As directed by Taymor, it's a competent and nicely designed biopic that for all of the director's attempts to link surrealist film imagery with Hayek's depiction of Kahlo somehow manages to be generally lackluster.

Neeson, taking a welcome break from his late-career reinvention as a man of action, and Manville (Another Year, Phantom Thread) are such gifted performers, and they play this couple – their tenderness and stress – at a likably subtle frequency.

There’s enough intelligence and wit here to sustain your interest, especially when Curtis and Lohan are in peak form. They put the freak in this Freaky Friday.

The split screen is distracting enough, but it is the choppy scenes representing the passage of time that make the story hard to follow. More American Graffiti is not without its moments, though, and Cindy Williams' moment of realization -- when she defies authority to lead a police wagon full of women in singing Baby Love-- is a joy.

Ultimately, no matter how fascinating the subject, there are only so many shots of rich people relishing amuse-bouche, especially when it never feels like the main course arrives.

This is some dumb, thoroughly predictable, drive-in flotsam, but between the cast and the nonstop action, it's fun nonetheless.

Fake beer brands, star cars, crotch shots – a boy’s life unfolded, according to co-writer Uhelszki. Red Hot Chili Smith opines Mad magazine meets Esquire, and Uhelszki echoes equally extinct forces: “Everybody was politically incorrect. No one watched their words. That’s what made Creem so good ... If you put it through that politically incorrect filter, you would have lost 60% of what made Creem great.”

Altman-esque in its disjointed narrative but clear as day in its complexity of vision, Schimberg's film works best in its individual scenes, and scenes within scenes.

At its heart the film wants nothing more than to make you giggle, and at that it succeeds admirably.

When the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River began construction in the early Nineties, an estimated 2 million people's lives were impacted. That's a staggering number to contemplate, but Up the Yangtze effectively personalizes that near-meaningless number by putting a face on at least a few of those 2 million.

There's a sense of joy, distilled through a juxtaposition of images of celebration and ritual: women in a forest in Belarus, placing floral tributes on water; an elephant illuminated in a street fair; lanterns lifting into the air over Thailand like shooting stars in reverse; a Chinese cormorant fisherman with his bird; masked revelers at Bolivia's Carnaval de Oruro.

The film has lots of small moments that make it a worthy effort.

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

By the end, Kate admits “[her book] could be better.” Maybe this is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that real life doesn’t always make for a great movie.

While the dour pacing and tone rank right up there with watching water freeze in terms of gutpunching suspense, by the time the final, grisly revelation is at hand you're hard-pressed not to sweat.

Honeydripper’s story isn’t anything you haven’t seen a dozen times before, but where Sayles succeeds (where Sayles always succeeds) is in his ability to dramatize the psychological and linguistic details that give identity to a subculture struggling for survival.

You couldn't have gotten a more pleasantly bizarre film if Salvador Dali himself had directed, which says a lot for Miller's rabid talents.

Doesn't say much of anything at all about the Balkan conflict -- it's more concerned with MacDowell's shattered face and Brody's passionate, paranoid whinny, which, come to think of it, is just good enough.

Ultimately, Facing Nolan paints its picture of a baseball great with broad strokes, but they cohere into a warmhearted image that baseball fans and their uninitiated families can enjoy together.

It may not be spring yet, but this sweet little gem of a movie is the perfect antidote to that lengthy stretch of grimy gray weather Austin endured a while back.

Everyone knows that the villains are usually the most interesting characters in any movie. So the makers of Despicable Me were wise to cut to the chase and make the megalomaniacal Gru (voiced by Carell) the central character in this animated film.

If you’re looking for a thrilling whodunit, there’s nothing in this film that hasn’t been done – and done better – a dozen times before.

Silly, inconsistent, and completely frivolous, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby also happens to be one of the funniest movies this side of 2006.

A paradox, balancing the contradictions and ambiguities of its characters and setting with a careful hand that rarely falters, even though the film seems dramatically thin at times.

Burn After Reading, the new film from the Coen Brothers, won't be mistaken for "Fargo" anytime soon. Or "Barton Fink," or "The Man Who Wasn' There." Those films were black comedy done to perfection.

For all his superfan's intimacy with b-ball culture, he focuses less on the sport's fascinating mystique than on generic recapitulation of how celebrity culture seduces and devours young minority athletes.

Loses something in its translation to celluloid.

Predictable but never coy about it, After Words speaks to the fateful connection that sometimes occurs between two people under the most improbable circumstances.