M. E. Russell

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.