Wesley Morris

As Diesel says, ''I like something fast enough to do something stupid in.'' Mission accomplished.

Invites you not simply to identify with its low IQ but to cheer it on. This is a movie that knows you know it's dumb, and that's enough to make the whole thing worth tolerating.

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.

National Treasure even has a rough time approaching the heart of ''The Amazing Race," a show that manages, in 44 minutes, to make you care about average folks as they follow clues across the globe.

Works as a quixotic study of emotional quirks.

Aeon Flux is the sophomore picture from Karyn Kusama, who's first movie was a modest boxing film called "Girlfight." Here she's in over her head. The movie's sexual and scientific ideas never come through, and the characters would be fun only if they came with a joystick.

It's also the first apocalypse-minded franchise that's earned its downbeat mood. The action, for starters, is post-Cold War, post-Chernobyl, post-perestroika. Darkness is so much a part of the Russian psyche it must be nice to see a local movie try to put its hand toward the Light.

If you want to watch a gaggle of pretty faux-neurotic people hang out and throw quips, you're probably better off watching "Friends."

The new Abbas Kiarostami film is called Ten, and in it something amazing happens: nothing.

Fred Claus sells you something you didn't know you wanted: a Vince Vaughn Christmas movie. Vaughn is not the hook. Neither is the holiday. The script, by Dan Fogelman, is smarter than that.

This intimate, warmly made family portrait always feels true. The performances are particularly good.

It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.

It's an experience as frustrating as watching Jeff Gordon drive a stock car through a bowl of oatmeal.

An archaic rail-ride into the heart of boredom.

I wish I could say there is something pleasurable in watching John Goodman reminisce about the good old days while impaled on a steering wheel in the Volvo he's crashed on a California freeway, but I can't find what it is.

Spellbinding.

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.

You might cheer. You might cry. For a minute, you might even wish it were you on that medal stand.

As ridiculous German suspense dramas go, you could do worse than Jerichow.

Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.

It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.

Anderson is the rare filmmaker who doesn't want to use the actress as an instrument or to exploit her independent-movie cachet. She has freed Moore to be what she hasn't been with many directors: credibly human.

On most levels his performance is as flat as his abs: very early Wahlberg.

An ecstatic sensory experience so overloaded it hardly matters that the narrative has been placed on a back burner.

It's fun, but the blatant, obvious kind that mistakes allusive cool for mature filmmaking and subtle ideasmanship.

Wattstax is a disorienting and ironic moviegoing experience. It's a film about the curative powers of rhythm-and-blues music that sets out to frustrate your sense of rhythm in its insistence on the blues.

The usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.