympathy for a child's point of view.

A temperate, evenhanded perhaps overly timid film about an intemperate time in South Africa.

The film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity.

Eye-popping yet ultimately thin and shallow as a page in a graphic novel.

The movie boils down to one character, acting under enormous pressures of space and time, racing to solve a mystery. In this case, that may be good enough.

The film is thought-provoking but not terribly involving.

Brilliantly sung by an extremely talented lyric theater company in Cape Town called Dimpho Di Kopane. Whether this all works will be a matter of opinion -- mine is that it does not -- but the experiment is fascinating.

This is the perfect illustration of the banality of most scare movies.

Eastwood has always had the gift for comedy in his acting repertoire, but he indulges in it only rarely. His fans might embrace this return to comedy.

Unlike his songs, the film holds something back. It goes deep into a life filled with as much trouble and pain as triumph and accomplishment but never quite gets at the root of who Ray is.

This time, tedium sets in early and never loosens its grip. The gags are obvious, predictable and dull.

Sticking to one joke in an unconscionably long film makes for a very stale, witless and repetitive comedy.

Eyre does a fine job overseeing performances by a terrific cast that rings true until female hysteria takes over the final act. But in tone and theme, the film has all the hallmarks of playwright-screenwriter Marber's stark, uncompromising misanthropy, if not misogyny.

A respectable and at times an exciting film that should appeal to males of all ages, history buffs and -- yes, it's inevitable -- patriots.

Standard-issue superhero movie -- except that writer-director Guillermo del Toro, taking his cue from "Hellboy" comic book creator Mike Mignola, brings a wicked sense of humor to this particular monster mash.

It's all a bit bizarre. One soldier tellingly calls it "one big reality TV show," and the movie never makes clear whether such training does any good.

How she (Dunham) made her movie is more impressive or at least unique than the actual story she chooses to tell.

"Phoenix" might go down as the problematic film, full of plot but little fun.

The film does get claustrophobic. It never quite achieves the balance between a two-character study and a larger world, as did "The Man on the Train." The film also could do with a bit more humor, most of which is supplied by the sagacious shrink.

Horror film buffs like to giggle as much as scream but there're no giggles here.

The technical barrage of visual and digital effects, quick cuts and strobe lighting does produce something akin to the sensation of playing a video game. So why, one wonders, don't potential viewers simply play one instead of watching this pale imitation?

Where the film falters is Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers' adaptation, which fails to invest this world with strong emotions.

In her brave first feature, Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Zbanic tackles the theme of war's aftermath.

The greatest failure of the film, written by David Wolstencroft, is its inability to enter into the lives of the Rwandans, Tutsi and Hutu alike. The movie never moves beyond the tragic facts to show us the human face of either victims or perpetrators. All we get are white people shaking their heads and cursing Western governments.

A complex and often compelling melodrama, at times almost verging on soap opera.

Too narrowly focused.

The film lacks the juice promised by the teaming of such extraordinary filmmakers with a cast as large as a Hooverville encampment.

The movie so successfully raises the emotional and psychological stakes in the first half that not all audiences may like the film's reversion to con-artist form in the second. The con itself is preposterous and full of holes when we think back after the movie.

Like many lab experiments, this melodramatic hybrid makes for an unstable fusion. Only someone as talented as Almodóvar could have mixed such elements without blowing up an entire movie.

Harrelson goes full bore from the opening scene and there are no scenes he is not in. But the effect is wearying rather than exhilarating.

The film is by no means terrible -- its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.

In "Virginia Woolf," George and Martha are locked into a symbiotic, disturbingly needy relationship that absolutely feed off their acidic battles. But for Revolutionary Road's Frank and April Wheeler, you wonder: Why don't they just get a divorce?

This attractive cast may help get an audience, but they will surely puzzle over such a downward-spiraling story that lacks inner logic.

An unconvincing psychosexual drama that tries to reconfigure the classic romantic triangle but winds up looking like a preposterous pretzel.

The writer-director's inquiry into this tragedy makes for a moving and intelligent film, but the dark story never feels fully realized.

A downbeat story line layered with philosophical discourses will restrict the audience to fans of the animated genre.

Will richly award locals with sly in-jokes and a wonderful comic performance by Bruhl. Non-Germans will certainly get the essence of the humor but may find the movie long and repetitive.

This fascinating relationship gets smothered in pointlessly long takes, repetitive scenes, grim Western landscapes and mumbled, heavily accented dialogue.

Awesome will please fans of the band, but expect little crossover to nonfans. No new ground is broken here. From a cinematic point of view, Awesome represents simply a monumental postproduction salvaging effort.

May be too clever for its own good. Essentially, it's the story of weekend scientists who build a time machine in a suburban garage. But this nearly gets lost in a miasma of technical jargon and scientific conjecture.

A slow meander through the mostly stagnant life of a character hardly worth the bother.

The 3-D footage of Titanic does speak volumes, and sometimes the sheer fussiness of all the ghosts and archival images get in the way. As huge as the Imax screen is, when six different images vie for one's attention, it looks cluttered.

Moore stays "on message" here from first shot to last. There is no debate, no analysis of facts or search for historical context. Moore simply wants to blame one man and his family for the situation in Iraq the United States now finds itself in…So the real question is not how good a film is Fahrenheit 9/11 -- it is undoubtedly Moore's weakest -- but will a film help to get a president fired?

Yet music, the one thing that might have given the film some kick, is de-emphasized, with only two songs sneaking into the picture.

Chabrol has been making and remaking this film for six decades now. He seemingly will never tire of explaining how tired he is of the petit bourgeoisie.

Limitless should be so much smarter than it is.

This odd collection of oddballs doesn't quite play out as a satisfying movie.

An arresting visual style cannot make up for lack of new information or viewpoints about the Green Revolution in 2009 Iran.

The effect is impressionistic and provocative, with the emphasis falling differently on scenes because of our knowledge or lack thereof.

The whole film, a comedy about crime and mental illness, seems at war with itself.

Audiences might enjoy this cinematic sleight of hand, but the key characters are such single-minded, calculating individuals that the real magic would be to find any heart in this tale.

A meticulously observed story about fathers and sons within the Argentine Jewish community...What the film desperately lacks, however, is any meaningful conflict. Thus, there is little story here.

Earns an A for effort but a much lower grade in the entertainment department.

The film is messy the way Piaf's life was messy: It's unafraid of extravagant gestures even when they fail to come off.

While the film is made in English by a mostly Greek crew, Buzz"seems geared to foreign audiences. The film's "historians" spend too much time explaining things about Hollywood that are common knowledge to many Americans.

A disappointing and manipulative look at one family's loss in the Iraq war.

Lemming does possess a mordant humor as it watches characters spin out of control. But the payoff is slight.

A slim idea for a pulp-fiction short story padded out to 81 minutes with random encounters and celebrity sightings.

Determined to be faithful to the strong, often shocking language and in-your-face drama in Marber's mannered writing, Nichols and his actors find no way to lift Closer into a realm that enlightens.

As a thriller, The Debt performs many if not all the right moves. Where the John Madden-directed film gets into trouble is in wanting to deal with the Holocaust without being entirely a period film.

Not a bad film and veteran star Daniel Auteuil makes any film he inhabits an interesting place to visit. Perversely, its tissue-thin substance may even make the comedy more commercial in North America than such films of his as "Monsieur Hire" and "Ridicule."

Director Steven Spielberg seems intent on celebrating his entire early career here. Whatever the story there is, a vague journey to return a spectacular archeological find to its rightful home -- an unusual goal of the old grave-robber, you must admit -- gets swamped in a sea of stunts and CGI that are relentless as the scenes and character relationships are charmless.

The film just doesn't mine enough humor or drama from this situation. Meanwhile most of the developments are wholly predictable.

Things are too predictable. Perhaps the viewpoint is to blame.

The biggest surprise in Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist is that there are no surprises.

Edward Norton serves as lead actor and producer, but even his star power won't help this misfire reach a wide domestic audience.

A one-note, lightweight, condescending comedy about the rubes of Idaho.