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.

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.

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).

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."

Scenes will wander from gross-out gag to sentimental schmaltz to pervy leer to cheap nostalgia within a 30-second span, utterly free of clear directorial guidance. Even worse, very little of it is remotely funny.

The movie is well-acted and a bit frustrating, but also a pleasant little surprise.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It's a brisk, though laugh-imbalanced, B-comedy with a hard R.

Improves on the original in at least one key way: Its lead characters appear to have souls.

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

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.

The sequel has all the merits and demerits of its predecessor, only with a less-snarly antagonist, a more thoughtful final showdown and broader Holmes/Watson relationship jokes.

It's a definite crowd-pleaser and a perfectly fun night at the movies.

Director R.W. Goodwin (an "X-Files" vet) makes a fatal mistake: He never takes a clear stance on the material he's spoofing.

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."

At the end of Martian Child, we're told the movie is "inspired by actual events." But the movie isn't even fully inspired by David Gerrold's source novel that was inspired by actual events.

Night at the Museum ends up being a pretty fun all-ages comedy -- if you can survive its first 20 minutes.

The film is flat and false in the exact same way that director Anne Fletcher's last rom-com, "27 Dresses," was flat and false.

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

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

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

Suffers from the problem that plagues too many romantic comedies: The supporting characters are roughly 1,000 percent more interesting than the main characters.

Scratch the surface, and the movie's underpinnings are an insult to women everywhere -- the film is slick stupid propaganda for the myth of The One True Love that wastes the talents of fine actresses.

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.

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

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.

Rockwell is spectacular here, infusing Victor with a charm that makes you root for him despite the essentially sleazy con-man emptiness of his existence.

By film's end, you've enjoyed a middle-of-the-road episode of the series, basically. And as usual, Deputy Trudy and Lt. Dangle are getting the best lines while about one-third of the jokes hit their marks.

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.

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

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.

Grabs a fistful of hot-button story elements -- race, sex, politics -- and promptly mixes them into the thriller equivalent of tapioca.

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

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

The Ringer is appalling.

Turteltaub has a workmanlike touch and an easy sense of humor here, and he and his team do a better-than-expected job of keeping you interested in the story, despite it being yet another Tale of a Reluctant Young Man With A Supernatural Hero's Calling.

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

Unfortunately, the movie is the worst sort of liar: an unfunny one. Its gormless, assertion-free protagonist offends as a role model for idio youths, and, even worse, offends as drama.

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

It's meant to be funny, but I couldn't help thinking they were figuring out where to plant the pipe bombs.

It's fun-dumb and definitely not everyone's cup of tea -- I don't want to oversell it -- but Broken Lizard keeps it interesting by refusing to color inside the lines, creating their own silly little universe.

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.

If you can settle into its odd, low-key groove, I think you'll find it's a light pop beverage that goes down easy during one of the lamest blockbuster summers in recent memory.

I'm all for hearty theological debate. But this is intellectual suicide. Even worse, it's boring intellectual suicide.

Lopez can't decide if she's playing Lavoe's victim or enabler -- the movie sort of half blames her -- and neither of her characters is likable. The music's lovely, though.

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

The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's ideas impossibly trite.

It's horrible. It's wretched. It's Limburger pickled in castor oil.

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

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

Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig are adequate leads, but no great actor will be more squandered this year than Jeffrey Wright, who does nothing but speak in vast paragraph blocks of exposition while looking haggard and bored.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, is . . . well . . . not terrible. In fact, "Rise of the Silver Surfer" is roughly 300 percent less cringe-inducing than its predecessor.

Firewall does more to destroy my desire to see a new Indiana Jones movie than anything the aging process could conjure.

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

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

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.

Surprisingly dull.

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."

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

As idiot car-crash movies go, "Tokyo Drift" is pretty fun, and certainly a more-than-decent entry in this franchise.

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

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

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

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

The romance is the movie's least interesting element. But Heder's low-key, surprising charm and Thorton's gleeful wickedness at least glide the film in for a landing. You'll enjoy yourself.

If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

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.

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.

Full of small, weird moments.

A mild disaster.

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

The bright spot, again, is Grant.

Unfortunately, the dialogue undermines the movie's promise.

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

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

Wiseman's PG-13 remake isn't as funny, or vivid, or splatter-tastic. It contains no mutants, inflating heads, trips to Mars, or freaky little psychic dudes named "Kuato" emerging from people's stomachs. But it does a decent job setting up an unsubtle dystopia.

Freedomland is the worst kind of bad movie: one that thinks it's important.

The film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling.

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.

Has some good laughs courtesy of its cast -- but they're basically papering over a script that's masquerading as urbane and trenchant, when it's really self-involved and didactic and more than a little foolish.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.)

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

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.

There's almost nothing to Battleship beyond its grindingly dull, digitally rendered naval warfare.

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

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

Surprisingly entertaining.

Paul "Surfer Boy" Walker turns in a very credible action performance if you give him a Jersey accent, cover him in grime and beat the ever-loving tar out of him for two hours.