Scott Brown

Gibson stages the movie episodically, as a series of quiet actors' moments; his direction is scrupulous, tasteful, and, I'm afraid, rather sodden. By the end, he wrings a tear or two, but more from the story's sentimental outline than from anything he does to fill it in.

Zathura is a rarity: a stellar fantasy that faces down childhood anxieties with feet-on-the-ground maturity.

So Much So Fast (spanning five years) elegantly presents both a critique and a celebration of American optimism.

The music's sensational, but you keep waiting for the pledge number to flash up.

''Kid'' seeks to ''empower'' its target audience of recent Pokémon grads with an adult antihero desperation that feels preemptive and inappropriate.

12:08 East of Bucharest is a shrewdly built comedy, but the characters are broad-verging-on-cheap unholy hick fools.

Far be it from me to dismiss a man's effort (Uwe Boll) in a sentence, but the film on your teeth after a three-day drunk possesses more cinematic value.

A few gags are brilliantly staged, but most have a smug, collegiate take-it-or-leave-it quality that makes full-on belly laughter feel optional.

Jaw set but never stiff, he (Fillion) gets both the Whedon wit and the Whedon grandiloquence between cheek and gum, and gives the whole enterprise the heft of a real saga.

The film is a furious full-court press, its subjects aflame with the kind of passion only youth can furnish.

Yes, it's all a harmless lark. Which is why the only thing that could redeem this sour patch of candy-coated crud would be a final shot of Earth exploding.

The somewhat rococo songs and earthy pop-art animation tread a very fine line between heady and headachy.

Danny Boyle's glittering, deadpan, nihilistic little thriller.

Ken Takakura, a great rain-creased oak of an actor, delivers a quietly massive performance.

Blessed with excellent turns by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, this feel-gooder revels in its hip-to-be-square hyperliteracy, and neatly exceeds its own PSA-ness, practically amounting to a black, preteen "Good Will Hunting."

For 20 years, Megumi's family doesn't know where she is; when they find out, the frustrations and uncertainties only mount. But as thickets of history and culture are (too) neatly avoided, the viewer is also left in the dark.

Aims for the junior stargazer in a release coinciding with NASA's new moon-by-2018 initiative. The movie is unmistakably a pitch, and an honorable one.

East of Havana picks at these politico-philosophical threads rather than pulling them, and the sense of a larger movement is fleeting. There's a beat, but we never quite see who's dancing to it.

The collection can be summed up in four words I never thought I'd see together: science-fiction chamber music.

Pooh's Heffalump Movie is a harmless little ''ex-po-tition'' (to use a Pooh-ism). Still, making this your kids' first Pooh experience would be like weaning them on New Coke.

As a documentary, Jesus Camp could lose its haunted-house score and contrapuntal Air America refrains and still deliver its message: that, here and elsewhere, fundamentalism is no longer content with a separate peace. It wants the meat.

The flick is best in its bittier moments (watch for the stellar cameos), and there's nothing to trouble the tots.

Here, he's (Damon) the ultimate enigma machine, a man willing to erase himself for his country. Does that make him a hero? The Good Shepherd is too closemouthed to let on.

Feel-good ethnocomedy.

Here's yet another self-consciously ''Almodóvarian'' confection, studded with small odes to the glory of self-creation.

As for our heroine (Lohman), her archetypal struggle with crusty Pa (uncrusty Tim McGraw) feels attitude-heavy and life-lesson-light.

It's a canned clip reel of Heartwarming Sports Comedy, intermittently redeemed by its easygoing boomer vibe. And at its center is the redoubtable Bernie Mac, nicely aged, as he says, ''like USDA beef.''

It's a soothing stoner tableau, a fine dropout fantasy.

For the Western viewer, the cultural divide acts as a saccharine filter, and Kamikaze, a cult hit in Japan, becomes a mesmerizing lesson in otherness.

Director Sean Ellis has a lovely eye, but he's set the film in his blind spot. Not only can't he distinguish between art and porn, savoring and wallowing, universal truths and exhausted clichés -- he doesn't even seem interested in these distinctions.

The plot can't be summarized: Let's just say that crazy s--- happens, and occasionally, you laugh.

Watching his deft, effortless character work chafe against the outermost boundaries of the stand-up format, you sense the transgressive energy of Richard Pryor filtered through leading-man charisma — albeit tinged with hostile paranoia.

A deliriously, defiantly unfocused headrush, Stick It is primarily an exercise in exercise.

Special kudos go to Walker, for his dead-on impression of a time-traveling 2x4, and the perpetually hysterical O'Connor, who delivers one of the most grating performances in history.

Coffey, a tart comic mind who should cast his net farther from the 405, pads his story with more and more familiar degradations, and Watts plays each one to the hilt.

A threadbare crazy-quilt of Spanish sex comedies, Queens wants desperately to be "Women on the Verge of a Big Gay Wedding."

Step, under the sure hand of director-choreographer Anne Fletcher, quickly discovers its own virtuoso charms. Two of them are its leads.

The main problem? Raid lacks a center. It's an exhausted sprawl with multiple story foci, none of them terribly compelling.

Thing is Woody Allen on a third-grade reading level. Neurosis abounds, but awareness doesn't, and certain ''jokes'' demand additional therapy.

Accepted's winning dumbness and breezy bons mots save it from the pit.

Refreshingly, it's actually about action, albeit arbitrary action, and how it defines us and keeps us alive.

Some movies make love look schematic. The Trouble With Men + Women makes those films look stunningly insightful.

Teetering on an abyss of meta-wackiness, The Last Shot -- a movie about movie fakery, based on a true story about a fake movie -- succeeds modestly where, by all rights, it should fail miserably.

The characters are perfectly evolved screwups and the premise has potential. It lacks only the discipline of a 30-minute episode -- or a YouTube video.

Writer-director Alison Murray picks at a hard, true hurt in this zombie melodrama of defloration, but nothing beyond that hurt really comes into focus.

For anyone zombified by creaky thriller clichés, Skeleton is a fine little shot in the head.

By far, the most shocking carnage is Tilly carving up her persona. What a doll.

For all I know, Ryan's performance could be a dead-on Kallen impression. But what she appears to be doing is an impression of Johnny Depp doing an impression of Keith Richards doing an impression of Liz Taylor.

Beerfest panders shamelessly to the 15-year-old in this 30-year-old... without assuming he is a 15-year-old. It's R-rated puerility for actual immature grown-ups.

Anthony, with his famished thousand-yard stare, turns in a delicate -- perhaps too delicate -- performance more informed by the shadow of Lavoe's death than the spark of his art. And his shrill domestic scenes with Lopez feel small and squalid, as we wait restlessly for the band to play us out.

The dialogue aims young and low, and sounds translated from comic-book Esperanto.

The CG is on the rubbery side, and the backdrops are jarringly 2-D. But Valiant isn't so hard to look at -- it's hard to listen to.

Whatever you're imagining -- self-serving self-awareness; unedited hipster mopes; yammering dear-diary script -- The Hottest State, Ethan Hawke's bathetic tale of a good-looking young actor's first heartbreak, is far worse.

Having tamed one muscled man-child (Vin Diesel in The Pacifier), Disney sets its sights on The Rock. He preens winningly in The Game Plan.

So what disturbed me? It was the Shetland pony, which sports both Dustin Hoffman's pipes and his "I Heart Huckabees" toupee, and will haunt my nightmares forever.

Burns pads around Gotham, yammering yesterday's op-eds about Disneyfication and ''classic New York holdouts.'' He somehow manages to sound fogyish AND immature.

Feast isn't quite demented enough to reach Raimi-an heights, but Gulager uses parts of the monster-movie buffalo even the buffalo didn't know existed.

The film's generic feminism pales beside its bloated sense of privilege, only underlined by a nonstop cabaret of sideshow acts.

The title gives one hope.

Running is a fevered smashup, as if Hollywood dug up Sam Peckinpah's corpse and forced it to adapt "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" for the screen.

Deeply odd films are often deeply personal ones, and Constellation, a dazed, inchoate drama about a mixed-race Alabama family, tells a story that's clearly close to the heart of writer-director Jordan Walker-Pearlman.

In the ranks of improbable gymnastics coaches, Nick Nolte falls just below the cartoon version of Mr. T.

Cry_Wolf is underscored with idiot adolescent excitement (and gets extra absurdist points for casting Jon Bon Jovi as an educator).

In the ''flesh,'' Garfield himself (voiced by Bill Murray) is once again strikingly unlikable, a bloated, bingeing fascist.

The story is so bored with itself, it collapses -- but the diverse troupe of dance talents at least makes it an eclectic slide.

The big climax isn't climactic, just hysterical and incoherent. Murphy, with her bug-eyed, love-me mugging, is simply too slight and gawky to play the Everygirl.

The whole thing feels like a half-day of community service, which Lawrence walks through good-naturedly.

Hide and Seek, despite early signs of higher goals, is a factory-standard box of shocks.

A strange, sprained, but sprightly fusion of "The Usual Suspects" and the "Tragic Mulatto," Slow Burn wants badly to turn its standard neo-noir into a nuanced racial chiaroscuro.

There's nothing overtly better or worse about this sequel. But the ''kids'' look to be pushing 30 now -- an awkward age for theme-park performers.

Terrified of puppets? Enjoy being scared? Then you'll be half-satisfied with Dead Silence, a rote horror pantomime.

Once again, we're treated to loosely aligned scenes of half-formed characters getting a faceful of director Takashi Shimizu's croaking, implacable, and, yes, still scary housewife-geist.

Werewolves are tame with overuse, and movies like Blood and Chocolate -- where moments of inspiration vie in vain with Goth cliché -- play like underlit "Charmed" reruns.

What does satisfy is the pleasantly becalming presence of "Deep" costar LL Cool J. He's fast becoming Liv Ullmann to Harlin's Bergman.

If you're looking for comic insights beyond the well-documented ass differential between whites and blacks, well, golly, you ought to try another carrier.

The sheer, animal idiocy beaming from their faces in the opening credits of The Brothers Solomon creates the film's only moment of uncalculated comic joy.

Epps has a nicely beaten charm to him -- among the leads, he alone looks like he knows what a trip to the moon costs.

Sci-fi horror aficionados, however, might want to look elsewhere for their scares, as they're unlikely to find any here. Fright-wise, The Cave is a dry hole.

What might have been a rote horror exercise becomes instead a twitchy, mannered, often amusing rote horror exercise.

There are some genuinely clever moments of physical comedy, and the inevitable crudeness is offset by winning whimsy. Without has all the freshness of moldering Playboys stashed under a mattress, but it evokes what few boys-will-be-boys larks can: chumminess.

Too mild to be dirty, yet too dirty to be charming, and altogether too generic to be much of anything.

A pretty lousy movie, which would be offensive were it not safely neutered by its own stupidity.

The lushness of a Modigliani is largely absent from Modigliani.

A mud-simple horror trudge set in a swamp colony of Abercrombie models.

So perfect in its awfulness, it makes one seriously consider a theory of unintelligent design.

An animated movie designed with very young children in mind. And very young children should be very angry about that. Where is it written that 4-year-olds don't deserve a good story, decent characters, and a modicum of coherence?

While sloppier than the sloppiest of seconds, is laudable in one important regard: Its obsession with the male body.

A fairly harmless fertility rite with a skewed if not downright ugly view of women.

As an expat redneck, I recognize the deep, dumb need of every group for its own culturally customized minstrel show. Larry, a junker ''star'' vehicle run on arse wind and fan love, fills that niche.

Ultraviolet, warns someone, ''Don't overthink it.'' Sage advice for anyone masochistic enough to watch this pile of poorly pixelated vampire poo.

Here's a sobering thought: If every war gets the comedy it deserves, could Delta Farce, a strenuously unfunny "Three Amigos" knockoff, be our M*A*S*H?

It's all the thrill of watching other people play Uno.