M. E. Russell

It's an ambitious, passionate, grief-stricken work of film art.

Innocence revisits imagery from the first film. But this time computer animation pumps everything up to epic proportions. The results are overwhelming.

In "Upside" Allen's marble face acts as the pressure-cooker lid on a hilarious hissy fit.

The Boys of Baraka leaves you outraged in the way only the best documentaries can.

Unpretentiously fantastic.

If you enjoyed any of Frank's previous work, or thought "Brick" was the bomb, you'll love this.

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

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.

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.

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."

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

The teachers have moxie. The students have courage. Mermin's warm, funny, beautiful and deeply humane documentary certainly honors the latter.

As a study of a predator, "Evil" is fascinating and enraging.

Nair takes mostly low-key material about a traditional Indian family raising kids in America and turns it into something sensual, funny and quietly devastating.

Startling and amazing -- a cinematic hammer to the skull.

It's one of the best and strangest films of Miyazaki's career.

Intimate, funny, moving and incredibly rousing -- even if you're allergic to sports movies.

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

A sort of anti-date movie, a smart but deeply cynical study in failure, with our sense of loss growing in direct proportion to the characters' romantic hopes.

Monster House makes its intentions clear: It wants to wrap you in a thick, warm blanket of 1980s nostalgia.

A bright, sexy, globe-trotting and very French romantic comedy.

This meandering tale of a pack of ticket inspectors working the Hungarian subway system delights in misleading viewers.

Nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, it's deeply humane and even more deeply unsettling, in a way that most documentaries about Iraq, which tend toward the polemic, never manage.

Funny and weird and surprising and action-packed and genuinely beautiful.

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

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

It's quietly brutal stuff, beautifully acted by Fanning, Englert, Christina Hendricks and a word-twisting Alessandro Nivola.

It's a relentless finale to the "Bourne" movie trilogy that raises the stakes, pumps up the action and develops old characters while introducing new villains

Weaver is hilarious and horrifying.

A nasty little tube of frozen horror concentrate.

A dry, vicious and deeply moving little comedy that sort of takes the structure of a teen sports movie, then undermines that structure at every turn.

De la Iglesia is a mercilessly agile talent.

It's one of the great horror films of recent years -- and a welcome antidote to the in-your-face sonic assaults that all too often pass for genre fare.

Miller's global harmonizing never feels preachy -- he's too busy cramming Happy Feet with enough entertainment for three movies.

The film is a minor Christmas miracle: It succeeds on its own terms, despite the gossip hounds' best blood-sniffing efforts, and dares to be an entertainment rather than a statement.

A terrific midnight movie of the future -- a tough, funny, fast-moving and tightly constructed John Carpenter riff in which a bickering group fights a pack of space monsters in and around a single location.

If you're an actual adult who likes old-school Westerns, this won't disappoint you.

Odd, beautiful and ambitious film.

Maybe the best thing about Stranger Than Fiction is the way it extracts unexpected work from underrated actors.

The film continues the tone that "Half-Blood Prince" set: we're leaving childish things behind, and human and magical concerns are starting to mingle in a grown-up way. When "Part 2" hits theaters eight months from now, I suspect I'll appreciate the buildup to a (literally) explosive finale. It's going to be a long wait.

Other than flubbing the dismount, Stick It is smarter and funnier than it has any right to be.

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

Submarine pulls off a nice little feat: It's a reference-heavy coming-of-age indie flick that feels fresh despite being, well, a reference-heavy coming-of-age indie flick.

The Other Guys finds McKay back to trying something wildly ambitious with his comedy, and largely succeeding.

Daniel Day-Lewis may be one of our great actors, but he trips over a few Method-acting speed bumps in wife Rebecca Miller's third writer-director effort.

Despite dancing between a story and a story within a story, something seems simple and effortless about Ten Canoes. Director Rolf de Heer and his all-Yolngu cast offer a take on tribal life that's warm, funny and powerfully alive.

Sneaks up on you. At first, it plays like it might be another in a long line of dullish legal thrillers. But then, in its modest, grown-up way, it keeps getting better and better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

O'Toole just keeps turning up the volume, and it's thrilling to watch.

The movie's perfectly understated, warts-and-all sense of time and place will send any suburban Gen Xer in the audience flashing right back to their less-cautious days, when mix tapes did heavy lifting as calling cards.

The funny and powerfully weird Rango is probably the closest I've seen a big-budget, computer-animated feature get to the comic vibe of my favorite Chuck Jones cartoons -- specifically, the Bugs/Porky Western spoof "Drip-Along Daffy."

The film is exquisite on every level, full of sadness and emotional surprise.

Hugely entertaining.

The only scenes that felt "actorly" come when the pair drunkenly crash an ex-girlfriend's wedding party. Otherwise, The Messenger has a verisimilitude rare in films tackling this subject matter.

The movie unfolds in the uplifting manner you'd expect, but its real pleasures lie in its terrific '60s pop-soul soundtrack and especially in its frequently funny performances.

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.

In the parlance of the kids today, the movie totally goes there.

Lawrence steps up. And her character's fierce independence provides a welcome alternative to certain vampire-fixated young-adult heroines who define themselves entirely through the attention of much-much-older men.

Barrymore is terrific with her actors, finding moments for even the smallest supporting players.

It's charming, funny, exceedingly well-made and features enough comically thrilling flying-lizard mayhem to cause your child's head to lightly explode.

Director Kim Ji-woon creates a funny, fast-moving pastiche of Spielberg, Woo, Leone and George Miller, but it's really a must-see for its three big action set pieces -- which go on for a million years each and become almost hallucinatory.

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

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

Director Tony Scott's runaway-train action flick Unstoppable is semi-remarkable for what it doesn't contain.

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

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.

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

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."

One of this year's funniest movies -- and its most inspirational sports drama -- is a documentary.

As horror movies go, The Conjuring is an extremely skillful, entertaining remix album. That's not an insult.

Gosling is excellent playing a character who's fundamentally unknowable.

It's better at being droll than laugh-out-loud funny.

To my thinking, the grand simplicity of the metaphor is a big part of In Time's oddly retro sci-fi charm. Niccol is practicing the old-school craft of making a barn-broad alternate-reality that forces you to think about the way we all consensually agree to participate in systems -- even when those systems are hopelessly screwed up.

This isn't a crime comedy, exactly. It's a slightly absurd, minimalist noir, in the ZIP code of "Blood Simple" and "Fargo."

It's hard to argue with the movie's big heart, solid craftsmanship, likable characters, decent acting, gorgeous scenery or the fact that it's going to leave its audience blubbering and smiling.

I suspect audiences will divide sharply on the movie's wild tone shifts. I found them sort of fearless.

There is something, well, awesome about watching these vivid young women realize that music isn't always made on computers as they give their bands cool names like the Ready and get onstage after five days and ferociously sing earnest lyrics they wrote themselves.

The film's climax is a bit of a jumble, but by then Hillcoat has built his world so vibrantly that it hardly matters. And the hard-charging soundtrack -- featuring Cave, Warren Ellis, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson -- is an absolute blast.

A movie adapted from a novel inspired by a person who probably never existed.

The movie is gorgeous to look at, the script has a killer twist and the cast is competent.

The film suffers slightly from diminishing returns -- its first third is by far its scariest -- but it's still a bold, artful take on a popular horror idea.

Ultimately, it's a formulaic sports movie for kids that hits the expected dramatic beats.

Bridesmaids follows the lead of other Apatow productions and finds much of its comedy in pain, horrifying awkwardness and the difficult work that goes into building and maintaining relationships. If you liked this in "Knocked Up," you'll probably like it here.

Mullan makes the journey more than worthwhile, but don't go in expecting profundity.

One of those hard-to-pin-down movies where you're not quite sure which sort of story the filmmakers wanted to tell.

The movie has "heart" in a way that doesn't feel cloying or dishonest. And the cast -- especially Janelle Schremmer -- just nails it.

The movie's pretty good, occasionally very good. But I also kind of hope they don't make another one.

If you can look beyond the simple-minded Socratic political discourse, The Edukators reveals itself as warm, humane and sad, a movie that genuinely wants you to think about how idealism eventually collides with human frailty, and about what upstarts and sell-outs might teach one another.

It's a gorgeous, strange little piece -- but I did find myself wishing it poked fewer aces out its sleeve after urging us to pay such close attention.

If you're inclined toward women of the smart/sly variety, you'll leave with a massive crush on Hall. You might remember her as Christian Bale's long-suffering wife in "The Prestige." Here, she comes off as a sort of college-aged, raven-tressed, human rights-obsessed Emma Thompson, only cooler.

I'm pleased to report the new Land of the Lost movie keenly understands that what was once scary is now ridiculous.

The movie is strongest when it stays with Bateman and Spacey, who play greatest-hits remixes of their best-loved performances.

On balance, the filmmakers do a terrific job with one of the weaker stories. It's welcome news that Yates is coming back for one of the stronger ones; he's set to direct "Half-Blood Prince."

But as the story takes some surprising turns, it works like a slow infection: Patient audience members may find themselves awakening to the story in much the same way the characters awaken to their own capacities for tenderness.

Wants to be a sex farce, a sports film and a serious meditation on Catholicism. To its credit, it succeeds as all three.

The cast is almost uniformly spectacular -- particularly Angela Lansbury as a wicked aunt and Raphael Coleman as the sardonic, bespectacled child who delivers hilarious, verbose asides and somehow makes it look effortless.

But if it's going to be diet Pixar, at least it's action-packed diet Pixar -- with overwhelming, detail-choked production design that occasionally had my jaw lowering like a forklift.

Also fun: tiny characters such as Jimmy's surprisingly helpful stalker (Nick Swardson); the film's final moments, which owe more than a little to "Grease"; and the skating costumes, which take their influence from such cultural touchstones as "Tron."

It manages the weird feat of making a flock of sheep bounding across a meadow seem vaguely menacing.

A rough little comedy of tone. White, making his directorial debut, asks if the search for self is still heroic when the discoveries are unpleasant.

This is a violent, romantic, beautifully shot and performed film -- with brutal battle scenes and charisma-bomb performances by Asano as the future Khan and Honglei Sun as a rival chieftain and brother-in-arms.

The surprisingly funny Role Models does three things extremely well. It gives killer roles to comic actors frequently stuck in ensembles. It directs hilariously harsh words at children and lets the children direct even harsher words back at the adults. And it's oddly determined to give a fair shake to fans of both medieval role-playing and the band Kiss.

If you're willing to do the work, Triad Election pays you in tragedy.

This sci-fi thriller -- which is alternately nail-biting, gorgeous and a little silly -- spends most of its time throwing mechanical and human errors at the most important space mission ever.

Kazan has a gift for letting you see her think, even when she's perfectly still; the film's title refers to the ferocious trauma happening between Ivy's ears and her silent struggle to keep it in check.

The movie's biggest charm is its unpredictable, offbeat tone.

It's not perfect or "Shining"-level inspired, but it's solid.

Lumet blatantly, simplistically stacks the decks in favor of the defendants, pitting them against mean, stupid cops and a cartoonishly nasty prosecutor.

Where "United 93" was lean and merciless and got you thinking hard about how you might conduct yourself in a no-win situation, World Trade Center is reassuring.

Never actively unfunny. The cast is far too smart for that. But it never quite pops like it would if it were whittled down to something just a little longer than an "SNL Digital Short."

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

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 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.

John Carter is too wickedly strange not to recommend. Movies this expensive usually play it much safer.

The movie is plainly entertaining, with a terrific cast and a fast-moving story helping you overlook the dialogue's frequent failure to crackle.

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.

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

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.

Vastly entertaining, slightly overlong.

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

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.

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.

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.

In their best moments, Hark's action movies have a what-did-I-just-see giddiness, as if their choreography were springing straight from a cartoon id. Though I could have done without much of the film's CGI-heavy fakery, "Detective Dee" finds that giddiness more than a few times.

If I had to pick one word to describe The Great Debaters, it would be "nutritious."

While Wolf Creek has clunky moments, when you want to slap the idiot prey until they wake up, the movie embraces a minimalism that feels refreshingly old-school in a field of slasher films drunk on self-referential wisecracks and narrative tricks. And Jarrat's jolly-creepy performance might place Mick in the pantheon of great movie killers.

Arthur is sort of a dull hero, but the grandfather is classic, hilarious Aardman -- a thoroughly British eccentric prone to weird nostalgic/fatalistic utterances.

What makes Surf's Up stand out is its look and texture.

Surprisingly charming and well-acted.

It's fascinating as an offbeat storytelling exercise.

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.

Waititi is still telling stories of offbeat, semi-delusional New Zealanders, and he's still sprinkling his work with cartoonish flights of fancy -- but this time he grounds the comedy in a big-hearted, bittersweet story about a boy desperate to connect with his father.

Mike Terry's uncompromising fight for his principles makes for a fascinating, beautifully acted study in philosophical tension.

I wish Zenovich wasn't forced to skate surfaces when it comes to Polanski's perspective -- his interviews are vague and archival -- but she skillfully works around him to craft a maddening look at one of Hollywood's most infamous trials.

If you approach First Snow as a straight thriller, it's not terribly satisfying.

A basketball documentary where the climactic game looks like a Hong Kong wire-fu epic.

Make no mistake: This isn't a relentless button-pushing joke machine like the best Apatow schlumpy-man comedies. I guess I'd describe it as "agreeably ribald."

It is provocative, smartly made and truly independent.

After the terrifying grotesques that were the live-action "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "The Cat in the Hat," it was easy to dread a feature-length Horton Hears a Who!. But -- surprise -- the computer-animated "Horton" is largely funny and faithful to the spirit of the Dr. Seuss book.

It should be noted that Walk Hard is aimed at a fairly specific sort of movie subgenre -- it's practically an extended "SNL" sketch -- and it doesn't produce belly laughs so much as steady smiles of recognition over how accurately it's nailing its target. But it really nails that target.

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.

Fright Night joins "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" as proof that you actually can do this sort of thing correctly.

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.

A surprisingly fatalistic, way-above-average ski documentary that lays out a 35-year history of the "extreme" end of the sport.

Duplicity is perfectly titled: There isn't a second of this smart, twisty, grown-up thriller in which someone isn't lying, cheating or stealing, often from someone they claim to love.

It works as designed.

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

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.

Fassbender plays Magneto as a supercool assassin with a completely understandable set of beefs. I spent most of the movie rooting for him, and would watch a "Magneto, 1960s Nazi Hunter" sequel in a second.

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.

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

"Fast Five" and Fast & Furious 6 -- the newest, nearly-as-much-dumb-fun sequel -- play more like "The Avengers" than they don't.

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

Surprisingly flabby, with lazy writing and some final-act lurches into unironic rom-com that seem at odds with the bizarro premise.

Intriguing, not-terribly-probing documentary.

Travolta does a nice job, but Bolt is of course the most boring, blandly cute character in the movie.

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

Is it style over substance? Absolutely. But as with "Ocean's Eleven," style wins -- only just barely this time around.

The movie still works as a clever little "Twilight Zone" episode with great production values, and it's an impressively ambitious debut for Barthes.

Lymelife is more shaggy character study than rewarding narrative; its fateful final moments are self-consciously ambiguous in a way that (to me) feel almost flip, given the long dramatic build that preceded those final moments.

A fairly good movie about an evil subject.

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

Shrek 4 is at its best when it's sadistically doing these character remixes; you can feel the filmmakers' glee at getting to shrug off story continuity and make a mess.

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.

With his periodic porn-star mustache, shaggy hair and reckless demeanor, the movie Stander embodies a certain brand of brooding outlaw cool that feels increasingly rare.

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.)

The bright spot, again, is Grant.

While Predators isn't nearly as vivid or fresh as the original, it's certainly its strongest sequel.

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

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.

Surprisingly entertaining.

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

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.

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.

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.

No one joyfully embraces this absurdity better than Michael Sheen. The actor finds a ridiculous-yet-perfect way to deliver every single second of his performance as head of the global vampire council -- He's all over the film's finale. It's fantastic.

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

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

Bacon's mature performance serves a story that's considerably less sophisticated than he is, making The Woodsman less "brave" and more a slightly better-made movie of the week.

Enjoys the weird distinction of being one of the year's funniest comedies and one of the best zombie movies ever made.

It's pleasantly funny, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, from start to finish, even when it's staging broad, easy gags about baby barf and fat kids.

It all sort of plays out like "Law and Order: Spiritual Victims Unit," but the movie's stuffed (some might say overstuffed) with wonderfully staged moments and set pieces.

If you find the film's xenophobic undercurrents distasteful, take solace in this: Taken was co-written and directed by the Frenchmen responsible for "District B13," so at least the xenophobia is imported.

The movie is directed with real confidence by Batmanglij. He lets his actors breathe, builds suspense in one group-purge brainwashing scene, and lets the mystery unfold in an immersive way that's probably a bit more compelling than its actual scripted payoff deserves.

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.

The film sort of loses its touch when it gets "dramatic" toward the end -- it's the type of flick where the sky gets overcast when everyone is sad -- but it's hard to argue with the movie's general good spirits.

It's great to see The Rock re-embracing the action genre, and when his clobbering match with Diesel finally happens, it's as outlandishly room-wrecking as I'd hoped.

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.

It's all mildly uplifting in the way of an unchallenging sermon.

The King feels like a morality play without any morals.

At its best, Prisoners dwells on the ways the characters affected by the case are held mentally captive -- by conviction, compulsion, procedure, skewed beliefs, rage, and grief -- and how each character's blind spot and/or maniacal focus furthers or frustrates the search for the girls.

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

The movie's still quite affecting -- in part because of its simple, old-school earnestness, but mostly because Stolzl does white-knuckle work behind the camera to make you feel the height, pain and awe of the grueling ascent, and the bottomless terror and exhaustion after everything goes horribly, horribly wrong.

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.

Has a shocking anger and force.

Horror fans should still seek the film out for Dren -- one of the most striking abominations to hit the big screen in a while.

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.

It's fun junk. And it doesn't satisfy. Dot the I is a weird, pretty film with a dumb script, a skilled cast and a good twist, plus one hot sex scene and one brilliant scene-chew by D'Arcy.

While it's focused on the people -- on men who never had mentors struggling to mentor themselves and each other -- the movie works as a smart B film.

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.

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

Taken as a whole -- and it kills me to write this -- it just doesn't add up to much.

Basically "Before Sunrise" for middle-aged people, only with less interesting conversations and a more formulaic construction.

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

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.

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.

It's got a big heart and high spirits on a low budget and actors who refuse to phone it in.

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

Oblivion is Moebius-comic gorgeous and it sounds great, especially the loud, nervewracking honks the drones make when they're weighing whether or not to shoot you. I suppose that's a surface appeal. But it's a nice surface.

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

Full of small, weird moments.

There are several things to enjoy here. The use of motel service-industry code words by the safe-house staff is dryly funny.

The verdict? Could have been worse. Yes, it's a slightly hollow endorsement, but Guess Who is probably worth your matinee/pub-theater dollar.

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.

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

Sadly, director Jaume Serra has taken the Gothic premise of a madman casting his living victims in wax and, no doubt at the behest of copycat-hungry producers, turned House of Wax into yet another teens-versus-hillbillies slasher flick

I just wish the movie wasn't also so monologue-choked, muted to a fault and fond of oversimplifying financial lingo to the point of meaninglessness.

Super Ex does have a certain low-key, adult-contemporary charm. It's almost entirely because of Luke Wilson.

Sets up a situation so weird, it's almost weirder that Rob Reiner directs it as a cookie-cutter romantic comedy.

Despite some fast-paced direction by Wes Craven, Red Eye finally gets so silly, it's practically popping its wing-rivets.

Our Idiot Brother lives in a sort of relaxed in-between place where it doesn't really bite as drama or comedy, but the movie's world-class cast and big heart push it over.

Dramatizes and occasionally overdramatizes Albert's 24-year career. For a while, it's a study of a decent man who puts his life into compartments so he can do terrible deeds.

Eraser-dull.

This is a totally predictable exercise if you're not in the target market.

This is a perfectly serviceable thriller. It's just not the New York family crime saga it clearly wants to be.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Minkoff lets the fight scenes go on for a while, which is nice, and all the best bits are in the middle, when Jackie and Jet spend a lot of time playing off each other.

This makes "Eli" sort of wonderfully silly toward the end, as if the Hughes brothers set out to make the first-ever faith-based "Mad Max" movie.

By gilding the lily so shamelessly, Ewing and Grady guarantee they'll preach only to the converted.

It's almost like you're watching a 100-minute trailer for a much better six-hour miniseries.

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.

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).

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

It's inoffensive and shiny and competent and kids will dig it, and I can already barely remember a single thing that happened.

With the exception of one long improv riff on a campground basketball court, Williams nicely underplays his role. Unfortunately, Sonnenfeld also underplays his. We should expect more of him.

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.

Succeeds only in fits and starts.

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.

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

In the films at least, there's something so naked about the Potter/Percy story parallels that's it's hard not to sit there as a viewer and get distracted playing connect the dots.

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.

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

The dialogue is almost primitive at times, almost every female character is an idiot and McConaughey grossly overplays the bachelor-sleazeball antics at the beginning.

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

When it sticks to its central flirtation, the latest movie based on a Nicholas Sparks romance, The Lucky One, is blandly pleasant enough.

Nicolas Cageologists will be sad to hear that he's entirely too normal in National Treasure -- he's mildly funny but doesn't make any of the kooky dramatic choices (needless accents, ranting about the orifices of Greek gods) that made his other Bruckheimer performances so much fun to watch.

The end result is mediocre, slightly sloppy and a mild waste of a great cast.

King is good enough that you can't help but root for her. But frankly, I can't imagine paying full ticket price plus concessions for that privilege.