Todd McCarthy

A blustery, bombastic, visually arresting account of the Battle of Thermopylae as channeled through the rabid imagination of graphic novelist Frank Miller.

(Stone's) most accessible and purely enjoyable film in years.

The generational mix of actors works well enough, although Campbell too often seems stranded with little to do until the climax.

Will please fans of Sara Gruen's best seller, but it lacks the vital spark that would have made the drama truly compelling on the screen.

Despite the undeniable presence of a huge amount of action, X-Men: Apocalypse is decidedly a case of more is less, especially when compared with the surprising action and more interesting personal interactions (including the temporary subtraction of some characters) in other big Marvel franchises.

Something less than monumental, The Monuments Men wears its noble purpose on its sleeve when either greater grit or more irreverence could have put the same tale across to modern audiences with more punch and no loss of import.

Graced with well-chosen location eye candy, Tom Tykwer's biggest production to date is proficient but lacks the added tension and characterization to put it anywhere near the top tier of contempo action suspensers.

So determinedly old-fashioned it makes a strong claim to being the best film musical of 1959.

Individual scenes are charged with energy, tense confrontations are numerous, and Hillcoat and Cook's intentions were undoubtedly partly to tease and taunt viewers with uncertainly about where they, and the characters, stand, to figure out who's got the power and who doesn't. If it was possible to give a damn about any of them, it would help.

Tries to mix the messy realities of mismatched relationships with the structural neatness of a musical-comedy view of the world, with mild, occasionally diverting results.

We have a monotonous conjectural melodrama for the faith-based crowd that does nothing to reach out to others. It does indicate how a very important seed was planted for the blossoming of Christianity, but is banal where it needed to be charged with passion and a palpable religious compulsion of its own.

Cage supplies beaucoup energy, but his highly compromised hustler cop character provides little else in which he can invest his talent. Sinise wears an increasingly grim demeanor in a part that comes to make no sense, and John Heard's role as a local power broker gets lost in the shuffle.

A noxious little tale of Wall Street types whose amorality knows no limit, Rick takes smarmy knowingness to ludicrous extremes.

Story was originally conceived as an episode of Tales From the Crypt, and that is perhaps what it should have remained, as the thinness of the conceit shows throughout, painfully so in the first half.

Terse and understated, this is a spy vs. spy tale designed to minimize talk and maximize action, not at all a bad thing in movies but over-worked to near-exhaustion here.

Reitman keeps a strong grip on all the aspects of the story to prevent it from becoming corny, unduly melodramatic or obvious.

An intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target.

Nicely cast and made with as much conviction as can be brought to something so intrinsically formulaic.

The Getaway is a pretty good remake of a pretty good action thriller.

Despite the estimable talent on hand both behind and in front of the camera, the story never comes to convincing life and doesn’t, in the end, have anywhere particularly surprising or interesting to go.

Impressively rendered but oddly uninviting adventure.

This wan, mundane coming-of-ager focuses on kids enacting a pale imitation of '50s car-centered, "American Graffiti"-style time-killing, with the impediment of exceptionally dull dialogue.

A Walk in the Woods serves as a terrific showcase for two exceptionally durable stars.

There is a trumped-up quality to the action climaxes that is disappointingly perfunctory, and the story's final revelation is simultaneously far-fetched and unsurprising.

Spiked with wonderfully funny sequences and some brilliantly original notions, The Big Lebowski, a pseudo-mystery thriller with a keen eye and ear for societal mores and modern figures of speech, nonetheless adds up to considerably less than the sum of its often scintillating parts.

The pleasure is doubled in Spider-Man 2. Crackerjack entertainment from start to finish, this rousing yarn about a reluctant superhero and his equally conflicted friends and enemies improves in every way on its predecessor and is arguably about as good a live-action picture as anyone's ever made using comicbook characters.

Made mainly by Yanks and New York-based Dominicans, the vibrant film bursts with local color and trades in very specific aspects of criminality, island-style.

The intended metaphors and commentary about the interchangeability and disposability of bodies are entirely clear, although from the evidence it would appear that Refn is perhaps even more entranced by the surface glamour of the world he so voluptuously depicts than he is repelled by it.

This Vietnam War-themed drama is one of the dullest films made about that oft-dramatized conflict.

The lead role of a working class former smuggler who dirties his hands again to save his family fits Mark Wahlberg like a glove.

Todd Phillips' follow-up to the most successful R-rated comedy of all time serves up its share of laughs while not actually providing a terribly enjoyable time because of a queasy undercurrent that never goes away.

Sprinkled with just enough laughs, close shaves and compromising positions to keep audiences mildly interested, this old-fashioned popcorn picture is agreeably breezy and colorful, but lacks the pizzazz and star chemistry of a genre ancestor such as "Romancing the Stone."

It's all sufficiently well done and amusing enough to satisfy the appetites of fans who mainline this sort of thing, but it also sports a concocted, second-hand feel common to this sort of throwback homage.

There's little facetious comedy a la the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series. It's all traditional stuff, done well but without an original spark.

At no point along the way does the film provide a reason to invest your interest in any of this.

If the story is meant to represent a microcosm of the immigration problem, it’s woefully reductive. If it’s meant to be first and foremost an action thriller, it does have a few nice moves to offer.

Overall, the filmmakers’ take on the subject is highly esoteric and fails to suggest either why Wild Bill has remained such a famous figure, or the irony in the fact that he has done so.

This is a wannabe shocker with a clever premise that doesn't really get down and dirty or betray the base instincts of a born horror filmmaker.

Unusual for this sort of thing, Snitch is a film after which you remember the characters and actors more than the big action moments.

The filmmaking here is plain, prosaic and earnest. For some, just getting worked up all over again about capital punishment will be enough, but without flair or fresh insights into its chosen subject, this just seems like spinning more wheels about on oft-discussed subject.

The film only intermittently displays the snap, precision and stylistic smarts a mixed-tone project like this requires; a half-good effort is not enough where buoyancy and a sly-to-mean spiritedness are required at all times.

A strained and pallid concoction that won't fire the collective imaginations of modern children.

A story very much by, about and for middle-aged men, and with the commercial limitations that implies, this intermittently amusing outing is graced by one of Robert De Niro’s more engaging performances of recent vintage.

Richard Linklater's 19th feature becomes compelling in its final act, but before that too often appears tonally addled and dramatically dawdling.

A stillborn would-be comedy.

Unfortunately, instead of embracing the weighty moral, religious and political components of the story, Malick has alternately deflected and minimized them.

All the more frustrating because of its conceptual freshness and Ben Affleck's sly turn in the title role, this sleek action thriller ends up delivering standard shoot-'em-up goods after initially suggesting it might provide something rather different.

Dramatically and philosophically void and unprovocative on the grand scale of apocalyptic speculative fiction, this low-budget indie is somber and dreary on a moment-to-moment basis and leaves its talented cast stranded with few opportunities to alleviate the sense of stasis.

As much a trifle as its title suggests, My Blueberry Nights sees Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar Wai applying his characteristic visual and thematic doodles to a wispy story of lovelorn Yanks.

As detrimental as anything to the film’s effectiveness are the visuals, which are murky, lack compositional interest and do the actors no favors.

Phantom is easily consumable eye candy, but it contains no nutrients for the heart or mind.

So second-hand and disposable is it in every respect.

The Call for the most part is a tense, extreme-jeopardy thriller that delivers the intended goods.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates rates medium on the grossness scale (an all-body, pre-marital naked-Indian-guru-administered massage for the bride with a happy ending, anyone?), and pretty high in crude talk. But it's kind of a dud when it comes to endurance and imaginative moves.

Without Watts, Scott Coffey's feature-length expansion of his identically titled short wouldn't amount to much.

Whedon and his cohorts have managed to stir all the personalities and ingredients together so that the resulting dish, however familiar, is irresistibly tasty again.

The ever-righteous profile maintained by Boseman’s detective gets to be a bit limiting after a while; if anything was going to have multiple dimensions in this film, it should have been him, but the script is instead built around the goal of providing maximum movement and hoped-for tension. It’s got the former but only sporadically achieves the latter.

Given all the ways a project like this could have gone wrong, the result is surprisingly good on several fronts, beginning with a shrewd structure that fosters an intelligent dual perspective on the public and private aspects of the Deep Throat phenomenon.

Director Andrew Stanton's Disney extravaganza is a rather charming pastiche.

Mulholland Falls is a "Chinatown" wannabe that comes up short in every department. Although loaded with talent on both sides of the camera, this sex-and-corruption-drenched mystery meller about a big official cover-up in postwar L.A. simply feels underachieved, as it lacks the heady atmosphere, tasty intrigue and dramatic punch the alluring premise would seem to promise.

A very loose and contemporized remake of one of the more celebrated late '40s films noir, Kiss of Death is a crackling thriller that feels unusually attuned to its lowlife characters.

Tom Cruise is in fine form as mysterious tough guy Jack Reacher finally reaches the big screen.

The blood and grunge run thick on the mean streets in Romeo Is Bleeding. This heavy dose of ultra-violent neo-noir gives Gary Oldman a face-first trip through the gutter that would make Mickey Rourke drool, but the far-fetched plotting eventually goes so far over the top that pic flirts with inventing a new genre of film noir camp. Gramercy release will find a cadre of devotees who will groove on the hot cast, high style and low-down macho fantasies, but more people will be turned off by the excessive gore and progressive facetiousness.

Will serve as an excellent gauge of any viewer's tolerance level for schmaltzy contrivance and manipulation.

A sporadically funny romantic comedy with all the dramatic plausibility and tonal consistency of a TV variety show.

A generic suspenser that doesn't taste bad at first bite but becomes increasingly hard to swallow, The Saint comes off more as a pallid imitation of Paramount's Eurothriller "Mission: Impossible" than as anything resembling the further adventures of Leslie Charteris' charming rogue.

Even with the addition of new characters, such as the ones voiced by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, George Miller's animated sequel just isn't very funny.

Predictable, cutesy and nowhere near hot-blooded enough.

Where the film misses its biggest bet, however, is in depriving the animals of the voices they had in the animated version.

An unusually sober and serious-minded telling of Alexandre Dumas' classic tale, this handsome costumer is routinely made and comes up rather short in boisterous excitement.

Red State is cleverly contrarian enough to get a rise out of almost any audience.

Largely listless and witless, this extensive reworking of the 1968 sci-fi favorite simply isn't very exciting or imaginative; most surprisingly, given the material, it's also Burton's most conventional and literal-minded film, the one most lacking in his trademark poetic weirdness and bracing flights of fancy.

This action-drenched roller-coaster of a film tries to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to generating a tidal wave of violence — but it undeniably delivers the goods when it comes to action and impudence.

Agreeably prepared and attractively presented, this remake of the tasty 2001 German feature "Mostly Martha" bears too many earmarks of Hollywood packaging and emotional button-pushing, but doesn't go far wrong by closely sticking to the original's smart story construction.

Even though the evil impulses of the villains feel rote and arbitrary, The Equalizer 2 is not without its pleasures.

Individual scenes in actor Justin Theroux's directorial debut possess a certain flair, but the central issue on which the story turns -- how obnoxious and mean-spirited can you be and still get someone to love you? -- presents a forbidding obstacle.

A contrived but entirely workable premise is given a well-tooled treatment in Sweet November, a femme-slanted doomed romance with a heavily calculated feel to it.

It’s impossible to buy into the film’s plea to be taken seriously at the end, just as the upbeat finale feels false.

Fronted by an outstanding performance from Catherine Keener, who is onscreen, often by herself, at almost every moment, this challenging but not difficult second feature from Mark Jackson parcels out its information in gradual increments, forcing the viewer to infer rather simply receive most narrative information.

In every sense, The Great Museum (Das grosse Museum) imparts a feeling of privilege — privilege on the part of those (the Hapsburgs) who built and opened Vienna's extraordinary Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1891, privilege among those lucky enough to work at such a rarified establishment and privilege on the part of any viewer of Johannes Holzhausen's wonderfully evocative and droll documentary.

A perfectly respectable kid-friendly family offering.

A creakily old-fashioned comedy that forgot to pack the laughs along with the nudging and kvetching.

A genre mash that's mildly amusing until it can't think of anything else to do besides flop around in the deep end of conspicuous gore.

Engrossing but psychologically shallow tale.

Picture is impressively crafted and acted but far too narrowly and benignly conceived to satisfy even on its own terms.

A below-par star vehicle for Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, Conspiracy Theory is a sporadically amusing but listless thriller that wears its humorous, romantic and political components like mismatched articles of clothing.

Franco, employing diverse cinematic techniques from split screen (mostly early on) to direct-to-camera address, makes the Bundrens’ time of trial more immediately coherent than it is on the page without disrespecting Faulkner’s oblique style.

A superficially diverting but substance-free concoction, a would-be thriller as evanescent as a magic trick and one that develops no suspense or rooting interest because the characters possess all the substance of invisible ink.

A self-indulgent drama about a Harlem drug kingpin trying to go straight, Sugar Hill plays like a dreary variation on New Jack City.

Newman's charismatic, multishaded performance elevates the hodgepodge caper comedy a couple of notches above its preposterous plotting and self-consciously movieish texture.

There is no one to become attached to in The Four Feathers, no interest or sympathies appealed to or engaged.

A breezy, sexy romp with a conscience that reflects in obvious but interesting ways on societal changes over the intervening 38 years.

Director Rob Cohen has pulled together a simple yarn of an itinerant dragonslayer who decides to team with his prey to rid the land of an evil ruler who has betrayed them both. Tale’s poignancy stems from the fact that fire-breathing, armor-plated, high-flying creature is the last of its kind; when he dies, dragons will have passed entirely from Earth.

What holds the film back, however, in addition to its less than compelling schema and central relationship, is its utter lack of visual style. At a time when most pictures feature form almost at the expense of content, this one has an utterly undesigned look that’s virtually distinctive in its blandness.

Sexual suspicion and game-playing spiral down from the exotically intriguing to outright silliness in Chloe.

They just don't make 'em like this anymore, and it's a good thing, too.

Disappointingly, Death of a President shrinks from its promise as a piece of genuinely radical or adventurous speculative fiction.

Handsomely mounted and amiably performed but leisurely and without much dramatic urgency.

A certain staleness hangs over the proceedings despite the best efforts of the cast and the fun-minded creative team.

Harmless tale of the giant pooch helping out some itinerant performing animals while longing for home will go down smoothly with the preschool faithful, but anyone over 5 will feel antsy even given the brief running time.

For actor and director, the project seems like trying on a new coat, and it doesn't fit either of them.

A smoothly engineered crowd pleaser.

The visual effects are pretty sensational, delivering the cutting-edge CGI goods auds want and expect. It will be hard to watch "Earthquake'' ever again after this one.

A good, complex story unravels in disappointingly over-the-top fashion in "Gang Related." Premise, about two homicide cops caught in a trap of their own making, is a grabber that sustains interest for quite a while, and pic's exploration of the gray area where law enforcement and criminality overlap is intriguingly developed.

It all ends up being a half-hour too much of a just okay thing.

Apart from startling, out-there comic turns by Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise, however, the antics here are pretty thin, redundant and one-note.

A mostly standard-issue latter-day Arnold Schwarzenegger actioner spiked with a creepily plausible cloning angle.

Yields up plenty of opportunities for heated confrontations, wild and woolly dialogue and startling violence, which prove diverting in a shallow way.

As computer game-derived features go, it sure beats "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider."

Lively, sometimes funny and, inevitably, provocative.

Heijningen doesn't display the instinct of the best Hollywood action directors to give the audience what it craves at the big moments, except for a few gory in-your-face shots.

As overcranked as it is -- the film is directed as if it were an action drama, with two or three times more cuts than necessary -- People Like Us has a persuasive emotional pull at its heart that's hard to deny.

Would have made for a fine film noir 60 years ago but feels rather contrived and unbelievable in the setting of contemporary New York.

Universal’s attempt to find gold by bringing to new life one of the mustier items in its vaults is pure hokum and scarcely of the first order.

The effects are snazzy, even if they pass by quite quickly, and there's enough going on to keep audiences watching, if not entirely happy. Smith, Theron and Bateman capably handle the main roles, but such is the skimpiness of the scenario that no further characters make any impact.

Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist. As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images.

Visually, the film is without flair or ambition, conveying no sense of atmosphere or mood. But the performances put it over.

Tartly written and vividly performed by a fine ensemble cast, Gary Fleder's bracingly entertaining first feature covers familiar ground in a fresh, breezy way.

Dennis the Menace isn't really appropriate for anyone over the age of 12. Very young children may find the numskull, by-the-numbers gags here amusing, but teens will consider this kids' stuff and adults will be pained.

Builds and sustains considerable interest through its unexpected characterizations, unusual milieu and atmospheric style.

Elaborate, sporadically amusing but awfully lightweight followup, which has close to the same tone as its predecessor but makes one realize that freshness had a lot to do with its impact.

Takes plenty of liberties with the material and never generates much genuine excitement, but provides an agreeable ride without overloading it with contemporary filmmaking mannerisms.

"Chinatown" it ain't, not in any department. On its own level, however, new pic generates a reasonable degree of intrigue.

Funny as much of the action is, however, the approach feels rather less fresh, and the gross-outs seem more gratuitous.

Sophisticated, sexy and stylishly decked out, Rob Marshall's disciplined, tightly focused film impresses and amuses.

A creaky haunted house that, once the big twist is revealed, makes very little sense at all.

Absorbing in a low-key way but more dramatic where its secondary characters are concerned than its leads, and capped by climactic incidents that are less than entirely convincing.

Like many action stars, Statham is good at cool brooding, but West's frantic style works against this.

There’s no denying that The Tomorrow Man has a knockout ending. But is it worth sitting through the mundane, relatively uneventful film that precedes it? Few will think so.

Represents a passable follow-up to the venerable Peter Pan story and mercifully, at 72 minutes, is exactly half the length of the last attempt at same, Steven Spielberg's lamentable "Hook."

After the accomplished smoothness of "Match Point," it's back to more ragged form in Scoop, despite the almost identical posh settings, and the return of Scarlett Johansson as leading lady.

To use what, under the circumstances, is a far too convenient metaphor, Bay is interested in accelerating from zero to 100 as quickly as possible and then maintaining speed, rather than skillfully shifting gears and adjusting speeds based on curves, hills and road conditions. In this case, he gets you there, but you know the ride could have been a lot more varied and nuanced.

The Judge is well served by intense performances from stars Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall, but is undercut by obvious note-hitting in the writing and a deliberate pace that drags things out about twenty minutes past their due date.

Jennifer Eight is an unusually intelligent and unexploitative late-season thriller, which probably won't help its chances at the box office. Involving without being exciting, pic is notable for avoiding most of the standard suspense film contrivances, as well as for Conrad Hall's utterly smashing cinematography. Interesting cast and sober approach will mean more to critics and sophisticated viewers than to general audiences, resulting in OK results during brief release window before Christmas heavy hitters put this out to video pasture, where it might fare better.

While the surfaces, backgrounds and sense of constant motion are authentic to their tinselly cores, what goes on among the fictional participants resembles gag-reliant improv routines that haven’t been entirely worked out.

A bland and dour screen version of Sebastian Faulks' highly engrossing bestseller.

Earnest and well-intentioned.

After quite a few tedious detours and distractions, when the film finally gets down to the business of a climax at a gathering of elite European diplomats in a precariously perched Swiss mountain castle, it becomes not half-bad.

Lahti's feature directorial debut walks an innocuous middle line between the story's maudlin possibilities and its meaningful potential.

A very mild animated entry from Disney with a distinctly recycled feel.

A blatant commodity designed to illustrate what a splendid influence the hit television show has been on the world at large, if the series' creators don't mind saying so themselves.

Although formulaic in design and programmed to meet its quota of laughs, the film makes a point of going beyond basic expectations into some legitimate aspects of mature friendships without getting soggy about it.

Short on real drama and incident and long on tedium.

In its animated work, DreamWorks has repeatedly flip-flopped between the hip and the square. This time out, it's as if the company tried to apply a hip approach to a square subject, with unresolved results.

Schneider hams it up as a paunchy middle-aged Hawaiian stoner in an eyebrow-raising ethnic caricature that more than once calls to mind Mickey Rooney's unfortunate Japanese turn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

This is one of those pictures that unavoidably becomes part of the zeitgeist due to its coincidental arrival at a precise moment in history when its themes play into current events.

Despite its scaldingly hot cast and formidable writer/director combination, The Counselor is simply not a very likable or gratifying film. In fact, it's a bummer.

As it is for the two characters for two days, it’s an escape from real life, from anything consequential, a chance to delight in the pleasures that humans can take from what grows in the earth and from an amiable companion’s company.

Beautiful to look at, this is nothing more than a Little Engine That Could story refitted to accommodate aerial action and therefore unlikely to engage the active interest of anyone above the age of about 8, or 10 at the most.

Brandishing impressively packed abs and enough upper body strength to pull herself out of countless jams, Alicia Vikander gamely steps into the kick-ass role twice played by Angelina Jolie, but the derivative story and cardboard supporting characters are straight out of 1930s movie serials.

Lives up to its name by serving up a fraction of what audiences are used to getting in this department from PixarPixar and DreamWorks -- little originality, little humor and little ingratiating characterization.

Remains exciting as long as it stays on the mountains.

More palatable than most pictures of its ilk due to its keen awareness of its own preposterousness, a self-knowledge exuberantly expressed by a mostly live-wire cast.

A fine group of comic performers manages to keep the screen worth looking at despite the obsessively one-note nature of this curious matchup between MTV Films and producer Scott Rudin.

A deliriously trashy, exuberantly vulgar, lavishly appointed exploitation picture, this weird combo of road-kill movie and martial-arts vampire gorefest is made to order for the stimulation of teenage boys.

Other than for the pleasure of watching Green try to conquer ancient Greece dressed as a distant forebearer of Catwoman, more is less and a little late in this long-aborning sequel.

The flip-flops, coincidences, surprising disclosures, far-fetched happenings, TV-style chases and illogically protracted confrontations come flying virtually all at once, obliterating the plausible character work and making the film feel like a hundred others.

The puzzle of how the various personal and narrative pieces will eventually fit together exerts a smidgen of interest, but the characters are so dour and un-dimensional as to invite no curiosity about them.

Less turgid and aggravating than its predecessor, this cleverly produced melodrama remains hamstrung by novelist's Dan Brown's laborious connect-the-dots plotting and the filmmakers' prosaic literal-mindedness in the face of ripe historical antagonisms, mystery and intrigue.

At this stage, Pritikin shows considerably more aptitude for writing than for directing, and the exuberant eruptions of humor lead one to suspect he should try for outright comedy next time and forget the sentiment.

Could use a little extra comic poundage. The Farrelly brothers' latest sees the team tapping a sweeter, milder vein of humor than their outrageous norm.

Good silly fun, Alien Trespass is a dead-on spoof of cheapo '50s sci-fi programmers done with plenty of self-deprecating humor.

Handsomely made in the customarily fastidious style of most period biographical dramas, Tolkien is strongly served by Hoult, who, after four X-Men outings (and a supporting role in last year's The Favourite), demonstrates that it's high time he moved on from that sort of thing to more interesting and challenging dramatic characterizations.

Deftly playing Tina Fey's feminist-icon mother, Lily Tomlin all but steals Admission, a knowing but uneven comedy about the neuroticism of the college-admission process on both sides of the equation.

As a rich, gum-chewing matron who tools around in her canary-yellow Rolls-Royce, Flanagan is the picture's real scene-stealer.

Virtually bursts with visual goodies, and writer-director Stephen Sommers scarcely allows the actors, or the audience, a moment to take a breath during the nonstop action of the final hour.

With the combination of mobster characters and heavily R&B, hip-hop and disco/soul tune orientation of the soundtrack, pic has a more streetwise feel than most animated fare, which is not to say that it has street smarts.

Sheer energy and audience allure to burn, even if numerous speed bumps cause many of the comic possibilities to go tumbling overboard.

Telling the entire story of Chaplin's 88 years was probably a hopeless goal, but the biopic does offer the saving grace of a truly remarkable central performance by Robert Downey Jr. and some lovely moments along the way.

Beautifully crafted and highlighted by an arresting change-of-pace perf by Meg Ryan as an English teacher erotically awakened by a homicide detective. But the story's unpalatable narrative holes and dramatic missteps will hold sway over the pic's better qualities.

A simple repast consisting of sometimes strained slapsticky comedy, a sweet romance and a life lesson learned, this little picnic doesn't amount to much but goes down easily enough.

A crudely funny farce that covers no new ground but sees its talented players running some surefire plays.

You can virtually see the mystique peeling away while beholding the turgid melodrama, patchy plotting, windy dialogue and, yes, spectacular combat effects of this grand finale.

A sort of maritime Donner Party, In the Heart of the Sea is a rugged but underwhelming true-life drama of a cursed 19th century whaling voyage.

Feels like the most shameless effort yet in the renewed exploitation of the youth market.

Overstays its welcome by at least a half-hour after never getting very high off the ground in the first place.

Over-produced and under-thought-out, this unconscionably elaborate attempt at an old-fashioned Gothic thriller looks great but is beyond silly.

The most banal and indulgent of Gus Van Sant's periodic studies of troubled kids, this agonizingly treacly tale comes off like an indie version of "Love Story" except with worse music.

By-the-numbers plotting, seen-it-all-before action moves, banal locations and a largely anonymous cast alongside the star give this a low-rent feel.

Lovingly and knowledgeably made by director Tony Bill, who got his pilot's license as a teenager, pic nonetheless has a lightweight, airbrushed feel; despite the brutal dogfights and inevitable deaths, there's little gravity or resonance.

Unfortunately, story's tension climaxes a half-hour before the film is over, and thereafter dissipates much of the charge and good will generated up to that point.

Atom Egoyan's most mainstream and genre-oriented picture in his 20-year career applies a thick noir lacquer to a jumbled, time-jumping tale of a young female journalist prying the facts out of the aging entertainers and their cronies.

A lightweight, modestly engaging yarn sporting reductive mystical and philosophical elements that are both valid and borderline silly.

Delivers only annoyance and impatience.

An unabashedly old-fashioned entertainment loaded with traditional dancing and music.

The major jolt is saved for the very end but, like much else in the film, it is overexplained and underlined when more simplicity and quiet would have provided the revelation with the power of a depth charge.

A disarmingly pulpy, eye-popping disaster movie during its first half, and an increasingly dull survival melodrama during its second.

An exceedingly safe and conventional Chris Columbus comedy.

Daylight is a lower-echelon disaster thriller, in which the best character is knocked off early on and the leading man runs out of ideas with a third of the picture still to go. Noisy, technically proficient actioner about a group of people trapped in the Holland Tunnel after an explosion gets off a few decent blasts, but is just too limited in scope, imagination and excitement to burst out as a major B.O. winner domestically.

One of the more absorbing and palatable entries in the rather disreputable "Death Wish"-style self-appointed vigilante sub-genre.

If you're going to ask an audience to sit through a three-hour, nine-minute rendition of an oft-told story, it would help to have a strong point of view on your material and an urgent reason to relate it. Such is not the case with Wyatt Earp, a handsome, grandiose gentleman's Western that tries to tell evenhandedly more about the famous Tombstone lawman than has ever before been put onscreen.

An attempt to merge a semi-jokey buddy movie with a more realistic account of cops' messy private lives, Hollywood Homicide falls short on both counts.

This comically intended battle of the species is family entertainment for families that will buy anything.

Refreshingly revisionist in the sense that it takes a relatively clear-eyed view of the messy lives and equivocal circumstances of many of the key participants.

A high-energy performance by Richard Gere and an intensely brooding one from Lena Olin engage attentive viewer interest, but the stars are forced to overcompensate for a rather slow pace and lack of plot.

If an age produces the renditions of classic stories that reflect those times, then The Passion of the Christ, which is violent, contentious, emotional, extreme and highly proficient, must be the Jesus movie for this era.

Every character here is so squeaky-clean, and the prejudice as depicted is so toothless and easily overcome, that the film feels like a gingerly fantasy version of what, in real life, was an exceptional example of resilient trail-blazing.

Despite the highly mobile and often arresting work of cinematographer Christina Voros, The Broken Tower is not a heady experience like many of the semi-experimental 1960s films he emulates. Instead, it's mostly a tedious chore, much akin to listening poetry you don't much like.

It's something you'd think only the crassest of Hollywood producers would come up with - injecting sex appeal into an event as ghastly at the Nanjing massacre - but it's an element central to The Flowers of War, a contrived and unpersuasive look at an oft-dramatized historical moment.

A dramatic situation that should be wrenching is mostly tedious in Reservation Road.

A well-upholstered but hopelessly contrived romantic comedy, Picture Perfect is too ineffectual to tickle either the funnybone or the heartstrings.

Best of all, von Sydow is absolutely wonderful, with the great veteran actor clearly relishing this very unusual role as he darts, skulks and, in a stealthy way, mugs across town. Without saying a thing, he dominates the middle part of the movie.

Immortals is not only entirely without humor, but is dominated by a lot of huffing and puffing, thunderous self-importance and windy Socratic quotations about the immortality and divinity of men's souls. You just have to roll your eyes after a while.

It's raffish, flashy, energetic, entertaining and not very deep.

Essentially approaches its subject seriously, but does take stabs both at horror and grotesque comedy, neither with much success.

The subject being race relations, Manderlay is bound to stir considerable debate in intellectual circles, but given the director's abstract style and use of characters to enact an agenda, it's a discussion that will exclude the general public, who will ignore it as they did "Dogville."

As an exercise in style, it's diverting enough, but these mean streets are so well traveled that it takes someone like Eva Green to make the detour through them worth the trip.

A low-impact romantic comedy-drama from James L. Brooks in which the central characters are strangely disconnected from one another as well as from the audience.

Impressively made and well acted by an exceedingly attractive cast, this dark tale of ceaseless conflict is adult entertainment and will likely disappoint viewers expecting a "Camelot"-like love triangle.

Senselessly long at two-and-three-quarters hours and with a protracted climax that eradicates any goodwill established in the fastidious first couple of reels.

Feels like a film from several years ago, one of the many made in the wake of "Pulp Fiction" that tried and failed to be as clever as its progenitor.

A series that's provided a successful, moderately enjoyable ride up to now blows its tires, gasket and transmission on its way to flaming out in Fast & Furious.

Pfeiffer tackles the part with obvious dedication, but she's thwarted from the get-go by the heavily proscribed nature of the role as written.

Director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have conspired to drain any sense of fun out of the melodrama, leaving expectant audiences with an oppressively talky film that isn't exactly dull but comes as close to it as one could imagine with such provocative material.

The Basketball Diaries is a weak-tea rendition of Jim Carroll's much-admired cult tome about his teenage drug addiction. Leonardo DiCaprio's committed lead performance deserves a better context than this gloss on the source material.

For those always on the lookout for the "funny" Allen, this one definitely has its moments, but too much of the picture is flat, dispiriting and frankly unbelievable in fundamental ways that defy the granting of poetic license.

Shrill, strenuous and entirely without charm, Ron Howard's attempt at a Christmas classic is an elaborately wrapped empty box that will fool many people into buying it but will not greatly please its recipients.

Blandly internationalized, generically derivative, drained of any personality, edited as if by computer and bleached of the slightest hint of emotion other than a holiday card-like sympathy for children and allegedly cute animals, The Meg is a one hundred percent inorganic meal, something made from pre-tasted and then regurgitated ingredients.

Despite a couple of unconvincingly upbeat tacked-on moments at the end, Project X basically reads as nihilistic, as not believing in or standing for anything. Not even fun.

Replete with smart, capable characters and crimes so bizarre that they lend the film a suspiciously lurid nature, this tony suspenser is hampered by the presence of a villain who is all too obvious from the very beginning.

Begins as though the filmmakers imagine that they're making a daringly anti-p.c. serio-comedy, but long before it's over, the picture is wearing its bleeding liberal heart all over its sleeve.

Writers and directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have crafted a solid script... Holding the enterprise back, however, is a terribly restrained directorial approach and academic visual style that prevent the lubricious story from truly coming to life.

The story is told in a hammer-on-anvil manner that evinces no gift for social satire or sharp cultural insight.

Whereas Peckinpah managed not only to raise hackles but to get under the skin, Lurie manages only the former, which reduces the material to the level of sensation-mongering.

The opposition of the two dramas winds up in gratifyingly moral and philosophical territory.

Director Alan Parker has done a dazzling job creating screen images to accompany the wall-to-wall music, resulting in a musical fresco that is much closer to a sophisticated filmed opera than to any conventional tuner.

The picture serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good, its images evaporating nearly as soon as they hit the screen.

A disappointingly routine thriller that prefers to lean on tired Hollywood conventions rather than to explore fresh dramatic and stylistic territory.

Garishly unattractive to look at and lacking the spirit that made Wonder Woman, which came out five months ago, the most engaging of Warner Bros.' DC Comics-derived extravaganzas to date, this hodgepodge throws a bunch of superheroes into a mix that neither congeals nor particularly makes you want to see more of them in future. Plainly put, it's simply not fun.

In the end, given how little goes on in Breaking Dawn - Part 1 despite the major plot points, what you're left with is to gaze at the three leads, all of whom have their constituencies and reasons for being eminently watchable. The only hope is they'll have more to do next time around.

Mildly engaging but very far from being for 50 Cent what "8 Mile" was for Eminem, this lurchingly structured story of survival against the odds looks to get off to a strong start thanks to the singer's large following.

There's no catharsis at the end from the journey taken, just relief that it's over.

In the spirit of the venture, the entire cast gets down and comes off all the better for it. Both Efron and McConaughey get very messed up physically, and both actors seem stimulated to be playing such flawed characters.

Without the pleasure of watching Cate Blanchett continue the role that launched her to stardom, there would be little to recommend this latest of many cinematic and television accounts of the celebrated monarch's life.

Feels like a film that should have been made at least 25 years ago. Or made as a period piece. Heavy, doom-laden and, unfortunately, entirely predictable.

Revives the format but not the fun of classic Hollywood screwball comedies about rediscovering the virtues of a former mate.

This decorous look at the great man's five years as ambassador to France in the period leading up to the French Revolution touches upon much significant history, incident and emotion but, ironically, lacks the intrigue and drama of great fiction.

The ‘70s recreation is reasonable -- there are plenty of vintage cars and pop tunes of the moment -- but the characters never register beyond the surfaces of the scenes despite being equipped with long-festering resentments and grudges.

The slapstick and action comedy interludes are haphazardly executed at best, and matters aren't helped by the film's incredibly ugly look.

Pumping high-performance gas back into the series after a second lap sputter, third entry stays in high gear most of the way with several exhilarating racing sequences, and benefits greatly from the evocative Japanese setting.

The central idea is quite clever and appealing, and that the charm meter is turned up all the way.

The picture has vitality, a fine cast and excellent craft

Eastwood's main achievement here lies in trusting his hunch that the young men could handle playing themselves onscreen, with an acceptable naturalness and without self-consciousness. This they do, without a false note.

Mostow's smart speculative suspenser imagines a time when people can live through ideal versions of themselves while they sit wired up at home.

A Steve Martin vehicle that's not prankish or weird enough by half.

Arid, self-consciously arty and emotionally uninvolving.

The problem with the script by Susser and David Michod, working from a story by Brian Charles Frank, is that Hesher's uncouth behavior is so aggressively pushed to single-minded, crudely exploitative effect.

This is one of those high-concept pictures with a big windup and weak delivery.

Engagingly intriguing throughout most of its slightly overlong running time, and perhaps the strangely mesmerizing mood Lynch has orchestrated for the entire "Twin Peaks" undertaking should not be underestimated at this juncture. But the feeling persists that, to a considerable degree, Lynch is marking time with this project, creating new riffs and variations on themes he had already largely worked out.

It's all utterly preposterous, and yet Waugh handles the big scenes pretty well.

Director Jon Turteltaub's insistence upon hammering every point home with giant closeups and relentless musical underlining makes this insufferably cloying and sickly sweet.

Half formulaic and half simply unimaginative.

A broad and obvious approach to ambiguous material that's virtually all plot mechanics with little nuance or characterization.

Despite an effectively low-key performance by Billy Bob Thornton in the leading role, pic is no more spiritually insightful or illuminating than Sunday School instructional story, and a lot less dramatically coherent.

Reserved, careful and largely predictable in the way it plays out its wrenching emotional crises.

It's a very academic movie about academics that belongs in academia, not movie theaters.

A miscast James Franco and a lack of charm and humor doom Sam Raimi's prequel to the 1939 Hollywood classic. Oz the Wimpy and Weak would be more like it.

Staggeringly cornball and squeaky-clean even when flirting with such issues as interracial sexual rivalries.

A partly smart, mostly dumb addition to the teen horror sweepstakes -- smart in how it neatly catches the petty, hurtful, sexy and druggy aspects of high school life, dumb in how it makes absolutely no sense once its resolution is known.

Another tale of out-of-it working-class men cooking up a harebrained scheme to improve their lot in life.

It's close to a no-win situation dramatically, culturally and politically, and Kaplan deals with it plausibly enough by concentrating on the performances and the interior conflicts they reveal.

Valerie Breiman’s exceedingly slick feature is one of those cutesy items in which the characters talk about nothing but relationships and themselves.

Just compare their superficiality to the complex characters in "From Here to Eternity" and what's missing here becomes terribly clear.

This fleet-footed, glibly imaginative international romp stays on its toes and keeps its wits about it most of the time, with entertaining and pointedly U.S.-friendly cast additions.

The Legend of Tarzan isn't half-bad; actually, it's pretty good. Beautifully made and smartly set at the beginning of Belgian King Leopold II's rapacious colonization of the Congo in the 1880s, this is certainly the best live-action Tarzan film in many a decade (which, admittedly, isn't saying much) and offers a well-judged balance of vigorous action and engaging-enough drama.

An aggravating romance that runs only 78 minutes but ends not a moment too soon.

This mangy, dimwitted gender switch on "The Last Detail" won't even have the benefit of trial before being sentenced to the video brig, since it's virtually there already.

Clever enough to provoke a few abrupt laughs along the way, this big screen debut for two television stalwarts, director Matt Shakman (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and writer Robert Patino (Sons of Anarchy, Prime Suspect), is sabotaged by some frightfully on-the-nose expository dialogue and an adamantly prosaic visual style.

In short, it's a long-arc revenge tale fitted out with very elaborate effects, courtesy of Peter Jackson's Wingnut Films, and characters that are moderately decent company but hardly compelling.

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber adequately manages the mechanics demanded here but adds no finesse or grace notes.

Half-intriguing, half-tedious.

A heaping serving of metaphysical gobbledygook wrapped in a physically striking package.

Paul Schrader hits a low water mark with Forever Mine, a strenuously straight-faced film noir wanna-be that edges perilously close to self-parody.

Arguably the most critic-proof picture of the decade, Barney's Great Adventure will delight everyone who can't wait to see it and be a grin-and-bear-it experience for those who must accompany members of the former group.

The villain here, Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor, is so intensely annoying that, very early on, you wish Batman and Superman would just patch up their differences and join forces to put the squirrely rascal out of his, and our, misery.

You laugh in spite of yourself in This Is Where I Leave You, a potty-mouthed comedy with enough exasperation, aggravations, long-standing grievances and get-me-outta-here moments of family stress to strike a chord with anyone who’s ever had to endure large clan gatherings that might have lasted a bit too long.

The Bronze is a strident comedy made in accordance with the sole guiding principle of, when in doubt, go even more vulgar.

Rarely has a picture been so self-consciously designed to be a culturally meaningful touchstone, and fallen so woefully short, as Southland Tales.

Some of the filmmaker's keen intelligence remains on display, but only in fractured and often obscure form, and pic overall gives the impression of a giant expurgation of negative feelings about things in general rather than a carefully articulated brief on recognizable subjects.

Impeccably crafted but dramatically dull.

This muscular thriller--led by Jason Statham, Clive Owen and Robert De Niro--strives to be a genuinely good film, but unwilling to let go of proven formulas, it falls short.

Harmless, but also, unfortunately, almost entirely mirthless, this putative comedy about an unsuspecting man obliged to transport a pachyderm cross-country aspires to a winsome charm that never crystallizes, leaving what’s onscreen to wilt before it ever blossoms.

Ewan McGregor’s directorial debut, in which he also stars, is decently performed and delivers some potent scenes of inter-generational discord between a concerned father and a radicalized daughter who becomes a murderous terrorist. But the filmmaking is prosaic when it should crackle with tension and disruptive undercurrents,

An intensely whimsical shaggy-dog crime story that ricochets between goofy violence and some endearing personal moments.

Robin Williams and Billy Crystal can each provoke a lot more laughs in a minute of standup than they jointly manage during the entire running time of Fathers' Day.

Such heart-tuggers have their appeal to some people in any era, but earnest hokum of this nature has become increasingly rare. And for a reason.

Every conceivable button is pushed to achieve rote satisfaction in young viewers, while any notion of creating tension and suspense is dutifully ignored. Not for a moment is actual peril considered as something worthy of a dramatic climax.

Visually resplendent but dramatically uneven.

With the help of his stunt and special effects teams, Harlin delivers more than enough goods to satisfy genre fans, so main question is whether a female action hero, and Davis in particular, is ready to be embraced by the huge public the film is clearly targeting.

A disappointingly pedestrian prison meller that falls between stools artistically and politically.

A dreadfully dull, completely conventional story of a young wife's recuperation from being unceremoniously dumped, this is a by-the-numbers bit of emotional calculation without a single fresh, original or offbeat move in its system, apart from a nifty opening sequence.

Has absolutely nothing to say about its characters and their lamentable actions.

The constant repetition of these shock tactics, in lieu of genuine suspense, makes The Wolfman feel cheap, despite the vast amounts obviously spent on Rick Heinrichs' opulent production design, the extensive visual effects, the more-than-effective special makeup effects, Milena Canonero's luxurious costumes, Danny Elfman's insistent score and the tony cast.

A handsome but pallid affair aimed squarely at a young Disney audience. Those who have never seen a previous "Musketeers" adaptation or a truly exciting Hollywood adventure in the grand style may be swept along, but the mechanical feel of this outing is too evident to ignore.

Physicality of the second half, then, will keep the audience going, but it is not quite sufficient to camouflage the elemental silliness of storyline.