Wesley Morris

While Prisoners of Paradise gives us but an impression of Gerron's state of mind, the film does a powerful job of showing us how deflated, small, and desperate this boisterous man had become.

Bland though it is, "Havana Nights" could be the start of a globe-bettering franchise -- and across history, too: "Dirty Dancing: Monticello Mornings"; "Dirty Dancing: Gaza Strip Afternoons."

Frankly, the story isn’t remotely as interesting as Cage. Nothing is. In Ferrara’s movie, Keitel emptied himself out. But there’s a hellion’s joy in Cage’s cop.

Hamlet finds in Hawke's greatish performance a Great Dane for this, or any other, modern moment.

Funny and untouched by cynical, ironic bids to be taken seriously.

The best I can say about his (Diesel)performance is that it's charmingly terrible.

A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.

As long as Saw stays in that big, nasty bathroom, all we need to believe is the knot in our stomachs.

If nothing else, The Filth and the Fury is a searing, forceful, entertainingly biased reminder only that the English group mattered - as musicians and as anti-social curs.

It's a self-amused, self-conscious, seriously limp throwback to motorcycle westerns of the 1970s.

This is also the first of Martel’s films to build in a direction other than up. The film’s lateral movement continues a kind of class commentary.

The film feels long when it should be brisk, and it's bloated with stretches of hot, dead air. The racial kitsch goes nowhere.

The only person in Don McKay having a better time than Shue is Melissa Leo, who plays Sonny’s insinuating housemate. She’s too much by half, in an Agnes Moorehead sort of way.

To be endured rather than enjoyed.

An impressively competent "how will male teen star get with female teen star at high school dance?" romance.

Turistas is not a slasher film -- not conventionally. Released by Fox's new teen division, it's the latest aquatic titillation from John Stockwell, the man who also brought us "Blue Crush" and the shockingly good "Into the Blue."

Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.

Frances McDormand rescues this role from the throes of cliche. It's as though drippy dialogue and sappy rock were a small price to pay for a part that lets her flash her breasts, get stoned, and join in a three-way.

The performances by Plotnick, Leupp, and Roberson comprise a jarring special effect.

What the movie unfolds is how the magazine is inextricable from Wintour’s vision of it.

From Marber's fiercely polished writing, Nichols wrings every drop of acid, yet it's a show of the director's goodness that a movie fundamentally preoccupied with interpersonal ugliness is allowed to end on a convincing note of beauty.

It's pedestrian.

Heymann's film was originally a six-part series for Israeli TV. The feature he and his crew have made smoothly truncates those three hours into a rich, discretely damning 85-minute portrait of intolerance.

By its hilarious, grotesquely over-the-top climax, Holy Smoke is ideologically, metaphorically out of control, as if it has risen from the '70s ashes.

Archer isn't necessarily taking us anywhere new, but his movie's rapture is beautiful inside and out.

Unlike most of what Moore has been in, Dedication is unlikely to delight retirement homes on movie night. But it's not imaginative, lively, or true enough to speak to its intended audience of American Apparel shoppers, either. It's a slog.

Well-meaning but trying documentary.

A football epic on performance enhancers that may be more flagrantly flawed, more shockingly predictable and just plain cornier than its rickety predecessors.

This is by far the most embarrassing of his seven movies.

The most popular facial expression for victims in The Grudge 2 is something I'd like to call "deep befuddlement." This time "deep befuddlement" goes double for paying customers.

The Hollywood version of one of those fawning "60 Minutes" segments about musical prodigies. For most of it, I could hear the congested awe of Morley Safer.

An arch espionage comedy that's never as amusing as it thinks it is.

This movie catalogs a wealth of human ugliness. It’s even been made to look ugly, presumably to underscore the horror movie that is Precious’s life.

The movie is a perfect blend of calm execution and uninflected farce.

Unique because it's the rare movie that fiercely respects the altruistic loyalty that bonds girls to one another.

It plays better as exasperating comedy than genuine horror -- although there is something terrifying about being stuck in a movie whose idea of a bogeyman is a scarecrow with an eating disorder.

You needn’t actually see Fracture to know that if the charge is acting that winks, these two are guilty.

In 80 minutes, the film accumulates a staggering gravity.

Part soap opera and part thriller, and it has the unique characteristic of being both undeveloped and overwritten.

There's not much of a script. The direction is the pits, and stars Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore, playing dueling divorce lawyers who fall in love, are lousy, too.

Gets on your nerves.

A fine afternoon at the megaplex. And it will make a welcome addition your home library when it's released on video.

One of those truly biodegradable experiences.

McTiernan's film mines what substance it has from its two stars, but is admittedly about keeping up its own appearances.

Perhaps Employee of the Month, which was typed then directed by Greg Coolidge, is unfolding in the key of satire. But you'd have to be a dog to hear it.

"Joshua" is a horror movie that doesn't want to freak you out too much. Vitus freaks you out, but its makers seem to have no idea that it does.

Quite easily Live-in Maid could have descended into a kind of Joan Crawford-Bette Davis gorgon salute. But everyone here seems way too smart for that, though apparently the movie is being prepped for an English-language version. So beware.

Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.

The film is overripe with erotic symbols.

I've seen Pacino over the edge. This is not it. He looks pooped and pickled. Maybe being the only thing standing between a megaplex opening and a trip straight to the $4.99 bin at Target wiped him out.

Oh, Jigsaw. Here we go again. You kill. I doze off. Someone at the studio goes "ka-ching!"

The movie doesn't know what it wants to say about the election or the people who run in it.

The movie unfolds like something out of E.M. Forster, but Assayas isn't all that interested in family dynamics. Instead, he's made a chronicle of how the children will handle the sale of the house and its treasures.

These people may be really, really dangerous, but they're also really, really polite.

Moreover, what the film lacks in temporal credibility, it amply makes up for in sheer rawness -- the rawness being literal.

A further, captivating extension of Oshima's marriage of the oblique and the erotic.

This isn't a great piece of nonfiction filmmaking, but it has its moments.

Moves from cheekiness to ineptitude, often in a single take.

Downey appears to like all this make-believe. Even the clunky dialogue sounds witty out of his mouth. This is not a part that makes great demands on his talent, and his slummy approach to it is amusing.

I wanted to keep watching. I wanted to leave. In between, I prayed for the piano-accordion soundtrack to silence itself for just one scene (it's like being trapped in a little French restaurant that refuses to close).

The film feels like bare- bones docu-fiction, though, resisting the attendant drama until the bitter, grisly end.

More a bleak docu-melodrama than an esoteric morality play.

A tedious adventure-romance.

Argento set a standard a lot of moviemakers are desperate to surpass. It's not simply that he's crazy about gore and supernatural hokum. It's that he understands that storytelling is both an art and a craft. His filmmaking carries you along on the illusion of effortlessness; amusement, suspense, a certain elegance follow.

The movie is like a daydream, and it's most infectious when the characters are in motion or misbehaving, which is often.

It doesn't belong at a megaplex. It should be playing on a Clear Channel station.

Not a happy time at the movies. It bears the distinction of bringing to the screen a dark nugget of history.

It's a thriller that refuses to thrill. It taunts us with resolution and mysteries, then slaps our hand for reaching out for a conclusion.

The film plays fast and loose with the book, until its emotional depths, spiritual conflicts, and Waugh's discreet humor have been wrung out.

The film is touchingly firm about leveling with children, drawing a careful, crucial line between fantasy and reality, without patronizing or haranguing them.

A terrifyingly cheap-looking B-movie comedy mocking terrifyingly cheap-looking science-fiction B-movies. As such things go, this one has its moments.

Only occasionally do the thrill of the game and the passion of its players come together. That said, these guys' nakedly neurotic enthusiasm keeps the movie from being a total jumble.

New York, I Love You wants us to know that the city is a sexy, romantic, thrillingly random place where anything can go down. Sadly, two of those things are your eyelids.

The whimsy Greenebaum wants to construct can't match the terminal sadness that naturally takes over the film. Perhaps in accidental tribute to Todd, the whole thing feels half-baked.

Has a silly, insouciant glamour often employed to sell hair conditioners and perfume.

Brainless thriller.

As dumb spoofs go, The Comebacks isn't bad. It takes almost every sports movie of the last five years ("Field of Dreams," too) and blends them into a single slapdash comedy.

The movie's climactic car chase is as absurdly thrilling as it is innovative. Set almost silently in a blue-gray daytime downpour, it has a tough, improvisatory danger that makes the movie. If John Coltrane went in for action sequences, he'd have dug this one.

A satire whose dead aim stops wounding - and starts making - stereotypes of white middle-classness.

A surprisingly effective little horror nightmare.

The film's good humor is often betrayed by its low-budget roots, however, as though it couldn't afford to be more original or ambitious than its premise.

Forget the metaphors, why not just make a movie about poor, exploited Mexicans?

Eden is "Once" after two kids and 10 years of marriage have sucked the music out of life.

It’s like Bob Fosse night at the martial-arts studio. Most of the killing here is done with bladed throwing stars that, like the ninjas themselves, arrive from nowhere. They appear to have been used to edit the film as well.

Mac's TV show seems to have trained him to settle for feel-good tack-ons that cut against the prickly nature of Mr. 3000. The actor has such a serious and wise bearing that it's hard to believe Stan as a shallow jackass, which is why several of his scenes with Boca seem phony.

The Bounty Hunter does give Christine Baranski, as an Atlantic City entertainer and Mama Aniston, another opportunity to enthrall us with her drag-queenliness.

This is a brilliantly structured hall of mirrors that wraps Catholicism and the movie industry into a tasty film noir.

A laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

Like so much Iranian cinema, Blackboards is a work of lyrical propaganda. But its metaphors are opaque enough to avoid didacticism, and the film succeeds as an emotionally accessible, almost mystical work.

Kline's combination of pratfalls and urbanity is funny, but it rubs against the rest of the movie's effortless rustic charm. He's like Errol Flynn on a hayride.

If Plympton is making pastiche, he's also having a laugh at a universal experience that for a lot of people was probably pretty crummy. Apparently, it was a little crummier for him.

Groovy.

Because Spun is so plotless it's almost avant-garde, we're meant to be delighted with its assortment of set pieces.

Watching what Howard has done with the book - covering up the lewdness, blunting the snobbery, and spackling the amazing plot holes - is dismaying. This adaptation has the stink of superiority about it.

A particularly egregious array of Kodak moments.

The first half of Moonlight Mile feels like the runaway trailer for a movie that can't wait to jerk your tears. But to quote Joe in a moment of epiphany, there's a ''truth enema'' out there, and, boy, it really brings this movie around.

Slight but fascinating.

It's a half-life better than Martin Lawrence treading similar, simpler water in "Big Momma's House."

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

Wonderfully deranged.

Hollywoodland has scraps of old movie glamour. It also has shades of later movies that sullied all that class and refinement with a lurid touch, namely Roman Polanski's "Chinatown." But that's all Hollywoodland is: scraps and shade.

Suffice it to say that Chris Smith's Home Movie is the most bananas episode of ''Cribs'' ever. The film is Smith's ballad of the wacky homeowner.

Technique is all you have to admire. There's nothing underneath the formal exercise. The film's coyness about what's happening is cheap.

Drillbit Taylor sounds like a rediscovered blaxploitation movie or a name near the top of the NFL draft.

Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus spent three years shooting two teenagers living in a Maryland juvenile detention center. The completed film is called Girlhood and it feels as much a work in progress as its two troubled subjects do.

Any optimism in 9, which is bound to try the fortitude of meeker children, feels hard-won. It actually ends in a bittersweet mystery.

At its most effective, the movie is a chastening, sobering, and thorough work of film journalism, however shortsighted.

Works purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq.

There are moments when Hill and Giler dare to turn Undisputed into an episode of ''Oz'' - albeit an insipid, belligerence-, and sex-free episode.

It's debatable whether watching Huffman get dressed, take hormones, and learn to use a more feminine diction could sustain an entire movie, but the character is certainly a creation more original than a lot of the film itself.

Cannon actually is funny -- not to mention funny-looking. Plastic surgery has left her physically absurd, like a vaguely glamorous R. Crumb cartoon.

The mess that's been made with all this money is maddening. This isn't economical moviemaking. It's a deluxe trailer for "Eragon 2."

Just watch Austin on "WrestleMania" instead, avoiding the shower this movie leaves you wanting.

This intriguing story, like many tales of mid-20th-century American art, is fueled by testosterone.

It’s unclear what Amy Adams did to deserve Leap Year, but all that’s missing from the movie is a set of jailhouse bars over her scenes.

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

Priceless.

Crashes the slapstick of "Home Alone" into the youthful angst of "The Breakfast Club."

The actor's (McConaughey) lovable exuberance is exactly what this heartsick movie needs.

The amusement it provides is cheap, disposable, and hardly worth the number of quarters you fed into the slot in a frenzy not to go home empty-handed.

Some will find it chicly inspired, recalling blaxploitation's heyday with its grimy urban realism. Some will rightly find it corny, absurd, and an insultingly limited presentation of options for the most disenfranchised African-Americans: I'm still waiting for the movie fantasy about the pimp who wants to get his GED.

This is extreme comedy, and it's amazing how director Jeff Tremaine, who along with Spike Jonze has been affiliated with this troupe from its outset, creates an environment where self-inflicted torture is uncontrollably funny without being morally offensive.

Sadly, more than an hour of this movie is given over to talking. And not the wink-wink Quentin Tarantino kind, either.

Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.

The movie is like an extra-strength episode of MTV's ''Diary,'' which is like ''A&E Biography'' in the first person. Only ''Resurrection'' has a subject who's been dead for six years.

The Oceanic Preservation Society doesn't change the world so much as call attention to something so very wrong with it. And in doing so, The Cove culminates with an image of political agitation that might be one of the most oddly effective public service announcements you'll see.

Cult shocker has been turned into throwaway megaplex fodder.

Offers cliches instead of chills.

A minor movie on a major subject, a drama with an almost unbearable lightness.

Creaky, earnest melodrama.

The film spends its first half explaining the song -- famously and vividly about the cycle of Southern lynching. Its better second half-hour unmasks its composer as a compassionate Jewish guy from the Bronx.

It does not feel good to report that a movie with Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise makes the eyelids droop. But that's what Lions for Lambs does.

About a magical toy shop, but it has some of the sadder moments I've seen in a movie all year.

Very much a genre picture, relying on notions of suspense, surprise, and comeuppance. Indeed, at the center of this movie is a question of whether what we're seeing is really to be believed.

It's hard to blame Telfair for letting his celebrity go to his head. If I were on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the 12th grade, there'd be no living with me either.

In theory, there's nothing wrong with this unorthodox approach to Arbus -- attempting to explain her from the inside out. (In its way, Harmony Korine's freakfest "Gummo" is a better Arbus movie.) The trouble is that Shainberg and Wilson don't connect their conceit to anything artistically enlightening, erotic, or truly deviant.

There's the air of sadness and worry all over this movie, and sometimes it's heavy. But it's air all the same.

There's the world-alteringly scary possibility that (Leder) might be trying to kill us with a star-studded "After School Special."

Over the course of the film's 88-minutes, Taylor cuts away to what's happening around her subjects (the unexamined life, I suppose). Perhaps she's attempting to make connections the thinkers don't.

In tone and plotting, Away We Go feels like a fairy tale built on an aggravating collection of attitudes. It's condescending, judgmental, righteous, yet sincerely searching.

These are not the marks of true cinema; they're the makings of a droopy karaoke video.

Unsalvageable B-movie junk.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

Attempts none of the witty, provocative visual and metaphysical set pieces from any of the ''Nightmare'' movies. And it offers none of the real fright of the early ''Friday the 13th'' films. In fact, the movie is deeply, proudly unimaginative.

Volver brims with personal and cinematic allusions, but no one hungry for a well-told tale from a master storyteller is required to understand them.

The only thing missing from The Hoax might be a couple of songs. It's that breezy and fleet a movie.

The movie tries going for a laugh or two. It even makes stabs at irony. But since none of the story is suspenseful, remotely believable, or, at the very least, cheaply entertaining, who cares?

Director Nowrasteh seems to think the only way to save lives is to sensationalize death. You could trek to the theater and have this movie whack you upside the head. You could also just mail a check for $10 to the human rights group of your choice.

As a movie, it’s a mess — and lazy, too.

For his part, Short, another pop choreographer, sounds like Vin Diesel, but he moves like a bee. When he dances, he makes sure every girl in the theater goes home stung.

The movie is a serviceable way to pass the time: Kids will cheer the bright colors and funny new words ("Kowabunga!").

While most of the scenes in Tony Stone’s peculiar Middle Ages art project look like a homemade educational reenactment, the film is actually more involving than it should be.

A runny intimate portrait that doesn't trust Tammy Faye Messner and her story to enthrall you. So they've all but spelled it out: k-i-t-s-c-h.

Playing the character with this much girlish innocence is risky. Barrymore can seem dumb, but as Lucky You unfolds, we realize that the character is just a device to bring viewers into the parallel universe of poker.

A collection of arbitrary sketches, bits and improvs jammed into a locker room-style variety show masquerading as some semblance of a narrative.

Is, in its way, an apolitical comedy about politics. Or at least a naïve one, since those weapons likely eventually made their way into the hands of Al Qaeda.

The movie feels exhaustive in its loaded 90-something minutes, showing and telling us much while leaving the meaning of the tangles and twists in this family open to interpretation. For once, the tip of the iceberg is enough.

This movie could have been a nagging, preachy headache had either man exhibited a tendency for self-righteousness. But both are friendly, almost humble about their mischief.

For better and worse, the movie is more attractive and competently assembled than its schlock peers. That's refreshing, but it hardly excuses the appalling lack of suspense, intermittent tastelessness, or shockingly low camp quotient.

Almodovar imbues his Harlequin-novel-meets-Marvel-comic-book melodramas with something more than a wink and a smile, and it's beguiling.

The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.

Shopworn to the bone.

Almost nothing works in this movie.

Fellowes is so desperate for us to like these people that, despite how guilty everyone seems, there's scarcely any pleasure in the film for us.

Audiences of a certain hipster disposition, in fact, will see Elizabethtown and pine for Zach Braff's ''Garden State," the movie to which Elizabethtown bears an unfortunate and inferior resemblance.

A work of strangely bold, distinctly American pop art - proud to be ashamed, ashamed to be proud, unafraid to ignore its commercial bearings.

This remake is ultimately content to be repugnant.

Man on Fire is ponderous and bloated, dragging the Bible and Giannini into its swirling cesspool. Scott can't give the movie any real emotional weight. And Washington gives his first lifeless performance.

Angry and tragic, Carandiru is finally, in its own way, uplifting.

It's the sort of stupid swill that gets spewed out by a studio committee, slapped together without a brain, a heart, or a good idea about where to put a camera or when to cut a scene.

Doesn't entirely work.

According to several sojourners who speak in the film, Amma is the embodiment of love. And according to her website, it's her religion, too.

Astonishing.

It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."

Once the vulgar comedy dissipates, we're left with poorly photographed, bullet-riddled summer-action mayhem. The only thing drunker than Hancock is the editing and camerawork.

Vigalondo is only partially capable of building suspense (the film's latter stages contain one knot too many); his achievement owes more to his imagination than his pop craftsmanship.

Silly to the last drop of rationed water.

Her (Anderson) performance is a study in the difference between hubris and pride, remarkable for how unshowy but profoundly devastating it is.

A screwball comedy that made me wish I were 13 again, because this is precisely the kind of movie I would have gone nuts for in the ninth grade.

The Others is great as a collection of acknowledgments, but a ghost story made of a bunch of ghoulish thank-yous isn't that haunting.

The whole thing is as subtle as a watermelon in a bowl of Cheerios but necessary, nonetheless.

Little of the fragile wisdom with which García Márquez imbued that idea has survived this timid Hollywood treatment.

As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.

Partly impressive, partly inane buck-banging toy of a movie.

This story could have gone in a number of more inspiring allegorical directions but winds up your average bedtime story instead.

In this era of Apatow and Ferrell and Rogen and Wilson, of men monopolizing movie comedy, Baby Mama feels absurdly momentous, and even political. Fey and Poehler aren't just taking back control of their bodies. They're taking back control of their profession.

Buried works better as an evocation of "Twilight Zone'' eeriness. Even then, it's silly and gimmicky.

As the eviscerations ensue, the truth becomes undeniable: This is easily the most gruesome, most pointless, episode of "Scooby Doo" ever.

Sadly, the movie is a zoo.

In Mamet's understanding, straight white maleness is the most powerful weapon such men have. It can also be illusory, which is why the last scenes of Edmond are so touching.

Like watching somebody else's flashback and wondering what you were doing then instead.

Rossellini doesn't do much more than show up and be a hundred kinds of ravishing. Yet there's a movie in her ageless face and that untamed bouffant.

As close as a movie about three Iraq war soldiers should come to mediocre TV comedy.

A thriller whose title remains printable only because the right people probably don't know that it refers to a violent sex act.

Swift, brutal, lurid, often overheated, and occasionally comical, but it’s also a serious, well acted, and unromantic exploration of the rise and demise of a terrorist gang whose radicalism ultimately reached beyond the young men and women who set it in motion.

Like two hours of outtakes in search of a studio audience.

Crime-by numbers-cop drama.

Zeiger's movie is a timely salute to the risky and brave men and women who had the temerity not only to think for themselves but to speak their minds.

The movie's inevitabilities (the humiliating loss, the ebb and flow of camaraderie, the triumphant finale) have deep resonance.

The sex bits are flat, the racial innuendo is flatter, and somewhere, Cosby is having a Pudding Pop and shaking his head in disbelief.

The movie is the product of his (Friedman) big, shiny love of forgotten soul legends whom superstardom (and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I might add) has eluded.

Loach makes a working metaphor of the old ant-and-grasshopper story, but the film's images are what echo the loudest.

As ambitious as this may be, however, the movie's objectives tax its energy even as the girls' plight tears at your heart.

This is a patient, simmering movie. It's contemplative but without his usual smitten indulgences.

The result is a cheap and cloying contraption that doesn't know when to stop smirking.

Once a hurricane blows Gere and Lane into each other's arms, all the director's tasteful style and good sense turn into mush. Given the material, I suppose it has to.

I'd like to make a 911 call myself: Lord, please stop this increasingly fine actor (Smith) from climbing onto another cross.

I liked these characters, and suddenly not having them in my life anymore, simply because Denis has decided to start the closing credits, devastated me.

Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.

The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.

The movie's afraid of [Stiles], turning Kat from riot grrrrl to Solid Gold dancer in the time it takes to drop one Notorious B.I.G. song at that house party - which is why it's the Spam of processed teen movies.

The movie is a block of paper that, when Tsai's finished with it, becomes a chain of snowflakes. Loneliness doesn't often get such a gorgeously ornate tribute.

It's all terribly sentimental without being truly terrible.

The voice actors are also excellent, especially Michael-Leon Wooley as a bouncy trumpet-playing alligator and Jim Cummings as a lovelorn Cajun firefly.

The film is in the key of "Romeo and Juliet," and it's a one-note tune.

Garlin's movie is beautiful in its own way. It also suggests that David's show would still be brilliant without the aggravation. I'm not saying that David should renounce misanthropy. But maybe he could curb less of Garlin's apparent enthusiasm for people.

It's one TV-movie romp that Kristy McNichol never got around to starring in.

Like most movies about men and horses, Hidalgo spares no expense in matters of corniness. Set in the 1890s, it's sort of a throwback movie, executed with the boyish kick of dusty old cowboy matinees.

This is as safe and sweet a movie as you could make about America’s sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll-est event.

Assassination reminds you that Penn can be very funny.

Garçon Stupide was shot on digital video and is the rare piece of European sexual realism centered completely on a boy's awakening.

It's the year's best movie sex.

The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.

At its best, Swept Away is like a scrapbook of postcards starring two lovebirds with great tans.

A good, occasionally insightful workplace comedy.

Installment six of the Harry Potter’ series, The Half-Blood Prince, merely gets us one movie closer to the finale, which, apparently is so big (and by big, I mean “$$$$’’) that it’s being split into two parts.

A delightful road movie.

Writers Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow remake is more devilish, hitting its targets with the reckless glee required for a round of Whac-A-Mole.

The point of all this solemnity may be to pay serious respect to those rescue swimmers, who courageously look after errant kayakers or victims of Hurricane Katrina. But what we get in exchange is a movie that feels too much like a Coast Guard recruitment film. Who wants to pay to see that?

For a movie with such a misplaced sense of history, The Scorpion King seems afraid to have more fun with its own stupidity.

The movie itself isn't nearly as interesting as whatever it is Foster is trying to work out for its two hours.

Feels conceived and shot on the fly -- like between lunch breaks for Shearer's radio show and his ''Simpson'' voice-overs.

Soberly, deeply effective.

Bay's movie is also a confident mega-production that feels it doesn't need to lean on its visual frills if it has Smith and Lawrence -- it's a natural-born buddy flick.

This is one beautifully drawn, frequently lifelike piece of anime.

A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.

A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.

The movie they've assembled is in the vein of 1973's "Wattstax," but it's much more than a concert documentary. It's a jubilant, civic-minded lollapalooza.

Frill-less almost to the point of minimalist, teary without being lachrymose, hers is a performance you'd think was great were the movie in a language you didn't understand.

It's a terrible sign for a movie when the sole reason for its existence is a satanic opening date.

The sight of Adams gliding and beaming and chirping in this movie - a self-mocking cartoon that transforms into an inspired live-action musical farce - is just about the happiest time I've had watching an actor do anything all year.

A sporadically entertaining cupcake of a movie.

This prequel has something to appall everybody.

A ludicrous little abduction thriller that boasts an entertaining cocktail of gunpowder, suspense, adrenaline, and cheese. I just couldn't hate this movie, and I really, really tried. It's tightly made and well written in deceptive ways that don't reveal themselves until past the halfway point.

As lifeless and unneeded as The A-Team is, it might have been worse.

An alt-country paean to libidinal mothers and the little girls who clean up the mess.

Less like watching a movie than it is like being accosted by one.

Long-delayed, pitiful excuse for a horror film.

In the Land of Women sounds like a piece of cheap science fiction about the last man on earth. If you're the lovelorn mother and daughter in Jonathan Kasdan's first movie, a grating romantic drama, that's painfully close to the truth.

Eyes Without a Face, outre as it is, never tires as hypnotic, touching, ghastly fun.

By taking nonsense seriously Outlander never achieves camp. It's a comic book that's mistaken itself for scripture.

Whitney's body of work doesn't suggest a filmmaker so much as an opportunist with a video camera. He makes a very specific sort of reality movie. It's called porn.

Duvauchelle is actually the best thing in the movie.

Effortlessly entertaining romantic comedy.

Aiming to keep it real, the cast of the new dance casserole Center Stage sweats spunk.

Too confused to provide any thrills, even indecent ones.

Not particularly good -- meaning navigable, remotely entertaining, pleasing to the eye -- it does, rather nobly, want to hip its audience to gender fluidity.

What's special about the movie is how totally it believes in itself as a musical. The tunes, co-written by Sandler and a bunch of his pals, take on rock opera and traditional Jewish folk music with boyish exuberance.

This movie just seems like a scattered excuse to make political points without saying much of anything. Worse, it also fails to show us, with any vividness, how Mirit and Smadar think and feel as women.

A vicious horror flick with an actual beast and someone who just acts like one.

Blithely inept.

All we have here are bits, so many, in fact, that Extract’ feels more like a collection of crumbs.

This emperor verges on dementia, having no apparent clue how to function.

A finely coiffed, cream-cheese "8 1/2" remix with Gere, a Marcello Mastroianni for Oprah Winfrey times.

Like Schumacher, director Gregor Schnitzler is more preoccupied with his characters' looks than their behavior. You might not buy the ideas. But you'll definitely want the T-shirt.

The movie might have been more tolerable had Besson searched harder for a performer and not a specimen. Barbara Stanwyck in her prime might have made more sense.

This third installment is the loudest, dopiest, and least inventive of the three. But what the movie...lacks in intelligence it makes up for in sheer doom.

Il Divo is showboat moviemaking, but the opulence is of a piece with the film's damning assessment of the durable Italian elder statesman Giulio Andreotti.

Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.

A self-consciously arch work of hipsterism that's more styled than funny.