M. E. Russell

When it works, it's decent family fun; the kids are incredibly sharp. But the script's not as sharp as they are, and not everyone brings his A-game.

Director Stefen Fangmeier, a well-regarded special-effects man and second-unit director ("Master and Commander," "Galaxy Quest") does a superb job visualizing the CGI dragon. But Fangmeier is working with a script without a single memorable line and far too many characters and creatures with silly names.

Often as not, the movie works. Here and there, it works kind of beautifully.

You end up with a movie that takes that real problem and makes it feel like an exploitation contrivance.

Kids will enjoy the experience overall: It's a little messy and undercooked, but still vastly more imaginative and entertaining than junk like "Fred Claus."

The writing, acting and filmmaking make Hustle & Flow nothing short of amazing.

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

I can see how Mamma Mia! might be a fun stage musical. As a movie musical, it's a train wreck.

The Host isn't just a terrific monster movie. This South Korean box-office smash is also a laugh-out-loud comedy and a surprisingly angry political satire.

The juxtapositions can be beautiful: haunting music played over a water-streaked windshield, a deaf student awakening to the "feeling" of sound, Glennie staring ferociously at a gong as she extracts its vibrations.

The movie's as casual as its lead characters' approach to changing history; it's also lewdly and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious -- especially if you wasted any of your youth watching a certain brand of '80s comedy schlock on HBO at 2 a.m.

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.

Surprisingly entertaining.

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

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.

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.

Ends up feeling like the sort of leisurely man's-man adventure movie you used to be able to catch on Sunday afternoon TV.

This is one of Downey's most enjoyable performances, and one of Kilmer's funniest. It's a relationship comedy wrapped in sharp talk and gunplay, a triumphant comeback for Black, and one of the year's best movies.

Beyond the lipstick-lesbian twist, this is a formula flick, but the acting is excellent. It also has genuine laughs.

The movie's a ride, basically. It's a slick, funny buddy-flick confection about a dork (Jesse Eisenberg), a Twinkie-loving hick (Harrelson), a hottie (Emma Stone) and a sassy kid (Abigail Breslin) who bicker and bond as they drive cross-country after a zombie plague.

Sporadically funny, bland, talent-wasting junk.

I was stunned to learn that "Beth Cooper" was adapted by former "Simpsons" writer Larry Doyle from his young-adult novel and directed by "Harry Potter" helmer Chris Columbus. Rarely have two seasoned Hollywood professionals produced something so painfully, amateurishly, relentlessly unfunny.

Kind of a drag.

Although the drama suffers from the episodic story structure, Zathura feels less like "Jumanji" and more like a really great episode of Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories" TV series.

It's frustrating that a movie about a man so deathly serious about music has largely boiled his life down to addiction and adultery.

Conrad seems to have used whatever clout he got from "The Pursuit of Happyness" to fund something personal and sincere -- a story that's ultimately about victories of character and suppressing your worst impulses.

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

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

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

The Guardian doesn't offer too many surprises. Except for one: it's genuinely well-made and, at least when it comes to the character Ben Randall, kind of moving.

There's something quietly but unmistakably angry underneath all the slapstick.

The writing is lazy, the movie focuses on all the wrong things and the tone lurches unpleasantly between gum-soft comedy and lukewarm thriller.

It's the best kind of complaint. You can see why the $50 million man refers to something he gave away as "the best single day of my career."

Vastly entertaining, slightly overlong.

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

The only bright spot is Marsden, a great actor who's always stuck playing the less-desirable romantic rival (see: "The Notebook," "X-Men," "Superman Returns"). He finally gets the fun-guy role for a change and does everything he can to rip it up. He can only do so much.

Yet another mediocre-to-lame thriller shot in Portland.

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

Though it somehow manages to be a movie about inner peace with crazy, incredibly staged fight scenes every 10 minutes, it is, first and foremost, a movie about inner peace.

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.

Despite this familiarity-wallow, The Holiday is likable. Really likable, in fact.

Social justice is never an excuse for bad art. In fact, one could argue that a really bad movie about a really important subject is twice the artistic crime -- because, however well-intentioned, it trivializes human suffering while squandering a teaching opportunity.

By an order of magnitude --- the strongest (or at least the most mature, subtle and emotional) entry in the series thus far.

If I believed in the concept of "guilty pleasures," I'd classify "Centurion" as one, but I think I maybe just kind of enjoyed it.

Fox uses her earth-tone-clad, Ivy-League-schooled characters the way Jane Austen used hers: taking their privileged, rigid social structures and building a stage to explore deeper human problems.

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.

The Protector is the nuttiest movie I've seen all year, and I've seen the last 20 minutes of "The Wicker Man."

A charming Rob Reiner film that more or less works as intended.

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

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.

In a film marketplace where even the best superhero movies tend to do a lot of the same stuff, I really admire Will Smith and bad-boy director Peter Berg for trying something different.

Poseidon '06 is spectacularly noisy, uninteresting and character-free.

This is one of those comedies where the humor lies in the audacity of tone and character rather than any particular sight gag or one-liner. Same with "The Foot Fist Way," which is absolutely worth your rental dollar.

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.

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

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.

Isn't easy to watch, but it's beautifully written and acted, with a sharp eye for the small embarrassments of divorce.

By presenting murderers as actors and then filming those actors discussing their sins, the line between performance and soul-searching blurs in unnerving ways.

One of the best movies playing in Portland is, I kid you not, a loopy dramatic thriller starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

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

Norbit might have worked if it had fully committed to being over the top or made Rasputia the lead character and found the human inside the cartoon. Instead, the movie doesn't give us anyone to care about.

Mostly connects with a fairly tight story -- even if it feels less like a movie and more like a really good episode of a "Shrek" TV series.

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

The final third...is so overblown and anticlimactic that it finally gets you thinking about empty profundity and loose ends.

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.

Simultaneously boring and cringe-inducing; you can't decide whether to flee the theater or lightly nap.

This movie is a powerfully silly brain vacation. It's a by-the-numbers underdogs vs. bullies comedy.