Paula Nechak

It's the script -- by director Mark Fergus (who also wrote the adapted script for "Children of Men") and Hawk Ostby -- that lets everyone down.

A decidedly mixed bag.

Chereau's film is disjointed and abrupt and it rages when is should be deft. We're given too little too late and, despite the lessons that lie within the affair, the lines between enlightenment and nihilism blur.

An awful, misanthropic, deadly unfunny and badly acted war-of-the-sexes travesty.

An almost too-sophisticated comedy, pitting the New World mentality and brash pugnaciousness of America against the staid arrogance of custom that defines the French bourgeoisie.

While the film shuns the glamour or glitz that an American movie might demand, Scherfig tosses us a romantic scenario that is just as simplistic as a Hollywood production.

The jokes run dry, the situation is redundant, the cast becomes tiresome and the running time is interminable.

Assails with its in-your-face, repulsively compelling (like a train wreck) brutality.

Wenham and Porter make the film better than it should be.

Darkly funny.

For all its moodiness, despair and disconnect, I've Loved You So Long is all about acknowledging human error and embracing ties -- to family and life -- that can't be undone.

The film is inherently calculated and cold, so smugly satisfied with itself and its surprise final trick that it seems to be running its own con to convince us the script's house of cards is actually substantial, original and slick.

The performances by Davidtz, Weston, Wilson and especially Adams stand out as Morrison paints his character study with raw, true bits continually tested by the absurdities of pain life dishes up.

An odd charmer with a whisper of autobiography (Blitz makes his film's protagonist a stutterer, just as the director was in school) and it's made even better by young lead actor Reece Thompson.

What it doesn't have is a script that has anything original, cohesive, or, gasp -- funny -- to say.

The two women -- as well as the always marvelous Bill Nighy as Blanchett's "older" husband -- run roughshod over its third act flaws and, with their exquisitely detailed performances, make it better than it is. It's an actor's triumph.

Much ado about very little because it takes no stand and gives little insight into the Chopper's psyche.

Doesn't offer much texture or depth of character.

It's a quiet anti-war film full of lovely, heartbreakingly assured performances and real situations and responses.

Instead of making fun of the series' fans and their lifestyle, Galaxy Quest targets actors and how an onscreen image can forever lock a performer in a particular role. And that proves to be its saving grace.

Pawlikowski has made a gorgeously ambiguous film -- based upon a novel by Helen Cross -- that is blessedly hard to tag; in fact, it's a compilation of genres and moods -- comedy, romance and diabolical thriller -- and that is its core strength and freshness.

The director's tenacity has resulted in a breathtaking as well as heartbreaking adventure of life and death.

Its only constant is that it's strangely eloquent and quite original.

There's something flat and obscure about this well-acted stalker movie.

There's a vicious, crude nerve that snakes through this sequel and it leaves no group unscarred -- but unfortunately, women and the handicapped take most of the thrusts.

It resorts to a story line so predictable that its willingness to go so earnestly into unoriginal territory is doubly disappointing since its first half had so much more going for it.

It's not the direction that feels flaccid in this film. Surprisingly, it's the stories themselves, which provide a bit of a giggle but little else.

Because the subjects are all mellowing into grandparenthood and their abrasive, wilder days are behind them, this particular "scrapbook" isn't as heavy hitting and hard-edged as its predecessors.