Nathan Rabin

Heavily indebted to the early work of Jim Jarmusch, both for its evocative use of black and white and its tone of deadpan quirkiness, Suddenly is typical arthouse fare, long on atmosphere and fine acting but short on urgency and ambition.

Garai's flowery, overwritten narration proves irritating in the movie's first half, then unfortunately sets the tone for a fatal second-half descent into soap operatics, dippy dialogue, and airless melodrama.

"Christmas" won't wow anyone with its audacity or originality, but it's bound to make plenty of people happy with its slick, crowd-pleasing familiarity.

The gimmicky yet strangely moving new fright flick The Signal distinguishes itself not through originality, but by smartly integrating just about every popular trend afflicting contemporary horror films.

"Potter" periodically brings Zellweger's charming drawings to life in elegantly animated sequences that are as delightful and lyrical as the rest of the film is stilted and clumsy.

Marginally better than its predecessor, but only because "Next Friday" lowered standards so far that only a homemade cockfighting video would have failed to surpass it.

TMNT confuses “dimly lit” for “gritty” and humorless for substantive. It’s afraid of being too fun or too light, and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a Nolan film or a 21 Jump Street-style spoof.

Corey Haim plus Corey Feldman plus Joel Schumacher doesn't seem like a foolproof formula for a good movie, but when the three oft-maligned figures united for 1987's horror-comedy The Lost Boys, the result was briskly entertaining.

Arteta’s well-intentioned film version feels simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked.

The film is essentially a skillful advertising-industry infomercial that speaks its subject’s slick aesthetic language.

Like Affleck's performance, Hollywoodland has its affecting moments. But generally it feels like an HBO original movie, where respectable but uninspired execution mars a fascinating subject and great cast.

There’s an element of self-deprecation to Hogan’s performance—a winking, grinning acknowledgment of the character’s absurdity that nicely undercuts the macho fantasy.

While the film's social-satire elements are flat and overly familiar, its dry absurdity is unmistakably Lynchian.

"Hilary And Jackie" director Anand Tucker establishes and maintains an appropriately delicate tone, apart from the presence of cartoonish, jarring man-eater Bridgette Wilson, who seems to have wandered in from a much cruder comedy.

What makes Curious George such an enduring figure is that he embodies much of what's wonderful about childhood.

Myers returns as his menagerie of repulsive characters, but this time, his frantic mugging feels more like an insipid parlor trick than ever.

Rugrats: The Movie gets off to a good start, with some amusing, albeit tame, satire revolving around the status-conscious, materialistic lives of the toddlers' parents. But after the Rugrats get lost, the filmmakers focus almost exclusively on the irritating little brats, and the film devolves into an interminable episode of the show, albeit one in which things periodically slow down for forgettable songs.

At its best, A Series Of Unfortunate Events is the stuff nightmares are made of, a sick joke of a film that realizes the best children's entertainment doesn't hide from the bleaker side of life, but plunges into the void and respects kids enough to assume they can handle it.

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.

In making The Matrix's leaden answer to "The Phantom Menace," the Wachowski brothers seem to be afflicted with George Lucas Syndrome: They're so enthralled by the convoluted mythology of their own private universe that they've lost touch with its human core.

Ted is never stronger than when Wahlberg and MacFarlane's Ted hang out, riff, and luxuriate in an easy friendship, but as it lurches to a conclusion, Ted unwisely devotes far too much of its time to a plot it would be better off ignoring.

Like its fellow crowd-depressor "Blue Valentine," Beautiful Boy offers the antithesis of escapism: a claustrophobic, punishingly intense, beautifully measured exploration of the depths of human despair.

An affable, breezy, but undistinguished kiddie comedy.

A lovely, sweet, funny, romantic, and supremely worthwhile endeavor that unfortunately takes longer to wrap up than it should.

Incident is too reverent for its own good. It could use a big blast of Herzog-like madness, but it sticks to the conventional show-business satire's arsenal of clichés.

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.

Friedkin's latest rivals his Druid horror flick "The Guardian" for sheer lunacy--Bug remains disconcerting, real, and raw. It poignantly suggests that some lost souls would rather be crazy and doomed than alone.

Stays unrelentingly pleasant, but affability is a poor substitute for laughs or chemistry.