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.