Marc Savlov

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.

A bore... The film leaves you with the feeling, once again, of having enjoyed a lovely meal fit for royalty only to discover, too late, that the fruit was made of wax and the roast was little more than a Styrofoam mock-up.

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.

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

Relax, sit tight, and enjoy the ride.

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

The only thing here that feels truly, utterly alive is Ledger's maniacal, muttery Joker. The last laugh is his and his alone. It's enough to make you cry.

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

King Arthur is a snooze, overcast and drizzly both on location and on the pages of the script. Owen is too classy, too James Bond-handsome to realistically portray the not-yet-King Arthur.

Too strange for its own good, Careful is less interesting as a film than it is as a Canadian cinematic anomaly.

Second-guessing the audience in the third act takes some of the wind out of his sails (the film wraps up the loose ends so tightly you can practically see the bow), but Hackford does his best with a King tale that many thought would be unfilmable.

Feels awfully rushed, as Ryan flies from the Ukraine to Moscow to the Russian hinterlands and back to Baltimore to make sweet, sophomore agent love to his physician girlfriend (Moynahan). It has the feel of one of 007's globe-hopping adventures, but without any of that franchise's giddy sense of fun.

Falters in small but important ways -– the suspense, carefully ratcheted up throughout, just plain goes busto in the film’s final moments -– while Malkovich stays resolutely behind the camera, a consummate professional who, this time, misses his mark by the merest of degrees.

Both interesting and insufferable.

Some people might find Chunhyang a chore to sit through, including me. Despite all of its accumulated period gorgeousness, or perhaps because of it, the film moves at a snail's pace, telegraphing plot twists miles before we actually arrive at them.

All I can seem to muster, post-screening, is a modicum of fondness and a probably impermanent relief that the film isn't anywhere near as awful as it might have been in less capable hands.

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

The heist itself is a charm with the kids zipping about in go-karts and eluding klutzy security guards, but the film seems trapped in a strange Twilight Zone somewhere between comedy and drama.

For all its Del Toro touches (Goodwin as a young autistic boy kidnapped by the bugs), Mimic is a surprisingly hollow thriller.

It wouldn't feel out of place on a double bill with "Dangerous Liaisons," given Breillat's unrepentantly nihilistic attitude toward the battle of the sexes in which all are pawns, every knight is errant, and the only queen is Queen Bitch.

But even a rapper needs to punch things up a bit, and 8 Mile, for all its hip-hop braggadocio, is a pretty weak riff.

This is a more hardscrabble, beaten down version of Neeson’s iconic revengers than most of his action roles, with Hanson coming across as sympathetically appealing despite the cliched storyline.

As an extended metaphor on the perils of imperialism and the colonization of both land and heart, Before the Rains works just fine, but as a love story run afoul of the times, it's a soggy affair.

Both a headache and a marvel, often eliciting simultaneous groans of despair and sheer wonder at the director's nervy chutzpah.

You have to wonder – not too hard, though – what this gore-soaked auteur's bedtime dreams are like.

Meehl's documentary features plenty of interviews with cowboys and ranch hands who've had their lives – and their horses' lives – changed by Brannaman, but it lacks the literary or cinematic magic of either version of "The Horse Whisperer."

Iwish I could say 99 Homes delivers a shockingly good sucker punch to the American electorate and a stand-up-and-cheer piece of socially conscious filmmaking, but it’s not. It lacks the satisfactory denouement of, for instance, Michael Mann’s The Insider (and Garfield is no Russell Crowe), in part because the events it depicts are still happening across the country (albeit to a lesser extent).

It's gritty, nasty, predictably meat-and-potatoes suspense, but genuinely gonzo fun nonetheless.

Narnia is nearly saved by those immensely likable and altogether stiff-upper-lippy Pevensie kids.

In the end it's all much ado about not so much, a semifunctional thriller that tingles but never terrifies. Ledge schmedge.

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.

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.

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.

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

A bold (and lovely) experiment that will almost certainly bore most audiences into their own brightly colored dreams.

Ultimately the composition comes off as both overplayed and underdone.

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."

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

Despite the hardships depicted, Golden Door is a sweet film at heart, playing witness to the birth pangs of modern America with both due respect and the occasional comic grace note, but not, oddly, one single shot of the Statue of Liberty.

Herzog, ever the eccentric filmmaker on a mission, may have met his match in this man of the cloth.

Feels overlong and underscripted.

Quarantine is a one-note nightmare, nicely pitched to the high-C howls of the bitten and the biters but offering considerably less froth than last year's "The Signal," which mined similar nightmares with far more fulsome results.

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.

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.

While director Bill nails the sheer spectacle of squads of SPADs dovetailing in flames into the wide blue yonder, the earthbound action (much as it was in another sputtering epic, Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor") is strictly laissez faire.

The script fires off clunker after clunker so fast you don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I chose to laugh as I'd already done enough crying at The English Patient.) Vintage bad Stallone, this lost-in-the-shuffle Summer of '96 blockbuster is just what you thought it would be: loud, boisterous, and without a single original line of dialogue. It's enough to make you miss Judge Dredd.

Without a doubt, the animation is vibrant and electrifying; it's only the story that lacks.

Taken as a whole, Thirst meanders too far from the crossroads of life and death; it gets outright dull in spots, although they are few and far between.

Why remake Norman Jewison's staunchly cool 1968 heist film in such a lackadaisical, uninspired manner?

It’s The Alamo, all right, but will anyone want to remember it?

Sweet enough but in the end a bit of a corny-syrupy wipeout, this is middling family-night fare, but it never even comes close to the emotional or technical wizardry of Pixar's finest moments.

So ingratiatingly good-humored that it's hard to take it seriously enough to complain. Sure, it's no great triumph of moviemaking, but it is entertaining, and a more or less plausible way to kill 95 minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

Feels like an overlong "SCTV" skit. Many prime gags are recycled throughout the film, and, honestly, there's only so much Eugene Levy schtick one can take (though he does get the best Yiddish lines in the film).

This is, disappointingly, a long way from being a Studio Ghibli classic. The essential plot may be archetypal, but it’s no "Kiki’s Delivery Service."

For all its emotional and familial kerfuffles, People Like Us is an honorable misfire – good intentions and all.

Predicated on the slimmest of notions, this debut by Jones is so cuddly-cute in its desire to be pleasing that it's all but transparent.

From its marketing-impaired title on down, Event Horizon is a steadily churning debacle that promises much more than it can deliver and ends up drowning in a crimson sea of gore and maddeningly out-of-place steals from other, better genre shockers.

For a film that's ostensibly about modern American society's love affair with addictive behavior – sex, drugs, rock & roll – its bark is much worse than its bite.

Ultimately, it's 79 minutes of footage of a pair of petty, pretty people freaking out over having to go to the bathroom in their wetsuits, and in the end you find yourself rooting for the sharks.

October Sky falls flat (despite its rich tone and some startling cinematography by Fred Murphy) due to its all-too-obvious third act and the vague fact that, really, not that much happens.

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.

Onward is neither terrible nor great; it simply is.

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

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.

It's the kind of film you feel like watching twice -- not because you found it that engaging to begin with, but because you didn't, and everyone else did.

Not in itself a bad thing -- the "Star Trek" films have long come under friendly fire for being too heavy on the philosophizing and not enough so on the deep-space car chases -- but oddly, the film feels soulless and hollow, despite best intentions to the contrary.

For all its noble intent, Hopkins' film falls flat halfway through, mired in bad philosophizing and too-beautiful killing fields, neither bark nor bite mean much here.

Suffers from a persistent case of narrative backsliding that only serves to make older members of the audience long for the days of the dwarves, beauties, and poisoned apples of Disney-yore, and younger ones squirm in their seats.

Honestly, if it weren't for Denis' striking visual sense, the producers could make a small fortune marketing Nénette and Boni as a sleep aid. Granted, Colin and Houri are both delightful actors. The bond they create between these onscreen siblings is terrifically realized and fully developed, but it's far too little to sustain a film in which virtually nothing happens, despite the fact that it all looks so very good.

A dodgy, hit-or-miss affair that never quiet seems to gel: too many lumpy bits, and not enough crème.

The animation itself is superb, and the filmmakers long ago mastered the dreamy, stream-of-consciousness narrative tropes that work so well with stop-motion, but even with all that going for it, A Town Called Panic feels more like some exotic animated curiosity than a film to return to again and again.

Contagion is certainly the most realistic portrayal of a global pandemic I've seen, but that doesn't make it the most entertaining, or even all that intellectually interesting.

The film's very title is a tease, however: It never gets all that loud, and you might doze off after 30 minutes of watching this unwieldy power trio recount their formative years and visit old haunts before heading on to a soundstage for their minimum rock & roll "summit."

Part metaphysical treatise, part educational primer, and part dangerously goofy self-help manual for the New Age set, this bizarre and not unentertaining documentary strives mightily to teach the lay audience everything there is to know about quantum physics in 108 minutes.

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

Sure, Double Team is a mind-numbingly silly outing, full of gratuitous violence, testosterone-fueled goonishness, and acting turns that make TV's Van Patten family look positively Emmy-bound, but lest we forget, it's also pulse-pounding, often hilarious fun.

By the time Foot Fist limps to its ultimate fighting climax, you'll likely wish you had double-teamed "Game of Death" and "Waiting for Guffman" instead.

James Gandolfini’s wintery silences and bitter outbursts are enough on their own to merit seeing this otherwise frustratingly vague slice of low-end Crooklyn crime life, but just barely.

Amibitiously mediocre.

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.

Equal parts Ray Bradbury and rickety carnival spook show, this animated tale of a carnivorous, haunted house and the band of neighborhood kids who decide to put it out of commission feels maddeningly unfinished.

D-FENS is a cut-out, a cartoon Everyman we're supposed to feel sorry for and can't. He's a bad parody in what will doubtless be an over-analyzed film about loss of control. It's just too bad nobody on the creative end seems to have had much control either.

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.

Hell, even Heston's performance elicited cheers back in the day. Franco, in a totally, tonally different role, but still the prime human here, is a pale shadow of the ruined future to come.

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.

Once you get past the admittedly breathtaking shots of our national landmarks being turned into kindling, the rest of the film is a tired and empty two hours of feel-good patriotism and oddly cast characters.

Dependably fascinating.

uUltimately Better Luck Tomorrow feels nearly as hollow and unknowable as its characters’ hearts.

For all its kiss kiss, bang bang, Haywire ends up feeling as hollow as the points on Mallory Kane's 9mm ammo.

Limitless is a writer's movie by a writer, and it explores the dark side of the muse.

Still, the revelations of evildoers clogging the corridors of power pack very little punch; we're all too aware that such malfeasance and malignity have become the status quo in the real world.

A curiously unaffecting amalgam of the archetypal coming-of-age tale, here twinned to "outsider" religious overtones (in this case São Paulo's Orthodox Jewish community) and a small but deadly dose of uneasy political melodrama.

It's charming, in its own little way, but really, this film has as much substance as a Cirrus cloud, despite fine turns from Boyle as the family patriarch and Warden as Godfather Saul.

Oh, the ennui. In Somewhere, it's so thick you could cut it with Stephen Dorff's chiseled cheekbones.

The film is being marketed to kids and their parents, and as such, it’s well worth mom and dad’s hard-earned sawbuck for the implicit lessons it stresses. Be kind, especially to the seemingly strange ones who might not look like you.

Who knew reincarnation could be such a lovely snooze?

Fascinating, no? Of course, that's just one (obvious) reading of Fast Five. You could also say it's a kickass demolition derby – pure dumb summer fun – and often easy on the (hetero) eyes thanks to the inclusion of Brewster and Mendes.