Lisa Schwarzbaum

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.

Adrien Brody completists will appreciate Love the Hard Way, if only as an example of the kind of self-conscious, brat-noir projects their man probably won't be doing anymore.

Neither star is sloppy, but both are loose and mellow -- a couple of pros who know they're the whole show.

Even the championship showdown feels polite.

A disconcertingly jumpy tale of breathtakingly crummy parenting, the windblown movie dares a tolerant audience not to call Child Services.

An alarming male wallow passing as a fetching date-night dramedy.

Timing is everything. And Youth in Revolt is late -- arriving not just at the tail end of the star's sell-by date for this particular kind of character, but more importantly at the tail end of the intended audience's attention span for an inconsequential Sundance-y tale of sexual coming-of-age.

It's easy enough to accept the romantic-comedy luck of the two finding each another. It's much tougher, and ultimately useless, to buy everything else about this fairy tale of self-reinvention in a stalled economy.

The effect-laden showdowns feel more dutiful than daring, and the rare moments of fun are parceled out frugally, like precious nuggets of adamantium.

You know what you want to see if you want to see The Notebook...You want to see girls in pretty 1940s dresses, soldiers in stirring World War II uniforms, handsome automobiles and equally handsome Southern landscapes. You want to see romance overcome adversity.

Shortbus is chipper, it's fresh, it emits a distinct musk of controversy. I'll take the longbus.

Wayne's World's Penelope Spheeris directs and also plays herself, in a movie with a message as self-congratulatory as it is meta: All problems are surmountable when selfless Hollywooders work extra, extra hard, pulling together ''for the kid.''

Best in show is the divine Gillian Anderson as a powerful celebrity publicist, editing the image of her clients in much the same way this adaptation tames Young's much pricklier book.

Wargnier directs his French historical drama, a foreign film Oscar nominee, in a way that allows little perspective on the extent of Stalinist cruelty; even when terrible things happen, they do so sedately.

The production feels self-congratulatory and illuminated only dimly.

A frustratingly old-school, Hollywood-style, inspirational biopic about Amelia Earhart that doesn't trust a viewer's independent assessment of the famous woman pictured on the screen.

Remains a sampling of stagy scenes barreling to a gruesome climax, parts greater than the sum of the whole.

More like a summer-camp theater project than a studio movie.

The movie is ornate, arbitrary, and fetishistic, too, with the added challenge of being hell to follow for those without access to crib notes. Intellectually, I can admire the emphasis on visual style over plot clarity.

Parse the philosophy behind the spill of words, though, and you'll find intellectual jumble, junk. Better to nod to Yes as a drowsing chant than take it seriously as a statement of global concerns.

There is every reason to learn about the link between jewels and death, by all means, but no reason to try to disguise a term paper as entertainment.

Nothing Lee has done is as flashy or as mucked up as Bamboozled.

Soon enough a pointed ode to New York City nerve-rack and survival skills dissolves into a far more average, less compelling, and sometimes just slapdash-vicious cat-and-mouse game.

You see the pattern here? Winter-release slot + travel budget + Liam Neeson = slightly preposterous, routinely violent, apparently lucrative action movie in which the Irish-born star signals inner emotional conflict with his handsomely mashed boxer's face while settling outer physical conflict with his boxer's fists.

Smith's book is a charmer, but the keys to this ''Castle'' have been misplaced.

Howard luxuriates in writerly misery as Barlow, and the participation of the filmmaker's real-life wife, Debra Winger, as Barlow's ex gives the scenes between the two of them an unfakeable erotic charge.

Lovely to look at -- and languid to the point of stultifying torpor, as interesting characters make speeches to one another about life, love, and literature.

Unfortunately, the charming Batfamily can't stay in their cave indefinitely; they've got to go out and fight crime. And that's where this elaborately high-style production from Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher hits an iceberg.

What's missing in The Missing -- despite throwing in The Everything, from magic trinkets to group hugs -- is soul.

As PC busting goes, this first feature directed by Tony R. Abrams and scribe Adam Larson Broder shoots at close range, and there's something endearing about the way the filmmakers fire away so eagerly at such fluorescent-colored targets.

The conservatively cheery artistic style suggests that the animation team has been reading Sundance merchandise catalogs.

The twist in The Double slack mystery-thriller is revealed with a shrug about a third of the way in. After that, it's all about Gere looking grim, and Grace looking stricken as he learns what we already know.

The amazing thing about John Woo's steely, impersonal adaptation of Philip K. Dick sci-fi story about a tech genius whose memory is erased...is how it vanishes in front of our eyes even as we watch it.

In such an audience stroker, where casting is everything (on Broadway, James Gandolfini brought exciting menace to the role of Mr. Longstreet), Winslet and Waltz jell while Foster and Reilly flounder, unable to make sense of what kind of people they're supposed to be.

Tonally scattershot and more than a little heavy-footed.

The kids in this syrupy family picture are spunky tykes and the adults are dolts, but Wood is worth watching because she's so clearly ready to play nobody's girl but her own.

Downey's head and heart are in the right place, but the movie is more in pieces than whole, and more about iron than about men.

The whole concept, supposedly based on a true story, is weird — this is what Vietnam movies have come to? But at least the Disney quadruped has the grace to say nothing, and Leary, still an interesting motormouth, knows enough not to smoke or swear when there are elephants around.

And yet. And yet, Gawd help me, the always surprising Mark Wahlberg throws himself into his thespian adventure with such radiant wacko energy, so full of Boston beans, that Ted is also kind of, well, impressively nuts.

A dull and unbewitching movie.

As a thriller, this 21 2-hour production takes a slow route between short bursts of excitement.

Doesn't keep any secrets but an open one: that Johnny Depp is on a roll, and actor's block is definitely not his problem.

Here we are again: not entertained, not nearly enough, by an installment of the ''Star Wars'' epic that, for the first time, exhibits symptoms of...nerves. And a chill, conservative grimness of purpose, rather than an excited thrill at the possibilities of cinematic storytelling.

With very little modification, the relationship woes of the six chirpy young New Yorkers in this self-absorbed indie could be reworked into episodes of TV's "How I Met Your Mother."

There's not a moment in Bagger Vance that can't be anticipated.

And as ever, the jokes are a jumble of the gross, the baggy, the raunchy, the mistimed, and - every once in a while - the refreshingly incorrect.

The actors themselves are more rip roaring and full of spunk than in their first outing.

The Cell is foremost about singular imagery, a succession of still pictures strung together frame by frame.

The author was able to compensate for the book's plotlessness by contemplating other people leading full lives quite as important as hers. In Wells' movie adaptation, even the birth of a friend's baby becomes all about Frances and the play of emotions on Lane's busy, beautiful face.

Directed, with overfondness for the goofy ways of guys, by Ted Demme and written, with overfondness for the sound of guys pontificating about nothing, by Scott Rosenberg.

Gentle Bingenheimer, who retreats from being ''figured out,'' is dubiously honored with unenlightened commentary by people hell-bent on doing so.

Too bad Kapur's new, glittering sequel also shows up feeling prematurely old, square, and cautious. A production of exquisitely complicated wigs and expensively grand wide shots, it pauses often to admire its own beauty, leery of messing with previous success.

It's hard to empathize with the family in the indie drama Every Day when each member is so sitcom-ready.

The team who made "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" display plenty of whirligig energy, if not much control or lightness of touch.

How Do You Know asks really good questions but doesn't so much answer them as toss the ball from player to player until the clock runs out.

The movie is cross-eyed with fuzzy thinking; it's also an interesting, if wacko, artistic response to world events.

If only Roberts' warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness as Felipe, were enough to compensate for the folded-map flatness of this production.

Too often, Purple Butterfly is as impenetrable as Zhang's placid, obdurate beauty.

In this oddly uninvolving caper, the size of skulls makes its own statement: The producers assume that audience interest in movie stars is bigger than audience interest in characters.

Gerwig can't make her character come alive, though, and neither can Adam Brody as one of their neediest male cases. In the midst of the froufrou, lovely, stalklike Analeigh Tipton (Crazy, Stupid, Love) is delightful as a student who enjoys being normal and living in this century.

As a book, The Beach offers the option of diving deep. As a movie, it sticks too close to the shoreline.

Time, Kim Ki-Duk's pointed commentary on surfaces and consumer fads -- with particular meaning for plastic-surgery-obsessed South Korea -- is as tautly ''pretty'' and inexpressive as the results for those who compulsively seek cosmetic perfection.

In a series of endings, she, and the audience, are falsely promised that she can have it all. In other words, The Prince & Me is committed to the controversial American policy of No Fantasy Left Behind.

The hell of it is, Be Cool is tepid entertainment that could be cool if it spent less time entertaining us as if we were demanding a definition of rhythm.

Ang Lee's bloody but dramatically anemic depiction of the American Civil War as fought by boys without uniforms.

The movie is Drew Barrymore's directorial debut (she also plays fellow Hurl Scout Smashley Simpson), and it's clear she's more attuned to grrrlishness than real athletic power.

Based on a true story, this Indian variation on a theme of "The Burning Bed" emphasizes the psychological freedom the inmate finds behind bars.

When Barrymore finally gets mean, the movie finally gets good. Then comes another sing-along, dammit.

A lot of Money Never Sleeps - too much - is about Gekko père's desire to reconnect with his very angry daughter.

The culprit, I'd say, is the uninteresting casting of Miss Roberts in the title role. She's a pleasant enough performer, but her made-for-teen-TV acting style, a perky blandness, doesn't supply a clue as to the appeal of Nancy Drew after all these years.

The fact that this formulaically winsome movie, directed by British TV helmer Julian Jarrold, is based on product-line changes at a real Northamptonshire factory does little to freshen its approach.

Robert Downey Jr. is an uncomfortable sight as the school's hard-drinking, overstressed principal.

The entertainment gods have cast mixed blessings on Stolen Summer. Let Pete Jones pray.

Isn't nearly as cheerily unpleasant as it ought to be.

Not since "Snow Falling on Cedars" have I seen so pedigreed a lit-pic sit there like such an inert teapot, available only to be admired for its mysterious, ineffable Asian teapotness.

It’s an exercise in mad-as-hell vigilantism. And to reinforce the absurdity of what fury can be unleashed in a woman when a killer smirks, Sally Field — the Not Without My Daughter star herself — plays the ponytailed mom with the itchy trigger finger.

When the florid speeches of volcanic rage and frustration draw to a close - and when Collins and Gooding complete their acting exercises - we still have no clue who these men are and what sent them down their intersecting moral dark alleys.

The movie works hard -- desperately hard -- to be all things to all audience segments. And the visible effort erodes the sense of gaiety, of unfettered fun.

Tack on a jarringly upbeat coda that looks like the kids at the studio demanded a ”happily ever after” ending before they would agree to put the picture to bed, and Something to Talk About becomes a safe, generic family story of no particular personality.

Glued tightly from page to screen, Sin City is so seduced by the visual possibilities of sin that style becomes its own vice.

With (Keanu's) stiff body language and wooden delivery, his every word falls like drops of flat Diet Coke rather than intoxicating wine.

Technical elegance and fine performances mask the shallowness of a story as simpleminded as the '50s TV to which it condescends; certainly it's got none of the depth, poignance, and brilliance of "The Truman Show," the recent TV-is-stifling drama that immediately comes to mind.

That The Big Kahuna is hardly more than a sketch or curtain-raiser is not the fault of the play in itself -- it's short-film size, not feature-worthy.

Too many moments of evident labor weigh this clever production down. To quote the playwright: ''Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.''

No matter what panache Bier adds, Things We Lost is still a TV-scaled tear-duct drama about a beautiful woman who pushes past sadness in her House & Garden home.

Among its better tricks, Matrix Revolutions finally gets the love-story subplot of Neo and Trinity in the right proportion.

There's not a guy I know who hasn't been looking forward to seeing The Rock pick up the big wooden stick first swung by Joe Don Baker more than 30 years ago.

Scott Sommer's late-1970s coming-of-age novel, with little of the vivid specificity of "Mean Creek," even though the two share a screenwriter and a producer.

What a dull, nice movie, wrenched from a wild premise and battered into docility.

Not one bit of the story tracks. But with these women in these roles, you're asking for truth?

Natalie Portman, by the way, is fierce and funny as a babe warrior the brothers meet along the way. She's good with dirty words, too.

It's fun to see the glamorous actress turn down her movie-star flame, but it's a pity she's stuck with so many trite gestures on Kate's journey to fulfillment.

The message is so good-hearted, so inarguable, so dull.

Deserves sympathetic attention, if only for the family-values specifics loaded into the story, and the way mildmannered stars Ben Shenkman (Angels in America) and Tom Cavanagh (Ed) embrace their instructional roles.

This cautionary tale might be easier to swallow if all that stuff didn't look like it came from a Sky Mall catalog.

A shaky piece of work, with stumpy cinematography, choppy edits, speechy dialogue, and loose plotlines. And yet: There's an easygoing authenticity to the depiction of Kenya and her world that coexists with the picture's many weaknesses.

The other thing The Thing has got going for it is a welcome hint of dour Scandinavian sensibility sneaked in by director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. whenever there's a pause in the unexceptional antics of aliens consuming humans.

The intrepid one is the outstanding Josh Brolin, who does such a phenomenal job in the title role that he carries every scene he's in to a place of subtlety and integrity far beyond what Stone needs to make his attention-grabbing noise.

Figgis never frees the play enough from the stage to fill the screen.

It's as if, in exploring the scars that shape these personalities, Téchiné has forgotten to color in the flesh.

An overstuffed, unengaging drama that makes time for a love triangle.

With Green Zone, though, the malaise has finally hit me. So while Damon's Miller uncovers the (inconvenient) truth of why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, all I want to know is: How does he suggest we get out?

It's just a matter of time, flashbacks, many costume and accent changes, some more jazz, and a triggering tune on the radio before the truth can set Frankie, and the audience, free.

Ed Helms and Ving Rhames score laughs. But the breakout is "Step Brothers'" Kathryn Hahn as the tough (sales)girl who keeps up with the boys.

Each joke and one-liner is a made-for-HBO zinger, each scene with Sandler a reaffirmation of the old friendship between the two successful SNL alums.

Hunt is so vibrant that the movie suffers when she's not around.

The dilemma of The Dilemma is that the conundrum at the center of the story isn't particularly hilarious.

Still, it's only just a jump shot or two before Glory Road settles into its rudimentary, music-cued rhythms of classroom civics lessons punctuated by on-court action.

In Catfish, the camera's-rolling readiness to trawl for drama leaves a slimy aftertaste.

Laddish, one joke, genre scrambling rock & roll fairy tale.

Like a blue plate special at a theme diner, Sunshine State comes with a lot of overdone side dishes thrown on the table at the same time.

With no headliners to raise hopes, this negligible entertainment has its own boneheaded charms.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams' unnecessarily hectic debut feature won several British film festival awards, no doubt for its bounty of low-budget stylized violence and blood, as well as its thing for prostitutes and runaways.

Costner (who's also a producer) plays to his middle-aged strengths in a role that exaggerates male weaknesses.

Spike Lee noisily attempts to place the hunt for real-life serial killer David Berkowitz at the center of a hotheaded sociological fantasy linking disco glitz, punk rebellion, ethnic insularity, sexual craving, and sizzling heat into one rattling chain of urban hysteria.

This steam-driven military weapon of an enterprise is a sobering reminder of just how tinny a musical Les Misérables was in the first place.

Everyone in the cast (including Geoffrey Arend, Mark Webber, and Caplan's Party Down colleague Martin Starr) is talented enough to deserve a stronger story line than this.

Nothing wrecks the mood of a high-toned British period piece about erotic obsession quicker than an unintentional laugh. In which case, prepare for Asylum to be derailed by snorts in all the wrong places.

It turns out that Joe ends up liking the old Joe better too. Who just so happens to be the kind of average-Joe character that continues to make Allen such a tidy, non-Joe bundle.

Martin's gift for physical and vocal comedy is as deft as ever.

The antics are wacky -- but far from Wilde.

The surprisingly puny haul comes from the jolly, usually sparkling comedy workshop of David Dobkin, who directed "Wedding Crashers," and Dan Fogelman, who wrote "Cars" -- two great movies that both make better stocking stuffers.

Every once in a while, though, Firth's eyebrow hints, Can you believe I'm wearing this dorky leather breastplate?

Walking the path grooved by such stone-faced confreres as De Niro and Schwarzenegger (and following up on his own more successful self-parody in "Men in Black"), Jones positions himself as a Man in a Stetson.

The fact that Allen wrote the script in the '70s explains something about why his newest movie feels so old.

There's something and nothing for everyone in Conan the Barbarian 3D.

Exceedingly blurred rendering of a simply told, artful novel.

There are pleasing outcomes for almost everyone in Happy Endings, and that's not good news.

Eventually I gave up on meaning and began instead to study the profuse imagery -- and also the flat characters and anchorless performances.

Strangely inert drama.

No schmucks were harmed in the making of Dinner for Schmucks. That's the problem.

As for the concert itself, it's a generically big, loud, overchoreographed, over-mic'ed, post-Madonna production.

Ladies! Thelma and Louise drove a '66T-bird, remember?! They picked up a young male hitchhiker 17 years before you did, and they too, um, interacted with a trucker and admired magnificent American sunsets -- is it coming back to you? Nope, it's not, which is exactly why the tires are so low on this creaky vehicle.

It's sort of an ursine ''The Last Waltz,'' with more costumes and no direction from Martin Scorsese.

The Weather Man is what indie misery looks like when re-created by one of Hollywood's big studios.

The Ephron sisters, sophisticates entrusted with a simple TV situation comedy, lose the magic of the com as they mess with the sit.

A chaste and tepid remake of a 1950 British comedy.

Drips along about as slowly as a polar ice cap and leaves both those who know the international thriller on which this creepy-doings-off-the-coast-of-Greenland yarn is based and those who don't out in the cold.

I Think I Love My Wife has got to be the unlikeliest French New Wave classic ever to be retrofitted by a famous African-American stand-up comedian best known for his stinging social commentary -- at least until Dave Chappelle remakes Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" as a hip-hop caper.

What feels enjoyably outré in the 1998 coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Ames (creator of HBO's Bored to Death) feels oppressively outré in this deadened, literal adaptation.

It's no accident that portions of Six Days mildly echo some of Ford's most popular films, from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to "Working Girl."

Between cycles of gunfights and glowering, Yun-Fat displays some of the dignity and suave good looks that account for his star status (without much chance to show his wit).

The number of levels on which these pros trade on their diminished reputations makes the movie an inside joke rather than a funny one. If Spade thinks otherwise, he's nucking futs.

The movie is overplowed, even if Brad Pitt's debut as a Coen comedy player is eye-catching.

The balance of inspired idiocy to hackneyed buffoonery is out of whack.

A drama about corruption in the city's transit system that's not only hard boiled but also dipped in egg batter dialogue and deep fried.

A wildly romanticized Australian druggie drama.

Still, it's refreshing that the animals don't talk.

The character of a scruffy computer nerd, played with might-as-well-enjoy-myself charm by little-known actor Justin Bartha, steals the picture from glossier players.

Unbearable were Witherspoon not such a genuinely attractive performer.

A ripe psychosexual compost heap of a drama that emits a provocative scent of rot and nonsense.

Enough to anesthetize the living.

But the very thing that drew the two actors to this ripping yarn — their enchantment with playing archetypes of male power — is the very thing that undoes their awfully big adventure.

The result is a pageant long but not deep, noisy but not stirring, expensive but not sumptuous.

Opportunities for bad behavior abound in Waldman's novel - the author's prerogative. Roos, though, hasn't cracked the puzzle of how to explore that behavior on screen in such a way that the characters behave badly in interesting, rather than arbitrary, ways.

A loony attack on wacko liberalism and a ding-dong defense of wacko conservatism.

A comedy that might have made Butch and Sundance jump off a cliff.

Cassavetes throws in everything he can recycle to grab a core-demo viewer -- slutty teens making out, blaring rock music, guns, split screens.

Hoffman acts the hell out of the role.

The scariest thing in the not-scary-enough The Ring Two is the notion that even smart, attractive adults - yikes, even mothers - just never learn, either.

The actors more eager to goof around in schlumpfy costumes on a low-budget lark than to play their trashy characters with the seriousness such farce requires.

Howard looks peachy, and actor-turned-director Jodie Markell sweats the details -- moonlight, honeyed accents -- but the brittle script resists restoration.

The movie can't be saved from its own vices of manic pacing and tediously pro forma pop culture jokes.

A slick, synthetic, self-important drama that thinks it is saying more than it is simply because of its subject matter.

While much of The In-Laws feels stuck in time, what really does it in is the script's boring, modern sensitivity to fatherhood, and bonding with one's kids, and all that enlightened parenthood crap.

While Robbins has a good time playing the boyish devil, the rest of the principals transmit on an awfully low baud rate.

The imagery is exotically grungy and jumbled by flashback, but in the end, the picture's more pulp than juice.

The first 3-D film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer turns out to be similar to 2-D projects from the same noise-making producer--heavy on action scenes and heavy, too, on message.

Like many of the worst pop-referential parodies of the post-''Scream'' era, this one stalls on laughs once the big joke has been established.

Feels staged and exoticized in the way stories about insular communities often do when told by outsiders.

Commits sins of romantic comedy as well as sins of spiritual tragedy.

The orgasm, it turns out, is low on the list of Amy's issues. The title is faked.

Only pretends to care about good people who sometimes do bad things. In fact, it hasn't got time for the pain.

While we can agree, for the sake of Iberian-American cinematic friendship, to go along with the whole simplified 1960s swinger premise and ''The Jackie Gleason Show'' choreography, we can also long for the comparatively nuanced 1990s swinger premise of ''Friends.''

In stories like this defiantly unsubtle, structurally clunky specimen, causes women who are considering abortion to think again, and self-selecting audiences to enjoy a light, luxurious weep.

Look for bloody axes, grotesquely disfigured zombies, and creepy visions — much of it bloatedly self-indulgent and a small part wicked funny about the influence of guys like Stephen King/Sutter Cane who write words read by people who don’t read anything else, or maybe don’t read at all but only go to movies like this one.

Operates on such outdated, unimaginative conventions of movie chemistry that Moore and Brosnan end up appearing older and stodgier than necessary.

Grace Is Gone grabs on to a name, a war, and the metaphor-come-to-life of a theme park with rides going nowhere. And we, the people, are spun around and shaken for tears.

A weightless, style-driven thriller set in a photogenically chaotic Hong Kong.

Excitement trumps incompetence as one colorful loser recruits another. Pretty soon, the screen is filled with hip actors playing clueless lowlifes, pretending they're in a Bizarro World production of ''Ocean's Eleven.''

Nothing is new, which is a problem. Nothing is particularly funny or endearing, which is a worse problem.

Annabel and Enoch learn from each other, even as time ticks away and the end draws near. Weeping is invited, but by no means required.

Requires tremendous restraint not to conclude that this entertainingly apocalyptic mess is about nothing, since it may well be about everything. But I doubt it.

The Hunted stalks the masculine psyche with sharp knives, but it tracks its audience too noisily to bag us.

Dismayingly conservative dramedy.

Want Jesuitical fineness of argument? Look elsewhere. This one merely answers the prayers of those looking for an argument.

Rachel Griffiths...is the best reason, nay, the only reason to pay attention to Me Myself I.

A crotchety, alcoholic, wheelchair-bound coot played on cruise control by Morgan Freeman learns these recycled lessons in a pastel-colored, embroidered wall-hanging of a drama directed by Rob Reiner.

Some sure symptoms: The movie demonstrates a smart movie geek's obsession with the rhythms and gory details of horror storytelling, undermined by a pompous insistence on spiritual lessons of the tritest kind.

Congratulations are in order for Rachel's sexual awakening, but we might as well applaud the dull girl for falling in love with the nearest bunch of lilies rather than the florist.

Overstyled pseudo-thriller.

The movie implodes, with each actor less vivid than he or she ought to be and each character less connected to the others than necessary for such an arbitrary plot.

The energy is sapped by clinging condescension in the guise of compassionate liberalism.

A frustratingly inert story, a bookend to last year's wooden ''Captain Corelli's Mandolin.''

With Intolerable Cruelty, though, something scares me: I cannot detect a heartbeat of feeling, no matter how close I press a stethoscope against the star machinery of George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

A histrionic mess.

A slight romantic comedy about five winsome Australian university students who fret and joke about their romantic woes when not talking about movies and cinematic theories. Each has a charming quirk — one (Frances O’Connor) is a cute lesbian, another (Alice Garner) is writing a thesis on Doris Day — but none is deeper than a bag of Reese’s Pieces.

Who knows whether the project is meant to be earnest, ironic, post-ironic, made for adults, made for kids, made to teach lessons, or made to be watched in an altered state? All or none...jeez, this thing is one bumpy ride.

"The Station Agent's" Peter Dinklage provides diversion as a gay wedding planner.

The movie, directed with a gym teacher's whistle by "Scooby-Doo's" Raja Gosnell, is a contempo soft-focus remake of the 1968 original starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.

There may be nothing more fun for actors than experimental exaggeration, especially when filming on a Caribbean island. But there’s nothing that makes an audience feel less welcome than not being in on the joke.

TV's ''I Spy'' knew how to swing. The movie 'I Spy knows only how to scramble and string together moments of Murphy braggadocio and Wilson stoner-ocity, and the sweat shows.

A conflicted entertainment, compromised by trying too hard to impress the restless, self-referential adults in the audience.

The big underachiever turns out to be DeVito, who is incapable of exhibiting believable warmth and complexity, or, indeed, of playing anyone who is not a cartoon.

More calculated than a Starbucks sampler CD, the picture could win the up-from-hardship award.

The two stars appear to be as bewildered by the turn of events as we are.

Killer Joe throws down a dare by expecting its audience to be the cool connoisseurs of the story's "comic" outrageousness, then rubbing viewers' faces in close-up scenes of brutality that reasonable people ought not to be able to watch. That up-close experience, however effectively done, is a movie specialty that's its own kind of mean.

Waving a dubious flag of feminist inclusivity, Cole and screenwriter William Ivory turn cartwheels insisting that girl power, even in the 1960s, trumped class divisions.

Gillen can't make good on his gaze's search and destroy capabilities.

The Island begins with a whimper of interest as a cool-hued, cautionary exploration of the ethics of cloning, and ends, in a hail of product placement, with a dumb bang.

A slippery entertainment that's all feints and few punches thrown at a fight card of indistinguishable terrorists, Muslim and otherwise.

The cast, though, includes a great bunch of Brit faves who have all done better work elsewhere.

Her (Harron) torpid adaptation of Rachel Klein's novel about female sexual desire, jealousy, death wishes, and vampires at a girls' boarding school defeats Harron's talent for exploring darkness on the edge of kinkiness.

What falls in Chicken Little are hopes.

Ellen Barkin provides unexpected diversion in a madwoman cameo as the PD's brassiest brass. But otherwise the clichés keep coming.

The enterprise might also be called ''Picket Fences on Ice."

There's a lot of yelling, cracking wise, and cooing in this creepy rom-com.

Weirdly moving.

That's the moral nut of this highly unexceptional episode, a midlife production in which each Enterprise crew member does his or her vaudeville act.

Everything is aces about this lineup's pedigree. But Devil never lets loose. It's a jazzy composition about sex, sleuthing, corruption, race, and cheap liquor that's a half step out of tune.

Writer-director Oskar Roehler spends all his energy on cataloging ''outrageous'' behavior, and none on giving the transgressions any meaning.

An awfully tidy, infernally sparkly study in skewed blessings, made manifest by Committed Acting from Sigourney Weaver.

As a Balanchine-like martinet, Peter Gallagher is a hoot, whispering to his minions about good and bad feet.

At the Lethal Weapon plant, what you see, after 11 years, are the rusting remnants of a once innovative model.

Lacks confidence in its own much bigger, potentially fascinating story -- an American tale of pageantry and history.

Director Todd Phillips tries for the kind of frat slaphappiness he applied so successfully to "Old School," but these boys are less scoundrels than individual salesmen for the brands of Heder and Thornton.

Oldboy caused a love-it-or-hate-it stir at Cannes last year, and how could it not: It's an onslaught made to cause a sensation. Consider me simultaneously jolted and depressed.

Costner's determination to avoid change keeps this baseball movie at a low line drive when it might have knocked one into the bleachers.