Raimi plays with the audience’s loyalties, making the insufferable Brad increasingly sympathetic and Linda more unhinged and despicable by the minute. Yet ultimately Send Help devolves into two awful people being awful to each other for two hours.

Becoming Astrid’s saving grace is Alba August. She is in almost every frame of this film, and gives life to what, on paper, amounts to a Lifetime channel biopic.

Heijningen's The Thing is tightly paced, has enough imaginative horror to satisfy even the most jaded gorehound, and never strays too far from its source, so why do you come away from it feeling like it was the runner-up in a daylight nightmare festival?

Pleasant but pedestrian.

Somehow, there’s more than a little bit of fun to be had in this oddball little throwback, filled with mischievous glee and a sullied heart of gold.

Although the film never fully convinces us of its characters’ cold, pain, and desperation, their brotherly sparring keeps the story interesting.

The film reunites Carell with his "Little Miss Sunshine" co-star Arkin, who, as always, delivers the goods, as do most of the other supporting players. Too long by at least 15-20 minutes, Get Smart is nevertheless a giggly summer movie.

Hereafter is a consistently identifiable Clint Eastwood movie only in the sense that the prolific filmmaker shows that he still has the ability to confound our expectations of him.

Never finding its right tone, Admission uncomfortably founders between the story’s comic and dramatic aspects and leaves behind a lumpy residue that tars its likable leads.

Cobbling together so many different characters (nearly all of them familiar to regular viewers) has left the Kids' feature debut as something of a letdown. We've seen it all before, and better, on HBO and Comedy Central.

Cars 2 makes for a decent play date but is not an especially good movie.

It never really rollicks like a good political satire.

Persecuted is a profoundly conservative, Christian ideological take, guised as a classic Seventies paranoid thriller. Certainly unique, this is another targeted release, specifically aimed at groups sharing its beliefs.

The movie doesn't quite add up beyond its performances.

At its best, Roscoe Jenkins is about the crushing influence of the past and one man’s attempts to free himself – by hook, crook, or Hollywood – from underneath it. At its worst, however, the movie is content to just explore the apparently infinite comic potential of dogs having sex, people getting sprayed by skunks, and men getting beaten up by overweight women.

For most of the film, Bateman, the director, manages to bring out the two principals’ anguish without resorting to sentimentality, until the unsatisfying last quarter of the film.

Honestly, the visuals let a stellar voice cast down. In trying so hard to escape Disney, Serkis just fell deeper in his shadow.

Perfectly passable film.

Intends to be a farce, not a drama. The film never quite achieves either definition.

Yet, the problem goes beyond the film's staginess (although there's plenty of that to go around). It could even have something to do with the delicate difficulties involved in the successful transfer of stage camp to the more intimate level of film.

Director Caton-Jones ("Scandal", "Memphis Belle") once again shows his flair for period detail though he never here exerts his grip on the human drama.

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

The performances of Mary McDonnell as the coach's ex-wife and Alfre Woodard as a ballplayer's ambitious mom raise the dramatic levels to such a degree that you might want to see the movie for their performances alone.

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

In the sea of mediocrity that passes for children's films these days, Mr. Popper's Penguins has enough originality (and silly physical comedy) to make it stand out.

A shaggy lead actor, a mundane setting given sci-fi spice, and a quick rattling off of the film’s central pitch – Rockwell’s Man From the Future needs six people to come with him to save the world – all fulfill the Fantastic-Fest catnip check list. Yet that intense energy can’t sustain the movie’s two-hour runtime, even with charismatic infusions from the star-studded supporting cast.

Pacing problems and shallow psychological inquiries plague this film almost as much as the overworked metaphor that supplies the film's title.

Just when you thought you'd been ecologized to death, here comes another preachy-teachy, green cartoon. But wait, this is no Captain Planet of the big screen. This is no wooden caricature spouting he-man environmentalism. This is funny, pretty, touching, scary, magical stuff.