Wesley Morris

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.