Sean Axmaker

Ball's snide humor and cynical arrogance undercut his message at every turn.

First-time director Billie Woodruff, a music video veteran, busts his moves in the dance scenes while the movie throbs to the beat of the wall-to-wall soundtrack.

It's bright, colorful and udder-ly unmemorable.

Neither clever nor heartwarming, Four Christmases is the coal in the stocking of holiday movies.

It's more ambitious and passionate than thoughtful. Singleton is better at criticizing than understanding, and he leaves too many characters lacking a legitimate voice.

Rock Star roars to life with a promise of something inspired and inventive whenever Wahlberg leaps onstage. Offstage, however, even he can't breathe life into this same old song.

Under Schnabel's direction, it becomes stilted and static, if not simplistic.

The film half-heartedly paints their actions as rebel-chic heroism even when it has all the integrity of tomcats spraying outside their yards, and it ends up just as confused as the characters.

Too hip to play it straight and too cool to resort to an actual story, Hartley turns the whole rambling spy game into a puzzle box where every certainty is thrown into doubt, every character has a hidden motive, and every clue is contradicted.

Its one saving grace is Godzilla himself, the James Bond of giant monsters.

Herman's intentions are admirable, but his results are unsettling in the worst ways.

The script is as sloppy as Song's unkempt cop, sprinkled with intriguing ideas and imaginative details that, like the investigation, simply get lost in blind alleys.

Feels like the effort of a tired artist reworking the same themes.

Ashton Kutcher wants to be taken seriously so badly it hurts. So does this metaphysical mess of a movie, a pseudo time-travel drama so complicated it takes more than half an hour just to establish the gimmick. And a gimmick it is.

Imagine Warren Beatty in "Shampoo" by way of a Jewish Rambo.

Sivan makes it all quite beautiful with verdant imagery and tastefully melodramatic direction, but at the cost of emotional and social ambiguities, not to mention living, breathing characters.

The new parody from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, takes another swipe at the corpse armed with the same old weapons. This time, rigor mortis has set in.

Given the possibilities it's not particularly inventive, but it is nice to see a comedy so affectionate with the conventions it spoofs.

A canny but hollow pastiche.

If Chadha never quite overcomes her cliches, her good-natured humor and familial faith gives it a warm, winsome dimension.

It's all so visceral that it overwhelms the near-abstract story and smothers what passes for characters.

At its best when exploring grieving and loss and anger, but Shear turns it into spiritual shock treatment.

Many will find Griffin profane, sexist and decidedly offensive. Many more will find his raunchy insights inspired, his body language hilarious and his gift for mimicry and caricature worth the entire show.

Weaver was half-heartedly pushed as an underdog Oscar choice. If the film was worthy of her performance, Weaver may have had a shot.

A diversion so soggy that even the few combustible comic disasters fail to light a flame under the lukewarm laughs.

Not extreme enough to skate the edge of tasteless farce and not straight enough to play the material for edgy satire, The Ringer is a cheat right down to the final stretch. Breaking the rules should be more fun than this.

Though a hypnotically beautiful film, it's dramatically listless and dull, and completely lacking in passion.

It's a little sloppy and full of convenient coincidences, but at its best roils with edgy character tensions.

Autobiographical or not, the frankness and family hysteria of this rolling therapy session gets awkwardly intimate and at times tough to endure, as much for its raw candor as for its confessional contrivance. Too bad the revelations of past mistakes are more interesting than the story played out screen.

For all the clumsy scenes and cloying performances, director Patricia Riggen puts her adults through tough choices and hard consequences.

The curious character study is a comedy in a minor key, but for all White's fascination with Peggy, he brings little conviction to the healing message under all this creepiness and social awkwardness, beyond what Shannon brings to the role.

It's ultimately just numb, a sober wartime romance roused only by Blanchett's intensity and Crudup's passionate swings between righteous anger and moral zeal. The rest is just tired melodrama.

Rich with emotional turmoil and searing beauty, but it could have used a little more time in the editing room to make sense of it all.

For all its pronouncements, it's a frothy romantic lark.

Presents itself as tragedy with the insensitive Joe as its tragic hero, but Joe's fantasies of artistic rebellion and individualism have rotted into simple, solipsistic selfishness.

Ultimately a primer. Without actually putting it in direct terms, it proposes a revolutionary solution, not just in Argentina but everywhere that the corporate culture has failed its workers and their communities.

Campbell fans will get a kick out of it. The rest of the world will likely find this spoof a little too insular and indulgent.

I can't imagine how Smith can capture a big enough audience to pay off this private joke, but the inner geek in me had too much fun to care.

Surely played better on the page than on the screen. What's left is the same old drill driven by brutal master race fervor.

It's a fine moral and an admirable statement, but it's the portrait of an icon rather than the story of the person thrust into that position.

An uninvolving film.

The cozy, lived-in atmosphere created by the ensemble and the unlikely chemistry of Carell and Binoche are so genuine that you wish the rest of the film was just as effortless and authentic.

A bland Bond.

The attitude is older, maybe a tad sentimental, and as adolescent and reckless as ever. Whether that's a good thing depends on your appreciation for dead-end conversations, geek debates and the Smithspeak sandbox of creative vulgarity.

The film is thrown off balance by the weight of Norton's compassion for this troubled soul.

Buscemi gets a fine performance from Miller and plays his part with a murky mix of self-pity, opportunism and arrogance. A few scenes crackle with their intensity. The rest of it wallows in glib acrimony and cynicism.

The official R rating is for "strong language, sexual content, drug use and some crude humor," but the MPAA is just being polite. It's all crude.

The warmth of Baker as the cuddly nature boy (another idealized image, certainly, but a romantic one) and the intelligence and fire of Lathan give the lesson, and movie, just enough heart to make it enjoyable.

Along the way the film loses sight of the joy of music that supposedly pushes them all.

The film ultimately swindles its own story.

The boys and girls are so busy acting out their romantic fantasies or soulfully pining over impossible loves that, however photogenic they may be, they never seem to actually live their lives.

Just another low-budget effort from filmmakers who mistake cleverness for smarts.

Maybe it's fantasy fatigue, but for all the pretty effects and breathless chases and goblin war battles, the sense of wonder and magic is lost in the shuffle.

A good-faith effort, if not completely successful.

A perfectly competent, if undistinguished, action film that smoothes over all the most interesting bumps in the drama.

The restraint so magnificently applied in "The Remains of the Day" has simply fallen into disconnection.

More silly than funny.

Full of compassion and good intentions, but Kirkman never spins the stories into compelling cinema.

Loses focus of whom the film is honoring.

Too bad Igor didn't jolt the film to life with his Frankenstein shenanigans.

Deyfus' haphazard filmmaking dissipates a potentially fascinating mystery into one long diversion.

Rambling and easygoing, Nico and Dani is a modest but frank look at adolescent lust, both heterosexual and homosexual.

As action movies seem to get more complicated and convoluted with international conspiracies and technological concepts, the "Transporter" franchise is refreshingly simple.

In this brand of comedy, nothing succeeds like excess, and this film is seriously deficient.

When Plympton's freak flag flies, Hair High delivers the same whacked-out weirdness of his shorts. The rest of the film simply stretches out the simple premise and marks time between his ideas.

More than simply a raw-nerve success-gone-sour story. It's a revenge tale, and the directors come out on top.

For a film that uses race, class and sexual stereotypes as the starting point, this is disappointingly skin deep.

There are no surprises in this match, but director Fumihiko Sori makes the games visually thrilling.

It's not sleepy, it's comatose, and writer/director Josh Sternfeld never wakes it up with anything as crass as a plot.

It lacks both complexity and compromised characters. While the cultural backdrop is intriguing, the story is frustratingly conventional and familiar.

Not as cool as the first.

Shyamalan has learned the lessons that so many horror directors ignore: Suggestion is scarier than revelation.

Apparently there's a fresh generation ready to take this at face value. That, in its own way, is refreshing.

Abigail Breslin, the preteen Oscar nominee for "Little Miss Sunshine" and the most effortless actress of her generation, plays the precocious little girl part without overdoing the precociousness.

It's a passionate vision thick with eroticism, but the musky atmosphere gets a little thick and murky.

Farce is a genre best served with building momentum and crack timing. This lazily paced piece seems more concerned with winking at the audience and putting quotations around the performances than anything so crass as playing this farce for laughs.

Whether Mann's film will make a difference, however, is another question. He devotes little time to really exploring the issues, leaving the film a patchwork of assertions that, while they may be true, have to be taken on faith.

Well-meaning portrait of intolerance concludes as grand tragic melodrama, executed with a stately beauty in somber colors.

It wants to be a "Carrie" with a modern-day "Frankenstein" twist, but it lacks the smarts behind the weirdness.

A fumbling attempt to create the European equivalent of a Japanese manga thriller in the conspiratorial mold of "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell" has a stunning look.

As fresh as a highlight reel of day-after replays, Mr. 3000 is a case of major-league talent stuck in a minor-league story.

Ledger mumbles his entire performance (some of it barely legible) as a fuzzy, friendly, happily passive heroin addict and sometime poet, as if he's too blissed out to even open his mouth as he simply drifts along with his addiction.

A jargon-filled documentary less interested in culture and history than mechanics, machinery and the rush of speed.

At 140 minutes, the film becomes a humorless, long-winded spectacle.

There isn't a spark in the familiar emotional situation or a reason to care how these amiably bland characters end up.

Well-intentioned but not very well directed, it makes for a better psychological profile than a film.

When the spectacle turns ridiculous, the movie just becomes another big-screen video game.

In place of the dysfunctional family Christmas story we've come to expect for the holidays, The Family Stone gives us a cheerfully uncensored, generic counterculture clan and tosses a tightly wound control freak into the center of their holiday celebration.

Hodges cuts the film like a diamond, but it's just an exercise in cut glass, an impressive surface that only looks tough.

Mostly it's tedious as we watch the photogenic but emotionally blank Chatagny bounce between anonymous sexual encounters.

John Jarratt is perfectly creepy as the outback loner gone psychotic survivalist who gets his kicks from the systematic degradation and torture of hapless victims. And make no mistake, the ordeal is excruciating.

It's an interesting experiment that doesn't quite work.

It becomes simply another banal gang film so familiar and predictable you have to wonder why so much potential is wasted on such a confused dramatic mess.

Despite Clement's best efforts to make Jarrod a deadpan oddball nerd, it becomes apparent early on that excessive teenage eccentricity and terminal self-delusion isn't quite as cute in the adult male and absent father.

For all of its minor pleasures, this encore lacks the depth of its conviction.

The Will Ferrell comedy engine is running on empty in Step Brothers.

It's funny. Dumb, yes, but funny.

Peter Riegert's is a labor of love film where you feel love much stronger than you feel the film.