Wesley Morris

If we are in the midst of a culture war, as many people proclaim in Jesus Camp, then the left should be concerned. The right's Christian soldiers appear to be extremely well trained.

The real core of The Core is the beautiful friendship between a highly emotive Eckhart and the sacrificial Karyo. Their bond is the best thing to happen to Franco-American relations since SpaghettiOs.

Like an old college wrestler, Harris saunters through this toasty little piece of biographical fiction in love with the part's fixins'.

The Treatment fails to do anything interesting with Jake.

As films about the young and the horny go, I preferred the smarter approach director Jeffrey Blitz takes in "Rocket Science."

A defective poker comedy where the poker is a lot more interesting than the people playing it.

Entertaining.

Queasy comedy.

A passable, sometimes skillful farce.

It's mesmerizing nonetheless for its flagrant disregard for narrative, character, pacing, performance and good lighting.

When it was over I felt vaguely embarrassed. I wasn't just leaving a movie theater. I was taking a walk of shame.

It's hard to care about people this generic - even when they're naked.

As loving and welcome as Chris & Don is, it's not well enough conceived to create equilibrium among its many parts.

Most of the time it looks like we're on the back lot for a Romanian production of "Lord of the Rings IV."

It is a traffic jam of broken hearts, fluxing racial identities and deplorable outfits that has everything but a salsa overhaul of "I Will Survive."

The director is becoming a master of blending the political and the personal with eloquence and deceptive lightness.

If Restaurant feels like a high-caliber TV drama, it's one that tries to pack an entire season (plus pilot, plus backstory) into one episode.

Is a truly political stoner movie even possible? The entire point of getting high is to take some of the sting out of life. The movie goes after easy targets and goes soft on the harder issues.

It takes almost an hour for The Legend of Leigh Bowery to make a case for Bowery's sort of genius, and in the last third, the movie gives a real sense of what made him him.

The movie has embarrassingly limited ideas about both the sexes and sex. Like Sandra Bullock’s career woman in “The Proposal,’’ Abby appears to have never heard of intercourse, much less experienced it.

Has a novelist's human touch. Were it a book, it would go somewhere on the shelf with Jonathan Safran Foer and early Philip Roth.

At its best the film serves as a music appreciation class taught by embattled artists whose cloudy livelihoods grow increasingly uncertain with each bittersweet symphony.

Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.

It's the most touching love story about tragically separated sexy beasts since "Cold Mountain."

What the writer and director, Lance Daly, means as some kind of transporting urban adventure for them is a disenchanting slog for us.

A distant thematic and artistic cousin of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl."

The Unborn joins a growing glut of Holocaust- and Nazi-themed material -- "Valkyrie," "Defiance" - that are long on posturing, suppositions, and righteousness, yet short on moral complexity. Nazism and its crimes have lately inspired theme parks more than actual movies. Too many rides on that roller coaster and I feel sick.

If it's difficult to find straight laughs in a colorblind prison movie (It's difficult enough to find a colorblind prison movie), finding straight laughs in a black one is almost impossible.

Who most of these exquisitely costumed people are I have no idea, but they brush past the camera in such rapids of jubilation it's a wonder they don't knock the thing over. I watched most of the film exhilarated, but depressed that I'm not a big Russophile.

A parody of and winking homage to the history of Thai melodrama, Wisit Sasanatieng's uproarious filmmaking debut exuberantly combines pop and kitsch with a wholesome belief in the thrills of bad art.

This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.

Not the sweaty midnight stroll through the garden of carnal delights that its title wants you to believe.

Turns into something like a screwball farce, an intimate, self-aware one.

Shampoo refuses to be coy. There's a deep, soulful confusion here that isn't careless with frivolity.

This is the sort of movie where men stand blankly over dead loved ones, then start digging. Masculine stoicism or emotional botox? You decide.

The worst thing about the first Quentin Tarantino picture in five years is that after 93 minutes of some of the most luscious violence and spellbinding storytelling you're likely to see this year, Kill Bill ends.

What is the value of art in times of strife? Should people be sitting in the theater or rioting in the streets? Walter's film reminds us that once there was a man whose work made no distinction between the two.

The movie has a jolly, half-remembered quality, as though it were adapted from a particularly rose-colored memoir.

You want the movie to stir your soul, push your intellect, or at the very least, break your heart. But it's such a repetitive and thinly constructed piece of filmmaking that the scope and complexity of Sampedro's case are turned to porridge.

De Bont's effects-riddled remake of the '63 spook-out adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel is not nearly as creepy as either its cinematic or its literary precedents. But it's a hokey, hokey entertainment and a $100 million Lili Taylor movie.

This is neither a psychological thriller nor an erotic one, so any interest in the story is purely the work of its stars.

Comes tantalizingly close to being interesting.

It’s one of the richer movies you’re likely to see about average Arabs in America.

A collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vignettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment.

Everybody in the movie is so tightly wound that Walters seems a model of actorly limberness. She cuts through the movie with speed and mannish, zany wit.

Going the Distance earns its R rating, often by daring to say what goes frequently unsaid by women in raunchy comedies. It's not a very good movie. The entire second half is a sitcom.

The movie star Julie Christie turned 62 last month, and anyone under the impression that she merely floated through her prime heedless of the age in which she worked should catch her in A Decade Under the Influence.

There's a cheap thrill in watching Hudson defuse Cook's pig antics with some foulness of her own.

It’s as slickly enjoyable as anything you’d see on VH1.

Schwartzberg does stumble upon some pretty fascinating people.

Feels like an interminable pilot for a show to fill that deadly 8:30 slot between "Friends" and "Will and Grace."

The screenplay's intelligence begins to break down in Egoyan's formal choices. Ideas never elude Egoyan, but boy does Saroyan's epic look uncertain and cruddy.

The documentary is primarily a work of whimsy.

Shattered Glass, with its dumb title, is smart about good vs. evil. Incidentally, the good is Lane, who now works at The Washington Post and was a consultant on this picture.

At once a stifling exercise in thwarting emotional dynamics and a heated invitation to engage in the film's discourse on the shortcoming of sexual politics and justice in a media-saturated land.

Robert Downey Jr. looks as hung over in Iron Man 2 as he seemed drunk in “Iron Man.’’ He does his share of drinking this time, too. And the sequel makes more out of his insobriety. It has an early stretch where it fizzes and slurs, with the stars stepping on each other’s lines and feet. The movie feels drunk, too.

With Election, Payne announces himself as one of the keenest purveyors of the scattered pieces that once was an American morality.

The early dilemma in "Rise of the Silver Surfer " is this: Save the world or marry Jessica Alba . Your conscience says, "Save the world." But the Maxim reader in you knows better.

Rendition is a reminder that, in the wrong hands, political outrage can be a slog.

Brilliantly named Half Past Dead -- or for Seagal pessimists: ''Totally Past His Prime.''

The scenes between Montgomery and Stone in plainclothes would seem to be tangential to Moverman's movie, but they're very much its point. Only in uniform do these men make sense to themselves.

It’s network television drama, starring actors best known for their TV work and full of the petty gripes and mild worries of characters who really have nothing compelling to worry about.

The opportunity to see what Lollobrigida could do with a crooked smile or a roll of her eyes -- let alone a simple street dress -- is well worth the price of entry.

The movie is as modestly unpretentious as David O. Russell's "Spanking the Monkey."

It's a slow, moderately involving descent into the inevitable, with Pearce gamely trying to figure what's going on. Better him than me.

It has no pulse, no apparent breath.

The first half of The Heart of Me is just that sort of hoot. You know where it's all headed, and you can't wait for it to get there, as the cheap, cruel ironies pile up almost farcically.

Just bland behavioral propaganda, and Holmes makes such a guileless and robotic spokeswoman, it wouldn't be nuts to think the White House was just another mansion in Stepford.

"Wolverine" feels enslaved to its many masters - Marvel Comics, Hollywood, and the young men who devour their products - never sidestepping the déjà vu it inspires.

Just Like Heaven suggests that a post-coma Elizabeth might understand what life is truly all about. Of course, if being alive means having to live in this movie, maybe she was better off the way she was.

Never has this war been filmed with such ragged glory.

Comes on as both a rebuke to male vanity and a chic metaphor for midlife panic.

The genius of Zulawski is that he's dispensed with all the buildup and explanation and logic. How many horror-movie explanations make any sense? He just made an entire movie out of the scary parts, the way a different genius concocted only the muffin top and some pop music producers give you 10 minutes of beats and chorus. Possession climaxes for two whole hours. It's as if, with "The Shining," Stanley Kubrick found 25 variations on "here's Johnny" and "red rum." [17 Nov 2012, p.G5]

We're left with the painful reality that Paycheck might get Alfred Hitchcock, but it certainly doesn't know Philip K. Dick.

What an amazing presence Gorintin has. Never mind her hunched back and white hair, she's no crone. She makes Eka needy for happiness but susceptible to heartbreak. It's a great performance, full of both joy and the quiet, disappointing parts of being alive that come with knowing change is part of life.

Lawrence just leans on Grant and Bullock, who could have done a movie this breezy from the set of their next one -- where, presumably, Bullock will be playing Medea.

In a summer in which every blockbuster is zealous to be a video game, Rodriguez, with a wink, has produced his own.

Just as I was beginning to hope that she’d (Heigl) find a part that called for intelligence and sophistication and backbone, she plays another uptight naif.

It does manage to put a somewhat complex human face on the domestic troublemakers, if not their exploits.

Crassly funny passages.

All the gears, in fact, are shamelessly visible, yet they lock smoothly and resonantly into place. If Akeelah and the Bee is a generic, well-oiled commercial contraption, it is the first to credibly dramatize the plight of a truly gifted, poor black child.

Another "Exorcist" bastard -- one with a chick-flick pedigree.

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's film is a fascinating look at the intersection of commerce, celebrity, and controversy.

Medea works on von Trier's own imagistic terms. There are shots and sequences in this movie that feel unique.

You don't have to hand the folks behind Dragon Wars much (the acting, directing, costumes, editing, props, music, etc: They're all off). But when they decide to sic that giant snake and those prehistoric dino-birds on downtown Los Angeles, the movie turns shockingly watchable.

It's neither a neat little allegory about faith nor a transcendently entertaining one. I Am Legend is actually about the last man on earth played by one of the last real movie stars on earth. To be honest, Smith was all I was thinking about while I sat through I Am Legend.

To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.

[Cuaron]'s a visionary and crafty storyteller who rewards your patience, not with twists in the plot, though the movie has its share, but with pure feeling. Deploying wit, grace, and artistry, he's whisked a kid flick into adolescence.

Part sketch-comedy cartoon, part Cracked magazine spoof, installment four is the most scornfully made yet.

Showing up for Molière eager for the story of one of the theater's greatest comedy writers would be unwise. It's not that kind of party.

The movie's few false notes come from Lumet's script, which can be overly explanatory. Because Demme is opting for present-tense realism, the characters are forced to fill us in on who did what when to whom, why, and how.

In the end, it's hard to see a real reason for the movie's existence. We already have Muppets.

Woo delivers a vintage breakneck, break-arm, break-face 20-minute finale.

Boys Don't Cry's intensity sneaks up on you like a snake.

The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.

Nothing about this movie works, not the title (it used to be called "Clubland "), not Blethyn's attempt to inject comedy into her rickety stereotype of a character.

Of course, there's little else of interest about Pokemon beyond the consumption factor. Buy more.

Yellow Submarine takes a magical mystery tour through the history of art and spends a splendiferous good time splashing in the pop art of it all.

A righteous but wrongheaded thriller, chokes on its well-meant outrage and leaves a moth-eaten plot and handful of nonsense characters on its way to a dopey finish.

Doesn't have its heroine's conviction. It'd be better if it had.

It's a resplendently basic, lovey- dovey and inside-out "King Lear."

Tens of millions of dollars were spent to tell us what we should have known going in: that the makers of the movie you're slogging through will spare no expense to demonstrate how much they hate us. Do us a favor. Tell them the feeling is mutual.

A fascinating, sometimes profound curiosity.

While the picture isn't brilliant, it is, at its most entertaining, a kicky, surprisingly astute throwback to bygone Hollywood social comedies.

This is many lousy movies for the price of one.

Technically outstanding and the performances are strong.

There's gangsta rap with funnier insights into the opposite sex.

A crafty, sometimes craven, but hardly worshipful snapshot of an unlikely candidate for biggest rock act on earth.

In James Marsh's The King, the usually wonderful Gael Garcia Bernal is all wrong for the role of Elvis Valderez.

If even half of Olivier Dahan's robust film about Piaf's life is true -- and let's face it, much remains shrouded in myth and mystery -- it's a wonder she could get dressed in the morning, let alone forge a legendary singing career.

After a sensuous introductory act, The Reader descends into a series of dismaying contradictions regarding the moral toxins of the Holocaust - which still pollute postwar Germany.

A masterpiece.

Pedro is what a friend of mine calls a ''macho Iberico," which refers to a certain type of cocky, insensitive Spanish man.

As entertaining, charming and conceited as other Robert Redford joints, but it's also insufferably obvious.

Perry shelves his crowd-pleasing Madea character and aspires for the impossible mix of 1950s social melodrama, gospel-inflected public service announcement, soap opera, R&B video, girl-centric sitcom on the CW, and any episode of "Good Times," featuring Janet Jackson's oft-affronted Penny. Were Perry a visual director or a logical, patient screenwriter, that hybrid would count as a feat of singular ambition. Instead, it seems like the product of an abbreviated attention span.

What begins as unassumingly dull wanders into disarming chaos.

Even if some of the references are inscrutable, a lot of 8 Women is a riot. Here and there Ozon finds the key to a level of farce that would have amused Bunuel himself.

The film's central drama is not between the former secretary and the filmmaker. It's between McNamara and history.

Ultimately, Bingenheimer seems underwhelmed with himself. The people who know him say, in the movie, that he's a relic. Mayor of the Sunset Strip makes heartbreakingly clear what a glorious relic Bingenheimer is.

Implausibly dainty.

While Lane is her typical winning self, the film is mawkish. The more we're cajoled to root for Sarah Nolan, the divorced preschool teacher she plays, the more Must Love Dogs stops resembling a movie and starts feeling like a greeting card.

The fun of these movies is that Linney often seems too refined for such greasy junk, but there she is anyway, hamming it down as it were.

The movie's not bad enough to be world-ending, merely clumsy.

Frustratingly, Carnahan barely trusts his storytelling to keep our attention long enough to get through a scene without some grisly cutaway -- a gun to the head, the writhing wounded.

The appeal of Bedtime Stories belongs entirely to Sandler. As a comedian, he doesn't have to stoop to a kid's level. He's usually already there.

It's the tone of the movie's two sides - action and stillness, graphic violence and romantic melodrama - that don't cohere.

A jokey, junky potboiler.

The problem with the new movie is the same as with the previous one. Vardalos has this idea that she's a marm. And while it's true that she personifies her movies, I don't quite buy her librarian mode.

The 6-year-old I went with had the villain pegged in the first 15 minutes. Needless to say, she completely ruined the movie for me. Meddling kid.

Touching and brisk.

Too screwy to be really funny.

Sensationalism and doom are not on screen here; Jacquot offers a relatively peaceful moment in Sade's life.

A cult classic is born.

Proves acutely subtle. But its question of what we forgive art in the face of atrocity and immorality is one for the ages.

A milestone of eloquent understatement that captures the daily life of have-nots as few American movies have.

This is that rare art flick whose subject goes nuts because his work is not self-indulgent ENOUGH.

The first 30 or so minutes of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story condense the entire Hollywood biopic genre into a sweet chewable tablet. It's the Flintstones vitamin of spoofs.

Delivers chunks of ''Yellow Submarine'' and ''The Phantom Tollbooth'' -- a vividly timeless oddity suitable for many children and most stoners.

By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.

While the story couldn't be simpler and the filmmaking is crude, it forcefully addresses a reality.

By the time I saw poor Tim crushed, head to toe, by a falling sheet of plate glass, I was certain I hadn't signed up for anything this punishing.

A romantic comedy with film noir shadows.

The movie begins to run out of gas as it racks up a body count, but even the mad-scientist and I-created-a-monster clichés are contorted satisfyingly enough.

Just as exciting and socially vivid as Bielinsky's. Yet, somehow it's more stressful. The American characters practically sweat desperation.

Like a guy who finally gets what he wants, you just want to go home once it's over.

This mangy comedy only demonstrates that Lohan's star power is too bright for falling into mounds of mud, rooting around in cat litter for a contact lens, and getting punched out by a roughneck jailbird, as she does here.

Dogtooth is slightly less self-congratulatory than the average Dogme movie, a few of which belong to Lars von Trier. This feels, instead, more like an extreme summer at a Dadaist acting camp.

A pure Frankenstein flick -- ugly, profane, terror-inducing, clumsy, nasty, desperate, stupid, contemptible, horny and brought to life by schlocky, shoddy science and an electric wish to prove that its makers still matter.

Fails to match the philosophical and acting bounties of 1996's ''First Contact.'' Baird has seen to it that the Enterprise's being under fire still amounts to the crew rocking back and forth, gripping the railings as the ship's phasers are down to 4 percent.

The movie is as inconsequentially pleasant as its star, and far nicer than the title lets on, too.

An edgy, hypnotic entertainment that's like a Club Med production of "Lord of the Flies."

The film is so immersed in Roberts's life that it becomes easy to think that most of what the camera sees is also from her perspective. It's actually too seamless.

Harwood's screenplay obscures any sort of philosophical, religious, or historical considerations in favor of pulpy and faith-bruising sensationalism.

Rohmer's style saps the film of the drama that flows directly from the subject matter.

A flavorless family-friendly action-adventure that doubles as memory exploitation. It has nothing to do with either the Mickey Mouse broom sequence of the same name from 1940's "Fantasia'' or the 213-year-old Goethe poem that inspired it.

As an ad for the city's charms, Paris couldn't have asked for a more sweetly jaundiced love letter.

Oasis is that rare miraculous whirlwind romance that moves from attempted rape to reverence without kicking up a lot of dust.

The World Is Not Enough, like a 19th version of anything, is inanely self-parodic. So much so that one wonders why Austin Powers need have bothered in the first place.

Piercingly co-written and directed by Susanne Bier, the movie dramatizes one man's collapse and the other's surprising maturation.

Blame the unsexy subject matter if you want, but blame the uninspired casting first.

Brutally dumb canine comedy.

Norton is unapologetic and unflappable in his part. Slimy and vaguely nerdy, he's become the thinking man's thug, even if this character's Armani-wear is better tailored than his psychology.

It's more like a cartoon with a body count.

Before an hour has passed tedium overtakes Black Dynamite - one corny martial-arts sequence turns out to be plenty - and all the good jokes dry up.

Not horrifying enough.

A depressing piece of gun-crazy Hollywood scuzz that, with its gassy style and runaway immorality, makes a Tony Scott movie look like a Robert Bresson picture.

There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.

Awash in strangeness, a poem that details what it's like to be 13 at the end of a millennium.

This is one of those your-roots-are-showing family circuses where just about everybody seems like a clown.

Sings in the key of life.

Watching [Berry] run around in that getup I felt embarrassed, the way I do for people who put on makeup before climbing a StairMaster -- it's too much.

Phyllis and Harold is really about Phyllis and how discontent has a way of spilling, then spreading. Kleine never quite says so, but her mother’s life was a tragedy.

Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.

Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.

Meanders around Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the fuzzy benevolence of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.

The movie is only so-so, borrowing a little from the VH-1 school of popumentary but lacking the snazzy production values.

Watching the uncertain and disappointing new apartheid documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony'' is like going to the lecture of an impassioned but really disorganized professor.

This is less an affront to women than it is to comedy.

The movie's narrative can be taxingly ornate, but there's something beautiful about its metaphorical conflation of politics and glamour, the real and the fictional.

This is a corny tale, told with both generous helpings of deli-sliced cheese and a brief stretch of chilling tumultuousness.

At its least intolerable, the movie is a fatherhood freak-out.

This low-rent, nonsense cop business filled me with a nostalgic twinge. I didn't know I wanted the "Police Academy" series resurrected with a lot more hilarity, but I'm glad somebody did it.

A powerful film of suffering and sacrifice and desperation. But it's vacuous, banal, and, where its mix of sentiment and grisliness is concerned, rather despicable.

Amazingly, no one seems steeped in the salubrious self-explication of therapy. They just sound like very good storytellers.

Sayles seems to be trying, single-handedly, to correct centuries of First World self-centeredness in Third World contexts.

An infuriatingly indulgent piffle of adolescent wish-fulfillment.

More often than not the film casts an infectious, evocative spell.

Raimi, who shares script credit with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, strikes an exquisite balance between pop and woe, drama and whooshing adventure.

The movie's banal fantasies badly chafe any anthropological consideration of what a girl should do with her career. This isn't life. It's Lifetime.

The movie pits fortune against destiny and has an enigmatic old time splitting the difference.

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

The 70-something director puts us back in luxury's lap with Roman de Gare, which looks just like the high-roller ads you get in the first 40 pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair but feels vaguely more emotional. Lelouch wants to tie a Hermès scarf around our hearts.

A tidy soap opera. But it's a discreet, warmly made one, too. In a show of restraint, the intrigue never rises above mildly juicy.

Material this banal needs a madman of David Lynch proportions to incinerate it. Hackford leaves it intact, forcing us to regard a car he doesn't have the guts or skill to crash.

It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth.

Hot-blooded.

More vulgar than funny.

Despite the appearance of numerous free-speaking conservatives, the movie's partisanship leans nakedly to the left.

Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.

Historians might demand a little more history from Elizabeth: The Golden Age. But soap opera loyalists could hardly ask for more soap.

The biggest problem with this movie - not that it's mediocre, dull, or barely written (though it's guilty on all counts). It's that Carrey himself is miscast.

Most crucially, Barrymore encourages Page to just let herself go. The sight of her making her way up residential streets in a pair of Barbie roller skates or screaming “Marco’’ in a game of Marco Polo is simply joyful.

This gnarly and illogical little sitcom is bound to make any adult reconsider that next outing with the kids.

If anyone is capable of pulling off a deviled screwball with cheeky panache, it's de la Iglesia, who's one of the world's great nutty directors yet to find the American following he so richly deserves.

Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.

An overblown urban crime drama that should be a lot better than it is.

Imbued with infectious pluck. It's also a lucid, competent, titanically entertaining movie loaded with workable gags.

The laughs come in all the wrong places when they come at all.

The word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is here to speak the still-inconvenient truth. The filmmaking, however, is far more relentless than in that Oscar-winning Al Gore slide show.

The real problem with this movie isn't its trashy side - the "Death Wish" stuff is actually suspenseful. It's the creepy note of causal judgment that hangs over it.

The trouble with the movie is basically everything. It's long, sloppy, and -- to both the quantum-physics ignorant and informed -- steadily implausible, never exciting in either its skill or its ludicrousness.

I don’t think the movie is looking for answers; it isn’t asking any questions. But by its very nature, this is both an experiment in ontology (do babies know they’re babies?) and existentialism (are they thinking about who to be?).

What the cast members lack in sharpened skill they more than make up for in raw gusto and athletic scrappiness (most of the actors have logged a lot of soccer in their pasts). These guys give a sport that is virtually nameless in the movies a good name in this one.

In another universe - though it is difficult to imagine which one - Garry Shandling might be sexy.

The movie has none of the embarrassing absurdity and cheap effects that made last year's trip back to the 14th century, "Timeline,'' such a joke. We should be so lucky. Instead, we get a listless avenger drama.

Neither (Bullock/Reynolds) brings out anything good in the other, and watching them try hurts the eyes, the tummy, and the libido.

The movie is full of risible pontifications about the nature of art but falls well short of capturing the angst of creative frustration.

An absorbing piece of investigative journalism.

The score is the most effective thing about the film. Sometimes it's a suspicious, mischie-vous distraction from the reality that not enough of this makes sense.

The Banger Sisters so frequently features Hawn running around in revealing attire, tossing instructions at exhausted people that I'm inclined to think of it as a workout video.

Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.

Despite the Gallic source material, what we truly have in Unfaithful is a tasteful, adult-contemporary ''Fatal Attraction'' redux, right down to the mister's Soho address and the happy family tucked away in the New York hinterlands.

This is the kind of movie that mistakes heartbreak for being housebroken.

Duplicity so thoroughly equates sex and money that, in a manner apt for a recession, the audience is rewired when it's over. You don't care whether they love each other. You just want to see them paid.

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

Once it’s clear the movie won’t be deviating at all from its formula, Frank’s journey gets tedious.

A deplorable piece of cynicism whose only point of interest is Gael Garcia Bernal's accent

Broadway-sized performances.

The film has a habit of cutting away from interviews for Maher's commentary during the drive to the next location. You can see him trying to work the car for a laugh.

Engrossing, smartly made documentary.

Directed by F. Gary Gray and written by Christian Gudegast and Paul T. Scheuring, the movie isn't even worthy of former NFL linebacker turned straight-to-video action figure Brian Bosworth.

Dreary-looking and painfully slow, but it's not terrible.

Not the sanctioned wet T-shirt contest you might be anticipating. The Pacific is the hottest body here. And director John Stockwell handles the frivolous material with an integrity that I have to admit I found disappointing. The movie isn't nearly dumb enough to be much beach fun.

This present-day Paris of Le Divorce is smartly shot and costumed, and the whole affair is breezy and uncharacteristically insouciant, given the reserved nature of the folks responsible for it.

This film has provocations to spare; it just hasn't been made provocatively. It's a mess, actually.

Their movie is watchable - never more gratuitously so than when Alba is filmed showering and slipping into a tank top. But we've been here before, no?

Corny. But it's corny in a way that a Hollywood movie about a boy who just wants to go home ought to be corny. Plus when it's done with this much care, corny works for me.

Breezy humor and a dazzling heist keep 'Ocean' franchise in the money.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

It's an exercise in 1970s mood. But all the film does is conjure, channel, and allude, until there's really no movie of Green's own for an audience to grab onto.

A riveting and sobering way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

The movie brings to mind the more polite parts of "Wedding Crashers." Failure to Launch, while totally exuberant and appealingly made, is not nearly as randy.

Slow but rarely tedious.

Because the characters in the movie have only stock obsessions and vague personal histories, there's no reason to be interested in them.

Most of the expert insights contained in this concise documentary are already available in the door-stopping exposes of other experts, a fact that lends the proceedings a nagging redundancy.

Who's it for? How do you put this message across without it seeming medicinal? Sure, MTV is among the movie's producers, but what 11th grader wants to spend a Friday night being hit with such a blunt instrument?

As the movie is in step with Connelly's aching heroine and not trying to scare our socks off, Dark Water is of a piece with Salles's sensitive filmmaking. Obviously, from a genre standpoint, that presents a tremendous problem. Nobody goes to a horror movie for a good cry.

An earnest, alarmist new docu-plea for nuclear disarmament, concludes with an orgy of such destruction. Mushroom clouds. Infernal white light. Obliterating energy blasts. It's all here, and mostly beyond the pale.

It looks great and the dancing is the kind of stuff that would upstage the average pop star.

The movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the cliches of the genre take over.

The movie is as grim and grave as the comic book. But it lacks atmosphere. It's often illogical and drubs you numb with its single dimension: noisy retribution.

Even if the story is hackneyed, it's hackneyed in a warm and universal way.

It's as if a version of Oliver Stone's movie has been frozen in some fraternity house beer cooler since 1987 and thawed for the age of plasma screen TVs.

Even by the lowest standards, this is a frightless, cynically made movie.

Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use.

The only chills to be found are courtesy of your theater's central air, and the suspense will come from the wait to see which disappointed kid in a hockey mask will be the first to slash the screen.

The film quickly becomes one of the most powerful, carefully researched investigations of the moral-legal side effects of current American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's terrifying in a way that sneaks up on you.

Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.

This is a smart piece of revisionist fluff that dares to question what happens after the royal honeymoon is over.

It takes a while for the movie to build to its wicked possibilities and only a few scenes to squander them.

Painfully unfunny.

In its seriousness, Syriana has an absorbing, ominous roundness that plays even better with a second viewing.

Where a lesser movie from a lesser director might sink into its own ponderousness, Sokurov uses the ambiguity of the father and son's relationship to craft a sort of erotic puzzle.

At its best when it's hovering around the muted dysfunction between a father and a son, who never understood each other to begin with.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life.