Tom Russo

The actors also acquit themselves well singing the film's numerous tunes. Breslin's voice is pleasantly melodic, while Nivola sounds like someone who's been grinding it out on tour for years.

What's more genuinely wacky is what a kick the movie can sometimes be, completely in spite of its big, flat stunt.

After a fast, funny start, the new sequel, Johnny English Reborn, proves to be more of the same.

The basic story is identical, and when there are fraught, climactic opportunities for the movie to make a gutsy departure, it passes up the chance.

For all Kendrick's stolidity, he delivers a couple of wrenchingly tender scenes.

Never thought we'd say this about a movie, but Bucky Larson probably doesn't wring as much out of recurring bodily-fluid gags as it could.

Alba, meanwhile, is again ridiculously shoehorned into a comedy gig, although she does have an amusing opening bit spying while nine months pregnant. If only diaper bomb gags weren't the inevitable follow-up.

Stabs at the dramatic don't amount to anything that makes us care, even for Bell, who has been solid on AMC's "The Walking Dead'' and in the chairlift chiller "Frozen.'' But genre fans who have been thirsting for gore via acupuncture needles or a LASIK machine should get their giddy fill.

Macdonald knows plenty about crafting something evocative from unscripted material.

Zooey Deschanel shows off her singing on a couple of generically pleasant soundtrack ditties.

Some entertaining inventiveness, before nagging limitations finally drag it down.

By the time the giant, snarling spider shows up - the most boggling of the movie's various "holy schnitzel" touches - parents of the littlest "Hoodwinked" fans may be feeling hoodwinked themselves.

Scholey, Fothergill, and crew do impressive work, but we're also reminded that wild animals don't know from cues, marks, and scripts. That's part of what makes them so compelling.

Credit Bowers and company, finally, for making some good calls about where to follow the leads furnished to them by the book and the first movie, and where to get creative.

"Mars" needs Mom more than the filmmakers seem to realize.

In The Desert of Forbidden Art, documentarians Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev offer some background on the late Savitsky, a painter who initially collected ethnic folk art quashed by the Stalin regime.

Fresh or not, creatively merited or not, here it comes: the third installment of Martin Lawrence's big, dopey franchise.

An intermittently arresting, mostly standard action entry that deals death noisily more than cleverly - a lot like the original.

The film is also packed with enough sharply scripted screwiness from Adam's roommate (Jake Johnson), Emma's roomie (Greta Gerwig), and others to keep viewer impatience to a minimum.

Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander's dark-comic expansion on his cult Internet shorts, in which he crafts a back story for Santa that's as black as stocking coal.

While the movie seems designed to be a breakout for Jang, it's Lee whose work actually makes an impression.

The copious violence, as always, is an assault - even aurally, as every thudding knife strike is made to sound like a boulder dropping on the theater.

Laurence Olivier gives the textbook course on Shakespearean villainy as crown-stealing schemer Richard. Considered by many to be Olivier's best take on the Bard. [22 Feb 2004]

This thoroughly stripped-down thriller simmers in a way that's still unsettling 25 years later. [24 Oct 2004]

The initial close-up of Thompson - all sourly snaggletoothed and begoggled - is as funny as anything in the original. And just that one quick glimpse would have been perfect.

There are some amusing looks at the elation - and panic - that come with winning big, from the praise-Jesus swooning of Kevin's grandma (underutilized Loretta Devine).

There's no gore in Campillo's tale, just a group of emotionally remote but otherwise seemingly healthy undead who inexplicably wander back into the world a world unsure how to reassimilate them, be it in the workplace or more intimate fronts. The complications he imagines are achingly smart; witness the grieving parents feeling even further despair at the realization that their returned little boy isn't truly all there. The film does, ultimately, lack closure, but maybe that's part of the point. [26 June 2005]

Has a pleasantly freewheeling, European art film feel to it, a welcome reminder of the New Hollywood of the '70s. [04 Sep 2005]