Lou Lumenick

A credulity-straining thriller featuring a few good paranoid moments — and, perhaps most important, Rebecca Hall running in high heels.

In his directing debut Battle in Seattle, actor Stuart Towns end does an impressive job (on a shoestring budget) of re-creating the massive street protests that forced the cancellation of the World Trade Organization summit in 1999.

A big, loud, proudly brainless popcorn flick that blows up cars, trucks, tanks, boats, helicopters and even a train.

Perhaps this year’s timeliest film — as well as, unfortunately, one of the hardest to sit through.

Sweet, funny, well-acted and nicely shot on locations in the south of France -- but on the dull side overall.

What's cutting- edge comedy for one generation can become generic filler for the next - that's the lesson to be learned from The In-Laws, a strenuous attempt to recycle a vastly funnier minor classic.

Ultimately fails to make its case that five teenagers were sent to jail for a crime they didn't commit solely because of institutional racism.

Perabo gives a fairly impressive and flashy performance, even when the script descends into melodrama.

While the performances are often engaging, this loose collection of largely improvised numbers would probably have worked better as a one-hour TV documentary.

The most depressing date movie since "Random Hearts."

Yet despite the efforts of an excellent cast headed by three top comedy names -- Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black -- and tons of beautiful scenery (mostly British Columbia and the Canadian Yukon), this movie stubbornly refuses to take flight, or generate more than a few chuckles.

Even with a clever final twist straight out of "The Twilight Zone," this crummy-looking two-hander is a tough sit.

The overlong Amigo has its heart in the right place, but its approach to complex issues is too simplistic to win over unconverted minds.

So haphazardly written and directed that it barely qualifies as a movie, The House Bunny is watchable solely for the comic stylings of the blond veteran of the "Scary Movie" series.

It's in the teenage section where the film goes seriously wrong and veers from an absorbing family story.

Silly enough for you? Did I mention that the immortal Ken Jeong of “The Hangover’’ plays God, who gets mighty pissed when hubby accidentally shoots Jesus out of the sky?

Yet another murky film about the 1970s that's watchable mostly for its cast rather than the story.

The actors are engaging enough that you only occasionally remember that there really isn't much going on. Then, unfortunately for the audience, something does actually happen.

Odd and not entirely uninteresting little docudrama.

A rare drug-crime movie devoid of violence, and pretty much anything in the way of excitement.

Aside from one tasteful nude scene, this well-meaning if bland romantic drama plays and looks a lot like a "special" episode of "Dawson's Creek."

Basically "csi: East Texas,'' the debut feature of Ami Canaan Mann is long on style and short on coherent storytelling, not unlike numerous efforts by her director dad, Michael, who serves as a producer here.

Todd Robinson’s Phantom gives us a couple of things we haven’t seen in a while: the great Ed Harris and a Cold War submarine thriller. It’s not something you want to plunk down $12 for, but just diverting enough to check out when it arrives on Netflix Instant.

More than a few will agree with the penguins, who netted the film a PG rating with the utterance, "Well, this sucks."

This overlong drama is the first (mostly) English-language film from the talented Swedish filmmaker Moodysson (“Lilya 4-Ever”). Any semblance of subtlety was unfortunately lost in translation.

Awfully poky, even for an art film.

A couple of heavyweight actors — Tim Roth and Cillian Murphy — get top billing, but this British drama belongs to young Eloise Laurence, memorable as Skunk, the diabetic daughter of Roth’s kindly solicitor.

Worthwhile mainly because of "Inside Out," a 28-minute autobiographical film written, directed and starring Jason Gould, who not-so-incidentally is Barbra Streisand's son.

Nowhere near as funny as you’d expect with its stellar cast.

A genially scattershot mockumentary.

A Walk in the Woods is broad as a barn door, with two stars who have minimal chemistry — and there’s not much in the way of reflection about mortality.

Tried to turn this into a replay of its 2000 military-rescue hitBlack Hawk Down -- though, in the end, it's almost totally lacking in the serious hardware and viscerally paced action that propelled Ridley Scott's movie to the top of the box office.

Rebecca Hall is wasted as Sandvig's sister and the film's voice of reason.

Basically a feature-length rock video from Germany with appealing performers, decently written characters, a killer score, and an interesting premise.

While Greenwood and Posey turn on enough charm to make this a fairly painless experience, Zack Bernbaum’s And Now a Word From Our Sponsor is a mild, toothless satire — a “Being There’’ where there’s barely any there there.

The posthumous campaign to polish Michael Jackson's tarnished reputation continues apace with this Spike Lee infomercial, commissioned by Sony and the money-grubbing Jackson estate to promote the 25th anniversary of his 1987 album "Bad.''

A slick, shallow and thoroughly generic caper flick.

Deeply mediocre and ultra-predictable.

Ultimately, Birthday Girl disintegrates into a fairly routine -- and brutal -- caper movie.

An intermittently interesting drama.

The Manzanar Fishing Club has enough interesting footage for perhaps a 15-minute segment of a TV news magazine. Beyond that, my eyes started to glaze over with endless talk about rods, reels and bait.

What is Inland Empire - which Lynch is understandably distributing himself - about? What is it trying to say? If you figure that out, let me know.

Some gut-busting moments, but for the most part the thrill is gone.

An instant candidate for the so-bad-it’s-sort-of-great hall of fame, Jupiter Ascending is totally bonkers, a sort of black-velvet-Elvis mash-up of “Star Wars’’ and every other sci-fi/fantasy movie of the past half-century right up to “The Hunger Games.”

Mostly a second-rate action picture that's content to use apartheid as a colorful background.

Beyond the Ocean, which at its best is reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger in Paradise," doesn't integrate its two story lines in a particularly satisfying manner and the ending is somewhat abrupt.

I adore Frances McDor mand, but she's seriously miscast in a title role Emma Thompson could play in her sleep.

Writer-director Julian Henriquez does a great job staging the lively musical numbers.

Little more than an infomercial for the candidate.

It's not a total shipwreck, but abandon hope all ye seeking a coherent, much less satisfying, narrative. Expect instead a reported $300 million worth of eye candy, delivered with enormous technical skill.

Strictly for the 8-and-under crowd.

It's not exactly a surprise the makers of Reign Over Me feel compelled to manufacture a happy ending for a story that really has none. Pity.

Borrowing liberally from the "Exorcist" and "Omen" movies, and with little regard for credibility, The Ring Two has a familiar ring to it.

Ignore the furiously overplotted, headache-inducing story -- derived from a series of comic books -- and focus on the exquisitely drawn Japanese animation.

Long-winded and often over-the-top Italian soap opera about a neurotic, middle-class Roman family.

If you were wondering what “12 Years a Slave” might have been like as a two-part episode of “Masterpiece Theatre,” you might want to check out this unsatisfying but not uninteresting oddity. It renders another historical story about race with exquisite taste but not much in the way of passion.

There is probably an amusing movie to be made about camps that try to "rehabilitate" homosexuals - but this thuddingly stupid satire isn't it.

Probably would have yielded a more interesting documentary than this sugary feature.

A schmaltzy filmed record of a Nashville concert given by the legendary former rocker, who has morphed into the new Kenny Rogers.

Sporadically hilarious but more often just plain crass and contrived.

Trimming half an hour from this bloated, 143-minute blockbuster would have highlighted the film's treasures, not the least of which is Johnny Depp's endearingly eccentric performance as Captain Jack Sparrow.

A good cast and disciplined direction add some distinction to Ric Roman Waugh's Felon, which is basically the old tale about an innocent man corrupted by a stay in prison.

Burt Reynolds and Sally Field they're not, but you could do worse for mindless late-summer entertainment than Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell in Hit & Run.

Wears out its welcome fast because of its artistic pretensions and self-absorbed characters. You'd be better off renting "Manhattan" instead.

Much sillier - and the movie's nearly two-hour running time seems to last nearly as long as a vampire's afterlife.

Curious George skews very young, but parents should be warned that it arrives not only with the worst ad slogan in recent memory ("Show me the monkey"), but a full line of plush toys and related tie-in merchandise.

Well-meant but rambling little indie melodrama.

The biggest load of New Agey hogwash to grace the big screen since Spacey's "Pay it Forward."

This lavish coffee-table-book of a movie gradually reveals itself as an uninvolving, crashing bore.

The Good Night is at heart a mediocre Sundance variation on the Dudley Moore-Bo Derek alleged classic "10."

In the end, this relentlessly nihilistic crime-caper thriller adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

Rambles on for nearly two hours with subplots that go nowhere -- and half-baked leftist political commentary -- before focusing in for a quietly devastating climax.

Basically the Mike Tyson saga reduced to its B-movie essence.

So exploitative and misogynistic that its last-minute dramatic turns and pleas for tolerance and understanding come off as manipulative as its heroine.

Directed with sledgehammer subtlety by Dennis Dugan ("I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry").

A mildly funny, stereotype-stuffed comedy.

Deschanel manages to make Winter Passing almost matter. That's real talent.

A very elegant and fit-looking Omar Sharif appears as the on-screen narrator and Kate Maberly ("The Secret Garden") plays his granddaughter in a framing story.

It may take a scorecard to keep track of the complicated relationships in this sorry clan.

While Amen works as a history lesson, it's less effective as a thriller, since the outcome is sadly all too well-known.

Though quite watchable thanks to its cast, the overly ambitious Don McKay ends up as confused as its main female character.

Godardian title not withstanding, Zeina Durra's not-uninteresting slice of the downtown Manhattan demimonde is too concerned with being cool to work up much in the way of political outrage, much less narrative drive.

Unfortunately, director Marc Foster (who co-wrote the screenplay) never allows anyone except Mitchell to play more than a one-dimensional character.

At best, mildly entertaining.

The tin-earned dialogue and haphazard plotting are more reminiscent of Tarantino's frequent collaborator Robert Rodriguez.

While he takes an evenhanded approach, the filmmaker appears on camera far too often and goes off point as frequently as Moore.

There isn't anything terribly exciting or original on offer in the somewhat poky directing debut of screenwriter Zach Helm.

Certainly watchable, but don’t go expecting much in the way of surprises.

The film plays out pretty much exactly as you would expect - which won't bother some people one iota.

Basically “Lorenzo’s Oil” without the earlier film’s visual flair.

Barely enough chuckles to keep from running out of gas. Yet it's the sharpest-looking movie shot so far on digital video, outdistancing even "The Anniversary Party."

Aside from an uninspired script by Frank Cotrell Boyce, is that none of the assembled actors really has enough star presence to compete with the sheer spectacle.

A smug, deliberately convoluted mix tape of Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Guy Ritchie and Hitchcock with (mostly) a cast to die for, Lucky Number Slevin is great fun for, say, 20 minutes.

Looks great but moves like molasses, is more interesting than truly involving.

This is an overlong film interesting chiefly for its performances.

A stylish but distressingly generic and not particularly scary American remake of a phenomenally popular Japanese supernatural thriller that spawned two sequels and a TV miniseries.

Unfortunately, as in Bay’s “Pearl Harbor,’’ much of the sometimes draggy 2 1/4 hours is given to clichéd inspirational drama.

A soufflé that begins promisingly but never quite rises.

Make no mistake, Father of Invention is the hilarious Spacey's show all the way.

Gandolfini, who skillfully fleshes out what's written as a one-joke character, comes close to pilfering The Mexican from the stars. Under the circumstances, that's not a huge accomplishment.

The misleading trailers for the supremely goofy The Adjustment Bureau promise action-packed sci-fi. What you actually get is a love-struck Matt Damon running for the US Senate as he's stalked by fedora-wearing angels.

An occasionally delightful mess of a movie.

O'Grady is very good, but she can't make the hard-to-watch Rid of Me dramatically credible.

A too-cute-by-half Irish romantic comedy that's overloaded with movie references that begin with the title.

An OK kids movie passing through on the way to video.

Douglas Langway's middling comedy is sort of a "Sex and the City" for big, hirsute gay guys and the younger cubs who fancy them.

In the dud thriller The Tourist, Jolie basically plays an overdressed, humorless live-action version of Jessica Rabbit, running around Venice dodging hired killers.

Offers a few laughs - and little sexual heat.

Modestly entertaining.

Shepard, who directed "The Matador" and the pilot for "Ugly Betty," can't quite get the disparate elements of The Hunting Party to mesh into a satisfying whole.

A cartoonish 1940s shoot-'em-up that's impossible to take seriously.

Thanks to a winning cast, all of this is funnier than you would expect considering the erratic script.

For all his skill with a cue, the charisma-challenged Callahan is no Nia Vardalos in the acting department -- let alone a Paul Newman or Tom Cruise.

Crude and cheerfully sophomoric teen sex comedy.

A campy, low-budget Romero homage that's badly in need of editing.

An earnest, if dreary little Canadian domestic drama.

The film repeatedly disappoints because Sandler and his director...have so little faith in focusing on the two characters' plight that they interrupts the romance repeatedly for vulgar, Farrelly brothers-style sexual and ethnic jokes that are so relentlessly unfunny they may not even rouse Sandler's core constituency of 12-year-old males.

All movies require suspension of disbelief to a certain degree, but p.s. really pushes the envelope.

After a wickedly promising start, this pointed political satire quickly deteriorates into a fairly routine, if sporadically quite effective, home-invasion thriller.

The sort of heart-tugger a small group of people will love passionately.

Aims straight for the tear ducts as well, but this weepie is a dry well.

A sometimes eye-opening, if overlong, German-Swiss documentary on a holistic health system that's been practiced, mostly in India, for more than 500 years.

Has its moments, but overall it's depressing.

The unusually explicit dungeon scenes with Pablo, a leather daddy and a fellow slave may whip a rather specialized audience into a frenzy. But for others, A Year Without Love will be a less pleasurably painful experience.

Unremarkable and none-too-scary horror movie.

Although the golden-hued cinematography (a filming cliché that really needs to be retired) and the sometimes slack direction by Marc Evans are minuses, Hunky Dory does deliver in the musical department.

A female revenge movie. But you could just as easily characterize it as fairly well-executed exploitation.

A lame comic tribute to the dwindling band of "Star Wars" aficionados, is one of those be nighted projects whose back story turns out to be significantly more compelling than the movie itself.

Basically "Jumanji" in outer space -- and even without Robin Williams, this is still a singularly loud, charmless and overbearing family movie that could use a hit or two of Ritalin.

There are a few interesting moments, but basically Up at the Villa is dangerously short of sympathetic characters.

Basically a Lifetime movie that somehow found its way into theaters.

Good grief! This painfully sincere animated feature seems aimed less at contemporary kids than nostalgic adults who might buy toys marketed for what is being billed as the 50th anniversary of the Peanuts gang for their children and grandchildren.

Hard-core Hitchcock fans will not find much in the way of revelations.

Despite risible dialogue, Mercy is watchable because of Caan's physical presence -- and a couple of scenes with his real-life father, James Caan, as his cynical dad who pronounces that "love -- it does not exist."

This new low-octane version is hardly going to make anyone forget Robert Aldrich's semi-classic, testosterone-laden original starring Jimmy Stewart.

Tepid tale of star-crossed lovers in 1910 Wales.

Very sentimental.

While often diverting and physically impressive in an old-fashioned way, Hidalgo suffers from weird shifts in tone, offensively outdated stereotypes, a cumbersome subplot - and a supposedly fact-based story that bears only a nodding acquaintance with reality.

Thornton lends gravity, focus and humor that are otherwise in short supply in this serious-minded but meandering, talky and action-deficient epic.

Even for a surreal black comedy, Jesus Henry Christ requires massive suspension of disbelief.

No worse and no better than the majority of chick flicks.

Few of the increasingly far-fetched events that first-time writer-director Neil Burger follows up with are terribly convincing, which is a pity, considering Barry's terrific performance.

Osment, playing a fatherless 14-year-old, has entered the sort of awkward adolescence that afflicts so many male child stars - and seems utterly intimidated by his esteemed co-stars.

Even the great Helen Mirren can do only so much to elevate this relentlessly mediocre, fact-inspired drama.

De Niro gives a technically brilliant performance as Walt, struggling with a body that will no longer obey him.

Deafeningly loud and proudly silly epic.

Basically a watered-down collage of scenes from "Heathers," "Clueless," "Sixteen Candles" and numerous other teen flicks.

Harmless if not exactly inspired, and rarely hilarious.

A challenging experimental film that will never play in a commercial movie theater and is settling in for a two-week run at the ever-venturesome Film Forum.

Ambitious, guilt-suffused melodrama crippled by poor casting.

Wildly uneven romantic drama.

Except for a couple of isolated, mildly subversive moments, Hanks is basically playing the genial host of “The Wonderful World of Disney’’ rather than an actual person.

That The Big Bounce works at all is a testament to Wilson, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter ("The Royal Tenenbaums") who probably could have come up with something better in his sleep.

The movie includes a recurring motif of immigrant taxi drivers - like them, the movie is constantly going around in circles.

A glossy gay soap opera that graphically illustrates new meanings for the term "missionary position."

An ultra-predictable if essentially painless romantic comedy.

The biblically themed Seraphim Falls moseys along very slowly, climaxing with a lengthy series of flashbacks and an appearance by Anjelica Huston as a medicine woman who may or not be the devil.

A brave but ultimately futile attempt at adapting a piece that is so quintessentially theatrical that it defies translation to another medium.

Complaining about the gooey and generic The Holiday is as useless as railing against fruitcake - this is a slick, throwaway chick flick designed to provide nothing more than mindless diversion between bouts of shopping.

Though Binoche does very solid work, she can't sell the idea of her and Law as a couple; the chemistry isn't there. Not much else rings true in Minghella's screenplay, which is full of coincidences and speeches about race and class.

Too crude for serious audiences and too serious to be good exploitation, Coming Soon is a teen sex comedy that's predictably getting a token theatrical release prior to its imminent debut on home video.

A chilly, pretentious and talky drama.

Yet another teen comedy that tries to have it both ways -- basically, "Mean Girls" with crucifixes instead of designer jewelry.

So s-l-o-w-l-y paced it seems twice as long as its two-hour running time.

Ends up a nightmare of a star vehicle.

Thanks to (Douglas), Diamonds is quite affecting -- even if it's not a particularly good movie.

A determinedly raunchy holiday comedy about a libidinous, larcenous and perpetually soused St. Nick with a nonstop potty mouth.

Johnny English Reborn sounds like a reboot, but it's actually a tired recycling of something that wasn't exactly fresh to begin with.

This is a by-the-numbers rehash that will leave anyone much over 5 enormously grateful that, if you duck out before the lengthy end credits, it lasts just over an hour.

A glorified TV movie.

Only mildly diverting and way too long for a movie aimed at kids.

There are far, far worse ways to spend two hours than watching Jessica Alba in a skimpy bikini - as well as other natural wonders photographed in the Bahamas - in the airheaded underwater adventure Into the Blue.

Shallow and blatantly manipulative variation on "Awakenings" in which every plot development is telegraphed.

Overlong, overblown and utterly forgettable.

Despite reams of maudlin narration, McKidd's powerful performance as a conflicted man makes this beautifully shot low-budget feature worth checking out.

It must have sounded great on paper.

Rogers gives a brave performance, but there isn't much chemistry between Bridges and Basinger, who were teamed to better effect in 1987's "Nadine."

While it's not a disaster like Kasdan's last film, "Dreamcatcher'' (2003), Darling Companion doesn't amount to much more than a fairly painless way for the AARP set to spend an hour and a half watching a movie with stars their own age.

Panders to its audience by glorifying drug dealing and violence in all-too-depressingly familiar ways.

With cheesy-looking effects including a ride on the backs of giant bees and dubious literary references, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island comes dangerously close to giving books, never mind 3-D, a bad name.

While “300" maestro Snyder puts together some very striking scenes — which may be enough for many fanboys — they never really cohere into a whole. He literally throws in the kitchen sink in a film that frantically introduces characters and concepts while never clearly establishing the rules of the DC Comics universe.

If I were a member of Generation X, I would be fed up with Hollywood's obsession with the idea that its men are genetically incapable of growing up.

As formulaic in its own way as anything mainstream Hollywood turns out, In Bruges is also a fish-out-of-water comedy.

Easier to sit through than the typical, earnest Christian movie.

There is nothing startlingly new in Resident Evil: Apocalpyse, but it is delivered with some panache and humor.

Beowulf & Grendel has its moments, as well as its debits. Among the later is the grating Canadian accent of Sarah Polley, who plays a witch named Selma.

Rarely have filmmakers had a more wildly improbable happy ending forced on them. Well, you need all the help you can get, divine or otherwise, when your two stars - Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon - have no chemistry whatsoever.

Lee's framing device - which ends with a head-scratching fantasy - doesn't work. At. All.

Pours on creepy atmosphere, but this dud is too intent on delivering its liberal "message" to actually deliver the kinds of scares it promises in the terrific trailer.

Not unpleasant, but you've seen it all before.

Superficial and hokey yet still oddly endearing.

Ryan's heart is definitely in the right place and his film has good performances and flashes of talent. But, overall, it plays like the world's longest — over two hours -- after-school special.

Gorgeous location filming on Italy’s Amalfi Coast and a voice-only performance by the great Claire Bloom as an elderly woman remembering World War II are the main attractions in Kat Coiro’s familiarly snoozy romantic drama.

Heavy on slapstick and may appeal to very young viewers who won't need to bother much with the subtitles.

Return comes briefly to life when John Slattery of "Mad Men'' turns up as an acerbic yet sympathetic reclusive drunk whom Kelli meets during court-mandated rehab. But it's not enough for a film that limps along to a pretty much preordained climax.

Winning performances by Roger Rees and Mary McDonnell, as well as colorful Virginia locations, lift Crazy Like a Fox slightly above the TV-caliber script by its director.

Moves in a predictable path that includes some remarkable coincidences.

Fairly sexy and stylish. Alas, it's also quite silly and not especially scary.

The Sketches of Frank Gehry will appear this fall on PBS' "American Masters," which seems a more appropriate venue than theaters.

You rarely see movies as dramatically uneven as The Weekend, which has a dreadful, one-star first half - followed by an interesting, three-star conclusion.

Mind-blowing and headache-inducing. But the kids loved it.

Heavy on celebrity voices, pop culture references and rock tunes and low on memorable characters or imagination, Chicken Little is on a par with such mediocre but popular CGI films as "Madagascar" and "Shark Tale."

Generic variation on the overworked serial-killer genre.

Watchable even when what's going on makes no sense whatsoever.

I’m a sucker for films with great surfing footage, let alone wacky ’70s hairstyles. But this overlong, cliché-infested Aussie period drama tested my patience.

It's almost worth the price of admission to see Allen paying homage to "Singin' in the Rain" in the final sequence. Almost.

One of the big problems here is that, despite much exposition, the nature of Klaatu's mission on Earth isn't at all clear.

Your Highness refuses to take itself seriously, which is both boring and sort of charming to a limited extent.

Only sporadically amusing. (review of re-release)

Even in an underwritten role, the delightful Madsen shines in her best performance since her comeback role in "Sideways."

At heart a cliché-strewn melodrama about a bunch of white, upper-class Manhattan kids who aspire to ghetto culture.

A not particularly revealing documentary.

An ugly-looking mismash of a fairytale.

A genially silly gay date movie.

Holland lets things peter out midway, but it's notably better acted -- and far less crass -- than some other recent efforts in the burgeoning genre of films about black urban professionals.

Terrific performances by Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a comic duo clearly modeled on Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin get swallowed up in Atom Egoyan's muddled murder mystery.

In their overly earnest attempt to flesh Sendak’s story out to 100 minutes, Jonze and his co-screenwriter, novelist Dave Eggers, have laboriously spelled out motivations (divorce is bad!), elaborated back stories -- and added reams of less-than-inspired dialogue.

Divergent is a clumsy, humorless and shamelessly derivative sci-fi thriller set in a generically dystopian future.

So strenuously inoffensive it makes Disney's "High School Musical" look almost racy by comparison.

It certainly has its moments (erotic and otherwise), but there just aren't enough of them.

While the film has impressive 18th-century trappings and vivid battle scenes, the plotting and acting are rudimentary.

Me and You takes a couple of neat swipes at the pretentiousness of the art scene, but as a commentary on the difficulty of connecting in contemporary society, it's too precious by half.

Many of the kids seem to be social outcasts of one kind or another, but Spellbound, which will show on cable later this year, doesn't dig deep enough to disturb the movie's relentless feel-good tone.

The film never adds up to the sum of its parts, effectively a two-hour trailer for a movie I’d still be interested in seeing.

Unfortunately for the film, it's clear from the outset this is a totally one-sided battle that well-connected developer Bruce Ratner is fated to win.

Manages to build interest as it goes along, leading to a spectacular climactic battle with all those elephants.

The best parts of this awkwardly paced film are Bell’s scenes with Enrico Colantoni, who returns as her private investigator dad, concerned she’s throwing away a bright future by getting sucked back into her old life.

Black, who all but stole "High Fidelity," is disappointingly bland and one-note in his first starring role.

Great fun for the first 20 minutes - which include Kubrickian tracking shots and music from "2001" and "A Clockwork Orange" - but seems long at 86.

This long and overly genteel adaptation of Peter Cameron's 2002 novel never quite comes to a boil.

Has a secret weapon in Winger, whose part is small but crucial. Looking a bit older and with redder hair than previously, she brings an earthiness to a movie that could use a lot more of that quality.

The funniest and arguably most envelope-pushing episode stars Winona Ryder as a newlywed who falls in love on her honeymoon - and steals the object of her lust: a ventriloquist's dummy.

May be the steamiest lesbian romp in recent memory.

Mostly it fails to score. Maybe that's why no one has attempted summer-camp comedy since the third "Meatballs" sequel a decade ago.

Seriously flawed - and choppily edited in the worst Harvey Scissorhands style - but there are enough good moments to anticipate a second film from writer-director Katrina Holden Bronson, whose parents were Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland.

If Ruby were more of a person than a character, we might care more for her plight. But like Calvin, Kazan has written herself into a corner that can only lead to embracing the sappy romantic clichés that Ruby Sparks tries half-heartedly to mock.

A lesson in the perils of trying to cram a hefty Canadian novel that spans decades into a movie running just under two hours.

Molly Shannon is dementedly charming as Eva.

After a promising start, writer-director Daniel M. Cohen pours on schmaltz straight out of the similarly themed "Diamonds," including the proverbial hookers -- with hearts of gold.

The movie fails to add up to the sum of its laborious parts. There's no emotional investment in any of the characters, and you can see the writer-director's windup con coming a mile away.

Disappointing, curiously uninvolving.

Interesting but never compelling.

It's a testament to Goodwin's skill as an actress that we almost buy this.

A campy erotic thriller that’s seriously short of, well, passion.

A lazy coffee-table book of a movie,

Coincidences and plot contrivances pile up. What starts out as a delightful black comedy and social commentary ends up, at best, as a guilty pleasure where I had a hard time sorting out the intentional from the unintentional laughs.

Erstwhile boy wizard Daniel Radcliffe works no magic as a grieving lawyer in The Woman in Black, a creaky haunted-house story that's strong on creepy atmosphere but woefully deficient in the scare department.

Played by Logan Lerman -- the Zac Efron look-alike who was young George Hamilton in "My One and Only" -- Percy is a Manhattan high-schooler who learns he is a demigod.

A soggy cannoli of a domestic dramedy.

A marginally funny comedy at best, recycles themes, scenes and even lines from Allen's own old movies - like many of Allen's later efforts.

The most interesting parts of the movie are the long, sexy and well-staged dance sequences, some of them involving a very nimble Duvall.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the three-hour epic is third-rate schmaltz that pays only lip service to history.

Jeff Goldblum is a hoot as Hatosy's pot-smoking shrink, who also happens to be his mom's boyfriend, but Dallas 362 is basically a road movie that doesn't really go anywhere.

If I Were You has more than its share of laughs, but director Joan Carr-Wiggin needed to cut half an hour to make this fly without interest flagging. She had the exact same problem with her last movie, “A Previous Engagement.’’

Nuanced work by the great John Slattery ("Mad Men") as an emotionally distant dad isn't enough to sustain more than sporadic interest in Brian Savelson's underwritten, slow-moving indie, which plays distressingly like a photographed off-Broadway drama.

The poster art for Nanette Burstein's American Teen, which follows five students through their senior year at a high school in Indiana, is modeled after the one for "The Breakfast Club." So, to a large extent, is this ultra-slick and predictable documentary.

So udderly mediocre.

It’s only fitfully entertaining as an all-star indie team led again by director Jon Favreau, who gets swallowed up by the same sort of overproduced overkill as “Spider Man 3.”

A great-looking but torturously slow and often hokey cross between "The Exorcist" and "Dirty Harry."

Among the variations of gags from the original are a threesome involving Harold, Kumar and a giant bag of marijuana.

Starts out as a thriller inspired by that city's 2005 Tube and bus bombings but gets bogged down in a family soap opera.

A murky, vaguely fact-based melodrama that quickly sinks into the same swamp as such recent De Niro mistakes as "15 Minutes" and "Showtime."

It's déjà vu all over again for Aussie actor Guy Pearce, returning to motel rooms in the American Southwest to sort out metaphysical issues in the thriller First Snow, to somewhat less original effect than he did in "Memento."

The surfing sequences are some of the best I've ever seen in a film, and the re-creation of Jay's climactic battle to ride El Nino-driven waves is real white-knuckle stuff...But neither Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") nor the fellow veteran director who replaced him when Hanson took ill, Michael Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist"), can do much with the hokey sequences on land.

Garage Days is fun, but it would have been even more entertaining if Proyas had taken an unplugged approach.

Weds half-hearted thriller elements to the self-absorbed, no-budget mumblecore films pioneered by Katz in efforts like "Dance Party, USA."

Pleasant and has not a few laughs.

Wants to be a "Last Tango in Paris" for the new millennium, but its flaccid dramatization and hollow moralizing doesn't rise even to the level of last year's "An Affair of Love," let alone Bertolucci's masterpiece.

Merely a passably amusing excuse to pass a couple of hours in an air-conditioned theater.