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.