Maitland McDonagh

Welcome Home also features surprisingly strong performances from Ratajkowski, Scamarcio and Paul (“Breaking Bad”) and ends with a nifty little parting shot whose implicit condemnation of mindlessly consuming the lives of others should give audiences a little chill.

Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is a truly engrossing film, one that balances the big picture and the small one.

Ultimately, Speed Kills feels startlingly like a 1990s direct-to-video action movie with an inexplicably inflated budget.

Overlord, produced and presumably overseen by J.J. Abrams, is good, bloody fun, with all the polish and production value that come with not being a low-budget exploitation movie.

Don’t Go is sufficiently subtle that some viewers will find it dull and lacking in traditionally “scary” moments. But others will appreciate the care with which it walks the line between supernatural and psychological horror.

The Super is well written and acted—two things that should be givens but often aren’t, especially in genre films

It’s a smart reimagining, but not a particularly compelling one, which is the problem overall.

The film’s pleasures are small ones, but they’re perfectly pitched and anyone who’s ever collected anything will empathize with the depth of Alan and Paul’s passion, if not their actions.

A Crooked Somebody (the title derives from pastor Sam’s unheeded advice that “it’s better to be an honest nobody…”) is a meticulously balanced blend of character-based drama and genre conventions.

Peppermint is a bloody crowd-pleaser, but it’s fundamentally forgettable, the kind of movie whose details begin to disappear the moment the credits roll.

Older Than Ireland isn't relentlessly upbeat. It's filled with stories of loss, disappointment, tough lessons learned and compromises made, and it's hard not to suspect that the genetic hand you're dealt counts for a lot.

The bottom line is that Reprisal is an extremely silly movie doing its damnedest to look tough and gritty and clever, none of which it is. In fact, it’s both tediously formulaic and weirdly puzzling.

It’s clearly meant to be a light romp –a party movie to be enjoyed in group settings—and it is.

Writer-director Colin Minihan’s thriller is tightly plotted and delivers a couple of terrific shocks, shocks that are firmly rooted in character

Funny little Nazis require rather more finesse than The Littlest Reich possesses.

The film isn’t a genre changer, but it’s elegant and admirably remorseless—and when it breaks bad, it breaks very bad indeed.

What makes it play is Archambault, who gives a strikingly unpleasant performance as Gerald.

If it were half an hour shorter, China Salesman (released overseas as Deadly Contract, the epitome of generic titling) might be a candidate for “so bad it’s good (or at least kind of fun)” status. But it’s not.

Though the story meanders, the film's look is nothing short of breathtaking.

It all seems terribly familiar.

Though this frank documentary about extreme sexual practices comes with a cautionary message, it could perhaps use a stronger one.

While there's no denying that the film's animation is technically impressive and is sometimes quite clever, its inventiveness is frequently at the service of gags so distasteful that gag is the operative word.

As live-action adaptations of cheap, unapologetically stupid cartoons go, this is top of the line: The cast is appealing, the sets brightly colored and fun to look at, the mystery as lame and goofy as any featured in the many inexplicably beloved Scooby-Doo cartoons.

Thoroughly heartfelt. But though Trachtman alludes to the impact that Lior's special needs and local fame has had on his family, she seems uninterested in exploring the larger history of beliefs and traditions concerning mentally challenged people and their closeness to God.

The Carter and Spotnitz's credit, such weighty concerns aren't the stuff of most mainstream genre movies. But they're also not sufficiently gripping to transform a middling thriller into something truly provocative or haunting.

As provocative as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," but nowhere near as engaging.

Sandler's performance is aimed squarely at the fans who love his smarty-pants man-boy shtick and Rock gets off some funny lines, but overall this is one dreary, formulaic slog through sports-movie cliches.

This stage-bound farce could easily be an American sitcom: It's all slamming doors, eavesdropping and stupid miscommunications, garnished with a heavy-handed helping of comedy of humiliation.

An earnest, thoughtful, surprisingly well-written (given the number of writers who worked on it) drama about guilt and betrayal that features excellent performances by Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt and dares to defy the juvenile wham bam thank you ma'am aesthetics that have turned mainstream action pictures into feature-length video games.

Intelligent and engaging, this documentary about rave culture overcomes the challenge inherent in its subject; rave's appeal is by nature nonanalytical and experiential, while documentary films play to the intellectual observer.

As to what happens between shows, well, apparently not a whole hell of a lot. If there are groupies, demolished hotel rooms, midnight payoffs to the vice squad or drug- and alcohol-fueled misbehavior, there's no evidence of it here.

No cliché is unturned, no "dog duty" pun avoided (get it -- dog doody), no creepy gay-panic subtext unplumbed in this family comedy.

Though meticulously researched, well acted and filled with striking moments, the movie ultimately feels oddly disconnected.

The cloying odor of therapy hangs over this preachy holiday fable about a boy whose neglectful dad dies and comes back as a snowman.

The best thing about it is the cast. Baldwin's moronic Barney is an acquired taste, but Krakowski is an adorable, sassy Betty, and Johnston brings an endearing coltishness to the sensible Wilma.

This DIY oddity is both quirkily funny and strangely poignant, and does justice to the same themes that underlie the far more lavishly produced "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence."

The images of gods and ordinary Tibetans that Bush captures are more eloquent that his turgid narration, and overall the film works better as a travelogue than an introduction to Tibetan Buddhist beliefs or history.

Frankly, the film's nostalgia for the "coffee, tea or me?" era of flying, when stewardesses were fantasy figures in soaring heels and uniforms tailored for bust enhancement rather than utility, is retro in all the wrong ways.

Overall, this puff piece is shapeless, repetitive and feels much longer than it is.

Unlike most mainstream filmmakers, Ratnam doesn't try to include something for everyone, but he does deliver several handsome production numbers.

Actress-turned-writer/director Asia Argento's angry, outspoken, semi-autobiographical rant of a film is strident and occasionally juvenile, but it packs an undeniable wallop.

A tabloid slice of tabloid life, ragged, vivid, awkward and punchy all at once.

Homey but not especially interesting trips down the Ellis and Cheney family lanes.

It's all mean-spirited, foulmouthed sniping.

The film's liabilities include Lustig's excessive reliance on flashy editing, tacky special effects and a blaring alterna-rock soundtrack that's used to make the characters' thoughts and motivations painfully obvious. Among its assets are the clever premise and generally appealing performances.

The film's bright spot is Irish comedian Dylan Moran, who plays Libby's charmingly dissolute cousin and who also happens to be Dennis' best friend. He's fresh, unpredictable and genuinely funny -- everything the film isn't.

The hyperactive Hong Kong action stuff is getting old.

This supremely silly supernatural potboiler is slickly entertaining for just under two hours and absolutely hilarious for 10 minutes near the end.

Formulaic and derivative, but sufficiently well made to work as both teen-angst melodrama and bone-rattling brawl picture.

Would be as tedious as a home movie if the couple, Edward DeBonis and Vincent Maniscalco, weren't gay men and their nuptials not colored by the clash between their personal faith and their rejection by the mainstream church.

Gloriously seductive musical sequences seem suddenly hokey and self-conscious when they're staged in Western settings, and the songs' English-language lyrics are painfully banal.

This vapid, mean-spirited comedy is Lopez's show, and though she is utterly unconvincing as a paragon of down-to-earth virtues, the last laugh was hers from the outset.

It has the air of a particularly accomplished student film, by a student whose philosophical concerns outweigh his interest in narrative filmmaking.

But in the end it all comes to naught: Tantalyzing though the leads are, the paintings remain elusive.

The child actors are bland, the adult characters are forced to act like dunderheads to keep the paper-thin plot going, and the generic-sounding Jimmy Buffett songs are just a LITTLE out of sync with the film's target age group.

Hippolyte subsequently reinvented himself first as a director of baroque erotic thrillers and then as music-video maestro to pop tarts like Britney Spears, but stalk-and-slash horror -- for all its porn-movie rhythms -- appears to have defeated him.

Owen Wilson single-handedly hauls this amiable, middle-of-the-road comedy out of sheer mediocrity.

Roth's screenplay, steeped in the peculiar rituals, lock-jawed repression and smug sense of superiority of the WASP ruling class that both shaped America's intelligence community and made it vulnerable, is less interested in derring-do than back-room deals and the day-to-day drudgery of spying, driven by the notion that espionage is a cynical high-stakes game played with people's lives and the ante is human decency and connectedness.

Even by the standards of pop-moral parables passing for entertainment, this is bland stuff.

It's lavish, clever entertainment, a welcome opportunity to laugh without shame.

It delivers some bracingly nasty gore scenes, but there's no spark left in the run-scream-repeat formula, and a movie whose biggest draw is profoundly untalented hotel-fortune heiress Paris Hilton is in desperate need of some juice.

To his eternal credit, Jones gives his considerable all and even coaxes a startling note of poignancy from one scene, while Smith just bops along, lobbing gags and grinning at the special effects.

Camille's desperate, destructive antics just don't seem especially cute or funny.

Scruffy, loosely structured and piercingly perceptive about the ways in which technology that supposedly brings people together actually keeps them apart.

An intoxicatingly beautiful but painfully simplistic fable about love and death.

The "cute" kids are insufferable, but leads Ali Khan and Mukerji radiate the unabashed star quality that's all but gone from American movies -- poverty and desperation haven't looked so glamorous since the glory days of Joan Crawford.

The devil is in the degrees. Pineyro and Ferrer have a fine old time teasing the viewer with the ongoing search for the corporate mole.

Based on the story of Milarepa (1043 - 1123), who renounced the violence and vengeance of his early life to become a revered Tibetan Buddhist saint, lama Neten Chokling's directing debut ends on a frustrating spiritual cliffhanger.

A screwball comedy without a charismatic, smart-talking dame is no screwball comedy at all.

A morose, slow-moving action picture.

The less you demand of this bloody, by-the-numbers sequel, the more you'll enjoy it.

There isn't a one-note character in the mix, and they respond with haunting, subtle performances that feel utterly natural and unaffected. It's a striking debut for Estes, and a remarkable showcase for the cast.

Danner, whose Dina actually resembles a human being, would be its saving grace if her gracefully controlled performance weren't lost in a sea of braying caricatures.

Diehard Sandler fans will probably find it uproarious, but others will have to make do with the occasional chuckle.

The climactic shootout might have more impact if we actually cared about the so-called characters.

A creepy, clever, film buff's delight of a fantasy.

Once upon a time there was a feisty young woman who didn't sit around twiddling her pretty thumbs and singing "Someday My Prince Will Come." That's the revisionist spin on Cinderella, and it twirls very nicely.

But for all the profane language and sexual frankness, Soderbergh's film is no more cynical or world-weary than its inspirations, and in the end, it feels like a clever trick wrapped around a hollow center.

While both the novel and the film are weighted in favor of Bill's (Cruise) character, it's Kidman who gives the film's standout performance.

And while the divas make their characters hugely entertaining, they're also such high profile actresses in such a soft-edged film that it's hard to actually worry about what's to become of them.

The cast, a mix of beauty-contest winners, models, veteran actors and newcomers, is as diverse as the characters they play and work together surprisingly smoothly.

It's hard not to feel sorry for the high-profile cast, obviously working for brownie points in heaven -- they're so good, yet nothing they do can make the movie fly.

Does so many things right that it's a shame to see it sink into horror-movie cliches.

Smith's unrepentantly juvenile sense of humor leans heavily on elementary pop-culture parody, a particularly tiresome and parasitic form of humor that depends on an audience of smirking know-it-alls who can be trusted to snicker whenever they get the reference.

Rather than rage, Peosay's film radiates sadness over a singular way of life in danger of imminent obliteration.

The film is never dull -- no mean feat, given that it spends two hours telling a story whose end is widely known -- and features performances that range from coarsely effective to phenomenal.

Though ultimately the film is all smoke and mirrors, the sensibility it reflects is rich and exciting.

This loving parody is steeped in comic book trivia and lore: The more you know, the more heartfelt your response to the film is likely to be.

Sharply acted and cheerfully coarse.

Impassioned, unwieldy and padded with celebrity interviews.

It's a fearless performance and yields some squirm-inducingly funny moments.

It's a shame it's not a better movie, but its small virtues include an uncompromising performance by English actor Jonny Lee Miller.

The music is generally undistinguished, with the exception of the searing "Every Six Minutes."

Young Tamimi is a terrific rider but a lackluster screen presence, and the film's brevity ensures that her trials have a perfunctory quality that keeps them from being truly compelling.

It unfolds in the angst-haunted shadow of the 9'11 terror attacks and teeters on a thin edge of sheer panic.

Ribisi is painfully intense without being histrionic.

For horror fans in a forgiving mood, it's an adequate fear fix.

The script, by co-writers and -directors Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, is intermittently clever, but their direction is leaden and assassinates every gag with a lethal accuracy the CIA could only hope to achieve.