Teen Witch is an all-around delicious flick, both despite and because of the afterschool special quality of its message.

All of it plays a bit phony. Perhaps something was lost in the transition from book to film. The movie was adapted by novelist William Boyd himself, but it feels like it's missing something, maybe a narrative voice that gave all the coincidence and silliness some sense.

It’s a fittingly mediocre end to a franchise that has always been OK with being average.

It seems downright unfair to harp on the remake’s differences from the original when both films are having such a ball.

There's a nice little story here about the intermingling of cultures, but it rarely gets beyond the obvious clichés.

A delight when its comic elements are in high gear.

It's diverting enough, and intermittently suspenseful, but also strangely empty and decadent in a way that truly merits that overused term.

Knoxville, in his first dramatic role, does what he can with script and direction that aggressively eschew any insight into Kaufman's grief.

As a heartfelt feel-good story about industrial espionage and how to win the right way, Hero Mode is charming if undemanding, and feels at least a little authentic to its milieu.

The Mighty Ducks may satisfy the Pee Wee hockey players in your household but the rest of you may be turned off by the simplified penance and redemption formula.

Granted, it's breezy enough in a retro-chic kind of way, but the meh factor is too high to overcome for all but the hardiest of J-Lo die-hards.

The laughs and pacing of Fun Mom Dinner may be uneven, but days later I’m still smiling at the thought of the dispensary’s recommended strain: the Ruth Bader Ganja, which “gets you supremely high.” It’s the little moments that matter here.

Unfortunately, there's little more than formula in Ichaso's El Cantante.

Yes Man proves utterly formulaic.

Jorgen Persson's camerawork is spectacular, illuminating the cobalt blue of the frozen wastes with an almost regal air. As a travelogue, August's film works wonders; as a narrative, it's just not all there.

Basically a rehashing of previous genre films, Hopkins borrows heavily from such superior efforts as Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers (minus that film's gang motif, natch) hoping that no one will notice.

Between the neutered and uninspired adaptation, the direction that seems satisfied relying on shots that already exist rather than building something new, and the gobsmacking, borderline offensive portrayal of the lead character by Khan, Laal Singh Chaddha is a big miss.

This is a Farrelly film for adults, if not the entire family, and its a charmer, honest both to the nature of the loves we choose in haste, and the fear that makes us so hasty so often.

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.

And then there's the overacting. And then there's the hamminess of the script. And then there's

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.

There's the shell of not one but two excellent films in Pumpkin, but as it is the one we have here is just too bewildering to puzzle out.

Deanna is so irksome that even McCarthy seems to tire of her, and her bumbling, burbling, shy but gregarious persona is often discarded – not as a sign of character development, but because it would get in the way of a gag.

This film slips and sloshes around in such ways that you really can't figure out its take on the unfolding and ill-fated story.

Its kooky hybrid of slapstick gender jokes already had whiskers on 'em in Shakespeare's day.

Far more interesting than Juli and Bryce's banal budding love is Reiner and co-scripter Andrew Scheinman's sensitive exploration of how parents shape their children.

As delivered by the politically inclined international filmmaker Costa-Gavras ("Z," "The Music Box"), Mad City's oversimplification of the ethical issues is bound to annoy those with any first-hand knowledge of the news dissemination process and disappoint others who've come for the promise of a city whipped into a "mad as hell" frenzy.

Yes, the canon invoked for this film is that of the Three Stooges, but it’s still not as magnificently berserk as they can be. Set your expectations carefully for this one.

Adults can enjoy the way these youngsters spout grown-up chatter and all ages can delight in the old-fashioned slapstick. I won't claim this film's great, but it is fun, and remarkably innocent and playful.

Ultimately, the remake is, at best, rote and, at worst, totally unnecessary.

Black or White is a film all about matters of race that hardly matters at all.

There's much to enjoy here as long as your expectations aren't too high.

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

If it weren't so rivetingly realistic, it would be an easy film to dismiss. And if it weren't so easily dismissible, it would be an easy film to defend.

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.

A middling urban thriller that's one part "Rear Window" and three parts "Seven."

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.

Cinematographer Enrique Chediak (28 Weeks Later, The Good Girl) delivers crisp images, and the climactic underwater nuclear explosions are really something to behold. But director Michael Cuesta (Kill the Messenger, L.I.E.) adds little of notice to the proceedings.

Experiencing Evita is like watching one uninterrupted long-form music video divided only by different arias or costume changes (of which there are untold numbers).

Redgrave still manages to inspire awe, yet a poetically prosaic moment like the one in which she goes chasing after a butterfly is enough to throw a net over the whole thing.

It runs the stopwatch on a chase sequence to a comical extreme and takes way, way too long to take its final bow, in the process burning off any residual goodwill.

It's a call to action with no banner behind which to rally, sanitized to the point of being anodyne.

There are no astute or emotionally resonating takeaways to be had about the pain of depression, just stock melodrama with a cautionary-tale climax that feels desperate to shock.

Bottom line: costumed Goku and Chi Chi cosplayers may argue the finer points of this adaptation, but it is fairly dazzling it its own overextended, futurist-teenpulp fashion, and Chow makes a vastly more entertaining Roshi than he did a King.

The naiveté with which the missionaries approach their initial meeting with the Waodani, whose propensity to violence was well-documented, appears at once incredibly stupid and divinely loving.

The film's voice talent is good, as are the characterizations. However, the film's computer animation leaves much to be desired.

Looks and tastes an awful lot like a TV movie of the week.

Girl in Progress is an old story about a young girl told in a smart way, and that's something you don't see every day, no matter how many times you think you've seen it before.

With so many video game adaptations being little more than live-action fanfiction, Uncharted stands out by feeling like an actual movie, mostly eschewing fan service in favor of little organic beats between characters.

An adequate, inoffensive thriller that, every so often, shows itself to be a little smarter than it needs to be… even if it isn't often enough to make this thriller anything more than average.

Look, when Mel Brooks is both a producer and star of your film, you know it’ll have some laughs.

Its characterizations are as bland as sand.

Feels awfully rushed, as Ryan flies from the Ukraine to Moscow to the Russian hinterlands and back to Baltimore to make sweet, sophomore agent love to his physician girlfriend (Moynahan). It has the feel of one of 007's globe-hopping adventures, but without any of that franchise's giddy sense of fun.

It’s just too much drama for one modest film to service adequately. In an effort to cram it all in, scenes abruptly jump from one to the next with nary a smooth transition in sight, relationships evolve far too quickly, and certain subplots drop out of the mix only to resurface, jarringly, much later.

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?

Morse and Caruso provide better reasons to see this film than do Ryan and Crowe.

An above-average “killer kid from hell” picture. Not The Bad Seed but not bad.

In a world of blockbuster franchises and micro-budget horror – where movies above a certain budget seem to justify their own expense by adopting a detached irony – The Pope’s Exorcist is the kind of goofball sincerity so many of us hunger for. It’s not going to work for everyone, but if you are the kind of viewer who ends up on its wavelength – by god, what a ride.

It's not even funny. Nor does it contain half the wit or charm as the old Doris Day sex comedies it so resembles.

It's the pod people's version of a great, contemporaneously resonant cinematic fable, created by apparent committee, and utterly devoid of both meaning and feeling. The tagline warns: "Do not trust anyone. Do not show emotion. Do not fall asleep." Yawn.

So kudos to Spurlock for going into enemy territory and coming back with the message that there really is no enemy territory. It almost – almost – makes up for the fact that Where in the World is marred by one of the worst endings in movie history.

A film of immense contradictions and baffling coherency, it may be Besson’s most interesting work to date, because he finally embraces the outcast.

Colombiana is one long megayawn; I'd have garnered more titillating thrills rewatching freckle-faced Russkie sexbomb Natalya Rudakova strut her leggy, sassy stuff in Megaton and Besson's "Transporter 3."

Relentlessly dull and curiously bombastic.

Busy and boring and oppressively computer generated, Justice League screams we’re back to business as usual.

Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Chicago, Gods and Monsters) takes over the directing reins for these final two parts; his most noteworthy contribution to the series so far is a terrifyingly staged birth scene that should turn the teen fan base off of sex altogether … which is precisely what this whole dumb, punishing series has been gunning for from the start.

Broad across and rippling with muscle, 50 Cent mumbles his way through his hits.

It starts off with a slick split-screen bang, but this high tech heist thriller is like a For Dummies guide to the genre.

By the time the police come knocking at the front door, Mr. Brooks has exploded from its mild-mannered start into full guignol mode, and would take a defter filmmaker than Evans to steer the tonal shift.

Deathbed scenes and colonoscopy humor, Bible quotations and Maury Povich "Who Is the Real Baby Daddy" episodes: All cohabit with equal relevance in the world of Tyler Perry.

Never fully taps your empathy or your fears; it plays like a movie that's always about someone else.

Adults may have a hard time swallowing this toothless tale of PG-rated bloodsuckers, but kids may relate better to its lessons.

What the movie lacks is spark and sizzle. There's no palpable chemistry between Lopez and male lead Ralph Fiennes, plus the script by "Working Girl" scribe Kevin Wade is workmanlike in the extreme.

This family melodrama is as subtle as a load of bricks and occasionally as painful, but it offers two of the most finely tuned acting performances yet this year.

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.

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.

There are gestures toward a deeper interiority to Alexis’ character – and perhaps a different, genuinely thorny film about great art via dubious methods – but it never quite investigates that far.

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

Maybe America will prove me wrong by voting, but I felt like you were holding back until the end.

Come What May over-romanticizes the horrific, forced French exodus.

Is this the start of a new subgenre? Probably not – 2009's "The Unborn" traded in Jewish mysticism, too – but it's considerably creepier than it has any right to be and, to be sure, righteous rabbis can be pretty terrifying in and of themselves.

It's a Herculean task to steal the thunder from a Johnny Depp performance, but Richard Griffiths (best known these days as Harry Potter's tubby Muggle uncle, Vernon Dursley) does exactly that.

This movie won’t be for everyone; you’ll need to dive back into European arthouse cinema from the Sixties to find anything quite like it.

23 Blast is a well-acted inspirational sports drama that never quite rises above the treacly mire of cliches that seem inherent to the genre.

Most of the performances are good in a flailing sort of way, and McConaughey, especially, is a standout in this year of his reinvention. Despite all its garish accoutrements and salacious underpinnings, The Paperboy can be a hoot to watch.

The film gets there eventually, but one wishes it weren’t so timid about embracing the inherent schlockiness of the genre.

Patrick leaves no scenery unchewed, and, in doing so, he gives life to an otherwise by-the-book script and proves once again that in Hollywood, it’s usually the bad guys who turn out to be the best characters.

The movie features a very cool soundtrack and more hip lingo than two ears can absorb. But, like the air in Denver, this movie is spread awfully thin.

With a foretold ending and long stretches of pure driving, The Last Ride squanders its potential, much like its tragic subject.

Best of all, is this knock-out, though overused, optical effect of a bullet hurtling and whizzing through space toward its target. Sniper is sure to appeal to armchair assassins and fantasy war-gamers. Beyond that audience, Peruvian director Llosa's American debut will appeal to anyone interested in well-made and well-acted pictures that compensate with skill for what they may lack in inspiration.

Sandler is a post-Catskills goldmine of potential, he always has been, and when he's willing to break with tradition (a là Punch Drunk Love), he's downright revelatory. Not this time, though. This time he's just dying.

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

They (Mirren and Southerland) give potent and particular performances, bright buoys at sea in an otherwise nondescript picture.

Despite good performances all around, particularly the ever-brilliant Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a gilded ornament, speculative and uninterested in much besides this queen's matters of heart.

It's a good thing this movie has been sitting on the shelf for a year or more, because, apart from the difference in release dates, there's little to distinguish this new cop drama from last year's cop drama "We Own the Night."

What it needs is a little more dirtying down. What it needs, in short, is less New York, and more Alabama.

The action can be bloody, but is mostly routine. Ultimately, the film’s most eye-catching special effects are reserved for bikini waxes and implants.

It's fun enough on its own relatively low-budget merits, but it's really nothing to die – or kill – for.