Mark Keizer

The movie was written and directed by Oscar winner Paul Haggis (Crash) and when stripped to its logline, it's pretty ridiculous.

Brotherhood moves fast, but it can't outrun its superficiality.

This depraved charmer offers enough to admire and a specialized hipster crowd will enjoy it, if to a mutedly positive effect.

A charmingly hardened Carla Gugino reprises her role as the titular porn star, still pregnant and now coping with retirement.

There is so much wrong with the political system at this point that gerrymandering, in which politicians shamelessly redraw electoral boundaries to rig the outcome of elections, seems almost quaint.

The new film could have benefited from even a moment of genuine reflection. Being a mechanic seems like a thinking man's occupation. The Mechanic, though, barely has a thought in its head.

Prior and Zagorodnii have a fair amount of chemistry, although both are so Fashion Week gorgeous that it edges Firebird near soft-core territory.

The movie is a bit of a departure for the mumblecore pioneer, one that does not play to his strengths.

Pierce delivers everything the role requires except serious menace, while the less-seasoned Crawford improves as his handsome face bares more of the evening's scars.

The film teases us with hat-tips and in-jokes and then pushes them aside to become an ungainly horror mashup that works in pieces, most notably during its climatic free-for-all, but not as a whole. In The Retaliators, the storylines fly in as many directions as the blood.

The resulting distillation is brisk, light and engaging with none of the cheap shots that usually accompany any discussion of ventriloquism. If anything, Goffman is too gentle, refusing to pursue his charges into their darker corners.

The hijinx get deflating, yet the tension and genuine sense of investigation keep you involved.

Stone embarrasses himself by backing the wrong horse and then making a weak case for him.

At 74 tough and tragic minutes, though, Kimjongilia is not destined for monetary glory. The waiting arms of public television are the more likely destination.

Robert Young's Eichmann feels the burden of history so heavily that it's effectively smothered by it.

It's only sporadically amusing and it's certainly not original.

So it's apropos that Forby's biggest misstep is his thin and careful script that can't carry us away on the same winds of fate that would put a sovereign republic's future in the hands of such a young woman.

It’s faint, if legitimate, praise to say that The Meg 2: The Trench is better than the first film because, while it repeats everything the first film did wrong, it improves on everything it did right. It lacks the drive, imagination, and sense of awe to work as a pastiche of Aliens, The Abyss, Jaws, and Jurassic Park. But the more fulsomely the movie embraces its big budget, DVD-era silliness, the longer it and the audience are riding the same enjoyably stupid wave.

Impractical Jokers: The Movie is an undistinguished and unnecessary extension of a brand whose primary attributes are likability, authenticity and relative modesty (given the worst impulses of the genre).

The execution is where it’s lacking: the wit, the timing, the headlong comic drive, and the ability to make us laugh at actions and dialogue that, in any other context, would be rude or distasteful.

It becomes a parade of interpersonal conflict and miserable circumstances that adds up to nothing less than angst-porn.

Neeson’s austere, meticulous turn is the best reason to see After.Life. He’s cinema’s most soft-spoken, high-toned boogeyman since Anthony Hopkins opened his first can of fava beans.

A classic case of being too much of a not-very-good thing.

Conceptualized and re-conceptualized, written and re-written, shot and re-shot, cut and re-cut, the final product is the world's longest short film.

Nobody here brings their A-game, denying us the pleasure of what Adams and director Anand Tucker could create together.

The Undefeated says less about Sarah Palin than about the political and cultural environment that made her big screen beatification possible.

Burzynski may have credibility in the eyes of some, but the movie about him has no credibility, so no one will be receptive to its message.

If "Midnight Run" and "His Girl Friday" had an unwanted, mutant baby, it would be The Bounty Hunter, a romantic comedy where the jokes sputter and die immediately after exiting the character’s mouths.