Lisa Schwarzbaum

What's ultimately shocking about Kika is how empty mayhem can be made to look.

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

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.

She's no Mary Poppins: Maggie Smith is more like a cheery Angel of Death in the light black comedy Keeping Mum, one of those dutifully daft British diddles (complete with Rowan Atkinson as a vicar) that, except for the blunt sex talk, might have been constructed decades ago.

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 film values quips and declamations over natural conversation (or an explanation of how such intelligent women could have been so blind to world events).

Suicidal depression has rarely looked so amusing.

Whenever Rupert Everett appears as a rich fellow who distinctly does not fancy ladies, it's a hysterical history lesson of the hilarious variety.

I'm confounded by the fact that, aside from the Pevensie siblings and their nicely obnoxious cousin, absolutely everything and everyone aboard the Dawn Treader looks one-dimensional.

In the end, we never know why anyone is the one for anyone. And this qualifies as a filmmaking problem, at least for us here on Earth.

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.

British director Mike Barker and magpie New York screenwriter Howard Himelstein, have taken "Lady Windermere's Fan" - Wilde's first big stage success, written in 1892 - and pulped it senseless in the name of puttin' on the charm.

I don't know what tools of the trade Paul Rudd and director David Wain share to dream up the kind of inspired nutso stuff Rudd has done in smart-funny-raunchy winners like "Wet Hot American Summer" and "Role Models." But whatever it is, the two are in a groove - and backed up by some blissed-out creative co-conspirators.

Long before the second hour of Australia (which feels like the fifth), it's clear that Luhrmann hasn't found a satisfactory way to make a movie nearly as ballsy -- or coherent -- as he wants his creation to be.

Yes indeed, Pirates 2.0 is a theme ride, if by ride you mean a hellish contraption into which a ticket holder is strapped, overstimulated but unsatisfied, and unable to disengage until the operator releases the restraining harness.

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.

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.

More a sampling of previous crowd-pleasers...than a fashion statement all its own.

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

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.

It's scariest as a parable about the evil that exists in the hearts of adolescent boys.

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.

As an overwrought, overacted drama, Kill the Poor is negligible.

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.

Out of the zany strictures of Dogma 95...Danish newcomer Thomas Vinterberg has made a funny, volatile, visually dynamic story about the unraveling of one extended family during the course of a patriarchal 60th-birthday dinner.

The two XXL personalities are in fit, fighting form in a comedy as bracing and furiously right for the moment as it is broad and huggable.

Emotional presence and a sophisticated understanding of commitment-phobia (as something other than a comedic punchline or an excuse for sex scenes) distinguishes this intense, contained drama, as does the unforced, sensual, and sensitive cinematography of Uta Briesewitz.

A genial story of friendship among three young African-American men that gets far on charm even when the cinema technique falters and stalls.

Be prepared to collapse into a hoot and a howl of hilarity at all the wrong moments.

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.

Best part: Colorful Croatian-Danish actor Zlatko Buri´ reprises his role as the jovially menacing foreign heavy out to collect his dough.

The only real magic in The Lake House is that Kate and Alex have never heard of e-mail.

In this slapdash production directed by Mel Smith ("The Tall Guy" but also, alas, "Radioland Murders"), written by Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings") and Robin Driscoll, there's just enough unrepentant self-centeredness missing to take the hilariously brutish edge off Bean's game for those who know him.

Damon's how-to-break-the-law lesson - as ludicrous as anything else in this enjoyably zigzaggy exercise in accumulating peril - grants Neeson the fun of experimenting with an American ex-con accent for his one scene.

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.

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

Serendipity has no business working, but it does. And by the way, Eugene Levy has no business almost stealing the show, but he does, too.

Watching Running With Scissors the movie instead of reading Running With Scissors the best-selling memoir by Augusten Burroughs is like running with a spatula, or maybe some weird toast tongs.

A chaste and tepid remake of a 1950 British comedy.

Streep is a pleasure to behold; less so the rest of The Iron Lady.

This charming, if unnecessarily coronation-length production gets the duckling-to-swan ambivalence just right.

Rodrigo Santoro (Paulo on Lost, Xerxes in 300, and even better, Raúl Castro in Che) is mighty matinee-idol charismatic himself in the title role, alternating between swaggering lady-killer and ravaged victim of self-destruction.

The loveliest moments put both politics and theatrics aside, conveying the strange beauty of a hard life involving little else than fish, water, and gray sky.

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.

Look, but don't be touched: There is much to see but little to remember in this telling of a battle we are meant never to forget.

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.

Janet McTeer displays Amazonian power while Jennifer Jason Leigh tears into her role as a high maintenance creature with a ferocity that leaves little room for her usual acting tics.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The accountant in Bloom would probably approve of the new Producers: It's an efficient extension of a popular brand. In theory, what's not to like? In reality, the whole schmear.

Doesn't take advantage of its own possibilities, either as a hard-boiled gangland battle or as a soft-boiled, interracial Shakespearean love story.

The easygoing silliness with which this late-summer movie surprise scuttles from mayhem to mayhem and the verve with which the cast throws itself into the fray are so cheering and liberating.

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.

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

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.''

A film not even a star as foxed and foxy as Johnny Depp himself could save.

This triumphant sequel to the hard-to-top 2002 original may be the first great comic-book movie in the age of self-help and CGI wizardry, an entertainment in which both the thrills and the therapeutic personal growth are well earned.

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

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.

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."

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

Reveling in mess and homegrown multiracial mayhem, Death at a Funeral finds a new lease on life.

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.

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.

The villainous Polluter-in-Chief is eloquently played by Robert Knepper, familiarly loathsome as T-Bag on Fox's "Prison Break." And when Knepper and Statham get together, there's a fine showdown of grimaces.

This trip down The Road to El Dorado proceeds under the speed limit all the way.

Bears the weight of too many genres jostling for screen time.

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

Tonally scattershot and more than a little heavy-footed.

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.)

The hilarious Malkovich, coiffed in an artful pageboy and savoring a fruity French accent, would overpower the competition on sheer thespian madness.

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

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

I'm as touched and charmed by its failures as I am transfixed, at times, by its successful inventiveness and audacity.

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.

Where the movie falters is in sustaining the tricky balance between pastoral life lessons and creepy suspense.

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

The movie is a rigged game of clichés and platitudes, but fans will be pleased by additional proof that Latifah is a lovable Queen but not a pampered princess.

A majority oriented movie that assumes sophisticated familiarity with a sexual minority.

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

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.

The words belong to Mr. Shakespeare. All else in this Macbeth is the pleasurably fevered invention of brash Australian director Geoffrey Wright.

What a fun-dumb relief! In the isolationist Expendables world, all foreigners are bad news. All buddy bonding is done with a wink. All pretenses of art are checked at the door. Someone even says, ''I'll be back.'' (Guess who?)

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

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.

Thumpingly silly yet self-serious period-piece what-if.

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.

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

We, the people, are meant to cheer in response, but the spirit isn't willing. War is hell, but so is peace -- at least when it comes to movies in a no-man's-land like this one.

The cast is tasty, including Vincent D'Onofrio as a friendly fellow Mob guy, Val Kilmer as the head of the Cleveland PD, Christopher Walken as an underworld power broker, and a bunch of character actors hoping for a remake of "The Sopranos."

Earnest messages about bad climate change and good parenting skills have been replaced by a we-all-share-a-planet sense of fun that's more "Finding Nemo" than National Geographic.

In Final Destination 5, Death makes the point yet again that it will not be cheated. And happily for those of us who enjoy the FD series' grotesquely clever premise beyond reason, unfortunate folks still refuse to pay attention, with inventively dire consequences.

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?

Perry has taken Shange's feminist word-and-movement portraits of disenfranchised African-American women and turned those howls into...a maddeningly choppy mess of a Tyler Perry movie.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes Brenda Blethyn is content merely to nibble the scenery. In Introducing the Dwights, a drippy Australian family comedy caper, she chomps it to a pulp until we long for her straightforward monstrosity as a mother in "Little Voice."

A very low grade romantic drama indeed, a love story with all the life and death intensity of a heat rash.

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

Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.

The mad genius of this cheerily bonkers feature is the integration of a documentary-style safari into an outlandish fiction involving a fancy-pants CIA pursuit of a downed spy satellite, and a shotgun-wielding outback widow.

Runs into construction problems, maybe from too many foremen. DeVito favors pushy slapstick; Stiller prefers hotshot sarcasm. Barrymore's comic talents are wasted; she's there for decoration.

The Guilt Trip is not about Rogen, bubbeleh. Streisand is her own once-in-a-lifetime trip, looking gawjuss with that divine voice and those killer fingernails, and the sight of the lady scarfing down four pounds of beef at a Texas steak joint is one a Streisand lover can now cross off her bucket list.

The troubles are broad, the plot twists giant, and the performances cheery in this carol to ethnic pride in Chicago's traditionally Latino Humboldt Park.

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.

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

The Stoning of Soraya M.'s drawn-out torture sequence is harrowing and lurid.

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.

Redgrave shimmers like one of Tuscany's magnificent cypress trees as an Englishwoman searching for Lorenzo (Nero).

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.

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

It's a buoyant, old-wave disaster pic for a generation of well-conditioned thrill seekers charmed by the revelation that Richard Dreyfuss really is the Red Buttons of our day.

There are no big thrills, only gentle laughs in this light story by Hugh Wilson and Peter Torokvei (Wilson also directed).

This is what a videogame movie looks like now.

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.

This latest market-savvy bit of circuit preaching is less cartoonish than Perry's previous big-tent revival meetings.

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.

Really, all this movie is about is the joy of checks, calls, folds, rivers, and the acquired thrill of knowing what those words mean.

The leisure-time viewer will say, ''Hey, this is sort of like "Casablanca," so why play it again?''

The nightmare is that the live guys in this Dreamcatcher lose the battle the minute the mechanical worm turns.

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

God forgive me, but I enjoyed the nerve-racking silliness of this newest, loudest exercise in destruction.

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

The Reckoning, with a script by Mark Mills, demands close attention; it's a play of words and ideas crowding for consideration.

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

It's raunchy, outspoken -- and also a smart and agile dissection of art, fame, and the chutzpah of big-budget productions.

May not tell a great story, but it's a great wow.

Kinsey is patient and educational and never (darn it) rude or shocking.

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.

Enthusiastic as one might be that Jack Lemmon has found a new lease on movie life with his Grumpy Old Men series, the funny-crankpots genre wears mighty thin on this road trip.

These tales are as highly designed as fashion layouts. But they're as relaxing to thumb through as those NYT Magazine trend pieces.

The mix is Lifetime soap–meets–Woody Allen smart-set comedy, with less humor and a genteel Connecticut setting.

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.

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.

A riveting and unexpectedly inspiring essay on the peace that comes from shared physical and mental concentration.

Because the script, riddled with verbal ugliness by David Elliot and Paul Lovett, sends the movie to a series of arbitrary nowheres, the final showdown for the Mercer boys and their enemies is just as meaningless and sense-deadening.

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.

The movie is also visually magnificent - modestly so. Plus, it's half the length of "Avatar."

A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie from the filmmaker (''Harvard '66'') who, in his body of work, indulges his fantasies as fetishistically as other men finger their cigars.

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.

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

Intense, autobiographically based drama.

An Unfinished Life is inert, kaput -- a middlebrow mush of platitudes rather than an okay corral of distinct characters with heartbeats. It's awful not in an exciting, uncontrolled way but in an overly controlled, narcotized way.

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.

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

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

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

There's nothing nice about 30 Minutes or Less. It's got no redeeming social value. It just ticks away, exploding all notions of where you think it's going to go. It blew me sideways.

A denouement more textbook than thrilling stalls some of the movie's power. But the early chills are potent, intense.

A traditionally dressed, old-fashioned drama, starring Kevin Kline in the Robin Williams role -- is as much about the moral development of the adult as about his boys'. More so, maybe.

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.

Mirren's all-out display in this distinctly British absurdo-literary extravaganza had me wishing Elinor were my own fabulous auntie and that she'd lend me some magic items from her closet.

So jaunty, so limber, and so visually self-assured that art peeks through where crap has traditionally made its home.

A companion piece to "Match Point" that suffers all the more in comparison.

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

What slays them in the second balcony, though, flattens on the screen.

Brooks guards the movie from overheating in a surfeit of warmedy.

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

Ultimately, the talented cast -- among them M. Emmet Walsh, Faye Dunaway, Skeet Ulrich, and Viggo Mortensen -- play to their easiest star turns rather than their most interesting strengths.

[A] gimmicky actors' holiday.

Bride of Chucky is teen horror for dummies.

This is a deeply unpleasant movie masquerading as a heartfelt social commentary on life in these United States.

Every porridgy inmate in this instantly forgettable romp warbles in the prison's amateur musical, and one of them demonstrates a rather extreme devotion to the tomatoes he grows in the on-site greenhouse.

This voyage is strictly one for the disposable present, however quaintly old-fashioned the hand-drawn work that the animators have blended with 3D effects. (Tots will twitch during the grown-up relationship parts, and teens will groan at the kiddie sops.)

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

Fun in its raunchy unwieldiness.

Coarser, more hectic, more cheaply written sequel.

The whole thing wobbles, like the garish, trashy, sexy shoes the young folks are wearing this summer on their way (in droves) to movie theaters, intent on abandoning themselves to pleasurable mindlessness.

What falls in Chicken Little are hopes.

Arriving amid the traditionally withered harvest of January releases, Orange County is peachy.

Scattershot, hit-and-often-miss comedy.

With no thriller cliché left unused, the gaily outlandish plot is matched by tin-eared dialogue, ripe tough-guy overacting from the very game Pearce, and best-that-she-could acting from Grace.

For a story with so much going for it — including an interesting cast — Just Cause is just not taut and thrilling enough.

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.

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

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.

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.

The characters in Alien Trespass (directed by X-Files producing alum R.W. Goodwin) are specimens of Sputnik-era determination, led by a gung-ho Eric McCormack.

A drippy, uninvolving movie adaptation.

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.

The magnolias in Callie Khouri's fried green movie look limp.

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.

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

The result is a slack do-over fantasy in which Zac Efron, as a basketball star, looks baffled as to why he hasn't been asked to sing and dance.

The chemical energy between Bullock and Reynolds is fresh and irresistible.

The movie is so littered with clichés of genre, as well as clichés of artifice in Reeves' pained performance, that any semblance of social reality goes foul.

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

Even in the summertime, the most restless young audience deserves the dignity of an action hero motivated by something more than franchise possibilities. Movies like XXX -- a big 000 -- don't deserve our $$$.

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

A poky dawdle of a Southern-style indie that would pass without notice but for John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson.

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.

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.

The performances are mediocre. The heart is big. The weather is swell.

A quaint, romanticized rendering.

Bright dialogue and finely embroidered performances adorn The Guru like festive beading on a pair of made-in-India bedroom slippers.

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

Nothing more than a bad harvest.

If you like Kathy Bates movies, you'll probably be frustrated with this one, since as Tripp's mother, the invaluable character actress is made to whipsaw between playing sappy domestic slave to her son's laundry and salty, overly sexual wife.

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

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

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.

Every character in The Architect is crazily stuccoed with crisis.

Aside from the awesome flames and pyrotechnic scenes of crisis, danger, and part-of-the-job bravery, the movie is a quiet salute; it does its job.

Earnestly ersatz down to every spangle, dance move, plot turn, and line of hokum dialogue, Burlesque is a showbiz pic for these American Idol times - a time when we agree to pretend that mediocre mimicry of better artists is good enough to keep us entertained. We agree to pretend that quality is in the eye and ear of the undemanding beholder.

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.

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

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

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.

The movie never gives its heart freely and honestly to the satiny whirl of post-"Chicago" showbiz spectacle it so clearly wants to be.

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.

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

What Emily doesn't do, though -- what this slow-moving, sour, sloppily assembled teen drama doesn't allow her to do -- is make her predicament of any emotional interest.

Had Latura et al. paused for even a moment to acknowledge what they were doing, Daylight might have been a whole other ball of fire.

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 movie's mortal failing is echoed in the religious medal Pita gives Creasy in a gift of innocent, uplifting love: Finding heft or coherence within all the lugubrious agitation is a lost cause worthy of St. Jude.

For those newbies, this update, starring peppery Disney re-do queen Lindsay Lohan as wannabe car racer Maggie Peyton, is as serviceable an introduction as any to the notion of a sentient set of wheels.

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

Jaa, mesmerizing as ever to behold with his pinwheel moves, also (co)directs for the first time.

Irksome dither of an indie drama.

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.

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.

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

There are stretches of big fun in Big Trouble, and little pleasures too.

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 big goofball relies too much on the funny hair and swingin' postures of the era as punchlines in themselves.

Calculatedly soppy, seasonally phony Americanized remake of Giuseppe Tornatore's 1990 "Stanno Tutti Bene."

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.

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.

Argues on behalf of the Darwinian theory that all of life imitates high school...But the argument is only halfhearted. Just Friends is much more interested in - and hilarious about - the small nostalgias of suburbia.

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

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.''

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.

It's the showy story, script, and even staging that wear a fella out in this relentlessly precious feature debut by writer-director Jordan Roberts.

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

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

Director Betty Thomas demonstrates her expertise at keeping indulgence at bay in even the coarsest of comic situations.

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

It's young-Hollywood-driven business as usual in this derivative, nasty, and ultimately empty drama.

Union, who looks so chic and can talk so bitchy-funny, doesn't so much establish a character as roll out a series of attitudes. That's all she's called on to do. That's all anyone is called on to do: Be very tame, and make much ado about zilch.

There's a kind of tough beauty to this deft, satisfying thriller.

Another contemporary story about a woman with a successful career punished with a lousy personal life.

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 dull and unbewitching movie.

Weirdly moving.

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.

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

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

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.

It offers an attractive getaway route from self-importance, snark, and chatty comedies about male bonding. Here, stick shifts do the talking.

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.

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.

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.

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

The mangy joke in the defiantly homemade documentary 95 Miles to Go is that Ray Romano on a business trip is no different from any other schmo, minus the autograph signing.

As the groom's brassy-babe stepmother, Demi Moore does her own share of scenery chewing, but at least she looks like she's having fun.

Rambo teaches that fighting sucks, good intentions can be futile, and coalitions of the willing are a charade: A man's got to do what a man's got to do.

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

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.

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.

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

Disappointingly tired, unfunny, and disengaged.

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.

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.

Martin and Hunt are exactly the right lively but not sticky authority figures to keep the house (and the comedy pace) bouncing.

If your allergy to comedies bred from British style mugging crossed with Disney style prancing has, like mine, flared up in recent years, this hybrid from writer director Joel Hershman (''Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me'') will make you wheeze.

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

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.

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.

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.

This funny, gory stab-athon is as sophisticated about the mechanics of Part 2s as the original was savvy about horror flicks.

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

A skeleton-thin thriller wrapped in glamorous production values.

It's a gussied-up sorority-of-rising-stars project produced, I fantasize, by baby-boomer studio guys whose younger spouses articulately defend a woman's right to stay home and raise the kids.

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.

The movie wants so badly to be mentioned in the same breath as "Heathers" or "Election" that it's not even funny. Really, I mean it, this charred-black comedy is not even funny.

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."

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

This inauthentic teen tale, with its cosmetically softened edges, serves neither the young people nor the Mendes fans for whom it might be intended.

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

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.

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

So let's hear it for the giant wig of Pre-Raphaelite gray corkscrews planted on the noggin of Jane Fonda as a glamorous hippie grandma. The hairdo meets its match in the dull Ann Taylor togs encasing Catherine Keener: That's how you know Granny's daughter is an uptight lawyer.

A histrionic mess.

What we learn in this all-pain/no-pleasure episode is that marriage feels like a life sentence, weddings are miserable events, honeymoon sex is dangerous and leaves a bride covered in bruises, and pregnancy is a torment that leads to death in exchange for birth.

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

Firewall is a witless entertainment, and a derivative one, too; it's everything listless about Hollywood in February, everything discardable about the genre in general.

Dopey, not dope.

No maid, and no fancy lady either, would swoon for a fellow as damp as the hero so grudgingly coughed up by Fiennes. In the words of Cinderellas everywhere, no effin' way.

No worse than any disease-of-the-week TV movie, and no more moralistic than any Lifetime drama. But it's no better, either, and it ought to be.