M. E. Russell

Beautifully acted and accomplishes exactly what writer/director Alan Ball set out to accomplish.

A funny and sincere indie about what happens when an acerbic teen finds herself "in a fat suit I can't take off."

The flashback itself is a romantic dramedy that's far smarter than junk like "27 Dresses." Unfortunately, to enjoy that flashback, you have to ignore two gargantuan idiocies: No sane father would twist his daughter into knots by telling this story. It's full of booze, cigarettes, infidelity and sex with women who aren't Mom.

It's been fascinating to watch the "intellectual" subgenre of the serial-killer movie -- the one where poetic evil geniuses elude the cops while leaving trails of art-directed crime scenes -- run out of ideas and start feeding on itself.

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.

This may be the best work we've seen from either actor, which is saying something.

Succeeds only in fits and starts.

Watts is a champ for seeing this through now that she's actually famous.

If you're willing to have your patience tested, Twohy and his cast reward it.

I cared enough about these characters to follow "Exorcism" to tense and occasionally goofy places, even if the setup proved a bit stronger than the payoff.

C.S.A. has a love-it-or-hate-it bite that probably will lead to a few passionate post-screening discussions.

One doesn't want to oversell the film; you could catch it on DVD and regret nothing. But, frankly, in a marketplace that tends toward cranked-up action thrills, it's just nice to watch a level-headed crime movie aimed at actual grown-ups.

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.

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.

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

It's a shame The Matador isn't a better movie, because this semi-dark comedy contains one great, cackling, self-loathing performance by Pierce Brosnan.

The movie starts out as a potboiler with a troubling character arc; unfortunately, it ends up becoming a goofy, story-overwhelming Rube Goldberg contraption that would make the producers of the "Saw" series blush.

At one point during the big race, the kids get passed at close range by a team of pros so seasoned, they wrote the navigation software the kids use. I was begging the camera crew to follow them.

A modest movie full of decent pop songs, three-dimensional humans and sharp observations about the male mind. It's also full of funny little ironies.

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

The Rock charms you through the worst of it, but the effects are cheap, the dialogue is about as challenging as a "Hannah Montana" episode, and the pace manages to be both brisk and numbing.

The Ringer is appalling.

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

The story of Dito escaping and then facing his demons is meaningful. But that story is so buried in actorly noise that it feels false.

I'd argue that a very good movie could have been great if it had kept to subtler psychological tones.

A gorgeous, life-affirming movie. On paper, it sounds lurid bordering on ridiculous.

Waitress is strange and sexy and personal and wonderful -- a weird little slice of pure feeling -- and it's horrible that Shelly never got the chance to see it delight a mass audience.

A sweet, intelligent little movie.

We end up with a piece of B-grade junk in which Elektra exchanges "banter" with the unexceptional Prout between fight scenes so badly shot that even Garner looks like a stunt double.

Raimi as a filmmaker is clearly having more fun than he's had in years. So will his fans.

It gives me no pleasure to report that Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters is fairly excruciating to sit through -- because I'm writing this as a fan of the TV series that spawned the movie.

It's a waste of classic material. Rent "The Incredibles" and see what should have been.

Despite the hot-button pedophilic story hook (I'm surprised Jeff and Hayley didn't meet on MySpace.com), Hard Candy ultimately beats with the heart of a stagier, more complicated psychological revenge picture along the lines of Roman Polanski's "Death and the Maiden."

The romance is boring. Everything is blandly good-looking. The emotional beats are so programmed, you can predict the entrance of every single note of the Philip Glass dirge of a score. And the title means nothing beyond its double-entendre.

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.

The script is just all kinds of terrible. The characters are hollow mannequins telling a thin, depressing story that's less of a noir and more of a simple-minded bummer full of barely connected scenes and stunningly empty dialogue.

To be fair, Rudd and Bell are cute and funny in their scenes together, and Rudd salvages a few laughs with his deadpan line readings.

Shrill, unfunny third installment.

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.

While you're in the theater, it's actually -- heaven help me -- pretty fun to watch.

Full of small, weird moments.

The characters devolve into boring narcissists. And the movie devolves into a broad-brush dark satire of emergency bureaucracy that feels a lot sillier than the post-9/11 panic attack of the first half-hour.

By the film's end, you feel like you've spent two hours rapidly changing channels between a WB sitcom, the gospel-choir segments of the "Ladykillers" remake, an episode of "Law & Order" and a Mexican soap opera.

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

You see, in "Jesus Is Magic," Sarah Silverman plays "Sarah," a self-absorbed Jewish American Princess who also happens to be casually, cluelessly racist.