Mary Elizabeth Williams

Stone is an undeniably stylish director, and his talent for conveying intense emotion is well put to use here. But more often Stone's in-your-face technique is as exhausting as his steroid-enhanced players.

You know how they say to find one thing and do one thing well? Well, Pattinson's thing is glowering. It doesn't help matters that the movie itself is so painfully mediocre.

What really saves She’s All That from being just another why-good-heavens-you’re-beautiful piece of piffle, however, is the way its lesser elements sparkle. The romantic comedy may be predictable, but director Iscove’s over-the-top parody of faux celebrity — by way of Lillard’s gleefully preening, partying, getting-sensitive-for-the-camera ex-Real Worlder — is a hoot.

The movie starts out as a sweet piece of hardcore pie, full of energy and "Repo Man"-esque satire, but ultimately deteriorates into a Percodan-flavored "Afterschool Special."

It may not be a great film, but for moviegoers, Letters to Juliet is like that long buried missive of its title -- a hopeful sign that when we hold out for good things, our patience is sometimes rewarded.

An uninspired, recycled Mafia gags caper.

The directorial debut of the writer of "The Usual Suspects" keeps tossing the genre hand grenades one might expect, but they all wind up duds.

The overblown and overlong version of Percy's adventures largely fails to capture the quirky allure of Riordan's books.

One of the most mindless, shamelessly lazy films.

The biggest disappointment of 27 Dresses is that it inhabits a Harlequin romance New York City, one remarkably short on homosexuals and divorce.

May not be anything new, but it's still just as shocking.

The fault isn't all in the chemistry, or lack thereof. The more pressing conundrum of "Forces" is that writer Marc Lawrence paints his lead character into a morally ambiguous corner.

The problem with Hirschbiegel's ("Das Experiment," "Downfall") convoluted, car-crash-laden Invasion is that it doesn't know what symbolism it wants to grasp.

What makes the characters in Pride and Glory real -- and raises the movie above the standard corrupt-cop fare -- is their capacity to live and die in shades of gray.

You would never have predicted it from the breakout success of "Pretty Woman" nearly a decade ago, but it turns out that the pairing of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts has ripened over the years into something resembling month-old brie.

Enough flickers of Jay Ward's gloriously subversive sensibility to make it watchable, but it also has enough lengthy stretches of pure triteness to make it easy to skip altogether.

You'd have thought, in his infinite wisdom, the Lord would at least send stinkers like this direct to video.

The surprise of the movie is that it actually does have a talented director and star. It doesn't begin to make up for the low quality of the story or the numerous other unfortunate elements, but it does suggest little flashes of something that, with more thought, might actually have been somewhat interesting.

I don't begrudge Take Me Home Tonight or the whole "I Love the Eighties" juggernaut its fight for its right to party, but there is something touchingly off-base about it.

The major drawback of I Don't Know How She Does It, however, is Parker herself. She seems pathologically drawn to characters who don't possess believable flaws or complications -- just annoying tics.

Despite how easy it would be to write off Righteous Kill as one sorry excuse for lazy filmmaking, there is still something utterly mesmerizing in the palpable chemistry between the two leading men.

One of the most dreadfully unnecessary movies in recent memory.

When Pegg is breaking protocols with his uniquely ballsy aplomb, dancing like a doofus or doing battle with Venetian blinds, the film almost flies.

The plots vary widely in their watchability -- from mildly amusing to stupefyingly godawful.

The man who showed such promise less than a decade ago has been leaving a diminishing creative footprint ever since.

The only thing more disappointing than a truly awful film is a merely weak one that has some really fun moments.

As stupefyng as Idle Hands is while the title appendage is still attached to Anton, it goes into a whole other realm of godawfulness when the demon digits take off on their own.

A leaden exercise in what can go wrong when movies attempt to explore mysterious forces with dated special effects and easy symbolism...a soggy mess.