Mary Pols

Apparently Bachelorette has been divisive, with audiences either falling hard for it or walking away disgusted. I'd have fallen harder for it if I'd walked away more disgusted.

Wanderlust, a comedy that looks way better than it actually is set amidst the dreck of late winter releases.

What makes White House Down not just tolerable but frivolously entertaining is its slapstick soul; a scene where the presidential limousine does doughnuts on the South Lawn plays like an homage to the Keystone Kops.

Slick, well acted and engaging. It's also morally bankrupt--a film that makes you feel as though you've been taken for a smooth ride by the Hollywood machine and dropped somewhere very nasty.

I didn't believe a word of the film and found myself feeling nothing but (I'm sure this wasn't Kaye's point) detachment.

Casa de mi Padre is flawed in that it wouldn't be particularly enticing in any language.

Beautiful Creatures is good fun and I want to know what happens next for Lena the teenaged witch.

The interplay between Wahlberg and Foster and then Ribisi is nicely done but the action in and around the cargo ship is where the movie's real fun lies. There is plenty of guy humor.

This is the kind of movie you should never see twice, because so much of it is based in appall-me humor. Meaning you'll laugh the first time in the reflexive way you do when you can't believe how audacious the comedy is and how uncomfortable the situations are, whereas a second viewing would afford you an opportunity to feel kind of rotten about laughing the first time.

The technology is undeniably there to make a credible beanstalk fly into the heavens, and giants that are utterly grotesque and vividly threatening. But how about something we can take our kids too? Doesn’t anyone want them to be there?

Bettany's Darwin always has a chill or a case of the sweats, tummy ache or trembling hands. He has our sympathy initially, but the movie bathes us in such general despair that the natural instinct soon becomes a desire to tell him to buck up. We do believe in survival of the fittest, after all.

The raunchy but charming Going the Distance is credible, intimate and more appealing than 90% of the romantic pairings in American movies these days.

Emmerich has turned his attention to the past. He and screenwriter John Orloff have embraced a kitchen sink's worth of 20th-century conspiracy theories about the provenance of Shakespeare's plays, each wilder than the last. Oliver Stone's "JFK" looks reasonable compared to this.

The Guilt Trip works because we all know and like a Joyce Brewster (or dozens of them).

Four minutes of Bush on SNL is just right, but 85-minutes of Cam Brady feels like a lot, even with a strong supporting cast that includes Jason Sudeikis as Cam's campaign manager and Katherine LaNasa as Cam's picture-perfect, but mean-as-nails wife.

I'd take any woman in my life, ages 10 to 100, to Letters to Juliet and my guess is we'd both leave with a little Italian glow.

Tron: Legacy is not good, but it is amiable. While it seems less like a parody than the original, it is also silly in a not unpleasing way.

What's lacking is the sense of emotional balance and urgency that the original Terminator, though just a B movie, was blessed with--the quality that earned it fans in the first place.

It is the movie's uneven writing-half funny and daring, half punishing and senseless-that proves to be Lola's biggest opponent.

Even in a predictable horror film like Silent House, Olsen draws empathy like a magnet.

Quick, capable, thoroughly bloody action film.

The Counsellor is neither an outright disaster nor misunderstood masterpiece: it’s just a very bad idea for a film, proficiently executed.

Even in the skillful hands of director Lone Scherfig, the effect is disjointed. The characters that Nicholls brought so cunningly to life in the book feel rushed through a timeline, tied to an agenda.

This is a big, often quite scary action movie, with tons of creepy computer-generated imagery that's right up there with Voldemort in terms of physical nastiness, although less powerful emotionally.

Bad Teacher revels in being distasteful. But it can't just let a bad woman be bad; she also has to be burdened with physical insecurity, even if it makes no sense. Can you imagine if Billy Bob Thornton's character had become Bad Santa so he could steal to fund his penis implant?

The results, while occasionally forced, are consistently amusing.

Alas, it was George Lucas who became captivated by the Tuskegee Airmen and has, after many years as devoted producer, managed to turn their story into a feature film that falls much closer to the goofy "Hogan's Heroes" in the spectrum of World War II-focused productions than "Saving Private Ryan."

Light as a feather, the movie is at times a modest pleasure, but inconsequential.