Sean Axmaker

Utter lack of irony and curiosity.

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.

This is a familiar journey and director/co-writer Todd Phillips sidesteps every opportunity to inject a little edge or originality into it.

Harmless and thoroughly unmemorable: colorful, cute, fast paced, and about as involving as an amusement park ride.

Director Casey La Scala directs with enough energy to carry the odyssey over the next ramp, but for all the eagerness of the performances, the conviction is strictly prepackaged.

Backseat satisfies itself with small observations and minor breakthroughs of self-awareness. In the scheme of their lives, this journey is just a speed bump, jolting them awake for a brief moment. The rest is up to them.

Mostly it's a series of dream-image clues scribbled out by juvenile seer Fanning, followed by super-powered smackdowns between agents and mercenaries with slangy titles like watchers, stitchers and sniffers.

It's about as convincing as any other Arnie musclefest, but has a little too much resonance with real world events and ultimately comes off as insultingly simplistic.

Glib, sense-numbing action fantasy.

The film is a shapeless mess and about as convincing as a cartoon, the usual mix of slapstick, doofus humor and raunchy sex jokes lacking even the bite or attitude to make it adventurous.

The most sensuous and intimate work of cinema of the past few years, a film that luxuriates in the immediacy of the moment. There is no guilt to the act, only exhilaration, joy and freedom. At least for the moment.

Zack and Miri is funny, and Rogen is a natural as Smith's alter-ego, spewing profane dialogue like he was born to it.

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

Varda sees herself as a gleaner as she searches for the people and cultural activities missed by the rest of the media.

It's a gloriously baroque vision and Leconte believes in his sequin and sawdust fantasy with such unabashed enthusiasm that he makes it work even through its most absurd moments.

All about the thrill of the chase, and Friedkin challenges the antiseptic spectacle and fantasy flamboyance of computer-enhanced blockbusters with a lean, mean manhunt thriller and gritty, hard-edged style.

Director Alfredo De Villa doesn't play it for the kind of knockabout comedy so often seen in these films (like the shrill hit "Four Christmases").

For all of its weakness, Ju-On: The Grudge is creepy and unnerving, qualities in short supply in gore-filled American horror films.

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

A celebration of the human spirit nothing short of sublime.

A sloppy, indifferent action movie with a sadistic edge and a sour hypocrisy.

There's not a lot of story here and the dialogue lacks the snap one usually gets in New York stories of affluent young adults, but the characters have an authenticity.

51 Birch Street, like the best of the recent wave of personal documentaries, is both a compelling story and an eye-opening bit of social history.

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.

Fresh, vibrant and vital, this interpretation reminds us why Shakespeare is timeless.

For such a harrowing portrait, Mandoki remains oddly distant but for a few scenes. He makes his points boldly when he should be making his points sting.

This vampire story is as soulless as they get.

It's the soulless quality of so many films that value devious plots, smug deception and quirky personality traits over actual story and character.

The result of this blender mash of exotic horror isn't much of anything at all, neither suspenseful, terrifying or inventively gory: Turistas is dead on arrival.

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

For all of its admirable intentions, the awkward melding of movie-of-the-week tragedy, non-denominational salvation drama and teen sex comedy mistakes banality for conviction.

Smokin' Aces isn't a story, it's a premise with a madhouse of characters flung into a collision course that ends at the same finish line.

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.

It's often quite funny (when it's not spinning its wheels in rehashed skits and recycled gags), but when Myers gets his mojo working and his mind out of the toilet, he's capable of better.

It is charming and at times disarmingly surprising.

Not as cool as the first.

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.

When (Tykwer) connects it's exhilarating and gorgeous, a sight to behold.

Cohen drives the film at a galloping pace, but it's not fast enough to outrun its absurdity.

Black's apoplectic fits and sardonic rants are strictly a bonus for the parents dragged along for the adolescent shenanigans.

This restrained drama of lifelong friends drifting in separate directions is a quietly rich and resonant portrait of disconnection.

Blunt, somewhat artless, but very effective.

All processed sugar and artificial flavor, right down to the sticky but tasteless happy ending.

The results are shapeless, excessively lurid and often unpleasant, with Argento shamelessly vamping the white-trash junkie mother and truck-stop hooker. She apparently forgot whose story she was telling.

The stripped-down dramatic constructs, austere imagery and abstract characters are equal parts poetry and politics, obvious at times but evocative and heartfelt.

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

The film ultimately swindles its own story.

What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Pitches itself somewhere between "Bound" and "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels," trying to add a feminist twist to the spate of Britain's bloody gangster thrillers and never quite succeeding.

Sweet, sexy, and unexpectedly enchanting, Yana's Friends is the little feel-good comedy that could.

Delivers a clever confidence game, if not much else.

It's messy and painful, eased only the admirable modesty of Stockman's writing and direction.

The sudden turns of temperament are a treat after the smart-ass attitude of American horror flicks, and the film is full of minor surprises, squirming in unexpected directions without leaving the conventions behind.

In the best Altman manner there are no real heroes and villains, only people trapped by their vanity and ambition and the straitjackets of classism.

The ironies and contradictions that give the first half a dark humor give way to gravity and respect as soldiers are killed (off camera).

It's colorful and determinedly kooky, with "Kung Fu" references and an H.R. Pufnstuf interlude between performances.

It makes for an unusual angle on the era, and a passionate paean to the power of books, ideas and art.

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

The story -- something to do with an ancient evil returning after 3,000 years -- plays like a multi-episode story arc of the TV series.

Anderson is a hopeless romantic in a cynical world, and for a brief moment he makes the case that true love is the only power that can crack time and space.

Though it's hardly as uplifting or inspiring, it's hard not to appreciate these driven men who know they've found their calling when they start to anagram in their dreams.

The funniest thing I've seen this summer.

Not just a bad film, Hannibal Rising is downright dull, which is a far worse crime.

It's a fantasy of a crime epic, to be sure, but it's a glorious fantasy in which the unspoken bonds of brotherhood bathe every shootout and sacrifice in the light of myth.

Ceylan has an unerring gift for camera placement, and his slow, measured scenes can be as hypnotic as they are lovely -- at times, too much so, with the characters constrained by his poetic perfection.

Vital and alive. Frustration and malaise rumble through every richly textured frame, but behind it all is a restlessness and a desire for something better.

Both blunt and complex, Sauter's illustration of economic Darwinism at its most primal and unforgiving is a harrowing vision of human life as collateral damage in the modern global economy.

Low octane comedy running on fumes.

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.

It's as if Gondry lets his performers settle into their parts and feel their way through their stories. It gives the film an ambling pace and a unique chemistry that bubbles with strange and unexpected flavors.

Inspired, inventive and funnier than it has a right to be, Larry Blamire's loopy spoof of 1950s bargain-basement sci-fi and horror knock-offs gets it right where so many well-meaning efforts go wrong.

Charged with raucous energy and a satirical slant, this witty history lesson is preaching to the converted, sharing a knowing wink with everyone who's ever inhaled.

Selick proves a clumsy director of live-action scenes and never overcomes the muddled, half-baked script or the scatological gags.

The humorless and self-important execution attempts an operatic scale but only succeeds in sinking the remnants of the story's integrity. By the time it makes landfall, this incoherent production has blown itself out.

Writer/director Michael McCullers sprinkles the film with sight gags and comic characters (the lisping birth coach becomes funny out of sheer doggedness), but his pacing is poor and doesn't know how to showcase the small-screen chemistry of Fey and Poehler on the big screen.

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

Takes itself seriously enough to pull off a clever bit of sleight of hand, but doesn't have much to offer once the twist comes out of hiding.

For all its good intentions in exploring the grace of death, November never creates a life outside of its all-too-obvious inspirations and the mystery becomes little more than a groaner.

Presents itself as a sassy twist on "Taming of a Shrew," but what looks like just another contrived sex comedy becomes, surprisingly, an insightful and sensitive look at knots that family ties create in adult romance.

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

It's hardly original and rarely laugh-out-loud funny -- the filmmakers constantly fall back on the sight of bounding balloon Jimmy squeezing his way out of one situation after another.

The disingenuous attempt to give the tawdry story some kind of social import only makes the tinny caricatures more insincere, while his erotic display of 15-year-old girls isn't a satire of a sexualized culture, it's just dirty.

It is passionate and angry and rousing where you might expect it to become numbing and depressing.

There are some flat moments, to be sure, and Palansky's direction can be a bit unsteady and awkward, but he doesn't wallow in the eccentricities or the modestly self-empowering moral. This fairy tale feels pleasantly down-to-earth.

This is pseudo-cynical comedy, however, not social satire. All the sharp corners are smoothed over and what's left is little more than a big screen sitcom.

Deutch never raises the film beyond its paint-by-numbers blueprint.

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

The sentiment smacks of "Titanic" for teens, but that doesn't make it any less valid, or the quietly told coda any less lovely.

Burger is so respectful of the trio that he never gets under their skin. Apart from the generosity of strangers who pay tribute to the soldiers with little acts of kindness, you get the same generic observations of any road movie.

All the jazzy effects and jumpy editing merely move us quicker to an otherwise predetermined tragedy.

There is no histrionic excess or crackpot camp, only hoary sentiment, the puppy-dog cuteness of the mentally handicapped, and the proposition that the "cure" for lesbianism is one good man brave enough to get in touch with his inner cow.

There's a dark and demented little psychodrama of self-inflicted madness beneath the narrative contrivances. Vigalondo's direction makes it work more like a waking nightmare than a genuine experience, and he gives it the quality of madness.

Entertaining in a trashy sort of way.

Quaid and Russo outshine the script with their presence and chemistry alone.

Has the modesty of a savvy, smart drive-in movie with Hollywood studio polish and a movie buff's loving care.

Director Jesse Vaughan keeps the ball in play through the aw-shucks lessons in humility and generosity, but the teamwork is shoddy, the plays lack surprise and, finally, Juwanna Mann misses more than it hits.

The film is weirdly fascinating in its own maverick way.

The snappy wit of the script make Ol Parker's British romantic comedy the equivalent of comfort food a pleasant cinematic snack.