Wesley Morris

Everybody in the movie is so tightly wound that Walters seems a model of actorly limberness. She cuts through the movie with speed and mannish, zany wit.

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

At heart, Sylvia is constructed as a psychological suspense film framed around the ambiguities of Hughes's infidelity and Plath's resulting paranoia. So at its strangest, the movie is a potboiler.

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

The movie is corny enough to remind you that boxing rings are square.

Neeson is much better suited to the loneliness and self-doubt of Martin's crisis than he was for the thuggery of the previous movie.

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

Collapses under its own contempt.

Fancher's placid, eerily subdued first directorial feature.

It's hard not to like a movie like Men of Honor, but it's entirely possible.

The best I can say about all of this is that it didn’t bore me.

What ought to be a bittersweet movie about a woman's momentary unraveling feels like a workout class: Cardio melodrama.

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.

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

There's no real journalism here, just the sort of appalling revisionism that can turn a bloodbath into a beach party.

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

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

Like an ''Afterschool Special'' with costumes by Gianni Versace, Mad Love looks better than it feels.

Schwartzberg does stumble upon some pretty fascinating people.

There's also new piety and self-righteousness about parenting. Comedies are nervous to find the real humor and wonder in having a family. It's usually tragedy or nothing.

This movie is basically where some small-screen comedy in the last year has been: "2 Broke Girls," "New Girl," and, their far superior sister, "Girls."

The result is a unique time at the art house: a work whose badness becomes guiltily pleasurable, like a Harlequin romance novel masquerading as a dissertation.

The movie, though, is nonsense. At its most credible, the story evokes fond memories of the adult drug narcs hiding among American high schoolers on ''21 Jump Street."

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

Harris, Heche make unholy twosome.

Part of the trouble is casting. This is a movie that needs a great or gonzo performer to give it depth or heft.

This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It's all surface and formula.

If most boxing movies are about redemption, Resurrecting the Champ is a boxing movie that goes to exasperating lengths to redeem its boxing writer.

One wants to find enlightenment - or at least entertainment - in this reconsideration of Playboy and of Hefner. But it's tainted.

The real problem with this movie isn't its trashy side - the "Death Wish" stuff is actually suspenseful. It's the creepy note of causal judgment that hangs over it.

Street Kings is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.

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

The closer you get to sorting out the truth, the less likely you are to believe it, let alone comprehend it. The latter half of this movie is as outlandish as a Mexican soap opera.

Veronica Guerin hardly trusts you to follow its story, opening with the murder, then a series of titles that explain what's to follow.

Maybe my priorities are wrong, but this inquiring mind wants to know when these two will find a movie entirely worthy of his understatement and her naughtiness. This one has its moments, but it's also littered with action-flick junk.

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.

According to several sojourners who speak in the film, Amma is the embodiment of love. And according to her website, it's her religion, too.

It’s just two and a half years of — sorry, two and a half hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.

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

It's a funny, fearless, suspenseful sex comedy that, in drawing on science and philosophy and art and death, risks accusations of pretentiousness. But, even in its romantic idealism, the movie proceeds according to recognizable rhythms of how some people live.

It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth.

Sayles seems to be trying, single-handedly, to correct centuries of First World self-centeredness in Third World contexts.

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

Rendition is a reminder that, in the wrong hands, political outrage can be a slog.

A feel-good but inane Disney production.

The movie partners all the cliches of the inner-city school drama with the cliches of the dance instructional, and the two keep stomping on each other's toes.

In attempting to show us a love blind to class, culture, and color, she's (Chadha) also made it bland.

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

Is a mellowed Herzog to be believed?

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

Works more as an object of pop curiosity than as a work of popular entertainment.

In this era of Apatow and Ferrell and Rogen and Wilson, of men monopolizing movie comedy, Baby Mama feels absurdly momentous, and even political. Fey and Poehler aren't just taking back control of their bodies. They're taking back control of their profession.

Not horrifying enough.

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

Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.

Ben Stiller is like a guy on the 1919 White Sox. He's rigged to lose. His comedy is the stuff of failure, and sometimes it's pleasurable watching him flit around in funny get-ups, only to have a pretty costar put him down.

The camerawork is steady, the editing patient, the choreography playful. It's a zippy and inspired piece of moviemaking. But there's one problem. It's playing under the closing credits.

This is the first movie to make me equate coming home from prison with coming home from war.

It's also a message movie, about as weighty as Lara Flynn Boyle and twice as absurd. But I'd like to report that I had an excellent time.

Like a Bond picture with no spies or villains or car chases or gadgets or explosions.

Unsalvageable B-movie junk.

Eddie Murphy in another mediocre family comedy? Imagine that.

What the movie lacks in technical polish (it's not very handsome-looking) and dramatic perfection, it makes up for in unusual social sophistication.

Nothing has brought me more cheap pleasure at a movie this year than the sight of shampoo and conditioner bottles falling off a rocking wall while comedian Alec Mapa, as a fellow stylist, tries to keep a straight face. He does a much better job than I did.

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

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.

It's a better movie than what's inspired it, but that fails to explain much. It's like preferring the line at the concession stand to the one for the bathroom.

Doesn't entirely work.

Busch combines French absurdist theater and American performance art with a drag queen's flamboyant wit.

The Treatment fails to do anything interesting with Jake.

In an age in which it feels as if seemingly pure intimacy no longer exists, this film thrives on nothing but intimate moments.

Brüno is what "Borat’" was too well-done to be: a publicity stunt about publicity stunts.

Formally, the effect is like watching really cinematic confetti.

No one here is prodding you to laugh. It just happens.

Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.

Crammed with such earnest belief in the power of love - even if it happens in the Chicago Zoo - it almost doesn't matter that O'Connor and Loggia have better chemistry than Duchovny and Driver.

The platitudes in this gratuitously sentimental movie are taken a lot more seriously than the people.

The movie has to twist your arm to get you to feel for these people. But you wouldn’t be wrong to think it’s been broken.

The movie is a perfect blend of calm execution and uninflected farce.

More of a sand-and-noodles western set in the Far East.

It's not that Jenna Fischer is miscast in A Little Help. It's that she's mis-everything else: misused, misdirected, misanthropic.

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

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.

A horror film whose only scare is that it was made at all... As with so many stupid horror movies in these post-''Scream" times, this one is at such a creative loss that all it can do is make its audience feel duped for having purchased a ticket.

The songs are catchy. The lip-synching, meanwhile, is always a little off, and the dancing is usually average at best.

Disappointing for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's silly. For another, it's not always silly enough to be diverting.

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

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.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

A skillfully managed fairy tale about a mouse, a rat, and fairy tales in general.

As it escalates to a nasty conclusion, Alpha Dog doesn't have the moral or emotional weight of tragedy. These aren't the psychologically exploded youths of "Rebel Without a Cause," or even "The Outsiders." They're characters in a long, violent, unbleeped episode of MTV's "Cribs."

Korine is finding his way toward artistic greatness by searching his soul. It's possible that the man in the mirror is him.

Bullock’s levelheaded acting frequently saves the movie from emotional garishness.

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

For the moment, King has restored women to their rightful place in a genre that is nothing without them. But, sadly, that genre isn't romantic comedy. It's the chick flick.

You can feel the movie building away from the whiny comedy and toward something more emotionally raw then something sexually weird.

This is by far the most embarrassing of his seven movies.

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

It's fun to see Tom Wilkinson, for instance, with a massive bald spot virtually eating scenery with a knife and fork.

Crime-by numbers-cop drama.

The movie is another of those harmless and politely made dark comedies that the English seem incapable of doing without.

The film's centerpiece is a massacre at a wet T-shirt contest, which the horror director Alexandre Aja has a good time staging (yes, Eli Roth, we see you with the water gun). But it feels like an imitation of B-movie beach schlock and John Waters. The visual humor lacks wit or nerve.

The actor's (McConaughey) lovable exuberance is exactly what this heartsick movie needs.

The Dawn Treader, like its predecessors, has no real struggle or drama. We're dealing with kids for whom everything comes too easily for us to care.

A cheery version of a darker, grislier movie, one in which people like Daniel beat up people like Charlie, girls like Vicky end up in far more compromising positions, and women like Celia turn to Scotch and prescription drugs to cope with their pain.

It's pedestrian.

This is a flavorless adaptation of Richard and Florence Atwater's 73-year-old children's book.

A grubby little redemption comedy that in every way feels like a consignment-shop Jack Black vehicle.

Dunst is the realest, rawest thing in the film.

A movie that sports more cameos than a "HeeHaw" marathon but not much else.

This movie has no teeth. It does not want to say anything, other than the unprintable word for penis, over and over.

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

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

The performances by Plotnick, Leupp, and Roberson comprise a jarring special effect.

Peregrym is like a secondhand Hilary Swank. She has a looser presence and might be a better actor, but since we already have Swank, finding out is not a priority.

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.

This is one beautifully drawn, frequently lifelike piece of anime.

The movie is torn. It wants to honestly explore the natural wear-and-tear of the Grogan marriage. But it also seems OK with being something that could pass as a midseason replacement on ABC.

Kennedy doesn't take the character any deeper than a caricature of rich, nonblack fans of hip-hop culture. But as a caricature, he's fantastic.

The point of all this solemnity may be to pay serious respect to those rescue swimmers, who courageously look after errant kayakers or victims of Hurricane Katrina. But what we get in exchange is a movie that feels too much like a Coast Guard recruitment film. Who wants to pay to see that?

The movie tries to do for forearms what the loosely similar science-fiction romance "The Adjustment Bureau'' attempted for men's hats: make them chic.

If I wanted a Nora Ephron cuddle-ganza, I'd rent one.

So phenomenal that Bill Murray can't even steal it. And he tries. So excellent that Murray's MTV progeny Tom Green can't sink it.

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

The most dispiriting thing about Anger Management is that its cameos seem like leftovers.

The Protector is about 84 minutes long, and only four of those minutes are devoted to plot.

Exists as a seldom represented American time capsule, and it's all good.

A lark, with pretensions to be more.

This movie is crazy, but the insanity is electric.

Berman can’t quite juggle it all.

Even if the story is hackneyed, it's hackneyed in a warm and universal way.

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.

Archer isn't necessarily taking us anywhere new, but his movie's rapture is beautiful inside and out.

The romantic comedy has never had a star as depressing as Jennifer Aniston. It's not the movies - well, it isn't simply the movies.

The movie's inevitabilities (the humiliating loss, the ebb and flow of camaraderie, the triumphant finale) have deep resonance.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

Huppert's character, who's a tornado of demands at work, is almost as obnoxious as Poel-voorde's. She just not as willfully disgusting. He chews up all the scenery with his thick Belgian accent and splaying limbs and general cartoonishness.

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

An army of rolled abs and their owners give the state of American race relations a beginner's workout.

As the movie is in step with Connelly's aching heroine and not trying to scare our socks off, Dark Water is of a piece with Salles's sensitive filmmaking. Obviously, from a genre standpoint, that presents a tremendous problem. Nobody goes to a horror movie for a good cry.

Director Wayne Wang and his screenwriters sometimes ape ''Pretty Woman." But Latifah's obvious forebear is Pearl Bailey, who was just as regal and straight-up.

Chasing Madoff is mostly that sort of movie, the kind you make when all you've seen is other movies and television shows about crime, when you want someone to know what you can do with a juicy story that takes some effort to ruin.

It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.

Bring Wet-Naps to The Devil's Double. It's coated and fried in the same batter KFC uses for Extra Crispy chicken. The movie might be greasier, actually.

This fifth and mercifully final installment features so much idle anticipation that it's unclear whether we're watching a movie or an Apple product launch.

The emphasis here is less on cuteness and romance and more on the "Raiders of the Lost Ark"-style adventure.

Slow and ultimately distressing.

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.

It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."

There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.

This is not a movie. It's a coming attraction for a theme park.

A football epic on performance enhancers that may be more flagrantly flawed, more shockingly predictable and just plain cornier than its rickety predecessors.

Argento set a standard a lot of moviemakers are desperate to surpass. It's not simply that he's crazy about gore and supernatural hokum. It's that he understands that storytelling is both an art and a craft. His filmmaking carries you along on the illusion of effortlessness; amusement, suspense, a certain elegance follow.

Builds into a shapeless riff on the existentialist misery of company.

Narrated from start to close by an 8-year-old, it often seems like a coloring book on tape.

Scream 4 has a smart beginning, featuring Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, and one well-delivered line at the end that would have brought down the house in a better movie.

The camera, costumes, and art direction do everything right. Too much so. The movie strips away both the grand weirdness of the circus and the dire desolation of the Depression. Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange are exchanged for Vanity Fair.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

I'm not getting the most of his (Washington) charisma or enough of that million-dollar dental work. I'm not getting the joy, and I miss that.

Less a documentary than a PR package with a chip on its shoulder.

While most of the scenes in Tony Stone’s peculiar Middle Ages art project look like a homemade educational reenactment, the film is actually more involving than it should be.

Right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me.

Raimi seems more comfortable being his outlandishly jokey, B-movie self, letting entire sequences play on the line between carefree schlock and Hollywood blockbusting.

This is a party, and you're either having a good time or wondering when Akin is going to get down to business. But for an hour and a half, fun is the business.

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.

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.

Shopworn to the bone.

A rather pat, occasionally desperate road comedy.

In Winona Ryder's case, Girl Interrupted is a showcase in which her brittle, angry portrait shows she has graduated from ingenue to actress.

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

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 Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.

This present-day Paris of Le Divorce is smartly shot and costumed, and the whole affair is breezy and uncharacteristically insouciant, given the reserved nature of the folks responsible for it.

The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.

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

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

Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.

It’s bad, the sort of bad that knows what it is — campy rather than camp. “Campy” is camp with a diploma and a martini. And “Christmas on the Square” is a drunk.

The thrill of the ridiculousness is gone. So is all the mystery that made Statham so appealing in the first place.

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

More vulgar than funny.

A lazy, torpid piece of animated tourism.

Regardless of how cheated out of a full-bodied motion picture you feel, you're still left with the year's sickest bathroom humor.

Marshall reveals himself to be a terrific showman of chaos and comic savagery. This is Baz Luhrmann's "Mad Max."

A good, occasionally insightful workplace comedy.

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

In addition to being his filthiest, this is his most free-associative movie. In spite of and because of its homemade look, it's also his funniest.

Antal is a professional who respects your dollars. In a season where the blockbusters are as flat as month-old soda, that’s the most romantic gesture a commercial filmmaker can make.

A fluffy piece of Disney nonfiction.

The best movie Steven Seagal never made. Except that Statham, while just as marked for death, is harder to kill.

We do learn that love heals and that the movie's title makes a terrifically lewd little rock song. (Thank you, Sol.) But that's about it.

This is territory previously covered in the French film "Ma Vie en Rose," which took a relatively more sophisticated view of both a child's self-expression and adults' discomfort over it.

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.

The trouble with the movie is basically everything. It's long, sloppy, and -- to both the quantum-physics ignorant and informed -- steadily implausible, never exciting in either its skill or its ludicrousness.

Going the Distance earns its R rating, often by daring to say what goes frequently unsaid by women in raunchy comedies. It's not a very good movie. The entire second half is a sitcom.

Nicely shot and edited, but the movie is a narrative mess, which wouldn't be so bad if all it were up to was depicting Lucia's ups and downs. But the film takes too many illogical detours to be of much use.

The Brown Bunny is certainly about how vain Gallo is. Yet rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema.

What makes the film such a guilty pleasure is how Williams's righteous self-pity is perfectly matched to Collette's nuttiness and despair.

You don't need to be a "comic-book person" to find the set pieces exhilarating. But if you are such a person, or a fan of the movies that comic books turn into, The Avengers feels like the moment you've been waiting for.

Marry Me is a sad tale that’s too busy leaping from plot point to plot point for Lopez to express anything close to real. It tells a lot and shows nothing.

Taken? You bet.

The moviemaking is proficient, if unremarkable. I like the idea of an Elizabethan action movie apparently more than I enjoy watching one.

This movie is the height of by-the-book dullness.

It's handsome filmmaking that doesn't surface until the final 25 minutes during which Stevo and company's sense of marginalization achieves the palpable, emotional import that's more expressive than anything its characters' have to bitch about.

No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premise. It’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment.

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.

Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one.

Does a lot of winking and teasing.

The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.

Nothing about this movie works, not the title (it used to be called "Clubland "), not Blethyn's attempt to inject comedy into her rickety stereotype of a character.

Unlike most of what Moore has been in, Dedication is unlikely to delight retirement homes on movie night. But it's not imaginative, lively, or true enough to speak to its intended audience of American Apparel shoppers, either. It's a slog.

Less like watching a movie than it is like being accosted by one.

Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.

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 only person in Don McKay having a better time than Shue is Melissa Leo, who plays Sonny’s insinuating housemate. She’s too much by half, in an Agnes Moorehead sort of way.

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.

The result is a cheap and cloying contraption that doesn't know when to stop smirking.

It's actually a pretty lousy thriller.

It's the sort of movie that thinks cutting between two different stories makes it art. Usually, it feels like an exercise in art. There's a lot of calisthenics but very little beauty or truth or whatever it is the movie is going for.

It's as if a version of Oliver Stone's movie has been frozen in some fraternity house beer cooler since 1987 and thawed for the age of plasma screen TVs.

There is, however, Viola Davis, who might win an Oscar tomorrow for her one scene in "Doubt." Her part here - a minister combing the street for crack-whores to rescue - is about three times as large.

It's all terribly sentimental without being truly terrible.

Director Nowrasteh seems to think the only way to save lives is to sensationalize death. You could trek to the theater and have this movie whack you upside the head. You could also just mail a check for $10 to the human rights group of your choice.

In theory, there's nothing wrong with this unorthodox approach to Arbus -- attempting to explain her from the inside out. (In its way, Harmony Korine's freakfest "Gummo" is a better Arbus movie.) The trouble is that Shainberg and Wilson don't connect their conceit to anything artistically enlightening, erotic, or truly deviant.

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.

Runs out of fresh ideas about how to make its heroine look nuts.

The current, much better Canadian movie "How She Move" has a more realistic grip on the racial politics of hip-hop-dance.

Ludicrously written and appallingly directed by ex-film critic Rod Lurie, seems to pride itself on the fact that it never (ever) leaves the greasy-spoon milieu in which the president and his staff are trapped by heavy snowfall.

As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.

Shyer's version is a thing of infinite emptiness and nauseating vanity. It's not funny, alluring, affecting, or erotic, just conceited.

The movie is actually a softer treatment of the similar sibling anguish in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Allen isn't enough of a great dark artist to pull off a full-scale tragedy the way Lumet does.

The movie will please those looking for easy physical comedy.

Perry shelves his crowd-pleasing Madea character and aspires for the impossible mix of 1950s social melodrama, gospel-inflected public service announcement, soap opera, R&B video, girl-centric sitcom on the CW, and any episode of "Good Times," featuring Janet Jackson's oft-affronted Penny. Were Perry a visual director or a logical, patient screenwriter, that hybrid would count as a feat of singular ambition. Instead, it seems like the product of an abbreviated attention span.

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.

The laserdisc of media movies - it plays fine, but it's clunky and cumbersome.

Smoothly made and smart enough. It's not going for too much, but I laughed a lot.

The movie has none of the embarrassing absurdity and cheap effects that made last year's trip back to the 14th century, "Timeline,'' such a joke. We should be so lucky. Instead, we get a listless avenger drama.

Neither a profile nor a critique, though, the film's only focus is its subject's mild self-regard.

The idea that self-mockery makes people relax is tricky. One man's disarmament is another's minstrelsy, and the fine line is well worth another documentary.

It's called Queens and, no, silly, it's not about six gay men who want to get married. It's about their MOTHERS. And this being a Spanish comedy of the lowest Almodovar-ian order, the moms are a lot more flamboyant than their sons.

Tron: Legacy gives us a dud stud named Garrett Hedlund as Sam Flynn, the hero of this petrified sequel to 1982's "Tron." None of what he sees impresses. The feeling is mutual.

Despite its contradictions, the film stayed with me after I left the theater. It's frivolous. But it's also powerfully surreal.

The directors don't know how to make this new plot funny or infectious. Most promises of comedic pleasure go as unfulfilled Stifler's T-shirt. This movie hasn't a clue where to begin the donation process.

The Sentinel isn't an entire season of ''24" smushed into a bland two hours of movie? Does Kiefer Sutherland know?

New York, I Love You wants us to know that the city is a sexy, romantic, thrillingly random place where anything can go down. Sadly, two of those things are your eyelids.

The film is touchingly firm about leveling with children, drawing a careful, crucial line between fantasy and reality, without patronizing or haranguing them.

Takes a leaf from the "Psycho" handbook and abandons its star for stretches here and there.

Once the vulgar comedy dissipates, we're left with poorly photographed, bullet-riddled summer-action mayhem. The only thing drunker than Hancock is the editing and camerawork.

Wiseman has made several films about both disability and dance, but this new one might be his most hypnotic, rhythmically assembled observation of corporeal expression.

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

There is one bright spot. Ellie Kendrick plays Dolly's silly, breathlessly romantic little sister, Kitty.

Franco can be exhilarating in movies -- tremulous, unhinged, a little wild. Here his jaw never stops quivering and his eyes stay welled up, advertising a breakdown that never comes. Not that Myles has a presence a man would fall apart over. She's too professional to drive anybody crazy.

The movie, instead, is a work of giddy self-sabotage that seems determined to matter and not matter at the same time.

Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use.

There's something wrong with this picture, and the problem is there on Smith's face -- Smith looks distressingly I-was-an-Oscar-nominee bored. That goes double for Jones.

The first thing you notice about this so-so adaptation of James Ellroy's novel is the shoddy acting.

The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.

Like most of Hallström's Hollywood movies ("The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat"), this one is excruciatingly tasteful.

Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.

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

These are not the marks of true cinema; they're the makings of a droopy karaoke video.

The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.

The movie is full of risible pontifications about the nature of art but falls well short of capturing the angst of creative frustration.

The crime is appallingly petty. But occasionally the friction between two actors' idiocy will produce a comic spark.

There are two reasons to put up with Soul Men, and that's the soul men themselves. Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac appear to be having a good time, and for most of this raunchy, poorly orchestrated buddy comedy, that's enough.

This is acting that seems more freaked out, more traumatized than it ought to for a movie about an unwanted houseguest.

Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.

Notably Wayansless. It's also notably devoid of a point of view.

Most of the time it looks like we're on the back lot for a Romanian production of "Lord of the Rings IV."

Medea works on von Trier's own imagistic terms. There are shots and sequences in this movie that feel unique.

The picture's structural intricacy is a smoke screen for its psychological and emotional shallowness.

An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.

The movie might have been more tolerable had Besson searched harder for a performer and not a specimen. Barbara Stanwyck in her prime might have made more sense.

Might as well have been written by a rushed piece of software. The program calls for a surprise engagement, a street fight complete with crotch punches, an apartment eviction, and a runaway child - all in about five minutes. As an obstacle course, this is mighty efficient. As comic storytelling, it's painful, not too far from being socked in the crotch.

The Banger Sisters so frequently features Hawn running around in revealing attire, tossing instructions at exhausted people that I'm inclined to think of it as a workout video.

The movie's glee is contagious.

A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.

In a refreshing change of pace, this week's anti-Bush documentary, Bush's Brain, is not really about George W. Bush at all. It's about his senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

Television is a state of mind. And the makers of Saw III have delivered the most despicable episode of "One Life to Live" ever.

What he's (Brooks) come up with is one of the most humane works ever made about the lives of working mothers.

So much of Virgin is bunk masquerading as sexual politics.

The film would be just as powerful, if less likely to saturate suburban megaplexes and flatter its patrons, were its saviors -- I don't know - French.

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

Gets on your nerves.

It's a thrill to watch Posey incorporate, at last, some true emotion into her exuberant screwball wit.

The film is faithful to its absurdities, sometimes hilariously so.

The casting alone should warn you about what kind of bottom this movie's going to hit.

It's a fact that becomes riotously evident in the reel of outtakes that caps the picture and incites wonder about why no one thought to give us 90 minutes of those instead.

Deadly funny.

Demonstrates that sadomasochistic streak in von Trier that equates the raw with the experimental.

For a little while, comedy ensues.

The real core of The Core is the beautiful friendship between a highly emotive Eckhart and the sacrificial Karyo. Their bond is the best thing to happen to Franco-American relations since SpaghettiOs.

For an anonymous Saturday afternoon, it's the best lump of coal Hollywood can jam in your stocking.

There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.

Watching what Howard has done with the book - covering up the lewdness, blunting the snobbery, and spackling the amazing plot holes - is dismaying. This adaptation has the stink of superiority about it.

Every minute of the film is trash, and director Carl Franklin seems to know it.

One wishes Incantato was made of something other than musty air. Avati provides no real emotional counterweight for all the whimsy and nonsense, and the movie carries neither the force of morality nor the titillation of trashiness.