It helps that J.K. Rowling’s third book in the series is full of spooky stuff that translates beautifully to screen.

The bulk, the heft, and the girth of Bukowski: Born Into This arrives in the form of the author himself, giving beery readings to Berkeley audiences clearly enjoying a contact high or sitting, ill-kempt but quiet, pensive, Heineken in one yellowy paw, in his apartment.

Excruciating in the extreme, this is the nadir of urban comedies thus far: a trashy, crass, and painfully unfunny airline disaster of a film.

While Saved! initially gets in some good gags at the expense of religious hypocrisy, it eases off, opting not to skewer religion but rather to poke it gently with a stick to see what happens.

A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother – as if any of this could end well – but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.

Among the many things that Baadasssss! is, it is also a movie about moviemaking. In fact, the film should be a primer for anyone about to make an independent film.

Emmerich’s sense of irony has rarely been so pointed, and The Day After Tomorrow, for all its obvious cataclysmic set-pieces and stock characterizations, is nothing if not timely.

Riveting, and frankly it's great fun to see Leth best the smirky von Trier five times running.

There’s nothing especially offensive about the actress (Hudson); if anything, it’s that lack of offense, her overwhelmingly benign vibe, that has become increasingly repugnant with every picture she puts out.

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

Irritating throughout, Love Me if You Dare turns positively appalling in its last half hour, with the inevitable final showdown producing an image that continues to curdle my stomach days later.

Perception is key and Control Room should be required viewing for anyone within reach of a TV signal.

Unsurprisingly, your enjoyment of Shrek 2 will likely be predicated on your enjoyment of Shrek 1.

It has the resonant feel of myth, buoyed by simultaneously vicious and compassionate performances from the men on both sides of the bars.

It's nobody’s idea of a classic comedy, but in its own inoffensive and eager-to-please way it's a pleasant enough way to spend 90 minutes ogling the lustrous Ms. Union and Mr. Foxx's equally and endlessly fascinating volcanic coif.

There is also a lot of good supporting work in this movie, including the performances of Irma P Hall, Tom Bowser as Evie's clueless dad, and Bruno Kirby as Kiddie Acres' gruff impresario.

Its narrative conceit will entertain for a while, but eventually you will long to disappear with the rest of the Mexicans.

Serves up a weak brew.

Petersen, a director who knows his way around a crane shot better than almost anyone, rallies his troops but can't ignite his actors, and the end result is the sound and fury of Homer undone.

Is it classic cinema? Perhaps not, but then again, American shores and citizens have never been lacerated by atomic weapons. What do we know?

The character of Valentin is immediately recognizable to anyone who's gone to more than 20 films in their lives -- charming, cuddly, hellbent on making his world tolerable -- but to his credit both Noya and Agresti don't overplay their hand.

Although Super Size Me benefits from a number of interviews with nutritionists, lobbyists, lawyers, and the like, the film inevitably (but not unenjoyably) is dominated by Spurlock, who offers his sober-minded statistics and cheeky asides without ever devolving into an off-putting Michael Moore-like moralizing.

Van Helsing is simply far too much of a good thing, and although Hensley's Frankenstein Monster comes off better than anyone else, the film suffers from some truly inane dialogue and pacing that will likely cause tachycardia in members of the audience old enough to recall who Dwight Frye was.

The kind of winking, disingenuous youth comedy that tries to play it both ways, dangling the twins as fetish objects and then yanking them back on the leash because, you know, this is a family film.

Posey and Sheen appear to have a blast playing oversized characters so obnoxious that it's obvious they belong together.

Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle.

Envy feels like a comedy in search of a drama in search of some sort of lugubrious existential meaning; it never quite seems to know where it's going to head next, and neither will the audience.

It seems nothing is left out, and the movie makes us begin to feel as though we've witnessed every swing the man ever swung.

The movie occasionally continues on too long with certain scenes and may strain the sensibilities of anybody not caught up in its delirious visuals and melodrama, but The Saddest Music in the World nevertheless beckons with a seductive and unforgettable melody.

Wistful voiceover explains too much, and, even worse, interrupts the requisite Teen Movie Climactic Speech.

Remarkable, melancholy, and ultimately hopeful documentary.

The straight dope for speed junkies and fans of the art of flinging one’s well-padded frame through the contortions enabled only by disastrously catapulting oneself off a slippery asphalt track at speeds even Dale Earnhardt would have dismissed as lunacy.

Ultimately more bleak and furious than most Hollywood tales of this sort. Man on Fire plays it out to the bloody end, like there’s no fire extinguisher in Mexico but for the oceans that hold its borders.

This is a determined, resolutely paced, and atypical samurai movie, more an epic of the heart than of the battlefield, and all the more powerful for it.

The film lacks the emotional resonance that made "Big" such a sentimental favorite with audiences of all ages.

A compendium of really neat stuff and nifty sequences, and it will just have to do until Vol. 3 or reunification comes along.

The Punisher is such a bad film that it becomes inadvertently entertaining; it’s enough to make you pine for the original version of the black-clad Marvel Comics’ badass, played to awful imperfection in 1989 by Dolph Lundgren.

Although the transvestites’ plight – mishandled, misunderstood, and/or misappropriated – is meant to supply Connie and Carla's emotional core, one never gets the feeling of anything stronger than an at-shoulder-length's sympathy from this film.

The film is set in post-WWII Scotland, but its tone and its telling are so stark, so Medieval, that it seems anachronistic when one of its characters picks up a telephone or plays a bebop jazz record.

Until Hollywood stops being a boys club, and America graduates beyond short pants and its embarrassingly pubescent attitudes toward sex, I suppose one can only hope that all male adolescent fantasies will play as goofily sweet as this one.

The characters all feel like concoctions, like synthetic movie people forged in a crucible of Red Bull during late-night meetings at the studio compound.

By far the most gorgeous slice of sunlit sadism so far this summer, I’m Not Scared also manages to be oddly sweet: a boy’s life, with treachery.

It’s The Alamo, all right, but will anyone want to remember it?

This might not matter so much to the youngest members of the audience, but for anyone over the age of 10, it’s strictly a colorful bore.

As arduous to watch as your neighbor’s poorly focused vacation slides.

Retains and updates the basic plot points while losing much of the original's heart and soul.

Proof that movies don’t always have to be busy to entertain and enrich, this tale of life at a bucolic Korean monastery is at once profound and simple.

The trouble with retooling fairy tales to jibe with our more enlightened times is that too often the fun gets stripped along with the offensive parts.

While the film ably thrusts longtime fans of Mignola’s highly stylized artwork and newcomers alike into the world of that ol' debbil Hellboy, the film suffers from both scattershot character development and a serious case of H.P. Lovecraft overdose.

A good bet for family viewing. It's got a charming, simple plot, a smart Alan Menken score, and enough subversive humor to wring a chuckle or two out of Mom and Dad.

Hoge's film raises more questions than it answers – that's his point, I think, to get us thinking – and Gosling, who previously played the conflicted Jewish Nazi skinhead in "The Believer," inhabits the role of Leland so fully it's as if the character had killed him as well.

As we are informed in the film’s prologue, "Cats live in loneliness, then die like falling rain." Sh--, man, whatever. This is so stupid it’s positively genius.

Henderson's warm and toasty little gem of a film, slight though it may be, reminds you that the Greatest Generation, full of vim, vigor, and – most important – an indefatigable sense of purpose, grew up on both sides of the Big Pond.

"Always be good to rock and roll and it will always be good to you," the film quotes Phil Spector as saying, and a more fitting explanation of the Bingenheimer mystique you'll likely never find.

If Never Die Alone had even a smidgeon of comic relief (or even, say, a bunch of zombies) to offset some of its relentlessly downbeat brutality, it might have been at best tolerable. But it doesn't, and it's not.

This is not a family movie; the kids will be bored by it. This is a guilty pleasure for thirtysomething stoners with ironic dispositions and large nacho platters.

The Coen brothers’ newest is an odd amalgam of tics and stutters that plays like something of a greatest-hits reel but never seems to jell into a real comedy.

If Affleck stumbles, Smith's script does nothing to catch his fall. Surprisingly, Smith's truest talent – that of writing – is Jersey Girl's weakest link.

Von Trier’s vision is amazingly thorough and exquisitely executed, but the audience may feel executed as well.

Suffers from Frey’s diluted multitasking. The director, writer, and star are not equally talented.

This portrait of 1940 France on the verge of capitulating to the Vichy regime is intriguing. However, what keeps the movie engaging is its nutty tone.

A twist ending in search of its movie.

In manipulating its many disparate characters to bump into each other and set plot lines in motion, Intermission walks a fine line between clever and contrived, with the scale tipping more often toward contrived.

Snyder’s film isn't likely to be considered a classic 20 years down the road like Romero's film is, but it's a winningly extreme episode in the ongoing adventures of Zombie and Harriet. (And stick around while the end credits roll: The film isn't over 'til it's over.)

A delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.

Lemarquis, as Noi, has a stoic and silent tenderness to him, and Hansdottir's Iris is the picture of pensive sluggishness. But then all that cold, cold snow slows you down, both inside and out, until the only thing moving is your heart.

A political thriller with topical currency, Spartan delivers the goods.

It's not until the film is over that we fully appreciate the originality of an Israeli film that focuses completely on the family crisis while leaving politics behind altogether.

The film itself is an effective enough metaphor for out-of-control bullshit that frankly, Koepp aside, was part and parcel of King’s novella from page 1.

Everything about Agent Cody Banks 2 reeks of hurry-up and make this movie before its kid star Frankie Munoz loses his pubescent looks (it’s already borderline).

The film moves so subtly, in fact, and so seamlessly between wry humor and the emotional wreckage of life-or-death, that it was with some shock that I found myself weeping halfway through the film.

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.

Ultimately, Hidalgo won't win any movie races, but I'd definitely bet on the movie to show.

The highlight of this satirical remake of ABC's mid-Seventies buddy-cop anomaly is named, unsurprisingly, Will Ferrell.

McGuigan's wonderfully ambitious but terribly melodramatic film is chock-full of symbolic references, subtext, and the sort of period detail that made Monty Python's historical comedies so gamely endearing.

It's interesting to see this more quotidian aspect of Israel displayed on film, but the parable of James' Journey to Jerusalem has the sophistication of a Sunday School lesson.

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.

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.

Ridiculously overwrought.

Not a sequel, not a prequel, but a "reimagining" as the producers say. And they're basically correct, although I wouldn't put any real emphasis on the "imagination" aspect of that term.

The film seems overlong and drawn out, with variations on the same joke occurring throughout. Although the performances are good, the nostalgia for the past seems quaint in the new "have it your way" Burger King world.

It's not the most flattering depiction of Jews I've seen. Still, The Passion of the Christ is something of a masterpiece, terrible to behold, unfit for children, certainly, but very much the work of a director in the throes of his own distinct passion.

Like a lot of sports movies, this biopic about boxing promoter Jackie Kallen is better than it has to be but not as good as it ought to be.

As far as animated flicks go, Clifford's Really Big Movie is third-string Disney, but don't tell that to the kids.

It’s hardly the most original teen comedy we’ve seen, but, again, Schaffer, working from a script by himself, Alec Berg, and David Mandel keeps things borderline sweet throughout.

Another casualty of the uncomfortable branding so common to the teen genre, the same branding one sees in a film starring Hilary Duff, or Amanda Bynes, or the next sweet but bland blond actress that comes down the assembly line.

An enjoyable study of ridiculous regimentation and a sure balm to anyone who has overdosed on the efficient designs at Ikea.

As is, Welcome to Mooseport is clunkily earthbound as its characters and the situations plod forward while never getting anywhere.

Funny weird and funny ha-ha go hand in hand in this small Icelandic town, apparently: It's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Feels so depressingly vacant that it registers less as a film than as a pointed lesson in what not to do in the wacky world of non-traditional dating. Hasn't anyone in this film heard of Friendster?

What do you get when you mix Adam Sandler with SPAM gags, a trained vomiting walrus, a wall-to-wall soundtrack of calypso covers of 1980s pop hits, and Rob Schneider in native-Islander brownface? You get a pretty crappy movie, but for one major mitigating factor: Drew Barrymore.

As a complete work, Robot Stories is a solid collection.

Highwaymen is an also-ran. It lacks the sprawling, Westernized mythos of The Hitcher and feels, in the end, like a previously owned nightmare sorely in need of a new universal hell joint.

Osama begins in fear and ends in terror. In between there's all manner of hopelessness, deprivation, and death, which is to say that as the first film to come out of a post-Taliban Afghanistan, it's practically a documentary.

Works just fine for the first half hour or so, but quickly devolves into a case of too much affection and not enough affliction.

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

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

The heist itself is a charm with the kids zipping about in go-karts and eluding klutzy security guards, but the film seems trapped in a strange Twilight Zone somewhere between comedy and drama.