Ruthe Stein

I'm not denying that a 40-year- old woman might be self-conscious about going around with someone this young. But the subject isn't interesting or provocative enough to sustain an entire movie.

With the aid of a charmingly offbeat story and a jolly good dialect coach, the stars leave you thinking, well done. Their spirited performances help cover up glaring holes in the plot.

Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard are incredibly compelling and hold your attention despite Jordan's deliberately slow pacing.

The new movie shrieks of motherhood - raising hot-button issues like biological clocks running down, the rights of birth mothers and whether to adopt or give artificial insemination a shot.

Only intermittently funny.

The message is muddled.

An amusing melodrama.

The film will have to settle for a bogey rather than a par. Still, some hyperbole is warranted, like "Safest Movie to Take the Entire Family To."

Pretentious drama.

Exhilarating and enchanting family picture. It's the best I've seen this year and highly recommended for girls and for boys, too.

Sam Garbarski's use of slow-motion shots is pretentious, and he paces the film too slowly. But he captures the seedy side of London, giving you a feel for Soho during the day when sunshine exposes a cheap gaudiness.

From watching this meandering, stilted movie, anyone unfamiliar with Charles Dickens' novel would be not only disinclined to pick it up but also clueless as to why it's considered great.

An energetic young cast, consisting of a mix of professional dancers and actors who do convincing imitations of Arthur Murray graduates, is positively inspired in numbers combining traditional ballroom steps with hip-hop.

The Astronaut Farmer's goofy quality makes it totally endearing. It's also super entertaining. Critics are fond of referring to movies as a "great ride." With this one, the words couldn't be more apt.

Attempts something startlingly original by melding light opera with soap opera.

That Pride ultimately gets to you is more of a surprise than the outcome because it's not very well-constructed.

The attempt to be clever is transparent.

Well-intentioned but lifeless.

Intermittently funny.

Art School Confidential exudes confidence as long as it is satirizing a questionable, at least according to Clowes, institution of higher learning. But the film loses its way with multiple subplots, becoming a hodgepodge that isn't particularly hard to follow, but, far worse, provides no compelling reason to bother.

Proceeds at that pace to an ending that is as inevitable as it is poignant.

Like its low-key star, Hamlet 2 is more likely to elicit quiet chuckles than raucous laughter.

It is crystal clear who screwed up this tortuously slow-moving romantic drama.

An old-fashioned and occasionally schmaltzy movie that delivers an emotional wallop

Becomes tiresome.

May be too convincing for its own good.

The whole thing is dizzying, like "Moulin Rouge" without songs and dances extolling love.

The movie doesn't aspire to be art, merely to entertain adolescent girls, which is practically guaranteed by the luminous presence of Anne Hathaway.