Kirk Honeycutt

Day Watch does dazzle and even at times amuse. But its imagination is limited. The backstory is shallow and pat. Its characters are mostly one-note. And everything goes on much too long at 133 minutes.

A fascinating film even if it never completely pins him (Verges) down.

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.

While it makes no bones about where its sympathies lie, these fictional stories show a genuine fascination with the role politics plays on both sides of such confrontations and how things can spin out of control with no single person to blame.

Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol is, in its essence, a product reel, a showy, exuberant demonstration of the glories of motion capture, computer animation and 3D technology. On that level, it's a wow. On any emotional level, it's as cold as Marley's Ghost.

A ferociously entertaining film.

Working with non-pro actors, Hammer pulls authentic performances from the trio that are at times almost too painful to witness.

Where the best Coen brothers comedy is a matter of finely tuned tone, diction, attitude and visual rhythms, everything in The Ladykillers feels out of kilter. With Tom Hanks delivering -- arguably -- one of the most perplexing performances of his career.

The story is a sketchy, dramatically muddled rumination on familiar Williams themes about the Old South and its brave, beautiful, rebellion women always on the brink of love, suicide or madness.

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

So much is unspoken and this slice of reality is so thin and slow as to make the film downright unsatisfying.

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

The best one yet.

Dick's strongest points are that these raters receive no training and are given no standards by which to judge movies. Experts in child psychology or media or social studies are not consulted. Nor are they allowed on the board. The days of counting F-words or pelvic thrusts need to end, and in the film's quieter moments, Dick makes this case compellingly.

Where the first film was something of a teen horror film, the follow-up, again from writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky, is more of an unintentional comedy.

Thanks to dynamic performances by Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez and a strong cast -- sometimes all but buried beneath irksome stylistic flourishes -- this dark and absurd melodrama certainly has raw energy.

A perky comedy aimed at young women that gets the job done with crisp efficiency.

Whether meaning to or not, Devor and his accomplished crew expand our concept of the documentary film, which relegates this documentary to art houses, not porn theaters.

Electrifying and alarming film.

It contains terrific sequences, and Nicholson and Sandler team up better than one might expect. But the film plays like two characters in search of a story and runs a good 15 minutes too long.

Rock solid performances by up-and-coming German actress Julia Jentsch as Sophie and Alexander Held ("Downfall") as Mohr along with an excellent cast of supporting players insure that no one mistakes this for a lifeless docu-drama.

A sensitive but not sentimental story about a romance involving a mentally challenged young man never makes a misstep.

While nearly every shock comes at predictable moments, there is genuine ingenuity behind many, and the movie is surprisingly fresh for one made by a guy on his third go-round with the same material.

A neatly packaged Walt Disney Co. picture with bone-crunching football action; a nice sense of the blue-collar, male-dominated milieu that nourishes football fanaticism; and a few too many tugs at the heartstrings.

Thumbsucker is a head-scratcher. It's well directed and acted. Yet the story has little emotional pull.

This is the mother lode all action/suspense directors search for and Lee, who usually doesn't work in that genre, has hit it.

The film's characters are lively, the women all look terrific (the guys do too, for that matter), and its many romantic story threads weave into artfully told tales of love lost and found.

Improbable and generally unfunny comedy.

This is one of the most wildly romantic movies in ages.

Shaky story and predictable developments make this an off-key ballad.

Nothing really adds up, and the ending is downright absurd. You would like even the most austere, doctrinaire existential movie to earn its downbeat ending. This one fails utterly to do so.

A compelling and illuminating story of four people who form an unlikely and momentary friendship of considerable depth.

If one thinks of "Babel" minus the melodrama and histrionics, you get a clearer picture of what Moodysson has done here.

A fascinating, mythological western.

By the movie's end, writer-director Karen Moncrieff's The Dead Girl delivers considerable emotional impact. But that doesn't mean you've enjoyed the journey.

Sustains itself through terrific forward momentum and two glorious star turns by gifted actresses Frances McDormand and Amy Adams.

Great comics from Jerry Lewis to Peter Sellers have turned pathetic into comedic. But James never seems to able to get beyond pathetic.

Fast & Furious is the first film since the original to be smart about how far to stretch logic without sacrificing the desired macho swagger and revved-up emotions.

It is more sad-funny than funny-funny, but Jenkins has enough empathy and wit to realize that even the sad parts are, somehow, funny.

Stiller manages his movie nicely so that all actors get their share of the comic spotlight. Seldom does an ensemble comedy not contain a single weak character or performance as does this one.

Say Anything is an easy film to like. Ex-rock journalist Cameron Crowe, known for two screenplays about teenagers caught up in the fast lane, has written and directed (for the first time) a surprisingly gentle comedy about teens that concerns itself with values and love.

Demonstrating a mastery of the medium that belies his status as a first-time feature filmmaker, writer-director Ali Selim has crafted in Sweet Land a tale of pure Americana that speaks both to the immigrant experience and the nature of love.

Splinter is a bad idea, borrowing body parts, as it were, from old horror flicks to genuinely unsatisfying results.

This is a coolly efficient, tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy.

Julia Roberts marches through Erin Brockovich like a force of nature. Granted, the movie gives her all of the best lines — to say nothing of its most eye-catching wardrobe. But the actress seizes the film's eponymous role with fire-in-her-eyes possessiveness and injects the character with all the energy and drive she can muster.

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

The film might amuse some, especially fans of Alfred Hitchcock, but is likely to annoy almost everyone else.

Cheerfully disconnected from the real world, bearing a great resemblance to screwball comedies of old.

What is lightly sketched in the novel, where much is left to the imagination, blossoms into full-blown, richly detailed life in the movie.

Depp is the comic gel that holds the whole enterprise together. The performance is a total delight that somehow combines Bugs Bunny, Peter Pan and Charlie Chaplin.

Following up on Morgan Spurlock's wildly successful indie film "Super Size Me," critics of fast food were hoping that a one-two punch would further raise consciousness among consumers and purveyors alike. Alas, Fast Food Nation is punchless.

James Newton Howard's music picks up its comic cues perhaps a bit too swiftly and loudly, but little of this detracts from the movie's many pleasures.

Does a good job of reviving stale material. Thanks to a snappy script by Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa and an effervescent performance by Jennifer Garner, this romantic comedy has a buoyant personality.

A must for Doors fans as the film attempts to disentangle the facts from the myths surrounding the legendary band.

Greengrass has made not only a thoroughly fact-checked film but a film that uncontrovertibly comes from the heart.

Actors blossom under Frears' direction. There is no false moment or off-key note in this movie.

This is one helluva good movie that craves the eyeballs of as many American high schoolers as it can possibly get.

A bottomless pit of lame characters, horror-film cliches and improbable monsters.

A feeble medieval epic with a lackluster romance at its center.

Downey plays off his own bad-boy image wonderfully. The writers give him great lines to work with and ditto that for his Girl Friday, Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, whose own svelte lines cannot be improved on.

Keira Knightley is a terrific choice to play the 18th century socialite.

Reminds you of an elaborate Christmas card that tumbles apart with pop-up figures, silly/charming greetings and perhaps even a jingle. It probably cost more than the gift it heralds, and you can't help but laugh at the audacity of such an aggressively cheerful card.

This is a movie not built for subtlety, but it does tackle a subject American movies have mostly avoided -- that of racial profiling and the plight of Muslim-Americans.

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.

To borrow a cliche from another medium, Santa might have jumped the shark.

It's discouraging to witness a filmmaker who clearly yearns for the indie world yield to the temptations of mindless movie manufacturing. At least Figgis made it as soulless as possible.

The writing is often clever and the overall production playful and intelligent.

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

Kill Bill-Vol. 2 puts to shame doubts entertained about aesthetic strategies or structural imbalance provoked by "Kill Bill-Vol. 1." Now that the entirety of Quentin Tarantino's epic revenge melodrama is on view, "Kill Bill" emerges as a brilliant, invigorating work, one to muse over for years to come.

For comedy, director Peter Howitt relies on halfhearted slapstick as the script contains little of the sharp dialogue one might expect from a script written at least in part by Harling ("Steel Magnolias," "Soapdish").

What makes the film so much fun is an ingenious plot device embedded in Rashid's sharply observed screenplay.

All the acting is solid including a knock-'em-dead single scene by Annabella Sciorra as Jackie's ex-wife.

Several good ideas for a movie rumble around inside ATL, but they never coalesce.

This is a film of terrific selectivity. By focusing on two of the few who did survive the collapse, the film achieves emotional power and an uplifting ending.

The movie entertains, but it's a shallow entertainment where you have no rooting interest in the outcome.

An innocuous -- to the point of blandness -- look at the "hardships" of a recent college grad.

Not since Woody Allen's "Radio Days" has anyone created such a cinematic Valentine to the wonderfully imaginative medium of radio as A Prairie Home Companion.

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.

Beat has a moody, furtive quality that jibes perfectly with the perplexed life of a pianist-gangster.

One of the best film musicals in years -- exuberant, sexy and life affirming in equal measure.

The story is about musicians and how music connects people, so the movie's score and songs, created by composers Mark Mancina and Hans Zimmer, give poetic whimsy to an implausible tale.

The cast sparkles especially Simon Baker, a sturdy leading-man type, who is primed to break through any day now, and Paz Vega, already a star in Latin market.

Despite shortcomings and implausibility linked to their roles as written, Rogen and Banks come off with surprising charm and grace.

It has style to burn, eye-catching acting by an international cast and a story that harkens back to many literary classic with its themes of a family torn apart, brothers in conflict and a son's rivalry with a towering father figure.

The 134-minute film jams in much information, incidents and characters without losing any entertainment value. And, fortunately, its heroism isn't pumped up or glorified.

Despite a virtually unplayable premise, The Switch overcomes this handicap to turn itself into a friendly, offbeat romantic comedy.

This family comedy adventure from Walden Media is likable in a scruffy way. Its characters, especially the youngest one, are engaging, and few adults are immune to childhood fantasies about secluded tropical isles.

The film does not lack for ambition both in terms of its themes and artistic design. Consequently, his (Jenkins) feature debut, while not flashy, shows promise. Clearly, here is a young filmmaker who wants to tell stories rather than deliver shocks and sensation.

It's disappointing the film is so sketchy and underdeveloped. The filmmakers may have sold their story short.

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

This is resolutely a film of the imagination. As with all films in Malick's slim body of work, its imagery, haunting sounds and pastoral mood trump narrative.

Provides Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche with comic roles that fit them like designer threads.

Mostly, Good Boy! exists for the middle section where youngsters and dogs speak the same language. These escapades, all taking place under the adults' radar, generate many sound laughs.

Even assuming the best possible motives by its makers, Beyond Borders runs the risk of making human suffering exotic while glamorizing white disaster relief workers in the Third World.

The film is stylish as hell with sharp dialogue, a tongue-in-cheek plot and visual and editing razzle-dazzle.

Sunshine is its own creature, taking inspiration from classic science fiction films but insisting on a gritty reality that much improves on past space adventures.

In Channing Tatum, who also starred in "Saints," the film has a good-looking, magnetic hunk to draw a crowd. Terrence Howard lends the pedigree of great screen acting, and Zulay Henao adds charm and glamour.

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