Michael O'Sullivan

The high-school sports drama Crooked Arrows has two -- but only two -- original selling points: Its protagonists are Native Americans and the sport in question is lacrosse. That's something you don't see every day. Other than that, however, the film's moves are taken straight out of "The Bad News Bears" playbook.

There's a nagging question at the heart of Chernobyl Diaries. It isn't what, or who, is stalking these kids. After awhile, the answer becomes apparent, leading to a denouement that, while mildly exciting, feels like a ride you've been on before.

This third outing climaxes with a dark and melodramatic twist that, while adding a layer of nuance and back story that the previous two films never had, also feels wildly out of sync with its audience's expectations.

An invigorating blast of cinematic adrenaline.

By turns sweet, sad, funny and poignant, We Have a Pope is the story of a man who doesn't want to be God's representative on Earth.

A blandly middling crowd pleaser.

The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. They bring a rich expressiveness and sense of complex inner life to their characters. It's the movie - and its placard-sized message - that is more two-dimensional.

Does it matter that Maggie might be a charlatan if she's truly capable of helping people? That's the film's most intriguing, and open-ended, question - not the more gimmicky one that will leave you hanging, and probably disappointed, at the end.

Like many Aardman films, The Pirates! is awash with silliness. There are far more fleeting visual jokes than one can possibly digest in a single viewing. It makes for an experience that, while geared toward younger, more fidgety audiences, has enough humor to keep Mom and Dad from falling asleep.

But nature is messy, and Chimpanzee doesn't shrink from that, to its credit. Fothergill and Linfield at least exercise discretion when their cameras capture disturbing turns of event.

At the core of the movie is the message that the real lonely hunter is the heart.

Without being parodistic, it manages to poke fun at the air of privilege and strenuous political correctness common to lefty, liberal arts schools, while retaining a certain affection for their heartfelt quirks.

Enjoy it, in moderation. It's your recommended weekly allowance of schlock.

A funny and touching coming-of-age story.

Crafted by writer-director Jill Sprecher and co-writer sister Karen - a filmmaking duo who are sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Coen sisters" - it will erase any lingering memories of "Fargo."

An aggressively crass - and not especially funny - trip down memory lane, an attempt to recapture the sweetly ribald magic of the earlier film. As anyone who's ever attended a class reunion can tell you, it almost never works.

The story is maddeningly oblique and incomplete, despite paying what at times feels like excruciating attention to the minutiae of a dying love affair's final hours.

The only reason you'll feel any wrath is because you shelled out 12 bucks for this steaming bucket of half-baked plot, cliched dialogue and disappointing 3-D special effects.

If it's art, it's only mildly interesting.

It is Markus's sensitivity to nuance and to the feelings of others that characterizes every step that he - and this sure-footed if off-kilter film - takes.

With Casa de Mi Padre, it's often hard to tell the difference between when it's making fun of bad movies and when it's being one.

It's a thriller that feels like a documentary.

It will make you jump, to be sure, and your heart to beat a little bit faster. But what's truly scariest about it takes place not in the body, but in the mind.

At times, the movie has the look and feel of the cheaply made late-night commercials that it mercilessly, and occasionally hilariously, mocks.

A cautionary environmental tale with a thin veneer of entertainment on top. With its cotton-candy-colored palette of orange, pink and purple truffula trees, it looks like a bowl of fuzzy Froot Loops. But it goes down like an order of oatmeal. Sure, it's good for you. It's just not terribly good.

The film suggests that it doesn't really matter whether Harris ever gets back in uniform. He's forever carrying around a piece of unexploded ordnance in his head.

Director James Watkins knows how to make a body jump out of its skin, even if he does use the face-reflected-in-the-mirror/window trick once too often. At the same time, the film is kind of, well, silly.

As it is, The Divide is simply noxious for noxiousness's sake. French director Xavier Gens and writers Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean almost seem to take a kind of perverse pride in seeing how far they can go.

Watching it leaves you feeling less buzzed than jittery and slightly nauseated. If the "Ocean's" movies were martinis, Contraband is a thermos full of coffee.

Though marketed as a comedy, this film is too creepy and acerbic to be consistently comic.

A worthy addition to the Christmas movie canon. It's funny and good-looking, with an impeccable voice cast of U.K. actors. It's also unexpectedly fresh, despite the familiar-sounding premise.

The Muppets is both a delightful family film about the Muppets and a winking, self-referential satire about how lame the Muppets are.

And that's the moral of this story. Or one of them, anyway. Clash's success is shown as the result of a combination of talent, gumption, pluck, misadventure, supportive parents, following your dreams, luck and, yes, love.

The unapologetic laziness and ineptitude of Jack's impersonation, which is played for cheap laughs, is just as lazy as Sandler's performance as the real Jill. You don't buy it for a minute.

The humor is even more wildly inappropriate, with a running joke about getting a baby stoned on pot, coke and ecstasy, and a scene inspired by the famous incident in "A Christmas Story" where the kid gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole.

It's powerful, gut-wrenching stuff, and it doesn't need tarting up.

All in all, In Time is not just stylish but surprisingly substantial. From now on, you'll think twice every time you hear the phrase "rollover minutes."

For a kids' movie, the humor, at times, strays a bit too far into grown-up territory.

Mainly for those who are already infatuated with Cena's stoic, Mount Rushmore-esque countenance and who do not find the idea of the big lug leaping off the edge of a cliff onto an airborne helicopter's landing gear remotely absurd.

Chandor's film goes a long way toward making understandable - in vivid, cinematic terms - what exactly happened to make that first big domino fall over.

When all is said and done, Mike proves to be not only peripheral to the main thrust of the movie, but a drag on its momentum.

I'll say one thing for The Skin I Live In, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar's ambitious, crazy, even a-little-bit-infuriating new film: I did not see it coming.

Blackthorn feels less like a proper sequel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which it purports to be, than a coattail rider.

It's uncompromisingly steamy, in a way that seems designed to make people who are uncomfortable with a physical relationship between two men even more uncomfortable.

There really is no other movie on Earth quite like it. And that's including "The Human Centipede: First Sequence," the 2009 horror film on which this dismal, nauseating and yet bizarrely artful sequel is based.

The movie is called Love Crime. But its hidden message has more to do with business than with passion. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Especially one in a power suit, who knows how to work a room.

A slightly soggy tale of father-son bonding, crossed with an action-adventure flick about high-tech battle-bots.

What's Your Number? ups the vulgarity, ladling it on top of a rom-com base so insipid and predictable that the only thing to keep you awake is counting the number of times that the script drops the word "vagina."

It gets the bullet points of Sam Childers's life, but misses the target.

I've got another portmanteau word for the movie: unbelievaballistic.

Does Lurie have an ax to grind? And how. Yet if, to some ears, its high-pitched whine nearly drowns out the underlying story at times, why did so many in that preview audience seem deaf to it? Maybe that's Lurie's real point: A culture that feeds on violence -- in real life and on film -- has also inured us to it.

Insipid, unfunny and cliche-ridden.

Plays less like a conventional medical thriller - think "Outbreak" - than like a dramatic reading of a "Nova" episode, performed by Hollywood's elite.

Worse yet is the insincerity of the film's central performances. Too cool by half, Glodell, Wiseman and Dawson speak every line as if it had air quotes around it. In fact, the entire movie feels as though it has air quotes around it.

Here's a better title for Griff the Invisible, a well-meaning but unengaging love story about two 20-something misfits: "Griff the Implausible."

The Hedgehog is a treat: a movie that's smart, grown-up, wry and deeply moving. Best of all, this is accomplished with the lightest of cinematic strokes. It sneaks up on you, without grandstanding, melodrama or outright jokes.

The argument in Amigo is so heavy-handed - and its execution so crude - that by the time the movie winds its way to a predictable but uninvolving conclusion, nobody will be listening anymore.

A classic example of a film that doesn't trust the strength of its source material - or the intelligence of its audience.

In the end, The Devil's Double is one long balance sheet. On the plus side are the dueling performances of Cooper, which anchor the film. On the minus side is a seemingly interminable litany of violence, abuse and degradation. They cheapen the film by nudging it in the direction of a splatter flick.

As large as Earth Two looms - literally - in the frames of Mike Cahill's film, so do its implications. It's one big, honking metaphor, as much as a special effect. As a symbol of second chances, it's as intriguing as it is frustratingly obvious.

Now for the bad news. The filmmakers seem to have spent so much attention and, presumably, money on getting the primates right that they completely forgot about the people.

Life in a Day is, without exaggeration, a profound achievement.

A movingly told tale of tragedy and its consequences, not just for the players in the original tragedy but also for those touched by their actions, in an ever-widening circle of aftershocks.

McKinney, a woman whose spellbinding and baffling presence - nay, performance - in Tabloid more than lives up to her recent off-screen antics.

Scorchingly raunchy - and yes, pretty funny.

What is their passion for? Not newspapers, or even a single newspaper, per se, but for journalism itself, the practice of which is nowhere stronger than at the Times. That, at least, is how Page One argues it. It's a compelling argument.

The film's real problem is that it can't seem to make up its mind about whether it wants to frighten us or make us laugh.

It's a light and breezy, recession-themed romantic comedy; "Up in the Air" without all the angst and introspection.

It isn't as sad a movie as "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," another behind-the-mask documentary. It's funnier. But it's just as illuminating.

Unfortunately, the sequel shortchanges the very relationships that gave the first movie its surprising heart.

During the movie's awww-inducing conclusion, those of you who are allergic to cuteness - or to Jim Carrey - might want to look away.

The real value of poetry - of the contest itself - is not revealed until the closing credits, when we see the impressive list of colleges that the movie's four subjects have gone on to.

There's no sense of perspective here.

It's a muscular, physical movie, pieced together from arresting imagery and revelatory gestures, large and small.

For much of the film, this is very funny and fairly original stuff, though Submarine starts to run aground about the time that Jordana and Oliver's relationship does.

It knocks you off your feet and leaves you shaken.

And, yes, Kung Fu Panda 2 is a little darker and a little more intense than the first film, especially for very young viewers.

It's heartwarming. But the film never really takes fire.

Bad role models sometimes make the most interesting movie characters. The ill-mannered, unkempt, foulmouthed and hot-tempered title character of Hesher is just such a walking contradiction.

If it sounds wholly bleak, it isn't. Remember, this is a movie about a yard sale. Over the course of the film, Nick struggles with the idea of, as he puts it, "selling all my crap" - he means that both literally and metaphorically - and getting on with his life. That sentiment, and Ferrell's refusal to sentimentalize it, is reason enough to smile.

There Be Dragons is like fine wine, served in a Big Gulp cup. A little is very nice. A lot is way too much.

The effects are effective. The humor is humorous and just self-referential enough to let you know the film doesn't take itself too seriously.

Like the best ad man, he makes his point by making us laugh.

The most compelling thing about Winter in Wartime, the Netherlands' official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars, is not the story. And the story is pretty darn compelling.

Big, slick and showy. It is also undeniably effective entertainment.

The problem is, the movie doesn't really care if we are laughing with it or at it.

Rolls straight over silly, smashing through stupid without stopping and then barreling into a kind of insane comic brilliance without so much as a speed bump to slow it down.

Still, what separates Walking With Destiny from a run-of-the-mill war documentary isn't necessarily its insights into its main subject but its tangential stories about fascinating nobodies.

This Arthur is an exercise in time-travel tedium, a trip to the Land That Funny Forgot.

The swells of inspirational storytelling sometimes threaten to swamp the underlying inspirational story.

The single most compelling reason to see Hanna is Hanna herself. As played by Saoirse Ronan, who made her first big splash as another morally challenged youngster in Wright's 2007 "Atonement," the character is a fascinating and frustrating cipher.

You can't criticize it for false advertising.

You can't fault the filmmakers for reshaping a diary into a cohesive film. You can however, fault them for taking one of the great antiheroes in preteen literature and turning him into, well, an even wimpier kid.

A heck of a ride. On the way to its unpredictable (if less than wholly satisfying) conclusion, it is entertaining, a little silly and visually dazzling.

The derriere-flashing, dope-smoking, potty-mouthed antics of this antisocial E.T. justify every bit of the rating that the MPAA has slapped on him.

It's hard not to feel a certain affection for a tale that is so unapologetic about just that: affection.

Unnecessary and unfunny re-imagining of the classic satire by Jonathan Swift.

That's the problem with the whole movie, which lies halfway between poker-face documentary and broad farce.

Boasting a plot that's heavy on the magical shenanigans, this pretty and poetic adaptation of Shakespeare's play is a fantasia for the smart set, a literary novelty for anyone who wants to have fun without giving up food for thought. On that score, at least, it delivers, in spades.

There are worse things than being trapped inside a computer game with Olivia Wilde. In Tron: Legacy, the loud, long and less than wholly satisfying sequel to "Tron," that's the bittersweet fate of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the computer-nerd hero of both the 1982 sci-fi cult classic and its high-tech, 3-D update.

Megamind has presentation in spades. But it also has something even rarer than that. It's got heart.

Some of it sounds, quite frankly, nuts. And a few of Lomborg's enemies have said as much. But throwing tons of money at the problem with little result? That also sounds kind of crazy.

No ordinary horror film. If it were, it might be a bit better than it is. As the movie stands, it's a less-than-compelling relationship drama, with aliens.

"Welcome to the Rileys"? Thanks, but no thanks.

There's plenty to scratch your head about here. Is it a drama? A comedy? And if it's a farce, what's it making fun of?

After all, it isn't every kid's movie that wrestles with the subject of faith in a higher power, or sin, or the afterlife. And it isn't every kid's film that can do it so entertainingly. Sure, that's heavy stuff if you're looking for it. But it doesn't spoil the great, great fun to be had in Narnia - or the magical spell it casts - if you're not.

A lean and hungry thing. With the sparest of storytelling, the French filmmaker ("35 Shots of Rum") devours her audience, swallowing us up in a yarn that is as enigmatic as it is engrossing.

It's hard to imagine that any self-respecting man would want to sit through two hours - let alone two minutes - of such caustic man-bashing.

The final, deeply satisfying conclusion to the trilogy of Swedish thrillers based on Stieg Larsson's bestselling novels.

At nearly two hours, the movie feels bloated. It could easily lose 30 minutes, give or take, and live. It would still not, however, live up to its title.

In addition to all the rollicking, ribald humor, Tamara Drewe also has a couple of flashes of darkly comic violence. In a literary sense, it's poetic justice, really. Punishment meted out for bad behavior.

It starts out with a tsunami - and ends up standing in a puddle.

Introduces us to many who have known, worked and tangled with the man some call Bush's "co-president" during his multi-decade involvement in Republican politics.

Where Elizabeth really triumphs over its dusty source material is in transforming all this boring history into a real, rip-roaring adventure tale.

Offers up the kind of pleasures that only a summer movie can...The cast is good-looking, the soundtrack is loud, the plot is stupid.

Keys isn't given much to do except look as though she's posing for an album cover, but Okonedo's face is a marvel. Every thought, every emotion flickers across it like clouds obscuring the sun.

Plays a little like a mystery, the central question of which is not whodunit but why.

Delivered with the kind of English aplomb that PBS audiences around the country have come to know and love. It must be the accent.

It's a rousing, fast-paced tale, told with a modicum of verve and packed with colorfully flawed, occasionally heroic and even tragic characters. It also feels disappointingly bloated and too fast-paced by half.

Ultimately one flat-footed beast.

A kicky, twisted thrill ride, with enough laughs to leaven what can be read, at heart, as a metaphor for the modern marriage.

Satisfies a hunger for the basics: a decent mystery to chew on, a bit of juicy suspense, maybe a plot twist as garnish. The fare is all on the standard menu, but it goes down well just the same.

Although filled with fey, flamboyant characters, the stereotype of the gay hairdresser seems to have been meticulously expunged.

Based on "Romeo and Juliet" the way a martini is "based" on vermouth.

Its real agenda is rip-roaring adventure, and that it delivers all wrapped up with a bow.

Really nothing more than "Clueless" redux but without the edgy, knowing wit.

At least it's a pleasant walk, with attractive people and nice conversation

In this modern retelling of the well-known fable, she is one princess-in-waiting who does not need rescuing by any knight in shining armor. [31 Jul 1998, Pg. N.47]

Less a movie than a meticulously, tediously accurate Civil War reenactment committed to celluloid.

Just inspiring enough, just scary enough, just sappy enough and just funny enough to get by.

A lowbrow, only fitfully amusing comedy.

An unfunny comedy by Tony Vitale that is enacted not by fleshed-out characters but by hackneyed, two-dimensional stereotypes. There’re so many sexual and ethnic caricatures, it’s hard to know which is most offensive.

The dynamic between Channing and Stiles is as compelling as a freeway wreck.

Wickedly clever drama.

No movie this stupid should need a plot synopsis this complicated.

One half of a very funny movie, and half a funny movie is better than none.

Well acted, moodily shot and tautly written, this Tattoo may feel like you've seen some of it (or its ilk) before. Still, its haunting images get under the skin, leaving an indelible impression.

Never preachy, never sanctimonious nor touchy-feely.

The film is so anemic you should probably order iron supplements with your popcorn, its plot so predictable it makes falling dominoes seem like a white-knuckle thrill ride.

What keeps The 40-Year-Old Virgin out of Rob Schneider territory, however, is: 1) the fact that it's pretty darn funny, and in a way that feels consistently real, and 2) the fact that it's actually an excellent date movie.

I will admit that this TV skit stretched out to a filament-thin 83 minutes is idiotic, but I mean that in a good way.

Rated PG, which must stand for "particularly gullible," it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for people who slept through American history class.

It's like a PBS version of a movie of the week about child abduction, complete with histrionic, spit-flecked speechifying in quaint Irish brogues.

It's just so darn annoying to watch this attractive, seemingly smart woman throw her life away for some (admittedly rather hot) sex in the greenhouse.

Touching, funny, unflinching and true.

It is through the genius of Frears, screenwriter Jimmy McGovern and this talented cast that Liam lets no one off the hook, least of all the audience.

With the exception of a few dazzling special effects and a digitally enhanced camera move or two... it's also a towering bore.

Playing a hero who's meant to be something akin to the young Dalai Lama, Ringer brings less than zero gravitas to the role. He makes the kid who plays Gibby on "iCarly" look like Sir Laurence Olivier.

Made me feel like a Christmas goose being fattened for slaughter. Its force-fed diet of whimsy cloyed long before the eagerly anticipated romantic payoff arrived to put me out of my misery.

The drug-fueled romp turns ugly, sexist and misogynistic, as so many rap-star vehicles do.

Shows more hopelessness than optimism but is never less than honest.

It's a sweet but slight film whose undeniable appeal is largely due to the performances of its flat-out adorable leads.

Freeman fills Cross's gumshoes with distinction.

It's a performance in search of a movie.

Benign but forgettable sci-fi diversion.

Although laced with adrenaline and flavored with noirish seasoning, John Frankenheimer's Ronin is a disappointingly conventional thriller.

Very, very funny, thanks to a lively first script by Mark O'Rowe, who has a good ear for earthy dialogue and a sense of life's absurd little synchronicities.

So rich in processed sugar, canned sentiment and schmaltz, I thought I was going to throw up.

Manages to take the cerebral act of literary creation and make it exciting, sexy even.

A mediocre production that nevertheless will strike a deep and resonant chord with viewers.

Even the Richard Rich-directed animation -- except for some nice but gratuitous computer-generated walking statues and dramatic ocean waves -- is not appreciably better than Saturday morning cartoons.

Torpid, syrupy melodrama from the Chinese director of 1993's "Farewell My Concubine."

Enormously entertaining.

Quest for Camelot, the first feature-length, fully animated film from the Warner Bros. studio, is a quasi-feminist Arthurian adventure about a young woman who wants to become a knight of the Round Table. It is also, unfortunately, a derivative rip-off.

There are a number of surprises in the idiosyncratic film, and one of its pleasures is the oblique and unchronological way in which Ward peels away the layers of the story, flashing backward and forward in time and jumping between Earth and the Beyond, separating his scenes with blindingly blank, white-out screens.

Will satisfy only those who can't tell the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly.

Controversial, yet undeniably powerful.

Feels like a hazy high that takes too long to shake.

A gorgeously morbid meditation on the interconnectivity of life.

When the danger subsides and the sparkless romance returns to the foreground, the vehicle comes sputtering back to earth with a thud, weighed down by the inertia of its leaden leading lady.

I'm not sure if it was that or the cloying script, but after a couple of hours of spinning around listening to this drivel I felt like I was going to barf.

Under normal circumstances, nothing kills a joke faster than trying to explain it. Yet here, such examination is the film's strong suit and provides much-needed respite, quite frankly, from the exhaustion of constant laughter.

It's one heck of a basis for a funny movie.

Shakes, rattles and rolls the house, building to a climax that makes you almost forget you're in a movie theater and not a football stadium at halftime.

Goes beyond interesting, though, to moderately annoying.

For a suspense drama, Impact is a slack, oddly enervated and mawkish soup of largely lethargic performances.

Maybe not wonderful, but still pretty darn good.

The film degenerates into sophomoric name calling and a brand of insult humor that would embarrass Don Rickles.

In the end Monsieur N. could use a little less cloak-and-dagger and more of what made "The Emperor's New Clothes" work, i.e., heart.

Despite the unforced humor and honesty in the performances of its young and talented cast, The Wood spends too much time wallowing in arrested adolescence to make you feel you've traveled anywhere.

The frequent, mundane talks -- which Alexandra engages in with her grandson, Malika and the base camp's enlisted men -- are not so much about politics as they are about people.

A well-crafted story with a unique voice. But its literary gifts are outweighed by its pictorial prosaicness. Dimming the screen in every shot is the unmistakable shadow of the page.

The film's maudlin focus on the young woman's infirmity and her naive dreams play like the worst kind of Hollywood heart-string plucking.

Complicated? Yes. Potentially heavy? Sure. But it's also highly engrossing and, in a dark way, ultimately rather sweet.

With its cast of back-stabbing functionaries and desk jockeys, Spy Game makes the sport and hard work of espionage seem chillingly real.

While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.

Very funny in a way reminiscent of "Babe: Pig in the City."

Suffers from an increasingly common movie defect: appealing, sharply drawn supporting characters, and a cast of main characters that is as unlikely as it is unlikable.

I can't imagine why anyone would pay money to see this sorry excuse for a film, which plays more like a home movie than something from cinema professionals.

Cedric the Entertainer is the best (and probably only) reason to take this "Vacation."

A compelling if singularly sour tale.

It's all too, too cute and too, too forced for words -- not to mention too, too dark.

The disparity between Cindy and Jerry is itself obscene, but less so than that illuminated by the customers of Farewell Cruises, whom Yung shows to be almost parasitic in the way they feed off the misery (albeit without knowing it) of those who serve them.

What's troubling about "My Mother" is not the way the sisters respond to the news, but the way that Paris and Fejerman have opted to make lighthearted comic fodder out of the daughters' responses.

If you didn't know that it was based on a true story, Skin would be a little hard to believe.

As is his wont, Spielberg can't resist stuffing the ending of the movie with a bit too much cheese and baloney. Despite those quibbles, War of the Worlds is taut, gripping and surprisingly dark filmmaking.

An elegant drama about power and its frightening uses, The Cat's Meow is the bee's knees.

Enriched by a strong and unforced supporting cast, "Bread" nourishes the heart, even if its fairy-tale ending feels tacked on and unnecessary.

Sure, the animation work is great, but it's the actors and their subtle, complex vocal performances that make us care about these fairy-tale characters. Shrek 2 is all about fantasy, but its characters are rousingly, affectingly real -- not to mention real, real funny.

In its heart burns the indomitable flame of the human spirit.

After viewing documentarian Stephanie Black's dour exegesis of the wrecked Jamaican economy -- only the most insensitive vacationer will want to set foot anywhere near the resorts and beaches of Montego Bay.

Scares, to be sure, which is certainly one promise on which it delivers. But the film offers little insight into what it seems to be saying is essentially a mundane fact of life: When one devil leaves the world, there is always another one waiting just outside the door.

Dear Nicholas Sparks, There's no easy way to say this. But with Dear John, the latest of the five films made so far from your sentimental, best-selling novels, I think our relationship is in trouble.

Audiences who have avoided the multiplex these last few years because of the garbage peddled there are the only ones for whom this overly familiar "Walk" will be memorable.

In a role that challenges our very notion of morality, Cox comes across as both predatory and fatherly, sometimes at once, in an acting turn as astonishing as it is stomach-turning.

Ghost suffers most from a distinct lack of anything, well, cinematic.

Monument Ave. is a cinematic dead-end street that is not without its gloomy, gritty thrills -- assuming, that is, that you're not in the market for a hero or even the slightest feather of that thing called hope. [09 Oct 1998, Pg.N.49]

Subtle it's not. Still, the film, directed by Andrew Fleming ("Dick"), gets large and plentiful laughs where it's supposed to.

Even as Brick Lane manages to sidestep one formula, it falls prey to another.

Despite this tale's surface sheen and propulsive momentum, it never transports one very far.

The problem, sadly, is that the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts.

It's a silly, giggly piece of pink-colored fluff, as hyperactive as its heroine and as redolent of bubble gum and Love's Baby Soft cologne as Lola apparently is. Yet the superficial sweetness masks something rotten.

As the film's boo! moments get spookier and more frequent, Godsend gets more and more inane.

The movie drains Cole and Linda Porter of blood and fills them with embalming fluid.

With a surprisingly unhappy, anti-Hollywood ending that will appeal to those who like things dark.

More love story than thriller, with the mystery providing only slack tension and the December-December romance that ultimately develops between Regina and Camargo crackling with drama and sexual tension aplenty.

Loud, dumb and obnoxious.

Bizarre yet popular.

One heck of a tale of deliciously unladylike payback.

Starting out as a wacky little comedy about a mousy Spanish couple who become unwitting porn stars, Torremolinos 73 suddenly morphs, during the third act, into a far more sober and tender story about the lengths to which a man will go to give his wife what she wants.

A turbo-charged remake that should alienate no fans of the adrenalized 1975 original.

The film doesn't even cut it as cheap escapism.

Like a haiku, it is not what is said, but what is unsaid, that leaves the most lasting echoes.

Filmmaking at its purest and most visceral – a tale full of sound and visual fury, signifying, if not exactly nothing, then something not so readily articulated in words.

I love a good story, too, but I prefer one that actually goes somewhere (although, as joy rides to nowhere are concerned, this one is a beaut).

The underwhelming, only fitfully amusing movie left me hungry for more.

The movie and its star just aren't that funny.

It's a love story, yes, but one whose sweetness is cut by honest performances, a sharply drawn supporting cast and a fairly serious, yet never self-pitying, tone.

Much to my surprise and delight, the movie is nothing like its marketing.

Visually stylish surrealist drama.

It's a case of the heart being in the right place, but the script getting in the way.

Drew Barrymore has figured out what works, and what works for Drew Barrymore is this: Cinderella stories.

The movie is not for the squeamish, but for those who are unafraid to look at what is, perhaps, their own metaphorical "backyard," for those willing to stare into the long, dark night of the contemporary American soul, its bone-crunching message is worth hearing.

It's a question of tone, which jumps back and forth between airy-fairy romantic comedy and leaden family drama with the alacrity of a manic-depressive.

It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.

Admirably restrained melodrama.

Within this overly familiar trope, there's plenty of room for small surprises, not the least of which are delightful, understated performances all around.

Will keep you awake, jittery and perched on the edge of your seat for pretty much the entire flight.

Wickedly funny, jarringly transgressive, obdurately unpigeonholeable and startlingly moving.

The acting of the main cast is uniformly nuanced, and, except for some bad makeup on Mendy's father, the film never looks as low-budget as it must have been.

Cumming manages to keep the film's pandering in check with every wicked raised eyebrow.

The smart but slight film implodes under the weight of its own "excessive linguistic pressure."

It's a thoughtfully constructed story, with nuanced performances all around and even a mild surprise thrown in, but the whole thing feels ever so slightly enervated, like a game of chess between codgers in the park.

A film whose effects are as hard to wash away as blood.

This "Holmes" is just about as silly as it awesome. At times, Ritchie and company try so hard to make sure this isn't your father's "Sherlock Holmes" that it comes across as, well, cartoonish.

It's laughably stupid, only fitfully scary and relatively harmless summer fun – if you're 12 years old, in which case you probably aren't supposed to be going to movies like this anyway.

Believe it or not, there's life in the old boy yet. After a disappointing third outing, this "Shrek" brings the cycle of fairy-tale-themed films to a fine finish.

The film actually gets to tackle some larger questions than one normally finds in the average fireball drama.

It's a love letter to the myriad ways, large and small, that mail handlers change lives the world over.

At times, it's downright nasty; and that's when I like it best.

Like Affleck himself, the film is perfectly satisfactory without being deeply satisfying.

An entertaining and surprisingly serious look at the infamous New York discotheque, with a genuine nostalgia for the late '70s and early '80s.

Personal and private almost to the point of self-absorption, the film is ultimately saved from neurotic narcissism by the director's self-deprecating humor and unapologetic honesty about his own dysfunction.

The line between madness and genius is thin. Not to mention more than amply explored in any number of films about tortured artists. But to look at the almost religious ecstasy on Moreau's face is to feel the artist's passion and be inspired by it.

However many millions of dollars Rodriguez set aside for blanks and exploding squibs was a waste. Depp's salary, on the other hand, was money well spent.

Contrary to expectation, it's neither a movie about religion nor the coming together of enemies. What it is, at heart, is a movie about love.

All too often, the second movie of a trilogy is a bridge. ("The Matrix Reloaded," anyone?) As often as not, it feels more like the first half of the last movie than a film in its own right. The Girl Who Played With Fire is no exception.

My only question is this: In the context of these by-the-book pratfalls, is it funny enough?

Short on drama but long on poetry.

Buffed and waxed to within an inch of its life, Stella registers as more of a sequence of slick commercials than an actual drama.

Collapses under the weight of its own pretension, a victim of misogyny trying to pass itself off as female sexual empowerment.

If you saw the French version, well, here it is, in Disney language, with John-Hughes-style slapstick.

An extraordinary film in many ways, the least of which is its unorthodox casting.

For anyone old enough to cross the street without holding hands ... the movie's a reconditioned lemon trying hard to hide its flaws.

In Sheridan's warm and glowing treatment, the moral of the story feels less like a reheated fable than like something utterly, indescribably original.

Zahn is the single biggest reason why Management is a delightfully screwball romantic comedy and not a crazed-stalker film. And why it works. Like watching a puppy chase its own tail, it's a pleasure watching Mike try to win Sue over.