An example of how good intentions don’t necessarily make for a good movie.

Transporter 3 is so far over the top that it more than once spills into outright cartoonishness.

The very best animation can excite the senses and inflame the imagination. But Chico & Rito's charmless line drawings just made me wish the film was live-action instead.

This is in fact the end – it is what is. We’ve had some good laughs. Let’s part amicably.

Maybe we won't fully understand Eastwood's film until we see the second part of this project, "Letters From Iwo Jima," his companion film seen from the Japanese viewpoint expected in 2007. On its own, however, Flags of Our Fathers merely flags.

Miss Potter is, in the end, a confection, a trip through the imagination on gossamer wings. Enchanting, perhaps, but a long, long way from meaningful.

Unfortunately for Barbara and for us, what makes William Wilberforce a great man is also what makes him a bore.

Visually arresting but dramatically rote, The Book of Life at least introduces American kids to the Mexican holiday of Día de los Muertos and should score points with families looking for kid-friendly movies that reflect aspects of their Mexican cultural heritage.

The show delivers with its corps of dancers, backup singers, elaborate runways, and a couple tunes by boy group, the Jonas Brothers, who do their thing while the fictional Hannah makes the backstage transition into the flesh-and-blood Miley.

This first dramatic feature by documentarian Evans is an important film but not necessarily a successful one.

It's like 90 minutes of teasing foreplay, and then, just when it's about to get really good, your partner rolls over and goes to sleep.

No Reservations succeeds as well as it does (kinda sorta) by virtue of Zeta-Jones' performance.

Chalamet embodies Dylan in a quite literal sense; he’s clearly studied the tape and does a more than passable mimicry of Dylan’s voice and performing style. Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

Last Chance Harvey is so much an "actors' film" that the hand of the director seems hidden until it bursts into view with something clunky.

Neither a true concert film nor a strict behind-the-scenes documentary, This Is It is, like Jackson himself, a real hybrid.

It delivers commendable entertainment value.

The story is rather creaky, but who cares when the actors Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche are so sublime together? Even though the film creates an artificial construct that rings hollow, the two central characters generate great heat and interest. Their presence is enough to keep the film’s nattering foolishness at bay.

This mash-up of family drama and science fiction is a pleasant but unconvincing adventure with strong adolescent appeal and music by Mogwai.

Unfortunately, The Pelican Brief comes across as a prolonged bout with deja vu: you know you've seen this before, and more than once at that.

The good news, then, is that The Siege is hardly the ticking time bomb of racial slurs some would have you imagine, and the bad news is that it doesn't matter because it's all too damn pedantically serious to take seriously.

Ultimately undone by some less than remarkable character development and an unnecessary, if currently contemporaneous, pseudo-political undertones. Which isn’t to say it’s not a blast to see Gammell’s eerie, Francis Bacon-esque illustrations come to herky-jerky and horrifying life, because it is, absolutely.

Amounts to little more than a big, wet kiss to the group’s worldwide legions of young, female fans.

Fincher's camerawork gives the movie a jittery feel, and his video-trained eye lends the prison sets the look of a dilapidated cathedral, but again, there's really nothing here that we haven't seen before, and better, at that. Nice title, though.

Ambrose owns this crawlspace between being fierce and being fragile. But she can't escape the fact that her role is underwritten; the script suffers from an excess of subtlety.

Funny and expands our background knowledge of these likable characters, but the story gets bogged down.

It's a hodgepodge of wildly divergent narrative styles, from the mystical to the grisly and into the ridiculous.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a hobbled parade.

Fuller’s film is inarguably a stone-cold classic of the genre, but Fury, for all its cacophonous chaos and half-crazed characters, never quite reaches the shellshocked heights required to make it a bona fide pillar of cinematic combat.

Good performances give this movie a pleasant shine, but in all honesty, Thin Ice relies on too many familiar setups to feel wholly fresh.

Inherently funny, with a terrific sense of timing, an amazing gift for mimicry, and an ability to perfectly imitate all kinds of everyday sounds, Iglesias is always charming and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

Kick-Ass 2 returns with the original’s rollicking sense of vulgarity and bodily trauma fully intact, but the story has more plot lines to string together than absolutely necessary.

This is primarily a children's movie and I have a hard time working up much rancor against a movie as campily perverse as this one is.

The sequences where the film moves beyond the store, and places it within a greater context, are undoubtedly the most intriguing.

Jim Jarmusch's elegiac, hilarious performance as a man about to smoke his final cigarette is brilliant.

Nemes’ subjective camera and long takes ironically make the film seem longer and lacking in any narrative substance that equals the filmmaker’s fastidious technical skills. Sunset hopefully gives rise to a new dawn for Nemes.

In the end, Meadows' film lacks the bite it needs to make us care about this oddball trio, endearing though they are.

Iranian-American director Keshavarz utilizes the always reliable Sarandon to fine effect, but the final takeaway is less than riveting.

All in all, Malcolm & Marie is less a coherent narrative than it is a beautified slideshow of ideas. These ideas are often compelling – but still, just ideas.

A Perfect Getaway is, in its own delightfully silly and manipulative way, one of the most effective paranoid thrillers of the new millennium. That doesn't make it a great movie by a long shot.

Juvenile yet compellingly smart humor.

A must for any Deadhead and of genuine interest to any music fan, even if its documentary chops hit a few sour notes.

Vanilla and sweet, it's an overly generous helping that, if it doesn't make you sick, will put you in a good humor all day long.

Turnabout is fair play, to be sure, but ultimately virtually everyone in Teeth ends up using sex as a weapon, edged or otherwise, to the detriment of all concerned. Just say "Ow."

The movie offers glimmers of truth about the aging process, but there is always the sense that Moss only wades knee-high into this river.

What begins as a punchy, feminine-biting satire becomes fuzzy after the first act. It’s an admirable effort, but an overstuffed, demanding one as well.

Ultimately, however, this film is a collection of vignettes in search of a narrative center. Although it’s enjoyable, the film never coheres into a whole. Instead, it resembles a pile of ill-fitting jigsaw-puzzle pieces rather than a fully formed picture.

Like its protagonist, Sleight is a scrappy, semi-super origin story that lacks the existential heft of, say, M. Night Shyamalan’s "Unbreakable," or the grim comic nihilism of James Gunn’s "Super."

Like the repertoire of most bar bands, this all plays out like a cover – competently performed, but the original was better.

Well, we're not in "Chicago" anymore, or even its soundstage approximation, but that hasn't stopped Oscar-nominated director Rob Marshall from fashioning another epic spectacle out of two squabbling women in (a sort-of) show business.

For better and worse, the story unfolds as the late Brown himself might have related it, scattered across time, told with more impulse than clarity.

Verhoeven's film is fascinating, if stupid and stylish, if shallow. The story has to move along at a fair clip because otherwise we'd notice how nonsensical it all is. And there is very little to connect with emotionally.

Torture, you may recall, used to be an unparsable, unpardonable sin. Now it's porn.

It's not often you come across a film as unique as this, and while my taste for liver, lights, and sweetbreads isn't what it once was, this is still a fine post-Halloween aperitif, with guts to spare.

For a movie that’s ostensibly about scratching at real feelings, it comes off as phony as a perfume ad.

There are droll comic flourishes in this very brave film, to be sure, but all you really want to do after watching CSA is hang down your head and cry.

I Am Everything is most fascinating when it goes deep into his formative years and the influences of truly obscure figures like Esquerita and Billy Wright (both Black queer musicians). Yet the further into his life the documentary goes, the less insightful it becomes.

When Hellboy does succeed, it is glorious. Harbour and Jovovich understand this kind of inflated supernatural action, and when it's just them inhabiting the line between two worlds (such as Hellboy's trip to face the child-eating Russian witch, Baba Yaga), or when the narrative is given time to breathe, there's a sense of the movie this could and should have been.

While the film will be of acute interest to jazz fans, the film offers up an object lesson in how contemporary documentaries function in the 21st century. Comprised of the requisite talking heads, archival footage, and the shotgun blast of endless photographs of iconic moments, the film delivers a perfunctory tableau that is right at home with the programming on The History Channel (with fewer Nazis, of course).

The film rarely demonstrates how the ideal actually works in practice. Personally, I would have liked to see a savage breast or two being charmed.

The People’s Joker feels like it would work better as a one-woman show, a monologue that seems weighed down by the burden of its own metaphor.

Carla Gugino, however, energizes the film with every step of her self-assured stride. She genuinely manages to create a dimensional character who is fulsomely inspirational – and as I said at the outset, that's not too shabby an accomplishment when it comes to the world of women and sports movies.

Inoffensive fun that kids will love and adults will likely love too, it's a middle of the road affair, but a far cry from roadkill.

May not be grade-A prime, but it ain't chopped liver either.

“Caution: Contents may induce brain bleed.” That is, if you think too hard on the logic and mechanics of its time-travel conceit.

Does not go gentle into that good night.

Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume paints dreamy scenes of happiness, too, playing in the backyard with siblings, trying on a pink bikini – in these moments we see the most of Sasha’s personality.

Whether Ringer, with its mild comedy and milder messages about inclusiveness and tolerance, will be embraced by Knoxville's hardcore "Jackass" fans remains to be seen. But we can at least trust that the Farrellys will stay the course.

The film is often quietly humorous.

With acting legends Duvall and Jones in the lead roles, the story stays afloat, but occasionally these actors seem to be lurching around in a script that's too "small" for them.

For sheer, sepulchral eye candy at this most horror-ific time of year, del Toro’s Crimson Peak leaves Tim Burton – reigning misfit king of hyper-stylized, goth-y weirdness – in the dust and well-nigh forgotten.

The film is absolutely charming if a bit too predictable and glued more to sit-com narrative strategies and aesthetics than is healthy.

It would be easy to pigeonhole this as "Norma Rae" en L.A., and Padilla is at least as ingratiating and as much of a guy magnet as Sally Field was in that movie.

If anything, Daniela Forever feels overly familiar. Calling to mind other life-of-the-mind films, it suffers by comparison, falling short of the wowee-zowee visuals of Waking Life, the satisfyingly intricate mechanics of Inception, the soulfulness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Before the cocaine economy, Miami was a sleepy seaside hamlet, a "virgin city" with a permeable border and largely unprotected coastline.

At the end of the day, people won't be lining up at a Disney park to ride a clamshell into a ride based on this live-action version. And that tells you everything you need to know. Next time, maybe just give this kind of money to the ink and paint department.

Maria by Callas is not the place to look if you’re in search of a biography of the star.

Comedic touches aside (nearly all of which belong to Ben Stiller who's off on another, far more interesting, planet as the genuinely goofy Bwick), If Lucy Fell strives hard to be a serious romantic comedy for the Nineties. It almost succeeds. Schaeffer trips up, though, when he lets his philosophies get the better of him. Nothing stops If Lucy Fell faster than its mordant underpinnings, cute though they may be. It's “The Best Date Movie of the Nineties,” number 224 in a series. Collect 'em all.

Plenty of gore-slinging, wisecracking fun to be had, and yes, the repulsively convincing werewolf transformations and attacks still pack a breath-stopping wallop.

Although the movie's anti-war propaganda mission is clear, it nevertheless makes a strong case for asking questions and examining our country's imperialistic motives.

Much of the film is frankly ludicrous, but that does little to dispel its overall power and passion.

Make no mistake, I'm not saying Dr. Giggles is a cinematic watershed or anything like that, but it does manage to mix humor and horror in a way that very few films ever manage successfully.

Although the film’s character portraits are vividly drawn, they remain largely one-dimensional.

With its offbeat-dramedy-meets-sci-fi concept, Jules feels pulled right out of the world of indie cinema from 10 years ago. It’s in communion with the likes of Safety Not Guaranteed or Seeking A Friend for the End of the World: movies that revel in a superficial attempt at charm that’s undermined by a shallow understanding of their own characters, instead choosing to live and die by a determined sense of quirk wrapped up within their supposedly refreshing sense of genre-bending.

Where The Toll feels like its overdrawn is in the narrative. Even at a sparse 80 minutes, the build of the tension and set-up of Cami and Spencer's mistrusting relationship is too extended. If the film is asking asking you to pay it in time, the return on investment may seem a little low.

There are a million reasons why couples break up. If only We Broke Up had landed on one, they might have really had something here.

The reality of this film is that it is pretty innocent fare, for the most part, and Depardieu does prove his versatility by possessing a natural comic flair that eases him into the paunchy papa bear role.

It's a gorgeous albeit depressing mess, as distancing and despairing as a realpolitik wipeout.

As pleasantly amusing as Victoria & Abdul is, the film is really little more than another showcase for Judi Dench’s reigning talent.

Dragon should never be regarded as the utmost in historical veracity, though it certainly captures a great deal of the spirit and flavor of what we so fondly remember as the essence of Bruce Lee.

A quicker overall pace and trimmed dialogue might have lent the film more sparkle and zest, but it still makes it to the finish line with its decency intact.

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

As much as the original Genie was an extension of Robin Williams' onstage persona, so does Smith’s Genie springboard off two decades of action-comedies. It may not always work, but nobody else could even come close.

It’s all supremely silly stuff, and amusingly so, as long as you don’t stop to think about all those blameless officers and agents cut down in the line of mindless entertainment.

A refresher course in the perils of celebrity and activism, but its syllabus and insights are purely remedial.

A pleasant frolic, but fairly inconsequential in terms of the overall Allen output.

Overall, Just Married doesn't really take -- it has a shelf life about as short as the disastrous honeymoon -- but in the moment, it's cute, if corny. It'll do.

The whole production does reek a bit of origin story filminess, but even so, it's light sabers beyond Christensen's sad, revengeful fate in "Episode III" and does offer a nice view of the top of the Sphinx's head no less than three times.

Plotnick is an appealing actor. He has the same sweetly knit brow and watery blue eyes as Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, but his character here is as flat as a pancake. Moreover, if you’ve seen the trailer for Wrong, you’ve seen the movie.