Sean Axmaker

The texture of Manic feels honest and the chemistry of the kids is well observed, but even the modest breakthroughs are dramatic conventions that favor the symbolic over the genuine.

Most Bond parodies tend to flatten because they fail to evoke the production design overkill and slick cinematic style of its target. Johnny English is no different. Director Peter Howitt delivers action like a journeyman, but Atkinson saves him time and again.

Yet for a film so affectingly steeped in loss, resignation and the ghosts of memory, the revelation that pulls it all together, while satisfying and even touching, lacks emotional resonance.

A thoughtful and often evocative drama of identity and assimilation, but she leaves Nazneen so cocooned in her protective shell of disconnection that we can't connect emotionally.

For all it's warmth and wonder, it carries little more power than a storybook fable.

As exasperating as it is conventionally satisfying.

Part treasure hunt, part disturbia.

Is it too much to ask that the fictional scenes have at least some of the complexity and unpredictability of the real-life theater?

Never quite transcends its origins as a high-concept action thriller, but the clean professionalism of Donner's direction, the low-key turn by Willis and the street-level heroics make it a satisfying piece of genre filmmaking.

This isn't the Bollywood blast of color and song or the brassy razzle-dazzle of "Chicago," but a quieter, sweeter approach that works against the chaotic comedy while humanizing the characters.

The insistent crosscutting suggests there is something powerful between the two stories, but apart from vague connections of jealousy, emotional tension and conversations that constantly dance around the real issues, they don't resonate across the years.

Salva spins a backwoods serial killer setup into something really scary.

Less a story than a film of emotional textures, this is a study in stasis.

The film never earns the irony of the title or offers anything profound in its observations of fractured family dynamics in an atmosphere of lingering resentment, but Allen and Costner enrich and elevate the film and give the growth of their characters a hard-earned gravitas.

It's often helplessly hilarious in its adolescent gross-out way, yet the cast periodically invests the film with sweetness.

Robinson makes these characters breathe, and they bring the film to life.

There's nothing sophisticated or inventive about it, but Cube has fun with his characters and first-time director Marcus Raboy drives the film with enough momentum and energy to make the gags flow together almost like a real story. That's enough to carry it through another Friday.

I'd like to think it's all a joke, that far from a dream this is actually Linklater's idea of a nightmare.

It's not the dance but the kids' passion, and the boisterous support of their friends and family in the audience, that makes the contest so entertaining.

Verbinski, Depp and company just want to make it the best ride you've had all summer. If that's all you demand of a frothy summer blockbuster, then this delivers the goods.

At its best, The Good Girl is a refreshingly adult take on adultery, where the dark humor and offbeat fringe characters don't get in the way of the consequences or the quiet declarations of devotion slipped between the words.

The lack of irony, let alone ambiguity, in an upside world in which mobsters are the underdogs, should sink the film, but Lumet's laid-back professionalism and Diesel's big-hearted performance give it an affable buoyancy.

How She Move is the latest urban music drama from MTV Films, and it manages to give a familiar story a vivid jolt of character.

What Spottiswoode lacks in subtlety and restraint, he balances with a heartfelt passion for the material.

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

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.

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

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.