Pete Vonder Haar

The most interesting aspects of the film — the real pressures felt by caregivers; popular perception of the severely disabled — are obliterated by the heavy-handed script and Swank’s inspirational bromides.

Watchmen is indeed gorgeous, with Gibbons' original work reproduced and – in some cases – improved upon by detailed F/X, but even at a healthy two hours and 41 minutes the story feels truncated. Even abrupt.

The direction is lackluster, the child actors – with the exception of Eisenberg – are pretty dismal, and the whole thing is about 15 minutes too long.

Leatherheads is as trifling as Clooney’s second movie (“Good Night and Good Luck”) was significant, but that’s okay. It succeeds where so many other romantic comedies fail because of a superior script and because everyone involved has the good sense not to take themselves too seriously.

Formulaic and creaky as a Harrison Ford action sequence, but sufficiently gussied up with good actors and a decent director so that you don’t entirely mind.

Golf's become such a ridiculously well-heeled pastime that it's refreshing to see it portrayed in its infancy, when clubs were carried like a bunch of kindling and the desolate greens of St. Andrews were more like the hazards of today's game.

Messina, making his directorial debut, keeps it simple. Alex undergoes a surprising amount of personal maturation in a week, but Winstead never lets the character bog down in excessive navel-gazing.

The movie's front-loaded with puerile, junior high humor (and, admittedly, several laugh out loud moments), which is fine, but all this still followed by an increasingly awkward and clichéd third act.

As an official history, Spark shines adequate light; I just wish it had spent a little more time on the shadows.

Very little in Reservation Road ultimately rings true, which makes the anguished theatrics on display that much more exasperating.

Two things come to mind as you watch the first act of Street Kings, the first is how fresh and exciting the movie would’ve been if it was released in 1984, the second is the question, “James Ellroy wrote that?”

There's no denying Banderas' talent as an actor, and he's admittedly fun to watch. The rest of the cast are serviceable, meaning Woodard finds new ways to show us how this Latin heartthrob melts her icy exterior.

There’s a lot of talent up there on the screen, and some authentic laughs, but too much of it is comedy territory that was claimed long ago.

In spite of the tatty "coming of age" familiarity, Johnson's vision seems fresh and vibrant.

Kirk and Mol are convincing, easily inhabiting their respective roles.

Quinn Shephard’s directorial debut, Blame, leans heavily on this persistent despair, yes, but also leverages it in innovative and occasionally startling ways.

As a look at the disenfranchised of America, Explicit Ills could use some work. As a debut, however, it's quite promising. I'm looking forward to seeing what Webber comes up with next.

Your enjoyment of Alpha Dog may very well depend on how put off you are by these facts, as well as how much you buy Timberlake in his role, and how in the mood you are to sit through "River’s Edge" set in the "Entourage" universe.

Decent vampire movies are few and far between, and I’m having a hard time remembering a recent one that impressed me like 30 Days of Night.

To paraphrase the play's most famous song: how do you measure the lien against your soul when you're forced to sit through something as forcibly maudlin as Rent? I dunno, but 525,600 minutes is about how long this movie felt at times.

A sweetly engaging effort that manages a fair amount of charm and innocence in spite of the rather seedy surroundings.

Exactly the kind of thing most of us have in mind when we think "popcorn movie." It's largely brainless, pretty to look at, and produced solely as a lead-in to another moneymaking sequel for Disney.

Not many actors could do justice to the vanilla story presented by Grogan and screenwriters Scott Frank and Don Roos, but Wilson and Aniston – two of the blandest, most uninteresting actors working today – are just the actors to pull it off.

Davis and company need to be taken to task for giving us a movie that makes rescue divers, arguably among the most death-defying of professionals, boring.

For an origin story about one of the most compelling and important characters in history, The Nativity Story is pretty damn boring.

Dark Water isn't a bad horror movie, simply because it isn’t horror at all: a full hour passes before anything remotely scary occurs, and all the suspenseful scenes take place in the final ten minutes (and are all fully shown in the trailer). What's left is tedium and a seemingly endless build-up to nothing much at all, making it a bad movie. Period.

Murphy doesn't have much of a handle on juggling laughs with pathos, and this makes some of the more touching scenes unintentionally amusing. The film, like Augusten's life, is uneven but not without its charms.

300 is a feast for the senses (well, two of them anyway) and an impressive technical achievement. More than that, it's a hell of a lot of fun.