Wesley Morris

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.

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.

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

Mediocre-TV-drama-load of formulas.

This is the most-off-the-mark adaptation of a novel since Brian DePalma's what-was-that "Bonfire of the Vanities."

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

The movie's sense of inspiration is realistic. It never implies a future of glamour, only hard-won success.

Harris, Heche make unholy twosome.

Fails to be the histrionic bubble bath that you want to carry you away.

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

A warmly made, slightly offbeat movie about friendly devotion. It also happens to be a western, and every man in it is grizzled or wizened or both.

Brims with forboding, but it pulses with candy colors and the hum of neon signs.

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

Broad and badly made but sporadically inspired, "Chuck and Larry" is still an amazing improvement over "License to Wed," this month's other wedding comedy.

This is not “Death of a Salesman’’ or “Save the Tiger’’ (in the case of the latter, thank God). But how refreshing to see a movie about a mother’s struggles that doesn’t culminate in her lying on her back to make ends meet.

A more convincing star could make this a degree more tolerable, although in Cyrus’s defense not much more.

Weirdly enthralling film.

Neither thrilling nor psychological, but it's chicly shot and edited and is pretty much art-directed to death.

A limp excuse for a coming-of-age flick, more interested in sexploits than sex, more adept at gross-out than girls.

An effortless heartwarmer that manages to be utterly corny but quite likable.

A feel-good but inane Disney production.

Doing nothing special, Freeman manages to make the picture seem wiser, funnier, and more eloquent than it is.

The welcome hints at emotional excess are compromised by the blunt force of the movie's political point-making.

A movie that seems to have been made mostly on the hard drive of a Power Mac G4. But whatever, we get it: Technology destroys everything.

Anyone looking for sleek futuristic action and production design should keep walking.

The movie seems terrified of true psychological complexity or perversity. It's less a family tragedy than a lousy country dirge.

In the intervening years, they've become pretty good actors, too. Now where's the filmmaker who'll give them more to do than pregnancy scares and falls off donkeys?

Every ounce of the film feels artificially upbeat.

There is still a great horror movie about foreclosure to be made. In the meantime, this movie plays games. (How many rounds of hide-and-seek should an audience tolerate?)

It also goes out of its way to give you a schlocky B-movie vibe by wrangling bait in the form of a bunch of Big-Gulp stupid stock characters - that's a whopping 44 oz. more stupid than you probably were bargaining for.

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

The secret here is that the movie is rather tasteless. It has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.

It has a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for romance will find only cardboard lovers. People looking for a resounding musical will find it odd that the camera runs away from the lip-synching cast. And people looking for opera -- well, shame on you.

A feat of droll, refractive, melodramatic self-portraiture.

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

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.

Curran is a talented director, especially where his actors are concerned. His previous movie, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," an adaptation of two Andre Dubus stories, was another literary adultery drama featuring Watts. The Painted Veil doesn't achieve the fire that characterized that film.

Half hearted in its mockery of corporate culture and schlock. The filmmakers want to have it both ways -- the funny and the sadistic -- but rarely do so at the same time with any success.

The movie dreamily conjures up the outlaw's last months, and it's gorgeous, but long, cumbersome, and slightly shallow.

The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?

Any movie that would think Calista Flockhart to be the sort of high-strung basket case who'd hurl obscenities down at a dog kennel outside her apartment is worth sitting through.

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.

It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.

Full of redeeming throwaways.

Redundant for a filmmaker whose work has always dealt with the dismaying consequences of this country’s profit motive. Isn’t every Michael Moore film ultimately about capitalism? This one just has a more facetious title.

It's not as bad as the average Hollywood movie, it's stupendously worse.

Dave is one of the most ineffectual characters ever to have an entire movie built around him.

The film turns that stale old Seder into warmed-up dinner theater.

Renders the juicy bits of the artist's life in two hours of pulsing highlights that suggest a man who never really had any emotional or psychic downtime.

Timely in that it joins an already mammoth list of bad movies about post-hippie static, including the recent "Steal This Movie."

It's a portrait of the artist as Mary Poppins.

The crime of The Chorus isn't that it's corny. (I like corny.) It's that its corniness seems programmed.

It's a movie so foul even the folks at the NAACP Image Awards would have to look the other way.

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.

A movingly acted, terrifically old-fashioned World War II picture rethought as a post-colonial rebuke.

The decadence is obvious. But true to the Valentino prerogative, it's beautiful - sad, too: a dream life moving into the unknown.

A belligerent little sex farce roiling inside an otherwise inconsequential lampoon of corporate America, the movie is rude and ridiculous, fearless up to a point, and breathtakingly hungry to provoke.

The surprise here is how thrillingly bad things get.

Where Never Been Kissed succeeds is in its unabashed refusal to stoop to choosing sides in the high-school hipness war.

In Catch a Fire Noyce has caught the holy spirit. The movie is a thriller that wants to lift you up.

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

Engrossingly manic version of Tracy Letts's great stage play.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

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

Playing Clouseau's exasperated boss, Cleese rams his head into a wall minutes into the action. That's a powerful image, insofar as his headache was mine.

Like the current hit "Taken," Last House 2009 packs a vicarious jolt that might feel cathartic to certain moviegoers.

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.

Told in a serenely observational fashion.

Freshly viewed, the movie's melancholy seems to fit uncannily well in the moment we find ourselves now. In the film there are mentions of nuclear annihilation and worries that heedless lust and wanton partying could bring Rome a second fall.

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

Has to be appreciated simply for doing its job, for being the only thriller I've seen recently that made me wonder how my knuckles ended up in my mouth.

In American movies, the iconic question usually is, can men and women be friends without the sex part getting in the way? Here it's, can a husband appreciate his wife as a woman? The movie's success in Italy is partly a matter of frustration: Women need their men to grow up.

Watching Granger and Priya chase each other around a hotel like squirrels in a park, you wonder what these two see in each other.

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

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

Incisive, highly entertaining political farce.

A film where suspense and exhilaration are incompatible, and a receding plot line is merely the platform for cars to fly through panes of glass.

Daredevil the movie strains itself trying to catch up with Sam Raimi's web-slinging megasmash. It's a faceless copy, right down to the muscle-rock groaning on the soundtrack.

The movie does offer intriguing, perceptive glimpses of the everyday difficulties of being both a survivor and the child of a survivor.

The art direction is reliably vivid and hyperreal, but director Satoshi Kon and company can't articulate how mentally taxed Mima is without confusing us.

The rare ecological documentary that doesn’t nag us to run out of the movie theater and change the world.

Has a power that doesn't announce itself until it's over: You leave not wanting to give up on life, just resentful of the world we live in.

An embarrassing romantic comedy from Rob Reiner.

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

Godsend makes swill of religion, science, family, and morality. It has the sensitivity of a cactus, the ingenuity of a square wheel, and the integrity of a CEO.

You're smarter than this, but occasionally it tricks you into thinking it might be up to something you haven't considered, like an above-average, extra-bloody episode of "Scooby Doo."

As involved as Crudup and Connelly beseech you to be with this story, their very youthfulness, their nagging lack of adulthood, keeps the film from being anything more credible than a tight grad-school tryst.

A big, silly party.

Looks like something stubbed out in an ashtray.

Gordon made similar lurches all over the map in his previous exercise in grotesquerie, "Edmond," which was based on a David Mamet play and starred William H. Macy as, of all things, a racist misogynist on a grisly bender. Stuck could have used some of that outrageousness.

The grime, filth, slop, vomit, and crotch-nibbling pigs double all too easily as a recipe for this movie's failure. It hasn't been made so much as excreted.

The mix of mawkishness and polemic is naive. Children, though, will probably leave with a lot of good questions. A better movie would leave them with more.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

Uses lots of stock footage and takes looks back at America's big transitional period as though the era came in a can.

If Millennium Mambo is the only chance to see Hou Hsaio-hsien's work at a movie theater, you'd better take it.

We are treated to the riotous, almost David Lynchian moment in which Ferrell runs around a motorway in his undies screaming that he's on fire. He's not. Actually, come to think of it: He is.

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

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

This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."

This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. Some directors give you a healthy ratio of mashed potatoes to gravy. Wong seems not at all to care for the potatoes.

The ideas are generous and inclusive rather than divisive: Zinn wants history to be seen and to be experienced from every possible perspective.

Judy Irving's terrific documentary 'The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is ostensibly about birds, but only in the way that a game of Scrabble is about tiles.

An arcade game disguised as a love story, nearly comatose with cute.

Mildly satisfying.

Beautiful, wandering little love story that wants to break your heart and probably will.

The best and worst of old school -- retro but stale. Frankenheimer, along with Ben Affleck, donates what cool there is.

By 2009, the franchise has nothing new to offer. The culture, through video games and reality television, has caught up to the series and surpassed it.

Most atrocious movies build into their badness, as lacks of talent, ideas, self-confidence, or a total hatred of an audience, are revealed. This one gets it out of the way up front and never looks back.

Setting aside, just for a moment, his general loathsomeness, there is a case to be made for a less apparent aspect of Benito Mussolini: He was once really hot.

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

Rebound is about as unmotivated as Coach Roy, doing nothing to distinguish itself from any other movie ever made about winless teams that learn to stop losing.

An unsteady stab at noir.

The movie offers up too many airy spiritual lessons in the hope of crossing from farce to sentiment.

Manages to fascinate more than it entertains.

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

Loaded with priceless encounters that would seem incongruous in any other movie but play here as low-comedy facts of some parts of black life.

It's hard to dislike a film that wants to say that the bereft have to move on with their lives, that death is part of living, and that poverty is a state of mind. But it's not impossible.

The film, which is as economically made as it is primitively animated, ambles from adventure to adventure, taking nothing seriously, not even itself.

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.

The resulting film is nobly ridiculous and ridiculously noble, doing everything in its power to subvert the dross it's fooling around with.

Thompson adapted the screenplay from Christianna Brand's "Nurse Matilda" books, and she and director Kirk Jones balance the slapstick and levity with darker enchantments. At its most enjoyable the film feels like Roald Dahl's idea of "Mary Poppins."

Devor's sympathy for both the men and the animals is humane, yet his movie is palpably sad. A sense of shame cuts through all the ambiguity. You know less about what you've watched when Zoo is over than you did when it started. And that's what makes the movie so hard to shake.

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.

Part Marxist social drama and part Michael Moore corporation-needling, with fed-up residents trying to outsmart the big, bad naive company to keep their lights on for free.

This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.

There is a mild pleasure in the sight of Jude Law pirouetting with a hacksaw through gangs of extras, but the amusement is notional. I actually don’t find him terribly interesting as a kinetic object.

It's unbelievably bland.

The film is quick, painless, and more than a little brave: not since John Travolta, Jamie Lee Curtis, and the aerobicizers in "Perfect" has so much Lycra been so abused for our pleasure.

Like no movie before it, Adaptation risks everything -- its cool, its credibility, its very soul -- to expose the horror of making art for the business of entertainment.

Cradle of lifelessness.

It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker

Like a Sally Field movie by Vittorio De Sica: Zhang wants to affect you with the subtle sting of his politics.

Like the great Iranian filmmakers, Rasoulof has no use for the artificiality of heightened drama.

Sexual doublespeak is everywhere.

Elegant.

This is the first, smallest, and most essential planet in the Van Sant solar system. The seediness of "Drugstore Cowboy " started here. So did the one-way crushes in "My Own Private Idaho " and the gorgeously epic longueurs of "Last Days. "

The film is like watching Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a rubber bat -- it's only almost heinous.

It's a grisly, chuckling cartoon made on shots of tequila, Red Bull, and Sergio Leone.

Is a man with Asperger’s boyfriend material? It’s difficult to determine how we wind up here, but it’s strange that a movie ostensibly about a man and his lack of social options left me depressed about a woman and hers.

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

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

A one-trick action thriller that feels like a poor cousin of an episode of ''24." Call it ''12."

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."

As art, the movie is neither shallow nor profound, just inconsequential. Yet Coppola is too clever a filmmaker to dismiss the movie out of hand. If her film is mostly surface then she skims with style.

Disappointing.

There are episodes of "Rugrats" with stronger sexual suspense.

There’s no reason a conspiracy this outlandish should work twice. But it’s so hilariously within the realm of plausibility that it does.

Messing should know this is precisely the kind of movie Grace would ridicule Will for dragging her to see.

A lovely , old-fashioned farm romance quietly doubling as a comment on immigration and American identity.

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

As easy as this movie is to watch, it's artificially flavored. "Golden Flower" runs on crocodile tears and corn-syrup blood.

The willful sloppiness and retrograde gags make Epic Movie, which was not shown to critics, an inevitable byproduct of our Internet video era. It seems downloaded and projected onto the screen, a failing online-film-school project paid for and put out by a Hollywood movie studio. That said, very little on YouTube is this unentertaining.

It's a lot like a pumpkin spice frappuccino with extra sugar and extra cream. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll leave with foam on your nose. So cute. As a friend said on the way out: At least no books were harmed in the making of this movie. And he's right. But that's only because no one really tried.

The film itself is also a beautiful work of art, exquisitely framed and precisely envisioned.

Rothemund gives us his sophisticated filmmaking only in the finale, which is devastating in its briskness and fury.

Zahedi's search for fulfillment is depleting, like throwing good sex after bad. The more we learn about the hole in his soul, the more vivid his misogamy becomes.

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."

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

The result is a masterpiece of investigative nonfiction moviemaking - a scathing, outrageous, depressing, comical, horrifying report on what and who brought on the crisis.

Guy Ritchie made a name for himself with scuzz, but even his shtick has exceeded its sell-by date. Nobel Son goes further, crossing the contortions of "The Usual Suspects" with the shallowness of certain intellectual family melodramas.

It's the men in ''Upside" who speak all the truth.

Blakeney can't decide if this is a quirky romantic comedy or a quirky mob essay, and you can see the movie thinking itself into a rhythmless hole with cement shoes.

Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.

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

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

If their movie doesn't float your boat as a work of science-fiction, action, philosophy, heliocentrism, or staggering visual spectacle (although, it really should), then it certainly succeeds as a parable for cinematic ambition.

Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.

Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.

The filmmaker doesn't exactly let anyone off the hook.

Cairo Time is a kind of bourgeois delusion. It's authentically aggravated but bogusly conceived.

This is a film of our times - paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned - and the rare recent American movie whose characters react the way actual people might.

A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.

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

The Lost City is Andy Garcia's ballad to Havana during the Cuban revolution. You'll have to forgive the penthouse view, though -- it's the only one Garcia can seem to find.

Has the problem of drifting in and out of authenticity.

There are enough mullets to win this movie a Stanley Cup.

What should have been 90 zippy minutes of jingling, giggling, winking fakery adds up to only about 20 minutes of fun.

As perfectly bad horror movies go, Wrong Turn is something new: a gore-splattered workout flick.

Prince-Bythewood's movie is an occasionally clunky, mostly engaging coming out party for herself.

The cute little domestic comedy gains a slightly rough edge - maybe Sven isn't meant to be a father or a husband.

I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

Numbing story.

Shannon gives the movie its inner life. Maybe the movie will give her back her comedy career.

As it develops, Who's Your Caddy? just becomes depressing. You want to alert the United Negro College Fund: A mind has terribly gone to waste.

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.

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.

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.

This is the feistiest Hollywood movie about American women and their thankless jobs since "9 to 5."

Where most effects-laden extravanganzas aspire to be nothing more than a live-action comic book, The Matrix sees things with the venturesome clarity of a graphic novel.

At its best, Up in the Air invents new realms for old Hollywood sophistication.

Scares up few chills.

It's ultimately just a rigorous personal training film made by people who don't seem to like movies or the people who go to them.

An adrenaline-pumping, post-musical musical.

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.

From both sides of the camera, Eastwood works the crowd better than he has in years.

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

Indeed, woe be to the child who doesn't mist up at this movie, since it's been made if not with zip, wit, or imagination, then at least with sweetness. But I hope no one will think the film is an adequate replacement for White's book. That would be a crime.

In light of our recent crackdown on runaway nudity, the steady stream of exposed breasts in the gnarly Eurotrip give it a nostalgic feel.

It's actually a pretty lousy thriller.

At some point we're flashed a junkyard billboard telling us that Collinwood is the ''Beirut of Cleveland'' - yes, but here, it's by way of Looney Tunes.

Full of action, but no soul.

This is the epidemic from love's point of view, a story as much about how the disease can ravage the heart as it does the body. It is also Téchiné's best film since 1998's superb "Alice et Martin," and 1994's even better "Wild Reeds."

It just feels like playacting.

The triptych is a device but never a gimmick: three windows into one fractured soul.

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.

Enormously enjoyable.

This plot leaves ample room for viewers to sweat the small stuff, like whether Trevor Nunn's score is more Marines ad or deodorant commercial.

In The Bucket List, Nicholson is human-ish. And Freeman is so human.

Even at the movie's most ridiculous (and Mongol is not without its ridiculous moments), this is a picture you laugh with more than laugh at.

Revanche was a foreign-language Oscar nominee this year, and it's a better movie than most of the films in the main race. The word "revanche" means "revenge" in German, but "waiting" would have been just as good.

In The Hurt Locker, the thrill is unexpectedly contagious. You don't realize how riveted you are until you're back on American soil observing James in civilian life.

I could have watched this woman rip a piece fabric and turn it into a dress all day. I haven’t seen a lot of that. I have seen movies about a woman caught between two men, as Chanel is here.

It makes a sane, civil, humanist case for marriage for all.

If only Miller's writing had some human zest. Nearly everybody here is crunchy, salt-of-the-earth organic, and off in a dreamland.

His [Director Tony Scott's] pornographic lust for bloodletting, gunplay, and out-of-control camerawork far exceeds his abilities to tell a story.

Moore's roving essay feels even more urgent now than it did when the jury had to make up an award to honor it at the Cannes film festival in May.

You aren't likely to see a more ludicrous movie for the rest of the year. But rarely has such ludicrousness been used to pay tribute to a town in need of love. Déjà Vu is generic enough to have been filmed anywhere. But it happens to be set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

A meticulously assembled dramatization of a grossly controversial moment in TV history.

The unworthy new Hollywood remake of Japan's horror phenomenon, ''Ring,'' has packed on a definite article and a whole lot of hooey.

It's polished-looking, yet dull.

An hour and a half of cultural and sexual headaches only barely leavened by MacLachlan's performance.

By aiming for something more ambitiously, ambiguously philosophical, [Sayles] forgot to include a heart and a soul.

Finding Home is well meant and earnest but is stretched to almost twice what would have been a comfortable length.

In a sense, Sandler is damned if he develops, damned if he devolves. But he needn't apologize for being who he is by turning a goldmine sitcom into a tame "Baby Boom" for guys.

What Grind lacks in cinematic skill, it makes up for in heart, which is what most dudes-in-arms flicks are missing. Given the option of spending eternity with these gentlemen or the boys of ''American Pie,'' I'd choose the lads of Grind.

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

Fighting has real grit and excellent acting. In other words, there is gold in that dirt.

Daybreakers has unexpected flashes of brilliance.

It's the videotaped equivalent of a primary research data dump. But to quote Bette Davis by way of Edward Albee: What a dump.

Eastwood risks embarrassment flirting with material this naked in its mawkishness, then jumps right in. He seems to want the world to know: Inside the 72-year-old body of this icon of virility beats the heart of a Mexican woman.

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.

This version is a well-meant but corny distillation -- a whole lot of bombast and phony exaltation in the name of entertaining enrichment.

The movie can barely muster the bravery to be even "Dude, Where's My Car" stoopid.

Short without feeling scant. That's how big its sense of grief is.

Clueless and sad.

Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.

The movie's no good: It's written, directed, performed, photographed, edited, and marketed on a fifth-grade reading level; despite that and its twin stars' saucer eyes and ropy limbs, it's no Muppet movie either.

Even at 148 minutes (and viewed twice!), you still feel as if you’re watching the longest coming attraction ever for a John Woo movie.

A stupendous bore.

It's a movie only a psychic could love, since a psychic would know to stay home or see "Zodiac" instead.

It should be renamed "Drop Dead Ghetto" and hauled off to the "Jerry Springer" hall of shame.

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.

Its commendable, if juvenile, sense of erogenous adventure is sullied by bland technique, canned suburban punk music, and the fact that all the exploration does amount to maturer characters.

It's looking for comedy and romance in the obvious places.

The resulting movie is a nauseating flight of Hollywood navel-gazing.

The horrible anticipation he [Aja] builds is derailed by a gimmick that makes the twist in, say, ''Fight Club" seem perfectly logical. To say more would be to ruin the movie, and why should I do that when its own makers have done it for you?

It's the year's funniest, most absurd sight gag.

Die Another Day is still as professionally mediocre as its predecessors.

Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.

At the very least, a movie like this requires coherence to stay afloat. Barring that, it needs a star to distract us.

Miley may vacillate, but for now her indentured servitude to Disney continues. The image that comes to mind is Princess Leia chained to Jabba the Hutt, but that's probably just me.

Who knew that the franchise’s creators would eventually find a plot twist that made sense?

The director, Beeban Kidron, handles the proceedings with an episodic aimlessness on par with Bridget's.

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

More like that crowd-pleasing UK fluff that requires great actresses to do wacky things. Mirren is such an easy, breezy presence that you might think she's playing the screenwriting equivalent of air.

The screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs affirms life and jerks tears with welcome degrees of humor and muscle.

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.

Looks and feels like someone else's better-made schlock.

Washington hasn't been this relaxed in years. When he feels like it he can be the most charismatic star in the movies.

Another helping of egregious slicing and slashing.

A chillingly effective documentary.

A momentously, shockingly moving fit of shape-shifting by a filmmaker grown tired of the macabre.

Despite all the hyperventilating, the movie fails to consider what these crimes mean when, say, the residents of the White House happen to be black. The filmmakers recognize that identity politics are often a trap door. But it's one they're helpless to save themselves from falling through.

A family melodrama with charm.

This is the sort of asinine action exercise that needs a star to blow up cars and leap from rooftop to rooftop with gusto.

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

The Last King of Scotland joins the ranks of nightmarish innocents-abroad movies, from "Midnight Express" to "Hostel," where the disillusioned hero fights to return to civility.

Despite Aniston's hard work, Good Girl could be better.