Sean Axmaker

The kids have good chemistry, there's some fun oddball humor stuck in around the slapstick, and the gorgeous photography of the Gulf Coast beaches, waterways and wildlife brings their mission to life.

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

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.

Full of sharp ideas and wry moments awaiting the inspired ingenuity of a screwball comedy to pull it all together. It never comes.

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.

Evening is so distanced from the emotions of the story that it never breathes on its own.

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.

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

A modest but amiable comedy.

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.

A bland Bond.

Momentum, motivation and story are all swallowed by simple sensation, and the film finally exhausts itself for lack of stylistic imagination.

It's so affected and arch it flops into self parody.

Little Nicky will please Sandler's fans and likely won't win any converts.

Easily the least passionate romantic comedy I've seen in years.

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.

The result is a great-looking movie with an awkward balance of pulp noir and campy self-awareness.

The film is inoffensive, and Baldwin is fun and engaging.

This is one family reunion where you need someone to act up or pick a fight, anything to bring a little life to the party.

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

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

Competently directed by Christian music producer Steve Taylor, it's a sincerely (if not exactly subtly) performed spiritual drama with a faith-based lesson in humility and the practical charity of offering a helping hand.

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

To call the haphazard string of gags a story is to give it far too much credit, but it is funny in a blunt, profane frat boy way, thanks to the bulldozing energy of Ferrell, the smarmy manipulations of Vaughn and the anything-for-a-laugh excess of Phillips.

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.

Kilner's light touch keeps the romantic pair dancing around their romance without tripping, but as the film reaches the inevitable happy ending, the steps look all too familiar.

At times it gets lost in the backwaters, but the eccentric characters and offbeat humor make it an entertaining detour.

For all of the credibility of the performances (or at least the teens), it all feels like recycled social commentary.

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

The result is a heartfelt film brimming with ideas and passion but hampered by a literal approach that douses the emotional heat.

It's weird, clean, good-natured fun, and it's far too subdued for its madcap milieu.

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

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

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.

For all its energy and inspired moments of giddy goofiness, Psycho Beach Party gets stuck in the sand.

Even as the prosaic script gets lost in the intoxicating fantasy of the bloodless revolution, the hot heartbeat of the music drives the film with pure energy.

A competent concoction of familiar ingredients, smothered with gothic mood and served up with a generous helping of teenagers: skewered, slashed and stabbed.

Disarmingly funny in its own naive way.

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

Apart from the gender twists, there is one notable difference between the traditional slasher flick and this gay take: Here, even the nice boy gets it on. And he doesn't even get punished for it.

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.

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.

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").

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

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

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

The film ultimately swindles its own story.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The movie's a little thin for the two-hour running time, but likable enough for its schoolgirl audience and painless enough for the adults doomed to be dragged along.

The Rock manages to play both with a crude candor more genuine than the entertaining if contrived spectacle around him, and a surprising big-screen charisma and ease that makes him a natural-born screen hero.

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

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

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.

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

Under the lingerie model façade beats the heart of a celestial Dr. Phil.

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.

The curiously stylized piece, shot in a muted palette with performances to match (the cast is perhaps too restrained given the theatrical framework), is dramatically colorless, but the moods and moments are crafted with kinky grace.

This is one of those capers doomed to unravel in comic chaos, but it finally plays less like a con gone wrong than a long, lazy, insubstantial shaggy dog story coasting on nothing but charm.

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

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

Best enjoyed by keeping in mind the latest cinematic proposition that apocalyptic disaster doesn't bring out the worst in people, only the stupidest.

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

It's often funny but it flails around like a chicken with its head cut off, flapping and squawking and making a spectacle, but never really going anywhere.

Ultimately less psychological thriller than polemic about the effects of living in an atmosphere of paranoia fed by daily threat-level assessments and round-the-clock TV news-channel coverage of fear-mongering speeches.

Grand and imaginatively designed epic that forgets that the spectacle -- and this is nothing if not spectacular -- is just the flourish.

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

Does its job colorfully and entertainingly, as long as you don't lean too hard on such niggling details as logic, legality and the laws of physics.

Though it's rarely dull, first-time feature director Yasuo Inoue has a better eye for intriguing and unusual imagery than dramatic staging, and he illustrates his points long before he runs out of un-endings.

No, it's not the big screen version of "24." For one thing, Sutherland is in the wrong role.

A collision of medieval fantasy and commando action movie, where you can almost believe in the high-concept mix-and-matching.

Makes a great time capsule, a shot-on-the-streets glimpse into the texture of a bygone time, place and attitude, but a listless, lightweight odyssey.

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.

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

The minor pleasures of P2 lie in the simple effectiveness of the sleekly unshowy direction and the clean, unadorned script, which pares away extraneous distractions like motivation and complicated back stories to get on with the mechanics of tension and the obligatory jumps and startles (which stand in for genuine scares).

Cranks up the hysteria to screechy sitcom levels.

Barely substantial enough for a feature but just light and tasty enough to satisfy.

The result is a film with an identity crisis, a fluffy romantic farce that gets progressively darker, more destructive and finally so downright demented that the featherweight story line is crushed under the weight of brutal, unpleasant truth.

Taking on the sneeringly blase Alig may be a cagey career move for Culkin, but it's a disappointingly thin performance.

It comes out less like a spoof than a smart-aleck remake of "Meatballs," minus the energy of Bill Murray.

A lively and lightweight comedy, the film finally connects with the real-life rush of playing music for a live audience.

It's a pretense of even-handedness. The true story has been reduced to a case for faith. It merely sacrifices all reason to get there.

So grim and humorless that the first half almost sinks into silliness.

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.

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

Favors pageantry over substance.

It's flashy, it's often funny ...,and it resembles a movie so much that soon it demands something resembling motivation, character, a plot, anything to explain the seemingly arbitrary connections between the stunts and the skits.

For all the tough-minded talk and frank portraits of inner-city life, however, the film is not altogether convincing.

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.

It probably cost less than the catering budget of average Adam Sandler comedy and, in its own hit-and-miss scattershot fashion, it's about as funny. At least when it hits.

It's the chemistry between the women and the droll scene-stealing wit and wolfish pessimism of Anna Chancellor that makes this "Two Weddings and a Funeral" fun.

Doom may be by the numbers, with a roll call of colorful types systematically exterminated while The Rock entertains with cartoonish expressions and reactions (the closest the film comes to personality).

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.

A strangely warm, affectionate look at bad behavior amid emotional damage and a stranglehold of identity issues.

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

It's a bright, swiftly paced story with some spirited humor.

While it displays precious little originality or ingenuity, A Guy Thing is less graceless than most of its ilk and benefits from a likable cast.

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.

More silly than funny.

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

There are too many unearned runs to fully embrace this underdog triumph.

Director Troy Beyer, who adapted the original screenplay, can't seem to decide if this is a morality play or a music-video fantasy.

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.

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

There's simply nobody beneath the derisive attitude worth caring about.

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.

The unchecked enthusiasm of McGinley as the touchy-feely renovation guru gives slow-burn Cube the perfect foil and mellows the malicious comic tone. The rest is pure slapstick.

Seeks to shock and to outrage, and so far it's done both quite nicely.

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

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

There's a gripping thriller between the gaps in logic. Director Florent Siri has a tough style and an unforgiving attitude, but it drowns in the queasy blood lust.

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.

For all of its good-natured guff, Jersey Girl chooses uncomplicated sentiment over the messy complications of real life.

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

The underdog story doesn't miss a cliche, even though it never figures out whether it's a boxing picture or a military drama.

It lacks the invention of Pegg's comedies with Edgar Wright, which buzz and crackle with ideas and energy. This one simply plods through, just like Dennis. Only Pegg's doggedness gets this effort across the finish line.

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.

Michael Winterbottom's erotic drama isn't so much a story of a love affair as an anatomy of a sexual relationship.

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

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

With a title like Chaos Theory, one might expect a little runaway energy or a dash of wild spirit under the antics, but there's little punchy anarchy in this controlled experiment.

Opens on a display of humiliation and human degradation at its worst and then rewinds, like a video surfer zipping back to replay a favorite scene, to the nominal beginning of the spiral.

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

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

It's kind of like "Tootsie," only without the drag. Or the class. Or the laughs.

To be fair, Clockstoppers isn't a bad film, merely bereft of creativity and personality.

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.

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

The contrast of the naive assurance of youth with the confusion and ambiguity of adulthood is sweet but simplistic and the wandering script hasn't much else to offer.

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

Director Wayne Wang stumbles through the awkward script without finding its shape or its tone, steering it toward maturity while the script falls back into slapstick sports gags and adolescent social politics.

Too bad the film, which Kennedy spun from a stand-up skit, remains as blissfully unaware of its possibilities as B-Rad is of his absurdity.

Splashy and sweetly romantic, if hopelessly unimaginative.

For an ostensibly personal film, this plodding portrait of the self-involved flailing for meaning in a mercenary world has little of Soderbergh's insight, empathy or generous personality.

It feels like a peek into the closet of a pedophile and it's genuinely discomforting.

Think of it as a buffet of romantic comedy comfort food: the good old American standbys complemented by bland international dishes.

There's no conviction among these self-involved folks who sidestep commitment with a quip and a grin.

Scott, whose sensitive turn as a priest inspired by Ralph's conviction and commitment gives the film a touch of grace at the cost of revealing McGowan's drab direction of every other actor.

A thoroughly ordinary drama of temptation, dubious redemption and easy revenge.

Offers precious little inspiration, and the only irony it manages is surely unintended.

You can feel the debt to Sidney Lumet's '70s studies in police corruption and cop brotherhood, but O'Connor never captures the edge of danger, anger and moral stands being ground up in compromise.

Washington's fire and righteous anger can only do so much, and the token grit amounts to a few grains of sand in the sentimental machinery.

Yet for all the debauchery, there's a juvenile candor in its knowing embrace of teen sex comedy cliches, as if the entire film is just one of Scott's fantasies. You half expect him to jolt awake at the end, and why not? The film fades just like a half-remembered dream.

The script is soggy and sloppy and Waters is no master of suspense, but he does have a pair of engaging stars flirting in a world of chic New York glamour.

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

For all the color and lively music, it's an overlong, messy labor of love built on a sense of personal betrayal that rings hollow.

If Irwin is your bag, then this is your film. Otherwise, Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course is dumb, mate. Real dumb.

Utter lack of irony and curiosity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Low octane comedy running on fumes.

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

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.

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.

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.

Entertaining in a trashy sort of way.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There's no comic spark under Showalter's drab direction, and no good argument in the film why we should ever wonder about the guy left at the altar.

If only Outlander was as fun as the premise makes it sound on paper.

The film has good design, effective animation and generic if endurable songs, but Sandler wants to slam his sentiment and wallow in it too, and he compromises with the worst of both worlds.

It's all too much and too little: a history lesson in institutional racism that falls into character cliches, a human drama that gets lost in melodramatic detours, a war movie put together by a fan rather than a filmmaker.

It should have warned us that logic was also hitting hard times.

A preachy parable stylized with a touch of John Woo bullet ballet.

A one-note farce that struggles just to remain on key.

If Laurence Fishburne could only have harnessed his fierce performance to drive his directoral debut, Once in the Life might have made something memorable of the done-to-death tale of small-time crooks on the run after a heist gone wrong.

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

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.

Bright, bouncy, kooky and comically tone deaf, CJ7 is the most bizarre kids movie I've ever seen.

Has moments of inspiration, but the scattershot spoofing never achieves enough momentum to get this flight airborne.

Beck wants to dazzle the audience. I'd settle for a story.

Director Bill Duke may believe the message but he never invests himself in the characters or their story, which becomes an illustrated lesson with reflective interludes and comic relief.

Breiman brings nothing new or insightful or even all that clever, for that matter, to the familiar questions of love and sex.

Ben Stiller provides a jolt of personality as a past victim who rouses himself from exile, but otherwise Todd Phillips' fitfully funny script never delivers the crude creativity or the raw energy that feeds this genre of proudly crass male-centric comedies.

Cut down to a frantic 88 minutes, you wonder if all the human moments were trimmed away to get to this abstract, humorless exercise in empty flourish.

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

Shallow Hal begs for the Farrellys to unleash their arsenal of offensiveness, but they want to be liked so much they appear afraid to offend. The result is safe, well-meaning and dull.

Sober and serious and downright glum, ultimately an all-too-familiar portrait of lonely souls unable to break through their own isolation.

Bland and boring.

For all the grace of the animation and visual splendor, the stilted script and emotionless "performances" give this digital artifact a distinctly stiff, wooden flavor.

It's too insubstantial to support its two-hour-plus running time, and too arbitrary to work as a story, so you walk out wondering not happened, but whether anything actually did.

That may be enough to keep the kids bobbing along -- and there are worse heroes for a kid to have than Arnold -- but apart from the shenanigans of civil-disobedient senior citizens, this movie offers little to keep accompanying parents interested.

Finn Taylor's lark of a movie feels like two unfinished films awkwardly fused together and ever threatening to snap apart.

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

Diverting, at times even visually impressive, but has neither the spirit or style of "Spider-Man" nor the ambition of "X-Men."

If there is a delicate story of forgiveness, friendship and family buried somewhere in Erica Beeney's script, Potelle and Rankin haven't managed to find it under the throes of empty rebellion and painless triumph.

Fat Albert's originality is lost on the big screen.

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

It doesn't leave you much to hold on to in a comedy about apathy that can't even muster the energy to care.

This well-meaning mistake gets lost in the metaphors.

Be warned that what looks to be a family comedy pushes its PG-13 rating to the edge with blatant sexual references and creatively crude sexual metaphors.

The film lacks the nerve for any genuinely nasty fun or comic bite.

Fails to generate the elementary visceral thrills we've come to expect from science-fiction thrillers, let alone a compelling human drama.

It plays like a big-budget, after-school special with a generous cast, who at times lift the material from its well-meaning clunkiness.

A canny but hollow pastiche.

A tired tale that never comes to life.

Like shave ice without the topping, this cinematic snow cone is as innocuous as it is flavorless.

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.

An uninvolving film.

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.

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

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

The ploddingly literal screenplay by John Logan doesn't help matters.

The best scenes belong to Tucker and director Brett Ratner keys in to his timing, whether it's a Chinese twist on "Who's on First" or a seduction scene in which Tucker blurts out every impulse.

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.

At least Lin's local color make the idiocy fun to watch.

A good-faith effort, if not completely successful.

Writer/director Jordan Roberts aims for heartwarming drama and settles for tepid entertainment.

It all feels false and calculated, an overearnest attempt to find old-fashioned romantic innocence in the modern world by someone too jaded to believe.

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

There's just no juice to this thing, merely a bunch of fitfully funny gags and a climactic football match that, under Skolnick's direction, fails to show us why the Europeans find this so exciting.

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.

You'd hope God would think bigger for His divine intervention in American politics.

A slick, cynical, nasty piece of heist-film plotting that hides its more obvious logical gaps in techno-babble and distracting spectacles of wanton violence and big explosions.

This half-baked production sat on Miramax's shelf for a couple of years. It's no more done now than then, merely more stale.

It wobbles between a conventionally quirky lighthearted goof and an oddball farce in which character is sacrificed for sight gags.

This larger-than-life cartoon of a trained dog has more character than the two-legged co-stars.

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

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.

A bubbly, high-spirited paean to the joys of pharmaceutical phun that grooves to a throbbing beat but constantly trips over flat, prosaic dialogue and literal, lifeless sight gags.

Even a one-two punch from Australian stars Guy Pearce and Rachel Griffiths, who are wryly good in this crime caper, can't keep it from sinking into a cavern of cliches.

The stylistic cleverness of the opening minutes settles into a self-satisfied flair.

Resembles nothing more than an overstuffed, undernourished "Brady Bunch" episode, only not as funny.

Willis and Breslin are stuck in a charmless, predictable picture they can't escape.

There are some surprises to be had amid the cruelty (inflicted by both Jigsaw and his test subjects), but this time around the ordeal is less grueling than simply distasteful.

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.

Feels like nothing less than Dana Carvey's desperate bid for his own "Austin Powers"-like franchise, but with a harmless humor far less crude. Carvey favors whoopee cushion punch lines to toilet gags and references to big butts over sexual double-entendres.

Whether or not Garden Party is an accurate portrait of the shadow L.A. culture where the young, pretty and desperate can find quick rent money, this low-budget production never engages with its characters or stories enough to make you care either way.

By the film's interminable, unforgivably embarrassing third act it sinks in a sticky swamp of sentimentality.

Drowns promising ideas in a sea of missed details and unconvincing motivations.

See "Freaky Friday" for convincing cross-generational female bonding. Despite it's elegant style and uptown milieu, this film is a cheap imitation.

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.

Has neither the raucous energy and impudence of "Animal House," the defiance of "If ...," nor the grace and wit of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."

It simply isn't that funny or clever. For a comedy, that's about the worst that could happen

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

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.

For a film so intent on the rules of engagement, this is hardly engaging drama.

This film is satisfied merely to wallow in women in peril, cinematic sadism and the spectacle of violent death and dismemberment.

Between Stallone's soap opera of a script and Renny Harlin's speed-obsessed visuals, we're never really shown much more than fast cars and obsessed drivers.