Wesley Morris

The movie is terrible partly because it's badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind.

It's basically a blaxploitation movie stretched to meaninglessly international proportions that leans on tired Colombian stereotypes. But if Saldana's aiming to be some kind of new Pam Grier, she needs to save more than herself.

Wetzel's challenge is to film the experiments so that the process itself is legible. We're made to marvel at slow-cooked, freeze-dried, unappetizingly bagged food, the way some mushrooms, when delicately sliced, evoke fruit and some crustaceans resemble side-sleeping snooze-bar slappers.

Mysteries of Lisbon brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn't imitative. It's simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.

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 all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

The remake isn't openly nostalgic. In a sense, this is another sexy vampire movie. But Farrell does something special with the sexuality: It's simultaneously omnivorous, dangerous, and a hoot.

Octubre is a quick, quiet movie that distills Lima, Peru, to a downtrodden version of its more dynamic current self.

The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine.

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

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

The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The fun is in watching these robustly generic people trip over and pinball off of each other, seeing them eddy around Carell, who as the straight man here is getting dangerously close to Greg Kinnear's territory - where comedy is too self-serious to laugh at.

It's hard to tell whether this is a tribute to female solidarity or a lamentation.

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

On the one hand, welcome to the music business. On the other, if A Tribe Called Quest can't stay together who can? It's a worry that eventually gets at the eccentricity of both the music and the movie.

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.

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

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

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.

Even by the standards of mental-institution-movie misogyny, what an accidental but predictable creepshow this is.

Larry Crowne isn't a movie for adults. It's a movie for adults who don't like things with screens and keyboards.

Honestly, the whole movie is from 1960-something.

He concocts a climactic war that flattens downtown Chicago. Bay is such a little boy's director. You know he picked that city because it's the one with the best rock-'em-sock-'em street names. Wacker! Wabash!

The Last Mountain is that sort of movie, the sort that sends a Kennedy into the West Virginia wilderness to press for change. It's sincere. It's misguided. It feels like a stunt.

Metz is another artist more interested in war's side effects than combat itself, although he and his crew are embedded for battle.

This is an action movie that nods to Hayao Miyazaki and those sleeky dumb European chase thrillers with guys like Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

You don't want to think, what would Preston Sturges or Alexander Payne do with this material? But there is a seed of satirical cynicism in this movie that a smart, clear mind could have finessed. Jake Kasdan is not that director. He doesn't appear to know what to do.

There's just very little in Beautiful Boy that feels fresh or new or truly raw. The houses, that title, every emotion, even the false moves: They're all generic.

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

The film is remarkably stunted.

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.

Mosteller might be the movie's real discovery. He twists his lisp and slurry speech around the dialogue in a way that exudes far less attitude than the kids.

The movie is church via the planetarium. It's as if Malick set out to paint the Sistine Chapel and settled for a dome at the Museum of Natural History.

Here the Japanese senses of honor and of shame are particularly entangled. Later in the film, Lu mounts an Imperial Army parade through the Nanking ruins. It's something to see.

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.

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.

Bridesmaids openly, comfortably turns the stress of being girlfriends into comedy. It's really about the single friend backing away from the edge of temporary insanity. This isn't the greatest such movie. That would be Nicole Holofcener's "Walking and Talking" (1996), with Catherine Keener and Anne Heche.

The most provocative thing about The Beaver is the adult-movie title. The film itself is alternately fascinating and dull, though mostly the latter.

It's a self-conscious, inherently absurd tale of a rich black family invaded by secrets, lies, working-class loudmouths, and one or two pairs of pants found down around the ankles.

Cinema's greatest caveman meets his ancestors. For us, it's a reassurance: The creative process is astonishingly old and its fruits still surprisingly fresh.

I don't know whether she's (Hudson) drunk, stoned, or simply out of her mind, but if it weren't so sad watching her pick away at this skimpy, overlong romantic lie, she might be entertaining.

Carancho is a particularly jaw-dropping example of what this great, cunning city - on film, anyway - is capable of: an exhilarating bummer.

As is par for the course in a "Fast and Furious'' movie, the only persuasive physical intimacy is between the men.

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.

Makes the surprising and seemingly inarguable assertion that, if we're not all Brazilian, then, at the very least, Brazil is a state of mind.

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

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

It's as much a portrait of a kind of artist as it is a document of a city's evolving sense of style.

As Apichatpong erases, once again, the barriers between the celestial and terrestrial, he also does away with the cordons between film genres - this is sci-firomancefamilyreligiousthrillercomedyporn. No video service has a section for that. The only suitable shelf is the one in your soul.

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

The new remake of Arthur is a thin copy of the 1981 original. But it has a few things going for it.

Shadyac doesn't film how his change inspires more change, or showing him, say, starting a school for destitute orphans. All we see him give is this movie. It's not much of a contribution.

The movie is generic and shallow in its glimpse of the love and sex lives of a handful of young New Yorkers.

Miral feels like gastric bypass moviemaking. It's a miniseries awkwardly stuffed in the body of a two-hour drama about the Palestinians' long struggle against the Israelis.