By the time the film's abrupt conclusion arrives, you realize you've been watching a love story and not, as some might hope, "The Lord of the Rings: The Asian Edition."

Save glancing asides (guns sure are easy to buy, the courts sure treat Black and white people differently), Gaudet and Pullapilly skip the social satire to focus on a more personality-driven story. Alas, the personality at the center is so very flat.

Much like the DNA-scrambled beast to which the title alludes, this film is a chimerical chop-shop product, consisting mostly of spare parts pulled from Alien, Jurassic Park, and even The Ghost and the Darkness.

Strong performances and Miller's equivocal stance toward her characters save the movie from its symbolic overload and melodramatic crash course, but in the end there may be less here than meets the eye.

Tykwer ends the film on a bizarre note that caught me off guard, a too-literal bit of salvation that is more bothersome than revelatory.

All goes according to course, and that's exactly the problem with Dan in Real Life.

A cracking good adventure film well worthy of classic Saturday-afternoon matinee status. It's also, in myriad ways, a more youthful version of Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."...What you don't have, however, is a great movie.

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.

At once perplexing and joyous, Maddin has crafted a film that, for all the confusion inherent in the tale, unfolds on its own unique (and rather tedious) terms. Love it or hate it, this is one film that just doesn't give a damn what you think.

The Christian faith-based film genre takes a dramatic leap forward with 90 Minutes in Heaven, a well-appointed work based on Don Piper’s bestseller, that, for a change, doesn’t look and sound as though it was written, performed, and recorded in some church basement.

Adams is absolutely winning in this role, which requires her to be a tough-as-nails attorney, grownup tomboy, and psychologically scarred adult. And she makes a good foil for Eastwood, though it's often uncomfortable to see the actor going through melodramatic paces.

Though Take Me to the River also offers up some civil rights history lessons between recordings, it feels like a mishmash effort overall, more a home movie than a theatrical release. That’s fine. If you approach it on those terms, you can’t help but feel the love, too.

Look, I can’t even pretend like Ambulance is great movie. I can’t even say it’s good, but, and it’s a really big but here, I can say for more than half of the run time, I was entertained.

Though it’s as estrogenic as dong quai, this amiable adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s eponymous bestseller about six friends and their book club is thoughtfully rendered with a certain universality of spirit – in that sense not unlike the books of Jane Austen herself.

In this context, The Crucible very much becomes a story about a love affair gone bad and a young, solitary girl who uses the situation to advance her position in society and wreak her vengeance. Surrounded by some phenomenal acting performances (notably Day-Lewis, Joan Allen as the wronged wife, and the always welcome Paul Scofield in the unenviable position of judge and jury), the weaknesses in Ryder's technique become more blatant.

Of course, the film is critic-proof, but as a longtime comic book (and film) nerd, I can say with some surety that Snyder has crammed too much of a great thing into his film, resulting in a super-slog that has just too much of everything.

Enemy at the Gates is a disappointment primarily because it seems so rich with possibilities.

There is much to recommend this earnest and enraged film.

The documentary hasn’t the depth of another study of high school ball, "Hoop Dreams,"' and tends toward repetition, but, in the end, its heartfelt saga scores.

It’s not a disaster by any stretch, but purists will ache to show newcomers the horrific genius of "Ju-on" over The Grudge as soon as they exit the theatre.

If there’s an error, it’s the occasional atmospheric shots of the frigid mountains around the car.

It's unclear if Van Sant intends to inspire guilt; here, as elsewhere, he is exasperatingly abstruse. And in this striving to not say too much, he ends up not saying much of anything at all.

Problems arise in the film’s third act, however, with a profoundly implausible plot turn that sends the movie skidding into bogeyman horror. It cheapens the sentiment, and the film doesn’t recover.

A weird mix of pseudo-jingoism and Bay’s usual bombastic firepower, 13 Hours ends up being a straight-up war film without an actual war in it.

Although handsomely mounted, this latest star in the Marvel Universe is not a leading light. But it probably has enough juice to keep the galaxy spinning until something more original comes along and knocks it out of orbit.

Writer-director Byler, in his first feature film, also proves to be a noteworthy new voice, even if his cinematic sense outweighs his narrative sense in this initial outing.

It’s all proper nonsense that in some ways lends itself to a more inspired, manic experience than the initial outing but in others is still held back by generic kids’ movie fluff.

Harris makes a valiant effort at a film noir but this work stars a hero in the kind of world where only anti-heroes play.