Kirk Honeycutt

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The Hollywood Reporter
For 1,003 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kirk Honeycutt's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Apocalypse Now Redux
Lowest review score: 0 Your Highness
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 477 out of 1003
  2. Mixed: 433 out of 1003
  3. Negative: 93 out of 1003
1003 movie reviews
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    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Banishment
    The Banishment (Izgnanie) starts off like a thriller with a car roaring into the city and a clandestine surgery by a man to remove a bullet in his brother's arm. Then, ever so slowly, the movie falls into the clutches of long, solemn stares into space, meaningful drags on cigarettes, cryptic dialogue revealing little and a tiny drama that feels old, tired and empty of real purpose.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Kirk Honeycutt
    Twixt
    One can reflect on what the young Coppola, with his masterful camera work and vivid imagination, might have done with such an opportunity. Unfortunately, the present-day one produces only tepid and tired imagery that would not earn high marks in any film school.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Violet & Daisy
    It’s a film that doesn’t always work but when it does you almost hear an audible click. Violet & Daisy has its share of these ah-ha moments.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Porfirio
    The film falls into an interesting intersection between documentary and feature, between reality and fiction.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Green Wave
    An arresting visual style cannot make up for lack of new information or viewpoints about the Green Revolution in 2009 Iran.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    360
    La Ronde 2011-style is simply a game and its makers expert gamesmen. The film is never less than intriguing. But the artifice shows all too clearly.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Paul Williams Still Alive
    The film has a winning combination for all sorts of platforms as the story is highly intriguing and the music speaks, or rather sings, for itself.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    The saving grace to the utter predictability in Christina Mengert and Joseph Muszynski's screenplay is reasonably personable characters and spirited acting by director Bruce Beresford's cast.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Mahler on the Couch
    The film's great gift, though, is Romaner. Unbelievably, this is the first film for the Bavarian stage actress. She fully inhabits the role of this complex personality whose passion for love and art collides with her role of wife and mother.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Sound of My Voice
    Now Batmanglij and Marling deliver another terrific and engrossing venture into speculative fiction, Sound of My Voice.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    You could point a camera just about anywhere at Comic-Con and record something weird, amazing, funny, stupid or all of the above.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Jess and Moss
    The filmmaker made the film on his family's tobacco farm so perhaps his own memories may filter through those of his fictional characters. Or maybe they're not fictional at all. Jess + Moss is, to put it mildly, open to interpretation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
    Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's final film about the West Memphis Three demonstrates how the first two docs played a role in galvanizing national support to free the wrongly convicted men.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    We Need to Talk About Kevin
    This is, in a way, a real horror film about everyday things and a disconnected family.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Big Fix
    A gloomy but perhaps realistic depiction of the forces of corruption and deceit that produce environmental catastrophes.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Rampart
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Dog Sweat
    The cast is fine, but the roles are superficial and too concentrated on the film's theme.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    A mildly diverting naughty comedy, lacking the pure comic nastiness of "Bad Santa" or the sheer audacity of "Up in Smoke."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    RA. One
    You don't have to be an enthusiast of Bollywood to embrace RA.ONE, but it sure would help.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Mighty Macs
    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.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Father of Invention
    Comedies don't get much more unfunny than Father of Invention, a lame and somewhat preachy comic take on a father trying to get back into his daughter's good graces.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Skin I Live In
    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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Fireflies in the Garden
    Dennis Lee comes up empty. Kids, parents, siblings, an aunt and an estranged wife all bicker and yell, but the noise cancels itself out. The movie is one long argument, tiresome and repetitive, that produces more heat than light.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Anonymous
    The film grabs at historical facts, mangles them into a plot worthy of a John le Carré spy novel and takes the viewer on a breathtaking ride through ye olde London.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    What's Your Number?
    Mild vulgarity and discreet nudity garner the sought-after R rating, but this effort feels forced. The real "bad" here is the sheer formulaic nature of everything. There are no surprises but for once you don't much mind.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Finding Joe
    Everyone's comments are thoughtful and articulate but everyone stays "on message" so steadfastly that no dialogue ever ensues. It's 20 people giving the same lecture.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Bunraku
    Moshe, who wrote and directed, creates a boldly Expressionistic alternate reality to background this heavy-on-the-action story, but neglects narrative and character beyond the most basic strokes.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Thunder Soul
    A greater argument for music education in our secondary school curriculum can't be made than Mark Landsman's doc about a Texas high school funk band that tore up the music scene from 1968 to 1977.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Puncture
    The film is chock-a-block with extraordinary performances and no one will fault the filmmaking either. This is a well-made movie, make no mistake. It just suffers from a dysfunctional hero.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Machine Gun Preacher
    One can't escape the nagging feeling that the film doesn't dig deeply enough into its real-life hero. The film doesn't explore all those "whys" and "whats."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    50/50
    Reiser has written his characters with an indelible sweetness and vulnerability, which allows the cast to deliver performances with some depth.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Position Among the Stars
    An eloquently shot and closely observed documentary about a poor family in modern-day Indonesia.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Berlin 36
    The film, well made in every way, smartly focuses on an unlikely friendship between Gretel and the athlete who ultimately replaced her -- a high jumper who was later revealed to be a man!
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Moneyball
    The movie does achieve something nearly impossible: Someone who doesn't even like the sport may care about Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Debt
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Saving Private Perez
    This Mexican action flick from director-writer Beto Gómez has all the makings of a great comedy only no one told the filmmakers.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Warrior
    It's a long movie that feels short: It grabs you in early scenes, intense though low-key before all hell breaks loose, then keeps you riveted to its mostly male characters.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Chasing Madoff
    In a sense, this is not a financial thriller so much as a financial mystery. Which gets a bit lost in the movie's stylized presentation.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Higher Ground
    The film is a deft, graceful and often poignant story of a woman's quest to find her own identity and a spiritual sanctuary that will give her life hope and meaning.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    One Day
    Danish director Lone Scherfig skillfully adapts David Nicholls' best-selling romantic novel to the screen.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Conan the Barbarian
    There is no purpose to the film other than random blood splattering amid scenes of bondage, primitive savagery and S&M eroticism. The film is numbing and dumb with its hero indistinguishable from its villains.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    The result is a scary movie that is genuinely scary in parts, although an adult can't help noticing this is set in the very worn and tattered territory of the haunted-house genre. Then when you get a glimpse of the CGI critters causing all the mayhem, the scares completely vanish.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Final Destination 5
    To borrow from TV terminology, the series hasn't jumped the shark yet, but the strain of inventing bizarre deaths is beginning to show.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Help
    Taylor does capture the Jim Crow era and its anxieties well, but his characters tend toward the facile and his white heroine is too idealized.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    30 Minutes or Less
    Fleischer stages one chase scene with a bit of comic flair but otherwise never locates that mix of macabre action and comedy that at least made "Zombieland" amusing.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Change-Up
    The Change-Up bravely attempts to revive the dormant subgenre but it's a lame effort that grows increasingly frantic and foul-mouthed as the realization sets in that the gimmick isn't working.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Gun Hill Road
    Green has chosen for his focus to fall on Enrique, in many ways the least interesting character in his story, rather than the son or even the mother who is surprisingly protective and understanding.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    The film never quite pins the chef down about any of this but in his menu introduction to the staff or off-hand remarks to long-time colleagues you begin to understand the mindset. "The more bewilderment, the better," he declares. He is not joking.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Point Blank
    A high-wire act that almost slips as it edges perilously closer and closer to the edge of improbability. But it never does.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Good Neighbors
    Good Neighbors is a film of acquired taste. If one is willing to accept humor in a movie about a serial killer, if one likes a thriller than emphasizes character over thrills, if one is susceptible to a cast of characters that includes three cats, then the movie has found its very selective target audience.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Life in a Day
    Life in a Day is an experimental project driven by the Internet at its best, where connectivity among the planet's population has become a reality.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Cowboys & Aliens
    The key to its success lies in the determination by everyone involved to play the damn thing straight. Even the slightest goofiness, the tiniest touch of camp, and the whole thing would blow sky high. But it doesn't.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Crazy, Stupid, Love
    The movie suffers perhaps from too many characters and subplots but all the actors appear to have fun with their characters.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Captain America: The First Avenger
    Sticking to its simplistic, patriotic origins, where a muscular red, white and blue GI slugging Adolf Hitler in the jaw is all that's required, Captain America trafficks in red-blooded heroes, dastardly villains, classy dames and war-weary military officers.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Sarah's Key
    The movie gathers momentum with a steady, assured pace, accumulating incidents, characters, secrets and lies until the rush of events is absolutely transfixing. Cinema can sometimes rival the novel in compulsive intensity and Sarah's Key is one such example.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Lucky
    Nothing is bleaker than failed black comedy, which this is.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    So strong are the emotions - and, yes, the melodrama - that Snow Flower and the Secret Fan represents one of Wang's best films to date.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Horrible Bosses
    The lameness of the gags and dialogue and the film's frequent deep dives for the bottom at the expense of real comedy speak to desperation in Hollywood to figure out the audience for contemporary naughty comedy.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Ledge
    Charlie Hunnam and Terrence Howard put enough actors' oomph into these ledge mates to make them authentic characters even though the film fails to achieve anything like the same level of authenticity.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Another Earth
    The best science fiction tells stories about people in extraordinary environments or situations that serve to open up the vast, still largely unexplored terrain of the human heart. Mike Cahill's Another Earth is science fiction at its best.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Larry Crowne
    Every scene is on the prowl for laughs at the expense of the inherent drama in the lives of its colorful characters.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    The millions of man hours put into producing this techno shock and awe must be staggering. Everyone got his job done, but somewhere along the way, the movie got lost.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Turtle: The Incredible Journey
    The loggerhead turtle's journey is indeed incredible. But you would rather the narration, delivered intelligently by Miranda Richardson, didn't feel a need to remind you of this fact so frequently.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    A Better Life
    By keeping things simple and understated, director Chris Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason have crafted a little gem where humanity is observed with compassion, not condescension.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Mr. Popper's Penguins
    The six penguins cast in this amiable family comedy steal the movie -- along with any fish they can find -- although the film's star, Jim Carrey, does manage to hold his own. Barely.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Just Like Us
    The movie is fast, funny and light on its feet, dipping less into politics or religion than into cultural quirks and characteristics.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    The film wants to put on screen the sense of random play and concentrated games that fill a child's world for a few summers. In this it succeeds, but the film does not welcome others who might still retain memories of those NOT bummer summers.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Beginners
    All the movie's playfulness rubs off on the actors. Scenes crackle with life. The chemistry among all the actors is terrific.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Rejoice and Shout
    For anyone with a keen interest in this unique American musical form, Rejoice and Shout is a must-see and see-again.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Cost of a Soul
    While Kirkpatrick does a fine job in establishing a gritty inner-city milieu and a collection of more than credible street characters caught up in an endless cycle of crime and violence, his body count reaches the proportions of the worst sort of studio schlock. Going for a shock effect, he instead strains credulity and risks unintended laughs.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    How to Live Forever
    How To Live Forever is less about how to delay or defeat death than a film about what gives life meaning.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 10 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Big Bang
    Without Antonio Banderas, The Big Bang would be a whimper of a movie, too awful to watch.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Everything Must Go
    The film just doesn't mine enough humor or drama from this situation. Meanwhile most of the developments are wholly predictable.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    There Be Dragons
    British writer-director Roland Joffé dips a toe into explosive material - the Spanish Civil War, betrayal, sainthood, Opus Dei - but all these big themes and characters slip from his grasp.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Last Night
    Last Night is a sex tease, but that makes it sound more exciting than it ever becomes.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Jumping the Broom
    A wedding comedy that grows increasingly unfunny with each passing minute.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Something Borrowed
    Doesn't so much borrow from other movies as settle into a comfort zone of raising provocative questions regarding love, commitment and marriage only to dismiss them with a brush of a hand as so much dandruff.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Prom
    The movie has a cheerful good nature and a solid cast of youngsters - including Aimee Teegarden and Thomas McDonell - but any resemblance between this and real high school is, of course, purely coincidental.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    To call this movie fascinating is akin to calling the Grand Canyon large.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    So don't tell Spurlock he can't have his cake and eat it too. In Greatest Movie, he gleefully accepts his sponsorships on camera just to show you how wrong this all is.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Zokkomon
    Zokkomon gives Indian youngsters not only their first super hero but, even more tantalizing, he is a young boy "terrorizing" susceptible adults in a small village to the increasingly delight of the town's children.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    African Cats
    The cinematography and editing are as superb as the film's feline stars are photogenic and heroic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Princess of Montpensier
    One of the finest costume dramas in a long while.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 0 Kirk Honeycutt
    Your Highness
    There is little worse in the movie world than a spoof that falls flat on its over-costumed butt, but that's what you get with Your Highness.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Kirk Honeycutt
    Arthur
    In the end, it isn't so much that the New Arthur isn't the Old Arthur. Rather it's the anti-Arthur.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Wretches & Jabberers
    A documentary about autism that's nearly perfect in doing what an advocacy documentary should do: show rather than tell, entertain rather than preach.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Hop
    Hop delivers plenty of wit, verve and surreal mayhem to entice even the post-adolescent crowd into this jolly (and strangely Christmas-like) Easter egg hunt.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Soul Surfer
    A true story of courage, determination and guts that deserves a more exciting approach.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Wrecked
    Never less than gripping.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The 5th Quarter
    In The 5th Quarter, the filmmakers' hearts are in the right place but the execution couldn't be more wrong-headed.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    This time, tedium sets in early and never loosens its grip. The gags are obvious, predictable and dull.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Limitless
    Limitless should be so much smarter than it is.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Source Code
    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.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    I Am
    Documentaries have been coming down on humanity so hard in recent years -- from "An Inconvenient Truth" to the latest Oscar winner, "Inside Job" -- that it's refreshing to bask in a bit of optimism coming from a nonfictional film.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Lincoln Lawyer
    The film is only "superior" though, not great. The themes feel shopworn and devotee of crime fiction can point to the any number of antecedents for these characters.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Black Death
    Horror film buffs like to giggle as much as scream but there're no giggles here.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Mars Needs Moms
    The three most important things in movies are story, story, story so the movie never comes off as the considerable achievement it truly is.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Beastly
    Rarely do films from Hollywood emerge in such an inane manner. Its rote characters are inevitably in predictable situations with no subtext or subtlety to any of their predicaments.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Take Me Home Tonight
    Michael Dowse's aggressively unfunny film which seeks the lowest common denominator in nearly every scene.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Imperialists Are Still Alive!
    The film is fresh and funny, but it is also meandering, at times vague and defiantly uncommercial.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Happythankyoumoreplease
    It might even live up to that title: When it ends, you wouldn't mind a bit more, please.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Skateland
    Skateland is every coming-of-age-after-high-school movie you've ever seen with a formulaic plot and well-worn characters.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Of Gods and Men
    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.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
    Won't likely disappoint fans of men-in-drag comedy but doesn't offer much that's original or funny.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    I Am Number Four
    The movie is a mixed bag, with many of the elements fun and intriguing, but since this is also a Michael Bay-produced movie, CG monsters and cartoon bad guys gum up a third act.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Vanishing on 7th Street
    Whatever one's view of Christian evangelical beliefs, from strictly a horror-film standpoint the movie needs a better villain.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)
    Easily one of the most dynamic cinematic portraits of that decaying, vibrant, impossible city ever made; it treats the city itself as a character.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Dilemma
    The Dilemma is so tone deaf to its themes that it thinks it's a light and slightly rude Vince Vaughn movie. It's not.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Season of the Witch
    Cage supplies energy but no depth in his portrayal of a disillusioned knight. Ditto that for Perlman, who never feels comfortable in the sidekick role so he pretty much goes through the (exaggerated) motions.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Biutiful
    Biutiful has a strong, linear narrative drive. Nevertheless, and most of all, it's a gorgeous, melancholy tone poem about love, fatherhood and guilt.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Country Strong
    Feste, who has one previous effort as a writer-director, last year's "The Greatest," fails here to do the most basic thing -- give an audience a rooting interest, or any interest at all, in these four troubled people.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Gulliver's Travels
    While not the worst in recent 3D films, Gulliver's Travels is more gimmicky than a crackling good yarn.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Love and Other Drugs
    In the end, this is a smart movie that could have been smarter. The script feels like it was a draft or so away from total clarity and focus. But the energy of the cast and a dive into an unfamiliar world make the movie rather addictive.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Faster
    Stripped for action without a moment wasted on unnecessary dialogue, exposition or nuances.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Yogi Bear
    Yogi is still smarter than the average bear, but Yogi Bear is much less smart than most of the year's kid-friendly cartoons.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Tiny Furniture
    How she (Dunham) made her movie is more impressive or at least unique than the actual story she chooses to tell.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    The King's Speech
    It perhaps started with "The Queen," continued with "Young Victoria" and now achieves the most intimate glimpse inside the royal camp to date with The King's Speech.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Burlesque
    Women will love this, and men won't mind the eye candy either, so it looks like this Screen Gems release can't help becoming a hit.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Queen of the Lot
    The film starts out as a gentle Hollywood satire, shifts abruptly into a comedy of (bad) manners, turns into a crime story and deviates into a suicide attempt before it reverts to a Hollywood satire with a happy ending. No Hollywood satire should ever have a happy ending.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Rabbit Hole
    The film does achieve moments of catharsis, but it can be heavy going.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Fighter
    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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Warrior's Way
    One ticket buys you cowboys, samurais, gangsters, ninjas, spaghetti Westerns, Hong Kong martial artists, knife throwers and even Fellini-esque circus performers. But like kimchi pasta, some things aren't meant to mix.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Black Swan
    Indeed, White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Today's Special
    Not hurting matters for foreign and Indian film devotees, the film features two icons of Indian cinema, Madhur Jaffrey and Naseeruddin Shah.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Morning Glory
    It merely recycles 1987's "Broadcast News" with only a single reference to YouTube.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    In retelling the still-astonishing story of the political career of Eliot Spitzer, a shooting star whose spectacular crash might forever obscure his accomplishments, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney has all the ingredients for a potboiler: greed, corruption, sex, power, overweening ambition and jaw-dropping hubris.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Fair Game
    Liman outfits the film with spy-thriller packaging worthy of his "The Bourne Identity," so the film probably will attract above-average coin and possibly awards attention.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    For Colored Girls
    (Perry) style is too crude and stagy for Shange's transformative evocation of black female life, and his moralizing strikes exactly the wrong notes to express the pain and longing that cries out from her heated poetry.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Welcome to the Rileys
    The movie never overcomes the triteness of its premise.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    The movie features a great finish, where three movies' worth of subplots and characters dovetail into a breathtaking climax and final confrontation that is positively soul satisfying.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Inhale
    The final act hits like a gut-punch. Worst fears are confirmed, and the protagonist faces a moral dilemma no father should have to confront. Kormakur and his writers give their protagonist no easy way out.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Hereafter
    The film never is less than intriguing, right from its tour de force opening sequence, and often full of insights into why people long for answers, sometimes with great urgency.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Stone
    There is not a credible moment in this overly calculated melodrama.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Kirk Honeycutt
    Corpse Bride
    A wondrous flight of fancy, a stop-motion-animated treat brimming with imaginative characters, evocative sets, sly humor, inspired songs and a genuine whimsy that seldom finds its way into today's movies.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Kirk Honeycutt
    Avatar
    A fully believable, flesh-and-blood (albeit not human flesh and blood) romance is the beating heart of "Avatar." Cameron has never made a movie just to show off visual pyrotechnics: Every bit of technology in "Avatar" serves the greater purpose of a deeply felt love story.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Robots
    If sheer cleverness were everything, Robots would be the best computer-animated cartoon yet…Yet, unlike the very best CG animation, Robots doesn't quite connect with the emotions and humor for which one yearns in cartoons.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    War of the Worlds
    Might be too realistic for its own good: The film takes perhaps a little too much glee in its abilities to manufacture mayhem. That being said, the ride is extraordinary.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Asylum
    A psychological thriller without bothering much with psychology. Come to think of it, the thrills are pretty much missing, as well.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Da Vinci Code
    Da Vinci never rises to the level of a guilty pleasure. Too much guilt. Not enough pleasure.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 10 Kirk Honeycutt
    Memory
    A muddled and routine murder mystery tricked up with a science fiction gimmick that wouldn't pass muster for a "Twilight Zone" episode. The writing is poor, but the direction is even poorer. This is a film to delete from one's memory bank.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Pacifier
    Vin Diesel is out of his element in this lame family comedy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Valkyrie
    Singer has crafted a fine film. One just wishes for greater details -- and a different ending.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Katyn
    The period sets, costumes and cinematography all superbly recreate the brutal era, grand illusions and everyday suffering of the Poles under both the Nazis and the Soviets.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Ray
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Summer Palace
    At the heart of the film is a powerful performance by the beautiful and most promising Hao Lei as its tempestuous, complex heroine.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Young Black Stallion
    Designed to maximize the visual opportunities for Imax's cameras even as it minimizes the dramatic conflicts that make for a satisfying moviegoing experience.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The 40 Year Old Virgin
    Sticking to one joke in an unconscionably long film makes for a very stale, witless and repetitive comedy.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Evening
    What a cast but what a disappointment.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    City of Ember
    Stalls at the intersection of fantasy and science fiction.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    State of Play
    There is nothing we haven't seen here before in terms of chases, intrigue and betrayals, so for all its A-list cast and production values, the film comes off as routine.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    The details are what matters, and thanks to a cast of all-star British elders and a mischievous sense of humor, the filmmakers bring those details to vivid life.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Revolver
    The film's pretentious style and fractured storytelling preclude any audience involvement in the coy melodrama.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Doubt
    The film is nothing if not provocative.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Runaways
    The vigor and pace is electric, and the movie features three showy performances by Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    Everything today's young audiences are conditioned to want: incessant noise, jumpy editing, torrential music, shallow, overblown characters and sheer emptiness at its core. Imagine yourself trapped inside a two-hour video game, and you've got the Night Watch experience.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Keeping Mum
    Amusing dark English comedy produces its share of chuckles.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Tales from Earthsea
    An artistically arresting yet narratively lame and strangely unfocused cartoon aimed at older children and young adults.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    Director Jean-Francois Richet shows a career in crime with pulse-pounding moments of pure cinema, then lets you decide what to make of this homicidal sociopath.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Appaloosa
    A fine dramatic comedy with fresh characters, witty dialogue and a keen interest in how relationships must have developed among frontier folks, tyrannical ranchers, no-nonsense lawmen and -- oh, yes -- the complicated women on that frontier.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    The House of the Devil
    This is the perfect illustration of the banality of most scare movies.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Fred Claus
    The film isn't just not funny, it is off-putting.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Butterfly Effect
    An entertaining piece of supernatural nonsense whose sheer audacity disarms all (well, nearly all) skepticism.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Golden Compass
    A "soft" epic, a film touching on childhood fantasies with sturdy, unwavering characters driven to evil or good. More "Harry Potter," in other words, than "Beowulf."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Notorious
    For a man apparently making his first film, Woolard carries the movie like a pro. Cross your fingers that this is no fluke, for this guy could be a real comer.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    He's Just Not That Into You
    All of this results in way too much relationship chatter and not nearly enough comedy, romance or even dysfunctional relationships. We want to laugh -- but at what?
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Eros
    Only one of the three episodes of the anthology film Eros delivers on the title's promise.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Beowulf
    Director Robert Zemeckis not only deploys 21st century movie technology at its finest to turn the heroic poem into a vibrant, nerve-tingling piece of pop culture, but his film actually makes sense of Beowulf. In Zemeckis' hands, it's an intriguing look at a hero as a flawed human being.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Spirit
    It is truly a mess.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Changing Times
    A thoughtful and reflective love story about the impact of time on true love.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
    The curious thing here is that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor rewrote this long-in-development screenplay. Yet the authors of such smart comedies as "Sideways," "About Schmidt" and "Citizen Ruth" can't move the film away from the world of easy laughs and sitcom jokes into a realm where sexual prejudices and presumptions get examined in a whimsical yet insightful manner.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Brick Lane
    Beautifully acted and written so its themes are touched upon glancingly rather than with full force.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Cold Mountain
    A somber, often downbeat depiction of human savagery and treachery as well as of human kindness. Writer-director Anthony Minghella has meticulously crafted an intimate epic.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    My Sister's Keeper
    If you're going to make a weepy, there's no reason you can't make it with intelligence and insight as the makers of My Sister's Keeper have done.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Stepfather
    This remake turns a fondly remembered horror/thriller into a mild and tedious suspense film.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Dear John
    The film, while heartfelt and directed by multiple-Oscar nominee Lasse Hallstrom, is dramatically stillborn.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    This is a discouragingly limp movie in which nothing is at stake.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kirk Honeycutt
    Sideways
    Hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Beautiful Country
    The film achieves its power through a careful gathering of crucial details, in wordless glances, cruelties of nature and of man and the relentless determination to gain the promised land.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Happy Endings
    A real audience pleaser, so long as that audience is mentally agile and adult, for it comes at you from odd angles and features three distinct story lines and 10 main characters.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Prestige
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    "Phoenix" might go down as the problematic film, full of plot but little fun.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    This fascinating relationship gets smothered in pointlessly long takes, repetitive scenes, grim Western landscapes and mumbled, heavily accented dialogue.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Honeydripper
    His heart -- and musical soul -- is in the right place, but the film makes you at times uncomfortable with black and Southern stereotypes that may hinder some from fully enjoying an otherwise benign and cheerful tall tale of the Saturday night when rock came to rural Alabama.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    Legally bland.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Mystic River
    Arguably Eastwood's most ambitious film since his multi-Oscar winner, "Unforgiven." But it lacks the power and depth of that film's dynamic script by David Webb Peoples.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Shrink
    You do wish Pate and writer Thomas Moffett had gone for more wit given the outlandishness of the melodrama since it would be more fun to laugh at this than take it seriously.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    De-Lovely
    A sprightly musical revue built around Cole Porter songs and a few biographical tidbits culled from his extraordinary life.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Invictus
    A temperate, evenhanded perhaps overly timid film about an intemperate time in South Africa.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Phantom of the Opera
    What the film most damagingly lacks though is a sense of mystery and danger.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    My Date with Drew
    Indeed a wary viewer must get past the film's infatuation with celebrity culture to enjoy this movie's charms. But charms it has.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 20 Kirk Honeycutt
    A Sound of Thunder
    A gloriously lead-footed excursion into time travel with all the accoutrements of 1950s science fiction: an absurd plot, cliched characters, corny effects and a race against time to save mankind.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Down in the Valley
    Edward Norton serves as lead actor and producer, but even his star power won't help this misfire reach a wide domestic audience.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Street Kings
    "Kings" covers familiar territory but does so with ruthless efficiency, intense performances and a densely packed plot designed to highlight the moral issues that most concern Ayer and Ellroy.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    National Treasure
    If you're going to tell a wildly implausible tale of fortune hunting and unlikely heroes, you could do worse than National Treasure.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Constant Gardener
    His (Fernando Meirelles) impressionistic, guerilla style of filmmaking works surprisingly well in capturing the hypnotic urgency of le Carre's fiction. And his viewpoint is less British and more Third World.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Kirk Honeycutt
    Apocalypse Now Redux
    Perhaps returning to Apocalypse Now will reinvigorate the once brilliant storyteller. Certainly, the images, colors and design still astonish. And let's hope that Apocalypse Now Redux will become the definitive version. For the movie hits home even harder now. [14 May 2001]
    • The Hollywood Reporter
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Mother and Child
    Some may find the film overly schematic, but Garcia smartly uses three parallel narratives to probe the extraordinary nature of motherhood.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    How to Eat Fried Worms
    Boys will be happy at the mild grossness; parents will tolerate anything that entertains their hyperkinetic boys; and sisters will agree with the film's lone girl.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Painted Veil
    The film is unusual in that it is a co-production with the Chinese. Whatever difficulties this imposed on the Western filmmakers, the reward is a period film that feel authentic to its time and place.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Capturing the Friedmans
    Utterly compelling account of a true-life criminal investigation where "truth" can never be pinned down.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Love Hurts
    The acting is overly broad, so even the dimmest light bulb in the audience gets the gags.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    A downbeat story line layered with philosophical discourses will restrict the audience to fans of the animated genre.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Weather Man
    In The Weather Man, Nicolas Cage doesn't so much play a protagonist, warts and all, as he plays a protagonist who is all warts.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    For all its biographical truth, Get Rich's journey into a ghetto of hustlers, gangstas and mindless violence is all too familiar.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Kung Fu Panda
    The stroke of genius is, of course, the film's hero -- the big, lovable bear that is the Chinese panda.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Shwaas
    While the film sometimes plays like an hour TV medical drama padded to reach feature length, Sawant achieves touching, naturalistic performances from a fine ensemble cast.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Good Morning, Night
    The writer-director's inquiry into this tragedy makes for a moving and intelligent film, but the dark story never feels fully realized.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Sherlock Holmes
    Sherlock Holmes goes wrong in many ways except for one -- at the boxoffice.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Visual Acoustics
    A really terrific, intensely focused documentary on a fascinating personality.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    It took three films, but The Twilight Saga finally nails just the right tone in Eclipse, a film that neatly balances the teenage operatic passions from Stephenie Meyer's novels with the movies' supernatural trappings.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Burn After Reading
    Joel and Ethan Coen clearly are in a prankish mood, knocking out a minor piece of silliness with all the trappings of an A-list studio movie.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Oliver Twist
    The biggest surprise in Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist is that there are no surprises.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    I Think I Love My Wife
    In I Think I Love My Wife, Chris Rock does something entirely unexpected. He isn't funny.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 20 Kirk Honeycutt
    Downloading Nancy
    The Swedish video and commercial director seeks artistic adventure but winds up with pointless self-indulgence.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Open Water
    Could develop a cult following. But it is hard to envision repeat viewings or any great number of people willing, even vicariously, to undergo the couple's ordeal.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Despicable Me
    Despicable doesn't measure up to Pixar at its best. Nonetheless, it's funny, clever and warmly animated with memorable characters.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Pride
    Terrence Howard delivers another solid lead performance and competition swimming is a new arena for such films. Nonetheless, Pride is just plain trite.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Kirk Honeycutt
    She Hate Me
    How can a director as savvy as Lee make so many errors of judgment regarding taste, tone, intention and dramatic structure?
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Days of Glory
    With strong visuals and even stronger emotions, Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory makes a powerful war film about a particularly unique subject.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Private Fears in Public Places
    This is a minor film from a master, which is disappointing, but nevertheless it has its charms, most notably in the acting by a cast of stage and screen veterans.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Girl Who Played with Fire
    Noir never has been this dark.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
    A dull actioner that looks like a bad video game.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Nothing anchors the lighter-than-air story as it drifts away under the direction of Stephen Norrington ("Blade") into an FX stratosphere where wit, character and vigorous storytelling cease to matter.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Land of the Lost
    Lame sketch comedy, an uninspired performance from Will Ferrell and an overall failure of the imagination turn Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost into a lethargic meander through a wilderness of misfiring gags.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The World's Fastest Indian
    Hopkins' performance flat-out works.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Jack Goes Boating
    Hoffman emerges as a confident film director with visual flair and, no surprise, a remarkable ability to maximize his fellow actors' work.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Troy
    A protracted and uninvolving affair in which men battle over issues that audiences may struggle to find compelling, and no central figure emerges to take command of the film.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Stay
    There's really not much of an audience for this picture. The movie demands that its viewers put the fragmented images and information together like an intellectual jigsaw puzzle, but it never gives those viewers a good reason to do so.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha
    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.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Honeymooners
    A lackluster affair, devoid of laughs and just about anything else one might construe as entertainment.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Herbie Fully Loaded
    Herbie: Fully Loaded is, pure and simple, a children's film.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Groomsmen
    Edward Burns' best riff yet on guys trying to sort out their feelings about women.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
    Turning away from his highly entertaining epics "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," Zhang Yimou goes for utter simplicity in Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, a film of much distilled wit and wisdom.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Kirk Honeycutt
    Flushed Away
    Delicious slapstick, droll wit and terrific characters make Aardman's first venture in CG cartooning a great success.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Freaky Friday
    The new "Freaky" plays the obvious gags in ways both surprising and imaginative.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    Kim Ki-duk keeps dialogue to a minimum and actions simple in what is virtually a two-character piece. Humor arrives organically, often resulting in hearty laughs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Kingdom of Heaven
    Fulfills the requirements of grand-scale moviemaking while serving as a timely reminder that in the conflict between Christianity and Islam it was the Christians who picked the first fight.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    North Country
    The issue of sexual politics so dominates the story that it's a relief when an emotional showdown involves family rather than workplace issues. Not so surprisingly, these are the movie's best scenes.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Basic Instinct 2
    Morrissey gives a stiff, awkward performance, while Stone moves dangerously close to overplaying the femme fatale. There is little if any intrigue in the story or the characters. Even the murders don't even seem to matter much.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    All the King's Men
    Audience can certainly find entertainment in this movie, so long as no one takes things too seriously. One suspects, however, that Zaillian and a vast team of producers and executive producers that includes political consultant and pundit James Carville believe they are making a serious commentary on American politics. It comes closer to kitsch.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Underdog
    The movie isn't nearly as bad as you would expect when the studio holds its only press screening the night before a national opening.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    S.W.A.T.
    Noisy, standard-issue cop actioner.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 10 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Brown Bunny
    In his second feature as a director, Gallo acts as writer, director, producer, star, cinematographer, production designer and editor. Thus, the failure is all his.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Being Julia
    A delightful though wafer-thin starring vehicle for one of our finest actresses, Annette Bening.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Kirk Honeycutt
    Deck the Halls
    The sheer nastiness of the jealous one-upmanship and angry sabotage puts a damper on the yuletide comedy. You're much better off watching a DVD of "Bad Santa."
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    My Blueberry Nights
    The director is chasing a mood here -- a mood, an atmosphere and feelings -- much as he did in "In the Mood for Love."
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Shade
    A dramatic thriller with a large cast playing the hell out of some very juicy roles. Nieman's script shuffles nimbly among an array of colorful characters and offers unexpected twists that keep you off-balance.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Marie Antoinette
    In the revisionist Marie Antoinette, writer-director Sofia Coppola and actress Kirsten Dunst take a remote and no doubt misunderstood historical figure, the controversial and often despised Queen of France at the time of the French Revolution, and brings her into sharp focus as a living, breathing human being with flaws, foibles, passions, intelligence and warm affections.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Open Range
    In spite of its portentousness, the film does engage one.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Last Song
    The movie so deftly mixes sentimentality, romance and bathos in just the right measures that her fans and maybe new ones will enjoy the new Miley.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Vacancy
    While the sadism doesn't stoop -- rise? -- to the level of the "Saw" horror-thrillers, Vacancy does have a name cast.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Kirk Honeycutt
    Step Brothers
    The only thing that can explain middle-aged men acting like 6-year-olds is mental retardation, and there's nothing funny about that. The idea of middle-aged actors playing adolescents isn't much funnier. Put it this way: Such an idea does not make for an inexhaustible source of comedy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Sleep Dealer
    The freshness and ingenuity of this techno-thriller should spark a cult following among sci-fi fans at the very least, but the film could make inroads among cineastes, adult adventure-seekers and the Latino community as well.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Upside of Anger
    Allen turns the character into a tour de force that unleashes an unexpected comedy about compassion and self-loathing.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Kirk Honeycutt
    Just Friends
    Just lousy.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Grindhouse
    If you were keeping score, it would be Quentin Tarantino 1, Robert Rodriguez 0.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    xXx: State of the Union
    A smooth blend of visual special effects, exceptional stunts, fluid photography, sharp design and a possible best-selling soundtrack.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    Red Eye
    Red Eye has a devilish charm. It pulls just about every nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat trick imaginable, yet gets away with it through what is, admittedly, a clever and original gimmick.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Rumor Has It...
    Aniston gets marooned here: Her comic instincts are muted by all the identity angst, yet there isn't sufficient dramatic material into which she can sink her teeth. Costner strolls through this role with disarming ease.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Yellow Handkerchief
    Four terrific performances make the transition to a U.S. setting go smoothly for British director Udayan Prasad.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Kirk Honeycutt
    Father of My Children
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Kirk Honeycutt
    Fugitive Pieces
    Fugitive Pieces has a sharp, devastating story to tell.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Kirk Honeycutt
    Gran Torino
    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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Kirk Honeycutt
    The Black Dahlia
    The second half feels heavy and unfulfilled, potential greatness reduced to a good movie plagued with problems.
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