As witless and simpleminded as the irradiated humanoids that serve as the franchise’s bad guys.

This children's sci-fi movie should be palatable to the young and old alike, yet it's ultimately more a mild diversion than a magical adventure.

Pride's story was etched in stone ages ago by mysterious movie powers beyond our understanding, and all the Staples Singers' songs in the world won't keep it from its appointed rounds.

Cheadle takes what could have been a role as a mere foil and creates a rich portrait of a vaguely discontented married man. Yet the drama sputters once it reaches a contrived and melodramatic climax that feels undernourished and artificial – both less than and more than one had hoped for.

It's all probably too slippery for the youngest viewers to grasp and too sketchy for the nostalgia crowd (for whom this revival seems most geared).

Flat out, Air Guitar Nation (winner of the Audience Award at South by Southwest 06) is a damn good time.

A playground for Malkovich – enjoyable enough but not terribly deep.

First Snow tries hard but lacks originality.

A popular Vietnamese fable that bookends this first-time filmmaker's movie may have the effect of distancing more Americans than it draws in, but once the film gets going there is no turning your back on it.

This is Iranian cinema at its most accessible: a bit slow even in its 92 minutes, with more environment than story, but deeply immersive and thought-provoking, and quite often funny.

A revenge fantasy fit for a Seventies arthouse theatre: There are no knives or armies of kung-fu acrobats, no torture scenes involving rusty pliers; there's only a creeping malevolence quietly wreaking havoc on an otherwise normal bourgeois family.

The very concept of such an assassination isn't so absurd as to be wacky – at least not since somebody fired a rocket at UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last Thursday.

In its own peculiar way, What Love Is is a testament to the redemptive power of words. Thankfully, Callahan knows to keep it short and sweet, lest his audience go mad from the noise.

A poke in the eye of genre convention with a flensing blade and a disarmingly charming razor-blade grin.

Wan does manage to infuse his film with some of the subtle unsubtleties of classic Euro-horror outings, chief among them the palpable, dreamlike sense of dislocation and the abiding severance from reality that tends to make nongenre fans wonder if someone spiked their popcorn with LSD.

The movie becomes a weak rethinking of a quality film.

If only Bullock could have foreseen how bad Premonition would turn out to be, she would have spared herself (and us) a lot of agony.

Paul Laverty's script is a masterpiece of ambivalent populism.

This Danish comedy, like most of that country's dramas, is dark, dark, dark.

Not since Mario Bava's "Hercules in the Haunted World" has Greco-Roman movie-house mythmaking been so thoroughly well-conceived and executed.

The Host is a freewheeling mix of high style and goofy, good-natured fear-mongering.

Despite all its clichéd moralizing and blatant borrowings, the movie does offer a few clever twists on an old formula. "Hoosiers" may have been a better film, but Hackman never had to coach a team to victory after his star player quit to go have a baby.

Beyond the Gates bears witness to the worst of the worst, but these days, and far more importantly, so does YouTube.

Like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) before him, Scurlock sets his sights on vast money-motivated conspiracies and doesn't rest until he finds them.

Reminiscent of Jim Sheridan’s masterly "In America," The Namesake delivers such a tactile presence that it's difficult not to leave feeling as if you've just struggled through a New York winter, attended an Indian wedding, and returned from a Calcutta holiday.

The story, based on the novel by motivational speaker Jim Stovall, throws every emotional stimulus into the pot, and the result is a deep desire for those Hollywood execs to remember that Christian doesn't have to equal brain-dead.

At 2 1/2 hours, the film is too long in the telling and too short on suspense.

With his doughy face and oversized features, Travolta seems like a giant puppet these days. The lanky stud from "Urban Cowboy" or even the cool killer from "Pulp Fiction" are hazy memories amidst his over-the-top performance from the school of freak-out acting.