M. E. Russell

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.

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

Imaginary Heroes feels like an endless series of wakes, awkward cocktail conversations and teen house parties, which would be fine if Harris wrote less cartoony dialogue.

To my thinking, this splendid low-key bummer of a ghost story was eventually undermined by the film's increasing reliance on shock-scares, in which something suddenly and noisily jumps into the frame, over and over and over.

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.

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.

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.