M. E. Russell

Lymelife is more shaggy character study than rewarding narrative; its fateful final moments are self-consciously ambiguous in a way that (to me) feel almost flip, given the long dramatic build that preceded those final moments.

One of those hard-to-pin-down movies where you're not quite sure which sort of story the filmmakers wanted to tell.

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.

A bright, sexy, globe-trotting and very French romantic comedy.

The movie has "heart" in a way that doesn't feel cloying or dishonest. And the cast -- especially Janelle Schremmer -- just nails it.

If you're an actual adult who likes old-school Westerns, this won't disappoint you.

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

Is there anything more depressing than when middlebrow filmmakers decide to remake bona fide classics that did not, under any circumstances, need to be remade?

The movie's a fish-out-of-water romantic-comedy thriller that forgets to be romantic, comedic or thrilling.

The movie's pretty good, occasionally very good. But I also kind of hope they don't make another one.

If you can look beyond the simple-minded Socratic political discourse, The Edukators reveals itself as warm, humane and sad, a movie that genuinely wants you to think about how idealism eventually collides with human frailty, and about what upstarts and sell-outs might teach one another.

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

Fans of Franken's wittier print and broadcast work might smile. But I haven't seen this much smug, awkward laughter and bathos since, well, "Man of the Year."

It's a gorgeous, strange little piece -- but I did find myself wishing it poked fewer aces out its sleeve after urging us to pay such close attention.

Odd, beautiful and ambitious film.

Maybe the best thing about Stranger Than Fiction is the way it extracts unexpected work from underrated actors.

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.

If you're inclined toward women of the smart/sly variety, you'll leave with a massive crush on Hall. You might remember her as Christian Bale's long-suffering wife in "The Prestige." Here, she comes off as a sort of college-aged, raven-tressed, human rights-obsessed Emma Thompson, only cooler.

Innocence revisits imagery from the first film. But this time computer animation pumps everything up to epic proportions. The results are overwhelming.

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

A few bodies pile up. Surprisingly little sex is had. And given that Catherine's true nature was revealed at the end of the first "Basic," the mystery seems superfluous.

I'm pleased to report the new Land of the Lost movie keenly understands that what was once scary is now ridiculous.

This meandering tale of a pack of ticket inspectors working the Hungarian subway system delights in misleading viewers.

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

Other than flubbing the dismount, Stick It is smarter and funnier than it has any right to be.

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

On balance, the filmmakers do a terrific job with one of the weaker stories. It's welcome news that Yates is coming back for one of the stronger ones; he's set to direct "Half-Blood Prince."

A fairly good movie about an evil subject.

An unfunny, undramatic comedy-drama that asks us to care about lying idiots making implausible choices.

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

As a chronicle of an extreme surfing subculture, Bra Boys is semi-fascinating. As a chronicle of rough-and-tumble street life, it's appallingly biased and self-glorifying.

Shrek 4 is at its best when it's sadistically doing these character remixes; you can feel the filmmakers' glee at getting to shrug off story continuity and make a mess.

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.

It's an ambitious idea that monkeys with your expectations: make a whole movie about the ugly, hurt-feelings part of the relationship that's usually disposed of in a romantic-comedy musical montage. Unfortunately, like a bad boyfriend, The Break-Up has a problem with consistency.

It's one of the few genuinely funny comedies in a dismal movie summer.

But as the story takes some surprising turns, it works like a slow infection: Patient audience members may find themselves awakening to the story in much the same way the characters awaken to their own capacities for tenderness.

Wants to be a sex farce, a sports film and a serious meditation on Catholicism. To its credit, it succeeds as all three.

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.

The cast is almost uniformly spectacular -- particularly Angela Lansbury as a wicked aunt and Raphael Coleman as the sardonic, bespectacled child who delivers hilarious, verbose asides and somehow makes it look effortless.

Once in a great while -- usually late August -- a movie comes along that's so lame, it doesn't deserve a bad review. It deserves a war-crimes tribunal. Ladies and gentlemen, Underclassman is that special film.

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

Also fun: tiny characters such as Jimmy's surprisingly helpful stalker (Nick Swardson); the film's final moments, which owe more than a little to "Grease"; and the skating costumes, which take their influence from such cultural touchstones as "Tron."

A movie of utter inconsequence -- a cinematic Listerine Strip that evaporates from the brain before you even get your popcorn tub to the trash.

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

It manages the weird feat of making a flock of sheep bounding across a meadow seem vaguely menacing.

A movie full of actors improvising their idea of how cops in a Scorsese flick would talk. It's a special sort of cartoonishness, a hard-to-pin-down brand of emotionally grandstanding fakeness you sometimes see in movies trying way too hard to be "gritty."

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

Joins the growing list of blandly made erotic thrillers that contain no eroticism, few thrills and fewer likable characters.

It's a cartoon that thinks it isn't one.

In "Upside" Allen's marble face acts as the pressure-cooker lid on a hilarious hissy fit.

The Boys of Baraka leaves you outraged in the way only the best documentaries can.

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

With his periodic porn-star mustache, shaggy hair and reckless demeanor, the movie Stander embodies a certain brand of brooding outlaw cool that feels increasingly rare.

Nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, it's deeply humane and even more deeply unsettling, in a way that most documentaries about Iraq, which tend toward the polemic, never manage.

A rough little comedy of tone. White, making his directorial debut, asks if the search for self is still heroic when the discoveries are unpleasant.

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 Other Guys finds McKay back to trying something wildly ambitious with his comedy, and largely succeeding.

The film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling.

The movie is not so much horrible as it is drab -- from its lazy plotting to its uninspired yuks to its cop-out ending to its relentlessly yellow-brown sets. "Mad Money" does little more than take up space, and you will be two hours closer to the grave when you leave the theater.

This is a violent, romantic, beautifully shot and performed film -- with brutal battle scenes and charisma-bomb performances by Asano as the future Khan and Honglei Sun as a rival chieftain and brother-in-arms.

A mild disaster.

In small doses, this looks kind of cool. For two hours, it's excruciating.

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.

The surprisingly funny Role Models does three things extremely well. It gives killer roles to comic actors frequently stuck in ensembles. It directs hilariously harsh words at children and lets the children direct even harsher words back at the adults. And it's oddly determined to give a fair shake to fans of both medieval role-playing and the band Kiss.

There are two solid sight gags and funny supporting work by Amy Poehler as a boozy publicist.

If you're willing to do the work, Triad Election pays you in tragedy.

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

Three stories in one. This might be two stories too many.

Daniel Day-Lewis may be one of our great actors, but he trips over a few Method-acting speed bumps in wife Rebecca Miller's third writer-director effort.

This sci-fi thriller -- which is alternately nail-biting, gorgeous and a little silly -- spends most of its time throwing mechanical and human errors at the most important space mission ever.

Kazan has a gift for letting you see her think, even when she's perfectly still; the film's title refers to the ferocious trauma happening between Ivy's ears and her silent struggle to keep it in check.

I was annoyed by Levasseur and Aja's desertion of their tense, simple plot in favor of tedious "plot twists" that could, frankly, use a rest. It's a waste of a good first half. (Grade: A- for first hour, C- thereafter.)

The movie's biggest charm is its unpredictable, offbeat tone.

Endless and tedious. It's also written-in-crayon, smack-your-face dumb, and edited so that every other shot is a close-up of a flailing limb.

The bright spot, again, is Grant.

While Predators isn't nearly as vivid or fresh as the original, it's certainly its strongest sequel.

Revenge of the Fallen almost feels like it's signaling an end-game for blockbuster movies: all sensation, no content, catastrophic expense.

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.

Fonda, playing grandmother to this clan of narcissists, is the only one who keeps her dignity. She's funny and low-key and deserves better comeback material than this and "Monster-in-Law." The other two actresses are humiliated.

It's not perfect or "Shining"-level inspired, but it's solid.

The all-description storytelling leads to other problems, too, the worst being that "Boleyn" suffers from the same affliction as "The Golden Compass," where you're told about interesting stuff happening elsewhere in another movie you'd much rather be watching.

Lumet blatantly, simplistically stacks the decks in favor of the defendants, pitting them against mean, stupid cops and a cartoonishly nasty prosecutor.

Might actually be the stupidest movie with good intentions that I've ever seen.

Eraser-dull.

Despite dancing between a story and a story within a story, something seems simple and effortless about Ten Canoes. Director Rolf de Heer and his all-Yolngu cast offer a take on tribal life that's warm, funny and powerfully alive.

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

Where "United 93" was lean and merciless and got you thinking hard about how you might conduct yourself in a no-win situation, World Trade Center is reassuring.

Sneaks up on you. At first, it plays like it might be another in a long line of dullish legal thrillers. But then, in its modest, grown-up way, it keeps getting better and better.

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

Never actively unfunny. The cast is far too smart for that. But it never quite pops like it would if it were whittled down to something just a little longer than an "SNL Digital Short."

Unpretentiously fantastic.

At what point does The Condemned turn from a stupid-fun action movie into something unpleasant and hypocritical?

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

Funny and weird and surprising and action-packed and genuinely beautiful.

I could see people enjoying Dan in Real Life, I guess -- the scenery is nice and the people are pretty and the songs are cute little emotion substitutes. But Dan? Buddy? It's not all about you.