Sean Axmaker

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.