Wesley Morris

Full of redeeming throwaways.

Redundant for a filmmaker whose work has always dealt with the dismaying consequences of this country’s profit motive. Isn’t every Michael Moore film ultimately about capitalism? This one just has a more facetious title.

The film turns that stale old Seder into warmed-up dinner theater.

It's a portrait of the artist as Mary Poppins.

A belligerent little sex farce roiling inside an otherwise inconsequential lampoon of corporate America, the movie is rude and ridiculous, fearless up to a point, and breathtakingly hungry to provoke.

In Catch a Fire Noyce has caught the holy spirit. The movie is a thriller that wants to lift you up.

Regardless, it's sad that Singleton is taking Diesel's sloppy seconds.

It's called Pride, and, while it's neither as socially urgent as "Freedom Writers" nor as danceable and soapy as "Stomp the Yard," it's better acted and tougher to resist

The movie does offer intriguing, perceptive glimpses of the everyday difficulties of being both a survivor and the child of a survivor.

The art direction is reliably vivid and hyperreal, but director Satoshi Kon and company can't articulate how mentally taxed Mima is without confusing us.

You're smarter than this, but occasionally it tricks you into thinking it might be up to something you haven't considered, like an above-average, extra-bloody episode of "Scooby Doo."

As involved as Crudup and Connelly beseech you to be with this story, their very youthfulness, their nagging lack of adulthood, keeps the film from being anything more credible than a tight grad-school tryst.

The movie is foggy with reverence and uncertainty. This is the passive work of a man nervous to touch the third rail of his parents' discontent.

The movie is a commercial for Hugh Hefner that makes his magazine seem like "Seventeen."

Rebound is about as unmotivated as Coach Roy, doing nothing to distinguish itself from any other movie ever made about winless teams that learn to stop losing.

An unsteady stab at noir.

The movie offers up too many airy spiritual lessons in the hope of crossing from farce to sentiment.

Manages to fascinate more than it entertains.

It's hard to dislike a film that wants to say that the bereft have to move on with their lives, that death is part of living, and that poverty is a state of mind. But it's not impossible.

It's unbelievably bland.

Sexual doublespeak is everywhere.

It's a grisly, chuckling cartoon made on shots of tequila, Red Bull, and Sergio Leone.

As predictably uplifting movies go, Saint Ralph isn't completely charmless.

Disappointing.

As easy as this movie is to watch, it's artificially flavored. "Golden Flower" runs on crocodile tears and corn-syrup blood.

The most disappointing thing here, besides Perry's ongoing visual impairment (he deserves better cinematography and editing) is Scott.

Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.

It's inspired of Sachs to lean on Russell for a kind of oblique emotional depth. But it's possible to leave this movie mistaking Sachs's soul for Russell's.

Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.

What Conviction lacks in characterization (the people here are monochromes - bright ones, but monochromes nonetheless) it makes up for with personality.

Has the problem of drifting in and out of authenticity.

The cute little domestic comedy gains a slightly rough edge - maybe Sven isn't meant to be a father or a husband.

Shannon gives the movie its inner life. Maybe the movie will give her back her comedy career.

The ballets are badly filmed. The camera shoots them often from the point of view of the patrons in the auditorium or in a way that dishonors the choreography.

This is the feistiest Hollywood movie about American women and their thankless jobs since "9 to 5."

Indeed, woe be to the child who doesn't mist up at this movie, since it's been made if not with zip, wit, or imagination, then at least with sweetness. But I hope no one will think the film is an adequate replacement for White's book. That would be a crime.

In light of our recent crackdown on runaway nudity, the steady stream of exposed breasts in the gnarly Eurotrip give it a nostalgic feel.

It just feels like playacting.

It wants, as Kate says about her documentary, to be a "seminal work on beauty and aging." But it wears like a gauzy romantic comedy.

I could have watched this woman rip a piece fabric and turn it into a dress all day. I haven’t seen a lot of that. I have seen movies about a woman caught between two men, as Chanel is here.

By aiming for something more ambitiously, ambiguously philosophical, [Sayles] forgot to include a heart and a soul.

Even at 148 minutes (and viewed twice!), you still feel as if you’re watching the longest coming attraction ever for a John Woo movie.

It's looking for comedy and romance in the obvious places.

It's the year's funniest, most absurd sight gag.

Die Another Day is still as professionally mediocre as its predecessors.

The movie has a field day with thousands of airborne lanterns, a troop of Neanderthal thugs (one is a mime), some surprisingly fleet camerawork, and good editing. I can't think of a cartoon more confident about how to use jump cuts for comedy. Those senses of cleverness and innovation merely underscore how shopworn the rest of this movie is.

Who knew that the franchise’s creators would eventually find a plot twist that made sense?

The movie usefully, carefully, and cogently argues that Bieber is more than his hair. He is his hoodies. He is his pop-hooks. He is his many handlers.

More like that crowd-pleasing UK fluff that requires great actresses to do wacky things. Mirren is such an easy, breezy presence that you might think she's playing the screenwriting equivalent of air.

The screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs affirms life and jerks tears with welcome degrees of humor and muscle.

Despite Aniston's hard work, Good Girl could be better.

A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.

Turistas is not a slasher film -- not conventionally. Released by Fox's new teen division, it's the latest aquatic titillation from John Stockwell, the man who also brought us "Blue Crush" and the shockingly good "Into the Blue."

Frances McDormand rescues this role from the throes of cliche. It's as though drippy dialogue and sappy rock were a small price to pay for a part that lets her flash her breasts, get stoned, and join in a three-way.

It's that awkward, tedious monster mash of "chick flick'' and romantic comedy.

An arch espionage comedy that's never as amusing as it thinks it is.

Unique because it's the rare movie that fiercely respects the altruistic loyalty that bonds girls to one another.

The comedy in Robelin's movie veers from wacky and overwritten to truly, beautifully sad, especially the whimsical final sequence, which is as apt an existential tribute to the afterglow of Fonda's fabulousness as you'll see.

Gets on your nerves.

"Joshua" is a horror movie that doesn't want to freak you out too much. Vitus freaks you out, but its makers seem to have no idea that it does.

The movie doesn't know what it wants to say about the election or the people who run in it.

This isn't a great piece of nonfiction filmmaking, but it has its moments.

Downey appears to like all this make-believe. Even the clunky dialogue sounds witty out of his mouth. This is not a part that makes great demands on his talent, and his slummy approach to it is amusing.

I wanted to keep watching. I wanted to leave. In between, I prayed for the piano-accordion soundtrack to silence itself for just one scene (it's like being trapped in a little French restaurant that refuses to close).

The film feels like bare- bones docu-fiction, though, resisting the attendant drama until the bitter, grisly end.

Not a happy time at the movies. It bears the distinction of bringing to the screen a dark nugget of history.

It's a thriller that refuses to thrill. It taunts us with resolution and mysteries, then slaps our hand for reaching out for a conclusion.

A terrifyingly cheap-looking B-movie comedy mocking terrifyingly cheap-looking science-fiction B-movies. As such things go, this one has its moments.

The whimsy Greenebaum wants to construct can't match the terminal sadness that naturally takes over the film. Perhaps in accidental tribute to Todd, the whole thing feels half-baked.

Has a silly, insouciant glamour often employed to sell hair conditioners and perfume.

As dumb spoofs go, The Comebacks isn't bad. It takes almost every sports movie of the last five years ("Field of Dreams," too) and blends them into a single slapdash comedy.

A satire whose dead aim stops wounding - and starts making - stereotypes of white middle-classness.

The film's good humor is often betrayed by its low-budget roots, however, as though it couldn't afford to be more original or ambitious than its premise.

Mac's TV show seems to have trained him to settle for feel-good tack-ons that cut against the prickly nature of Mr. 3000. The actor has such a serious and wise bearing that it's hard to believe Stan as a shallow jackass, which is why several of his scenes with Boca seem phony.

Works purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq.

Crashes the slapstick of "Home Alone" into the youthful angst of "The Breakfast Club."

Cool It arrives having been labeled the anti-"An Inconvenient Truth." It is. But not in the philistinistic way you'd expect.

A minor movie on a major subject, a drama with an almost unbearable lightness.

There's the air of sadness and worry all over this movie, and sometimes it's heavy. But it's air all the same.

Over the course of the film's 88-minutes, Taylor cuts away to what's happening around her subjects (the unexamined life, I suppose). Perhaps she's attempting to make connections the thinkers don't.

In tone and plotting, Away We Go feels like a fairy tale built on an aggravating collection of attitudes. It's condescending, judgmental, righteous, yet sincerely searching.

This is what the ongoing onslaught of comic book movies lacks: stars. Real stars. Robert Downey Jr. is the exception when he should be the rule. It's possible we take these movies for granted because the marketing tells us we should.

As a movie, it’s a mess — and lazy, too.

For his part, Short, another pop choreographer, sounds like Vin Diesel, but he moves like a bee. When he dances, he makes sure every girl in the theater goes home stung.

A runny intimate portrait that doesn't trust Tammy Faye Messner and her story to enthrall you. So they've all but spelled it out: k-i-t-s-c-h.

This isn't a case of a liberal-minded movie inflicting goodness upon a character but a man radiating goodness because, well, he is good.

Playing the character with this much girlish innocence is risky. Barrymore can seem dumb, but as Lucky You unfolds, we realize that the character is just a device to bring viewers into the parallel universe of poker.

A microscopic piece of shoestring weirdness-slash-hipster regionalism that the actor Robert Longstreet delivers into some odder, funkier, altogether mysterious place. I don't know what he's doing or what he's going for. But unlike the rest of the movie, his bizarreness seems authentic rather than forced or put on.

This is a bright, broad, silly, harmless movie whose sweetness is a means to an end.

Partly impressive, partly inane buck-banging toy of a movie.

Sadly, the movie is a zoo.

Like watching somebody else's flashback and wondering what you were doing then instead.

As close as a movie about three Iraq war soldiers should come to mediocre TV comedy.

It's all terribly sentimental without being truly terrible.

The voice actors are also excellent, especially Michael-Leon Wooley as a bouncy trumpet-playing alligator and Jim Cummings as a lovelorn Cajun firefly.

The film is in the key of "Romeo and Juliet," and it's a one-note tune.

Like most movies about men and horses, Hidalgo spares no expense in matters of corniness. Set in the 1890s, it's sort of a throwback movie, executed with the boyish kick of dusty old cowboy matinees.

This is as safe and sweet a movie as you could make about America’s sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll-est event.

Garçon Stupide was shot on digital video and is the rare piece of European sexual realism centered completely on a boy's awakening.

At its best, Swept Away is like a scrapbook of postcards starring two lovebirds with great tans.

A good, occasionally insightful workplace comedy.

Installment six of the Harry Potter’ series, The Half-Blood Prince, merely gets us one movie closer to the finale, which, apparently is so big (and by big, I mean “$$$$’’) that it’s being split into two parts.

The movie itself isn't nearly as interesting as whatever it is Foster is trying to work out for its two hours.

Feels conceived and shot on the fly -- like between lunch breaks for Shearer's radio show and his ''Simpson'' voice-overs.

A sporadically entertaining cupcake of a movie.

A ludicrous little abduction thriller that boasts an entertaining cocktail of gunpowder, suspense, adrenaline, and cheese. I just couldn't hate this movie, and I really, really tried. It's tightly made and well written in deceptive ways that don't reveal themselves until past the halfway point.

Duvauchelle is actually the best thing in the movie.

Aiming to keep it real, the cast of the new dance casserole Center Stage sweats spunk.

A self-consciously arch work of hipsterism that's more styled than funny.

The best there is to say is that it's better than ''Troy."

This movie has no light to shed on the matter. It is its own contradiction: a film about confessions in which nothing much is confessed.

This new movie is crazier, scarier, funnier, and more bewildering. It's the strangest movie I expect to see from a Hollywood studio for the rest of the year.

Honestly, the whole movie is from 1960-something.

The actor's job here is the hardest to pull off, since practical skepticism in a Tim Burton picture is next to villainy. Yet Crudup suggests complex grown-up feelings that makes the rest of Big Fish feel like an earnest collection of magic tricks.

Like all of Jacquot's movies, it's not crazy enough.

Offers yet another example of how a lot of what we consume is produced at somebody else's expense. In this case, it's sugar.

The vibe is acoustic-cafe: cute, catchy and ironic given its wimpy point of view.

Just as you're ready to give up on Chasing Papi, Paul Rodriguez shows up, and the movie goes from plotless to wildly overwritten in just one scene.

A tedious, soapy romp about overlapping lives and destiny.

As moviemaking, it's monotonous. But its insistence on breaking our hearts proves a reliable weapon.

Turturro tricks you into thinking there's magic realism streaming through this ode to art and commited love - despite there being little magic and not a trace of reality to speak of.

Breaking and Entering is a bourgeois movie full of bourgeois problems presented bourgeoisly.

Collapses under its own contempt.

It's scenic, confidently directed and performed, dutiful, faithful, revelatory, informative, and largely involving. Rarely, however, is it any <I>fun</I>.

A high-spirited, big-bottomed Polaroid of the comedian in a fat suit.

The movie's amateurishly made. But the script is full of little surprises.

Such a well-meaning but unambitious work that it's tempting to take it seriously even as you dismiss it.

It doesn't take its ideas or its audience far enough. The result is a humanist potboiler.

It's everything it ought to be: right-minded, well-intentioned, compassionate. But it doesn't rise above made-for-cable public service announcement, either.

Unlike in “Winged Migration,’’ the majestic imagery fails to tell a story or advance a message.

The movie is one long pose. But it develops into an idea slightly greater than its flippancy. The steady frenzy is whipped into a roux of two reasonably developed characters.

The director bludgeons us dumb with her genius.

It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a movie, and the closest Jaglom has come to brilliant satire. It also explains why this woman is just chatting on a countertop and not Jay Leno's couch.

The experiment in the new movie is this: What happens when his Type A's are forced out of their comfort zones? If only Brooks had managed to leave his. How Do You Know feels like a collection of scenarios he's done better.

If Perry’s cinematic vision remains less than 20/20, his sagacity gets stronger by the movie.

Bay's strength as a filmmaker, the reason his superficial yet entertaining productions can never be completely ignored, is that he appears to lack shame. He'll blow anything up and run anybody over. The moral complexities don't matter to him. He just wants to stage spectacles, appreciate very good-looking people, and assert his cowboy aesthetic.

Too smitten with the Eisenhower-era nostalgia.

Thompson - his brilliance, his self-destruction, and the ground he broke - is always at the center, but the film occasionally loses its focus.

Basically, talented French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has too much style on his hands. His film isn't as amorally grandiose as "City of God." Nor does it achieve the hulking tragedy of "Gomorrah."

Any movie that opens with a Goo Goo Dolls song and ends with a line like "I'm going to live -- just not as long as you" is bound to leave somebody reaching for a Kleenex.

The bodies are athletic, young, and white, and yet this is not the sport sex we usually see in Hollywood movies. It's the sex of adulation. Sometimes the director Robert Benton goes heavy on the hydraulic positioning, but his movie is scarcely mechanical.

The profanity is delightful. And the general atmosphere is grim. The movie just isn't terribly inspired.

While it insists that everyday lives in Araya are full of drudgery and toil, the film fails to produce a single ugly image.

In the case of Jeremy Irons playing the aloof English billionaire who owns the bank, that's dinner theater. But it's of the highest caliber.

This is a long, heavy film, in which Scorsese’s aerobic moviemaking turns mannered and uncharacteristically passive.

What makes Shadow Boxers special is how Bankowsky restores the woman's touch that always seems intentionally excised from coverage of the sport without comprising their participation in the sport.

This is an easy movie to watch. If only Julie Bertuccelli had more trust in her most interesting stuff.

Here's all you really need to know in order to determine whether Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris is something you need to experience for yourself: Her blond hair is often all frizz, and she prefers glasses with a big black frame. She's Mia AND Woody.

For most of Not Easily Broken, I wondered why the movie wasn't worse. Then I remembered it was directed by the veteran Bill Duke, who applies ample TLC.

Comes on like a runaway Humvee.

The movie Thoretton's made, L'Amour Fou, is ironic. It's a term that conveys wild, passionate love. But there's nothing "fou" about the movie.

Ambles along nicely, but feels as if it's never going to end.

The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.

Boy A comes frustratingly close to succeeding as tragedy.

Considering the sunny, relatively pleasurable romantic business that precedes it, the elderly stuff seems dark, morbid, and forced upon us.

The result is kitschy entertainment that wants to celebrate Lucas's chutzpah and acumen while loosely condemning what they wrought: "Scarface" with a ghost of a conscience.

Spike Lee has been treading similar terrain with both greater cogency and fewer similarities to Bertolt Brecht. Manderlay, though, is mad and perplexed in its own inscrutable, schematic way. The trouble is the angrier it gets, the more infuriatingly banal it becomes.

Simply an endurance contest, one almost worth staying the 82 minutes to see who wins.

The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

There's a certain pleasure to be had in some of the physical blowouts.

As murky and derivative-looking as the film is, it moves with an authority that pummels you into submission.

It’s all lavish, if disposable. But in a nifty change of pace, the warriors in The Warlords are interesting.

The movie is a holiday romantic comedy that wants to put the holiday romantic comedy out of business.

For folks like me, who missed "Firefly," the short-lived TV show on which the movie's based, watching Serenity is like showing up for a big lecture course at the end of the semester. And yet, after an hour of intense disorientation, the movie's arch sarcasm becomes oddly entertaining.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

Moon might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for fans of Sam Rockwell. Will there ever be more of him in one movie than there is here?

As documentary, it’s low concept. But it’s never dull.

Amazingly, Never Let Me Go could have been assembled from the Merchant-Ivory kit. It's stale with suppressed anguish.

Each player in this love rhombus keeps the Martin Ritt-directed affair from scatting off into period nonsense. [01 Jul 2001]

This movie can't commit to a genre, let alone a logical sequence or complete idea. But there is a wisdom in its blasé assessments and frivolous air: What's the point; where's the wine?

An enervated adaptation of E.B. White's Stuart Little escapades.

If we are in the midst of a culture war, as many people proclaim in Jesus Camp, then the left should be concerned. The right's Christian soldiers appear to be extremely well trained.

Like an old college wrestler, Harris saunters through this toasty little piece of biographical fiction in love with the part's fixins'.

Queasy comedy.

If I must watch two men not be gay together for the 300th time this summer, those men should be Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds.

A passable, sometimes skillful farce.

As loving and welcome as Chris & Don is, it's not well enough conceived to create equilibrium among its many parts.

If Restaurant feels like a high-caliber TV drama, it's one that tries to pack an entire season (plus pilot, plus backstory) into one episode.

At its best the film serves as a music appreciation class taught by embattled artists whose cloudy livelihoods grow increasingly uncertain with each bittersweet symphony.

A distant thematic and artistic cousin of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl."

This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.

Luckily, the movie has Scott Thomas. She knows her radiance can't be helped, so she uses it here like a searchlight.

Schwartzberg does stumble upon some pretty fascinating people.

The best moments come when Robb's all-purpose toughness experiences vulnerable doubt. These moments are flickers, but they're bright and human.

The screenplay's intelligence begins to break down in Egoyan's formal choices. Ideas never elude Egoyan, but boy does Saroyan's epic look uncertain and cruddy.

Robert Downey Jr. looks as hung over in Iron Man 2 as he seemed drunk in “Iron Man.’’ He does his share of drinking this time, too. And the sequel makes more out of his insobriety. It has an early stretch where it fizzes and slurs, with the stars stepping on each other’s lines and feet. The movie feels drunk, too.

It's a slow, moderately involving descent into the inevitable, with Pearce gamely trying to figure what's going on. Better him than me.

The first half of The Heart of Me is just that sort of hoot. You know where it's all headed, and you can't wait for it to get there, as the cheap, cruel ironies pile up almost farcically.

We're left with the painful reality that Paycheck might get Alfred Hitchcock, but it certainly doesn't know Philip K. Dick.

Lawrence just leans on Grant and Bullock, who could have done a movie this breezy from the set of their next one -- where, presumably, Bullock will be playing Medea.

Does a lot of winking and teasing.

Showing up for Molière eager for the story of one of the theater's greatest comedy writers would be unwise. It's not that kind of party.

Woo delivers a vintage breakneck, break-arm, break-face 20-minute finale.

Of course, there's little else of interest about Pokemon beyond the consumption factor. Buy more.

Doesn't have its heroine's conviction. It'd be better if it had.

Pedro is what a friend of mine calls a ''macho Iberico," which refers to a certain type of cocky, insensitive Spanish man.

As entertaining, charming and conceited as other Robert Redford joints, but it's also insufferably obvious.

What begins as unassumingly dull wanders into disarming chaos.

The movie effectively rids you of any notion that owning a cougar or a python is a good idea.

While Lane is her typical winning self, the film is mawkish. The more we're cajoled to root for Sarah Nolan, the divorced preschool teacher she plays, the more Must Love Dogs stops resembling a movie and starts feeling like a greeting card.

Frustratingly, Carnahan barely trusts his storytelling to keep our attention long enough to get through a scene without some grisly cutaway -- a gun to the head, the writhing wounded.

It's the tone of the movie's two sides - action and stillness, graphic violence and romantic melodrama - that don't cohere.

While the story couldn't be simpler and the filmmaking is crude, it forcefully addresses a reality.

The movie wails in pain. And it's that sort of grand empathy that makes Iñárritu both impossible to dismiss and impossible to live with.

Like a guy who finally gets what he wants, you just want to go home once it's over.

Fails to match the philosophical and acting bounties of 1996's ''First Contact.'' Baird has seen to it that the Enterprise's being under fire still amounts to the crew rocking back and forth, gripping the railings as the ship's phasers are down to 4 percent.

It's too much too-much. The audience I saw it with didn't seem to know whether to clap when it was over or start taking Lipitor.

This isn't a rousing movie as much as a reassurance. The brothers (Coens) prove they can play it straight, but they're preferred, for better and worse, at a sharp angle.

The film is so immersed in Roberts's life that it becomes easy to think that most of what the camera sees is also from her perspective. It's actually too seamless.

How could the Farrellys not? It pleases me to report that the movie is far from a disaster – on a dozen or so occasions, it's even funny.

Rohmer's style saps the film of the drama that flows directly from the subject matter.

As an ad for the city's charms, Paris couldn't have asked for a more sweetly jaundiced love letter.

It's more like a cartoon with a body count.

Before an hour has passed tedium overtakes Black Dynamite - one corny martial-arts sequence turns out to be plenty - and all the good jokes dry up.

The performances in tandem with the writing take most of these seven movies to interesting places.

Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.

Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.

The movie is only so-so, borrowing a little from the VH-1 school of popumentary but lacking the snazzy production values.

The movie itself is never truly clear. If it's also never intentionally bad, its unintentional badness keeps blasting into shockingly clever places.

The movie pits fortune against destiny and has an enigmatic old time splitting the difference.

The 70-something director puts us back in luxury's lap with Roman de Gare, which looks just like the high-roller ads you get in the first 40 pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair but feels vaguely more emotional. Lelouch wants to tie a Hermès scarf around our hearts.

The movie doesn't exactly argue anything. It's mostly a collection of scenes and footage, directed by Losier in plumes of abstraction and unified by Megson's voice-over.

Historians might demand a little more history from Elizabeth: The Golden Age. But soap opera loyalists could hardly ask for more soap.

Footnote culminates with stirring gravity that you wish Cedar had the confidence - in himself, his material, and us - to sustain. Both Uriel's dilemma and his father's are unenviable, even as you understand the deep guilt, sense of conflict, and hubris this mix-up provokes.

In another universe - though it is difficult to imagine which one - Garry Shandling might be sexy.

The movie charts its nine-game winning streak and post-season. If there's a problem, it's that there are too few moments like that one with Chavis in the locker room.

Not the sanctioned wet T-shirt contest you might be anticipating. The Pacific is the hottest body here. And director John Stockwell handles the frivolous material with an integrity that I have to admit I found disappointing. The movie isn't nearly dumb enough to be much beach fun.

This film has provocations to spare; it just hasn't been made provocatively. It's a mess, actually.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

I don't know that a lot of Contraband makes sense. But I'm not sure that it has to. The director Baltasar Kormákur carries the movie off with efficiency, brutality, and humor.

Slow but rarely tedious.

Most of the expert insights contained in this concise documentary are already available in the door-stopping exposes of other experts, a fact that lends the proceedings a nagging redundancy.

Who's it for? How do you put this message across without it seeming medicinal? Sure, MTV is among the movie's producers, but what 11th grader wants to spend a Friday night being hit with such a blunt instrument?

It takes a while for the movie to build to its wicked possibilities and only a few scenes to squander them.

Is a mellowed Herzog to be believed?

The grown-ups in Lucia Puenzo's XXY are a glum lot.

It’s a stagy, half-entertaining, half-tedious acting competition between five excellent Englishmen.

Marks a return to a not-so-distant time when horror movies weren't soul-rotting atrocities but just enjoyably bad.

As thrillers go, 1408 leaves too much room for fun.

Not since ''Mannequin on the Move" has a flamboyant black man brought so much fabulousness to stiff white heterosexuals.

It's not much of a part for Henson. None of these characters makes real-world sense. They're walking chapter outlines.

Shelter is a gay movie like other American gay movies. Boy meets boy. Boy comes out. Boys fight opposition. Opposition caves. If there's life beyond the closet, too few movies know it exists.

These are women who seemed raised on Louisa May Alcott and might have been aspirationally besotted with Jane Austen. But you sense tragedy looming. They're hurtling, inexorably, toward Tennessee Williams.

Leave it to Ron Howard to turn a plaintive Dr. Seuss ditty into a C-grade Tim Burton psychodrama.

A squeaky clean, family-friendly comedy that merely sounds like an unreleased Cheech and Chong romp.

You can see Bobby and Peter Farrelly bent over blowing violently into the sails of this toy boat, trying to get it to move.

After 2½ hours, the movie's become a bowl of trail mix - you're picking out the nuts you don't like and hoping the next bite doesn't contain any craisins. All the carefully crafted misérables turns into a pile of miz.

Actually the problem with Saving Face as a romantic comedy is that its central romance is a drag.

Fills you with a healthy respect for the men and women gladly risking their lives for your entertainment. The film itself works best with its into-the-camera reminiscences and on-the-set mishaps.

The college singing-group comedy Pitch Perfect isn't dumb, but Kendrick's participation implies that it might also be smart. And sometimes it is.

Once the final character has put the last puzzle piece in place, courtesy of an epic explanation, a kind of relief sets in: Someone just needed to spell it all out. It does not entirely help.

At its most profound, Benjamin Button isn't about anything more important than Pitt's very handsomeness, which, for a surprising stretch of time, is a wonderful subject for study.

Gibney has too much information, too much material, and too many people to shape a mystery or a drama or even a farce out of it all. His movie has elements of all three without ever sustaining one.

Stuck between point-blank ridicule and the obligations of a weary plot. Surprisingly, more than an hour of watching marionettes fight, curse, and fornicate turns out to be as dull as watching Michael Dudikoff do the same thing in one of his unremarkable soldier movies.