Nathan Rabin

Entrapment is ostensibly some sort of action film, but perhaps out of deference to its sleepwalking star, it moves slowly and contains very little actual action.

The Best Man Holiday alternates smoothly between raucous comedy and soap opera for a solid hour... Yet the balance begins to tip toward leaden melodrama in the crazily overloaded third act, which speeds past the line separating crowd-pleasing from crowd-pandering.

Johnny English's international popularity may or may not translate here, but in a sequel-glutted summer, even a mildly amusing time-waster can't help but stand out.

Even with the impressive talent assembled in front of and behind the camera, and a healthy budget for a television movie, Body Bags is still little more than an agreeable lark, and its breezy charm might not have survived a drastic cut in budget and shift in shooting locales.

A glossy, attractive, ultimately empty soap opera that -- despite being based on a true story -- never seems remotely plausible.

A non-movie that seems to wash over audiences without making any kind of impression. Except for those it does impress.

Ushpizin's effortlessly authentic depiction of Jewish orthodoxy--and the palpable, almost ecstatic sense of joy its characters take in it--ultimately tips the film's hand.

Makes a terrific case for the group's historical importance, even though its performances seem more fun to discuss than watch.

Thankfully, State Of The Union's pulpy, adrenalized blaxploitation spin on the secret-agent genre provides the dumb fun its predecessor should have dished out.

Like Boat Trip, another guilty pleasure of mine, Doctor Detroit is so transcendently stupid, gimmicky, and shameless that it almost becomes a smart meta-parody of stupid, gimmicky, shameless high-concept '80s comedies.

All The Light In The Sky is a refreshingly grown-up exploration of a woman at a personal and professional crossroads that’s stronger for never pushing its narrative or its finely wrought lead character in the direction of big moments or bullshit epiphanies. It’s casual, but also quietly moving.

Aided by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Friedkin works economically, lending the film the mark of a master craftsman, albeit of the coldly efficient variety. The terseness and surplus of technical skill make The Hunted surprisingly engaging.

At heart it's a randy, oversexed soap opera in period garb.

It's no surprise that when it ultimately tries to pluck at the heartstrings, it rings hollow. The film lives and dies by speed.

In a star-making performance, Evan Rachel Wood stars as essentially a younger version of Nicole Kidman's media-age femme fatale from "To Die For," an aspiring 15-year-old actress who hides a sharp, calculating mind behind a façade of vapid, chattering self-absorption.

Doesn't pretend to be objective, and the film derives much of its power from the way it invites audiences to look at the rapper's life and times through his own soulful, animated eyes. It doesn't always succeed, and there are times when it feels terribly strained.

Without a unifying authorial voice to tie it together, the film often feels shapeless and rambling, brought together by little more than free-ranging contempt for capitalism's excesses.

Bride Of Chucky is pretty f.cking stupid, but it's also oddly effective in its sheer audaciousness and contempt for good taste. It probably won't win a lot of converts, but for Child's Play fans, horror geeks, and stoners, it should seem like manna from heaven.

It's as notable for what it isn't as for what it is, but in a field full of loud, obnoxious fare, its easygoing affability qualifies as a welcome change of pace.

Mortensen nicely underplays his role, offhandedly tossing off one-liners and making the script's sometimes purple dialogue sound a little less cheesy, but the rest of the film often lurches into hammy overdrive.

As a period production, Belle is gorgeous, dazzling spectacle, replete with ornate costumes, lovely sets, and in Mbatha-Raw, a striking, charismatic lead. But the film never finds a way to invest its narrative with a sense of urgency.

Interior. Leather Bar.’s intriguing curiosity provides ample food for thought, in part because it’s the rare film that devotes much of its running time to its own principals discussing what, if anything, the film ultimately means.

I Spy confirms Wilson's ability to turn mediocre, mercenary endeavors into fun crowd-pleasers. Of course, Wilson starring in I Spy is like Phil Jackson coaching a junior-high basketball team, but as long as the results are this entertaining, it's doubtful audiences will care.

It's glossy, dumb fun that is diverting enough but forgotten 20 minutes after it's over.

It’s a slick crowd-pleaser, but it’s perversely unrevealing about anything other than Manganiello’s affection for a the stripper experience.

Embracing ugliness, lousy production values, and borderline hysteria as virtues, A Dirty Shame is one for the cultists, a proud retreat back into the sandbox of sexual juvenilia, a potty-mouthed manifesto from an elder statesman of shock.

Regrettably, Bate uses many of the tools of tabloid television in making his case, including heavy-handed reenactments, an ominous, sinister score, and overly dramatic narration delivered in a voice shaking with outrage.

A mess, but for the most part it's a fascinating mess. It helps that it boasts great acting all around--not just from Cusack, Thornton, and Jolie, but also from Cate Blanchett

Simultaneously a contrived piece of hokum and an absorbing, old-fashioned mystery.

This is time-worn, overly familiar material, indifferently directed by journeyman Tim Story, but Hart’s manic comic invention and textured persona elevates it somewhere beyond the level of pleasing mediocrity onto the slightly more distinguished realm of the agreeable-enough time waster.

The heroic struggle of its subject is clearly meant to inspire, but it also seems destined to shame weak-willed viewers who'd crumble under much less formidable obstacles.

Explorers was rushed into theaters before Dante could work out the kinks or create a third act he was satisfied with, and the result is a strange, wounded beast, filled with wonderful sequences and homemade charm, but also confused and anticlimactic.

Isn't as sharp or consistent as Murphy's "The Nutty Professor," but it's an amusing, lightweight diversion.

Brown sounds guarded throughout, and as a result, Jim Brown: All-American provides a curiously remote portrait that's often compelling, but seems to conceal as much as it reveals.

Dark Water devolves into something resembling genre schlock, albeit the kind featuring zesty supporting performances from the classy, Oscar-nominated likes of John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, and Pete Postlethwaite.

MacFarlane’s follow-up feels less like a film than like an extremely long, fairly inspired live-action episode of Family Guy, one that’s only as strong as the latest gag or riff. And this being a Seth MacFarlane production, those gags and riffs are of varying levels of quality.

It may be a dishonest, xenophobic, exploitative act of historical revisionism, but it's effective, and Jack Cardiff's cinematography lends Rambo's comic-book adventures an epic sweep.

It wants to humanize the plight of the disabled, but it undermines its worthy aims by presenting its leads as martyrs and saints.

Gets off to a bumpy start and runs into trouble along the way, but once it gets going, it's surprisingly warm and engaging.

Uncovered could easily come off as dull or strident, but the administration's arrogance and disregard for the safeguards and transparency necessary for democracy give the documentary an outraged charge that overshadows its staid execution.

Once Milk And Honey stops lurching after huge, actorly moments of near-psychotic intensity, it loosens up and actually gets around to telling a reasonably compelling human story.

Dragnet has its share of sharp gags and memorable lines, but for the most part, it’s entertaining but forgettable, a fun romp that assuredly hits all the expected mismatched buddy-cop-movie beats and serves up the subgenre’s clichés straight, rather than subverting or lampooning them.

A sprint when it should be a marathon, Yossi & Jagger crackles with promise, but much of it goes unrealized. Without the time or resources to develop its characters and overstuffed plot, the result feels like the Cliffs Notes for a longer, more satisfying film.

There's a terrific short film somewhere inside Mark Moskowitz's feature-length documentary Stone Reader. Unfortunately, it's buried within a flabby 128-minute slog that feels like a rough draft nobody had the heart to edit down.

The General's Daughter isn't a poorly made or acted film, but it's so shallow, hypocritical, and sleazy that it's difficult not to find it repulsive.

Cleverly realizing a novel premise, it's a slight but charming look at the lighter side of WWII.

It boldly subverts stereotypes and challenges conventional wisdom by presenting affable Korean and Indian antiheroes who are just as sex-crazed, irresponsible, mischief-prone, and chemically altered as their white counterparts.

Parkland finds a new angle on an exhaustively chronicled and debated subject by focussing on the grim practicalities of the situation.

During his clumsiest moments, Davis' fondness for provocation rises to the surface, which is unfortunate, since it weakens the impact of his many salient points about how American men are socialized to be warriors.

Undemanding, upscale, and agreeable enough in a low-key kind of way. It's a film of subtle, ingratiating charm rather than explosive revelations.

The film is ostensibly about sex and swinging, but in depicting the complex boundaries of the sexual fringe, it ends up saying a lot about the joys and frustrations of maintaining any relationship.

The astonishing visual poetry of Step Into Liquid's best surfing footage nearly compensates for the mindless boosterism of Brown's constant narration and the often comically banal observations of the film's largely homogeneous master surfers.

Dealin’ With Idiots is at its strongest when it forgets about plot and character development altogether (which is most of the time) and gives itself over to the laid-back pleasure of improvisation among veteran professionals finding and exploring a good groove together.

To its credit and sometimes detriment, Grand Piano keeps a frothing-at-the-mouth level of insane melodrama going for 75 minutes, aided by Wood’s sweaty, terrified performance, a screenplay rich in ridiculous contrivances, and a swooping camera that never stands still.

Like his makeshift societies, Garland's tantalizing set-ups tend to unravel in unsatisfying ways.

In the end, Tower Heist isn't a black Ocean's Eleven or a bold leap forward for feature-film distribution, just a passable piece of commercial entertainment that falls closer to product than art.

Fatboy nearly succeeds in spite of itself, thanks to Pegg, who makes a character who does some detestable things seem strangely likeable.

Thile has the charisma, presence, and emotional transparency of a great documentary subject, but How To Grow A Band maintains a respectable distance from its subject that ultimately doesn't work in its favor.

Keeping Mum never really gets going, and it inches to the finish line like a narcoleptic turtle.

By recounting Abbas' ordeal as an endless inarticulate monologue, The Prisoner reduces it to a dull anecdote--timely and relevant, perhaps, but an anecdote all the same.

Night Of The Creeps has all the ingredients of a top-notch cult movie, yet Dekker too often ends up recycling clichés rather than subverting or spoofing them.

Notorious suffers from biopic-itis, that regrettable tendency to reduce complicated lives to a greatest-hits assemblage of melodramatic highs and agonizing lows.

In spite of some punchy scenes, crackling dialogue, and fine performances, Broken City is hopelessly overmatched. It has Academy Award dreams, but a detective-show heart.

Sex Drive offers a limp variation on a hoary old teen-film trope.

Perfume is ultimately an unmistakable failure, but there's a strange majesty to its epic overreaching. It can be faulted for many things, but not for lacking the courage of its convictions.

Rambo works best as a pure action movie devoted to delivering the cheapest kicks imaginable--and to a much lesser extent, to bringing attention to human-rights violations and genocide in Asia.

Like its protagonist, Management is dopey and impractical, but strangely winning all the same.

Dancy’s character has difficulty processing information and dealing with emotion, but even he could probably see through this schmaltz.

Gyllenhaal and Peña's relationship, a sort of heterosexual love affair, is depicted with a sense of tenderness and care that does not extend to the cartoonish villains that dominate the film's lackluster final act.

A sports movie like every other, but the excellent, lived-in performances of Cube and Palmer make it a mildly affecting.

It's difficult to figure out exactly where the film might be heading at any given point, since it follows the loping, meandering rhythms and casualness of a character study rather than conforming to the conventions of any particular genre.

There's something almost perversely old-fashioned about Flyboys.

Don't be fooled by the action-packed DVD cover: Pacino spends roughly five minutes of Deerfield racing, and two hours learning, from a woman facing death, how to embrace life.

Tennant keeps his extravagantly stupid new comedy breezing along affably on the strength of photogenic locales, obscenely beautiful stars, a laid-back soundtrack, and a wholesale unwillingness to take itself the least bit seriously.

The Dukes could use more music and less sap, but it's refreshing to see a film about the problems of working-class men on the far side of middle age, struggling just to get by.

It isn’t exactly good, but for audiences in search of nothing more than a few silly chuckles, it should prove good enough.

He seems to have given up on making art long ago; these days, all he wants to do is entertain, and with Stolen, he succeeds, albeit only on the guilty-pleasure level. Like seemingly the sum of late-period Cage, Stolen is unashamedly cheese, but at least it's cheese of a pungent, flavorful vintage.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a movie about the ultimate stoner would be undone by fuzzy execution and lack of ambition.

Dolphin Tale is as casual as a pleasant afternoon nap and about as substantive.

It's refreshing to see a film that so directly addresses the issues and concerns of a vast, overlooked demographic, but it'd be much more satisfying if Boynton did more than just affably skate along the surface.

Sensual but profoundly silly, Silk is ultimately little more than softcore porn with arthouse trappings, a moony, dopily romantic "Red Shoe Diaries" variation for the NPR set.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its cornball charm, thanks largely to the confident work of old pros Carell, Arkin, and Buscemi, but it’s ultimately a big, gaudy, predictable show, strictly for the rubes and tourists.

Engaging enough, but its characters’ path to redemption would be more satisfying if it weren’t greased with authentically ’80s-style casual sexism, gay panic, and frat-comedy clichés.

Safe House does altogether too good a job establishing Washington as a seemingly unbeatable adversary: He brings so much gravity to his role that Reynolds seems hopelessly overmatched.

Rudd ably carries the film while retaining a light touch, though even with Rudd in the lead, it's still a featherweight trifle, an afternoon nap of a feel-good comedy.

The dialogue is witty and piquant, and the supporting players droll, but the labored farce of madcap marital misunderstandings are as flatfooted as the dance numbers are memorably airy.

Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas give Vincent Van Gogh's famously tortured existence the melodramatic treatment in 1956's Lust For Life, and the result falls closer to high camp than high art.

At best, Lay The Favorite registers as cartoon sociology, but the film's featherweight charms dissipate whenever it moves away from the world of gambling and devotes time to go-nowhere subplots involving Hall's bland romance with Jackson, or Willis' troubled but fundamentally healthy marriage to Zeta-Jones.

There is a time and a place for scruffy independent also-rans like this, and that time and place is the 2 a.m. slot on IFC.

Hyde Park On Hudson once again finds "Meatballs" star Bill Murray leading a populist, crowd-pleasing slobs-vs.-snobs comedy, but this time, his role as Roosevelt reflects his status as a silver-haired heavyweight thespian.

I found a great deal to like about She-Devil, especially Streep's performance, but it's easy to figure out why it didn't find an audience. It deals with just about everything American film-goers traditionally don't want to think about: old people, fat people, ugly people, nursing homes, class, money, and the ever-present specter of death. Also, it involves a dog dying.

The degree to which Shopaholic actually works is a testament to the looks, charm, and comedic chops of Fisher, who stole "Wedding Crashers" and has a gift for slapstick that places her somewhere between Téa Leoni and Lucille Ball in the pantheon of foxy redheaded physical comediennes.

In spite of End Of The Spear's fundamental conservatism, the missionaries' disastrous initial encounter with the Waodani ultimately teaches the progressive message that when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of foreign cultures, Bibles and superior technology are no substitute for a thorough understanding of their language and culture.

There's a smart, funny, observant comedy-drama to be made about the role our romantic pasts play in determining our futures, but director Mark Mylod and screenwriters Jennifer Crittenden and Gabrielle Allan are less interested in making that movie than in cycling Faris through a series of non-starting encounters with one-note-joke ex-flings.

The result feels like cinematic health food: vaguely good for you but less than delicious.

Deserves credit for attempting something more emotional and dramatic than the typical Ferrell gagfest, but Harrelson and Benjamin's earnest subplots cost the film comic momentum and big laughs without adding much in return.

The Reaping is Bible camp, pure and simple. And for bad-movie lovers, it's manna from heaven.