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.

This is nobody's idea of a happy family story, but it is a pristinely chilling depiction of familial meltdown in a post-Stalinist, Twilight Zone anti-place, the dark heart of heartlessness and mysterious parenting techniques.

The Dreamers is infused with the same kind of wistful melancholy that made the French New Wave films so winning, and it’s all gorgeous to look at.

At its core the film is as standardized as the exam it seeks to debunk, and nearly as tedious.

The end of the film edges toward camp, and the sudden arrival of surreal dream sequences threatens to push it over the side. The movie is more sophisticated when it’s not trying to be complex.

The worst thing about Bounce isn't that it's bad but that it just isn't interesting.

Just as clichéd as its predecessor, and lacks the old-school charm of films like "Wild Style" and "Breakin’."

The bland script and direction are spruced up by a likable cast.

Without really understanding what drove these two men to attempt the risky climb in the first place, it’s hard to extend the requisite sympathy for their plight. A void was definitely touched in this movie, and it was inside me.

My advice? Grab Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and recast with Jimmy Dean.

Teacher’s Pet feels more like Ren & Stimpy's John Kricfalusi on a mild dose of Prozac, and I mean that in the very best way.

Torque knows it’s one big joke, dusty chaps, heaving bosoms, and all, which makes it all that much easier to swallow. And forget.

The correlation between music and math, if not explicit, is seldom documented with as much panache as Tom Dowd & the Language of Music.

Something of a snooze.

The combination of high animé style and old-school heart gives the film a broad enough appeal to merit a wide release. Not that it isn't quirky.

Though the three leads are all likable performers, their lunkheaded characters are as thinly drawn as their cartoon counterparts, and the supporting cast is littered with one racial stereotype after another.

It becomes unmistakably clear that Wuornos’ wretched childhood and young life is representative of a deep failure within American society to adequately protect our young and defenseless. This becomes part of the movie’s argument against capital punishment.

Their travelogue-ready romance is utterly doofy but not disagreeable, and this sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy will strike the right chord with Moore’s fan base of preteen girls.

It’s Brisseau's penchant for the flamboyantly perverse and the perversely flamboyant, however, that might have been best left secret.

This is not a conventional love story but a philosophical one.

When The Company owns up to what it is -– a performance piece -– it’s glorious. Everything else -– the window-dressing of a fiction film -– just gums up that gloriousness.

Maybe it’s time for Woo to finally make that musical he keeps talking about.

A rare achievement.

Everyone learns a lesson by movie’s end: Don’t put work before family. Curiously, no one learns that all this could have been avoided with a good method of birth control.

If you can get past the ick factor inherent in these suddenly adulterized relationships –- and there’s really no way this film should have received a kid-friendly PG rating –- and latch on to the film’s wealth of metaphor, you’ll surely have something to discuss over coffee post-screening.

Doesn’t provide any answers, and that’s both its strength and weakness.

The actresses are terrific together, and it’s nice to see Helen Mirren smiling onscreen for a change. And although Calendar Girls is resolutely pleasant, the movie never really goes much beyond that.

In the end, The Fog of War offers a couple of hours of brilliant clarity amid the noise and chaos.

There's just no reconciling the film's ambivalent message. Newell hangs a modern sensibility on a supposed period piece, and hangs his film in the process.

A sterling example of what Hollywood can accomplish when it puts its trust into an offbeat project whose creative team has a different perspective on American life.

It’s odd and unfortunate, however, that The Return of the King just barely misses the eye-misting emotional wallop of the series’ previous installment, The Two Towers, which had a lyrical subtlety underpinning the vast vistas of growing chaos (and Christopher Lee hardly hurt matters) and hobbits-in-peril.

An interesting though not extremely successful experiment, but it definitely makes you want to see what Duncan Roy does next.

By the time The Statement comes to its inevitable conclusion, you'll be hard pressed to remember much about it, sadly enough. In other words, The Statement doesn't make much of one.

Looks mostly like the same-old, same-old.

Damon, particularly, stands revealed as a comic ace.

[Keaton's] lost none of the spunk, sass, and ditzbomb charm of her "Annie Hall" days. She, quite simply, is marvelous. Too bad her similarly iconic co-star is such a toad. Jack never stops being Jack, to great distraction.

In filming this movie with such artistic precision, the movie ironically winds up objectifying Griet just as much as any appreciator of the original painting.

Tim Burton is all grown up and getting serious with this wildly scattershot tale.

The titular role of Monsieur Ibrahim is not a terribly taxing one, but Sharif effortlessly demonstrates that he still has the stuff that made him a star so many years ago – he exudes a charismatic appeal that is apparently timeless.

Amid the endless stream of catch-a-rising-star movie clichés that Honey screenwriters Alonzo Brown and Kim Watson throw up and out are a few new ones, notably "skinny girls always win out in the end" and "hootchie bad, faux hootchie good."

What is not debatable, however, is that Cruise is an actor of limited emotional resources, one who lacks the presence required for the film’s protagonist, a character intended to inhabit more than one dimension.

As Timeline so adequately proves, not every bestseller will render a good film.

A blast to watch if for nothing more than the performances. They hit the proverbial jackpot.

Learn from the Evers family: The Haunted Mansion is not worth the detour.

The story is bizarre, unique, and thoroughly unpredictable, while its images resemble some kind of bastard offspring of the linear realism of George Grosz and the fantastic foreboding of Edward Gorey.

These people and the tale of their migration and reintegration into life’s ebb and flow will remain with the viewer long after Johnny's and Sarah’s green cards expire.

No doubt about it: Bad Santa is blasphemous. But, to borrow a phrase from another famous hedonist, Homer Simpson, it’s also sacrilicious.

A devastating and weighty picture.

A film that is long on atmosphere, but short on smarts: Plot points are easily unraveled 20 minutes in advance (no fun sleuthing for the audience here), the ending is an unsatisfying pastiche off too many horror tropes, and it would take a week to plug all of Gothika’s gaps in logic.

Sharp-witted delight.

They've taken a classic and they've battered it senseless and, boy, does it stink. It’s so bad it’s amazing it's being released, and box office-goers might soon end up fleeced. And annoyed and bewildered, perhaps even creeped-out by this cacophonous mess which is awful throughout.

Ron Howard has delivered a movie that’s a big departure from his previous film, "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." We may not remember him for "The Alamo," but we're glad he kept the Stetson.

Detailed but, ultimately, one-sided.

Fraser, Martin, and the rest of the flesh-and-blood characters look like they’re having a ball, which translates instantly to the audience as well.

A humanistic adventure film that's both rich with characterization and concussive cannon bursts, Master and Commander is, surprisingly, some of the best work either Crowe or Weir have ever done.

Fathers and families and the impossibility of ever fully understanding either are at the heart of My Architect, and like Nathaniel Kahn, we come away from the film with a renewed appreciation of both.

An antidote to holiday cheer like no other, this French tale of psychological horror is as harsh as they come -– it’s like finding a severed finger in your stocking and then finding it’s even better with hollandaise.

Moments of black comedy break up the melodrama – a newsreel depicts the song's "victims" and a Nazi secretary rages against her Duden grammar manual – but the overall tone is still that of a four-alarm weeper.

A movie that’s so profoundly ridiculous that it has to be admired, if for no other reason other than its sheer willingness to run with its premise and take it to the end of the line.

It's not so much the individual storylines that grab you, but Curtis’ unrelenting optimism. In the end, it's nice to know that love, actually, does conquer all.

It’s an impressive closing to the cycle, and, frankly, one that arrives not a moment too soon.

As riveting as a documentary can possibly be, this slim (74-minute) film is also one of the most politically aware films of the year.

Seems more like an amateur revue, perfectly all right for what it is, but not meant to be seen beyond an audience of friends and family.

Uses a wraparound story to provide a hint of Glass’ deep-seated pathology, but allows no details about how it came into being.

The darker stuff begs to be handled less delicately than this dance, and in that respect the director stumbles.

There’s definitely a certain fascination hovering about The Singing Detective, but after seeing the movie, that fascination turns to perverse dread.

You don’t have to be a cynic to find Radio naive for suggesting that high school is a good place for emotionally fragile misfits, that racism is not a problem, that caring for someone is all it takes.

The characters are mechanisms who move along the plot arc from Point A to Point B. They’re not particularly memorable individuals.

Wisely, a lot like the real event. No answers are given, barely any questions are asked, and the film unfolds at a leisurely, inexorable pace that stymies the traditional filmmaking tropes of tension and release.

Enough already.

I came out of Beyond Borders with the gnawing feeling I'd just been subjected to some sort of ghastly prank, Punk’d by the director of "GoldenEye" with Lara Croft as his willing confederate.

Ultimately never slices things as sharply as it attempts, but it’s definitely a cut above.

Sylvia also makes it seem as though, even at her happiest, she never received much pleasure from life. This makes for a long, slow procession to the oven door -– so dark, somber, and lifeless is this well-intentioned biography.

It’s hard to say what makes Veronica Guerin feel so distant and uninspiring. Maybe, it’s just as conventional wisdom has always said: Journalism is a dull and tedious business to put on the screen.

A notch above the mediocre movies that are usually made from mediocre John Grisham bestsellers. That may sound like faint praise, but it’s an endorsement for this surprisingly entertaining film.

While it’s far from bad, it also falls far short of the icy frissons produced by the original.

Ultimately Hedges’ film, like the turkey, comes out underdone.

There are some wonderful performances and lovely unadorned moments in The Flower of Evil when the movie is not drowning its viewers in its doomed fragrance.

It’s ingratiating in that nice doggie way, but the dogs, who have had their lips enhanced via CGI to aid in the illusion of speech, don’t have much more on their minds than where the next stick is going to sail in from.

It is wonderful for what it is: a delightful, thoroughly satisfying comedy of modern manners.

It’s cheese of the purest stripe, bafflingly bad to the point of being oddly charming in its brain dead naïveté.

It’s part camp, part trash, and part cabaret, with a delightfully retro Hollywood Hills palette and zingy dialogue served up with relish.

Don’t leave until the final credits finish rolling or you’ll miss what many are considering Kill Bill: Vol. 1’s best bit. Trust us on this one.

Far from being atypical, the events of June 12 and the litany of tiny nightmares that led up to that day are brutally obvious.

Mystic River asks plenty of questions but rarely if ever offers any answers, and certainly no easy ones. If this fine and sorrowful film is what can be expected from our aging cinema icons, here’s to the golden years, dark though they may be.

Does little to dispel the creeping feeling that Washington’s getting himself in something of a rut.

McCarthy’s film is rich in tone and subtlety, but has precious little dialogue. It feels less like a modern motion picture than some odd poem long lost and then discovered in another age, a timeless, ageless gem of hard-resined emotions melting into real life.

Possibly one of the dullest takes on a real-life murder mystery, this gutter’s-eye-view of the waning days of Los Angeles porn king John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes is barely as interesting as one of the big man’s films, and a lot less revelatory.

As far from "Slacker" as you could possibly get and still be using a motion-picture camera, The School of Rock is nonetheless pure Linklater, pure rock & roll, and pure fun. Gabba, gabba, hey!

Coixet’s film begins with the quiet patter of rain on skin and holds that somehow sweetly sorrowful tone throughout.

As a vehicle for Gina Gershon to strut her provocative stuff, Prey for Rock & Roll is a rock & roll fantasy come to life.

Were it allowed to be dark, Duplex would probably be more interesting, possibly even with cult appeal. Call it a fixer-upper with potential.

Like rocky road ice cream, The Rundown is chunky stuff, full of calories and easy to take in small doses. Also like rocky road, it’s bound to attract flies if you leave it lying around, and, more to the point, too much of it is likely to make you gag.

My cynical half hated it, despite the presence of Lane, who is so magnetic that she could prance around the countryside in the absence of plot and still be compelling somehow.

A charming surprise, the kind of neat little low-budget movie that seems more like a collaboration among friends than it does a corporate investment.

Joseph Fiennes smolders as young Luther, but it’s a performance that makes you wish instead that his older brother Ralph -– an actor who is one of the greatest at being able to portray inner torture and anguish -– were playing the part.