Sara Maria Vizcarrondo

A visually rough retreading of Superbad territory with a slightly more treacherous journey, The Virginity Hit has a surprisingly softer ethical edge than you'd expect.

Formally, everything's in order-it's an attractive film with some ingenious action sequences-but the problems overwhelm the pleasures, leading to the conclusion that this film's trouble is under the hood.

Italian audiences are bound to like it and the broadness of plot and appeal suggests casual fans of foreign film should, too.

Such a story is made to be colored in jumbo crayon, and at first you might long for a more nuanced approach, but this film was produced in the 1940's serial style that's made Lucas Films enormous.

It's a wonderfully moving meditation on the capacity of animals to inspire our imaginations and something applicable to educational markets as well as regular documentary audiences.

A film about how outwardly alienating our circles are (much to the detriment of our careers) and how caustic our supposedly nurturing intimacies can be at the same time.

Though the film is a fairly plastic British period piece with all the intimacy of a Hitachi Wand, the script captures some delicate and intelligent facets of a tensely conflicted era.

It's a great (if middle-of-the-road) family comedy to seek out.

It's never boring but the relentless twists do get a bit tedious.

Still, the fans are lovable no matter how mixed the Comic-Con bag is, and Morgan Spurlock is precisely the doc maker to tell us about it.

The laughs are proportionate to the stakes, which are middle-of-the-road.

Surrogate fathers and family values are at the foreground, making the film a quick sell to parents - especially as it boasts the added value of literary roots.

Trash-action director Paul W.S. Anderson's (Alien vs. Predator) finds no cultural purpose for this rather literal adaptation of the Musketeers, but it's not so horrible it deserved to be protected from the cold eye of film critics.

The film's biggest (and saddest) crime is malaise - it's not that John Carter doesn't care about what it's doing, it just can't make us care, even though the magnitude of every event, conflict and emotion is as melodramatic as its Victorian roots.

On the surface Monte Carlo is charming, oddly down-home wish-fulfillment, but it's riddled with unexplored class issues and generic filmmaking.

The Rite might have been more affecting if the performances gave just a hint that its histrionics were more than just that.

The film's strength isn't its shock tactics - it's the rapid-fire, party montage editing that finds a million natural ways to put mundane actions and moments up against each other for comic effect.

This foreign view of the subject is anthropologically useful, however the film's photo animation technique transforms family photos (used extensively to fill in historical plot holes) into something that resembles zombie-resurrection.

Killer Joe isn't as outlandish in premise as it is in execution, which is saying something.

A chick flick for do-gooders, The Help suffers from a malady common to the discrimination drama: its treatment of inequality is more condescending than the prejudice it aims to remedy.

ParaNorman is easily one of the most charming, imaginative and quirky comedies to come out of Laika Entertainment (Coraline), but for all its cleverness and urbane wit, it's in no way appropriate for kids.

The mother/daughter drama should have played a bigger part in this film as the 87-minute runtime passes quickly and leaves us feeling utterly short-changed.

The soulless-ness of their empty plot of track homes and super-store existence invokes both "Poltergeist" and "Employee of the Month."

While A Thousand Words features some reverent flashes and even has the potential to touch audiences (a moment involving a mother with Alzheimer's particularly hits home), it suffers from being too broad.

To say the franchise is coasting along on fumes suggests it once ran on a full tank, which may not even be true for "Meet the Parents," the surprise hit that kicked off this broad comic franchise.

From Prada to Nada might appeal to tweens but word of mouth won't be nearly as strong as Austen's parlor gossip.

We all have to make jokes around the water cooler, and if enough people bother to see Killer Elite, its silly nonsense could make for a great comedy routine by Greg from IT.

If this horror movie cashes in on the audience that echoes its character's awareness ("That's where the nucular thing happened, right?") then we're about to learn how low our national academic standards are.