M. E. Russell

The verdict? Could have been worse. Yes, it's a slightly hollow endorsement, but Guess Who is probably worth your matinee/pub-theater dollar.

The humor tends toward the mildly crass -- bare buttocks and inappropriate scratching are Schwimmer's go-to comedy staples -- and the story is ridiculous. But Pegg, who co-wrote the script, plays to his strengths. You can't help but root for the loser.

14-year-old girls will dig its amiable energy.

Sadly, director Jaume Serra has taken the Gothic premise of a madman casting his living victims in wax and, no doubt at the behest of copycat-hungry producers, turned House of Wax into yet another teens-versus-hillbillies slasher flick

I just wish the movie wasn't also so monologue-choked, muted to a fault and fond of oversimplifying financial lingo to the point of meaninglessness.

Super Ex does have a certain low-key, adult-contemporary charm. It's almost entirely because of Luke Wilson.

Sets up a situation so weird, it's almost weirder that Rob Reiner directs it as a cookie-cutter romantic comedy.

Despite some fast-paced direction by Wes Craven, Red Eye finally gets so silly, it's practically popping its wing-rivets.

Our Idiot Brother lives in a sort of relaxed in-between place where it doesn't really bite as drama or comedy, but the movie's world-class cast and big heart push it over.

Dramatizes and occasionally overdramatizes Albert's 24-year career. For a while, it's a study of a decent man who puts his life into compartments so he can do terrible deeds.

Eraser-dull.

This is a totally predictable exercise if you're not in the target market.

This is a perfectly serviceable thriller. It's just not the New York family crime saga it clearly wants to be.

Competently done and harmless enough to entertain the tots. It's just that the movie's kind of . . . sparse.

Its easy to see why Don Cheadle wanted to play Samir Horn, the hero of the post-9/11 thriller Traitor. Cheadles face is basically a perfect delivery system for woe, sadness and internal conflict. And Samir a deep-cover operative trying to infiltrate a terrorist outfit has to make brutal Sophies Choices roughly three times a day.

Feels less like a movie and more like a Tony Robbins motivational seminar.

Maybe the real Ernie Davis really was this perfect, but the movie plays as if the filmmakers didn't want to offend his family.

Seraphim isn't totally satisfying, even if you're prepared for an arty Western. It's pokey and odd in a distant, slightly self-conscious way.

More solidly crafted and insults its audience quite a bit less than its predecessor, and it sets up several nice emotionally complicated cliffhangers for the next installment. I hope its target audience has a blast.

Starts well, builds drama and then proceeds to fly sort of crazily off the rails.

The surfing scenes are gorgeous and overwhelming. But the rest of the film...

The movie's anchored by a strong lead performance and a steady sense of humor.

The bad news? The movie is monumentally stupid. The good news? It's a fun kind of stupid.

I'm not sure if parents will be counting out each of Shorts 89 minutes or not, begging for it to end, but I'm guessing 8-year-olds will absolutely love it, because Rodriguez isn't talking down to them or using pop-culture references in place of actual gags; he's making what might be called eye-level children's entertainment.

Minkoff lets the fight scenes go on for a while, which is nice, and all the best bits are in the middle, when Jackie and Jet spend a lot of time playing off each other.

This makes "Eli" sort of wonderfully silly toward the end, as if the Hughes brothers set out to make the first-ever faith-based "Mad Max" movie.

By gilding the lily so shamelessly, Ewing and Grady guarantee they'll preach only to the converted.

It's almost like you're watching a 100-minute trailer for a much better six-hour miniseries.

Your 12-and-unders will dig it, and it might even serve as a sort of movie-Bookmobile and get them to read a little history, or at least a little Wikipedia. But otherwise it's utterly dispensable.

There's pleasure to be found in the resolute offbeatness of Henry's Crime. It's nearly as concerned with the play as it is with the heist (and with drawing parallels between the two).

Jaa's performance as Tien is mostly wordless and humorless.

It's inoffensive and shiny and competent and kids will dig it, and I can already barely remember a single thing that happened.

With the exception of one long improv riff on a campground basketball court, Williams nicely underplays his role. Unfortunately, Sonnenfeld also underplays his. We should expect more of him.

Ends up being one of those heartbreaking movies that gets off to a promising start but never quite creaks to life, despite everyone's obvious best efforts.

Succeeds only in fits and starts.

I still kind of find myself admiring the actor, and the film. Love Guru is insane and self-indulgent but also fully committed, and there's a surprising undercurrent of earnestness to its philosophy portions.

For every gag that flies there are at least one-and-a-half that don't.

In the films at least, there's something so naked about the Potter/Percy story parallels that's it's hard not to sit there as a viewer and get distracted playing connect the dots.

Performances are for the most part strong, especially Seyfried's, and Kusama uses Fox well, making the most of the actress' blank-eyed arrogance. It's not a performance that suggests a lot of range, but it's fun to watch.

A comedy that's only kind of funny some of the time.

The dialogue is almost primitive at times, almost every female character is an idiot and McConaughey grossly overplays the bachelor-sleazeball antics at the beginning.

As pointless suspense exercises go, The Strangers at least gets off to a good start.

When it sticks to its central flirtation, the latest movie based on a Nicholas Sparks romance, The Lucky One, is blandly pleasant enough.

Nicolas Cageologists will be sad to hear that he's entirely too normal in National Treasure -- he's mildly funny but doesn't make any of the kooky dramatic choices (needless accents, ranting about the orifices of Greek gods) that made his other Bruckheimer performances so much fun to watch.

The end result is mediocre, slightly sloppy and a mild waste of a great cast.

King is good enough that you can't help but root for her. But frankly, I can't imagine paying full ticket price plus concessions for that privilege.

It's not a disaster: Branagh is an actor's director, and there are biting moments throughout and solid performances from Caine and Law.

You might be better off reading the book and imagining Nolte as Socrates.

The fun thing about Eclipse is watching Lautner emerge as the Han Solo of this series, getting all the laughs and calling Edward and Bella on their preciousness.

The movie never recovers from its cheesy center.

Are Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay getting tired of their own shtick?

Chris Rock probably has a solid writer/director effort in him. This isn't it.

Hilariously, gut-bustingly, mind-blowingly, jaw-droppingly stupid.

Unfortunately, the film loses its merciless rage toward the end, devolving into a stock and broadly comic thriller about unpleasant people you never quite get to know.

As satire, it doesn't add up -- but it's an admirable, if dull, experiment.

It's just another bland, junior-high-basketball riff on "The Bad News Bears" formula, one that takes every single dramatic cue from the underdog sports-movie playbook.

Keaton offers glimpses of a directorial gift, but this odd little piece feels like a warm-up for something more compelling.

Does have its charms. While the videography and most of the supporting performances are amateurish, Clark and Caland are winning actors.

This will personally go down as the flick that really made me realize how much I hate CGI stunts.

That cast is precisely what makes the new Arthur so frustrating.

Freeman and Nicholson mostly stand in front of special-effects green screens and have the locales projected, like they're in a "Road" picture.

The film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling.

For starters, everything's grimy and humorless in a way that infects even Aniston.

The dialogue is dippy. And there's no real suspense: The filmmakers are so deadly earnest about the power of music and love and all that stuff, you just twiddle your thumbs waiting for the inevitable.

Do yourself a favor. Rent "My Bodyguard" instead.

Surprisingly dull.

The drama is telegraphed and glossy and un-fascinating; the edges have been belt-sanded until any camp value is lost. And it's filmed in that "Moulin Rouge"/"Chicago" style where you see half a dance move before the shot cuts -- which somehow makes a lot of difficult, sexy work seem simultaneously frenetic and boring.

Feels like a movie that wants to bare its fangs, but only manages a mild gumming.

If anyone could take a movie about a bunch of jerks who play poker and make it interesting, it should be Curtis Hanson. Or rather, it should have been.

Modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge.

The movie gets just enough right that the things it doesn't get right (beyond its overdependence on a not-so-surprising story puzzle) smack you cold in the face.

Sporadically funny, bland, talent-wasting junk.

Kind of a drag.

In drama, tone, character and examination of the social issues tormenting these kids, Wassup Rockers is . . . taxing.

I love that fanboys fought for Fanboys. Unfortunately, their passion was misplaced.

Transplanting so much of the original story to a 21st-century setting only amplifies how badly the story has aged.

Putting it another way: When spoofs of bad singing and songwriting are the sharpest arrows in your quiver, and your politics are diluted until they hit about as hard as someone sticking their tongue out, your satire has a problem.

The movie pads the good stuff out with a bunch of mediocre mainstream-thriller junk. It takes too long to get started, it pulls some key punches, its dialogue is deeply uninteresting, it relies way too heavily on endless jump-scares and its finale is pure slasher-flick formula.

I appreciate that talented people wanted to honor Shelly by making this film. They likely would have better honored her by mounting her script as a play.

Quality-wise, the crime drama Broken City lives in a frustrating mid-range area: It's too complex and competently crafted to dismiss as junk -- but it's also nowhere near sharp enough to work as the serious grown-up detective movie it clearly wants to be.

It gives me no pleasure to report that the Pimentel biopic Music Within plays like a well-intentioned TV movie.

Fine moments, images and performances stand cheek-by-jowl with the clichéd, the on-the-nose and the slightly dopey.

An extremely weird and frustrating viewing experience. I think it's that way because Eastwood, 78, can't be bothered to wrangle the vast material into a tighter shape.

After getting off to a decent, somewhat muted start, Skeleton Key just gets sillier and sillier and sillier until it's yet another one of those stupid, noisy thrillers where everyone's running around in a house, yelling and falling down, and you're mostly wondering why nobody bothered to call the cops.

Almost totally emotionally bankrupt. But it's a very specific form of total emotional bankruptcy, one that feels honest and even uplifting at the time, because the actors are great and the direction's well intentioned and just-so.

Dolphin Tale is inoffensive enough -- little kids will probably dig it -- and I'm not suggesting that family-friendly docudramas should tightly conform to real life. But when they do embellish, they should distill the story into something more compelling, rather than watering it down with pleasant-but-utterly-forgettable inspirational boilerplate.

The movie's excessive and logistically goofy in a way "Taken" wasn't.

The movie's not good, strictly speaking, but it is kind of fun.

Sporadically clever and chilling.

The actors are mostly charming; Bettany in particular is broody and cool.

Unfortunately, the dialogue undermines the movie's promise.

Unsurprisingly, the formulaic "Breakfast Club" casting yields a formulaic narrative.

The leads are just too good to commit fully to something this baldly formulaic. It's sad.

The new footage adds almost nothing and feels like a lame, double-dipping cash-grab.

Unfortunately, the film's charm ends with the plot gimmick.

Getting worked up about John Tucker Must Die is a bit like getting worked up about the taste of flan.

Jim Carrey kills it every time he shows up in his supporting role as street magician Steve Gray.

Serious Acting Opportunities abound! Unfortunately, sharp dialogue and characters who keep you riveted do not.