Scott Foundas

Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.

The movie is enjoyable, but not passionately engaging in the way we've come to expect from Almodóvar, and it leaves you somewhat cold in spite of the warmth of Cruz's galvanic performance.

Cosgrove and screenwriter Dean Craig aim for the kind of close-quarters chaos that John Cleese and Connie Booth turned into high comic art on "Fawlty Towers," but Caffeine's roundelay of sophomoric urination, masturbation and pedophilia gags isn't half as funny as the atrocious British accents of the largely American cast.

There is something sweetly naive about pic's astonished contention that this is because morals were taught in a nonreligious context. But it's not a compelling argument for the Apocalypse.

If the great movie musicals are the ones that transport us to some heady superreality, the only place Rent takes us to is the Nederlander Theatre.

Always good with actors, Hanson brings out a beaten-down charm in Bana that works nicely against the hotheaded authority the actor shows in the gambling scenes, while Duvall is, like the veteran card shark he plays, a master of subtle gestures. The low card here is Barrymore, somewhat awkwardly shoehorned into this boys' club to provide some romantic relief.

A crass, condescending piece of corporate bamboozling, Grind plays like a movie conceived by monkey-suited honchos who regard their targeted audience as impressionable nincompoops susceptible to every new trend in sports, clothing and music that comes down the pike.

Big Trouble in Little China is a far more enjoyable mash-up of classic Westerns, Saturday-morning serials, and Chinese wu xia than any of the Indiana Jones movies, with Kurt Russell in full bloom as Carpenter’s de rigueur hard-drinkin’, hard-gamblin’, wise-crackin’ loner hero—a bowling-alley John Wayne.

It's the director's most complexly ordered film to date - a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners - and may be the movies' most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since "Adaptation."

Newcomer Short has charisma, charm and athleticism to burn, but it's mostly for naught in a movie that spends two tedious hours pulling out every stop in the gold-hearted-kid-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks- meets-gold-hearted-girl-who-values-true-love-above-privilege playbook.

It's screen comedy at the end of its tether, Capra-corn gone rancid.

Strictly for the birds.

A dreary, weary psychosexual thriller that's neither sexy nor thrilling.

Begins as a serious, straightforward account of the origins of the cocaine trade and "gangsta" culture in 1980s Harlem, but then downward spirals due to a weak plot and gratuitous violence.

She’s the Man amounts to little more than softcore porn for the tween set, with aesthetics ripped from the pages of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and virtually every scene revolving around Viola/Sebastian’s crafty escape from some impromptu disrobing.

There's greater consistency to it, and considerably more humor, with macabre slapstick and fun-house ghoulishness that, at their best, recall early Tim Burton.

An anemic sitcom pilot dragged out to an excruciating 108-minute running time.

The result is a glorious low-tech pleasure that may be the most lyrical, phantasmagoric boys' adventure story since Joe Dante's Explorers.

A superb, eye-opening and often absurdly funny deconstruction of the myths and realities of global terrorism that is marked by a balance, broadmindedness and sense of historical perspective so absent from many recent political-themed documentaries.

Despite agreeably short running time and committed performances, Edmond is rendered inert by its stagy atmosphere and failure to fully mine the depths of its protagonist's complex psyche.

It is the point -- and the power -- of Deep Water that the vast, unknowable fathoms of the sea are rivaled only by those of the human psyche.

The strengths of Dominion, however, have been little diminished by its long shelf life and, in fact, may have grown stronger with age.

Grim, grueling and triumphantly powerful.

Pic has a stagy, boxed-in feel. Both visually and energetically, it suggests something that has been done onstage to the point of mechanized repetition. And even though Whaley is supposed to be playing a disillusioned character, it's the actor himself who seems fatigued and over-rehearsed.

This thoroughly unhip, unfunny political comedy is the kind of movie TV actors like Ray Romano make on hiatus from their successful series, and movie actors like Gene Hackman and Marcia Gay Harden make on hiatus from taking their careers seriously.

Something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon--a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.

Inoffensive adolescent escapism laced with surprising amounts of genuine charm.

The sentimental novelty of watching two childhood antiheroes have at it dissipates once you realize the lugubrious lengths to which the screenplay must go in order to make that happen.