Stephen Holden

As more characters, including the couple's three children - enter the picture, Late Bloomers loses its narrative thread and becomes so choppy that you have the sense that it was butchered during the editing process. What remains is the skeleton of a story that leads to an abrupt, icky-cute ending.

Probably serves some useful purpose, despite its ham-fisted preachiness and mediocre acting.

Compared to Gray Matters, even a Nora Ephron bonbon has the weight of urban neo-realism.

If the movie is terrific on ambience and street language (the women call one another Dude), much of its melodramatic story involving a rape and payback feels forced.

Most disappointingly, the music is tepid, mediocre pop pastiche.

Most of it has to do with the ways younger Indian-Americans keep their culture alive in the United States and the ways they don't.

What balances the movie is Mr. Caine's exceptional portrayal of old age as the accumulation of a lifetime's experience. In his performance the child, the youthful rogue and the forgetful codger all live at once.

This aggressively whimsical fairy tale about a pair of grown-up orphans who rob from the rich to give to the poor (themselves!) and end up living happily ever after darts forward so quickly that several major plot turns are dispensed with in 10 or 15 seconds of babble.

This unwieldy amalgam of science fiction and horror, directed by Paul Anderson, douses almost every scene with glitzy special effects in a futile attempt to cover up a paucity of thought.

Amazingly, Cesc Gay's delicate but unblinking film Nico and Dani succeeds in capturing and sustaining the fragile emotional climate of curiosity, fear, innocence and prurience that surrounds adolescent sexual experimentation.

A conventional underdog sports movie that should have been much more gripping.

The heavy-handed man-beast comparison is one of several grossly overstated themes in a movie that abruptly changes direction as it goes along while taking shortcuts that leave its characters underdeveloped and crucial plot elements barely fleshed out.

When put into the mouths of American actors with no feel for Wilde's high-toned repartee, they simply hang in the air and die.

The film may be a mess - narratively muddled and crammed with many more vampires, shape-shifters and sorcerers than one movie can handle, but it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its own fiendish games.

The actor's (Jamie Foxx) deft touch lends the flighty story of mistaken identities and romantic mix-ups among mostly African-American characters in Los Angeles the kind of saucy bounce that Cary Grant lent to similar roles six decades ago.

So much care has been taken to build a mood of hushed suspense that the rushed, tragic conclusion, in which too little is shown and too little explained, leaves you deeply unsatisfied.

The movie offers a grab bag of oddball characters who seem unfocused, and its visual rhythms are jerky and spasmodic.

Faster, a turgid, ultraviolent parable of revenge and forgiveness, is as muscle-bound as its monosyllabic antihero.

It is up to its fine cast to build what little sense of mystery is conjured and to bring a sense of coherence to a narrative mishmash that is all smirking attitude with no subtext. Think of it as a goof.

Over the course of 105 minutes, the brutal high contrast begins to strain the eyes. Effectively moody as it is, the style makes a convoluted story of corporate greed, high-tech espionage and science run amok even more difficult to follow.

Because the film, which affects the style of “United 93,” offers no new insights, theories or important information, you’re left wondering why it was made.

There is much more to be explored than this noble documentary, made on a tiny budget, has the resources to examine.

Essentially two movies stuck together like chewing gum on a subway platform. One is a dumber-than-dumb teen comedy crammed with farcical sight-gags and raunchy adolescent humor, the other a no-holds-barred satire of professional sports, and the greed, egotism and pomposity surrounding them.

A clumsy remake of the 1987 cult thriller.

Never finds a comfortable fit between its biographies and its theorizing.

The shallowness of this idealized depiction of European cultural homogeneity is largely camouflaged by the comfortable fit of its director's sensibility with the actors' likable, lived-in performances. An apt alternative title for Russian Dolls might be "Lovers Without Borders."

The screenplay by Mike Rich is so far-fetched and riddled with holes that Mr. Van Sant's urban realist touches only underscore the falseness of what's on the screen.

Struggling to get out from under the film’s too-cheery surface is a much more serious movie about grown-ups confronting the depredations of old age.

Whatever else it may accomplish, Garden Party, which is clumsily structured but well acted, with pungently realistic dialogue, puts you in a world without a center in which you can't tell upside down from right-side up.

Aside from Ms. Harris's performance, the main reason to recommend Natural Selection - very conditionally - is that its creator clearly has talent. He simply lacked the resources to make the movie he envisioned.

In the opening images of Devil’s Knot, the camera sets a menacing, Hitchcockian mood by stealthily creeping into the woods where the murders took place. But the movie settles into being a police procedural with the tone of a superior episode of “Law & Order: SVU.”

In its stunted theatrical version, the second half is a sketchy digest of events that leaves you feeling cheated.

These characters are mostly too sketchy and their connections too contrived for Shrink to jell as an incisive ensemble piece.

Whatever it intends, Jesus Henry Christ is not especially funny. There are witticisms galore in both the thematically recurrent imagery and the dialogue, but very few qualify as jokes, and any laughter is hard to come by. Willfully zany would be a more apt description.

As his movie-in-progress goes along, his pursuit of a childhood dream looks increasingly like an excuse by a canny aspiring filmmaker to create a work sample.

West, for all its intensity, becomes too bogged down in detail to be as strong as it might have been.

A movie so lifeless and drained of genuine joie de vivre it makes you long for the largely fictional earlier film.

Because Mr. Carell doesn’t go in for the kind of all-out caricature that Mr. Ferrell embraces with a manic glee, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has an underlying soulfulness that cuts against its farcical aspirations. This is not to say that Mr. Carell isn’t just fine, only that his performance, as impressive as it is, lacks a shark’s bite.

The movie, originally titled “Song for Marion,” has more emotional clout than you might reasonably expect from a piece of inspirational hokum.

For all its demureness, Restless captures some of the excitement of youthful romance in which the partners aren't just separate individuals but the products of divergent cultures.

Might be described as a low-rent answer to Douglas Keeve's documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, "Unzipped," a movie that also revealed the fundamental silliness of fashion, though it had some glamour attached.

To describe And Now a Word From Our Sponsor as a one-joke skit stretched well beyond the breaking point isn’t entirely fair, because when used ingeniously, which is very seldom, the joke lands.

Because the film doesn’t begin to explore the wider implications of that loss of trust, its findings don’t add up to more than a sardonic gloss on a provocative subject.

Ms. Montenegro's rough-hewn integrity is the one quality that ennobles The Other Side of the Street, an otherwise confused mixture of cat-and-mouse thriller and sentimental old folks' love story that is well below the level of "Central Station."

The biggest hole in a movie that falls sadly short of being another "Diner" or "Trees Lounge" is Mr. Burns's failure to make his alter-ego character anything other than the best-looking and most affluent member of the pack, standing there and discreetly gloating.

In its mixture of the quirky and the downbeat, Ceremony aspires to be a hybrid of Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" and Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" but falls far short.

It's a good thing the movie has so little dialogue, because when it talks, the words dilute its almost surreal visual spell, and the fructose turns to saccharine.

Bluntly downbeat.

The movie, though lovingly handmade by Mr. Craven, has a frustratingly disjunctive rhythm.

A barbed reflection on the great divide between secular and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israeli culture. But its digressive screenplay lacks focus and momentum and is too oblique to connect many of the dots between its characters and their behavior.

May be reasonably diverting, but the story never matches the movie's fantastic visual imagination.

The lesson of Showboy is how disturbingly easy it is for an audience to trust what it sees when confronted with a film posing as factual documentary.

A film that's alternatingly intriguing and frustrating and that leaves too many loose ends dangling.

Retooled into a sleek pop fable that doesn't bother to connect all its dots, the movie aspires to fuse the mystical intellectual gamesmanship of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the love-beyond-the-grave romantic schmaltz of "Titanic," without losing its cool. It's a tricky balancing act that doesn't quite come off.

The structure of When Will I Be Loved seems deliberately flimsy, and many of its details don't add up. But as a contemporary fable about getting and spending in the new gilded age, When Will I Be Loved strikes a chord that echoes.

If Lebanon, Pa. is a tidy little indie with steady acting, it is too politically self-aware to transcend its well-mannered sense of fairness. But the performances by Ms. Kitson and Ms. Hurt give it spritzes of energy.

If Campfire is solidly acted, it is visually drab and has a haphazard narrative momentum.

Observed through emotional gauze, its four likable women are symbolic cheerleaders for personal loyalty and wholesome living.

Despite the glorious singing heard in archival footage from various periods of her career, the film is frustratingly sketchy.

As it abruptly crosscuts among the five friends, it fails to lend the characters' individual stories enough dramatic resonance to make us care about them.

Despite some gorgeous sequences. . . Titan A.E. is bland.

Despite some pretty seasonal photography and evocative scenes of the nuns’ rigorous daily rituals, which involve many hours of prayer, The Monastery is a flighty, disorganized film with a blurry timeline and a wandering attention span.

A drama is only as convincing as its characters. The people awkwardly forced together in Battle in Seattle are rhetorical mouthpieces tied to the sketchy plotlines of a so-so Hollywood ensemble movie.

You have the queasy sense that the whole thing is just an elaborate stunt, and in this case an exploitative one.

Tasteless at times, but where's the yuck?

The highly emotional documentary is narrated by Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter for “Milk,” who, like Mr. Cowan, is gay and grew up in a Mormon household.

The harder Mr. Radnor strains to make you love his alter ego, the more resistant you become.

Although Free Radicals overflows with messy feelings, it maintains such a measured distance from the gathered cries and whispers that it is difficult to empathize with the characters' fears and sorrows. Most of the women are victims, most of the men selfish pigs, and their stories are jarringly punctuated by brutish, joyless bouts of sex.

A Million Ways to Die in the West seems serious about only one thing: its contempt for the gun-crazed macho ethos exalted in countless Hollywood westerns. You might call the movie “Revenge of the Übernerd.”

Any movie that lumps Mr. O'Neal, Ms. Derek and Snoop Dogg (as the voice of a gangsta-rap answer to Stuart Little) under the same title can't be all bad.

Fails its stars in fundamental ways. Mr. Nicholson has played wealthy rogues before (most recently in “Something’s Gotta Give”), but this particular bon vivant is unsalvageably repellent.

Forever stumbling over itself and breaking its own spell.

Feels a little like a science-fiction Sunday school pageant.

In its groggy way The Lost City holds your attention. Incoherent, but splendidly panoramic and drenched in wonderful Cuban music, it has the texture of a vivid, intoxicating dream that seems to mean something until you wake up and feel it slipping away. All that remains are feelings and impressions connected by a mood.

Watching the movie is a little like gorging on chocolate and Champagne until that queasy moment arrives when you realize you’ve consumed far too much.

A soft-hearted, squishy-minded prototype for a network sitcom, is mildly ingratiating but never laugh-out-loud funny. Even Ms. Hudson's intrepid radiance can't camouflage the premise's leaky foundation.

Ms. Chastain’s watchful, layered performance helps keep the film on an even keel, but it is not enough to prevent The Zookeeper’s Wife, with its reassuringly cuddly critters, from feeling like a Disney version of the Holocaust.

A nasty little thriller that starts out on a somewhat higher plane but eventually trades in its level head for conventional scare tactics and violence.

A dawdling affair that never finds its own rhythm. Early on, it gets lost in its own earnestness and never finds its way back.

Yet the movie sustains a mood. It passionately believes in itself and in the value of the messy artistic lives it glosses, and some of that belief rubs off on you.

As truthful as it is, Boulevard conveys little insight into characters who are believable and well acted but incapable of change.

Flailing and pummeling the air, with body language that's part prizefighter, part baggy-pants clown, Reno is famous for her bluntness.

With its pointed, cavernous backgrounds and a Gotham City setting that evokes a 1940's-style futurism, "Mask of the Phantasm" looks splendid. But its story is too complicated and the editing too jerky for the movie to achieve narrative coherence. And the resemblance between the movie's hero and its enigmatic arch-villain is so close that audiences are likely to be confused.

Although the stunts come thick and fast in The Pink Panther 2, they are jammed together in a way that gives most of them barely enough time to register.

Quickly turns into an earnest talkfest (spiced with flashes of nudity and sexually explicit dialogue) that feels stiffly programmatic and ultimately false.

Would much rather wallow in music than develop the strands of a story.

Dramatically Joe the King feels unglued, as if crucial sequences had been left on the cutting-room floor.

The film's energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.

In the breezy, amoral heist comedy Mad Money, “Fun With Dick and Jane” meets “9 to 5” on the way to recession.

The film has the loose narrative structure of a quasi-poetic personal journal that is more a series of reflections than a cohesive story.

It may have been a shrewd business decision by the film’s director, Miguel Sapochnik, to treat the story as a nasty, comic thriller. But when, after a certain point, Repo Men subsumes its satire to strenuous action sequences, it loses its edge and turns into a chase movie of no special distinction.

Subject matter that seemed mildly shocking, even radical, a half-century ago may be impossible to refresh, though the screenplay, by Ms. Coiro, has a firm grasp of its characters.

This is not to say that Charlotte Rampling: The Look is a complete washout. A tease is more like it, an examination of the surface. Ms. Rampling is presented as an endlessly watchable mystery, an aloof but affable sphinx. But we knew that already.

More skin is shown in Spread than in most Hollywood movies. But despite twitches of insight into its characters and their world, Spread refuses go more than skin deep.

A small, intense period piece with a tough-love attitude toward lazy, self-indulgent little girls flirting with madness.

Although it leaves you with a knot in your stomach, its power is undercut by its own head-banging obviousness.

Ultimately, even after momentarily falling apart in a fit of paranoia, Martin remains a cipher in a movie that never fulfills its potential as melodrama. If The Good Doctor isn't a bad movie, it tells only half the story.

K-9 doesn't have a shred of credibility. And Mr. Belushi, despite some rough edges, lacks a strong enough macho growl to make Dooley seem like a police dog in human clothing. But with its surefire dog tricks and breezy pacing, K-9 is at least mildly diverting.

With its dearth of substance and its wandering focus, this is a middlebrow bodice-ripper posing as an epic that hasn’t the foggiest idea of what it wants to say.

There are some very good performances and parts of performances in Blood Ties, but the movie fails to convey a sense of tribal identity within this world.

Nobody in this sweet-natured, low-testosterone trifle is out for blood. Mr. Hall gives an agreeable portrayal of a man-child not unlike David Fisher, his character on "Six Feet Under."

Because Mr. Thurston and Mr. Wigdor lack the hard shells necessary to make their characters credible, White Irish Drinkers feels synthetic. Mr. Lang and the older cast members fare better, but they can't save a movie that runs on clichés.

Despite the intensity of their performances, Ms. Watts and Mr. Dillon are only fleetingly convincing as these desperate young Americans trying to maintain a foothold.

John Rabe, has its visceral moments. But it is also burdened by manipulative clichés of a screenplay in which exposition outweighs character development. Inspired by Rabe’s diaries, from which short excerpts are read, it tells the story almost exclusively from a Western point of view.

This absurdist satire of sex, sibling rivalry, Oedipal ties, homicidal fantasies and fast food in the American heartland at least has the right attitude. It just isn't funny enough in its particulars to make you break up laughing.

The movie feels like a grown-up version of little boys making whooshing noises and staging collisions while playing with toys on a living room floor. It belongs to the same star-and-his-pals-cutting-up genre as the lesser comedies by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

12-12-12 is not really a concert movie so much as it is a densely compacted scrapbook of moments onstage and off.

What does it all mean? Less than meets the eye. Amer is a voluptuous wallow in recycled psychosexual kitsch.

The Man of My Life is a sumptuously illustrated but shallow fable of the grass-is-greener conflict between freedom and commitment.

This is the kind of comedy in which the characters are construction-paper cutouts whose abrupt changes of heart are dictated entirely by the preposterous plot and not by psychological or social reality.

Darting around a futuristic Los Angeles on motor scooters that can fly, these plucky whiz kids are so indomitably cheery that they seem more mechanical than the demented cyber-messiah who tries to destroy them. At least he has a temper.

In many ways Sparkle is a bumpy ride. The editing is haphazard, the cinematography too dark, and there are holes in the story. If the new songs on the soundtrack are effective Motown pastiches, most of them pale beside their prototypes. But diluted Motown is better than none.

A film of noble intentions that eventually wears out its welcome.

Polite, detached documentary in which there are no highs or lows. Politically and emotionally, the movie's thermostat remains at medium cool.

Its familiar story of an embittered child's homecoming and confrontation with a parent throws off dramatic sparks, but they never flare into a blaze.

As beautiful as it is, Epic is fatally lacking in visceral momentum and dramatic edge.

As much as the story, based on a novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim, has the irresistible earmarks of the kind of high-toned bodice-ripper at which the French excel, its cinematic realization is oddly gawky and tepid.

The cinematic equivalent of sampling goodies from a spartan tastings menu in which the entrees, desserts and appetizers are confusingly jumbled together.

As an outcry against the forcible conscription of children into armies around the world, Innocent Voices, is an honorable film. But as a balanced portrait of a tragic civil war, it is simplistic and opaque.

Shrewdly divided against itself. What begins as a small, cleareyed drama about a teenager with terminal cancer morphs into a gauzy tear-jerker.

The only distinguishing characteristic of this mildly agreeable variation of a worn-out formula is that the boisterous family under examination is Puerto Rican, and the screenplay includes a smattering of Spanish.

Silly, featherweight comedy.

You can only imagine how much stronger the movie might have been had it fleshed out subsidiary dramas whose outlines are barely discernible.

As it wobbles from one episode to the next, The Pick of Destiny is a garish mess, and some of it feels padded. But it has enough jokes to keep you smiling, and the spirit Mr. Black brings to it is a fervent (and touching) affection for the music he spoofs but obviously adores.

The first third of The Switch, directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck, is so bizarre that it leads you to wonder if, through some miraculous lack of oversight, the movie will blaze an unpredictable path. No such luck.

Mr. Freeman projects a kindness, patience and canny intelligence that cut against the movie's fast pace and pumped-up shock effects. His performance is so measured it makes you want to believe in the movie much more than its gimmicky jerry-built plot ever permits.

The message about race relations in America conveyed by The Tenants, a small, serious, but choppy and psychologically cauterized screen adaptation of Bernard Malamud's 1971 novel, is dire.

Two Weeks gets into serious trouble in its clumsy attempts to offset the sadness and anxiety with humor. This pursuit of sitcom levity contaminates a movie that might have been an American answer to the hardheaded Romanian masterpiece "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

If the concept is ingenious, its execution is erratic.

Behind its transgressive affectations, The Foxy Merkins is a sweet, playful divertissement.

A sugarcoated romantic comedy that is just clever enough to make you wish it were three times as smart and only a third as sweet.

An enraptured fantasia of high times at the hotel, the film is so intoxicated with the Chelsea’s bohemian mystique it virtually consumes itself.

It all adds up to the kind of bad family entertainment likely to raise only a few eyebrows.

A poor man’s “In Bruges” that frantically chases itself in circles.

She’s Lost Control sustains a mood of deepening alienation, but the attitude of the movie is too detached for it to be emotionally gripping, and its ending is botched.

This earnest, well-intentioned movie elicits frustration that its story had to be packaged as a conventional, not very suspenseful fugitive thriller with a bogus Hollywood ending.

None of it adds up to terribly much beyond a rip-roaring adventure that shows off Carlyle and Miller as cynical British city cousins of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The movie, which begins with Mr. Sarkozy's election-night victory in May 2007, only intermittently rises above the tone of an arch, sniping drawing-room comedy peopled with mild caricatures.

By the end of The Walker a movie that begins as a dazzling round of charades has deteriorated into a plodding game of Clue.

The shortened version is lovely to look at, but the stilted dialogue and crude overdubbing in scenes where English is not spoken often make it an impenetrable hodgepodge.

Mike Binder’s steady, well-intentioned exploration of the racial tensions affecting two branches of a Southern California family, is notable for what it doesn’t try to do.

As impressive as it is in the abstract, all the detail ultimately drags the movie down and lengthens it unnecessarily.

Maddeningly, purposefully evasive.

If the film's old-movie homages are affectionate, they're slavishly imitative and scattershot, and the story is so willfully daffy that not even the hint of a subtext asserts itself. The film rides on the dubious assumption that camp and infantilism are the same thing.

Darts nervously between soap opera and sitcom, rarely blending them in a way that lets the two genres enhance each other.

The screenplay’s pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film.

And while Mr. Duke's direction has visual panache, the movie is unevenly paced.

Until it plunges into gore, the movie remains above the typical splatter 'n' scream fest. These careless hedonists are convincing, and the ensemble acting feels believable; the orgy looks very real. But the realism turns to caricature once the panicked party monsters begin viciously turning on one another.

What holds the film together, more or less, is the steady stream of mostly slapstick clips from early cinema.

The movie knows its audience, which is roughly between the ages of 5 and 13 and enjoys inane, goofy slapstick that seldom lets up.

Gives you the delirious thrill of ripping off your enemy's head and watching the blood gush by providing a ringside seat.

A film divided against itself. The more the cat-and-mouse game between prisoner and reporter points it in the direction of "The Silence of the Lambs," the closer it inches toward the sort of exploitation it condemns; for me, that's too close for Crónicas to be taken without a big grain of salt.

Appeal[s] to the delicate palates of an audience that craves the movie equivalent of tea and biscuits: stiff upper lips conceal hearts of gold, and all psychological conflicts are resolved with tearful confessions of vulnerability.

Had John Cassavetes directed “Love Story,” it might have turned out looking and sounding something like Mercy, a portrait of a sub-Mailer-like literary pugilist and the woman (named Mercy) who wins his heart. Odd as that juxtaposition may seem, it’s not a bad mix.

As long as it is fixated on gadgetry, FX2 is reasonably entertaining. But when the movie focuses on plot and character, it turns quite dotty in an amiable way.

So snug, airtight and insulated from reality that the nice, well-scrubbed "Cheaper by the Dozen" seems almost rambunctious by comparison.

Made of Honor retains enough sweetness to satisfy the cotton-candy addicts. For true believers in fairy tales, no romantic fantasy is too extravagant if the heroine is a sweetheart. The rest of us can sit there and roll our eyes.

Leaves a sour aftertaste since it's obvious that the filmmaker's intrusion on these unhappy people, fictional or not, only further worsens their discomfort and their difficulty communicating.

Too lazy and too scared to say anything pertinent about love, society and the human condition, Four Lovers is content to be a pleasant, mildly titillating divertissement with no meaning at all.

High-minded but hopelessly wooden film.

Mr. Harris's coach is not a flashy role. But the actor, who effortlessly embodies an all-American ideal of strength and decency, drains as much of the syrup from his character as any actor could hope.

Although Mr. Leguizamo wisely underplays a role that is just short of saintly, the character is still a filmmaker's bogus, bleeding-heart contrivance in a movie that is much less truthful than it pretends to be.

Mr. Schoenaerts’s dour André may make conceptual sense, but he leaves a hole in this handsomely mounted costume drama that would have profited from more intrigue and a steamier erotic atmosphere.

If American Gun avoids the most obvious kinds of sensationalism, it has the flaw common to many editorial broadsides of overstuffing its episodes with melodrama and symbolism.

If Deliver Us From Eva is amusing, it is not uproarious.

A cheerful teen-age adventure film that in its snappier moments resembles a far less clever and less expensive Back to the Future. Despite a plot that has few interesting twists and a shoestring budget, the film glimmers with moments of drollery.

As powerful and well made as it is, Outside the Law is too schematic and single-minded to lodge itself in your mind as a fully realized cinematic epic. Its few female characters are sketchy at best. It is all politics, all the time.

Though certainly not for the squeamish, the film is by no means the ultimate horror movie it aspires to be. The volume of stagy gore quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. And rather than trying to sustain a mood of grim suspense, the writer-director Dan O'Bannon has conceived this cinematic cousin of Night of the Living Dead as a mordant punk comedy.

Despite the humanity and courage exhibited by the members of Exit, the film is inescapably grim.

For those who accept the absurd simulations as realistic, Sex and Zen will have soft-core pornographic appeal. For others, its appeal should be as a cheeky if predictable sendup of erotic obsession and its unhappy consequences.

As long as it focuses on its feverishly needy central characters, neither of whom you would ever want to have as a friend, it remains true to itself.

We Are the Giant builds up quite a rhetorical head of steam, but it doesn’t try to analyze the conflicts it observes or to fill in the history, except in the broadest sense of placing these uprisings on a list of rebellions that stretch back through millenniums.

If Mr. Neil had the tonal mastery of Wes Anderson, Goats could have been so much more than an episodic sequence of whimsical little psychodramas.

Almost until the end, Loverboy maintains a shaky integrity. But in its final moments it caves in to convention with a mawkish epilogue to a story that ends with an appalling act of selfishness.

Archetypes and symbols solemnly parade through Seraphim Falls, a handsome, old-fashioned western of few words and heavy meanings that unfolds with the sanctimonious grandeur of a biblical allegory.

What keeps the movie, directed by Michael Dowse, on a more or less even keel is its steady pacing and emotional kinship to John Hughes comedies like "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club."

So awful it just might put an end to Hollywood's hypocritical infatuation with men in drag as symbols of its own supposedly liberated sexual attitudes.

Exudes a randy, robust charm as it unapologetically thumbs its nose at respectability and everything the word implies.

What ultimately sinks this stylish but heartless film is a flat lead performance by the eternally snippy Meg Ryan.

Jack of the Red Hearts is so good-hearted it doesn’t want to leave audiences without a glimmer a hope.

Most of the supernatural sightings are flickers at the corners of the screen, so that at certain moments watching the movie feels like taking an eye exam. You see it, then you don't. But the film is not especially scary, and even its boo! moments lack a visceral shock.

At around the halfway point, its characters’ haranguing voices begin to grate on you. People in their early 20s, even pretty people, lose their appeal when they dwell this obsessively on their own inchoate turmoil.

Better Living Through Chemistry never becomes a full-fledged film noir. It reads as an unabashedly positive infomercial for gorging on the apparently risk-free, liberating products of Big Pharma.

A disturbing, somewhat repellent portrait of a depressed middle-class woman's struggle to live comfortably in the world.

The best jokes in this scattershot screwball satire of job insecurity, upward mobility, political correctness and yuppie marital tensions have claws that leave scratches.

Although Maxed Out would like to be this year’s "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," it doesn’t measure up. "Enron" was a stronger film because its focus was specific, the personalities under its microscope were outsize, and its story had a beginning, middle and end. Maxed Out, which has no narrator, gathers facts, opinions and impressions and tosses them into a blender. And its story is still unfinished.

A sweeping but disorganized and sometimes monotonous exploration.

For all its violence and road rage, Snitch doesn’t disintegrate into noisy popcorn nonsense.

The biggest weakness in Nina's Tragedies, is the character of Nadav. His shadowy presence leaves the movie without a solid center around which to spin its tales.

The absence of an emotional catharsis in the film, efficiently directed by Mick Jackson (“The Bodyguard,” “Temple Grandin”) from a screenplay by the British playwright David Hare, leaves a frustrating emptiness at its center.

The only thing about the movie that isn't a transparent paste imitation is Douglas' hard, gleaming performance.

Makes the best possible argument for a cautionary drama that contemplates the absolute worst in us.

Beyond the Sea, with all its gaping faults, is the genuine article. It succeeds in being deeply and sincerely insincere.

Sets out to puncture the clichéd image of Scandinavians as rosy-cheeked choristers bonded in communal togetherness. But its subversive intentions are ultimately undercut by its lack of nerve, along with a lurking sentimentality.

Led by Ms. Bettis's discreetly campy May, the performances are a cut or two above what you would find in the average slasher film. But in the end that's all it is.

Like "I Am Sam," it is a film that tests your cynicism.

Like an over-dressed Christmas tree, Look Who's Talking Now is a movie so eager to shine that it arrives draped in several layers of sentimental tinsel and cutesy-pie decorations.

Instead of building sustained comic set pieces, it takes a machine-gun approach to humor. Without looking at where it's aiming, it opens fire and sprays comic bullets in all directions, trusting that a few will hit the bull's-eye. A few do, but many more don't.

The lead performances of Home Room go a long way toward camouflaging the severe flaws of this exceedingly earnest movie.

Partly because Miss Sloane is more a character study than a coherent political drama, it fumbles the issue it purports to address, and it eventually runs aground in a preposterous ending.

If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.

For all its flighty charms, The Extra Man never really lands. It hovers like a hummingbird madly beating its wings to stay aloft.

The House of Yes was adapted from a play by Wendy MacLeod. And the movie, with its brittle, outrageous dialogue has a shrill stagy feel. That would be fine, if the dialogue sustained the stylish crackle of a drawing-room comedy gone berserk, but there are many gaping holes between the funny moments.

Heavyweights is really two movies in one, and they don't mesh.

Tombstone is a movie that wants to have it both ways. It wants to be at once traditional and morally ambiguous. The two visions don't quite harmonize.

If Mr. Duvall's finely textured performance is a testament to the power of good screen acting to lift a film above the mundane, the movie's many irritating tics demonstrate that he is much more at home in front of the camera than behind it.

Mighty Joe Young, directed by Ron Underwood from a screenplay by Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner, is saddled with dialogue so wooden that Mr. Paxton and Ms. Theron almost seem animatronic themselves. Little children won't notice. In Joe, they can identify with the biggest, cuddliest simian toy a 6-year-old could ever hope to own.

It's all so seamy, sordid, lurid and shocking! And dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography and a jaundiced, smoggy color scheme.

Half of the time, the movie - based on a novel by Ivica Dikic, who collaborated with Mr. Tanovic on the screenplay - has the tone and pace of a farce. The other half, it plays like an unconvincing melodrama. The film assumes knowledge about the history and politics of the former Yugoslavia and the wars involved in its breakup that most Americans don't possess.

Not especially innovative in its look or subject matter.

Take the Lead, despite its nifty concept and fiery leading man, feels sloppy and rushed.

As Love Is All You Need ties up its loose ends, it settles into a rom-com formula with a predictable, upbeat ending. It feels good, sort of.

Magic Trip is the cinematic equivalent of a yellowed scrapbook whose pictures are accompanied by sketchy captions created after the fact.

It has the tone and texture of a well-made but forgettable television movie.

Not everyone will be thrilled by the movie, which is one long dirty (and occasionally very funny) joke.

When a poetically inclined film fixates on the same image too often, it is a sign that the movie may have succumbed to its own dreamy esthetic. That is one of the problems of The Neon Bible, the English director Terence Davies's hallucinatory portrait of the American South half a century ago.

Ends up stranded in the wilderness between comedy and rushed, halfhearted melodrama.

An ingenious contraption that holds your attention for as long as it whirs and clicks like a mechanized Rubik’s Cube. After it’s over, however, you may find yourself scratching your head and wondering if there was any purpose to this sleek little gizmo.

Although the movie captures the solidarity and the beauty and peril of a rustic mountain town whose residents are necessarily interdependent, its individual subplots don't connect. Despite several solid performances, the characters are too hazily sketched and too loosely linked to form a meaningful chain.

Terminally whimsical, it generates a steady current of humor, much of it off-color.

Almost a textbook example of what can go wrong when an artistic bad boy decides to be good.

These characters are fully alive. But the movie attaches them to a conventional, not to say creaky, hip-meets-square drama.

For all the earth shaking that goes on, “Percy Jackson” is agreeably tame and unthreatening.

Leaky PT boat of a comedy, descended from the television series.

It all makes for a poignant mix, the boy inside the man, pressing his nose against the glass, longing for the journalistic authenticity of someone like Burrows while still believing in Lassie and the unconditional love of True.

Ms. Barkin is almost unrecognizable as this bedraggled bundle of rage and disappointment. Exploding from deep within, her devastating performance hijacks the film.

Though it includes some moderately funny snippets of actual performances, Wild West Comedy Show is not a concert film. We never see a complete performance or even a quarter of one.

Think of it as a kind of “Twilight Zone 2007” in which the paranoia endemic to an industry that runs on illusion, hype and extravagant grandiosity comes home to roost.

The story is so schematically histrionic that the bringing in of the Holocaust late in the day feels exploitative and unearned. Gloomy Sunday is an oddity that takes itself much too seriously.

However persuasively acted, this mélange of cinéma vérité, slapstick and murder - whose story has a lot in common with the recent Australian gangster film "Animal Kingdom" - has too many narrative gaps for its pieces to cohere satisfactorily.

As much as you admire the stagecraft and the technical skills on display, when all is said and done, that's all it is: a fancy, not-quite-two-hour stunt.

An illustrated civics lesson that strains to make its complicated, shadowy subject - electoral redistricting - a political hot topic.

The chief pleasures of this mild-mannered dud lie in watching two resourceful comic actors go through their paces like the pros they are.

The movie should have been a steadily escalating rampage that results in outrageous property damage. Instead, it wastes too much of its time developing the cardboard characters of the hotel manager, Robert (Jason Alexander), and his two mischievous sons, Kyle (Eric Lloyd) and Brian (Graham Sack).

Acted with enough zest by its cast to give these not especially endearing people a poignant human dimension.

For all its subtext about identity and London's social fabric, Dreams of a Life leaves too many blanks and is ultimately more frustrating than rewarding.

Vanity Fair has a deeper conceptual confusion. In mixing satire and romance, the movie proves once again that the two are about as compatible as lemon juice and heavy cream.

Had it had the concision and symmetry of a classic French farce, Après Vous could have been an irresistible laugh machine.

Only twice does the film give a tantalizing glimpse at the personality behind the voice.

The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book "Letters From Hell."

It strings along its joke just long enough to keep from wearing out its welcome.

Despite its hip, off-center style and pointed de-glamorization of its singles, the movie adds up to little more than feel-good fluff.

The bits of Aboriginal lore imparted along the way by Tadpole add flavoring to a sugar-coated romp that has the craft of a high school revue.

Although the odds are against them, Mr. Gazzara and Ms. Moreno succeed in cutting through the forced sitcom banter to create a credible and touching portrait of a marriage of two proud individuals who respect each other even in moments of strife.

The Last Days on Mars ultimately can’t transcend its pulpy roots.

This opulent movie, with gorgeous rainbow animation, is heavy on message but light on humor.

Yes, Heartbreaker is diverting, intermittently charming and occasionally funny, but it is also a jumble of jammed-together notions. Unevenly paced, it goes on too many tangents to cohere as a persuasive comic fable about love and money.

What hip means in this uneven comic suspense film is maintaining the ironically distanced tone of a deadpan ''Married to the Mob'' or a tongue-in-cheek Coen Brothers caper.

The other alumni, played by Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Jeremy Strong and Rebecca Lawrence, are given such short shrift that they come across more as sarcastic commentators than as characters.

The characters never transcend the clichés embedded in the culture since "The Godfather."

The movie’s sense of time is as vague as Ezra’s perception of it. Chaos is all he knows. Making Ezra even harder to follow, and undermining its authenticity, is the fact that its mostly African cast speaks in a heavily accented English. Mr. Kamara’s glowering lead performance, however, is riveting.

Expressive touches are finally inadequate. Ms. Huppert's hard work notwithstanding, they don't take the place of psychological texture and narrative weight.

Recovery time is recommended after seeing Gardens of the Night, a harrowing, obliquely told story of kidnapping and forced child prostitution that conjures a world entirely populated by predators and prey.

It's enough to say that the bland romantic comedy Life as We Know It, in which there is not a single deviation from formula, is well made for its corporate type.

The deeper Ricky plunges into allegory, the shakier its grasp of the material.

Think of Death at a Funeral as a comic quickie. As it presses buttons, a few laughs come out, but that’s all there is to it.

The movie is filled with felines. It seems that the only things that Sleepwalkers fear are cats, which would like to tear them to pieces. That's why the Brady front yard teems with them. They are waiting for a denouement that, when it arrives, is anticlimactic.

Perhaps not since "Steel Magnolias" has Hollywood turned out a movie so resolutely for and about women.

Once again, the lesson that more is not necessarily better, something rarely learned by blockbuster sequels, is forgotten.

When My Neighbor Totoro, which was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is dispensing enchantment, it can be very charming. Too much of the film, however, is taken up with stiff, mechanical chitchat.

As much as these wonderful actors invest their performances with psychological nuance, their efforts go mostly for naught in a movie that gives character development a distant back seat to the grinding mechanics of its formulaic plot.

This expressionistic portrait of the American West is an oddity that only a director from another country could have conjured.

A cinematic game that might be called Urban Creep Show, New York-style.

For all its attention to detail, Yonkers Joe isn't half as tough as it pretends to be. The real story of these bottom-feeders and the sad young man they exploit is a lot uglier than the movie even begins to let on.

The movie is a continuous barrage of explosions, sneak attacks, chases, life-and-death face-offs, and amazing rescues that are as far-fetched as they are exhilarating. The cheap thrills are compounded by Mikko Alanne and David Battle's screenplay, a wallow in old-time Hollywood boilerplate, some of which you can't believe is being recycled yet again.

If the characters are likable enough, they are underdeveloped and have little of the quirky individuality or dimension of the adventurous seniors portrayed in the superior (but sugarcoated) movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For a truthful film about those final years, you'll have to wait for Michael Haneke's heartbreaking masterpiece "Amour," which is to open in December.

Much of Mr. Maher's film is extremely funny in a similarly irreverent, offhanded way. Some true believers -- at least those who have a sense of humor about their faith -- may even be amused. But most will not.

Extremely well acted. But as frequently as The Farewell touches on politics, it is essentially an excoriating (and sometimes grimly amusing) domestic drama of a latter-day king and his concubines.

Too light-headed to qualify as satire, too poker-faced to register as comedy, Fay Grim belongs in its own stylistic niche: the Hal Hartley film.