As the songs pile up and the plot putters along, Romance & Cigarettes wears thin, like a moral for the titular addiction: Sure, there’s the sweet dream of that first drag, but a whole pack’ll do a body bad.

For the most part, this is strictly kiss kiss, bang bang, yawn yawn.

A syrupy fable about love and family? What happened? Did they lose their nerves? Or did some meddling studio executive pull them back before they went too far out on a limb? The comedy gods hate a coward, so let’s hope it’s the latter.

The strangest part is that half the movie’s arc is missing, but the credits promise its arrival in 2009 as Milarepa Part II: Path to Liberation.

The film is visually bland and hits a few comic dead ends, but there's an element of pathos that allows us to believe in the plight of the fictional James.

One well-staged sequence in a parking garage is the film's only memorable moment

To make an intelligent heist film is difficult work; to shoot an entertaining sociological study is near impossible. To manage both at the same time has got to be some kind of minor miracle.

The Nines is the feature-film-directing debut from screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish), but it feels much more like some Bizarro World collaboration between Jean-Paul Sartre and Charlie Kaufman, and not in a good way, either.

Zombie continues to have a true, unflinching artist's eye for the sublimely horrific (a woodsy murder sequence is pregnant with disturbing, painterly compositions), that eye is wasted here on an unnecessarily moribund history of sociopathy as it relates to Halloween in Haddonfield, Illinois.

A compelling small-scale drama, and Lapica is a talent to watch.

A mildly entertaining reworking of the Farrelly Brothers' superior micro-sport parody "Kingpin."

It’s hard to imagine a time when the sea bore a sense of adventure close to outer space.

Never transcends its clichés.

If you like the character – his tooty yellow Mini, his busily working beetlebrows, his tendency to point and grunt and eat shellfish whole – then you will be rewarded with 90 minutes of such.

An awful lot of good talent has been squandered in this by-the-numbers film.

Stays on its feet through all the rounds, but it never “floats like a butterfly.”

This is frightening stuff, ably helmed (by writer/director Gorak, art director on the nerve janglers Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), viciously acted, and altogether horrific in ways George A. Romero could imagine only through the lens of the darkest sort of fantasy.

Muddled, sloppy, and obfuscating.

The action sequences are shot in close-ups and with such rapid editing, it’s nearly impossible to find a sense of rhythm let alone follow what’s happening.

Eye of the Dolphin is much better than most films of this sort, and if it helps a generation of young girls want to grow up to swim with live dolphins rather than groom My Little Ponys, that's certainly not a bad thing at all.

The film has no script; it goes from moment to moment unhurriedly.

Mostly Superbad is as soulful and funky as its soundtrack.

A comedy that's refreshing in its courage to embrace tradition and just have fun.

While it's a well-constructed doc, full of relevant information and geared toward those people who still might be fence-sitters on the subject, there's something missing from The 11th Hour's lengthy procession of talking heads: a sense of maddened outrage.

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.

Pure, goofy fun.

The Last Legion offers guilty-pleasure fun in a cheesy, very De Laurentiis way (much like 1976's Mandingo rip-off Drum), but, in the end, it's just not a very inspired or well-conceived film, despite Kingsley's strangely endearing turn as the proto-Merlin.

Shapeshifters-lite. Fangs but no fangs.