Marrit Ingman

This first dramatic feature by documentarian Evans is an important film but not necessarily a successful one.

The film is often quietly humorous.

Before the cocaine economy, Miami was a sleepy seaside hamlet, a "virgin city" with a permeable border and largely unprotected coastline.

Like a lot of animated fare, it's overly busy, lacking the comic's gentle, contemplative air.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that just because we CAN use computer technology to give dogs goofy faces, that doesn’t mean we SHOULD.

Expect lots of Slasher Movie 101.

The strangest part is that half the movie’s arc is missing, but the credits promise its arrival in 2009 as Milarepa Part II: Path to Liberation.

With its jellyfish direction, A Good Woman throws its actors overboard to see if they can swim.

Like a lot of sports movies, this biopic about boxing promoter Jackie Kallen is better than it has to be but not as good as it ought to be.

Somehow the film doesn't quite cohere; it's hobbled by its awkward exposition, with salient facts about the characters' lives.

I can tell you in two words why to see this movie, which is otherwise an unspecial Cinderella farce...and those two words are: Queen Latifah.

Schepisi underscores each emotional note by pulling the camera away from his actors and pointing it at family photographs, a saccharine conceit that becomes more irritating each time it appears.

Mainly it's messy, and I don't just mean the gouged-out eyeball in a puddle.

The elements of the film don’t quite mesh: The villains are cartoony, but Du Chau aims for soggy family drama in his father-son story.

It's a soggy drama said to be inspired by actual events – too serious to be trashy, too trashy to be serious.

It’s too didactic to be a spaghetti Western but lacks the moral compass required of a more evolved philosophical statement.

Sweet enough while it lasts.

Sort of annoying, and it doesn't do what you want it to do, but you know, it's so scrappy and persistent that it seems kind of cute in spite of itself.

The film isn't going to catapult Butcher to international stardom, but he holds his own in it and helps to sell its curious logic.

Once again the title pretty much says it all.

There’s not a sympathetic character in the bunch.

Mutant Aliens would have been brilliant as a short; there's just not enough story for a full-length feature, so the film seems strung together.

But for what it is, I think it's pretty okay. It's not going to win an Oscar or anything. But I liked how it was actually made for tween girls.

Half the time the movie wants to be balls-out weird, and it is. But the other half – the half with the good guys – is plodding procedural fare.

Pretty to look at, tamely racy, and fairly fluffy, despite its two-hour running time.

What do you get when you mix Adam Sandler with SPAM gags, a trained vomiting walrus, a wall-to-wall soundtrack of calypso covers of 1980s pop hits, and Rob Schneider in native-Islander brownface? You get a pretty crappy movie, but for one major mitigating factor: Drew Barrymore.

Can someone dial down Cuba Gooding Jr. a few notches? He's so hyperactive during this MTV Films production - which is comedically indistinguishable from "Sister Act," but with more marketable music - that his Vegas-showgirl drag act in the dreadful "Boat Trip" looks like Bressonian minimalism by contrast.

This is your standard genre fare: Smart-a-- player gets schooled, finds love, and is redeemed in time for the final big game.