Kyle Smith

With its starkly contrasted visuals (fierce blacks, Clorox whites, a dash of unholy crimson), The Spirit may resemble a comic book more than any live-action film yet made, but it makes "Max Payne" look like a gleaming jewel of storytelling by comparison.

Good grindhouse fun until a last act that's like a meeting of a psychoanalysts' convention.

The bad movie in my head was far better than the one on-screen, which offers no twists at all. A twist? There isn't even a curl or a bend.

A comedy that locks up Will Arnett's talent and throws away the key.

As for the script, a wittier director would have spotted the absurd elements and delivered a horror-comedy instead of a straight-faced bore.

Wraps a sari around the kind of suffering-housewife picture that became a cliché 30 years ago.

Although the payoff is creepy, it takes a little too long to arrive -- and when it does, it's about as worn-out as the movie's title.

As for Grant, who hasn't been this sharp since "Love Actually" six years ago, he is once again the prime minister of cute comedy.

Hot Rod started to go wrong at about the time someone in casting said, "You know what? I'll bet America's just about ready for the comedy stylings of Sissy Spacek."

Just when things should be getting exciting and complex, they become repetitive and predictable. Subtext becomes hint becomes statement becomes declaration. For once, Pinter is a little too easy to understand.

Vanessa Redgrave spends Evening dying, and so does Evening.

Combines unpleasantness and stupidity to a degree that would be difficult to match unless you were stuck in bed with a case of the shingles while being forced to watch “The Ghost Whisperer."

It has cult item stamped all over it, and fans of (severely) experimental cinema might see it as a revelation. Most others will find that watching this movie is like having your senses beaten with a rake.

An entertaining but routine rock flick.

A real actioner, generous with the bullets and blood and chase scenes, that simultaneously mocks shoot-'em-ups.

A wink of self-awareness might have made this a guilty pleasure; instead it's a howler along the lines of this fall's "Law Abiding Citizen."

The movie is well-acted, but it's as talky as if it were written for the stage, with fatally slow pacing. Strictly for hard-core Sayles fans and maybe for lovers of American roots music.

The Wrestler offers something to pretty much everyone in the audience. Much like "The Sopranos," it creates a world that might make you feel utterly at home or exhilarated by strange horrors. Maybe both.

Lymelife, set amid marital decay and teen frustration, isn't quite the "American Beauty" of the 516 area code, but it'll do.

A roaring old-school action adventure for kids, with as many mythical beasts as a year at Hogwarts and a healthy dose of smiting without the crazed bloodlust of “300.”

Overrun with malicious goblins, a vengeance-minded pig, a fast-moving troll and a giant horned ogre, but the true source of terror is scarier than all of these combined: New York real estate prices.

A slow ride to nowhere.

Five minutes before The Golden Compass started, I was wondering when it was going to start. Forty minutes into it, I was wondering exactly the same thing.

Remember how "Double Indemnity" featured smart criminals and a smarter investigator? The indie film If I Didn't Care, with its dumb criminals and dumb cops, is a sort of "Double Stupidity."

There is also something surgically sterile. The movie sounds as though it was recorded in a padded chamber instead of a bustling school, and it looks like it came from some alternate world, one that basks in the eternal sunshine of the spotless skin.

The movie takes us on a journey to an ugly, contentious period in our misty, ancient past - all the way back to four months ago, when "Apocalypto" came out.

Arch, wry and dry, with its exquisite wallpaper and impeccably blocked fedoras, Married Life is bracingly malicious noir for a while, a sort of gray-flannel-suit take on the Coen brothers' "Blood Simple." Every character seems morally capable of anything.

I'd call it a depressing soft-core porn flick, but that overstates its titillation factor. Mainly it's just icky.

Not like a lump of coal in your stocking. Coal is useful; you can burn it. This movie is more like a lump of something Blitzen left behind after eating a lot of Mexican food.

Much closer to Scorsese than "Scarface," Notorious gives a heartfelt yet clear-eyed sendoff to the late Brooklyn rapper Christopher Wallace.

Much of this footage might have been illuminating, even fascinating, in 2003. But seven years on, it's ancient history lacking insight, hindsight or a fresh take.

High praise for the movie Mother and Child: It's as good as a TV show. Although it's not as fine as HBO's "In Treatment," a show run by this movie's writer-director, Rodrigo Garcia.

The movie isn't insulting to homosexuals but to comedy.

Needlessly violent? No, Rambo is needfully violent. Johnny R. is a man constructed of violence.

Statham is an essential tough guy, what the Brits call "well'ard," as self-assured as Lee Marvin.

Shouldn’t Moore run his yellow crime-scene tape around the White House instead of Wall Street? Anyway, President Obama said this month that in cases where the government has fully sold its TARP bank holdings, it has gotten back its money plus 17 percent. Damn those capitalist barons, breaking into our treasury and filling it with their filthy money.

State of Play is bordered by the states of absurdity and cliché.

An icky S&M thriller.

Shifting the self-deprecating japery of "High Fidelity" from a record store to a quiz show makes Starter for 10 a sweetly endearing date movie.

A wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn't care.

Hunger is almost silent, most of its sounds being unintelligible moans and screams.

A popcorn picture that thinks it’s “The Last Emperor,” The Karate Kid is about as likely to grab your youngster’s attention as any other propaganda film made by the Chinese government.

The Tillman Story purports to be an exposé of the cover-up of the death by friendly fire of the Army Ranger and one time NFL star Pat Tillman. But, provocative and colorful as the film is, it does the very thing it denounces -- massaging the facts to seize Tillman for a political agenda.

An invigorating and surprising journey.

Sex Drive has shaky moments, and its smutty gags aren't edited so much as slammed together.

Raunchy frat comedies are as hard to pull off as any other kind because they have to keep surprising the audience, and The Hangover does with a bizarre series of uproarious situations with explanations that just about stay within the bounds of plausibility.

Say hello to my leetle dagger! Shakespeare meets "Scarface" in an Aussie adaptation of "Macbeth" gone gangsta.

A caper comedy that forgot to put in the laughs.

A great abortion documentary might leave you guessing which side of the debate the director was on. Lake of Fire is not that film, but it comes somewhat close.

On the M. Night Shyamalan scale of stupid endings, The Prestige isn't as bad as "The Village" but it's comparable to "Unbreakable."

The bite and bark of Underdog are both pretty awful, but little kids might take this pooch for a walk.

Ice Cube's well-worn performance as a wise old geezer is the only bright spot in a movie that otherwise fumbles every opportunity to be funny, exciting or insightful.

Douchebag belies its abrasive title with a soft touch for two wobbly souls.

Superb Noo Yawk attitude, dialogue and performances (including one from the essential Kevin Corrigan, now well into his second decade of being indie movies' dirtbag on demand) keep the movie lively and tart.

Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

It is a better option than the third "Santa Clause."

A boldly original undertaking: It's the first movie ever to come up with the idea of remaking "The Truman Show."

The ingredients are there for a cute con game, but instead the movie turns out to be a mushy melodrama.

As the movie's feet get stuck in its own misery, it made me appreciate "Trainspotting" all over again - its wit, how it moved, the way any outcome for its characters seemed possible.

There is too much funny here for a movie (even though it continues into the closing credits). Step Brothers should be a TV show.

Sherlock Holmes dumbs down a century-old synonym for intelligence with S&M gags, witless sarcasm, murky bombast and twirling action-hero moves that belong in a ninja flick.

We keep waiting for a story, or at least some comedy, but none ever materializes. The dialogue makes Algebra II seem fascinating by comparison.

It's the Food Network meets The Weather Channel meets . . . the Scary Doomsday Preachers Channel.

The chick comedy-drama Catch and Release may look bland, but it's not. It's worse. To rise to the level of blandness, it would need to have a few gallons of Tabasco dumped into it.

At times Halloween II dances on the line between alarming and disgusting, and it doesn’t all hold together — I couldn’t figure out what the goblin banquet was doing in this movie. But if it was meant to freak me out, it worked.

As with "Capturing the Friedmans," the documentary is grueling to sit through. Yet the greasy, guilty thrill of being privy to your neighbors' most intimate dramas makes it impossible to stop watching.

Has buckets of gentle sincerity. Since there aren't any dumb jokes or hip visuals, it's easy to get caught up in the simple messages: Be good to your sister, don't be a bully, use your imagination in a pinch.

If anything is frightening here, it's the scenes of the small children being indoctrinated into an organic lifestyle and being made to sing, at least three times, a song about the evils supposedly lurking in the environment around them.

A dreary message movie.

A lukewarm film about what might happen to three New York City friends if the draft were reinstated, proves that even the most controversial of topics can be the basis for the dullest indie films.

It follows exactly the same path as both "Glory Road" (except that was basketball) and "Gridiron Gang" (football).

Larry the Cable Guy channels both Moe and Curly in the Three Stooges-go-to-war comedy Delta Farce.

Buzzes around in random menace for an hour until its third act, when - zzzzzt! - it flies straight into the zapper.

The movie all but proclaims U2 the world's best rock band. Somewhere, Mick Jagger's jaws are grinding.

Even if the movie had more shadings, though, Marshall's political point would undo his he-man action-flick format. If you're looking for a rallying cry to make the emotions sizzle, "Quagmire!" isn't it.

How this thing got made in Hollywood is a mystery, but I laughed at most of it, especially the mean stereotypes about the French and the even meaner stereotype about England's soccer team.

It's a cute idea that a better filmmaker than writer-director Michael Schroeder could have done a lot with.

The film is narrated by Russell Crowe, whose star power is probably the only reason it's being released here.

Po speaks loudly and carries big shtick. Let the rest of the world cringe at our hyperconfidence, our charisma, our pure awesomeness.

The film has enough funny lines and weird situations - some comedy business with a sex chair lovingly constructed by the Clooney character is the highlight - that it could age into a cult film like "The Big Lebowski."

The banality of evil has met its match in the banality of Good, a Holocaust parable that barely registers a pulse.

Even for a horror movie, The Crazies is a bore, and we're talking about the most boring genre this side of dysfunctional-family indie drama.

This documentary, which begins at a low key, gradually becomes intense and psychologically complicated.

Alfred Molina gives a warm and engaging performance as an occupying British soldier.

Not very haunty.

Though Despicable Me is a little ragged on story, it's got a lot of imagination and a heart as warm as a fluffy kitty.

Dispenses with much of the caramel gooeyness of the first two episodes in favor of decent action, some heartfelt tender moments and even a splash of wit. This time they’re actually Twi-ing.

Actors tell us that dying is easy, comedy is hard. But comedies about dying are hardest of all.

The potential for suspense is dropped (there's a subplot about the receptionist's flight from her violent husband, but he appears in only a couple of scenes) in favor of lots of hushed interludes in which nothing happens.

Doesn't offer plot or an inquiry into the evil in men's hearts. It simply wallows in the filth and inhumanity that surround a father and his pre-adolescent son as they march across the shattered remains of this country.

All three segments are heavy on blame-America speeches, which may be a fair snapshot of Iraqi opinion, but it's strange how fond Longley seems to be of Saddam Hussein.

One of the pleasures of films about being stuck in a place -- "The Wicker Man" is maybe the best example -- comes from the skill with which the writers keep their protagonist locked in his box. On this test, The Last Exorcism pretty much flunks.

Watching I'm Reed Fish is like being forced to read the diary of a dull-witted teen who is breathlessly beginning a lifelong fascination with himself.

Thanks to an unexpected twist and a clever motivation lurking in the back story of the super-villain, G-Force has enough going on to more or less maintain grown-up interest, and there's plenty to please the kiddies.

The movie's last words are "This is how legends are born." Make that stillborn, because when the makers of this one pitch the sequel, the only answer is going to be, "Ah HA HA HA!"

The film is a failure if it can't convince us that these two people belong together. It can't, and barely tries.

It's fine for kids, though, and it doesn't try too hard.

What the Charles Darwin biopic Creation mainly creates is a do-over for Paul Bettany: This time he gets to have a beautiful mind.

You know those one-joke "Saturday Night Live" sketches that start to age after six minutes? Blades of Glory is one joke that lasts 93 minutes, costs $11 and could involve sitting next to a guy who retells the movie into his cellphone.

This is a one-joke skit that trots in a straight line, and your enjoyment of it will depend entirely on how many times you need to see gonzo sheep rip out human entrails.

What happens when several characters' lives intertwine with the maggot-infested corpse of a prostitute in The Dead Girl? A whole lot of crying.

Almost without exception, the men are either sickening deviants or wise mentors while the ladies tend to be kickboxing hipsters or victims of sexual abuse (many are both).

Mongol really isn't worth leaving your yurt for.

A warning: One scene in the middle is almost outrageously cruel and graphic. If you're the type of person who has to be reminded, "It's only a movie," stay away. This is the most depraved and dreadful piece of screen horror since last year's "Funny Games."

A depressing and tedious movie.

The best Parisian action movie of the week is District 13: Ultimatum, a serviceable thriller with a lefty message.

The movie begins to wear out its welcome even before a conclusion of breathtaking corniness.

This spoof of "The Da Vinci Code," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "The Chronicles of Narnia" and other recent blockbusters piles up sex gags, toilet gags and make-you-gag gags.

So what starts out as fascinating sci-fi becomes just fi, and winds up pulp fi.

Tired? This series is as exhausted as Shrek after a day of baby wrangling and diaper changing.

It puts a conservative twist on Michael Moore-ism, with campy stock footage, deadpan humor, mocking musical cues and less-than-ingenuous questions.

Rickman has fun playing a lecherous old bastard of a professor in Nobel Son, a pulpy would-be comic thriller, but the movie doesn't deserve him.

The insult comedy is sometimes brilliant.

Holmes, with Alice Cooper hair and crazy Jim Carrey eyes, looks terrible and acts worse, unless this movie is unintentionally a lobotomy documentary. Whatever could have happened to her in the last couple of years to zap the talent out of her like this?

Martin Short as Jack Frost, means we're getting a turkey and a ham for the holidays. As for Tim Allen as Scott Calvin, an ordinary guy who took over Santa's job by chance, he's more like a tasteless lump of mashed potatoes.

There have been worse horror flicks, but although this one offers a few scares, it doesn't have a lot of imagination.

Stretched both timewise and for plausibility.

Role Models isn't a classic like "Superbad" or as hilarious as this summer's "Step Brothers," but it's excellent fun for males in the mental age bracket of 14 to 22, which is most males.

Unless the director was aiming for a Victorian "Black Christmas," though, he overshot his mark

The movie hopes to be regarded as childlike too, but there's a difference between kid-friendly and just regular old dumb.

Among the year's ultraviolent pulp movies, "Sin City" was prettier and "The Devil's Rejects" more focused.

"Babe" was a classic because of its gentle simplicity. Charlotte's Web, with its insistently "magical" theme music, an overbearing climax and a trough full of bad jokes, is merely adequate.

The film is occasionally heavy-handed, and the priest character is almost absurdly saintly, but there is an awful power to scenes such as one in which the Europeans are evacuated on trucks.

The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.

The Last King of Scotland is a parable shocking in its truth, jolting in its lack of sentimentality, Shakespearean in its vision of the doctor's catastrophic flaw.

Like one of those five-minute featurettes on star athletes deployed to soak up time on the pregame show -- expanded to a paralytic length.

There's a reason you've never seen the words "Will Forte" topping the billing of a major motion picture. After the throbbing flameball of unfunny that is MacGruber, you never will again.

Williams appears to be having trouble keeping his eyes open, and the audience will, too.

The movie is neither an affecting romance (Coco even considers marrying Balsan because "I'd achieve social status") nor an inspiring success story. Chanel sold herself to one guy, happened to get customers through him, and took a start-up loan from another lover.

As things pick up in the second half, the splendid photography and tempestuous John Adams score cannot quite conceal that the film is uncomfortably close to being an extravagantly elongated, Fendi-clad episode of "Dynasty."

Edward Norton plays Ray, a (possibly) honest cop wearing an unexplained scar positioned just so on his cheek. It looks like it was bought in the markdown aisle of Halloween Mart on Nov. 1.

Everything is predictable three scenes in advance, and it's all stale, stuck, stolid.

Though thin on story, the film shows poise and vision, using bleak cinema-realité techniques with chilling effect. Campos promises to be heard from again.

Among cutesy pop musical trios aimed at nondiscerning audiences, I'll take Alvin and Co. over the Jonas Brothers any day.

October Country doesn't really have a point, or a story, but it's an almost unbearably vivid portrait of four generations in a single working-class family.

If I wanted to spend $10.75 making myself sick, I'd buy a bottle of cheap tequila.

The computer-generated flying effects are the only reason to see the movie, but at some point somebody left the computer on too long, so it went ahead and spat out the script.

The movie is at its best when Gekko gets back into the game, with his impish smile and his perfect hair.

Beaded with amusing moments.

A sometimes insightful, sometimes absurdly devotional but steadily engaging film.

It’s as if a ruthless gang of Richie Cunninghams terrorized the Fonzies of the world.

The more dramatic revelations and tragic inevitabilities that turn up, the harder it is not to laugh. Give credit to its maker for directing with an earnestness suggesting a pretentious 22-year-old. Having passed through the phases of Interesting Apprentice, Mad Genius, Chastened Bankrupt and Shameless Wage Slave, Coppola at 70 may be the world's oldest student filmmaker.

One of the few monster-crocodile movies that simultaneously tries to rip off "Jaws" and "Meet the Press."

The movie approaches the final scene with a straight face, but it left the audience giggling spasmodically. This script probably should have gone all the way and thrown in a few quips: If your movie is a joke, at least be intentionally funny.

As a former president of the United States remarked, "Childrens do learn," and what they learn in the heartbreaking yet thrillingly hopeful documentary Waiting for 'Superman' is that adults are finally starting to notice how badly kids have been betrayed by teachers unions.

Its characters are likable enough to settle in with for a pleasant hour and a half.

Their conversation is so insipid that watching this movie is no more interesting than talking to any random New York couple about what makes them tick.

On a technical level Buried is impressive, at times blisteringly suspenseful.

WARNING: Do not take your mom to Georgia Rule unless she's Roseanne Barr. You may expect a three-generational chick flick, but what you get is a child-rape comedy.

A barbell of a movie that carries some weight at either end. What's in between is purely utilitarian, though.

The movie is still a mess, stumbling from comic-relief scenes that aren't funny to a job-training interlude in which we learn that, among other things, owls make excellent . . . blacksmiths?

With its array of chases and shootouts and a sinister political plot, the movie at least holds your attention and keeps things brisk-ish. But every scene still bears the tags of the place from which it was stolen.

Earth, you had me at baby polar bears.

There can only ever be one Bad Lieutenant: Harvey Keitel. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, pretend tough guy (Malibu accent, long floppy coiffure, nervous smile), is more like the Bad Used-Car Salesman.

An amusingly preposterous last act keeps you guessing, or maybe keeps you ducking, as it lets rip an avalanche of startling revelations and double-crosses. Nothing is what it seems - unless it seems cheesy.

A pleasingly weird, dryly funny little indie.

The bickering and mishaps make for a semi-enjoyable if low-impact film that may appeal to the kind of nostalgics who buy Time-Life collections of '60s songmeisters.

Turistas has mastered the international language: stupidity.

The atmosphere is convincing - there is an "Eight Mile" desperation to Raya's plight - but nothing makes sense.

Calls to mind Grandpa taking out his dentures and trying to put on a comedy monster show for little kids at Halloween: When he tries to be scary, he's goofy, but when he tries to be goofy, he's scary.

The chatty killer and the nervy atmosphere are both so depraved that the film, though it contains hardly any explicit violence, is like stepping into a blood Jacuzzi, and there is a biblical severity to the ending.

This kids' cartoon from France is such a surreally demented attempt to connect with children that it's the equivalent of foie gras breakfast cereal or a bleu cheese milkshake.

There isn't anything especially wrong with Who Do You Love but there's nothing here that cries out to be seen, either. Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/who_do_you_love_VZgyGvsv0ruc9teHrzQIlJ#ixzz0kcaj8Mwl

Fighting arrives fully charged by the charisma of its star, Channing Tatum, who has landed the lead in the upcoming "G.I. Joe."

So swaddled in good intentions that it's like taking a very short journey cushioned on all sides by air bags. That are stuffed with cotton candy.

Some bits are too stagy, but for the most part this long night feels like an interview that could have actually happened. Miller is so good - dumb, smart, wounded, wounding, a lollipop of sweet poison that you'd buy every day until it killed you - that you feel you not only understand her but all actresses.

As sensuous as its title, Silk is an exquisitely felt love story that unfolds as delicately as a blooming flower. And as slowly.

With its dopey fight scenes, grimy look and goopy gore, this movie is so far from ept that inept is the wrong word. It's anti-ept.

Even for a French drama, Summer Hours is so slow as to be practically still.

At last: Uwe Boll has made his first intentionally funny film.

For a horny-road-trip flick that's actually funny, check out last year's "Sex Drive," which just came out on video.

88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.

Wanted is like a 12-armed heavy-metal drummer after a case of Red Bull, flailing and thundering through two hours of impossible action.

It's another flick about maps, landmarks and buried treasure that makes "The Da Vinci Code" look like TOLSTOY.

Possibly the least sexy vampire flick ever to crawl out of the crypt (it never occurs to anyone that biting someone's neck is kinda intimate; the act is strictly utilitarian), but it's unusually detailed in its imagining.

Everyone's Hero, a tame CGI cartoon for the simple-minded: the very young, the very old and Yankee fans.

For short stretches, the movie has a touch of surreal "Office Space" brilliance, but it's broadly acted, its characters are thin, and the production values are ragged. Still, it's hard to resist its goofy hostility: "You're like the drummer from REO Speedwagon. Nobody knows who you are."

As familiar as the costumes and decoration are, the conflicts are unsettlingly vivid and strange.

The film is Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The audience is the fire hydrant.

The script, narrated by Queen Latifah, is so embarrassingly dorky (it was co-written by Kristin Gore) that it's like Fred Rogers gone hip-hop.

The anti-Ben Stiller comedy: There's humiliation aplenty but no mugging, no abuse to the crotch region, no straining to be outrageous.

Too slow to be a guilty pleasure and too dumb to be an innocent one.

Your enjoyment will hinge entirely on whether you think the album is a masterpiece or a bore.

An Irish indie that is well-observed and well-acted - but ultimately, not much more exciting than the love lives of its lead characters.

A grubby cut-price sci-fi thriller.

Salt contains many conflicts: intelligence vs. counterintelligence, blond Angelina vs raven-haired and . . . well, that's about it.

John Travolta's From Paris With Love assassin/ superagent Charlie Wax is the master of whatever the opposite of wisecracking is. Fooljoshing? Lametalking? Flatlining?

Combines the sweet strangeness of "Fargo" with the existential panic of "Memento" and some Elmore Leonard tough talk. It all creates a cinematic tummy ache.

The movie doesn't do anything with these viney bastards. There's no back story, no satire, no allegory, no implications beyond what's happening on the pyramid.

What's Spanglish for "oy"?

The thing is a virtual remake of the fusty oldie "Sweet Home Alabama," which came out back when movie scripts were written on stone tablets.

Reflective but only mildly engaging dramedy.

Problem: Kidman is the only one in the theater who is turned on. The rest of us are giggling.

But improbable situations, heavy reliance on coincidence and an improbable climax nearly tip the film into TV-movie territory.

This boring, torpid movie notices its own flaws and unwisely underlines them.

The funniest movie of Smith's I've seen. It's "When Harry Did Sally."

Yet the moral at the end is that we should all be more tolerant of different cultures. Is that really true, though, if the culture you're trying to tolerate is trying to open your skull with a circular saw?

Has the kind of soulful subject matter that will strike some as profoundly emotional, but it gets a flag for roughing the tear ducts. This isn't football - it's cornball.

Considering that Gracie says nothing that hasn't been said in dozens of films, one does wonder whether Hollywood is being as diligent as it could be in digging up fresh story ideas.

The last time I saw this much talent in a losing cause was Super Bowl XLII. Trying to mix farce with heart, Drillbit Taylor is instead as soulful as Kenny G and as wacky as public television.

89 minutes go by like 89 hours. Not just 89 regular hours either: 89 hours of being stuck in an airport. During a blizzard. While Lewis Black sleeps drooling on your shoulder.

When the studio tells us that parental guidance is suggested, does it occur to them that they should have taken their own advice?

I went to a wartime thriller, but then a Poli Sci 101 seminar broke out.

A buffet of dumb and degrading stunts halfway between Looney Tunes and Abu Ghraib?

I won't reveal the twist -- but the marketing crew is aware that their only chance of selling this non-mind-blowing documentary about the people you might meet on Facebook is by promising a big surprise.

Two fins up for The Cove, a documentary that whales on evil Japanese fishermen who kill dolphins for lunch meat.

The strange thing about the movie is its idea that such couples are rare flowers. But you can scarcely take a step in Seattle or San Francisco or Los Feliz without meeting them in hordes.

If you've seen "Gone With the Wind," you've seen what Love in the Time of Cholera isn't.

Among cheesy sci-fi movies meant to make you think, I'll take Surrogates over "District 9." Both are highly derivative, but in the course of recombining the basic chromosomes of "Blade Runner," "The Matrix" and especially "I, Robot," Surrogates nudges the robo-thriller in an interesting direction.

The movie pretty much exists to sell tie-in products, and it's about as entertaining as watching little kids playing with their toys in the sandbox.

This spring, boredom has a new name: Lucky You. In the poker flick, an announcer calling a climactic poker match uses a Texas hold 'em term frequently, saying, "And the flop. And the flop. And the flop." This movie reviews itself.

Aheroin-stuffed hipster buys a dog, eats Vietnamese food and sells drugs to pay for rehab in Fix, the latest piece of cine-junk stamped out by the indie fakedocumentary factory.

A comedy that forgot to install the funny.

The beginning and end are classics.

As DJ, Columbus Short eases his way through the movie without trying to impress us too much, which is welcome, but he's also a little bland around the edges.

The movie is a gentle British ensemble comedy much like "Four Weddings and a Funeral" - minus the four weddings and four-fifths of the wit.

The laughs begin with the excellent title Hamlet 2 - and they end there.

Despite the pace, though -- pedal, have you met my friend metal? -- Ninja Assassin still has some of its best stuff left at the end, when the master returns to demonstrate his extra-special, super-most-deadliest technique.

Miller is wincingly good at playing up the innocence.

Dull and dreary prequel.

So laugh-poor that it shoves all its comedy chips on a bet that you can build a movie around nose gags.

It's all a gorgeous error, a bonfire of overreach.

A woefully earnest indie about a crime and its aftermath.

At the end, as I stumbled back onto the street as disoriented and grateful as a released POW, I thought I'd need a calendar to calculate the length of time I'd been away.

This film is headed quickly for DVD. In the video store, though, it isn't funny enough to be shelved in the comedy section nor dirty enough to be filed with the smut. It might be useful in propping up a wobbly chair, though.

The movie offers very little that food radicals don't already know.

Someday, The Bounty Hunter and last month’s “Cop Out” will be featured in a cable movie double bill as the two worst 1988 films of 2010.

They go on a biker trip from Cincinnati to the West Coast because they are tired of being bored and would prefer to bore us instead.

Instead of trying to make Austen's life entertaining by pretending it was just like her work - as in the dull recent French movie "Molière" - Becoming Jane has a more astute appreciation of how Austen, or any fiction writer, works. There's a bit of stealing from life, lots of exaggeration, some wish fulfillment, mix-and-match character assembly.

A comedy for no ages, has an amazing amount of CGI - Cuba Gooding Incompetence.

A serial-killer flick told like an art lecture, Anamorph manages to be gruesome yet dull.

Its personal, newsmagazine touch will make your heart ache for its cross-section of humanity.

Cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending, but what's strangest about it is that it actually thinks it's pro-soldier even as it portrays vets home on leave as foolish (Rachel McAdams), desperate (Tim Robbins) and dishonorable (Michael Pena) while playing all three situations for laughs.

Rising star Michael Shannon makes a riveting shamus hired to chase a runaway husband in the quiet but resonant little noir The Missing Person.

Despite the lingering aroma of Victorian rot shrouding 1961, An Education is excitingly young.

Some movies present their whole story in a two-minute trailer, but Gridiron Gang says it all in its poster.

Funny more often than not. Worth checking out on video.

The ever-excitable Martin Scorsese, who is listed as a producer and who pops up, bizarrely, to talk about how he decided to stage the last shot of "The Departed," concludes things by saying, "Cubism was not a style. It was a revolution!" Yep. And not in any way a fad.

Great actors make the craft look easy. In the Paris Hilton comedy The Hottie and the Nottie, acting looks very, very difficult.

Misses everything that made the first one eat into your spine like meningitis.

It's got enough going on to sustain five blockbuster thrillers. That is its blessing and its curse.

It's something old, it's something new, it's something borrowed and it's something that blows.

It'll be a real miracle if anyone manages to stay awake throughout this extravagantly dull film.

This movie -- G.I. Joke, The D-Team -- tries to do so little, and yet falls so short. A clue comes when the girl asks Clay, "How's your steak?" and he replies, "Meaty." Simple enough to achieve in theory, but this would-be treat for cinematic carnivores is a sawdust sandwich.

The men who made The Guardian strive to be the averagest of the average - and don't quite succeed.

Halfway through, the jokes stop - the laughs never began - and give way to a tiresome thriller.

We may not need another IRA movie, but even so, Ken Loach's Brit-bashing historical drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley, winner of the top prize at Cannes last year, raises hard questions about Ireland's uncanny ability to kneecap itself.

There isn't enough revealing material in the tedious documentary Jimmy Carter Man From Plains to sustain an 800-word magazine profile, let alone a two-hour film.

A black-and-white fantasia shot against a bright backdrop of famous sites, and it has potential to be a cult hit on its dreamy-hipster look alone.

A movie that features Wahlberg suggesting everyone try to outrun the wind can barely be watched once.

Giving Mrs. Tiger Woods a run for her money as the most humiliated celebrity of the month, Russell Crowe accepts a third-banana role in the laughable weepie Tenderness.

One of those Deep Dark Secret movies, the dull indie Lake City combines a wholly uninteresting family mystery with a wholly unconvincing crime drama.

New Moon is supposed to be an exciting love story plus monster action. So where’s the excitement? Where’s the action?

In the Land of Women is one of those films informed by intimate personal experience - the experience of seeing "Garden State."

Ridiculous comedies can be fine, but the ones that matter creep up close to the truth. This one lives in it.

The would-be noir Beyond a Rea sonable Doubt has an absurd story, but on the plus side you can hardly see what's going on because the photography is so murky.

There's a pleasing tension in the air as their relationship comes to seem like something of a contest: With two women this needy, who will out-crazy the other?

A viral blast of the American Dream. It's "Rocky" with a briefcase.

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did.

The film gets one star from me for the admirable brevity of its running time and another for the definite article in its title, seemingly an implicit promise that there will be no sequel.

Isn't especially hilarious, but it has a warm sense of humor instead of a string of gross-out jokes. It'll be a cable mainstay.

Zombieland is still the funniest broad comedy since "The Hangover." Its yowling, marching, munching corpses are as scary as grad students and as hilarious as the plot of "G.I. Joe."

If Young ever converses with the gentlemen from al Qaeda, I expect his comments to be along the lines of "Please don't cut my head off."

De Palma is extreme, visceral, usually in bad taste but almost always riveting. De Palma's Redacted, a no-budget fake documentary that imagines the circumstances behind a real rape and murder of a civilian girl committed by US troops in Iraq, is a piece of anti-war propaganda whose aims I don't agree with, but it jolted me nonetheless.

The movie chides us for being a sick voyeuristic society, hungry for the sight of violence. The purity of this moral stance is somewhat clouded by the movie's habit of staging sick violent acts.

A suspenseless rehash.

Based on the true story of the world's largest counterfeiting operation, The Counterfeiters is full of the weird details that, though unsurprising on one level, are so jarringly wrong that they seem fresh: As a reward for producing 134 million pounds sterling, the prisoners get a pingpong table.

Either a ludicrously bad movie or a parody of same. Either way, it's pretty funny.

This stuff is strictly run of DeMille.

"HP6" is suspenseful and artfully realized. It's a definite improvement over J.K. Rowling's dimly written and exposition-clogged book.

Combines a sketch-comedy premise with pacing like a philosophy seminar.

Rolls out stiff clichés to tell a familiar story of racial injustice in the South.