Lisa Schwarzbaum

Highly unoriginal but nevertheless stirring drama.

Everyone involved fulfills his or her job requirements adequately. But the magic is gone, and Shrek Forever After is no longer an ogre phenomenon to reckon with. Instead, it's a "Hot Swamp Time Machine."

This shambling romantic comedy...clings to a sensibility that's imperviously, uncompromisingly Canadian.

The best moments in his first movie outing are those that feel most TV-like, just another day in the eternally optimistic undersea society.

Here the fascination is Hurt, so deft at steering his character away from booby-trap clichés that he guides his young costars safely out of sap's way and brightens an otherwise very yellowed tale.

Filmmaker Reed Cowan (himself gay and raised Mormon) documents the church's considerable financial influence on Prop 8's passage. Then he expands his sad and furious homegrown film to record the misery of gay Mormons sometimes driven to suicide over being rejected by their church and families.

Poorly engineered: lurchingly paced, the dramatic conflicts duct taped together.

A thriller made from a completist's checklist rather than with a cultist's passion.

The more rink time, the better: As directed by hip-hop music-video king Chris Robinson from a story by "Antwone Fisher's" Antwone Fisher, the skate scenes are a blast.

The movie flaunts its comedy roots like a messy bleach job.

A strange, black-and-blue therapeutic drama equally mottled with likable good intentions and agitating clumsiness.

In the heaving cross-century swirl of the climax, ''Weight'' makes its point: Jealousy is timeless; Hurley is not.

In the end, One True Thing suggests, families can be healed even in loss. This may not be a true thing, but at least this emotional drama offers up hope, sweet like one of Kate Gulden's tasty cakes.

A triumph of performance, production, and adaptation over the empty-calorie dither of its source material.

Not to get all Dorothy about it, but when it comes to Cars, there's no place like home. The emotional punch of the original is inextricably rooted in the movie's appreciation of off-the-beaten-track America, and all that homegrown vintage car culture signifies.

Haywire cavorts around the world - Barcelona, Dublin, upstate New York, New Mexico - with Bourne-again energy and timeline shuffles, making only cursory attempts at plot coherence

The Big Apple of this evanescent tone poem is an invented nocturnal landscape featuring speechifying eccentrics and absurdist moments that feel northern European in sensibility.

I rather like the whole mystic- crystal-revelations aspect of K-PAX, and the idea that even a psychiatrist of Jeff Bridges' handsome, American substantiality is open to notions of cosmic improbability.

The storytelling may be ordinary, but the cast is one of those all-star reunions.

Rashid's optimistic fairy tale is inventive, in a show-queen way.

Always the smooth showman, Spurlock avoids answering his own question: Is he selling out or buying in?

The last thing Marber's quartet of modern miserables needs is to be admired; they are the very worst of average people, but on screen they have become the very best of the baddest.

What this Manchurian Candidate for a new generation makes up for in timing, it lacks in discipline and edge.

A sharp-looking Mob drama with a gooey moral center.

That durable, sexy powerhouse Beverly D'Angelo steals every scene she's in.

The unintended effect of all the melodramatic complications in Transamerica is, oddly, to distract attention from an understanding of exactly what that courage really costs.

A small, heartfelt film.

A traffic map of calls and responses, lessons and homework, wishes and fulfillment. All roads lead to acting-award nominations, but none lead to truth.

This sunny ode to brotherhood, made on a tiny budget, goes a fair distance on good vibes.

Antielitist, anti-hypocrisy, pro-feel-good entertainment.

Moreau's few ripe scenes are choice, and she spices up the joint with her gravelly voice of je ne regrette rien.

The best thing going for Selena is Selena herself, played with verve, heart, and a great deal of grace by the increasingly busy Jennifer Lopez (Money Train, Jack, Blood & Wine).

Walking and Talking is saved from utter banality by a script dotted with occasional buoyant moments of tenderness and wit, as well as by the light touch of its attractive cast.

Working with an explanatory script by Dean Georgaris, Reynolds is much more confident in scenes of realistic battle, or even muddy marketplace dailiness, than he is with scenes of desire.

Measured in anything other than biblical cubits, the sum of Babel's many parts turns out to be a picture that suggests Americans ought to stay home and treat their nannies better.

German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) noodles around with form, composition, and sexuality in 3, a playfully pieced-together, beautifully shot, and secretly ridiculous drama about a triangular relationship among blasé Berliners.

The filmmaker's got good taste -- and luck -- in casting.

A polarizing load of quirkiness in Extremely Loud gunks up (at least for this hometown mourner; your results may vary) what is at heart a piercing story.

A talent-stuffed assemblage of barbs and giddy musical numbers that shouldn't be written off as a feature flop -- but savored instead for the cult-ready collection of late-night satirical skits and misses it is.

The romantic troubles of three Irish-Catholic brothers on Long Island don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

For Yank color in her soap-bubbly movie, director Daniele Thompson has her pal Sydney Pollack appear as...a famous director.

There are mountain tunes as powerful as moonshine to be enjoyed in Songcatcher -- but there's also a mighty mushy heap of corn pone to be swallowed.

Thompson, who also wrote the script, has skittery, baffling fun enjoining her plummy guest actors (including Ralph Fiennes, Rhys Ifans, and Maggie Smith) to play broad Brit types.

The new movie is an opulent-bordering-on-hysterical mass of chitchat and chase scenes.

The premise, the structure, and the men-at-twilight conversation in Patrice Leconte's ingratiating drama feel cloyingly predetermined at times, but the sight of Hallyday and Rochefort luxuriating in their contrasting manly personas is a kick.

There's nothing not to like about the movie, a teensy, hand-crocheted trifle, fitted with embroidered pockets of guest stardom, including Mia Farrow as the nice local lady who wants to see what "Ghostbusters" is all about and "Ghostbusters'" own Sigourney Weaver as a movie-studio corporate meanie, ha-ha.

The depth of the story and the characters is awfully slight to bear the weight of such fancy editing. But the performances are crisp and in focus, with Cox in particular showing a photogenic feel for expressing grief.

The premise of the short-story-size comic thriller Don McKay is as thin and crumbly as a corn chip.

The Clearing is what's known in the biz as an alternative for adult moviegoers. Which is to say the film is a performance-driven drama devoid of special effects and loud noises. On the contrary, it's a meditation on midlife weaknesses and compensation.

Natalie Portman demonstrates tour de force weeping in the back of a taxi as an American searching for her roots in Israel.

The movie's warm advocacy of hospice, with all the dignity such end-of-life care provides, does real, influential good.

As directed by Dwight Little ("Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home," a morph of "The Day of the Dolphin" and "Lassie Come Home"), the tension-to-action sequences unspool efficiently.

This otherwise entertaining, aficionado-oriented production, with its circus-act technology that lets a viewer feel, briefly, like a member of the Petty racing dynasty, is as gaudily patched with corporate sponsorship as the sport itself.

The telegenic Lomborg is the on-camera "star" of the show, while his angry critics growl on cue.

All too content to be a comedy of surfaces and stereotypes. And because, for all the novelty of the bisexual romantic angle, there's something about Jessica, her New York-singleton ticks and her Jewish-family tocks, that feels...old.

The movie's power is undercut by the overemphasized presence of celebrity traveling environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

We're in David Mamet World. William H. Macy -- the quintessential player of Mamet men in all their impacted rage -- stars in this claustrophobic adaptation.

This movie is as packed with flashy bogusness as a lead singer's tight leather trousers. On the other hand, there's nothing bogus about the charisma and tough sweetness of Wahlberg.

What's new and nutty, though, is the physical comedy of Jackie Chan as Fogg's manservant.

There's something almost too controlled, cerebral, and overdetermined about Winterbottom's Western notions.

Owen devotes himself to the horror-flick role of a father battling his daughter's monsters with the same trademark efficiency and intensity he brings to every project, whether pulpy like "Killer Elite" or pure like "Shadow Dancer."

Not to be confused with a dramatization of Kate Chopin's great 1899 proto-feminist novel, this by-the-numbers British ghost story, set just after WWI, devotes a lot of energy to set decoration.

To fully savor Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, it's best to watch with an audience overwhelmingly populated by girls and young women.

Educational and upstanding, a little overacted and more than a little overdramatized. But it's honorable.

Affleck the director shows excellent instincts, not least of which is letting his younger brother, Casey, hold the center as a young guy not as smaht as he thinks he is.

I love the princess squad.

The yarn is too irresistible: We're fed plenty of sugar in this authorized fairy tale, but are left hungry for beef.

An affectionate puff profile.

In aiming for a new kind of lit-drama cool, Jane Campion freezes the warmth right out of Henry James' expansive heart.

Struck by Lightning sticks to generic character sketches of high school student types - the jock, the goth, the cheerleader, etc. - and gives Carson the best lines. In between, some charming, buzzy talents pitch in on this short little lark.

The affectionate, bemused, structurally unkempt portrait is at its best capturing Merritt's close collaboration with his longtime friend and bandmate Claudia Gonson.

It's Complicated is middle-aged porn, the specialty of Meyers, who also set ladies and interior decorators drooling over homes and gardens in 2006's “The Holiday.”

The movie meets the requirements of the "Life Is Beautiful" school; those loyal to the tougher, more stringent Osama academy of realism need not apply.

This peachcolored comedy about a wacky family who shove their sadness into a bulging closet is being marketed as ''from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine'' All that's missing from the formula is a Volkswagen Microbus.

When a brilliant fish wriggles by, even a less than ardent anime viewer will want to freeze the frame and gape.

Michelle Williams plays Monroe, and she's a wonder. Working opposite a suitably florid Kenneth Branagh as that high thespian Sir Larry.

The individual components of director Marc Abraham's David-and-Goliath drama are roundly unexceptional; the script, soft and teach-y; the performances, earnest.

In moments that have nothing to do with representing the weight of love (whatever that is), the film comes alive: when Ami Ankilewitz isn't a symbol - just a man who, for instance, loves a woman.

Trembles with respect for Hillenbrand's book. It's hobbled by good intentions, grand plans for telling many stories at once, and a fear of the very audience whose intelligence and sophistication it claims to court.

Coarser, more hectic, more cheaply written sequel.

The hardest work falls to Cusack, a subtle actor with a valuable gift for conveying the sadness and loneliness beneath the skin of even the most jaded and self-contained men-about-town.

Love and sex are scary in Bradley Rust Gray's over-Freuded exercise in semi-horror/gender studies.

A forceful Neeson and an even more intense Nesbitt (Bloody Sunday) both show their stuff and obscure the unrelieved pain endured by the men they portray.

This overlong, lurchy homage to John Cassavetes' 1980 film "Gloria" is a mess, but a fascinating one, given Swinton's desperately avid performance in the title role.

The fault, I think, isn't in our stars but in the script, running up a huge comedy tab the likable players can't pay off.

This is interesting stuff. So why does The Last Stand feel driven to dumb itself down, as if embarrassed by its own ideas?

So much is satisfying in KC that its shortcomings are all the more discordant.

The fact that it's difficult to believe someone who looks as dewy as Tautou would be so dangerous is much of the game.

For some viewers, Moonrise Kingdom may be movie heaven, another bric-a-brac-jammed bauble to place alongside "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited." Personally, though, I wish that Anderson would come out from under the glass, or at least change what he's doing under there.

Working from a stagy script by Sam Catlin, director Danny Leiner uses a dainty palette of tristesse (untouched when he made Dude, Where's My Car?) to suggest that the shadow of 9/11 makes every discontent more pathetic.

The power dynamic may charm the French, but it's likely to push the cringe buttons of local moviegoers in Obama's post-"The Green Mile America." Apart from the wince-inducing moments, The Intouchables is often a pleasant buddy picture.

Brisk and sweet, even if the script veers toward fussy and lame.

Goldberg, for all her character's tough bluster, is sweet too: Her performance here is contained, modulated, dignified without cushioning the Whoopi edge that makes her work so interesting and uncategorizable.

The vignettes don't add up to a story, but Wong's nervy brio and subterranean-fantasy style make for an arresting work about an exotic subculture.

The signature Eastwoodian music that the director lays over the proceedings - piano tinkle, guitar pluck, and an echo of Rachmaninoff out of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter - can't hold the assemblage together.

It is fun, though, 
 to see the younger Hanks play a murderer - it's like seeing Justin Bieber work blue.

The agonizing moments that convey what it's like for Bone to feel helpless and afraid of Daddy Glen even when he's not torturing her are where the art is. The pornographic violence is artifice. [13 Dec 1996]

The filmmakers can't decide whether to trust the period innocence of the book (and play down their casting coup) or let the young man rip as a preteen-babe magnet... So December Boys splits the difference -- safely, dully.

A painfully polite Iraq war drama pitched at the MTV generation.

Could it be that the director of "L.A. Confidential," "Wonder Boys," and "8 Mile" has been defeated by characters on a first-name basis with brisket, by women who, in Susannah Grant's screenplay, represent avatars of joyless workaholism and joyless sexaholism?

Bee Season answers the question no Talmudic student or fan of "Unfaithful" has thought to ask: What would Richard Gere look like as a learned Jewish scholar and teacher?

This hankie-yanker is an emotional cheat.

Even an audience moved to tender patriotism might wonder how Scott, a proven master of ''Gladiator''-size visual showmanship, could have bombed away the personality of every man fighting until he's left with nothing more than pure combat.

The biggest strike against Rango, though - for both the movie and the hero - is that the lizard is so damn ugly.

That Just Like Heaven succeeds at all - at least for teenage girls with limited interest in the drafting of living wills - is due entirely to Witherspoon's can-do charisma.

Doesn't have much time for refinement of image or elegance of plot. What it's got instead is an insider's feel for the local, excitable hoodlum life and speech.

The filmmaking is rudimentary in The Treatment, Oren Rudavsky's adaptation of Daniel Menaker's novel, but the feeling for the patient-and-shrink dynamic is authentic.

The movie pretends to warn against such shallowness -- but flaunts its arousal at how exciting such a controllable world is for those with access to the software.

In the most shocking contribution to this self-conscious but fascinating sampling of art challenged by life, Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu (''Amores Perros'') makes a horrifying suspense story.

The film is notable for its nice performances, its handsome photography, and its very active music. If the preceding praise sounds generic, so is the movie.

A weightless movie as cheerily artificial as the Old Navy pitchman's bronze skin tones.

In the tradition of such food-as-love films as "Eat Drink Man Woman" and "Big Night", kitchen work is idealized as a form of communion in this indulgently nostalgic story -- deep-fried with plot, script, and character cliches but honey glazed with goodwill...

Part "Law & Order," part "The Omen," the movie doesn't trust the audience to follow serious theological and legal discussion without a spook hook.

Something is happening to our boys: They're getting mushy. Shallow Hal is not so much about how gross people are as how beautiful they are once you get beyond the rude, noisy flesh. It's a sermon wrapped in a fat suit.

The performances are winning -- Gyllenhaal is particularly sharp as an aggrieved sibling, and there's mutual zing in her scenes with Reilly.

The ethical, independent-minded kid has his unhip charms, and so does Hey Arnold! The Movie.

In their own precisely posed ways, the drenched players in The Heart of Me are as compelling as those in any less decorum-bound love triangle.

A knock-kneed but likable just-for-girls drama set in 1963 that promotes single-sex institutions as the best breeding ground for future female senators and filmmakers.

It challenges, this nervy oddity, like modern art should.

Close's passion for the character she plays - 
a role, she has explained in interviews, that has absorbed her since she first played Nobbs on stage 30 years ago - contains its own intrigue.

Directed by Luis Llosa with all of the subtlety of a snake-oil salesman, is in the great tradition of cinematic cheese, as processed as Kraft Singles slices. [18 Apr 1997, p. 48]

Theatrically ambitious, musically busy, and in the end cinematically inert - clearly reflects the authorship of myth-loving director Julie Taymor.

An old-fashioned, tastefully constrained supernatural thriller, The Woman In Black embraces the elements of gothic horror movies with pleasing seriousness.

As filmmaker Michael Mann takes pains to emphasize in his handsome, underheated gangster drama Public Enemies, the gent may have been murderous, but he had style.

Disoriented but occasionally disarming saga packed with moments out of an ''Alice in Wonderland'' adventure, a stalker thriller, and a condensed season of TV's ''Big Brother.''

Joel Schumacher directs with far less fetishism than he might have, while producer Jerry Bruckheimer kicks up only a fraction of the bull dust usually visible in his projects.

There's something almost endearingly out of sync about the sleek but now dated Euro-thriller The International.

Some of the riffs are really funny and/or expertly scary. Others have the feel of awfully snappy dialogue crafted by middleaged people trying a little too eagerly to sound like the young people from whose mouths the banter flows.

It borders on perky -- a duller, safer tonal choice for the story of a conniving go-getter whose fall is as precipitous as her rise.

The movie's biggest surprise may be that the story we think we know from modern scary cinema - that horror is a fun, cosmic game, not much else - here turns out to be pretty much the whole enchilada.

This activist documentary -- alternately impassioned, despairing, edifying, and hectoring about all the ways humans are screwing up the earth in a death rattle of hubris -- shouts, People, do something! In contrast, "An Inconvenient Truth" feels positively hushed.

Often has the rambling feeling of a home movie Blaustein made for his buddies.

Indeed, the point of Syriana appears to be that the whole lousy, corrupt, oil-producing and -consuming world is a ball of wax, ready to melt.

In making the radical artistic choice to tell the story as if it were being enacted by players on a stage, Wright falls passionately in love with his own fanciful artifices.

With those piercing eyes, Owen makes a lovely, soulful Joe, of course. But it's not the nice papa we want to understand here, it's the unapologetically naughty one.

The added value that writer-director Douglas McGrath has in mind is gossip -- and a goggly interest in gossip becomes the glittering gimmick of Infamous.

Diverting enough, but it's also the kind of high-concept studio concoction Ricky Gervais might have ridiculed in his great backstage-showbiz sitcom "Extras."

There's a double meaning in the title of this folksy, relentlessly political, heavy-handed story, written and directed by Mark Herman and set among the coal mines of Yorkshire, England, in 1992.

Tatyana, the embodiment of a heroine whose still waters run deep, requires more maturity than Tyler as yet possesses.

Banderas uses all his old wiles in this well-oiled, businesslike, quite clangingly violent sequel to "The Mask of Zorro."

Coaching from the same playbook with which they made "Rudy" and "Hoosiers," director David Anspaugh and screenwriter Angelo Pizzo create a reverent fable.

A skeleton-thin thriller wrapped in glamorous production values.

Intriguing creepout.

The film's lures, while undeniable, are synthetic, and we never do learn what fuels all the greed besides pints of beer.

His (Charles Dance) cinematic style mixes the scent of mothballs with that of the lavender in which these ladies are preserved.

The result is flashy, but the meaning is a bit of a bob and weave.

Engages in the cinematic equivalent of not inhaling.

A boggy mix of fact, fiction, and changeable wigs and beards worn by Heath Ledger in the title role, manages to shrink the grandness of the myth without clarifying our understanding of the man.

The political angle is gratuitous, even foolish, and certainly a distraction from the movie's visual strengths.

I spoil nothing by reporting what readers already know, that when Fifty Shades is not a dirty story, it is, as the trilogy unfolds, a study in cartoonishly weird family dynamics.

The mixed-up rhythms of the story rescue Barbershop from bland goodness.

In that rare moment, the movie relaxes its rictus of pain and actually dares to feel good. Moments like these aren't just a negotiation between all and nothing -- they're everything that allows us to care about even those characters who only slouch and shriek ''F -- - orfff!''

There is pleasure in giving oneself up to the gusty swirls of the film's imagery, and especially to the handsome grandeur of its star.

Pirate Radio is, in the end, about as rock-revolutionary as a tea break. But the choppy production floats on a great soundtrack (the real pirates are the Rolling Stones) and is buoyed by an inviting cast.

Director Costa-Gavras packs a whole lotta hectoring into this high-strung morality play about the broadcast media's culpability in the escalation of human drama into camera-ready Greek tragedy.

Isn't exactly good - like "Legally Blonde 2," it's a more exaggerated, less buoyant sequel to what should have been a one-off comedy - but it's enjoyable.

Somewhere in this broody ''Twilight Zone''-ish story about magical thinking (and the lure, to filmmakers, of garish casino culture) is a provocative and maybe even shocking thought on the Holocaust as a crapshoot.

And so by the time the pair admire the Grand Canyon and, Due Date has lost its way, relying on its leading men to lead by charisma alone, even though their characters have nowhere interesting to go besides the happily-ever-after of dull, responsible male maturity.

Grant is game for a new level of meta-ha-ha, joke's-on-me in Music and Lyrics. But with Drew Barrymore as his costar, this bland, light romantic comedy insists on keeping the commentary as disposable as one of the '80s gumball tunes Grant used to swivel to as Alex Fletcher, a washed-up '80s pop star.

There are instances when the filmmaker tries for Western iconography and settles for ''Full Monty'' ingratiation.

For all its wispy fun, Small Time Crooks still tilts, with little-guy stubbornness, at windmills in Allen's mind.

Even though they're now college dudes, fulfillment for fellas is still predicated on copping a feel and downing a brewski.

The plot and script sag like worn out chew toys just when Cats & Dogs should be in full squeak.

It's no myth: All play and no work makes Jackman, as Leopold, a doll of a boyfriend.

I don't know that Where the Money Is would work at all were it not for what we, the audience, bring into the theater.

Every instance of gleeful bad taste is timed and positioned for maximum, liberating laugh value.

Steve Zahn makes full use of the many varieties of hyper in his acting arsenal, while Timothy Olyphant has a heckuva good time telegraphing macho mania.

You're set up for when director Richard Donner -- who worked with Gibson on all three audience-pleasing Weapons -- switches the movie from a really interesting, jittery, literate, and witty tone poem about justified contemporary paranoia (and the creatively unhinged dark side of New York City) to an overloaded, meandering iteration of a Lethal Weapon project that bears the not-so-secret stamp of audience testing and tinkering.

The Naked Gun writing team and actor-turned-director Hart Bochner do unto the stereotype of inner-city high schools what needs to be done to stereotyped inner-city high schools -- parody them silly -- in this high-flying, low-comedy production.

Only when you look closer do you realize that While You Were Sleeping exhibits precious few genuine feelings. It's a movie cranked out by machine, about supposedly delightfully idiosyncratic characters who only do what they do because the highly structured plot requires it.

A comedy of '90s sexual inclusiveness as effervescent as a cold sody pop -- and about as intoxicating.

It's the parental mush about trusting one's kid to make her own discoveries and blah blah blah (spoken in a Sandlerized version of a Dracula voice) that drains the movie of blood. What's left are platitudes, and Sandler singing a novelty song in a Transylvanian-accented falsetto.

David Schwimmer directs this smarmy Hot Topic drama with empathy for the craft of acting but less interest in the craft of making a movie move.

Tentle, dreamy animated sci-fi tale.

In a movie like this one, a little madness is its own Holy Grail.

Heavy on mood and murk.

Windtalkers blows this way and that, but there's no mistaking the filmmaker in the tall grass, true to himself.

The importance of faith, church, kin, staying off drugs, sharing food, repenting from sin, forgiving sinners, appreciating a good black man, rejecting a bad one, and honoring black matriarchy is enumerated with typical, reassuring Perry broadness.

Of course, there's still the Williams schmaltz factor.

Allen's canniest hire of all is Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a bratty, destructive young star, juicing the proceedings with a power surge that subsides as soon as he exits.

While we can admire their attractive exteriors, we don't know anything about the interior lives of the three women so vibrantly miserable in their unhappiness.

The Science of Sleep is like a weird dream that tugs at the memory throughout the day with its intriguing, misshapen pieces.

Concentrate instead on the delightful performances. A thespian shoutout goes to Reynolds (his hair bleached bright yellow for the gig) for his jaunty way with a cape, tights, and the hands-on-hip poses of superherodom.

The sum is no greater than the ''Fame''-style saga of any one of them, and Graff, an actor and screenwriter making his directing debut, is less successful at developing each story than at conveying his general affection for the curtain-call species.

Toni Collette gives it the old "Little Miss Sunshine" try in The Black Balloon as an edge-of-kooky, very pregnant mama presiding over a chaotic household.

Anxiety-provoking documentary.

Robert Downey Jr. is great in a role no one less magnetically reckless would dare approach.

Propelled by ferocious sex, nasty violence, and coy interludes of traditional Turkish love songs.

In their way, Mirabelle and Ray are the deracinated West Coast equivalents of a Woody Allen couple.

Director Scott Elliott, in his feature-film debut, is especially perceptive about what goes on at the edges during deepening family crises, literally at the borders of the screen.

A cute premise that, upon closer inspection, rings falser rather than truer. It's pretty good, but not nearly as good as Brooks gets.

It's as agreeably sweet as advertised, with a particularly yummy performance by Juliette Binoche.

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who brought his interest in self-discovery and untamed places to Quest for Fire, The Lover, and the IMAX 3-D film Wings of Courage, is at his best re-creating the serene exoticism of the Dalai Lama's Tibet. But the spark of the holy that the Dalai Lama lights in Harrer flickers only fitfully in all the wind in this production.

Between bouts of decisive action, the characters mill around the French countryside (in lovely costumes, to be sure, by Jenny Beavan) as if unsure of which sexual stereotype to bust next.

Despite the best of intentions, an actress who makes her own headlines gets in the way of the big picture.

Something is wrong under this big tent. Actually made to resemble a good old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing movie, this cinematic Water for Elephants droops and lumbers like Rosie the elephant herself.

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?