Scott Brown

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Generic hip-hop soundtrack? Check. Aerial stock footage of milieu? Check. Hardy-har homophobia and misogyny? Check. Emasculated sub-Gump white dude played by Jay Mohr? Double check.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.