Ruthe Stein

Extremely bleak but occasionally compelling debut feature.

A clever idea, but it's not quite pulled off.

Well-intentioned but lifeless.

Only intermittently funny.

A neo-noir thriller long on atmosphere and short on production values.

The last half is so superior to the first that you wish they'd rethought the whole thing and devised a way to make it more of a one piece.

Another romantic comedy about a career woman who has everything except a man, is Jennifer Aniston's attempt to break out of her TV role. But she doesn't have the magic on the big screen to make us forget where she came from.

Given his built-in appeal, Perry has the opportunity to broaden the subject matter of so-called black movies. He takes a stab at it in "Girls," but he could do so much better.

Despite a clever script and top-notch cast, whose commitment to doing service in the indie branch of the industry is commendable, Unknown falls apart just when it should be coming together.

Something to see and occasionally even to laugh at.

While often cliche ridden and preposterous, it's too busy and loud to put anyone to sleep.

A wildly erratic, often annoying but never boring endeavor.

The material obviously had to be stretched to fill the big screen for almost two hours.

A mostly entertaining movie with built-in appeal to young audiences. The good news for parents is that it won't put them to sleep.

Has to be one of the least charming French romances to find American distribution in recent years.

As a romantic comedy, Cease Fire is more annoying than amusing.

It's hard to get swept away when you're struggling to figure out who's doing what to whom and why.

Amusing performances -- especially from Willis, who takes on a new personality with each new hairstyle -- can't disguise the fact that the film is basically a pastiche of recent movies.

The mystery of Nancy Drew' is how a movie can get so many things right -- particularly the inspired casting of Emma Roberts as the spunky teenage sleuth -- yet ultimately disappoint.

Isn't likely to win Murphy another Oscar nomination, but it allows him to do what he does best - loads of physical comedy.

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.

Well intentioned, but only occasionally creepy.

The message is muddled.

The film version is gorgeous to look at and contains amusing performances from Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles. But it fails to get inside the minds of gamblers as Peter Carey so admirably did in his Booker Prize-winning novel.

As a sports drama -- a genre that's gotten entirely too much play lately -- "Dreamer" is singularly unexciting.

It works primarily because of the chemistry between Chan and Tucker, which is at its combustible best this time out.

A romantic saga that dares to ask realistic questions.

Wildly uneven, with long stretches as dull as Dickie.