Never thrills on an emotional level the way the best of sports films – a "Hoosiers," say – can, but it's a satisfying entertainment nonetheless.

Its characterizations are as bland as sand.

Serenity evinces the kind of swashbuckling bonhomie that made so many of us fall in love with the original "Star Wars" films, a love that was mightily tested by George Lucas' humorless prequels.

If you're not already smitten with all things Gaiman, you may well find yourself, like Helena, a stranger in a strange land.

It's thanks to Akhtar's standout performance that The War Within is as electrifying as it is.

An additional treat is seeing Hollywood good guy Henry Fonda playing one of the nastiest curs in the West. Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the great films in cinema history. (8/30/2000 Review)

As a filmmaker, Meredith has a strong, if derivative, visual sense, although his screenplay is packed with too many cliches and familiar riffs.

It's a knowing, dare I say sweet, little film that takes pains to let the characters speak for themselves, never rallying behind an implicit religious message, which may be the best message of all.

A History of Violence poses the right question: Are those who don't study history doomed to repeat it?

Flightplan should have remained grounded for repairs.

Despite a marketing campaign that appears bound and determined to make its subject look as grindingly dull as possible, Roll Bounce triumphs on almost all counts.

Daltry Calhoun's saving grace comes in the form of a snappy compilation soundtrack that spans from Johnny Cash to Serge Gainsbourg, a feat of all-inclusiveness that renders the film a moot point at best.

The movie's third act goes astray as the storyline shifts to Dorian's dating problems, which seem an overextended tangent to his coming-out story. Still, the film has a lot of playful dialogue and pixillated montages.

As in "The Pianist," Polanski is content to allow the film's narrative to evoke the emotions he wishes his audience to experience.

This is a bad movie, but one that awakens your senses every so often with flashes of originality and abundant self-belief.

Has a haunting afterglow, one that neither satisfies nor illuminates, but at least keeps the flame alive.

Loses something in its translation to celluloid.

Despite an ambitious script from Wadlow and Beau Bauman, it's extremely difficult to care, seeing as how these tropes have already been recycled enough to make Greenpeace proud.

There's a manipulative streak to the proceedings, and you'd have to be stone cold dead not to grasp the inevitable outcome long before the third act, but it's a professionally handled sort of emotional manipulation common to its genre, dating back to "Blithe Spirit" and, somewhat less memorably, "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."

The movie is a strange amalgam of compelling visuals and fascinating vocational details forged with deep moral ambivalence and often hollow didacticism.

The dead have more fun than the living, again, in Tim Burton’s new stop-motion animated feature, a gift to gothlings everywhere and as exquisitely crafted as one of Federico’s post-mortem still lifes on "Six Feet Under," and just as melodramatically melancholic.

It's the kind of movie that lives and dies by a viewer's own idiosyncrasies.

Garçon Stupide is interesting enough to merit an audience broader than its intended niche, though it isn't perfect.

Like the best UK drawing room dilemmas, Separate Lies is more tart than bitter, with Fellowes, the Cambridge-educated son of a diplomat, acquitting himself grandly of cinematic boorishness.

Less a movie than a longform, live-action Celebrity Death Match between its leads, this wheezing comedy may herald the death knell of the interracial buddy-cop farce.

Thoroughly predictable from start to finish.

Derrickson's staid direction, coupled with Wilkinson’s sad-sack priest and a general air of dreariness make for a courtroom thriller that’s somewhat less apocalyptic than the "L.A. Law" episode involving the death of Benny's mom.

Its ultimate message is as French as they come: The family that lays together, stays together. What the hell, it's more fun than a riot.

Lodge Kerrigan is one of the great, though largely unheralded, filmmakers of our time, and with Keane, his third feature, he finally shows himself to be in full command of his uncompromising talent.

At its best when it goes down to the pub and captures, quite flawlessly, the grotty intoxication of these mad, bad, dangerous-to-know Hammers fans hoisting incalculable pints.

Presents itself as a musical essay, but would certainly fall more under the category of a love letter. And ultimately, what would you rather experience anyway?

The only glimmer of actual characterization in the entire film comes – all too briefly – from Frank's old boss Inspector Tarconi (Berléand).

A Sound of Thunder is positively awash in bad hairpieces, leading one to believe that global warming is going to be the least of our problems.

Its star, who injected such life into the surprisingly unformulaic "Drumline," is adrift in a sea of cop-movie clichés, and Siega's party-to-go direction hews more closely to his music-video beginnings than to his critically noted "Pretty Persuasion."

Substantive and imaginatively filmed but is not an off-putting art movie; rather, it's the kind of solid but accessible filmmaking that prevailed in Hollywood's golden age.

Although Gilliam's bright color palette and weird camera angles lift the film, it has an overall sense of darkness, as if shot among people who have yet to see the Age of Enlightenment.

Bonuses all around, but a double one for Perabo, the only cast member to survive this dull-as-dirt Cave with her actorly integrity intact.

Some things are best left undiscovered.

The film never recovers its initial fizzy-pop charms, owing largely to pacing that turns positively molasses-slow in the second act.

The movie is tightly wound and expertly unraveled, resulting in a thriller that you'll remember – unlike the hitman Ledda.

Isn't quite a home run: The visually flat film leans on a pop culture crutch that probably won't age very well, and the finale – while terrifically funny – feels piped in from another, far sillier movie.

Red Eye's no classic, but with its smart, twisty little script and those two killer performances, it is a helluva lot of fun.

The movie makes use of every avian pun possible, a pattern that becomes quickly monotonous and predictable, if not contagious.

Hitchcock and Almodóvar this film isn't, but it's a worthwhile and fairly amusing effort.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance's byzantine plot appears fairly straightforward at first, but slowly, deliberately moves into uncharted waters with the fluid grace of a tiger shark bumping up against a potential meal.

Fails to kick start anything other than the urge to giggle.

True, the melodrama on display here can't compare to the likes of Larry, Moe, Curly, and the cannibals, but then this goofily charming quartet of Western outsiders is far more real than reel.

A top-notch cast was gathered and then wasted in this atmospheric but prosaic hoodoo spooker.

Not content to merely be lowbrow and stupid – there's room in the world for lowbrow and stupid mass entertainment – the film is pushy and might actually cause chafing.

This is the kind of scrappy Seventies-throwback B-movie that fits the bill when you desperately need to see regular-seeming, occasionally inept people rise up against our corrupt criminal oppressors and cudgel them with pool cues and bits of blasted-off brick.

Like the infamous Japanese water tortures of WWII, Dahl’s film is a steadily mounting series of pesky nonevents paced with all the frenetic, action-packed verve of a wounded lawn sprinkler.

The delectably atmospheric Asylum remains gothic to its morally maggoty core.

A truly provocative essay.

The film's ideas are provocative, yet vague and unfully formed. It's much like Pulse itself, which is a bit too long, despite several great sequences.

One of the most emotionally honest movies about drug addiction ever made.

How can a movie narrated by Junior Brown and backed with wall-to-wall southern rock – a movie that at one point features co-stars Nelson and Carter tied together, surely a first in celluloid history – be so uneventful? Why, it's lazier than Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane's good-for-nothing hound dog, Flash.

Broken Flowers is as elliptical as the haunting jazz music by Mulatu Astatke that permeates the soundtrack.

A riot of sight and sound that, however baffling, has an irresistible, elemental pull.

The film isn't going to catapult Butcher to international stardom, but he holds his own in it and helps to sell its curious logic.

Zips along at an urgent pace, both tantalizing and repulsing as it goes.

It's a Big Idea movie that comes out only half-baked.

The sum is something deeply profound: about awkwardness, culture clash, failed connections, and – ultimately – the strength that comes from surviving a trial by fire.

Sauper's delicately horrific documentary is a short, sharp slap in the face of the developed world, and a long overdue one at that.

No film that requires a woman to jump in water and dogpaddle toward a man has the "sisterhood's" best interests at heart.

It's inoffensive and sports a positive "be yourself" message that’s obvious enough to be seen from space without benefit of hero-vision, but really, there's very little that's super about it.

Plays like a slapdash assemblage of the greatest hits of conspiracy-minded action cinema.

At the very least, The Aristocrats provides a survey of some of the best comic minds in the business.

It recommends itself best to viewers who can appreciate its novelty and roll with the risks it takes.

Cute and toothless as a kitten, Seamstress doesn't inspire the same kind of fervent devotion its principals feel when confronted with art, but it does make a pleasant enough diversion.

The year's most viciously entertaining psycho-road-movie-revenge-'n'-wreckage-romance.

It's a winning formula, and when done right like it is here, it transcends the clichés and moves audiences.

If you like "Maxim," you will love The Island. It is glossy. It is expensive. It has lots of slick ads for Aquafina and Cadillac.

While Linklater's version has its own unique pacing, mounting up more like a series of innings than a series of acts (even if you think you know how it ends, that bottom-of-the-ninth screwball still beans you silly), it lacks the screwball-to-the-noggin punch of the original.

It works best as a spank-it movie you don’t have to feel guilty about and that you can dance to. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Sticking it to the man, German-style.

It's unclear if Van Sant intends to inspire guilt; here, as elsewhere, he is exasperatingly abstruse. And in this striving to not say too much, he ends up not saying much of anything at all.

It doesn't always succeed, and sometimes it has the egocentric obviousness of a particularly clever, grad-student thesis film, but at least Harrison is game enough to mess with your head in the first place.

Depp’s performance aside, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is pure magic, swimming as it is in a black-treacle riptide of astonishing Oompa Loompa production numbers, an eerie patina of CGI airbrushing (Wonka himself looks downright pasteurized), and some almost too-clever in-jokes, and at least two references to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film "The Fly."

A stiff drink or maybe some pharmaceutical assistance might have made me overlook the film's sour tone, or the unremarkableness of its direction.

Happy Endings is unabashedly sentimental (cheekily couched in a black-comic guise), with Roos acting as a sort of benevolent god over his characters.

Co-directors Rubin and Shapiro deliver the rare documentary that totally entertains, informs, and inspires.

The overall emotion the film generates is one of moist, enervated ennui. Who cares if the apartment is haunted when the best the ghost can do is get things a bit damp and run laps on the floor above?

After this mediocrity, no one's even going to remember Roger Corman's godawful bargain-basement 1994 version. Which, on second thought, had a lot more heart that this one.

Provides a panorama without insight.

A pure distillation of the great director's ongoing themes of the frailty of the human psyche and mankind's willful inability to accept the inevitable, whatever that may be.

Like its protagonist, Cordero's film is a nimble thing, darting from hot-button topic to prison-cell metaphysics in the blink of a blind eye, but it never quite achieves the level of journalistic condemnation it so clearly seeks.

Director Carr, who helmed the similarly predictable "Daddy Day Care," keeps things moving, both on and off the court, with the sort of light, sweet humor you're not likely to find in too many other summer movies.

The problem with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, as it was with "Fingers," is that the gravity of the character’s psychological divide is clear after the first half hour, and both films add little in the next hour to deepen our – or the characters’ – understanding or entanglement.

As always, there's the combustible band of mismatched survivors.

It's a magnificent film – thoughtful but not distant, aesthetically and technically sophisticated but staged with restraint and delicacy.

Certainly one of the most lovingly crafted, end-of-the-world, cinematic feasts ever made, a spectacle of destruction and survival not even C.B DeMille could have envisioned.

This isn’t Nicole Kidman’s first dalliance with witchcraft, and it is one of Bewitched’s unfortunate achievements that it actually makes one pine for Kidman’s 1998 dud, "Practical Magic." That witch at least had some sass; this cardigan-clad witch, alas, is an altogether more benign being, and by "benign" I mean boring.

Hopper, unsurprisingly, devours scenery like he's already dead and loving it, but for once his penchant for overacting is overshadowed by the real stars of Romero's world: They're dead, they're all messed up, but it's great to finally have them back in town.

With a running time of only 84 minutes, Rize frequently feels padded. However, there’s no denying the fascination of watching these bodies in motion, and perhaps the ascendency of a new, American-born art form.

While Yes defies film's conventions in many, many ways, it's still that same old story, the fight for love and glory.

The actor Scott Caan makes a strong debut as a writer-director in this atmospheric character study in which he also co-stars.

The result, although more sexually provocative, is not nearly as gratifying as was his (Ziad Doueiri) breakthrough film.

Becomes something of a rainswept Korean koan on both the nobility and futility of persistence in the face of obviously insurmountable odds.