Maitland McDonagh

Ultimately, the film feels unfocused and attenuated, despite its brief running time.

The climactic revelation is a real disappointment, humdrum rather than chilling.

Outsourced is a sweet, good-natured surprise that takes the cliches out of an overworked genre and makes them seem almost fresh and entirely charming.

The obvious product of a corporate search for the next great fantasy franchise, this adaptation of the first in a series of popular children's books by the writer-illustrator team of Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi is a lump of leaden whimsy.

The unspoken question that underlies their struggles is whether a facility run by sheer force of personality can survive when that personality is gone; the film ends on a cautiously hopeful note.

It's just plain exhausting to watch the admirably game cast members running around like headless chickens in chic period clothes, surrendering their dignity to the task of navigating the plot's frenetic contrivances.

A candy-colored, superficially fizzy revenge fantasy with a startlingly corrosive undercurrent of bitterness and frustration.

Elvira fans could hardly ask for more.

A painfully self-conscious comedy that mistakes relentless self-referentiality for cleverness, this half-witted misfire is filled with accelerated motion, repeated and overlapping scenes, direct address to the camera and other cliches of defamiliarization.

Dellal and their cast consistently hit the right notes, and the result is an uplifting tale that you don't have to be embarrassed to enjoy.

Beautifully acted, minutely observed story.

Buono is truly charming, and the film delivers a handful of genuine laughs -- low laughs, but laughs nonetheless; if only they weren't so few and far between.

The sad thing is that Arnett, Shepard and McBride quickly establish a loose, easy camaraderie that's a real pleasure to watch. The shame is that they're working with such unrewarding material.

While Travolta and Gandolfini have the beefy, closed-off look of post-WWII era cops, they never FEEL: They look like actors playing dress up. Leto overcomes his delicate good looks to embody Fernandez's feral, faintly exotic charm, but Hayek is a standard-issue femme fatale, damaged on the inside but flawless on the surface.

It's as laceratingly entertaining as its predecessor.

Feather-light and proudly goofy, this Jackie Chan action comedy appears to be aimed squarely at under-12s.

The plot is simply an excuse for a string of good-natured dope jokes (come on -- you have to love that their hookah is called Billy Bong Thornton) and goofy sight gags inspired by everything from Jerry Garcia to Jerry Maguire, most of which are undoubtedly funniest if you're eight miles high.

A stale rehash of Woody Allen-style "he's a neurotic Jew, she's a flaky shiksa" gags.

Ritchie wraps this folderol in cinematic razzle-dazzle, including animated sequences, reverse motion, trompe l'oeil production design and tricky lighting. But it's still claptrap.

On its own low-bar terms, it delivers the goods: pole-dancing, gut-chomping and Jenna J.

Like most anthology films, this thematically linked trio of shorts is a mixed bag.

A disturbing examination of what appears to be the definition of a "bad" police shooting.

It has a creepy power all its own.

The result is unfortunate: Pinter can't find emotional depths that just aren't there, but dispenses with most of what made the original entertaining in the search for them.

The success of this effect, which helps elevate the movie above a classy disease-of-the-week saga, rests firmly on Russell Crowe's performance, and it's a strikingly good and moving one.

It's about ordinary people living in the shadow of nagging, day-to-day racism, and about the music that reminds them of what's right with the world rather than what's wrong.

Played for Maverick-like comedy, the film might have coasted on Harris and Mortensen's dialogue. But played straight it's both dull and preposterous.

It's a sly, subtle portrait of systematic hypocrisy.