Nathan Rabin

Bettany's performance consists entirely of a purposeful frown paired with a menacing glare: He goes about his godly business with solemn, no-frills intensity. The film follows suit.

Director Craig McCall approaches Cardiff with something approaching awe, though his subject views his accomplishments with the good-natured humility befitting a proper English gentleman.

It's all quirk, posturing, attitude, and needless exertion signifying nothing beyond its own sad need to impress.

Everything is pitched to jarring emotional extremes of good and evil, joy and pain, chitlin'-circuit broad comedy, and melodramatic speeches.

The Conspirator should skip theaters altogether and become the first film released straight to middle-school history classes, where the standards for what can generously be deemed entertainment are much lower.

It's rare for a sequel to extensively acknowledge its own pointlessness, let alone make the unnecessary nature of its existence a recurring theme, the way Scream 4 does. Then again, the Scream franchise has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to deconstructing itself and the rules of the slasher genre.

Like "Man In The Moon," American applies a thick gloss of reverence and sentimentality to the story of a comic pioneer who made his living challenging the kinds of neat, convenient, slickly packaged narratives presented here.

If Your Highness often feels like an inside joke, the principals neglected to let the audience in on the fun.

With a little tweaking, this easily could have veered into grindhouse exploitation or mindless wish-fulfillment, but Schwimmer's detached, theatrical approach to his material makes it is more cerebral than visceral, and more Steppenwolf Theatre than Charles Bronson.

Browning has wildly expressive eyes and body language, but she turns wooden when delivering Snyder and Steve Shibuya's alternately purple and stilted banter. Like the film, she seems to regard plot and dialogue as necessary evils.

The film emerges as a powerful, even shattering look as music's power to unite where it once divided.

It's agreeably mediocre, a cinematic paperback novel transformed into the kind of fare folks mindlessly consume on planes and forget about before touching down.

Paul is a little sloppy and a little sappy, but the filmmakers' passion for their subject matter carries it over the occasional rough spot.

The film tells such a compelling, expansive story that its unwillingness to plumb its subject's psychological depths feels forgivable, though regrettable.

Shadyac didn't need to channel his angst into narrative fiction: He just needed to look in the mirror to find a symbol of Hollywood's arrogance and misplaced priorities.

Grace and his collaborators set out to make a typical '80s sex comedy and succeeded all too well; most of the movies they're paying homage to weren't very good, either.

The Chaperone is being marketed as a comedy, though no one seems to have told anyone involved.

An unabashed valentine to Winters, but like an unfortunate number of valentines, it proves a little embarrassing to the giver and recipient alike.

Well-acted and artfully (though conventionally) made, The Way Back tells a compelling story, regardless of whether it's based on truth or a fabrication.

It's an emotionally claustrophobic drama, played with frayed nerves and raw emotions, and it serves as an unrelenting glimpse into relationship hell. It could easily have devolved into sweaty, pretentious melodrama or ersatz John Cassavetes if Cianfrance and his actors didn't maintain perfect control over the material.

With deadening predictability, the filmmakers have reduced a definitive satire about the flaws and foibles of human nature into family-friendly sub-Disney pabulum about an affable slacker who finally musters up the courage to ask a pretty girl at work for a date.

That's How Do You Know in a nutshell: preposterous characters lurching through painfully contrived scenarios.

Saw has shown a ferocious unwillingness to evolve.

Heartless gets progressively better as it goes along, and benefits from a poignant late cameo from Timothy Spall as Sturgess' beloved father, but it never recovers from a dull first hour.

It does justice to a subject who made his life and death works of art.

Burlesque is a terrible film that will delight nearly everyone who sees it, whether they're 12-year-old Christina Aguilera fans or bad-movie buffs angling for a guilty pleasure.

So relentlessly generic and familiar, it might as well be called Crowd-Pleasing Ethnic-Food-Based Coming-Of-Age Comedy-Drama.

Chris Morris' corrosive black comedy Four Lions explores the lighter side of jihad. It's a ballsy romp through one of the least lighthearted subjects imaginable.

It's ultimately a tale of heroism in the face of fearsome, powerful opposition, but as stubborn pride masquerading as ideological purity proves Wilson's Achilles heel, the film's heroes reveal themselves as flawed to an almost fatal extent, and messily, fascinatingly human.

The bluntness wouldn't be so oppressive if the film weren't so austere and glacially paced: Welcome To The Rileys is way too humorless.

Just because a film takes place entirely in the long shadow of death doesn't mean it has to be this relentlessly dour.

The Architect wears its heavy social consciousness like an albatross, and Tauber's plodding, earnest direction does little to wean the material away from its stage roots.

Rugrats Go Wild! represents one giant leap forward for corporate cartoon synergy, but one similarly large step back for the Rugrats franchise.

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

Instead of building toward a grand romantic climax, it just gets sillier before exploding into a torrent of unintended laughs.

Wag The Dog is an oft-hilarious, witty, scathing satire that represents four gifted if uneven artists (De Niro, Hoffman, Levinson, and Mamet) at the top of their respective games.

A film divided against itself. Granted, neither part is particularly distinguished or appealing but the old-timey sports-movie elements at least possess a quaint charm. Unfortunately, that's wholly negated by the film's stumbling attempts at comic relief.

The Big Hit goes beyond the call of duty in terms of hateful, crass exploitation.

A good cast, terrific soundtrack, and genial spirit all help the film go down smoothly.

Another contrived, unconvincing romantic comedy that once again mixes stale sitcom humor with laughable attempts at pathos and emotional depth.

Made with just enough craft to keep it from being the instantly dated camp howler its title promises, but it's quickly apparent that there's no thought or originality under its grim, familiar surface.

Chick's underwhelming exploration of post-millennial angst is as empty and vacant as its protagonist's inexpressive peepers.

Galifianakis' magnetic performance suggests murky psychological depths the film doesn't have the substance to plumb.

The film exists for its shots of telegenic youngsters busting loose to a bankable soundtrack, and it's the cheesy dialogue, overstuffed plot, and predictable character arcs that come across as superfluous.

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

Dimly lit, emotionally empty, and devoid of thrills, Bangkok Dangerous should disappoint Cage fans looking for Wicker Man-style camp thrills just as thoroughly as action buffs looking for a passable thriller. It's never close to good, and it can't even get bad right.

It lacks the conviction to embrace its own garish awfulness, resulting in little more than tedious historical and patriotic hokum, a preposterous potboiler done in by slack pacing and pedestrian execution.

Above all, the film is an extended love letter to the EV1, a sleek GM electric marvel that, by Paine's reckoning, marks the single greatest innovation in human technology since the wheel.

Though it never regains the inspiration or comic density of its brilliant first 20 minutes, The Simpsons Movie keeps the laughs coming from start to finish, a feat as rare and wonderful in film as it has been through 18 years of television.

Day Of The Dead is more like Romero's scorching 1973 satire The Crazies, in which anarchy reigns and the very concept of heroes dissolves. The action at the end is lurid, made giddily disgusting by Tom Savini's amazing gore effects, and made gripping by Romero's gift for the cold logic of systemic breakdown. Still, some audiences may give up early, fed up with the shrill claustrophobia.

There's a tight, urgent, and timely film hidden inside Shot In The Heart, but it's not always worth forging through all the gratuitous bells and whistles to find it.

Takes almost two self-infatuated, smarmy, condescending, cringe-inducingly sentimental hours to reach its pre-ordained conclusion.

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.

This potentially sharp working-class fantasy proves strangely unsatisfying.

Driven by Dominique's personal magnetism, The Agronomist is a haunting, inspirational valentine to free speech and human resilience.

A surprisingly fresh and funny feature-length look at an unrelentingly filthy vaudeville gag that's been passed down from comic to comic like an urban legend, often changing with every telling.

The Bridge packs a visceral emotional wallop. How could it not? But along with plenty of difficult questions, Steel's film leaves a sour, disturbing aftertaste.

Though it's never wise to underestimate the power or universal appeal of Rai's cleavage and lustrous hair, that's about all that sets the doggedly mediocre The Last Legion apart from every other sword-and-sandal epic about the origins of Camelot.

Unsubtle but gripping.

Funny and realistically romantic, but almost never at the same time.

The filmmakers don't seem to realize that if a movie with a mythology this groan-inducingly convoluted doesn't have a sense of humor about itself, the laughs are going to come anyway. They just won't be of the intentional variety.

Like the forgotten blaxploitation schlock it often resembles, the film aspires to nothing but cheap thrills, but while it's plenty cheap, it's far from thrilling.

I was never bored, even if the film ultimately amounts to little more than a very expensive freak show. Just before slurring one of the all-time great terrible last lines ("I want to go to dog heaven"), Kilmer utters, with sublime understatement, a line that doubles as the film's epitaph: "Well, that didn't work out." Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco.

A vibrant, funny, fully realized slice of oft-overlooked cultural, show-business, and black history. It's better than the film whose genesis it chronicles, though inherently doomed to be nowhere near as important.

As Ray nears its abrupt ending, it veers into camp silliness, complete with a psychedelic freak-out withdrawal sequence straight out of a Roger Corman LSD epic.

Propelled by a fine Tomandandy score and a savvy assortment of seductive new-wave hits, Attraction is top-notch trash, a guilty pleasure designed for the decadent 14-year-old in everyone.

Everything an action-comedy should be. It achieves through parody what most films in the genre can't accomplish straight.

Differences would have benefited from a more cerebral lead actor, but O’Neal does a good job of capturing Bogdanovich’s ingratiating passion for cinema and his fatal hubris, and the script scores some clever jabs at the vapid self-absorption of show-biz types.

As a featherweight trifle rooted in young death, an endless mourning process, and quasi-incestuous stirrings, the film suffers from jarring tonal shifts on a continual basis.

A bad-movie-lover's heaven, and a good-movie-lover's hell.

Faithfully recreates a bygone era of larger-than-life filmmakers and stars.

An unforgettable tribute to a remarkable life, Sister Helen is inspirational in a way a film about a more conventionally pious religious figure could never be. Travis seems to be the antithesis of a cardboard saint.

Astonishingly boring.

Laughing at this turkey might not necessarily make you a redneck, but it sure does make you easily amused.

A punishingly awful slasher film with monosyllabic banter dreadful enough to make viewers yearn for the sophisticated repartee of earlier Dark efforts like "White Bunbusters."

An initially engaging but ultimately wearying combination of naturalistic acting, cinéma vérité camerawork, and broadly melodramatic plotting.

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.

Could and should have been a giddy, tongue-in-cheek action-comedy romp. Instead, it's a meandering action-drama, in which nearly all of the abundant laughs are unintentional.

The film's heart and soul belong to O'Hara and to Levy, whose folk-music burnout has the shell-shocked expression of someone who's been to hell and never quite made it back.

Writer-director Chris Kentis has dreamed up an ingenious premise, but he botches its execution. Every once in a while, the film stumbles upon a twist that ratchets up the tension, but then haphazardly discards it.

Workingman's Death's primary pleasures are aesthetic. Glawogger is an extraordinarily elegant filmmaker with a photographer's eye for striking compositions.

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.

They're now the first major all-girl punk band to inspire a bleary, excessive, and altogether mediocre big-screen biography.

Sidney Lumet’s uncomfortably intense adaptation of Edward Lewis Wallant’s novel gets inside Nazerman’s skin and lets the audience see the world as he does: as unspeakably vulgar, corrupt, and oppressive, a nightmare from which he cannot wake up.

It's become a tired cliché for characters in "serious" science-fiction movies not to realize they're dead or dying, but Stay as a film doesn't seem to realize that it's dead from the outset, an unconvincing automaton grimly going through the motions.

Escapism raised to the level of art, Singin' In The Rain inventively satirizes the illusions of the filmmaking process while celebrating their life-affirming joy. Half parody, half homage, the movie became the apex of the splashy MGM musical, while showcasing the collaborative possibilities of the studio system.

A pathetic wallow, first in misanthropy and later in sentimentality.

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

James Brown, B.B. King, and a dazzling array of top African, Afro-Cuban, and African-American talent finally gets its own solo spotlight in Soul Power.

Essentially "Bring It On" minus the effervescence, star power, energy, and brisk pace -- in other words, everything that made it bearable.

The advanced 3-D technology of today meets the mothballed clichés of yesteryear in Step Up 3D.

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.

Like much of Mann's work, it's an unabashed love letter to the counterculture. But this time out, Mann has made an unintentionally vicious satire of the fuzzyheaded self-intoxication and impracticality of the progressive left, a film that's far more scathing than anything Tom Wolfe could dream up.

Shrink is exactly like virtually all his (Spacey) post-"American Beauty" vehicles: flashy, phony, nakedly melodramatic, and full of big actorly moments disconnected from real life.

Like too many horror movies these days, House of Wax goes for scares, but settles for being gory and deeply unpleasant.

Parts of Get Rich Or Die Tryin' crackle with energy, vitality, and texture, like the prison-shower fight that descends into a weird sort of slapstick farce. But 50's leaden turn drags the film down. Scenes celebrating his personal and professional triumph ring hollow, since Rich never really gets under his skin.