Maitland McDonagh

Clearly, there's the germ of a good -- potentially even great -- movie here, but it's thoroughly smothered by a pair of lazy, self-congratulatory star turns by Hoffman and Travolta.

This disappointing sequel to last year's horror sleeper gets trapped in the clichés it's trying to send up.

(Griffith's) appearance often verges on the grotesque. Which, come to think of it, could be said of the movie as well.

A failure on every level.

Writer-director Pan Nalin's film is at its best when he focuses on the meticulous, hands-on preparation of herb- and mineral-based drugs; it's also genuinely provocative to hear Ayurvedists argue that healing should be a vocation rather than a career.

Climaxes in an ending of such sleazy preposterousness that it's almost worth the price of admission alone.

From her speech patterns to her body language, Roberts's performance is wrong for the period.

Before it goes down in a soggy mess of scary movie cliches and insultingly stupid plot contrivances, director and co-writer Nick Willing's adaptation of Madison Smartt Bell's novel Dr. Sleep gets in some good, seriously creepy licks.

Despite, or perhaps because of, a flurry of 11th-hour recutting and reshoots -- the film feels rushed and unfocused.

Hartley's score is lovely and he makes excellent use of digital video, but the film's paucity of provocative ideas is its undoing.

The cast is little more than the sum total of golden skin, firm flesh and blindingly white teeth, but in a film that demands them to be half-naked and soaking wet most of the time, looks trump technical acting skill every time.

Penn, in particular, is so subdued he's hardly there, while Hurley's seductive, hyper-articulate Adaline is actually ludicrous, sucking suggestively on ice cubes and reciting poetry like a phone-sex operator pretending to be a book-reading babe.

Film's real sticky wicket is that the bad guys not only threaten to nuke a major American city but do it — a conceit that might have been more amusing before terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center using hijacked commercial jets. Witnesses said the WTC attack looked like a movie; they didn't say it was a movie they wanted to see.

His (Crowe) emotionally charged performance stands in contrast to Ryan's annoying, movie-star turn.

The goofy use of animated, Flubber-like blobs aping Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" video (by way of illustrating the irresistibility of desire itself) makes it hard to take the science seriously, which is the BLEEP problem in a nutshell.

There's little room for ideas when there are flaming cars to be crashed, and overall the film is an infelicitous hodgepodge that lifts as liberally from "The Quatermass Experiment" (1956) and "28 Weeks Later" (2007) as "Body Snatchers" while leaving all the best bits behind -- even the iconic pods are gone.

Could as easily be called "Spurlock: Cultural Learnings Of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of America."

The result is strictly for those who like their comic-book movies short and stupid.

The charismatic Rajskub, who played a prickly computer geek on TV's "24," has nothing to do as Jack's loyal secretary.

There's no meat on this film's borrowed bones: They're polished to an exquisitely tasteful shine, but efforts to class up exploitation are pointless.

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.

Has a terminal case of the cutes.

Gets the details right while missing the big picture.

An uneasy mix of frat-boy yocks and "Twilight Zone"-style science-fiction.

History gets short shrift from screenwriters William Nicholson and Michael Hirst -- starting with the not insignificant fact that in 1585, Elizabeth was 52 years old – but Kapur is clearly more interested in spectacle and soap opera than dusty old facts.

The results are a bit amateurish, but wholesome and achingly sweet.

Fluff in the tradition of Hollywood's screwball comedies of remarriage, lacking the wit or grace of such classics as "His Girl Friday" (1940) and "The Awful Truth" (1937).

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

To call the film noisy and brainless isn't even a criticism - it's unadulterated auto-porn, as shallow and shiny as it wants to be.

Actor-turned-director Andrey Zvyagintsev's feature debut is haunted by an elusive past and suffused with dread about the future, and it's all suggestion without explanation.

This lighthearted meditation on life, death, love and timing contains some genuinely lovely scenes, but they're buried in a shapeless jumble of cutesy-pie vignettes.

Norman Jewison's honorable but stodgy exercise in ethical outrage, based on Brian Moore's acclaimed 1996 novel, fairly aches to be called a thinking man's thriller.

Lack of chemistry between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts sinks this souffle.

Crowe preserves the original film's plot twists and turns, but his version lumbers when it should be whipping along, daring you to keep up. The wall-to-wall pop music soundtrack eventually becomes oppressive, and Cruise's oily smile doesn't really constitute a characterization.

McKenzie's mercurial performance is the centerpiece of this sad, surprisingly absorbing story.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Ethan Hawke's second feature, an adaptation of his own novel about youthful heartbreak, is hobbled by its singularly unappealing lead characters.

"Make a Wish" (2003) actually beat this film to the gay-themed slasher-picture punch with its story of lesbians on a camping trip being stalked by a killer, but writer-director Paul Etheredge-Ouzts' background in art direction serves him well — his movie wins hands-down for style and attitude.

A pitch-perfect parody of poverty row horror/sci-fi pictures of the 1950s, Larry Blamire's meticulous takeoff could easily be taken for the real thing, which is both its genius and its Achilles heel.

Contains some nicely observed moments, but they're buried in an unrepentantly sitcomy script.

Though some individual scenes crackle, overall the film feels unfocussed and flabby, like a series of acting improv exercises strung together.

Ultimately, the more intensely you buy into the notion that golf is a complex metaphor for the human condition, the more susceptible you'll be to the film's insipid blandishments.

The heart of the problem may be that real life youth-sports insanity has far exceeded the bounds of family-friendly comedy.

Too long and its tone is disconcertingly uneven, but Perry never betrays or condescends to his characters.

Too elliptical to be convincing.

For rip-snorting pop entertainment, it's one discomfiting, nasty piece of work, and ain't that a kick in the head.

This amiable picture talks tough, but it's all bluster -- in the end it's as sweet as "Greenfingers."

Hopkins possesses a Candide-like equanimity in the face of bizarre happenstance that is thoroughly charming and keeps the story's excesses from becoming exasperating.

Actor-turned-director Clark Johnson uses the flashy, up-to-the-minute editing and camera stunts action fans expect, but keeps the mayhem on a recognizably human scale — it's big, but not insanely overblown.

Though something less than a masterpiece of the genre, this good-natured skirmish in the war between men and women benefits from Hudson's thoroughly charming performance.

It's earnest, well-intentioned and scrupulously even-handed, in the style of made-for-TV problem movies.

It's a deftly executed crowd-pleaser, but it's dishonest to the core.

It's impossible to overstate how deeply dumb all of this is, but it skims along at a brisk clip and manages not to overdo the nudge-nudge, wink-wink humor.

Clichés negate bona fides; hence, the movie feels like a corny Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland vehicle with cussing. That said, the tapping is fabulous.

The film never escapes the constraints of its genre, but it's a hell of a ride.

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.

The best you can say is that it's all pretty harmless and pretty stupid.

The film rings so consistently false that it's more likely to induce snickers and eye-rolling.

Though neither subtle nor particularly original, Gens' spin on the meat-movie classic has both nightmarish energy to spare.

For all its crudeness, Phillips' tale of men behaving badly is remarkably toothless.

Professionally produced and surprisingly tame.

Once it settles down, it becomes a star-making vehicle for Jackman, and a supremely polished example of the sort of swoony love story cherished by women who secretly hope that some day their prince will come.

Pearce can sing, but Drum's trademark "speaking out" -- free-associative ramblings that recall Jim Morrison of the Doors at his most embarrassingly pretentious -- falls far short of the hypnotic effect Tyler describes.

Sweet-natured and as inconsequential as can be, shored up by smooth, low-key ensemble performances.

Despite its scant 48-minute running time (which many viewers will find frustrating), the film sets up a provocative equation between vampirism and American involvement in Asia.

Boursinhac and Bibi Naceri throw all the usual elements into the pot: Economic inequality, ethnic tensions, feverish family ties and the titular criminal code, which everyone invokes and everyone agrees is a load of claptrap.

Overall it's a colorful, diverting cautionary tale.

This tale may well weave a more compelling spell on the page; onscreen it's simply ponderous.

A romantic comedy whose sour take on romance never manages to be comic.

Clearly, neither screenwriter Randall Wallace nor director Michael Bay ever met a cliche he didn't embrace.

This kind of gloomy razzle-dazzle isn't everyone's cup of mind-altering tea, but strong performances make it worth the effort to keep the time-tripping shenanigans straight until the surprisingly satisfying payoff.

The amazing thing is how dull a movie crawling with gunfire, psycho tantrums and stuff blowing up can be when you just don't care what happens to anyone.

Weber's losers really are losers -- envious, spiteful, complacent, mean-spirited and ultimately boring malcontents pickled in their own poison, and they drag his film down with them.

Although inspired by actual events, the film proceeds along formulaic wish-fulfillment lines, its dynamics unaltered by the casting of a mixed-race actor in what was originally a redneck role; it's a sign of some sort of social progress that justified ass-kicking trumps race.

The younger actors bring varying degrees of experience to bear on their roles, but all capture the desperation beneath their characters' tough fronts, while the NYC locations are suitably depressing.

The first full-fledged Indian musical coproduced and distributed by a major Hollywood studio, this fanciful love story takes its unlikely inspiration from Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story "White Nights."

It's vulgar, to be sure, but it's also brash and invigorating.

To an outsider, it's pretty thin stuff.

Wang's film doesn't really have anything more to say about power, manipulation and the wild unpredictability of sexual energy than "Last Tango" did 30 years ago.

Its power lies in the intense, subtle performances of the ensemble cast and Bellott's ability to keep the tangled narrative threads from becoming a knotted mess.

Noisy, spectacular and disposable.

The offbeat cast and gorgeous Barcelona locations can't quite make up for the thinness of the mystery and forced quirkiness of the characters and their tangled relationships.

Toothless satire punctuated by the occasional biting gag.

One-scene guest star Sissy Spacek packs enough genuine madness into her brief screen time to make the surrounding film feel like so much listless play-acting.

Overall it's a frustratingly uneven movie, delicate at one moment and bluntly obvious the next.

The insidious influence of too much therapy permeates this misguided and very long picture.

It's an entertaining diversion whose clever structure gives pulp-crime cliches a welcome twist.

The film's gotcha! payoff doesn't justify the gloomy journey.

Labored and dispiriting.

Uneven tragicomedy.

Johnny Depp's coruscating, rigorously uningratiating performance as debauched, self-destructive 17th-century aristocrat John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, is the glue that doesn't quite hold together first-time director Laurence Dunmore's adaptation of Stephen Jeffreys' 1994 play.

Delivers equal parts overwrought tedium and mind-bending beauty, spiked with brilliant throwaway images that more than make up for Kelly's heavy-handed hot-button pretensions.

Light and sweet, comfort food dressed up with a dash of exotic spice.

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.

Though clearly shot on a shoestring, it's handsome, tightly written and generally well acted.

The film is graphic without being lurid, and the naked emotions onscreen are far more shocking than the naked bodies -- though there are plenty of those, in all shapes and sizes.

While the film delivers some sharp dialogue, overall it's soft and slightly unfocused.

Stylish but shallow story.

The scenes from Epidemic have the high-contrast look of a 1920s horror film, are in English (much of it badly dubbed) and feature images that are handsome and preposterous in equal parts -- they're amusing, and too stylized to be disturbing.

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

Noisy, derivative and thoroughly preposterous even by the standards of 21st-century action movies.

The film's shortcomings notwithstanding, it's a must-see for Swinton fans, who can select a favorite among four different variations of their idol or simply adore them all.

This neo-noir pastiche is so preposterously overwrought that you keep figuring it must be some kind of joke, except that it's not funny.

The unfortunate fact is that it's more than a little dull when it isn't preposterous.

Never adds up to much of anything.

There are no surprises for anyone who's seen the earlier version, and younger horror fans may find the modest body count and restrained gore unsatisfying.

Apparently intended as a larky, character-driven adventure with dark underpinnings, this attenuated road movie was originally envisioned as a vehicle for relative unknowns, and might have worked better that way.

The movie's selling point is Schneider acting goofy, chewing on worms, making goo-goo eyes at a she-goat and licking his private parts.

How much you enjoy the film will depend entirely on how much you enjoy the spectacle of Williams spewing forth streams of nonsensical gibberish in an attempt to impersonate a German record producer, and Crystal pitching snit fits.

Stanzler's ideas about the psychic legacy of 9/11 are so confused -- that by the time he unveils the final plot twist, his film has lost every shred of credibility.

Crafting this crude, noisy remake of Disney's first live-action comedy required the labor of no fewer than five screenwriters.

Boyle's movie jettisons much of the telling detail; it has the shambling rhythm of a shaggy dog story and so simplifies the characters' ethical dilemmas that it's hard to care what they do.

An uneasy mix of B-movie scares.

While the film is shot in shades of gray, the drama is played out in black and white.

Director Forest Whitaker, who appears to have been typed as a female-friendly director in the wake of "Waitinh to Exhale's" runaway success, drags out the already painfully slow proceedings with syrupy dissolves, slo-mo sequences and redundant flashbacks, underscoring it all with an intrusively obvious country soundtrack that matches lyrics to emotions with cringe-inducing exactness.

Affleck is no more convincing as a flesh-and-blood action than as a superbrain, Thurman is cruelly photographed and director Woo appears to be imitating his own worst work.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong: there are second acts in American lives. But all too many of them are sad, sordid or both, as this fact-based story of sex, drugs and murder featuring adult-movie superstar John Holmes aptly demonstrates.

Without the gloss of novelty, the film's underdeveloped characters and thin -- though busy -- story are forced into the foreground, and its 88-minute running time feels far longer.

Coppola's awkward screenplay never finds its tone -- or perhaps it deliberately evokes the pulp conventions of WWII adventures, horror films, weepy melodrama, psychological mysteries and superhero origin stories as a way of evoking the fundamental artificiality of the cinema. Either way, it never comes together into a cohesive whole, and is seriously undermined by Roth's morose performance.

The whole thing is fun for 11-year-olds of all ages.

The acting is flat, and the scientist's ideological speeches too bluntly designed to mirror post-9/11 rhetoric. But there's a dreamy fascination to the iconic images of machines fighting a perpetual war for the human creators they'll inevitably outlast.

Hugely ambitious and driven by Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson and Edie Falco's fine, intense performances, Richard Price's adaptation of his own sprawling novel about a racially charged kidnapping that turns a volatile New Jersey town into a powder keg tries to tell too many stories in too little time.

Sweet and sort of cute -- watch and see if it doesn't kind of sneak up on you.

These lessons are driven home via silly dialogue ("Her name was Marion and she loved volcanoes...") and painfully predictable plot complications, repeated often enough that there's no need to take notes, except for the benefit of friends who fall asleep.

Mena's characters rarely do the sort of spectacularly stupid things that provoke derisive laughter from seasoned horror-moviegoers.

It doesn't pay to look too closely at this sumptuous fantasy, but if you're in the right mood to let it wash over you it's very warm and fizzy indeed.

Jelski's screenplay, a finalist in the fiercely competitive Walt Disney Screenwriting Fellowship competition, is repetitive and stagy.

Things take an unexpected turn into far grimmer territory when the wormy Robert finally turns.

The weighty themes of loss, regret and abdication of personal responsibility are undermined by the reverential use of baseball as a symbol of mankind's potential for selfless greatness.

Is this sophisticated humor? No. But it is pretty entertaining.

There isn't an original moment in the mix, but it's not as crass or vulgar as much of what passes for "family friendly" entertainment, and it keeps the precocious pop-culture references to a blessed minimum.

While sumptuously beautiful, the film is often stilted and undermined by some painfully amateurish performances that no good intentions can smooth over.

Despite some strong performances, never rises above the level of a telanovela.

In search of inspiration and the human spirit triumphant, they managed to cook up a pot of sanctimonious, reductive claptrap (which the credits confess was only "inspired" by Quinn's book) that's not in the least instructive or entertaining.

Director Joseph Ruben's best efforts can't keep Gerald Di Pego's puzzle-picture script from toppling into absurdity as it lurches from melodrama to psychological thriller with supernatural overtones to full-blown exercise in X-Files-style nuttiness.

Though the portentous title is taken from the Old Testament -- Elah is where little David took on Goliath -- the film's concerns are painfully timely and forcefully articulated.

Ruthlessly efficient and utterly predictable.

John Gulager's directing debut is horror at its most reductive and least resonant.

Aimed at youngsters, this odd mix of fantasy and disease-of-the-week conventions doesn't really gel, though its ambitions are laudable.

Simply a series of set pieces designed to insure Angelina Jolie's status as action-babe pin-up.

Naim's potential is evident, but his debut is a frustrating exercise in missed opportunities.

Biopic cliches hamstring producer-star Jennifer Lopez's pet project.

A hip-hop reimagining of "The Great Gatsby" that fails both as an update of F. Scott Fitzgerald's dissection of American aspirations and class barriers and on its own boorish terms.

Ambles to a surprisingly affecting conclusion, almost despite itself.

With his spidery fingers and his velvet eyes, the lean, languid Snoop Dogg was born to be an undead player, and clearly relishes the role of Jimmy Bones.

A surprisingly charming fable.

Smarter and more engaging than it has to be.

Most of the scenes fall flatter than a lead soufflé, and the film's sight gags -- Andy dumping campers' bodies by the roadside, Gene humping the refrigerator -- are outrageous without actually being funny.

This is pure big-budget formula filmmaking.

The story's incredible coincidences, lazy cynicism and easy ironies recast a real-life horror story as easy-to-dismiss melodrama, complete with sequential "happy" endings.

The big trouble here is that there seem to be pieces of three different films rubbing up against each other without ever fitting together.

Although phenomenally well-acted, the film's leisurely pace ultimately makes it feel as oppressive as the tropical heat and humidity that gradually turn the characters into slow-moving heaps of damp, dirty rags.

Embry and first-time actress Sparks have charming chemistry, but Christopher's slight screenplay wears out its welcome long before the film - which runs a scant 80 minutes - is over.

The movie's tone fluctuates wildly, suggesting that no one was exactly sure what kind of movie they were making.

Coarse, cliched and clunky.

This unsubtle parody probably worked better on stage; its candy-colored artifice looks more than a little strained on film, and the actors are all trying really hard to be camp.

McTiernan's extensive action background is nowhere evident in the murky, all-but-impossible to follow battle sequences.

Self-indulgent wallow in privileged malaise.

It's not a cheap rip-off -- it's a credible sequel to a horror classic, and a sad reminder that some things never change.

This psychological horror picture is harrowing and occasionally macabre -- you'll come away wondering what kind of father would cast his daughter in such a sexually brutal film.

Swank is painfully uncharismatic, leaving Christopher Walken, in the minor role of occultist Count Cagliostro, to decamp with any scene in which he appears. His performance may not be historically credible, but it's hugely entertaining: Would that the same were true of the film overall.

James Woods adds another hateful, embittered creep to his gallery of losers, neurotics and junkyard dogs with vampire slayer Jack Crow.

The movie takes a desperately wrong turn about 45 minutes in, and you can almost hear the great sucking sound as the whole thing churns down the drain in a swirl of narrative contradictions.

Yes, it's a testosterone cocktail, but at least it doesn't leave you feeling as though you've been tumbled around in a gem polisher for two-and-a-half hours.

Though it ultimately devolves into megabudget Hollywood action-movie cliches by way of John Woo, Lee's handsome blockbuster is an entertaining variation on the American formulas that have colonized world cinema.

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.

The story vacillates between broad, kid-friendly gags and a series of oddly sour riffs on the theme of adult sibling rivalry.

So clotted with back story that the Romeo and Juliet-style romance between a warrior vampire and a reluctant werewolf never has a chance to breath, Len Wiseman's revisionist horror tale is all look and no bite.

The film's secret weapon is its kicky soundtrack.

All but the most easily pleased kids will be bored as can be, and anyone who has fond memories of TV's Leave It to Beaver would probably rather not besmirch them.

The massive sets and extensive special effects are certainly... massive and extensive. But watching them is like watching the wheels and gears inside a hugely complicated clock: It's interesting and even beautiful, but can hardly be called scary.

If Michael Wincott -- who under normal circumstances can chill your blood just by breathing -- can't make the villain compelling, you know the movie's in trouble.

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

The first two thirds of the screenplay by Aja and cowriter Gregory Levasseur is a relentless exercise in bare-bones nastiness.

Vonnegut's brand of juvenile surrealism...doesn't age especially well...but it could hardly be worse served than to be brought to the screen with such ham-fisted literal-mindedness.

This melodramatic action opera is a lurid love letter to the guns and poses aesthetic of Hong Kong action cinema.

Sax keeps things moving, but the best thing about the film is the British cast.

Neither a conventional documentary nor a work of complete fiction, Hammer's film constructs a secret history, part imagination and part reality that is both revealing and slyly entertaining.

Hard though this antic farce tries to be outrageous, its satirical jabs at American culture are obvious and juvenile, as is the use of Jimmy's plastic bubble as a goofy metaphor for fear of life.

A riot of artfully grungy hotel rooms, sleazy costumes and sordid behavior, Allan Mindel's directing debut gives off the smug air of hipsters at play, making it hard to care what happens to any of its lost souls and inept opportunists.

Breezy and eminently watchable.

Fans won't want to miss this addition to the canon.

Sporadically funny... occasionally very funny.

Though the film contains many haunting images, the absence of a solid emotional foundation makes its increasingly preposterous story developments feel arbitrary and ultimately pointless.

The final irony is that it's tailored for a PG-13 audience: The violence is bloodless, the sex is all come-on and the surreally reckless stunts cater to viewers too young to drive.

Equal parts "Mad Max" and "Day of the Dead," this third and supposedly final entry in the Resident Evil franchise is no less derivative than its predecessors but moves along at a brisk clip.

For all the tear-jerking plot twists, it's a glumly dry-eyed affair.

How engaging you find this loosely structured road movie will depend on how charming you find the over-aged slackers played by Josh Alexander, who also wrote the screenplay, and Robert Bogue.

This genial little picture, which has been kicking around for more than a year, doesn't have a mean bone in its body.

It goes without saying that the humor is vulgar and juvenile.

Puerile, gross and pandering to the lowest impulses of teenage boys.

This stylized tale of guilt and retribution is a surprisingly sleek and affecting drama.

Bright, bubbly and thoroughly inconsequential.

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.

A slack combination of faith-based inspiration and broad 'hood comedy.

Yet another variation on the theme of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." If you've read the short story, you'll see where things are going in no time flat; if you haven't and want to be surprised, don't look it up.

First-time writer-director Ryan Shiraki's crude, gross comedy of campus sexual errors might push boundaries better were it not so painfully unfunny.

Mark Moormann's documentary tends to the worshipful, but Dowd, a charmer onscreen, was by all accounts just as appealing in real life.

Be warned: the silly songs are damnably catchy, from Gerrit's ode to the seventeen pigeons he keeps on the roof, which he sings while sporting a very tight set of white undergarments, to the rousing "Ja Zuster, Nee Zuster."

You can't accuse the film of making speed addiction look glamorous, but the freak-show kick is too compelling for it to be called cautionary.

A disappointing hodgepodge of rehashed clichés.

Newcomer Gregory never captures the mercurial charisma for which Jones was famous (and which Jagger notoriously channeled in his movie debut, "Performance"), without which his story is just another cautionary tale about fast times, intemperate passions and bad dope.

Where else are you going to find an extended riff on the weird, weird world of David Lynch movies, an homage to "The Shining" and flatulence gags in the same place?

The greatest hits of '70s bar-rock soundtrack - "We're an American Band," "Right Place, Wrong Time," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Magic Carpet Ride" etc. - has a certain rollicking, kick-ass energy that, unfortunately, never rubs off on the movie.

The result is an unpleasant slog to an unrewarding conclusion that feels far longer than it is.

The actors -- especially Klein and Bernthal -- deliver startlingly powerful performances.

You don't have to be Jewish to love Jonathan Kesselman's uneven, profane and occasionally flat-out hilarious parody of vintage blaxploitation pictures, but it helps.

Inspired mockumentary-a-clef so clotted with in-jokes that it should come with a crib sheet.

This is a thoroughly conventional story of one man's search for redemption in the neon slime; its multiple flashback structure is just a way of parceling out information, not a device used to undermine the narrative.

Whether this riot of unrepentant trashiness strikes you as tediously ridiculous or brainlessly amusing is probably a matter of mood.

It's way too violent and perversely excessive for many tastes, but there's more to its outrages than meets the eye, and that second look is well worth taking.

Davis' tough, man-of-the-people narration is often annoying, but his words can't diminish the power of his story.

Contains striking moments, but never coheres.

The chaotic, brutal iconography of Italian Westerns is put to novel use in this time-traveling, self-referential, hugely ambitious story of American brothers.

Hugely smug and annoying.

A peculiar and oddly haunting achievement.

There are effective scenes and powerful performances scattered among long sequences in which various members of the family gaze into space as they contemplate the burden of the past, walk aimlessly through Atlanta or have odd encounters with strangers.

The mere sight of strapping men in micro-mini skirts suffering the indignities of thong underwear, catcalls and pushy pick-up artists is good for a couple of lowbrow laughs, but they're buried pretty deep in dreck.

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.

This tale of crime and punishment is wrapped in a veneer of flashy attitude but founders on mundane details.

This ambitious independent feature eschews gore in favor of rubber-reality ambiguity.

This film will doubtless interest serious anime fans, but it won't win any converts.

Has the distinctive Heavy Metal magazine meets "The Neverending Story" (1984) vibe of Euro-science-fiction comics, complete with ponderous philosophical noodling, weirdly whimsical aliens and seriously creepy creature sex.

A sprawling, messy, frustrating and impassioned examination of the psychological fallout from America's obsession with a highly artificial and all-but unattainable standard of beauty.

A window into bygone morals and mores.

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.

Features a nutty mix of broad comedy, romance and maudlin melodrama.

At a certain point, its sheer can you top this excess, and credibility files out the window three's no reason to continue paying attention.

The story isn't much -- the ever-evolving aliens are better served by the cute-but-icky effects than the simplistic script -- but it skims along on the cast's chemistry.

The plot unfolds exactly as you expect, but Gedeck imbues Martha with a remarkably subtlety of spirit.

Ukraine-born, American-based filmmaker Andrei Zagdansky's deeply frustrating "documentary essay" examines the Orange Revolution.

The perky Aniston is both unflatteringly photographed and utterly unconvincing in the pivotal role of Lucinda, and overall the film has the oddly disconnected quality of '70s Euro-thrillers whose international casts spoke different languages on the set and were dubbed into conformity.

Danish writer-director Ole Bornedal delivers up a stylish thriller whose murky, shot-through-pond-scum cinematography is its most distinctive feature.

The film's lingering exploration of their sleek surfaces verges on roboporn.

But beneath the bombast it's pure paste and tinsel and, robbed of the thrill of live performance, the show's deficiencies are glaringly apparent.

A fairly serious psychodrama rendered in cartoon images.

A convoluted exercise in shifting perspectives and fractured storytelling.

Stanford's script is painfully obvious, right down to the line of dialogue spelling out the title's significance.

This slight slice of L.A. life is distinguished by two fine, subtle performances. Redgrave is quietly heartbreaking-- Penn accomplishes the daunting task of revealing the spine beneath Melanie's sweet-natured tolerance of her perpetually disagreeable husband.

So formulaic it starts to fade from memory before the last punch is thrown.

Although it looks like an action thriller with a sci-fi twist, the bad guys aren't scary (Biehn's soul patch notwithstanding), the sci-fi element is silly and the action is limited to some extreme bike riding and computer-generated zipping around.

The supporting cast is stocked with far better actors than Seagal -- Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton and Stephen Lang among them -- and country music personalities ranging from Mark Collie, Levon Helm, Randy Travis and Travis Tritt to Loretta Lynn's twin daughters Patsy and Peggy, to whom Seagal's character makes some vaguely suggestive remarks.

It's a silly, stupendously artificial enterprise.

Bello is phenomenally good as the embittered Marcia, while Stuart and Christensen do their best with their less complex roles, but they're all undermined by Alfieri's shrill, mannered dialogue and cliched backstories that wouldn't be out of place in a dysfunction-family-of-the-week movie.

Would be more appealing if the women's behavior weren't alternately moronic and venal.

There's never a dull moment and seldom one that isn't sublimely ridiculous.

There's no faulting this movie's Capra-esque concept, equal parts optimism and sad recognition of the world's intrinsic harshness, but its manipulative execution may rub you the wrong way.

Shot on location in Manhattan, the film is steeped in understated New York City ambiance and discreetly tinted by Jeffrey M. Taylor's subtle score.

Ricci brings her trademark gravity to the wary Suzie, but Blanchett's role is the dazzler.

Amateurish performances from nonprofessional actors undermine this ultra-low-budget crime drama.

The extremely intimate violence is more explicit than is the mainstream norm, and Dalle's mouth is the stuff of nightmares.

First-time feature filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel maintains a riveting sense of simmering brutality.

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

A three-hankie weeper in disaster-movie drag, and its tear-jerking bull's-eyes are separated by long stretches of tedium.

The quintessential cotton candy movie: It's pleasant, brightly colored and the minute it's done it's as though it were never there.

This soft, formulaic comedy/drama has a far better cast than it deserves, and they work their hearts out trying to bring life to a cliched script.

The costumes are phenomenal, the set design ravishing and the sadistic inventiveness extraordinary.

The impish Wood is a little light as Sean, who's inextricably bound by same family ties that robbed him of a promising future and made him a fugitive from the only life he's even known, but the supporting cast is top-notch.

Expanded by writer-director Randall Miller from a nostalgic half-hour short he made while a student at AFI, this well-intentioned film about loss, grief and new beginnings gets bogged down in syrupy cliches and blunt self-help dialogue.

The result is something close to a textbook example of how NOT to visualize spiritual principles of the "be here now" variety.

Pascal's low-key presence is particularly important, since in another actor's hands Alain's whining and waffling could easily be insufferable.

Wrapped in a layer of psuedo-spookiness that leads viewers to think the story is going somewhere it isn't.

Cynical and contemptuous of its audience, this lazy sequel oozes an insufferable air of self-satisfaction.

This small-scale film isn't for all tastes. But veterans of the dating wars will smirk uneasily at the film's nightmare versions of everyday sex-in-the-city misadventures.

Foxx is a charmer, and he makes Alvin's unlikely evolution from relentless hustler to reasonably solid citizen believable, and even rather touching.

A shameless puddle of romantic slop.

Wobbles unsteadily between broad humor and paranoid thrills. The result is a bland muddle.

Cinematographer Alain Dostie's stunning, painterly cinematography is the best -- and perhaps only -- reason to endure this stunted epic.

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

A crudely executed affair that doesn't play well to Western sensibilities.

Its seductive stylishness is undermined by one narrative twist too many; by the time the last revelation has been unveiled with a "But wait!" flourish, the contrivances have entirely overwhelmed the characters.

The film seems longer than its 93-minute running time, but kids will probably enjoy its potty humor, many scenes of 4-year-olds getting the better of harried adults and the inevitable moment when a cute little girl kicks the fat guy in the nads.

Freundlich's postmodern road movie contains several sharply observed scenes but doesn't really add up to much.

Though once capable of writing distinct characters, Toback now populates his pictures with one-dimensional conceits who all talk like undereducated hustlers, from college professors to bottom feeders and international lions of business.

Were the film's tone not so hysterical it might be provocative; as it is, insights and insults are inextricably intertwined.

Serviceable enough, if you come to it with sufficiently modest expectations.

This intermittently charming look at East-meets-West culture shock in contemporary Beijing seriously overreaches its grasp.

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

Whaley's determination to immerse you in sheer, unrelenting wretchedness is exhausting.

It's tough going relieved only by some lovely Irish scenery. -

But clichéd rapid-fire editing and cheap-looking digital-image manipulation drain away every ounce of atmosphere, and overexplanation blows what could have been a darkly ambiguous ending.

A caper comedy without chemistry is just a bunch of waiting around for something to get stolen.

Little Acuna -- who looks even younger than 11 -- gives a sweetly unaffected performance as the beleaguered child.

It's a sorry state of affairs when a goldfish and a frog (Ginger's prize specimen, unsubtly named Casanova) have more chemistry than a romantic comedy's human leads.

There's a surprising sweetness under its crude exterior.

This new SAW film is so utterly unimaginative it doesn't even count as hommage; it's just a smudgy copy of a still chilling original.

This multiple-twist thriller gets off to a fine, creepy start but eventually becomes too preposterous for its own good.

Where "Pitch Black" relied on shadowy threats and sharply drawn relationships between a small group of stranded victims-to-be, Twohy's bloated space opera is an eye-popping three-ring circus of fabulously freaky costumes, over-ripe declaiming and computer-generated spectacle.

Donnie Yen is famous for combining martial arts traditions into his own unique fighting style and Collin Chou, who studied with Sammo Hung, is up to the task of holding his own.

Neither as dull nor as insufferably smug as it could easily have been.

This tale has been told and retold; the races and rackets change, but the song remains the same.

The result is formulaic, shamelessly manipulative and surprisingly watchable.

There's at least one ending too many, Union regularly vanishes for long stretches of the movie, and director Michael Bay's unmitigated pandering to viewers who whoop with glee whenever someone gets it between the eyes is genuinely distasteful.

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.

Pays backhanded homage to Woody Allen via the travails of college loser Max (Gary Lundy), who fears that years of wallowing in "Annie Hall" have permanently poisoned his love life.