Paula Nechak

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.

Director Martha Coolidge attempts to keep the film grounded in reality, but the movie flutters away from her control.

Outside of a smart performance by Shawn Hatosy as Tim Dunphy, there just isn't much that's enlightening or new in this intimate recollection.

The actors navigate tough characters through emotional mayhem with such intense determination it's a shame they're undercut by the intrusive voice-over.

It's a well-acted but rote and strictly by the book "war movie."

Takes itself awfully seriously. It feels a bit like a grudge piece, laboring to grasp at large themes, but it is as trivialized as the capricious world it explores.

A heady, impressionistic mixture of biography, fantasy and social history in which it isn't always clear which is which.

Maybury's attempt at a more mainstream movie is really just a simple love story cloaked in a lot of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

While young Coppola is a pro with her camera, she'd be wise to brush up on her storytelling skills.

The film ultimately has no contrast and we can't figure out whom to like or dislike.

The film leaves an acrid taste with the viewer who sits through its long and winding tale of tortured courtship.

The restless, selfish, unfriendly people created by Lachow as protagonists only make the movie hard to warm up to. It's more akin to fingernails scraping a blackboard than an updated morality play.

The film is dominated by computer-generated effects and they're most of its problem -- they don't give us anything to emotionally attach to or invest in.

Feels the scratches of too much time and tinkling and is as disjointed as a dislocated shoulder.

Flies coach instead of first class, despite a charismatic cast.

There's not an original idea rattling around in the empty-headed but gorgeous-to-behold period film.

A pedestrian movie with a predictable romance at its heart.

In the end, it trivializes the psychological complexity of the girl's post-traumatic stress and betrays a game group of actors who struggle to find balance between the alternately dark drama and the silly, over-the-top melodrama.

A mess of incohesiveness and fragmented storytelling.

Unfortunately, the life has been sucked out of DiCamillo's story about a brave, unusual little mouse.

Shakespeare's comical, all-too-human tale of lust, foreplay and wordplay is buried beneath bad taste.

The film strains to achieve the comedic gait of "Wag the Dog" or the improvised, overlapping style that so defined Robert Altman's Hollywood movie, "The Player."

A low-maintenance crowd-pleaser, but we've seen the entire film, in thematic snippets, before.

We leave hungry for more of the film's substantial, if less physically perfect, subjects.

The film, despite the occasional gross-out joke, can't disguise the fact that it's a sweet old sappy -- even dated -- love story. Only Molly Ringwald is missing.

Never offers much enlightenment through its message.

A decidedly mixed bag.

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.