Wesley Morris

Has no intention of taking a more sophisticated path to make its point.

The movie doesn't trust that an illuminating comedy of pathetic people can be entertaining for long, so it sprinkles some hormones on the proceedings.

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.

Cop Out seems aptly named. It’s not personal. It’s barely even a movie. It’s a fire hydrant that the director and his stars use for exterior shots.

Priceless enough to flush "Metro," "Dr. Dolittle" and "Holy Man" from memory.

Fans likely to rave about Living.

It's too long and self-consciously progressive to be entertaining, but it's too well-intentioned to be dismissed altogether.

With impeccable skill, Akin has made a film roiling with cruelty but guided by tough political optimism. No, we can't all get along, but some us of are trying.

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.

So light it should wind up on the ''diet" shelf of the video store.

Everyone in this overstaffed showbiz sampler has been better somewhere else. An assortment of talented comedians, character actors, professional athletes, sports commentators, one rapper, and two former sitcom stars sit in this movie like too much food on a buffet cart.

Neither epochal nor epic in its ludicrousness. It's just run-of-the-mill trash.

The best parts of Flicka are its pinch-me optimism and its old-fashioned-movie flourishes.

Relentlessly bland.

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

If your name's on the marquee, chances are your agent's already dead.

Leaves you longing for the other, better political thrillers it evokes.

"Grin Without a Cat" brilliantly used montage and a wide intellectual scope to speculate about the history of war and revolution. "Grinning Cat" is a more modest achievement, but the director's wisdom remains robust.

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.

One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy.

The most powerful moment in the film is a tiny one. Anker and his Irvine, Leo Houlding, plan to reenact most of Mallory's climb wearing gabardine and hobnail boots instead of North Face and Gore-Tex.

Grace is grace, and however it arrives, there's no denying its presence.

On screen something happens that goes beyond Monk's powers of description and Fanning's way of seeming 14 and 44 at the same time.

A movie loaded with strange delights.

The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.

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

Directing Annapolis is Justin Lin, whose previous feature was the irresponsible high-school comedy thriller "Better Luck Tomorrow." This second movie is more his speed.

At its core, Quinceañera, a modest but remarkably poignant comedy, is the story of a neighborhood.

At least one chapter in the yet-to-be-written book "When Bad Movies Happen to Good People" belongs to the folks of Company Man.

For a little while, comedy ensues.

The film doesn't amount to an emotionally palpable experience. Most of the stops it attempts to pull out are rusty. The movie ends with a gigantic lump in its throat, one that would take a tall glass of Barbara Stanwyck to wash down.

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.

There is no plot in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's exceedingly mellow situation comedy, and that's preferred, frankly.

Brown lays out his guiding philosophy up front when he says of the Baja, ''This isn't about a race, it's about the human race."

For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of House of Wax will only stoke their schadenfreude.

Jolie doesn't seem entirely bored with the routine. She has a laugh or two at her bionic image: Evelyn is a woman who uses a maxi pad as a bandage.

A featherweight parlor-room French farce in need of an anchor to keep it from being blown away by the summer blockbuster gales.

"Rear Window" never comes up in the Disturbia press notes, which is probably just as well since it steals that movie's premise but none of Alfred Hitchcock's wit, finesse, or seduction.

The lack of sexual tension is astounding.

Stardust certainly could have gone somewhere fun. But the magic and zip you need to get a blimp like this off the ground is scarce.

The film is nothing to be ashamed of (especially if you're Kingsley). But it's as if everybody involved knows what the deal is.

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

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.

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

A bonanza of pop uplift. It wraps the up-from-nothing drama of ''Flashdance'' in the sassy, interracial pep rallying of ''Bring It On'' and the military romance of ''An Officer and a Gentleman.''

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

The movie, from South Africa, is charming and its characters' feelings sincere enough. It's just so cluttered.

A sound piece of profiling that has miles of archival footage of the affable, pop-eyed Langlois enthusing.

The product of immaturity. It approaches suffering with a meaninglessness that must be a luxury for anyone who has never lost anyone, or is incapable of empathizing with someone who has.

The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.

If the movie weren't so playfully dumb -- did you ever think you'd see Ian McShane throw Andy Samberg through a basement shelving unit? -- this would be exasperating.

The film moves slowly and steadily, but it's never exactly dull, just mild.

A bizarre film.

By Hollywood standards, a movie carried with such gusto by a 67-year-old woman has to be considered a miracle. And I'm not sorry to say I enjoyed watching her do it.

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

It's scant to the point of irrelevance.

The film leaves you dissatisfied, as though you'd just spent two hours with a menagerie of plastic white people.

This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.

Positively reeks of self-importance -- the jokey, ham-fisted, pseudo-socially relevant, punch-pulling kind. It reeks worse of acting -- the Jack-Lemmon-in-a-coma Kevin Spacey kind.

At some point, I just tired of looking at all the nicely composed shots unworthy of the stock they're printed on. Lives are at stake here, and I don't mean Julia's and her annoying pals'. I mean the lives of you and me, the only pronouns that really matter here.

The movie is just a cheesy, preposterous, semi-eroticized way of yelling, "Fight! Fight!," when two people go at it in the school cafeteria.

The overall lack of subtlety is a riot - there's even a cautionary production of "Peter and the Wolf" happening in the background during one journalist-politician showdown at a Beltway gala. Still, it's a pleasure watching this cast make the most of the material.

The finest element in de la Pena's carefully assembled account is how she doesn't simply state the obvious, but lets the meaty facts speak for themselves.

Wields its Middle America values and moralistic flogging of idiosyncratic lifestyle choices like a flipped bird.

This is a movie you could watch in your sleep.

Boring, mediocre movie.

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

The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.

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.

Everything about Chop Shop is modest - the movie's scale, the characters' ambitions. Another director might have tried to nudge the film's grim detours toward tragedy. And that might have worked, too. But Bahrani is a refreshingly deceptive director in that sense.

A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.

Its finest moments come in sequences such as Alice and Darlene's prison break and the girls' final wrenching plea for freedom.

The cast helps enliven what could otherwise come off as a treatise. All four actors played these roles during the play's off-Broadway run.

It sounds like the old unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object trick. Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo has the trappings of such a story, but, mercifully, none of the follow-through.

The Daddy Day Care business model appears to be the 1983 Michael Keaton vehicle ''Mr. Mom,'' put on an unstoppable sugar high.

This stuff is clever, in the reflexively satirical, self-aware way that many animated films are. It's not until the dog is accidentally shipped off to New York City that the movie lets you in on an altogether more interesting idea: It doesn't want to be that cool.

The movie is only sporadically interesting.

As a consideration of faith and propriety, the movie never managed to boil my blood or break my heart.

The movie turns what could have been a tedious meta-movie exercise into a sincere dour farce.

The film Soderbergh's made is about promiscuous stargazing. And you don't need a brain for that, just two eyes and a mammoth appetite for heavenly bodies.

What's most remarkable about it is the way Bong builds real suspense and plays the chilling moments straight while leaving himself room for nonsense and horseplay. He seems completely at ease with the marriage of the silly with the serious. Only time can reveal whether he's a master filmmaker, but this, at least, is a masterful performance.

Generates very little heat.

Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize.

A less confrontational, though positively gushing modernization of "Pierre, or the Ambiguities."

Like its stunt work, the movie is both ridiculously hyperactive and a muscular feat of absolute confidence. I don't expect to have a more adrenalizing time at the movies this summer.

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

Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.

Osmosis is really an occasion for the brothers to take their culture- debasing scatology to a PG crowd.

Aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination.

The jokes are as fresh as rotten eggs and the direction stoops to the occasion.

Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.

The latest Guy Ritchie shoot-em-up, is a joke. You laugh with it but mostly at it.

This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.

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 ballad as it turns out is a duet between a dad and his girl, who'd often rather accentuate the positive than exploit pain, quietly proving that she is her father's daughter.

The Signal is like a Romero zombie movie in which the zombies aren't dead, they're just really temperamental. Evil here is technology-born. Maybe our cellphones and satellite dishes are giving us all the crazy.

Fun here is fleeting.

Shouting the title never quite prepared me for either how stripping zombies aren't as hot or as funny as I thought they would be or how quickly the movie's eager intelligence collapses on itself.