Scott Foundas

Serviceable, wholly uninspired.

It's all fitfully amusing, thanks in large part to Bouchard's richly comic performance, but the movie is never very involving, and it overstays its welcome by a good, long while.

Part dewey-eyed paperback romance, part acid-trip planetarium show, this extravagantly silly movie comes on like the second coming of "2001."

Tries to combine the suspense of old Saturday morning serials with the gusto of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's action pics. Falling short on both counts, this long, and long-winded, series of middling cliffhangers won't pump the adrenaline of action aficionados or -- the family crowd.

The Lives of Others wants us to see that the Stasi -- at least some of them -- were, like their Gestapo brethren, “just following orders." You can call that naive optimism on Donnersmarck's part, or historical revisionism of the sort duly lambasted by the current film version of Alan Bennett's "The History Boys." I, for one, tremble at the thought of what this young director does for an encore.

When it comes to Annabelle’s five or six big stinger moments, Leonetti manages to deliver the jolts, and if audiences are sure to head home complaining about how dumb and predictable it all was, many may also find themselves nursing their significant others’ lightly bruised forearms.

Put simply, this second feature by the young Austrian director Hans Weingartner is a put-on -- a glib anti-capitalist rant in which the rhetoric rarely rises above the you-too-can-save-a-child-for-less-than-the-price-of-coffee level.

A scabrous, provocative and often funny social satire about the American dream, Spike Lee's flawed but fascinating She Hate Me addresses everything from corporate malfeasance to the African AIDS epidemic, barely catching its breath in-between.

A screwball road movie set in a middle-of-nowhere town, Kwik Stop suggests "It Happened One Night" as reimagined by David Lynch or Hal Hartley.

The Chorus is sham art and questionable entertainment, but at the very least it sends you whistling out of the theater.

Though the story hardly lacks for event as it traces Khayyam's ascension from the peasantry to the royal court, the period costumes and sets look to be on loan from Medieval Times, as do most of the actors, and the boxy, harshly lit compositions make everything feel even more cardboard.

The vaporous Wonderland never moves beyond its grungily romanticized view of the past.

It’s cheesy enough fun while it lasts, but in the Harlin pantheon, it isn’t a patch on “Deep Blue Sea.” Then again, few things are.

It's a rich idea for a comedy, even if the filmmakers seem timid about making the pic the full-on satire it might have been.

Rebound is a sports comedy so by-the-numbers that you don't really have to watch it -- you can just check in on it every once in a while between trips to the concession stand and the bathroom.

It’s fun enough while it lasts, but somehow, finally, all too much and not enough. The problem isn’t that dinosaurs have ceased to impress us, but that dinosaurs alone are not enough to sustain us

Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.

For all its failings, there is one thing about “Long Walk to Freedom” that can’t be denied: Idris Elba gives a towering performance, a Mandela for the ages.

Between them, first-time screenwriter Carl Ellsworth and director Wes Craven don't come up with a single clever way to generate suspense, and the movie's onboard atmosphere is so phony.

As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.

A handsomely produced, deeply passionate, but seriously flawed historical epic whose reach far exceeds its grasp. Somewhere inside this overlong, sometimes engaging, often tedious affair, there may be a solid, 100-minute movie.

As both book and film, The Human Stain comes to vividest life in its extended flashbacks, which offer the most compelling exploration of Roth's perennial themes of self-loathing and reinvention.

It speaks well of The Investigator that, for much of its running time, it’s possible to lose sight of the movie’s agenda and get caught up in its hokey machinations.

Only Williams makes any real emotional connection: I'm not sure I'd call his performance good, but there's something fascinating about seeing the man once heralded as "the black Clark Gable" three decades removed from heartthrob status, heavy and sullen-looking, weighed down by the burdens of time and age.

The director of 13 Going on 30, Gary Winick, was unable to infuse this material with either the sustained screwball cadences of his earlier "Tadpole" or an emotional resonance comparable to that of his superb "The Tic Code."

While slight comic concoction is so airy it seems in danger of floating right off the screen, the pleasant retro vibe and a handful of effervescent moments carry this film no self-respecting heterosexual male would dare see except on a date.

The Giver reaches the screen in a version that captures the essence of Lowry’s affecting allegory but little of its mythic pull.