Stephen Holden

The belated sentimentality of the movie is as thudding as its fire-and-brimstone moralism; they're really two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Because The Nanny Diaries is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. But Ms. Johansson’s Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor.

Had it exhibited a modicum of restraint, The Forsaken could have been twice as scary.

This version of The Mummy has no pretenses to be anything other than a gaudy comic video game splashed onto the screen.

The vital signs in Love Happens, a movie that feels likes a laboriously padded outline, are faint.

With its off-center dialogue and upscale industrial settings, Gigantic strains to be original. But beneath its indie affectations it is really another contemplation of generational misunderstanding.

About halfway through, the wheeling and dealing becomes so elaborate and the villains so numerous that the only way to enjoy the movie is to let its preposterous story wash over as you sit back and take in the scenery.

Has only the most tangential relation to reality, and therein lies its slender charm.

Like its recent forerunners, "Rachel Getting Married" and "Margot at the Wedding," Another Happy Day is both anguished and histrionic and in its strongest moments very, very good. But it is also overpopulated, strident and constitutionally unable to step back and scrutinize itself.

Not likely to spur much tourism to Greece. The sights, though impressive, are not photographed interestingly, and the citizens of the host country are less than welcoming.

Whether you find its dual resolution hopelessly pretentious or profound depends on your tolerance for a certain strain of Gallic sentimentality that takes itself more seriously than it lets on.

The film, which Mr. Rodger directed, wrote, produced and photographed on location in nearly two dozen countries, is the documentary equivalent of a spiritually angled coffee-table book of world travels

Set Fire to the Stars barely skims the surface of characters you wish had been given more dimension, but as a snapshot of postwar academia and its pretensions, it exerts a creepy fascination.

An underdog drama with clanging metal-on-metal action, Real Steel feels scientifically programmed to claw at your heart while its battling robots, which have a semblance of human personality, drum up your adrenaline. That said, I'm not sure that the movie itself has more than a semblance of a heart.

Frontera settles into a shallow, unconvincing drama with two heroes.

This is a hiss-the-villain, cheer-the-hero kind of movie.

If Ms. Bynes keeps going in this direction, she can conceivably develop a gallery of characters as rich and varied as Tracey Ullman's.

The jocular screen adaptation of the 2005 best seller "Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" is a shallow but diverting alternative to the book.

However authentic and heartfelt this film's depiction of life on the meaner streets of the Northeast corridor may be, it doesn't begin to match "The Sopranos'" epic vision of violence, class struggle and upward mobility in a barbarous culture.

The film leaves you with a sense that Kastner’s name is a casualty of rhetorical crossfire.

Mighty Fine chugs along heartily until it abruptly stops on the edge of cliff, leaving you feeling shortchanged. It is a couple of crucial scenes away from feeling complete.

An unusually pure example of American kitchen-sink realism.

A kind of apocalyptic 21st-century "Ordinary People," Beautiful Boy, directed by Shawn Ku from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Armbruster, is so high-mindedly determined to avoid sensationalism that it sidesteps critical dramatic content and sabotages its own ambitions.

Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.

If Ms. Smith's and Mr. Hoffman's mopey, sheepish performances are quite convincing and ultimately sad, the movie constructed around them doesn't really know what it wants to say or how to say it.

Everything she (Spears) does seems diluted and secondhand and is never transformed into something original or indelibly self-expressive.

Never regains that initial blast of energy and the final scenes wobble toward a wishy-washy ending.

After spinning out metaphors of paralysis and eroticism in its characters' feverish imaginations, Quid Pro Quo decides at the last minute that it has to explain everything. The moment it pulls away from the fantastic, it lands with a thud.

Heist feels rushed. Many of its points could use elaboration. Its final section is a to-do list delivered in the tone of a high school civics teacher.

The Jackal, like most expensive thrillers nowadays, knows how to do gadgets, pyrotechnics, underground subway chases and panicked crowd scenes. But except for Mr. Gere's uphill battle, it has only the vaguest idea of how to do people.

Once the film softens, it starts to come unglued.

This much sweetness and light in a movie is all very well. But there's a reason that recipes for cake and cookies call for a pinch of salt. In Miss Potter, there is only a grain or two -- not enough to dilute the sugary overload. The film is the cinematic equivalent of a delicate English tea cake whose substance is buried under too many layers of icing.

Mr. Goldthwait's screenplay is essentially a comedy act fleshed out with a story he doesn't try to make convincing.

But long before the last car has been flipped, this flurry of flying metal has lost its edge. The vehicular pirouettes and ski jumps are so exaggerated that they correspond neither to the urban geography nor to the laws of physics. And the jiggling camera can't blur the careless mechanical stitching in a sequence that tries to make up for in length what it lacks in inventiveness.

For Ms. Watts, it is a small, brave acting tour de force.

If the film's sentiments about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does Joyeux Noël, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth?

At the very least 28 Hotel Rooms, the first feature written and directed by Matt Ross, is an impressively executed acting exercise for Chris Messina and Marin Ireland.

Although Under Siege 2 isn't credible for a single moment, its director, Geoff Murphy, has done a smoothly efficient job of coordinating the action sequences.

Because The Matador sustains a tone of screwball insouciance and keeps its trump card hidden up its sleeve, it must be counted as a well-made comic thriller. That doesn't mean it has any depth, credibility or artistic value beyond its capacity to divert.

A Good Year is a three-P movie: pleasant, pretty and predictable. One might add piddling.

Shot in a quasi-documentary style at the actual locations where the events took place, including the sidewalk outside the Dakota, the movie is extremely uncomfortable to watch.

Far from being a typical Hollywood desecration of a difficult play, it stays true to the work's quirky, renegade spirit.

The lives of Olivia, Tomo, Milot and Joey converge in a climactic chase sequence as frantic as a Keystone Cops movie. By this time, grim realism has curdled into bleakly absurdist farce.

Stylistically a formulaic, middle-drawer television movie about intergenerational strife and forgiveness. Every plot turn is groaningly predictable. But at least the lead performances set off sparks.

A dense biographical collage.

The Perfect Storm is no "Titanic."

Teenage horror-movie spoof, John Waters parody, No Nukes protest movie, twisted sex-education film, quasi-feminist fable, outrageous stunt: Mitchell Lichtenstein’s clever, crude comedy, Teeth, is all these and more.

It is best appreciated as an immersion in a three-dimensional toyland outfitted with enough whimsical gadgetry to fill a thousand playrooms.

Watching Paul Cox's impressionistic film based on the diaries of that legendary dancer and choreographer, it is impossible not to contemplate with a shudder the shadowy line between art, ecstasy and psychosis.

The movie's staunchly liberal point of view extends to the 2000 presidential election, which is shown unfolding in the background. Al Gore's concession speech is used to suggest that the systemic racism in Melody is a symptom of a broader climate of injustice.

Too elliptical and poetically structured to cohere as more than an intense mood piece with social ramifications. The movie is so enraptured with its own romantic desolation that its narrative drive becomes sidetracked.

It all feels utterly real and banal. You could describe The Trouble With Men and Women as a comfortable armchair to come back to: too comfortable.

A wispy pubescent comedy.

Like most movies that examine specific ailments, this gawky, occasionally touching film has the feel of a dramatized case history whose purpose is to educate as much as it is to tell a story.

In critical ways, the movie is a mess. The basketball scenes are so sloppy and haphazard that the would-be slapstick registers as confusion. But away from the court, the actors bring their caricatures to folksy comic life.

Takes such pains to avoid narrative and verbal cliches and anything that could remotely be construed as sentimental or romantic that it feels curiously flat.

The best thing about All We Had is Ms. Holmes’s stormy portrayal of a desperate, foolishly trusting woman who rushes from man to man seeking security, only to find herself used and betrayed while her daughter looks on with increasing dismay.

Bang Gang goes out of its way to avoid stereotyping. Where a Hollywood equivalent would almost certainly punish George, “Bang Gang” refuses to designate clear-cut heroes and villains.

For its courage to address a ticklish subject with warmhearted humor, Breakfast With Scot, adapted from a novel by Michael Downing, deserves a light round of applause.

At a certain point, Mr. Norris forsakes realism for theatricalized fantasy, and Broken ultimately loses its stylistic cohesion, if not its humanity.

A Goofy Movie is engaging in its mild-mannered way, but the story is too rambling and emotionally diffuse for the title character to come fully alive.

The dialogue may be crisply idiomatic, but there's finally nothing realistic about the speed with which the characters hurtle through their mood swings and power plays.

Escape From L.A., which the director wrote with Mr. Russell and Debra Hill, is much too giddy to make sense as a politically astute pop fable. As amusing as some of its notions may be, none are developed into sustained running jokes. [09 Aug 1996, p.C5]

Does a fine job of building up a sense of dread as its adulterous relationship gathers steam. So it's all the more disappointing when the movie ultimately collapses with a ridiculous comic ending that leaves you feeling almost as betrayed as its cuckolded husband.

Mr. Bales's spectacular technical performance of a toxic bad boy on the fast track to hell somehow lacks an inner core.

The appeal of The Wendell Baker Story depends on how charming you find the Wilson brothers, with their chipmunk grins and hip smart-aleck attitude. For my taste, a little goes a long way.

Pointless little kidnapping thriller.

Delivers its Holocaust-related story with the clunking force of a blunt instrument slammed into the skull.

A small Canadian horror film that makes the most of its minuscule budget.

Well acted, but it doesn't enrich its metaphor beyond giving an old story a sour contemporary resonance.

As it drags along, the movie makes you feel trapped in the shoes of someone destined for failure.

For an actor like Mr. Hopkins, disappearing into another character, especially a historical figure, must be a far more unsettling deconstruction of reality than for the casual moviegoer observing the transformation. That is a notion Slipstream might have explored more fruitfully, had it focused its wandering attention span, kept its camera steadier and figured out what it wanted to say.

In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.

As it observes these people, most of them well over 60, it conjures a melancholy definition of exile as a haunted state of mind.

Eureka never comes to life. -- In pursuing its aesthetic agenda so single-mindedly, the movie leaves the characters behind in the muck.

She's All That is essentially a formulaic comedy, but it has enough glimmerings of originality and wit to make you wish it were much bolder and funnier than it turns out to be.

For all the trials its characters endure, you might almost describe Ramchand Pakistani as a happy movie: too happy to be entirely believed.

The film’s rich performances, in which every shade of every character’s emotions registers, can go only so far to camouflage the glaring lapses in a drama that often confuses hints and allusions with coherent storytelling.

As the movie fizzles, Mr. Clement’s endearing performance breathes what little life is left into a movie that, much like the insufferable Charlie, can’t make up its mind about where to go or how to get there.

Rookie of the Year, which was directed by Daniel Stern from a script by Sam Harper, has an appealing central performance by Mr. Nicholas, who manages to be cocky without seeming obnoxious. As a summer diversion, the film has about as much substance as cotton candy.

Whether or not Bush's Brain makes its case against Mr. Rove, the movie leaves you with the sickening feeling that it's no longer possible in American politics to stay out of the gutter unless, of course, you want to lose. Dirty politics work.

If it weren't so overpopulated and desperate to shock, Nowhere might have succeeded as a maliciously cheery satire of Hollywood brats overdosing on the very concept of Hollywood. But the movie is so hectically paced that it doesn't have time to develop its characters or to flesh out the tales it sets in motion. Even comic books are better at telling stories.

A liability of Casino Jack is the relative absence of its subject.

Little more than a sanitized blend of nonsense and adventure and just a teeny bit of romance, interspersed with the occasional pop song.

It is left for Mr. Heidbreder to offer the fanciest rationalization for their addiction. Asked whether the movies are a substitute for life, he rejects the suggestion that their behavior is pathological and declares that film itself "is a form of living."

Despite an abundance of mostly tepid jokes that keeps the comedic tone at a quiet simmer, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t jell. Ms. Zellweger floats through the picture, charming but strangely detached from her suitors.

Except for Williams, the sitcom-meets-sci-fi acting throughout the movie is strictly of television caliber.

Astonishing and frustrating, the fusion of live action and computer animation created by the Jim Henson Company in MirrorMask is an example of too much lavished on too little.

Deteriorates from a potentially enlightening exploration of urban development and class conflict into a preposterous melodrama.

Party Girl aspires to be a mid-90's answer to the Susan Seidelman movies "Smithereens" and "Desperately Seeking Susan." Although it has some of the same frothy energy, it has no real story to tell.

Newlyweeds, for all its freshness, never really lands. It remains suspended in a haze of secondhand smoke.

Containing enough characters and subplots for three movies, the novel has been nearly suffocated by Mr. Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and his screenwriter, David Nicholls, in an effort to get everything in.

Although the film, with its home movies and family reminiscences, portrays him as a heroic crusader for justice, it is by no means a hagiography of a man who earned widespread contempt late in his career for defending pariahs.

The strongest elements of this film, which adds nothing new to the subgenre, are its atmospheric, smeared-lipstick cinematography and Mr. Ferdinando’s portrayal of an arrogant, double-dealing crook.

The movie strains to drum up mystery as to the sources of Mr. Crimmins’s rage. When it finally spills the beans, you feel unnecessarily manipulated.

The movie has the metabolism, logic and attention span of a peevish 6-year-old.

In this sendup of Treasure Island, there are no compelling heroes or villains, and the suspense is minimal. Most of the fun lies in watching the Muppets defuse the swashbuckling tale of its scariness by superimposing their own precociously verbal identities onto their characters.

Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary portrait Tab Hunter Confidential is as mild-mannered and blandly likable as its subject.

At only 95 minutes, the movie feels as though it had been shredded in the editing room. In Hollywood-speak, it has a weak second act.

Although you wouldn't want an entire movie devoted to such shenanigans, Hotel for Dogs isn't half as zany as it might have been.

The beauty of the landscape and the monk’s sweetness, humility and good humor evoke a plane of existence, at once elevated and austere, that is humbling to contemplate. That said, Unmistaken Child offers no scholarly perspective on Tibetan Buddhism and leaves fundamental questions unanswered.

The harder the movie tries to shock, the shriller it rings.

It leaves you feeling queasy.

After the painstaking buildup, the revelations are disappointingly predictable.

When the banter sputters, there is always the glorious scenery along the Trans-Canada Highway to divert you.

As Mr. Van Damme fumbles through his part, you are likely to find yourself staring at the big lump on the right side of his forehead and wondering how it got there.

Elektra Luxx has some scattered witty notions, but it is not funny.

The movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support. The movie is so busy being seriously romantic that it forgets the poetry, the whimsy, the airy mystery, the dreamy what-if of angelic contemplation.

Overseen by a director not known for his human touch and lacking a name star, except for Mr. Freeman, Ben-Hur feels like a film made on the cheap, although it looks costly.

The obvious forerunner of My Wife Maurice, is "La Cage aux Folles," a movie that is several cuts above this frantically overwrought imitator.

Despite the movie's considerable visual splendor, the pacing of Warriors of the Rainbow is clumsy, its battle scenes chaotic and its computer effects (especially of a fire that ravages the Seediq hunting forest) cheesy.

Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Ángel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming Kidnapped into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.

Mr. Levy's cold, streamlined direction gives the movie the feel of a mechanical contraption manipulated by remote control with a nervous finger on the fast-forward button. Many of the jokes barely have time to register before we're on to the next stunt.

Wants to be both a realistic family drama and a mythical odyssey but lacks the substance to be much more than a vignette.

Plays like a middling episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” drawn out an extra half-hour and embellished with pretentious literary and cinematic flourishes.

Continually squanders its opportunities for hilarity.

Difficult to swallow.

For all its honesty, Home has only the most tentative narrative coherence. It's a collection of beautifully acted fragments that leave you longing for a story to connect them. The pretty but rather shallow poetry doesn't begin to do the job.

The characters' quirks lend The Big Shot-Caller a certain authenticity, and it is easy to empathize with Mr. Rhein's Lonely Guy in the City. But this minuscule indie variation of "Saturday Night Fever" moves only in fits and starts. When it ends on a cautiously upbeat note, you feel that you have seen just the stumbling first act of an unfinished drama.

Fatally true to the hypocritical values of its niche market. While pretending to teach a lesson in compassion, it wallows in the perks of privilege.

Angels have proliferated in popular culture in such profusion lately that maybe they needed a comeuppance. A few more movies like The Prophecy should stop the whole celestial bandwagon right in its tracks.

Every conflict is softened by inspirational clichés.

Under Bob Radler's direction, the sequences involving tae-kwan-do, a lethal ballet-styled hybrid of kick boxing, judo and karate, carry very little visceral charge until the last 15 minutes, after which the movie expires in a saccharine slush of blood, sweat and tears.

The movie itself is a shell. The characters, especially the unstable Hadley, barely exist. And even by the loose standards of film noir, the mechanics of the murder plot, and the story’s jolts and twists toward its abrupt surprise ending, are unconvincing.

Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.

Long before the film is over, one is left frustratedly grasping after characters and an ambiance that have evaporated into formulaic freneticism.

Dull, pretentiously verbose movie.

As Mr. Maher, in his feature directing debut, brings in surreal touches and puts on literary airs, the film’s grip loosens, and its vernacular turns increasingly wooden.

Passengers increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.

Maintaining a winking distance from his comic persona, Mr. Spade radiates a cunning show-business cynicism that lets you know he's aware that he's slumming to make a buck.

The dialogue in the film, directed by Anne Renton from a screenplay by Claire V. Riley and Paula Goldberg, has the loud, mechanical clicketyclack of a 40-year-old episode of "All in the Family."

A moldy, post-cold-war spy thriller.

This proudly old-fashioned movie will pull any trick in the book to hold your attention. And it needs those tricks: Damien Chazelle’s screenplay is sloppy, ludicrous and ultimately devoid of suspense.

Leaves a movie that wants to be a searching moral examination of human motivation under stress frustratingly opaque at the center.

With the exception of Marie Little White Lies focuses mostly on the men: whiny, strutting little boys whose exasperated, tight-lipped wives put up with their bad behavior and sometimes have to act like mommies.

Wants to be an outdoor, barbecue-grilled "Barbershop" but lacks the pungency and honesty of its prototype.

Wide Awake imagines it's a seriocomic "coming of age" film radiating waves of healing sweetness and light. But beneath its suffocating, smug sentimentality, you have to look hard to uncover a single moment of truth and genuine feeling.

Among this year's bumper crop of shallow teen-age movies, it is the shallowest and the most prurient.

A story that should have been a taut poker-faced French farce that pushed its premise to the brink of absurdity stalls, unsure of its balance between comedy and drama. The movie's one reliable constant is Ms. Huppert. You can't take your eyes off her, even when she is misused and misdirected.

The feisty, lovelorn Ray is far and away the strongest, most complex character, and Mr. Beauchamp gives him his due, even though too many of his speeches sound like a mix of biographical filler and boilerplate sloganeering.

At a certain point, Antiviral doesn’t know where to go or how to break out of its vacuum-sealed sepulcher, and Syd, even when vomiting blood, remains as incorporeal and creepy as a ghost. This is a movie that drinks its own tainted blood.

Its view of the near future may be vaguely plausible and its performances persuasive, but its formulaic construction, internal inconsistencies and fuzzy ending undermine its integrity. It has nothing to say about the big issues -- manhood, war and friendship -- that hasn’t been explored with more depth and honesty in a hundred other movies.

Short on laughs, if supremely inoffensive, this sleepy nonentity of a movie finds Mr. Lawrence in his huggable teddy bear mode.

Neither the screenplay nor the film's visual vocabulary begins to evoke a charged spiritual tension between the protagonist and the world.

The Baytown Outlaws" avidly subscribes to the grindhouse aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. If it has the right spit-in-your-face attitude, it has neither the stamina nor the wit to go the distance, although it makes it about two-thirds of the way.

Ms. Silverstone's pouty all-American brashness counts for little in a film whose flat screenplay doesn't give her a single funny line.

The movie's relentless comic excess is ultimately a little exhausting. But the longer the series endures, the more likely it is to achieve classic cult status.

Except for Ms. Janney's monstrous mother and an Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother (Polly Bergen), Struck by Lightning gives its characters no dimension.

Long before the story culminates with a preposterous final revelation, whatever hopes you had that Now You See Me might have had anything to say about the profession of magic, rampant greed or anything else have been dashed.

There are barely enough titter-worthy one-liners in Marc Lawrence's good-natured romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? to prevent it from sinking under the weight of its clichés.

Handsome but empty film.

Works up a reasonably delicious tingle.

If you're nostalgic for the third grade and all those little wads of wet paper bouncing off the back of your neck, Beverly Hills Ninja is the movie for you. It is one extended fat joke, tricked out in ceremonial robes.

These characters may serve an obscure metaphorical agenda, but they make no psychological sense. And as the movie contemplates the rewards and perils of giving and receiving, it winds itself into stomach-turning knots.

The semi-improvised performances, which seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters, bring Baghead into the realm of group therapy observed through one-way glass.

So long as the camera is studying Franny maniacally bestowing his largess or throwing temper tantrums, The Benefactor is mesmerizing. But Mr. Gere’s flamboyant performance is the sole raison d’être for this melodrama.

No amount of splenetic ranting by Brian Cox, a wonderful actor, when given the right role, can salvage The Good Heart from terminal mawkishness.

Woody Allen proved long ago that the self-pitying introvert is a fit subject for a movie, but only if the film has a strong enough sense of humor to make us laugh at ourselves. But Brooks Branch, who directed Multiple Sarcasms and wrote the screenplay with Linda Morris, was either too lazy to come up with the absurdist aphorisms that might give Multiple Sarcasms a lift, or he labored under the delusion that Gabriel’s metaphysical malaise is such a fresh idea that it deserves microscopic inspection.

If Bella (the title doesn’t make sense until the last scene) is a mediocre cup of mush, the response to it suggests how desperate some people are for an urban fairy tale with a happy ending, no matter how ludicrous.

With the ferocity of a drill instructor and the boundless confidence of a self-help guru who combines psychobabble clichés with embarrassingly explicit confessions, Ms. Lynch's Gayle redeems the movie from utter banality.

Its serious intentions notwithstanding, Beware the Gonzo is essentially a comedy with a mean streak; its portrait of the big man on campus is truly venomous.

The hokey solemnity of A Love Song for Bobby Long suggests "The Mundane Secrets of the Ya-Ya Brotherhood" or "The Notebook Goes to the Big Easy." The movie is another example of Hollywood's going soft and squishy when it goes South.

Sleek, attractive and ultimately vapid.

While Mr. Doug brings plenty of enthusiasm to the task, he doesn't have the moves, and the scene, which ends with his following a mouse into a Dumpster, is one dull thud. The movie also crams far too many subsidiary characters into its 89 bumpy minutes.

Tokyo Decadence is much better at evoking a creepy urban sophistication than at revealing character or telling a story.

If it weren’t for the diligent performances of its stars, who inject some emotional depth into this bogus claptrap, Before I Go to Sleep would be an unwatchable, titter-inducing catastrophe.

The movie, whose cacophonous soundtrack, when turned up, conjures your worst nightmare of sirens, car alarms, jackhammers and sundry aural assaults, is a one-trick film that rapidly wears out its welcome.

Except for the piquant garnish of Mr. MacLachlan, the movie, written and directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid, is barely a cut above an amateur production. The attempts at humor fizzle, and the performances are wooden and overstated.

The final product is soft at the center, a rustic cinematic greeting card.

What redeems the film…are its three outstanding performances.

Once Why Stop Now? has exhausted its bag of tricks, there is a screeching of brakes as it approaches the edge of the cliff. Having expended all that stamina, the film collapses from exhaustion and settles for an abrupt, feel-good ending that is as perfunctory as it is preposterous.

To say that this live-action comic book lives up to Mr. Lucas's description is not a wholehearted endorsement. Are teenage boys as naïve today as they were 60 or more years ago? And much of the dialogue is groaningly clunky. But so it was back then.

The movie builds to a human-versus-alien showdown so sloppily staged that it makes little visual sense. The bargain-basement pyrotechnics suggest that much of The Watch was filmed on autopilot on a strict budget.

Although Garmento exhibits a flailing comic energy, its eagerness to condemn everything about Seventh Avenue, along with its sub-par acting and a choppy narrative style that finally runs amok, lends it a tone of hysterical finger-pointing.

What authenticity Mr. Cannavale and Ms. Bening bring to their roles is the sense of groundedness and integrity for one-note characters in a movie whose screenplay is little more than an efficiently executed outline.

To describe August Rush as a piece of shameless hokum doesn’t quite do justice to the potentially shock-inducing sugar content of this contemporary fairy tale.

There are interesting ideas here, but they are swallowed up in dull, poorly choreographed shootouts and other action nonsense.

As the movie accelerates out of control into a series of frantically intercut scenes that lack basic continuity, the fun turns into a collection of abrupt non sequiturs.

The acting, especially Ms. Moore’s, is solid. But her strong, sympathetic performance fails to transform The English Teacher into anything more than a sitcom devoid of laughs, except for a soupçon of literary humor. It is a movie at odds with itself.

The main, and perhaps the only, reason to see the revenge thriller Lila and Eve, a shallow, cut-rate “Thelma and Louise,” is for the thunderous lead performance of Viola Davis.

If the movie had more courage, it would lay waste these people as hilariously as Robert Altman's film "A Wedding." But as its bad vibes accumulate, Cheerful Weather exhibits all the energy of a disgruntled wedding guest muttering complaints under his breath.

A lower echelon of musical comedy hell (or heaven, if you love the hoariest musical comedy clichés).

Despite earnest attempts, Mr. Franco can’t bring the fervency of Crane’s poetry to life in the extensive recitations.

Valiant is in dire need of some "Shrek"-ian sass, not to mention a drop or two of genuine emotion.

Doesn't trust the audience enough to keep from laying on the schmaltz.

The comedy of male midlife angst dates back at least to “The Seven-Year Itch,” when it was sweet and innocent. Each time it is recycled, it gets more sour and joyless.

Mr. Pitt is a reasonably photogenic specimen. But this actor, whose typical screen character is a broken, androgynous man-child, is disastrously miscast.

Except for the usual double entendres in which titles of mainstream Hollywood hits are twisted into salacious puns, Finding Bliss (Bliss is the name of the company's resident star) isn't especially funny. Nor is it sexy, despite flashes of nudity and fleeting glimpses of Grind's works in progress.

About as scary as a ride on a minor roller coaster, it unrolls its amplified butcher-block shock effects within the first five minutes.

Apart from Ms. Mirren’s performance, Woman in Gold smugly and shamelessly pushes familiar buttons.

Ms. Hall’s Lotte is the weak link in the triangle. Despite all her character’s flowery words of longing, she can’t convey the heat bottled under Lotte’s demure demeanor.

Ma Mère may be ludicrous, but its cast displays a commitment that deserves more than grudging admiration.

If the strong performances of its three stars infuse this metaphorically clotted movie with some life, the screenplay (some of which was improvised) has a weak narrative pulse. This political essay posing as a movie makes the mistake of confusing longwinded storytelling with compelling drama.

The kind of movie that is a must to avoid on a bad day. Even on a good one, it could send you into a funk.

You really can't hang a drama on a mathematical theory and expect it to serve as a shortcut for storytelling.

Agreeable but flagrantly unoriginal.

Buried somewhere under the gross-out jokes and the wet-lipped ogling at an endless parade of jiggling bikini-clad flesh in Grind is the kernel of a cheerful little movie about the world of competitive skateboarding.

A passionate but messy, often inarticulate home movie.

An intermittently funny free-for-all that tries desperately to flesh out a television sketch into a feature-length movie.

Faithful to the outline of the novel but emotionally and spiritually anemic, it slides into the void between art and entertainment, where well-intended would-be screen epics often land with a thud.

There's no escaping that "Dominion" is finally an act of commercial scavenging. You may retrieve the eggshells, coffee grounds and banana peels from your trash and assemble them into a cute, novelty gift basket. But if you bend down and take a whiff, your nose is still met with the scent of garbage.

Collaborator has the tone and structure of an extended one-act play. Its uniformly wooden dialogue lends it the stage-bound feel of a tortured writing exercise.

Narco Cultura feels like two short films sandwiched together to make a feature. One is a shallow pop-music documentary focusing on Mr. Quintero. The other is an equally superficial portrait of the embattled Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso.

Thoroughly blurs the line between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.

If it feels uncomfortably real, it's because its vision of decadence (if you'll pardon the word) is almost unwatchably creepy. Crazy Eyes awakens the same queasiness. Yes, it feels true. But why bother?

If Richie Rich has the ingredients for a sweet-natured fantasy of ultimate childhood bounty, the movie, directed by Donald Petrie, lacks any sense of wonder. Its visual perspective is decidedly grown-up and demystified.

More than Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Hogan behaves like a self-invented comic-book character sprung to life. No Holds Barred is as cartoonish as its star.

A clever if muddled collection of riffs on the "Blair Witch" juggernaut, dressed up with intellectual pretensions by Joe Berlinger, who directed this film with a chortling zest.

For all its seriousness, Kalamity lacks a steady narrative drive; its speeches are too long, and its themes become repetitive.

A grisly sick joke of a film that some will find funny, others simply appalling. On one level, it is an in-joke about movie making, since one reason given for Ben's rampage is the need to steal enough money to make the documentary. On another level, the film satirizes real-life television shows that purport to take viewers into the thick of the action. It suggests how profoundly the presence of the camera affects events, and thumbs its nose at the very notion of documentary objectivity.

Tenderness is a movie undone by its formulaic plot conventions, and its need to give its star more screen time than his characters merits.

The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier "Garden State."

My Name Is Hmmm ... has its magical moments, but they are sabotaged by the director’s showy, ham-handed technique applied to a frustratingly threadbare screenplay that leaves you wanting more.

If Kate's hyperkinetic cheer and shrill self-absorption are Carrie trademarks, 13 years after "Sex and the City" first appeared on television, their appeal has all but evaporated. I Don't Know How She Does It seems stuck in the past.

Teeters unsteadily between dystopian fable and Saturday-morning cartoon.

The one solid element in Wild Horses is Mr. Duvall’s squinting, stone-faced portrayal of a gruff, crusty patriarch beginning to crumble.

Ends up stranded between two concepts, either of which might have yielded a more satisfying film.

These cinematic feats are accomplished with meat-cleaver editing and awkward, jittery computer-generated imagery. The well-cast voices for the expressionless animals are at least good for a few smirks.

May be as exhaustive a study of one man's midlife crisis as has ever been brought to the screen. But as the movie lopes along, exhaustive becomes exhausting.

Much of the skimpy, waterlogged dialogue in Peter Vanderwall's screenplay is heavy with portent. Excerpts from Homer's "Odyssey" and Longfellow's "Children's Hour" add to the tonnage.

Loses tension (and ultimately credibility) as it wanders through three possible endings before grinding to a halt.

A jewel-heist frolic so stale it feels like a retread of a retread.

A choppy, forgetful, suspense-free romp that substitutes campy humor for chills.

So busy building its symbolic frame that it forgets to develop its characters, or even to make them likable.

This spare, minimalist film is not realistic. It has the simplicity of a silent movie, and the blocking of the actors, especially in the scenes with Koistinen and Mirja, emphasizes the distances between them.

Although the screenplay by Roy Blount Jr. comes up with some potentially sidesplitting situations, the director, Howard Franklin, who shepherded Mr. Murray through the equally limp Quick Change six years ago, methodically subverts them.

Aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification.

The fatal flaw of this well-acted movie, whose creators are sex industry veterans, is its refusal to examine Angelina's occupation from outside the bubble. You might even call it a recruitment film.

The harder this desperately obsequious circus of a movie tries to entertain, the more it falls short.

The Arrival, like so many science-fiction films, begins as a promisingly eerie mixture of pseudo-scientific exposition and chilly paranoia. But once its plot has been bared, it turns into a muddled chase movie filled with glaring inconsistencies.

How could a movie starring Hugh Laurie, Oliver Platt, Allison Janney and Catherine Keener go so wrong? That is the mystery behind The Oranges, a dysfunctional-family comedy - excuse the cliché - that backs away in terror from its potentially explosive subject.

A surprisingly unpolished piece of work that plays as though it were written for the stage and only slightly modified for the screen.

Born to Be Blind, for all its haphazard structure, takes you about as far inside Maria's world as a film could reasonably be expected to go, but at moments it also feels uncomfortably exploitative.

Once the plot has sprung into action, High School is a bumpy ride that takes a few amusing dives but never coheres into anything special.

Although Stuck in Love is an indie film, it hews slavishly to Hollywood formulas.

It is too flat-footed and sloppy to explore the obvious parallels between then and now, and the movie is peppered with gratuitous star cameos that distract rather than enlighten. At least it means well.

As it lurches between mush and farce, Very Annie Mary churns up a few genuinely funny bits.

Like "The Sixth Sense," He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not reaches for a crowning final twist, but in this case it falls flat.

The documentary illustrates the premise that if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Until everything collapses, and the filmmakers are left grasping at straws, it's absorbing in a sick way.

A high-minded, lethally dull biography of the legendary golfer Bobby Jones.

Brake is a full-scale paranoid nightmare with back-to-back double-whammy endings.

Much more effective at evoking a paranoid mood than at telling a coherent story, and the jerky action sequences are among the film's weaker visual elements.

As this cautious, politically evenhanded movie grinds along like clockwork, the fuse that should spark an emotional explosion fizzles after some sporadic hisses and sputters.

A more accurate name for Feast of Love might be “Feast of Breasts.” At every opportunity, Mr. Benton turns the camera on his actresses’ gleaming torsos. These beautifully lighted soft-core teases lend an erotic frisson to a movie that in most other ways feels enervated.

Watching the first half-hour of Tooth Fairy is like reaching into a grab bag of novelties, as the movie unveils its tricks... After that, the wit more or less evaporates, replaced by bloated sentimentality and clumsy plot exposition.

As the pace picks up, whatever spell the movie cast is shattered, and Still Life melts into a heap of sentimental slush.

Slick and treacherous.

A mechanically efficient chase-by-numbers movie.

Offering few laughs and a climactic scene of breathtaking cruelty, this plot-heavy movie, directed by Nick Hurran from a screenplay by Melissa Carter and Elisa Bell, draws you into its malignant force field against your will.

With such plodding dialogue, there's little the actors can do to surmount the falsity, although Ms. Shaw, in her brief appearances, almost succeeds.

Its message is quite simple and all too familiar: when it comes to sex, all men are little boys.

A werewolf movie masquerading as a thriller, it looks like a canny attempt by Bruce A. Evans, its director and screenwriter (with Raynold Gideon), to establish a "Saw"-like franchise using the names of fading ’80s stars to lend the project a semblance of respectability.

As a female vocal duo, their performances are passable, if a little dull and lacking in any sense of camp exaggeration.