Mark Jenkins

As the wily leader of the Japanese forces, grizzled Kurata Yasuaki has more presence than Zhao, who’s bland in non-action sequences. But Zhao’s ability to deliver dialogue is less crucial than his skill at leading hundreds of extras through elegantly choreographed, sumptuously photographed chaos.

The broad comedy clashes with the movie's final message: that 6,000 girls face genital mutilation every day.

A preachy parable of suburban discontent, Shorts probably has enough kid-oriented slapstick to please the under-12 set. But it's not likely to rival writer-director Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" series in long-term appeal.

The movie is less than incisive, but it's utterly well-meaning.

The protagonists of Late Bloomers have a problem, but it's not that they're getting older. Their dilemma is that they're reacting so differently to aging.

Like “The Intouchables,” Samba is loosely plotted and is at least 20 minutes too long. It seems ready to end half a dozen times before it finally does, with ironic payoffs for Samba and Alice that are too glib to be satisfying.

Shot mostly in deeply shadowed interiors, the movie rarely makes effective use of its widescreen format. Indeed, it has a stagy quality and plays mostly as a series of theatrical exchanges between Gilles and Koch.

Although its final act is brutal, this Chinese crime drama also has elements of farce and romance.

Basically the anti-"Kill Bill." Both movies are quilted together from their auteurs' favorite Asian action flicks, but where Tarantino's was overheated, Reeves' is elegantly iced.

Reportedly, the movie's humor relies heavily on Cantonese slang and profanity, which will be lost on most American viewers. But Quin's rapid-fire bilingualism gives some sense of the movie's verbal dexterity.

The movie's violence, although gruesome, flirts with slapstick, and the story appears bound for domestic comedy when all the major characters sit down for Thanksgiving dinner at June and Chet's grand Victorian farmhouse. But the meal becomes more freak show than satire.

Nanny McPhee, the homely yet exemplary governess, is back. Why? Hard to say, but one thing is certain: Writer-star Emma Thompson didn't do it for the kids.

Klapisch is a master of the half-biting, half-soothing farce, and he usually keeps the divergent tones in harmony.

A serviceable mash-up of sitcom and sports flick, 80 for Brady should please fans of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field and/or Tom Brady. Everybody else might want to call a timeout.

The dialogue is merely functional, and not always delivered convincingly.

There's plenty of material for a lively, profound documentary about Norman Foster. But How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? is, by design, lightweight.

Music redeems an at-risk teen in Urban Hymn, a social-problem melodrama whose other major characters don’t fare so well.

The original was a little sharper, with actual satirical swipes at modern British life. The remake replaces some of that material with lazy pop-culture gags, most of them specifically African-American.

Its cinematic flair nearly overcomes the awkward story.

Viewers who aren’t in the mood for star-crossed love will prefer the slapstick and earthy humor, including a sequence in which three of the guys get pregnant. It’s another fine mess the resourceful monkey king has to rescue his comrades from.

A 90-minute biography can't include everything, of course. But Lovelace comes on like an inquiry into the '70s zeitgeist, only to retreat into melodrama. Ultimately, the movie relies as heavily as any porn feature on its intrepid female lead. Rather than exploiting Seyfried, however, Lovelace just sort of wastes her.

Strange and uncompromisingly personal. It's also vivid and unforgettable.

Quotation forthcoming.

Director John H. Lee isn’t big on John Le Carré-style intrigue and introspection. (The dialogue comes in only two flavors: blustering and sentimental.) He’s better at the shootouts and chase scenes, which are loud, lively and well-choreographed, if sometimes outlandish.

What Newell can't seem to do is give Prince of Persia a unifying style, tone or purpose. The film moves well, but doesn't show any motivation other than getting to the next game level.

Yet Elles has contemporary pertinence. As the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair showed, feminism hasn't significantly mellowed France's macho culture. And sexual predation on young women from Eastern Europe remains a timely topic.

But c'mon! Erotic obsession, catfights, naked chicks making out -- at heart Chloe is a midnight movie, and all the Vivaldi in the world can't change that.

Flashy and fun, and a nifty showcase for Yen.

On balance, though, Turning Green is more fresh than stale. Gallery holds his own impressively with the better-known supporting players, and the script -- a Project Greenlight runner-up -- is solidly constructed.

As The Fifth Estate excitedly illustrates, in the Internet age no one can ever really have the last word.

As an investigation into American municipal corruption, Broken City is, well, damaged. But as an opportunity for hard-boiled types to trade threats, blows and caustic banter, this modern-day noir works reasonably well.

For a hymn to panic and hostility, the movie is curiously artful. But only the most sympathetic viewers will find that its poetry outweighs its belligerence.

The movie is so flimsy that people might wonder how it could possibly have been made.

If you're only going to see one film about the Battle of Stalingrad — and there are many — Stalingrad would be the wrong choice. Russian director Fedor Bondarchuk's treatment of the World War II turning point is shallow and contrived, if sometimes impressively staged.

Attempting to make an atrocity palatable to a mainstream audience, The Promise delivers the history, but undercuts its impact.

This slackers-go-gangsta comedy demonstrates that less than 90 minutes can be a very long time.

The Best of Enemies is perhaps the first account of the United States’s traumatic racial history that could be adapted into a sitcom.

The movie is crisp and contemporary enough to inaugurate another franchise for Statham.

The movie’s ending could be called a twist. But it’s really more of a belly flop.

Director Neil Burger, whose last divergent character was the smart-drugged protagonist of Limitless, allocates more than enough of this overlong movie to details of life and society in future-Chicagoland. But he fails to make any aspect of the premise persuasive.

The plot fails to deliver a single surprise, however, and the characterizations are thin even by the standards of the tough-guy genre.

An incestuous payoff might be expected, given the casting of Green; she first attracted widespread attention in Bertolucci's "The Dreamers," as a young woman who is unusually close to her brother. But whatever happens, Womb is more melancholy than erotic.

Perhaps the clearest evidence that Yelling to the Sky is based on Mahoney's own life is that the movie lets its most troubled characters off pretty easy.

Like "Eve's Bayou," her best-known movie, Kasi Lemmons' Black Nativity presents a child's view of a troubled family. The latter film is sweeter and slenderer, but that's only to be expected.

“Thunder” doesn’t boast a distinctive look or a cast of famous voices. But its characters are engaging and its action sequences exhilarating.

Hong Kong director Stephen Fung (“Tai Chi Hero”) is no John Woo, but he gives The Adventurers almost as much style as its larcenous characters exude.

Blair Witch runs only eight minutes past the original, yet it feels about a half-hour longer. The new toys — especially the drone — allow for fresh situations, and there’s more blood and supernatural affliction than before. Mostly, though, the filmmakers just repeat familiar moves and expand established locations

A splendidly plotted if thematically unsurprising comedy. The pleasure comes not from fresh insights, but from a droll script and expertly timed performances.

The movie is carried by sweeping widescreen images, dynamic camera movements, impressive special effects and a color scheme that contrasts icy blues against fiery reds.

If the movie fails to conjure soiled 19th-century Paris, that's not primarily because it was shot in Hungary and Serbia. More problematic are the English-language dialogue and actors who speak in a variety of accents and perform in a range of styles.

The result won’t sway nonbelievers, but is mostly watchable and occasionally even moving.

This is among the better Allen knockoffs of recent years, even if a few of its riffs seem hazardously off-key.

Miral stumbles, both thematically and stylistically. The two things that undermine the director's balance? Peace and love.

First-time director Trish Sie, a music-video veteran, is more interested in spectacle than character, as she demonstrates even when nobody’s dancing.

Next to the hopelessly inexpressive Stallone and the English-impaired Li, Statham emerges as the movie's principal wit. But the script furnishes him with only a few deadpan quips. Besides, it's no great accomplishment to be the funniest guy in a Sylvester Stallone flick.

The script doesn’t contain many lines that ring true, and a few clang wildly off-key.

There are some funny bits and characters around the edges of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, but its core is empty of humor. In fact, this purported satire of Las Vegas magicians is a three-void circus: the script, the central character and the main performance.

Stretched across nearly two hours, it tells a story that would have been adequately laid out in a 30-second television spot.

If the new biopic Mapplethorpe presents this transgressive vision is vivid detail — and it does — that’s only because it includes so many of Mapplethorpe’s pictures. Everything else in the film is timid and pedestrian.

The rest of the film has a cozy TV-commercial vibe, pumped by tunes from Katy Perry and the inevitable Neil Diamond. It’s no champion, but it’s still a reasonably good cry.

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy deserves credit for not entirely wimping out.

The movie wavers in tone, occasionally lurching into supernatural fantasy, and withholds information in a manner that’s more annoying than tantalizing.

A theological trifle that ultimately twists itself into a romantic comedy.

So the principal point of controversy involved here is not Jobs himself, but Ashton Kutcher, who plays him. The actor's approach is to ape Jobs' speech and movements, which he does quite well. Whether mimicry qualifies as characterization is a question for Jobs' viewers to answer for themselves.

Despite dramatic Hawaiian locations, up-to-date visual effects and a bit of nontraditional casting, the movie feels not especially brave and far from new.

After evoking only warm smiles in its first half, Le Chef ultimately veers into farce.

More mood piece than drama, Equals ultimately benefits from the scarcity of exposition, because the story’s details make little sense.

Set in a high-tech yet shabby future, the remake of Total Recall is a fully realized piece of production design. But its script, credited to six authors, is more like a preliminary sketch.

Unfortunately, brutality is about all this update of 1941's The Wolf Man can do well. Mutilations, decapitations and disembowelments are handled with aplomb in the first R-rated film from director Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III). But everything that doesn't involve gore feels like an afterthought.

Despite numerous missteps and contrivances, Olvidados succeeds as an indictment of Operation Condor’s horrors.

Ideally, The Taqwacores should be seen with "Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam," a new documentary that provides a better sense of the scene's aims and motivations. Zahra's jumpy feature film captures much of taqwacore's energy, but less of its meaning.

In the real world or a realer movie, the deceitful Arthur and the larcenous Mike would eventually get in big trouble. Yet this road movie is headed not toward serious consequences, but toward docile acceptance. In spirit, it turns out, Arthur Newman is a pretty much a Wallace Avery.

This China/Hong Kong co-production flips the formula: The fantastic images are solid, but the action is less substantial.

What's the difference between an action figure and an action star? Very little in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which features no performances of note, even from such combat-tested thespians as Bruce Willis, Jonathan Pryce and Dwayne Johnson.

If her career as director somehow doesn’t pan out, Meyers-Shyer would make an excellent fairy godmother.

For viewers who aren’t hostile to mysticism, vegetarianism and endless chanting, it’s a stirring story.

A sort of “Me, God and the Dying Girl,” the movie is well-made (if slow) and features an attractive cast and a lot of amiable (if bland) religious pop-rock.

As is typical of the genre, the plot gets sillier as it unfolds, while the violence gets gnarlier.

The newest model of the old submarine-from-hell picture.

“Dunjia” is exuberant and visually inventive, notably in the ways it incorporates text into the images. It also benefits from engaging performances. But the story is motley and not very involving, and the anything-goes CGI undermines the battle sequences.

J.H. Wyman's script is grim and fairly audacious, without anything so goofy as the silliest stuff in "Dragon Tattoo." The story involves some Grand Guignol violence, but its wildest notion is that a suicide-mission plot might somehow yield a happy ending.

At heart, though, the movie is as tame as "The Belles of St. Trinian's," the 1954 farce that started it all.

Zaytoun is different: This time, the director allows his characters to cross the frontier. That makes for a story that's sweeter, but also less convincing.

As Above, So Below is inherently absurd, but it would be somewhat less so had it fully committed to just one of its ridiculous premises.

Whether it’s being sexy, jokey or homicidal, Stage Fright doesn’t deliver the goods with sufficient spirit. It lacks the sparkle to be a truly killer show.

There’s a fundamental problem here. The movie relies on the instinctual human fear of death, but its message is that dying is a promotion.

Murphy is fine as the title character, although his performance consists mostly of suppressing all of his usual shtick. He certainly doesn’t endow Mr. Church with any unexpected depths. But then neither does the script.

If Nenette as a character is more a narrative convenience than a depiction of an actual condition, her permanent childhood does provide the 63-year-old Balasko with an exuberant, unpredictable role. That she continues to make work for herself as both an actress and a director is a good thing, but it would be better if she found a more ambitious writer.

This ode to "moving on" from grief packs so little genuine emotion that it will touch only the most susceptible of viewers.

Shanghai is an exercise in retro glamour, alluring decadence and tough-guy posing, all of which it delivers in sufficient quantities.

We're supposed to be awed, but a more reasonable response is to giggle. How does a Kevlar tie kill? And if it can, why hasn't the CIA sent a Kevlar scarf to Osama bin Laden?

Shot in New Mexico on a limited budget, Boys of Abu Ghraib is a credible depiction of the tedium, frustration and humiliation of wartime service. (Jack gets coated in human excrement not once but twice.) Naturalistic scenes of boxing, bantering and masturbation, set to a rap and hard-rock score, emphasize that these boys are young American everymen.

If that's the best Hollywood screenwriters can do, maybe they should sign up for a self-help seminar. Nothing focuses the mind like a little firewalking.

A disastrous father-son endeavor about a calamitous father-son expedition, After Earth doesn't play to the strengths of any of its major participants.

Aside from the giggles induced by the romance-novel bits, the movie's principal hazard is exhaustion. There are too many characters, and too many of them spend too much time morphing into something else. Five more like this? That would be demonic.

Neither innovative nor profound, but it is kinetic, visceral and sometimes moving.

The new Red Dawn's body count is as high as its predecessor's. But the fatalism in all of Milius' projects - even the silliest ones - has weight. That's not the case with the remake, whose portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.

It's a strange sort of film that casts Gallic tough guy Jean Reno as a clean-fingernailed mogul while employing cross-dressing comic Tyler Perry as a guy capable of hand-to-hand combat with someone called The Butcher of Sligo.