It's a Big Idea movie that comes out only half-baked.

The sum is something deeply profound: about awkwardness, culture clash, failed connections, and – ultimately – the strength that comes from surviving a trial by fire.

Sauper's delicately horrific documentary is a short, sharp slap in the face of the developed world, and a long overdue one at that.

No film that requires a woman to jump in water and dogpaddle toward a man has the "sisterhood's" best interests at heart.

It's inoffensive and sports a positive "be yourself" message that’s obvious enough to be seen from space without benefit of hero-vision, but really, there's very little that's super about it.

Plays like a slapdash assemblage of the greatest hits of conspiracy-minded action cinema.

At the very least, The Aristocrats provides a survey of some of the best comic minds in the business.

It recommends itself best to viewers who can appreciate its novelty and roll with the risks it takes.

Cute and toothless as a kitten, Seamstress doesn't inspire the same kind of fervent devotion its principals feel when confronted with art, but it does make a pleasant enough diversion.

The year's most viciously entertaining psycho-road-movie-revenge-'n'-wreckage-romance.

It's a winning formula, and when done right like it is here, it transcends the clichés and moves audiences.

If you like "Maxim," you will love The Island. It is glossy. It is expensive. It has lots of slick ads for Aquafina and Cadillac.

While Linklater's version has its own unique pacing, mounting up more like a series of innings than a series of acts (even if you think you know how it ends, that bottom-of-the-ninth screwball still beans you silly), it lacks the screwball-to-the-noggin punch of the original.

It works best as a spank-it movie you don’t have to feel guilty about and that you can dance to. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Sticking it to the man, German-style.

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.

It doesn't always succeed, and sometimes it has the egocentric obviousness of a particularly clever, grad-student thesis film, but at least Harrison is game enough to mess with your head in the first place.

Depp’s performance aside, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is pure magic, swimming as it is in a black-treacle riptide of astonishing Oompa Loompa production numbers, an eerie patina of CGI airbrushing (Wonka himself looks downright pasteurized), and some almost too-clever in-jokes, and at least two references to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film "The Fly."

A stiff drink or maybe some pharmaceutical assistance might have made me overlook the film's sour tone, or the unremarkableness of its direction.

Happy Endings is unabashedly sentimental (cheekily couched in a black-comic guise), with Roos acting as a sort of benevolent god over his characters.

Co-directors Rubin and Shapiro deliver the rare documentary that totally entertains, informs, and inspires.

The overall emotion the film generates is one of moist, enervated ennui. Who cares if the apartment is haunted when the best the ghost can do is get things a bit damp and run laps on the floor above?

After this mediocrity, no one's even going to remember Roger Corman's godawful bargain-basement 1994 version. Which, on second thought, had a lot more heart that this one.

Provides a panorama without insight.

A pure distillation of the great director's ongoing themes of the frailty of the human psyche and mankind's willful inability to accept the inevitable, whatever that may be.

Like its protagonist, Cordero's film is a nimble thing, darting from hot-button topic to prison-cell metaphysics in the blink of a blind eye, but it never quite achieves the level of journalistic condemnation it so clearly seeks.

Director Carr, who helmed the similarly predictable "Daddy Day Care," keeps things moving, both on and off the court, with the sort of light, sweet humor you're not likely to find in too many other summer movies.

The problem with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, as it was with "Fingers," is that the gravity of the character’s psychological divide is clear after the first half hour, and both films add little in the next hour to deepen our – or the characters’ – understanding or entanglement.