Marc Savlov

Ultimately, it's undone by the overfamiliar nature of Doon and Lina's quest, the outcome of which, while breathlessly paced, is never really in question.

It's a 24-hour-party-people travelogue, entertaining enough to grab your eyes... but less memorable than it may at first appear.

Breathtakingly gorgeous but ultimately thematically unsatisfying.

It's a loud, obnoxious, and pleasant-enough entertainment, but hardly the soaring tale of one man's struggle that it was so clearly envisioned to be.

Arguably better than the last five Eddie Murphy films taken together, The Nutty Professor still seems to be playing down to its audience much of the time, though you'd never know it to hear the gales of laughter erupting at the screening I attended.

Suffice to realize that Reeves’ opening salvo is an ambitious and heady mix of the glorious (if overtold) past, the tense present, and the imperfectly perfect realm of Chen’s fighter, his conscience, and blow upon blow upon blow. The concoction works, despite – or maybe because of – its unjaded, fantastical familiarity

Fernandez is excellent as the maladjusted daughter, but the film's heart and soul is embodied in Galina's noble, understated performance.

Pass the popcorn, dude; this shit rocks.

Certainly it's not for everyone, but fans of Euro-sleaze will groove on Argento's obvious charms and the film's dystopian thrill ride, while the rest will probably doze off dreaming Fassbinder dreams.

Ozon's take on this marriage in particular is notable – apart from Freiss and Bruni-Tedeschi's bracing performances – for his unwillingness to let things spiral out of complete control.

You get the feeling the filmmakers didn't want to make anyone think too hard about what's going on here behind the scenes of the main storyline, and that's more than a little insulting.

It's hit-or-miss comedy of the very broadest sort, but those who groove on deciphering obscure film-geek in-jokes will find their work more than cut out for them.

Consistently entertaining, athletically brutal, and, more often than not, well-acted.

The Land isn’t a perfect film, but it is a hell of a good start, and director Caple Jr. – and his young cast – are artists to keep an eye on, for sure.

Like the inky void of space, there's really not much here, but what there is, is certainly entertaining.

Gory, spastic fun, Love & a .45 is a broken roller-coaster ride of Texas trouble. It's not anything you haven't seen before, but it might remind you why you liked those other movies in the first place.

Flawed at its core but stunning nonetheless.

Truth is, once again, stranger and far more interesting than fiction, but Stewart, whose youthful idealism makes for passionate but uneven filmmaking, should scuttle further oceanic pedantry and focus his lens on Watson's "good pirate" efforts to sabotage the "bad pirates" and save the sea.

As a vehicle for Moore's acting abilities (and Mortensen's, for that matter), G.I. Jane is terrific. But as the end-of-summer blockbuster it's doubtless intended to be, it's pretty much a washout.

Lynch, who penned the screenplay with novelist Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart), seems to be attempting to capture not just a sense of place and time (it never works -- Lost Highway is wholly, irrevocably, out of place and without any linear time or time line to speak of), but also a sense of madness.

Forster should be commended for attempting something as daunting as the overreaching Stay, which despite all of its muddled logic and porous reality – or perhaps because of it – forces you to think, a genuine rarity these days.

It's a mess, but it's Wenders' mess, and that means that there are any number of salvageable parts to the whole.

Jorgen Persson's camerawork is spectacular, illuminating the cobalt blue of the frozen wastes with an almost regal air. As a travelogue, August's film works wonders; as a narrative, it's just not all there.

Despite the movie’s lack of anything resembling a narrative center, Testosterone isn't an entire waste of film stock – Sutcliffe, Sabato Jr., and especially the great Braga all act up a storm.

It's a noble effort, but aficionados and the mildly interested are recommended to seek out VH-1's excellent Studio 54 documentary in lieu of this shallow morality play.

As a period mystery, however, it's as muddy and swirling as the actual record of that fateful, deadly weekend cruise.

Dahl, who really does know what he's doing when it comes to investing a scene with both heebies and jeebies, is a notch or two above most.

Looks like a million bucks (or rather, a million bucks gone to compost), but at its dark heart it's a tedious, bewildering affair, lovely to look at but with all the substance of a dissipating dream.

Gratuitous in every sense of the word, this second remake of 1978's Joe Dante-directed/Roger Corman-produced "Jaws" knockoff is ridiculous summertime drive-in fun.

For a film focusing on such a rich emotional tapestry, Kundun is strangely lacking in its emotional core.

By turns entertaining, incomprehensible, goofy, and even on occasion unnerving.

The film is one of the more adult offerings out there in a spring movie season peppered with martial arts and superheroes. It may be just what you're looking for.

The catch is, once you get past the stunning special effects and the mind-numbing stuntwork, there's not all that much there.

Who, exactly, is stalking whom, and for what reason? I'm still not entirely sure, but Resnais' funky, frothy bonbon of a film is nevertheless a breathtaking sight to see.

All this and not a glimmer of General Franco makes for a surreal – and sporadically inspired – comedy of Spanish mores back when naughty was nice.

Above all, there's Nolte, who hovers over the whole production like some sapient force of nature.

Severance is a British horror-comedy that, from the get-go, has two distracting strikes against it.

Silly, predictable, and, dare I say it, oddly endearing, Hackers is the first film I've seen in a long while that annoyed me so much I actually enjoyed it.

Infinitely more entertaining than anything the WWE has done recently, this sophomore outing from "Napoleon Dynamite" director Hess is full of cheesy goodness, but it's Velveeta.

A go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator grab bag of raunchy sex gags and freakish outbursts. The cool thing is that it works.

The Cable Guy is being marketed as a dark comedy, which I suppose it is, to some extent. Honestly, though, it's just not dark enough.

Once the rodeo's over, where do the sweethearts go? Beesley, thankfully, doesn't end the film with the end of the rodeo, but there's a potentially more interesting follow-up doc ghosting right behind this one.

An occasionally charming mix of campy fun and dodgy computer-generated effects.

It seems downright unfair to harp on the remake’s differences from the original when both films are having such a ball.

Truth itself is little more than a word in The Prestige, a film that both celebrates the wonder of being fooled and the foolishness of wanting just that.

Invincible is like a thick, sweaty slab of NFL comfort food.

If you (or your kids) loved Toy Story, you'll like Toy Story 2 as well. Just don't expect any big surprises.

13 Minutes, which was released in Germany two years ago, is an earnest examination of personal conscience and the frequent necessity of the individual to monkey wrench the state. Or at least to try.

To call The Crazies the most original horror film in a long while only serves to point out just how lousy mainstream, studio-released horror has become. It's a solid thriller, sure, but there's precious little in it that hasn't been seen countless times before, and in the end it plays it safe … by not playing it safe.

Director Carr, who helmed the similarly predictable "Daddy Day Care," keeps things moving, both on and off the court, with the sort of light, sweet humor you're not likely to find in too many other summer movies.

Bombastic it may be, but it’s rarely boring, as was the first Tomb Raider. Keep your expectations in line with the source material and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Both interesting and insufferable.

It's the opposite of "The Opposite of Sex," a meditation on multiple truths, and the lies that sometimes lie in between.

Wilson and Beckinsale, as the couple on the rocks, do their damnedest to go along for the creepfest, but nothing in Vacancy manages to come anywhere close to the quiet and steadily mounting dread of the real thing, much less the purview of Norman Bates or his beloved mother.

Ultimately the composition comes off as both overplayed and underdone.

It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, just one that grabs your attention and then lets it go, time and time again.

Manages to get by on wry smarts, barbed asides, and plenty of Barrymore's comic grace.

The Coen brothers’ newest is an odd amalgam of tics and stutters that plays like something of a greatest-hits reel but never seems to jell into a real comedy.

For fans, Oasis: Supersonic is a reminder of both the band’s musical strengths and of a simpler time for pop music in general, pre-internet and all that that implies.

The comedic success of this pair of dramatic archetypes, the radiant flibbertigibbet and the gray, lumpen elder spinster, in a lightweight bit of piffle such as this is a testament to both Adams' and McDormand's smarts. It's tough to play dumb when you're not and even more difficult to dial down your own innate brilliance.

Ultimately, though, We Were Soldiers fails to bring as much to the table as it at first seems it might.

Pop psychology has never been as visceral as it is in Saw III.

It's a promising epic that ends with what feels like a lie. In short, it's a glorious mess well worth seeing, but light-years away from what fans were expecting.

Fans of the irritatingly limp and relatively toothless Twilight series may actually find their tormented inner selves fondled to exquisite, precoital perfection with this slick and gleeful adaptation of the classic Eighties vampire-next-door flick.

By the time the film's abrupt conclusion arrives, you realize you've been watching a love story and not, as some might hope, "The Lord of the Rings: The Asian Edition."

Tykwer ends the film on a bizarre note that caught me off guard, a too-literal bit of salvation that is more bothersome than revelatory.

A cracking good adventure film well worthy of classic Saturday-afternoon matinee status. It's also, in myriad ways, a more youthful version of Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."...What you don't have, however, is a great movie.

At once perplexing and joyous, Maddin has crafted a film that, for all the confusion inherent in the tale, unfolds on its own unique (and rather tedious) terms. Love it or hate it, this is one film that just doesn't give a damn what you think.

Of course, the film is critic-proof, but as a longtime comic book (and film) nerd, I can say with some surety that Snyder has crammed too much of a great thing into his film, resulting in a super-slog that has just too much of everything.

It’s not a disaster by any stretch, but purists will ache to show newcomers the horrific genius of "Ju-on" over The Grudge as soon as they exit the theatre.

A weird mix of pseudo-jingoism and Bay’s usual bombastic firepower, 13 Hours ends up being a straight-up war film without an actual war in it.

It also has wild plot holes and requires an almost inhuman suspension of disbelief, but it's still a fun ride up to a point.

This is a different sort of comedy that more or less succeeds on its own terms, despite that fact that you find yourself rooting for the post-Snowden CIA.

Beyond the Gates bears witness to the worst of the worst, but these days, and far more importantly, so does YouTube.

There's nothing terribly bad about Bend It Like Beckham -- in fact it's a fine Friday-night-out film -- it's just that it strikes me as being an awful little piffle cloaked in the garb of something so much more.

Miner strives to imbue the film with the requisite autumnal haze of the original but then gives up midway through and instead resorts to the standard stalk 'n' slash formulas.

A huge success in Japan, this thrilling, if overlong, epic from director Mamoru Hosoda (Wolf Children, Summer Wars) is part "Karate Kid" and part Japanese folklore.

By far the weakest of the trilogy. Spurting arteries and random acts of horror are not enough to sustain a film with such a supposedly bold groundwork. Let's hope Barker himself can find the time to return to directing before he ends up like Stephen King.

For some reason Derailed never fully engages our sympathies. I think that's because it's difficult to swallow Owen as anything other than eminently resourceful.

While this isn’t anywhere near a classic of the comedy-horror genre, it’s still a well-written work of splatstick that’s more downright engaging than 90% of the “serious” (i.e., mediocre) horrors that have flooded theatres of late.

Hoge's film raises more questions than it answers – that's his point, I think, to get us thinking – and Gosling, who previously played the conflicted Jewish Nazi skinhead in "The Believer," inhabits the role of Leland so fully it's as if the character had killed him as well.

Director Noyce has a sure hand with the action sequences and keeps The Saint from bogging down too often in the mires of action film exposition (once again, think Mission: Impossible).

Suffers mightily from sequelitis. Forced to explain what’s going on and what’s going to be going on in the next and final installment (due out in November), the Wachowskis have laced the film with a series of crushingly dull and often incomprehensible scenes of exposition and yakky gabfests.

The final 30 odd minutes of this revisionist Holmes explodathon are downright thrilling, and it should go without saying but we'll restate it for the record: Downey Jr. inhabits the role of Sherlock Holmes to a near-molecular level.

It's overstuffed with all the actors wasting both the viewers’ and the movie’s running time by actually speaking dialogue when we all know that what audiences really want to see is outrageous vehicular slamslaughter.

It's stoner comedy of the most absurd kind, part fryboy mental drizzle, part wink-wink audience baiting, and wholly, utterly funny.

At times, it’s a bit like being cornered and regaled by actor Bill Nighy’s aging rocker Billy Mack from "Love Actually," but certainly more interesting, and a rewarding and informative document of some unlikely visionaries of maximum rock & roll.

High Heels becomes mired in its own best intentions - primary colors and all.

The straight dope for speed junkies and fans of the art of flinging one’s well-padded frame through the contortions enabled only by disastrously catapulting oneself off a slippery asphalt track at speeds even Dale Earnhardt would have dismissed as lunacy.

Carrey has yet to find the perfect vehicle for himself, but The Mask, while hardly as fantastic as it should have been, is a step in the right direction.

Unnerving and occasionally witty, were it not for its weak third act, Nolan's film might fall just short of genius. As it is, though, it's unique nonetheless.

Despite the grating, workmanlike direction of Chris Columbus (he's no Robert Wise, and Rent is nobody's idea of "West Side Story"), this boisterous adaptation is both a vivacious, wiseacre musical and an inarguable morality lesson: Love is all you need. Oh, and rent, of course.

It’s ingratiating in that nice doggie way, but the dogs, who have had their lips enhanced via CGI to aid in the illusion of speech, don’t have much more on their minds than where the next stick is going to sail in from.

By the end of this film/experiment/prank – which, to be blunt, is pretty unsatisfying – the viewer is left to ponder what it's all about, and what its purpose may have been, which, knowing Lynch and Herzog, might well be what it was about, and what its purpose was.

It's all a little too polished, a little too smug to be ranked up there as one of the great journalism films.

As YA adaptations go, this isn’t quite "The Notebook," but its core demographic of teen girls will likely be more than satisfied.

Ultimately, however, The Way Back fails to connect on the all-important visceral, emotional level.

This remake of the 1972 Peckinpah gem lacks the Ali McGraw/Steve McQueen heart and soul of the original, opting instead for the vacuous and thoroughly forgettable anti-chemistry of Baldwin and Basinger.