A surprisingly engaging character-driven picture: not quite Ingmar Bergman, of course, but not Michael Bay either.

They have some fun playacting at class warriors on the lam – and Seyfriend, it must be said, rocks a killer bob – but it's all just big-budget dress-up in a futurescape that reeks of phoniness.

Green and screenwriter Peter Straughan never completely go as far as they might have, satirically speaking.

Despite its shortcomings, Redacted is nevertheless a film brimming with spontaneity and fury, and in a season of often-ambiguous films about the war in Iraq, there is a lot to be said for this kind of combustible energy.

The actors do a fine, if unsoulful, job, but the real problem with A Love Divided is its unwillingness to unromanticize its heroes.

It's the opposite of "The Opposite of Sex," a meditation on multiple truths, and the lies that sometimes lie in between.

A simply flat-out fun film.

Makes for a playfully enthralling hour and a half.

Jackson does it all in this movie: writes, directs, stars, produces, and designs the makeup.

Rapid Response is a celebration of behind-the-scenes heroes, and their dedication to medicine and science as a way to save lives. Its microfocus, anecdotal structure, and reliance on archive footage and talking heads, undoubtedly makes this one for the true devotees of motorsports, but they'll not want to miss it.

It's far from unenjoyable, but the dank shroud of the overfamiliar lies heavy over all, kind of like watching an Elvis concert circa 1976.

White House Down is amply endowed with enough tension, humor, and calamitous action to ensure it a solid berth in the summer box-office sweepstakes. Channing Tatum comes into his own as a leading man in this picture, proving himself as a beefy yet agile action star and not just the pure beefcake of "Magic Mike."

Suffice to realize that Reeves’ opening salvo is an ambitious and heady mix of the glorious (if overtold) past, the tense present, and the imperfectly perfect realm of Chen’s fighter, his conscience, and blow upon blow upon blow. The concoction works, despite – or maybe because of – its unjaded, fantastical familiarity

The story is good, but the execution favors the safe over the challenging. Personally, I'd rather just read the Bible.

Anyone just expecting a cutesy animal romp may be sorely disappointed, but that’s because this isn’t about the quietly expansive inner life of Juan Salvador.

Sandler has become one of our primary symbols of the modern rage-repressed American male. Let’s hope that one day he will learn to channel that rage to greater effect.

But while every expertly choreographed Muy Thai bout delivers, the film suffers from haphazard editing. Entire sequences of explanation are missing, as if Pinkaew made a 2 1/2 hour martial-arts film and then cut everything but the fighting scenes.

What really drags it down is the wafer-thin script by Carol Chrest, which neither Sivertson nor a determined if sometimes overblown Ricci can pull past its messy metaphor and undeserved twists.

It takes so long to get going and fails to generate the necessary suspense to keep viewers engaged, that the horrific final act is too little, too late, while at the same time nearly being much too much.

It’s a pity party to which you’d like to RSVP an unequivocal “no.”

The script, partly written by an uncredited Terry George ("Some Mother's Son," "In the Name of the Father") strains mightily for insight but never quite breaks through.

More than acting, the real culprit in Malice is the script by Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men) and Scott Frank (Dead Again) which favors florid dramatics over plausible theatrics.

All in all, though, this Brazilian import is a small curiosity, intriguing more for its failures than its accomplishments.

The cast is an impossibly beautiful bunch of actors who could hold your attention even if they spoke nothing but gibberish, which sometimes is the case in the pillow-talk dialogue provided by director/screenwriter Chick.

It's an engaging recollection that's more sweet than bittersweet, tempered by an eagerness to please that pulls us into its remembrances of things past.

Scorpion fails to connect on anything but the most basic comic level. Despite Allen's usual excellent direction, it all plays like a TV-movie version of something else, Allen-lite.

Sexy, sophisticated comedy that only occasionally falls short of its admirable ambition: that is, to be a fun, fizzy, razzle-dazzle thing. Straight to the moon, indeed.

His (Law's) is the standout performance, probably because it's quiet and reflective and nuanced amidst the flurries of relationship talk.

Both Glenn Close and Mila Kunis are very talented actors, but Four Good Days gives them absolutely nothing interesting to say or do.

The story is as humorous and raunchy as a good blues refrain, and the way Lazarus and Rae react to each other almost resembles the classic call-and-response structure of the blues.

Equal parts French sex farce, Mai-Decembre romance, middle-aged white male fantasy, and wannabe Hitchcockian intrigue, Fontaine's film can be a chore to sit through, but not for any of the obvious reasons.

Will likely warm the cockles of your heart, even though it's hardly the stuff of great romance.

If Love Me wants us to consider the inner life of inanimate objects, that message gets muddled when we’re mostly looking at these two very alive actors.

Blackhat plays a surprisingly flat and ever-flatter cinema texture against the careful roll-out of an elaborate plot. Not only is the pacing deliberate, but Mann often supplies only about 80% of the information needed to understand what is going on in a scene.

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

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.

When you get to the end of The City of Your Final Destination, you may discover that there is no there there.

There's no other woman acting today that even remotely resembles Parker Posey. For that matter, there's never been anyone quite like her that I can think of. She has the dynamite improvisational instincts of a born grifter who wandered too far from one con and ended up in another – acting – and her tricky-risky game of onscreen three-card monte is, again and again, a jewel in indie filmmaking's oft-tattered crown.

Snail-paced and ultimately dull creepy-crawl.

It bears noting that Greendale is an awful lot like the town of Mayberry R.F.D. in that paragon of homespun virtue, "The Andy Griffith Show," but then again, it's probably equally wise to bear in mind that before Griffith was the sheriff of that hamlet, he was in "A Face in the Crowd" playing a character who, with his conniving, manipulative, black-at-heart ways, might well represent Greendale's dark and awful future.

Goofily funny, oddly tenderhearted mock-documentary.

Ao relentlessly, gleefully dumb -- without being the slightest bit sardonic -- that you just can't help but guffaw … or groan … but probably both.

Invades theatres with its fangs bared for action. It's bloody hell and we love every minute.

Superficially, Wolf may seem like an entry into the queer canon, and it's not hard to see superficial similarities between the facility and a gay conversion therapy facility, or to superimpose transphobia onto Jacob's diagnosis of species dysphoria.

Clunky horror in-jokes, like a heavy-handed Scream nod in the name of Winnie's aunt (Isabelle), feel labored, and it's all plagued by the same unevenness that afflicted director Tyler MacIntyre's Tragedy Girls: The gore and the comedy are well-executed, but the timing is off.

You have a horror movie with two strong female leads – no small thing. The movie, however, has little else going for it.

Amiable fluff that takes its time learning how to walk, talk, and generally act like the kid-centric rom-com that it is.

This is a movie tailor-made for cheering on the not-so-little guy to find his self-esteem, dazzle the judges, and win the girl.

The film is a pleasant surprise.

There's nary a hint of suspense in West's film, though, mainly because he loudly trumpets the upcoming disasters so early in the film.

While Kandahar is undoubtedly spectacular war cinema, it's also a weighty meditation on the seeming impossibility for some of walking away from conflict.

Don't try to figure out a time-travel movie, it will make your head hurt. And if the movie stars Keanu Reeves, all the more reason to just stop, slowly put common sense on the ground, and back away from your capacity for rational thought.

At first, you fear this uncharted emotionalism may undercut the delicious pleasures of Christie’s clever plotting, this one being a particularly nifty stumper, but in the end, it subtly enhances the film without being pretentious.

There are only so many pratfalls you can string together sans storyline and keep a ball like this rolling, and unfortunately, too many of Bean's schticks were old news by the time they first aired on PBS.

A wistful, humorous, but ultimately fluffy look at those halcyon days, before punk, junk, and the onslaught of the Eighties.

Nothing but tarted-up melodrama.

Can barely limp to its final CinemaScope sunset shot.

There's an undeniable energy, originality and -- most hearteningly -- optimism here that makes Beefcake well worth your time, shortcomings and all.

There’s been an urge to excuse the director and blame the studio, arguing that Zhao just didn’t fit into the strictures of the MCU. Yet that doesn’t explain how weak the script she co-wrote is, or why it’s so insufferably long, or why it almost completely fails to tackle its own core conceits of blind loyalty, of the perils of immortality, of rebellion against faith.

It’s actually a pretty concise little premise as shark movies go, with almost all of the story happening underwater and a plot that has little on its mind other than survival. Still, a little bit of characterization would have been a nice addition.

Maybe taking a cue from his namesake dish, that much-maligned Scottish pudding concoction made with sheep innards and root vegetables, Haggis presents a mishmash of genres in this redo of Fred Cavayé's 2008 French film "Pour Elle."

The problem is more the overall tone: unpleasant, divisive, snarling and deceptive.

Television is reality, and reality is less than television. And that is, by the end of the 72-minute-long VHYes’ gleefully immersive, intermittently profound “found footage,” a lesson Ralph osmotically absorbs through the VHS viewfinder of his life.

A coda set in 1965 seals the film's status as a bourgeois fantasy, but fear not: Paris' student and worker riots of 1968 are only a hair's breadth away.

Aja's version, while a killer ride in its own right, never manages the nagging subtexts Craven so handily injected into the proceedings. It's a topnotch nightmare, but this time you wake up.

Turning Poirot into an action figure with a gun is simply heresy.

For American children, Nanny McPhee Returns may seem something like a foreign film, but the movie has enough spoonfuls of sugar to make the Britishisms go down.

Eleanor the Great never quite grapples with the ethical dilemmas that it raises, either in Eleanor’s stories, Nina’s efforts to turn them into a news project, or Roger’s usurping of their wishes for a segment on their show. But if the narrative logic falls apart, at least its emotional core remains solid, much of it bound together by Squibb’s warmth and charm.

The use of Bryan Adams as the madwoman's imagined paramour is indicative of just how mediocre this movie is.

About the only thing that makes any sense in La Vie Promise is Huppert's face, a visage that has aged in the most extraordinary way.

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.

Unlikely to receive many curtain calls.

Miner strives to imbue the film with the requisite autumnal haze of the original but then gives up midway through and instead resorts to the standard stalk 'n' slash formulas.

Despite an inordinately complicated third-act resolution, it's head-and-shoulders above most so-called suspense films.

It's kinda funny and pretty cute. Sometimes that's all it takes.

A moderately entertaining, mostly inoffensive piece of filmmaking.

The strangest part is that half the movie’s arc is missing, but the credits promise its arrival in 2009 as Milarepa Part II: Path to Liberation.

Charlie’s Angels isn’t revolutionary by any means, but for today’s Gen Z, it’s a jumping-off point.

Despite the bright spots of humor provided by the film’s game actors, Greed chintzes on unexpected barbs. Its satire hits every target but the film never aims at anything that doesn’t already have a giant target on its back.

Antwan "Big Boi" Patton appears in an entertaining role as Atlanta’s weaselly mayor. Atlanta may have dibs on Youngblood Priest this time, but even though the character is still fly in this reboot, it would be a stretch to regard him as truly superfly.

There's a lot of angry prejudice toward women playing soccer in the film, and a semi-fun "Footloose"-esque scene in which Gracie petitions the school board for the freedom to play. But melodrama reigns supreme as the film disintegrates into movie-of-the-week predictability.

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?

A holiday film with no conscience whatsoever, Mars Attacks! will make you laugh, it will make you cry, and it definitely will make you wonder about Earth's ability to defend itself in the face of higher life forms.

Although the film tends to suffer from a severe case of overt preachiness in the third reel (shades of James Cameron's "The Abyss"), it's still a wonderfully visual, exciting ride.

I will never understand the internet’s fascination with Sweeney, who appears to be scowling even when she’s smiling, but she and Powell both bodily throw themselves into their parts. The effort is there. It’s just a shame the material they’re working with isn’t better.

Certain touches resonate and remain memorable long after the film’s conclusion – I’m talking to you, creepy robo-geishas – but for all its CGI bells, whistles, and Johansson, this simply can’t compare to its (highly recommended) Japanese forebears.

Having sat out the first sequel, returning Magic Mike director Steven Soderbergh has made an entertaining enough movie, but it’s the weakest of the series.

I'm not entirely sure, but near as I can tell, this adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' memoir of family dysfunction finally and irrevocably lost me right about where the cat ended up in the stew pot, stirred with maniacally morose glee by Paltrow.

A throwaway film that in all the worst ways give summer movies a bad name: told by idiots, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing but first-weekend grosses.

It’s an adept translation that is in turns bloody and cruel, insightful and hilarious, and, under the plentiful gore and uproarious laughter, a surprisingly touching drama. Just one with slapstick bloodbath tendencies.

It’s a slow document of stiff upper lips beginning to quiver, and while Knightley excels as the perfect Kensington upper-crust mummy, it’s Goode who personifies that desperate attempt to keep a veneer of control, even as his world is on the verge of devastation.

I can tell you in two words why to see this movie, which is otherwise an unspecial Cinderella farce...and those two words are: Queen Latifah.

The only remotely entertaining aspects of Insidious come from Whannell and Sampson as a comic pair of hypercompetitive hipster ghost hunters, and even that schtick is repeated ad nauseam.

As much as Øvredal tries to evade all the modern blockbuster conventions that are bound to keep the Demeter from its best destination, it’s too bumpy a journey to ever feel quite on course.

Oliver and director Ry Russo-Young (Before I Fall) cherry-pick a few of these digressions and give them an artful, collage-like treatment; they don’t go far enough to mask the skimpiness of the story, which has been whittled down to Natasha and Daniel almost exclusively.

If I may presume: Thatcher probably would have preferred more action, less talk.

Critic-proof moviemaking, a candy pink wish-fulfillment fantasy prominently peppered with pubescent pop platters.

At a raw and rare 70 minutes, Invader is Keating challenging himself to deliver the leanest, sparest home invasion imaginable. But it’s only minimalist in the story and cinematography.