Lisa Schwarzbaum

Beresford, who'd like to teach the world to sing, makes the moment as moving as a Coca-Cola jingle. It's not the real thing, but it's effective.

As it is, the story collapses like a bad tip to Liz Smith. Still, there's something brash, retro, and even stupidly touching about all the chatty mania, and the way Baitz and Pacino get off on paranoia, conspiracy theories, and the lure of 1960s idealism.

Shanley turns out to have dismayingly few original cinematic notions to back up the basic did-he-or-didn't-he hook in his study of conviction and compassion.

That Cruise fails to make a case for Reacher's allure, though, has less to do with physical dissonance than it does with the film's inability - stupefying inability, really - to otherwise make a case for the character's originality in a movie so choked with visual clichés and dreadfully moldy dialogue.

The noisiest laughs in this watery animated comedy are reserved for those who value self-referential winks above all else.

Florid, convoluted historical drama.

Connoisseurs of digital animation, graphic novels, and the history of dystopian art will have plenty to discuss about Christian Volckman's visually striking, technically impressive black-and-white animated feature Renaissance…But no one will be talking about the movie's banal plot, the trite dialogue, or any of the indistinguishable characters who offer a bleak futuristic vision of cinema that's all style, no soul.

As a work of art, the movie, shot quickly on digital video, is genial enough if unrefined.

Older and sadder, Mulder and Scully are no longer sure they've got the energy to even ask if the truth is still out there. And it feels as if Carter is skeptical, too.

Ramis’ talented, underused SCTV colleague Eugene Levy makes a brief, welcome appearance as a nuttily dim cement contractor, but he’s a zany interlude in an otherwise muted, unzany tale.

Wafer-thin, content-light, structure-wobbly, and whimsy-heavy.

This sloppy, pleasant comedy by playwright and TV producer Robin Schiff (Almost Perfect) is an amiable mess, a padded-out expansion of a play called "Ladies' Room."

For the invited filmmaker, the opportunity to make a statement is surely a thrill, but for the viewer - who can't pause indefinitely, as with a book, between stories - the focus-shifting is a demand.

Scottish actor Peter Mullan saves a drama tangled in the seaweed of life lessons from drowning in pathos.

The warmth comes through, even if the storytelling is simplistic and clichéd.

But in this standard athlete-dies-young presentation, we never do catch the magic that made Steve Prefontaine a towering figure. Instead, this Pre is a shaggy-haired, sentimental favorite -- a teen angel rather than an Olympian.

Overworked if heartfelt indie.

The hothouse drama Mother and Child is organized like a femme-friendly spa that specializes in treatments for the psyche rather than the skin. Soft New Agey music tinkles intrusively. Sore spots are prodded and massaged. Clients pass one another in the changing room. The ritual is exquisite to some, and excruciating to others.

True to his stolid, humanist instincts and characteristically stodgy directorial style, writer-director John Sayles creates a story more educational than engrossing.

Filmmaker Greg MacGillivray, a specialist in gigantic-screen nature movies including "The Living Sea," is up to date in his use of 70mm IMAX film, but he's stuck in the past about how to tell a story.

Their message (Cassavetes and screenwriter Jeremy Leven) in My Sister's Keeper? Cancer sucks, but there's always the balm of beach scenes and an emo soundtrack.

Enough cheery mockery to amuse even non-tokers.

Plays more like a teaching tool than a dynamic drama.

Chan needs a foil, and Hewitt, while perky, doesn't project nearly enough comedy weight; she's too slight and tailored for his style.

There's something already exhausted, however, in the intrusively gauzy, wobbly, blurry, zoomy digital-video look of the piece.

For all the creaminess of the sets and costumes, every character talks as if she is still made out of written words, not flesh, and each woman's struggles feel about as important as a tea dance.

Ironically, they make the bond between John and Savannah look so natural that the ''dear John'' turn in their relationship makes even less sense than it does in the book.

What's missing from this by-the-numbers drama is a sense of abandon.

2F2F, under the cut-to-the-chase direction of John Singleton, strips the package known as the Mindless Summer Movie down to its barest components of wheels, skin, and a pulsing soundtrack.

Wrings laughs from the antics of affable, eccentric villagers who cheerily break the law.

Apted keeps the speechifying and dramatic poses away from Grant (poor Hackman’s the one forced to say, ”If you could cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn’t that be the brave thing to do?”). And he gives the star room to do clean work without the fussiness that marred Nine Months.

An ambitious debut feature.

Neither powerful nor interesting. It is a run-of-the-mill movie ''product'' developed as part of a 50 Cent marketing plan.

A revolutionary life has rarely felt less edgy, or the biography of an iconoclast more bourgeois.

Agresti fattens us up with the kind of kid's-eye-view tragi-comic adventures that regularly supply empty calories in artificially sweetened foreign-language imports.

The frustration of this good-hearted, off-key warble of an indie, written by Rose with Robert Cary, who directed, is that the filmmaking pales when compared with the classic elements of 1950s and early '60s romantic musicals to which it pays homage.

An old-fashioned romance-and-sickness picture, a publicity-grabbing sex picture, an Apatow-lite horny-boys picture, and a liberal satire on pharmaceutical-industry excesses committed in pursuit of pill sales - all in one.

Funny, director and co-writer Dani Levy suggests with no little coldness, how the scent of money can do what religion, ideology, and ethical principles cannot.

The Human Stain is, contradictorily, drained of color by the spotlight turned on its charismatic leads. Between the labors of simplifying the story for the screen and accommodating the stardust of world-class actors, an essentially, uniquely American tragic hero and heroine are bleached of real American tragedy.

Adams, of course, is a peach. Her sparkle requires only minor character adjustment and twinkle recharging from her recent triumph as the old-fashioned modern heroine in "Enchanted."

Forget "Monty Python," You Don't Mess With the Zohan is a circus that never really flies.

Under Reitman's deanship, Ferrell lets his freak flag fly and Vaughn unlooses a notably funny, light-on-his-feet lunkheadedness.

The film is almost deliriously stylish, which helps mask the silliness. But the bellowing music, by John Adams, is infuriatingly intrusive -- which undoes the visual good.

A historical drama as static as it is stately.

A quaint, romanticized rendering.

This cranked-up drama wants it both ways.

Croft is one humorless butt-kicker. Excavations in exotic lands have rarely looked so much like items on a to-do list.

The voices of Liam Neeson -- as the film's narrator -- and his late wife, Richardson, inevitably add to the project's poignance.

That everything gets worked out -- friendship affirmed, jokes made about silly magazine articles on reeling in a boy -- is as sure as the soundtrack's inclusion of a Mandy Moore song.

Part punk-drab British art-house portrait of underclass despair, part bloody vigilante pic, Harry Brown is shakily held together by industrial-strength sound design and the expertly employed theatrics of Michael Caine in the title role.

Maybe this well-loved Luke is who his neighbors want him to be, a good fellow who, with his father, reopens the old movie house in town -- the Majestic -- thus allowing his neighbors to dream in the dark again.

A strange history lesson that leaves us more overlectured than properly overwhelmed.

The one valuable prize for audiences in this war pic Cracker Jack box is Jude Law. Once again the talented Mr. Law makes more of a role than most movies know what to do with.

Adorable or what?

The characters are tedious, as are the fussy performances of Bale and Beckinsale. Everything good in this rock & roll fantasy belongs to the sexy, worldly-wise McDormand, who makes Jane ripe, real, and irresistible.

This insanely busy, exceedingly long, and sometimes endearingly preposterous rendering has simply gotten the directions reversed in its insistence on sticking only to where men-who-make-adventure-flicks have gone before.

Think of Elizabethtown as Cameron Crowe's rambling amateur travelogue, one from a well-liked professional filmmaker momentarily so distracted by private notes scrawled on his souvenir map that he gets lost en route to telling his story of self-renewal. This undershaped, overlong warmedy is an homage to the memory of his late father.

The shallow frat-on-frat rivalry and the poor-boy-loves-rich-girl subplot don't mean a thing. But the stepping does got that swing.

Kevin Bacon's passionate, sharply drawn portrayal of Billy Magic, a slick, finger-snapping, payola-pocketing disc jockey in early 1960s Cleveland, is the best thing about this conventional but heartfelt semiautobiographical coming-of-age story

The movie follows convoluted narrative tracks. By the end of the drowsy journey, the characters are indistinguishable from the scenery.

The real soullessness here is built into the production, a polished adaptation of Hong Kong-style filmmaking that, with its cast of depressive characters, allows for little Hong Kong-style joy.

The only real heat among the group comes from Jennifer Connelly, who, as the bad-girl middle daughter, raises the stakes any time she's on screen.

It's as self consciously arty and fragmented as ''Twin Falls'' was controlled and organically built.

By the end of Death at a Funeral's effortful farce about busted British propriety, you may feel that peculiar facial ache that comes from wishing to laugh with no really satisfying release.

A sad-but-hopeful, dramatic-but-gentle fairy tale intentionally made less upsetting for teens.

With so much flesh crunching and bloodletting, it could have been scary as all Walking Dead get-out. Instead, the movie plays safe by cutting every theme down the middle - a swing that's effective when splitting wood or vampire skulls, but dull when applied to filmmaking.

At least some Goode may come from Chasing Liberty: I hope we'll be seeing more of the handsome and unboyish young man with big star potential who looks ready to take on more, not Moore.

Adam is cute and all, but the real strings worth tying are those that bind this sisterhood of sharp, interesting, sexually active women together. Where's THEIR starring movie?

Tower Heist is the cinematic version of a Trump property: overblinged, eye-catching, and essentially tacky.

The movie represents an earnest effort to compensate for all the love the media has shown to firefighters and other land-based first responders in recent years with little thought to the Coast Guard; the drama also crashes on wave upon wave of clichés.

Tim Allen doesn’t do anything new in Jungle2Jungle, but he’s got that Allen-via-Disney persona operating at maximum efficiency.

Mildly cute, mildly drooly, majorly too late spoof/homage.

Everything about Foster's ocular intensity is riveting, but little in this hushed vigilante drama makes sense.

As the players enact the fall and rebirth of civilization, Meirelles suggests that even a society gone to hell looks better with a little music-video-like pizzazz.

Simplest of its charms is the opportunity to watch Mortensen adapt his charismatic demeanor of wary, taciturn soulfulness from that of a Middle-earth king-in-waiting to one fitting a half-Lakota horseman in 1890.

A decent disaster pic comes down to the handful of colorful individuals who will live (or, depending on the prominence of their billing, die), as it has since the days of chewy disaster meatballs like ''The Towering Inferno'' and ''Earthquake.'' And the heaviest lifting in Emmerich's production falls to Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal.

The screenplay, by Zemeckis and William Broyles Jr., plumps Van Allsburg's simple fable about the purity of childhood faith in what can't be seen with all sorts of wholly invented characters, complications, and declarations.

It's not the fault of "The Sopranos" charismatic, beefy star (Gandolfini) that he's an actor of such substance and quiet ardor as to make idle movie star ribbitting look frivolous.

Never harmonizes into a cinematic experience any more resonant than the average, manly, why-we-fight pic, or coalesces into a stirring cry for freedom.

The brittle, very ''written'' catty quips meant to characterize Washington hypocrisy sound perfunctory; the story of an aging, self-hating homosexual who goes home alone to his lacquered town house feels ancient as well as uncomfortable for the writer-director. (Harrelson seems both game and ill at ease.)

When it's dull, which it is too often for a kidnap caper, this movie is about a woman chirping ''notice anything new about my outfit?'' to a man whose idea of style is a jacket not crusted in human blood.

Radio is assembled from small, hard stones of ignorance and intolerance paved over by large, mushy examples of community goodness.

Van Damme and his cronies (including Lela Rochon, Paul Sorvino, and, for no immediately graspable reason, Rob Schneider as Van Damme's rabbity sidekick) race, speed, shoot, chop, and zip through scenes of such festive mayhem, plot is a clunky afterthought, like a lopsided fake Prada label on a cheap nylon knapsack.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about writer-director Robert Edwards' grimly satiric political fable.

The Promotion edges toward some pretty bleak stuff. Then it steps back and laughs, like an office slacker.

As the reigning inhabitant, Redgrave adopts the swanning gestures of Maggie Smith in this mild adaptation of a Maeve Binchy story.

An overdeveloped coming-of-age potboiler.

Ellis (The Good Wife's Graham Phillips), an alienated teen, smokes weed and hangs out with a goat-obsessed, pot-cultivating surrogate father (David Duchovny, hidden by hair). New Age details aside, though, Ellis is easily identifiable as a distant cousin-by-genre to J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield.

Russo-Young studies the strange species of affluent Angelenus erectus under a microscope that distorts every character into unbelievability.

Hancock can revel in schmuckery, of course, because you and I and cute kids and peaceful oldies worldwide know in advance that there's no way on Hollywood's green earth Will Smith will ever play someone seriously, dangerously unsavory.

The charms of Evans (from 1995's oddball Funny Bones) and Lane (who's at his best playing to the balcony) are lost in all the detailed hubbub.

And although director Paul Anderson treats the story with appropriate deadpan respect, there are enough sparks of humor (particularly generated by Linden Ashby as a shallow martial-arts actor who worries that he's a fake, with good reason) to amuse the adults accompanying the 10-year-old boys in the audience.

Even though Bullock engages in a climactic scene of blue-screen peril, she essentially cedes the match to the kids. In this mediocre murder case, their presence is the only thing that's really killer.

However admirably Minghella urges a break from complacency and an entry into a state of local/global compassion, his characters are position holders rather than people.

Scattershot, hit-and-often-miss comedy.

Rileys has been casually dubbed "Kristen Stewart's stripper movie," but the handle doesn't stick: Stewart may wear skimpy clothes and grind once or twice from the neck down, but from the neck up she's all hollow, bruised eyes, twisted little mouth, and classic, coltish K-Stew rebellion.

The best scenes are hilarious sessions between the great Gemma Jones and the wonderful Pauline Collins as a charlatan fortune-teller.

The movie whips up a big old puree of ingredients borrowed from other cinematic recipes.