Rob Nelson

Oddly overstuffed with cameos by bigscreen actors playing tongue-in-cheek versions of themselves, Webber's Los Angeles-set, microbudget dramedy delivers some rare and beautiful moments of daddy day-care, but its tone shifts more wildly than a preschooler's disposition and its narrative is stillborn.

Payback is a rarefied conceptual documentary that will appeal to a limited but highly appreciative audience.

Camp X-Ray is most commendable for believably depicting the U.S. military from a female’s point of view.

Slight but winning and often funny, the scrappy Amerindie Wah Do Dem is a fish-out-of-water comedy driven by Sean "Bones" Sullivan's offbeat performance.

Give or take the titular disclosure, John Dies at the End is a thoroughly unpredictable horror-comedy -- and an immensely entertaining one, too.

A possession thriller less terrifying than fun.

Reducing an immensely disturbing, politically byzantine tale to a series of cartoonish vignettes, this celeb-studded biopic squanders a gutsy performance by Amanda Seyfried.

Waiting for Super to deliver the funny is an experience as long as the film itself.

An aptly gorgeous-looking Manhattan meller whose quartet of sexy actors proves no less attractive than the well-mounted picture as a whole.

A typically smart performance by Juliette Binoche isn't enough to keep Elles from drowning in pseudo-intellectual pretension and general banality.

Far less chilling than versions from 1951 and 1982, Universal's latest take on The Thing at least has a strong lead thesp in Mary Elizabeth Winstead, recruited for the studio's bid to turn a tale of ice-cold macho paranoia into a beauty-vs.-beast shocker a la "Alien."

Pulling off the thespian equivalent of running a marathon, the hyperventilating Olsen works awfully hard in the service of a film that, in the end, does little or nothing to preserve her character's integrity.

This documentary plays like an extended episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” deficient as it is in stylistic zeal, investigative spirit and plain old scares.

In the curious absence of religious satire, toilet humor isn't enough to constitute comedy, while the leads' grating performances make 81 minutes feel eternal.

This merciless work of anti-entertainment is arguably admirable for being as disturbingly disgusting as it wants to be.

Straining to be a distaff “Deliverance,” indie thriller Black Rock is unable to shock, much less convince.

The effort of sussing out this satire’s attitude seems silly for the fact that its jokes just aren’t funny enough.

Despite amply funded f/x, including some spectacular muscle-car stunts, the movie motors to the grindhouse with squealing tires and guitars, gratuitous nudity and gore, and a scantily clad greasy-spoon waitress endearingly played by Amber Heard.

Even at 73 minutes, the film is, well, too damn long.

Shovels enough dirt on the Tea Party guru and self-described hockey mom to satisfy her haters, but lacks sufficient humor and insight to make it a must-see for anyone outside the Brit muckraker's fan base.

Gets one's attention but doesn't keep it, due to ill-cued flashbacks, groan-inducing dialogue and wooden performances.

This disarmingly cheeky, intermittently gorgeous trifle would create the perfect bookend to a career begun almost 50 years ago.

A literary film that stands to work best for those who don't read, The Words is a slick, superficially clever compendium of stories about authors of uncertain talent and varying success.

In this case, Montiel's awkward appropriation of gritty crime-drama conventions results in a film that's contrived and implausible, at times absurdly so.

Repellent not only in content but in visual style, writer-director Rob Zombie’s hatchet job on the series he revived so artfully two years ago plays like a violent act of euthanasia upon the huge, brain-dead body of work inspired by the 30-year-old “Halloween.”

Bursting with cheap f/x, the pic is often tedious when not repugnant, but it’s hard to dislike.

Though stretched to a two-hour run time, Doctorow's socially critical tale is reduced to queasy spectacle.

Milkshake sucks all the flavor out of a tasty premise.