With more than a passing nod to the far classier "Panic Room," this derivative seat-squirmer has a few good moments in spite of Johnny Klimick’s annoying score, its energy powered by the raw determination of its Mother Courage.

As a filmed drama, Mary Shelley is sorely in need of a jolt of electricity similar to the one that reanimated Frankenstein’s monster in the author’s novel.

A mildly engaging and roughly historical action picture.

The hit-or-miss nature of the gags makes NBT too uneven to recommend, but it's a great calling-card movie for guys who want to become professional comedy writers.

What it needs is a little more dirtying down. What it needs, in short, is less New York, and more Alabama.

A suitably rigorous sports movie. On the other hand, at no time does it break out of the "sports movie" mold.

Maltese writer/director Buhagiar emphasizes the character’s transformative path rather than her pitiable starting point, and with the help of some suspension of disbelief and a symbolic pigeon (no, not a Maltese falcon) Carmen comes into her own.

As a vehicle for Moore's acting abilities (and Mortensen's, for that matter), G.I. Jane is terrific. But as the end-of-summer blockbuster it's doubtless intended to be, it's pretty much a washout.

Lynch, who penned the screenplay with novelist Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart), seems to be attempting to capture not just a sense of place and time (it never works -- Lost Highway is wholly, irrevocably, out of place and without any linear time or time line to speak of), but also a sense of madness.

Forster should be commended for attempting something as daunting as the overreaching Stay, which despite all of its muddled logic and porous reality – or perhaps because of it – forces you to think, a genuine rarity these days.

Previously responsible for The Hitcher, a disturbingly cold-blooded exercise but still a powerful cinematic vehicle, Harmon still doesn't show enough humanity to be considered anything more than a stylish director. But he is a damned stylish one, who keeps the film interesting and the action sequences effective. If you don't expect much (and the developer vs. land owner plot is ridiculous) you may be surprised at what's here.

It's a mess, but it's Wenders' mess, and that means that there are any number of salvageable parts to the whole.

Stewart (per usual) is the best thing about the film.

The obvious thing is to say that Keep the River on Your Right has unfortunately bitten off more than it can chew -- but not more than we can digest.

An efficient, if overly mechanized, delivery system of thrills 'n' chills.

The pleasure of watching two alpha males -– Al Pacino and Colin Farrell -– circling each other mano a mano substantially beefs up this otherwise routine spy thriller.

Bigelow stages the film's action sequences with a brutal efficiency (they almost redeem the movie), but she can't keep the increasingly silly script in check.

Jorgen Persson's camerawork is spectacular, illuminating the cobalt blue of the frozen wastes with an almost regal air. As a travelogue, August's film works wonders; as a narrative, it's just not all there.

Despite the movie’s lack of anything resembling a narrative center, Testosterone isn't an entire waste of film stock – Sutcliffe, Sabato Jr., and especially the great Braga all act up a storm.

Just enough laughs to keep you from feeling blatantly shortchanged.

Like "Bring It On," Stick It is so much better than most of its insipid teen-movie peers yet like her earlier movie, Bendinger's new one is also not all it might be.

It goes down easy, with likable performances and a laudable emphasis on love and compassion.

The Hunger is typically Tony Scott -- more style than substance, and perhaps simply an excuse to get Denueve and Susan Sarandon, Miriam's post-Bowie love, in bed together.

A bittersweet experience. It leaves you asking for more, even knowing that nothing more is forthcoming.

It's a noble effort, but aficionados and the mildly interested are recommended to seek out VH-1's excellent Studio 54 documentary in lieu of this shallow morality play.

Predictable, affable, and completely guileless, the only part of Made in Italy that distinguishes it as having been made now, rather than any other random point in the last 30 years, is how grizzled Neeson's beard has become. The hapless English romantic lead bumbles on.

Chon’s ambitions are astonishing, but his bloated script needed an edit or two. It’s a film written with big moments for big performances in mind, which is too painfully obvious as the film treads on.

There’s some gorgeous animation and impeccable camerawork on display here. But as George Lucas’ 2015 fiasco "Strange Magic" demonstrated, beautifully executed visuals will get you only so far. There’s no emotional core to Abominable, which mostly proceeds at a glacial pace as the travelers’ journey across China.

Despite the film's abundant gory effects, its best technical achievement may be its English subtitles, which move about the screen for better visual and emotional impact, and sometimes dissolve into poofs of blood or other colored effects.

Everybody’s sleepwalking here. Vincent D'Onofrio is fantastic with Vaughn in a small part as his brother, but it's as if he’s running in during a break from "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

As a period mystery, however, it's as muddy and swirling as the actual record of that fateful, deadly weekend cruise.

Dahl, who really does know what he's doing when it comes to investing a scene with both heebies and jeebies, is a notch or two above most.

Lottery Ticket is ultimately no "Friday," but that 15-year-old film's communal vibe is clearly the model Lottery Ticket is chasing.

Renoir is great at capturing some of the details of daily life within this unique household and conveying an Impressionist atmosphere on film, but as far as telling us a story, the film is a washout.

Rarely has a movie been more urgently needed than Detroit, yet after delivering on its promise for nearly the entire first half, Detroit goes down in flames before it’s over.

Looks like a million bucks (or rather, a million bucks gone to compost), but at its dark heart it's a tedious, bewildering affair, lovely to look at but with all the substance of a dissipating dream.

Provides a panorama without insight.

These digressions aren’t enough to build anything like a real conversation about the Austin-made classic. There needs to be something more.

Fact is, good looks will go a long way in masking mediocrity, and Hollywood Homicide capitalizes on that fact doubly so: Co-writer/director Ron Shelton’s latest boasts two pretty faces, and all across the country, mothers and daughters sigh alike.

Honeymoon in Vegas is what every stupid comedy should be to justify the price of admission, sadly it is no more than that.

Gratuitous in every sense of the word, this second remake of 1978's Joe Dante-directed/Roger Corman-produced "Jaws" knockoff is ridiculous summertime drive-in fun.

Lucas and Moore aren’t savvy enough, or brave enough, to truly plumb the gallows humor embedded in their premise.

Showalter’s film never finds the right tone, leaving its audience with pleasantness in favor of sharp wit.

However, despite having all the tried-and-true elements set firmly in place, Ah-nold's latest doesn't quite measure up to the action star's finest work, even if it should prove to be a mildly pleasing diversion for fans.

As played with startlingly veracity by Jonas Dassler, there's nothing romantic about him: a deformed nose, shuffling gait, slack-jawed and with a misaligned eye, he looks exactly like the man responsible for the deaths of at least four women in 1970s Hamburg.

But the film overall is a jumble, a stitched-together bunch of scenes that, while often funny, don't hang together very well, you know, like a TV Christmas special or a middling episode of SNL. Free-form sketch comedy can work in a vehicle like Wayne's World, but it leaves a story like So I Married... so, so marred.

For a film focusing on such a rich emotional tapestry, Kundun is strangely lacking in its emotional core.

The film is by no means a disaster. Possession is prettily performed, prettily put-together. Yet, for a story set so firmly in the center of a fire, LaBute and his players have suited themselves in some mighty flame-retardant threads.

Whatever the reason for its disappointments, Mission: Impossible is a mission gone awry, prompting you to hope that reruns of its television incarnation will pop up on cable soon.

The laughs and pacing of Fun Mom Dinner may be uneven, but days later I’m still smiling at the thought of the dispensary’s recommended strain: the Ruth Bader Ganja, which “gets you supremely high.” It’s the little moments that matter here.

The love match is cringing; as a rom-com’s raison d’etre, their limp connection pretty much sinks the thing. But when the script settles down and stops feeling quite so much like an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thesis project, it has its bouncy moments.

If nothing else, 6 Years is a testament to the cohesion of the Austin filmmaking community. You can barely round a corner without seeing a familiar face or production credit.

By turns entertaining, incomprehensible, goofy, and even on occasion unnerving.

Yet even though Forever After is not as fresh-seeming as its predecessors, it provides passable entertainment, especially for the kids who won’t be familiar with the George Bailey storyline retread – or midlife crises, for that matter.

The film is one of the more adult offerings out there in a spring movie season peppered with martial arts and superheroes. It may be just what you're looking for.

The movie has a big heart, ambitious references, and moments that make it an entertaining watch, but it can curdle thanks to the constraints of the superhero genre.

Phillips and co-writer Scot Armstrong waste too much time on a silly love-interest subplot for Wilson; that time is much better served by the frat-boy idiocies, like Frank beer-bonging himself into streaking.

It is really gory, for the record -– though it's too silly and insufficiently twisted to slake the appetite of the hardcore gorehound, it's not something to take a kid to.

On a more basic level, I simply found it so hard to penetrate the two main characters' cauterized psyches that, in the end, I hardly gave a damn what happened to them.

Unfortunately, the film is as bloodless as its purported crime. In the Name of My Daughter is presented dispassionately, and the performances neither intrigue nor captivate.

The catch is, once you get past the stunning special effects and the mind-numbing stuntwork, there's not all that much there.

An aquatic, animated, all-ages romp full of familiar lessons and a few too many peppy pop songs that plays things so down-the-middle as to become perfectly forgettable.

Who, exactly, is stalking whom, and for what reason? I'm still not entirely sure, but Resnais' funky, frothy bonbon of a film is nevertheless a breathtaking sight to see.

All this and not a glimmer of General Franco makes for a surreal – and sporadically inspired – comedy of Spanish mores back when naughty was nice.

Above all, there's Nolte, who hovers over the whole production like some sapient force of nature.

Unfortunately, Sleepwalking isn’t content being a character study of damaged adult siblings (if it were, it would have made a nice companion piece to Kenneth Lonergan’s "You Can Count on Me," which is a far less sobering, but far more effective, movie).

Welcome to Me isn’t laughing with Alice, but at her, in what seems like a harsh reaction to mental illness.

Yes, this is the stuff of fiction, where individuals can drift in and out of another's life and make extraordinary, unbelievable things happen.

Fails in a pretty spectacular manner but, to its everlasting credit, it goes down swinging and sometimes even connecting.

In The Grinch power rankings, this one trails Theodor Geisel’s original 1957 storybook and Chuck Jones’ cheeky 1966 TV special by a long mile.

Severance is a British horror-comedy that, from the get-go, has two distracting strikes against it.

Day Watch falls prey to the curse of most sequels in which "more" is often a thin concept stretched beyond its limits and misconstrued to mean "bigger and better."

It runs the stopwatch on a chase sequence to a comical extreme and takes way, way too long to take its final bow, in the process burning off any residual goodwill.

Silly, predictable, and, dare I say it, oddly endearing, Hackers is the first film I've seen in a long while that annoyed me so much I actually enjoyed it.

Does the world need another movie about a bunch of miniature, blue-skinned humanoids with bulbous noses and perky bobtails; gnomelike creatures who wear floppy caps, live in mushrooms, and use the word “smurf” in every other sentence? Someone apparently thinks so.

White Christmas endures – despite not being a very good movie.

Best of all, is this knock-out, though overused, optical effect of a bullet hurtling and whizzing through space toward its target. Sniper is sure to appeal to armchair assassins and fantasy war-gamers. Beyond that audience, Peruvian director Llosa's American debut will appeal to anyone interested in well-made and well-acted pictures that compensate with skill for what they may lack in inspiration.

One thing Siegel got absolutely right in this film is the casting.

With The Ice Storm, Lee seems to have emphasized the details of cultural accuracy over the rudiments of telling a gripping drama.

Infinitely more entertaining than anything the WWE has done recently, this sophomore outing from "Napoleon Dynamite" director Hess is full of cheesy goodness, but it's Velveeta.

A go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator grab bag of raunchy sex gags and freakish outbursts. The cool thing is that it works.

Apted manages to say a lot by cutting between the squalor of life on the reservation to the magnificence of the land around it. Unfortunately, when the characters speak for themselves, they are often forced to deliver lines that are unspeakable. There is an element of misty romanticism about Native Americans that Apted just doesn't manage to pull off. His yarn, however, is a good one even if it could be told a little better.

The film is never less than absorbing to watch. However, in the end, I think Catfish lives up to its namesake's reputation as a bottom-feeder.

Morning Glory had the capacity to be a smarter, tarter picture, though it's not bad as is: well-acted and ingratiating, with at least one howlingly funny sequence.

The Cable Guy is being marketed as a dark comedy, which I suppose it is, to some extent. Honestly, though, it's just not dark enough.

What's translated to film feels like a rough draft, with bullet points at beginning and end, demarcating Lola lost, Lola found. And in the middle? A vast, vague maw.

At its best when making the political personal, the film’s exposure of a husband’s enduring mystery about his wife’s motivations has a universal appeal.

Scorsese’s outsized presence in the documentary – its very framework built around his relationship to Powell and Pressburger – ends up jamming an immovable object between viewer and subject.

A slick, sexy little package with fast cars, big explosions, dazzling locations in the south of France, a trip-hop score, and about as much plot to fill a thimble.

Turner, though as dewy-eyed as Doris Day, proves again that she is a comedienne to reckon with, and Quaid's playboy-tamed-only-by-domestic-bliss nonchalance is nearly as well played. Their repartee, while not up to the standards of Nick and Nora, is fast and funny and good-natured. In fact, this whole movie is so good-natured, I think I might have enjoyed a Shasta Black Cherry soda pop with my popcorn. Well, maybe some berry-flavored sparkling water…

An almost sweet sensibility emerges by the end of Bad Grandpa. Young Jackson Nicholl is a real find: The kid can really hold his own against Knoxville’s master pranker.

Once the rodeo's over, where do the sweethearts go? Beesley, thankfully, doesn't end the film with the end of the rodeo, but there's a potentially more interesting follow-up doc ghosting right behind this one.

The movie remains patchy as it continues to jump somewhat arbitrarily from day to day without fully realizing its subject matter. The one dependable constant in all of this is Christo himself. Smiling ecstatically one minute, despondently hangdog the next, he exhibits a genius lunacy on par with his life’s work.

But while Argylle’s stunt-filled antics are suitably loaded with those Vaughnian action sequences, it’s also bloated by more plot twists and reveals than a breezy action comedy can or should be forced to endure.

If Tuff Turf had used a little more of Downey's relaxed intelligence and amiability, and a little less teenage angst and sense of violence as retribution, it might have been tough stuff. As it is, it's a lightweight in a genre populated with featherweights.

An occasionally charming mix of campy fun and dodgy computer-generated effects.

This movie is much like its brethren: pretty, with strong leads -- the most fun is watching Sarandon match her heavy-lidded orbs against Jones' demon stare -- great supporting work (especially from the sorrowful Parker and the regal Davis), and a tense chase or two from director Schumacher.

It feels mechanical, more conceptual than realized, like a senior project by a particularly ambitious student who's recently read "West of Everything" – and who's lucked into working with a world-class actor.