Robert Wilonsky

Not good enough to overcome its status as damaged goods, which is almost a shame, since audiences will miss Billy Bob Thornton's best performance, and hairpiece, in years.

As stirring as it is slight, as effective as it is familiar.

Leguizamo is all twitches and spasms; there's not a bit of subtlety in his high-wire performance. By the time you get past it, the film bogs down in dime-store potboiling.

Is it enough to make us like a thing we used to love? For most, that rekindling of an old flame will be good enough.

This all-star Euro-indie is stultifyingly torturous.

An ethereal, creepy, almost breathtaking meditation on the life of a mind snapped in two.

Travolta is stuck giving a remarkable performance in a film so trivial and offensive its mere existence is as loathsome as it is laughable.

It's too easy, but here goes: This movie's a Loser. Sorry.

Sometimes junk is junk, no matter how fancy the platter upon which it's served. Which isn't to say A History of Violence is useless junk. It provides a few pleasures and a few giggles; it's a comedy, after all, an action movie in which things unfold at a deadpan pace.

Smith used to make movies to make fun of movies like Jersey Girl; now he's just another guy working the assembly line, which won't make you a sell-out if no one buys it.

The only thing worse than second-generation Guy Ritchie is fourth-generation Quentin Tarantino, and this movie has the musty smell of 1995 all over it.

Love it or hate it, you won't be able to leave it alone.

Its exquisiteness can overwhelm in a single sitting.

Never quite works, despite the wonderful performances or the decency in the screenplay's margins.

To say it's better than it has any right to be gives the original too much credit and the remake not enough.

The 3D, effective but not yet totally awesome, masks a world of sins: Ghosts can be an awfully tedious voyage-to-the-bottom-of-the-sea.

Clooney has become a movie star, and the Coens have given him his very own "It Happened One Night." The man, and the movie, are downright bona fide.

Capturing the Friedmans does not end after its credits roll; audiences will try the case over and over again in their heads. Jarecki does not judge, but leaves only tragic clues for us to ponder.

For all its kinetic energy, for all its camera tricks, for all its dark humor, there's still something a bit off about these Rules, and it's not really Avary's fault.

Worst movie of the year.

Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.

Runs out of breath and collapses into a heap of feel-good endings that turn a soaring feeling into a sinking one. But by then, the audience that adores it will forgive it its sins.

It's easily the ugliest film Gilliam's ever made, a movie shot with a lens someone forgot to wipe. It's also his loudest: Every scene is amped up to 11, and every line of dialogue is delivered as though it's a cry for help from the bottom of the well.

The movie, which feels as amateurish as a student film made for cable access, doesn't deliver the goods; the gotcha moment never comes.

Aspires to be a "Beach Blanket Bingo" redux with a gangbang Grease finale, but it plays like junior high Neil LaBute filmed by an elementary school AV squad.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of About a Boy is how substantial it plays -- as a feel-good film with weight, a knowing comedy with dramatic depth.

It puts us in the shoes of men and women for whom the war is not something distant and intangible but a bloodbath in their own back yard, which makes them the very definition of embedded journalists.

It strains to be funny where the original's gags were efficiently deadpan, yet it's also so unbearably lazy, stooping to cliché and caricature when it backs itself into the shower.

Succeeds in scaring you and boring you at the same time; unlike Moore's movie, it's agitprop bereft of artistry, porn for Republicans.

As enormously entertaining as it is appalling.

Klein's the perfect actor to play Howard--a man so actory he probably signs his checks in that thin movie-poster type.

At its best it plays like modern-day Marx Brothers in which every single thing that happens makes no sense and serves no purpose and nothing happens for any reason at all. It exists solely to get a laugh, not to make a point.

What makes Silverman a truly gifted comic is her timing and delivery.

The film desperately wants to play like "Three Kings," a war film with a guilty conscience, but it's too pat and familiar to earn its high-minded stripes.

It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.

This hackneyed, hapless and utterly useless redo of an overrated 1960s sitcom is excruciating to sit through for a dozen reasons.

A turgid, unfunny, out-of-time rockspolitation movie.

The droll has been made dull, a most inexplicable and unfortunate turn of events for so adored a genius, goofball work as this.

Obnoxiously dull.

Trite and silly, but, blast it, the movie has a good heart.

Warner Bros. is presumably aiming this movie not at children but at full-grown dopers with bad munchies glued to the Cartoon Network. Dude, pass the Scooby snacks.