Luke Y. Thompson

For strict action and a heftier soundtrack, “Dogtown” is king, but for audiences craving a story with their stunts, it's time to get Stoked.

As it stands, there's some fine sex onscreen, and some tense arguing, but not a whole lot more.

The computer-enhanced vehicle chases look fake, but the hand-to-hand combat scenes are the best of the year.

There's enough substance here to make Crazy/Beautiful more than worthwhile for its target audience, and certainly more useful than the standard teen crapfests.

The movie combines drawings, photos, hazy filters, superimpositions and computer effects into a pastiche both beautiful and disturbing.

The big-screen surround-sound effects are nice; too bad they're the only aspect of the film that's ready to rumble. And parents, be warned: There's an astonishing amount of bloodletting for a PG-13 film.

Actually quite amusing, thanks mainly to a script that keeps the gags flying so fast that even though so many of them are bad, they're quickly followed by something new, and occasionally something good.

Ong-Bak's script, if you can call it that, is nothing but a series of setups for star Tony Jaa to show his stuff.

As Bundy, Michael Reilly Burke (Octopus 2: River of Fear) has just the right amount of charisma and menace. It's his performance that makes the movie, giving a relatively shallow script more depth and character nuances than likely existed on the page.

Though the film came out a year ago in the U.K., the timing here is unfortunate, and one has to wish that, like so many bigger productions, Liam could have migrated to a more-distant release date.

Saw II, despite the swift turnaround time, improves on all of the first film's problem areas, while leaving intact everything that was good about the concept.

As far from crowd-pleasing as you're going to get these days.

Nighy feels like she’s finding her way in a new format. She’s got the hard part down, pulling off effective emotional beats even when the story seems to be operating on screenwriting 101 paradigms. All that remains is to find a script that’s up to the rest of it.

Unlike Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, what you’re going to get from this box of travel sweets is usually something you can expect. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be effectively tasty in the moment.

This is cinema at its most punk rock—a raucous, unpolished, cheap, sacred-cow shredding middle finger to the mainstream with just enough raw talent inside to keep it from being dismissable.

All The Old Knives is compelling moment by moment, but afterward viewers may have some lingering questions about what characters hoped to accomplish, or why they were involved at all.

Without spoiling, this is one movie where it’d be extremely interesting to know what happens five minutes after the final scene. But while the subsequent events may be up for vigorous debate, the film’s message is crystal clear: Screw you if you ever doubted a woman afraid for her safety.

For all the documentary reveals about the band, it leaves you asking further questions, and wanting much more—an apt metaphor for a band that created an impressive legacy, and yet whose members rarely came to a consensus.

Despite the off-putting blandness of its poster, soundtrack, and setup, About Fate proves surprisingly charming. Old pros (especially for their relatively young ages) Mann and Roberts manage to sell some significant character flaws.

Like the Despicable Me series, The Bad Guys may find ever-diminishing returns once the villain protagonists no longer qualify as despicable or bad. For now, at least, that mixed morality is not just part of the fun, but the primary selling point.

It certainly captures a side of the man, and maybe that’s all anyone would ask of it. But it’s hard to shake the feeling there’s an even better movie waiting to be made from all this material.

The humor in Pretty Problems isn’t often laugh-out-loud funny, but the observational satire is astute: it highlights how charity may be a performative act for donors, but that makes the need no less urgent for recipients, while acknowledging how far wealth distances some people from reality.

Try to forget about Michael Gambon in Potter's original BBC miniseries; Keith Gordon's film is its own thing, full of Brechtian artifice and oddball humor -- Mel Gibson's old man act in particular.

This movie is, essentially, porn, and whether it's a turn-on is likely to be subjective to each viewer. Those who find traditional porn too artificial should be pleased.

That sweet streak has grown, like a cancer, and gradually killed off any of the edge their (Farrellys) humor may have once had.

When the movie works, it gleefully skewers the clichés of the buddy cop genre... When it doesn't work, it's exactly what it purports to be lampooning--a lame, boring cop buddy movie.

It's moderately compelling drama, but also fairly static stuff, image-wise.

If your expectations aren't too high, there's lots of cool shit on-screen.