When the film is not focused on Wilson, it's really not focused at all. This is a comedy ever holding itself in check, filled with plot threads and asides that seem as though they should be funny but almost always fall short of the mark.

The second movie, Dead Man's Chest, is everything you feared the first would be: a theme-park spectacle lasting 2 1/2 hours.

With everything this film has going for it - humor, intelligence and a splendid ensemble - Richard Linklater's nightmare drug movie, A Scanner Darkly, should be continually compelling. But it loses its fizz after a strong series of pops.

Heading South is a hydra-headed love story, as dangerous as it is heated and complex.

They put the material on lifts - and end up tripping into TV dramedy land.

Contains a dozen winning moments of humor, uplift or exhilaration. But are they enough to justify a 154-minute running time?

Strangers With Candy -- a perfect title -- is filled with straight-faced loonies. It's a nutcake you actually want to eat.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you feel that no good idea, let alone good deed, goes unpunished. Only the exuberance of the moviemaking keeps your spirits high.

The emotions seem genuine enough, even if Sandler is not a talented-enough actor to always pull them all off.

It's about as much fun for the viewer as being dropped into a virtual-reality version of a highway-safety crash film. Hall writes and directs with the finesse of a rusty hatchet.

The only thing that tops Cave here is Cohen himself at the end, singing "Tower of Song" with U2.

The opening half-hour may prove to be a disreputable classic of pedal-to-the-metal filmmaking.

Tedious almost beyond endurance.

If you haven't had enough of Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan weepies like "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) and "You've Got Mail" (1998), The Lake House gives us Mopey in Chicago and You've Got Snail Mail.

Nacho Libre enhances Hess' reputation as a gifted filmmaker and suggests there's more to Black than manic dementia. Both director and actor, however, need to find projects better-suited to their respective (and often impressive) talents.

Near letter-perfect.

Lasseter's inclusive, utterly distinctive sensibility makes Cars all that it can be. His embrace of the comic-dramatic friction between innovation and tradition infiltrates every aspect of the movie - the look, the characters, the story.

A down-home-exquisite musical dramedy.

This documentary (like the fact-based 2004 feature Miracle) demonstrates how powerful true sports stories can be when they delve into the mystery of leadership instead of falling back on nostalgia.

Besides offering the giddy pleasure of seeing Mia Farrow play a demonic nanny, there's not much to the film that a repeat viewing of its earlier incarnation couldn't provide.

It's easier to accept a breakup when it's clear that the two parties are mismatched, but a better, braver film would reveal what caused the initial attraction.

For better and worse, the entire film goes by like a theme-park cyclone ride. It makes as much sense as it needs to when you're on it. All it leaves in its wake is a residue of vertigo and speed.

Peaceful Warrior fails pitifully at being transcendent. This New Age movie about living in the moment gets you looking at your watch and squirming in your seat.

It's an experience that blows your mind, clears it and educates it.

Whether the entry is good, great or (in this case) indifferent, it's always stimulating to return to the high-flying X-Men series.

Its knockout success is a testament to Gore's eloquence and humanity and to the dexterity of his director, Davis Guggenheim.

Lacks suspense, momentum and visual panache.

The film stays true to its characters and keeps the laughs coming in what may be the closest thing in spirit to the old Warner Bros. Looney Tunes to hit the screen in years. And when it comes to animation designed primarily for laughs, praise doesn't come any higher than that.

If this version had been called The Poseidon Adventure, audiences could have sued for truth in packaging.

All this might be forgivable if Just My Luck had a little more substance, but it never moves beyond the single joke of its premise.

Garry Marshall, old pro that he is, couldn't be more endearing as the grandfather, struggling gamely to make things right.

Russian Dolls never resorts to sitcom moments as it explores the transformation of friendship into love. All the characters here are believably appealing and refreshingly three-dimensional, and the situations they find themselves in have the ring of truth. You leave this film wanting to know these people, wanting the best for them.

A film that climaxes in Shanghai shouldn't go down like a meal in Shanghai. But an hour after you see M:i:III, you may be hungry for a real movie.

Intelligent and robust contempt has become so rare in movies that the first half of Art School Confidential is intermittently exhilarating.

As it is, Hoot doesn't accomplish anything a picture book of the Everglades and a few well-chosen Jimmy Buffett tunes wouldn't do better.

Jacobson and his actors do so much with the characters that they leave an ambiguous residue of blood-streaked regrets and sadness.

By turns grisly and hallucinatory, The Proposition is one of those grand, mythic Westerns, full of wide-open spaces and dank little hellholes, detestable bad guys and virginal women, laconic lawmen and wary natives.

There's no cheap uplift to their victory, no pop catharsis. What's great about United 93 is that you never feel it's just a movie - even though, as a movie, it's terrific.

A movie like this could easy slide into Shirley Temple territory, showcasing a child actor so full of sweetness and light and good, old-fashioned spunk that audiences wince. But Palmer, whose enthusiasm and energy never seem forced, avoids all those traps; her Akeelah is never less than believable.

What makes RV work are some genuinely funny bits (one of which is not an overlong sequence in which Bob has trouble emptying the R.V.'s toilet) that should ring especially true to any parent forced to cajole a recalcitrant child into having a good time.

Watching The Lost City is like falling into a delirious dream on a marathon train ride only to be roused every 15 minutes by a conductor punching your ticket or barking out the next stop.

It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.

A masterpiece.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu runs the same 2 1/2 hours as "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," but what a difference a comic-dramatic purpose makes.

Weitz's idea of satire is generally both ludicrous and mild: exaggerating types, then sentimentalizing them.

The Sentinel moves quickly and never becomes a bore. It does become something of a cartoon, though, which proves a major letdown for a movie that aims for something far more intelligent.

It's hard, bordering on impossible, to evaluate this movie without stepping on people's beliefs.

Anna Faris, her deadpan comic timing still a joy to watch, returns as Cindy Campbell, one of two main holdovers from the first three movies.

The Wild suffers from a breakneck pace that seems to exist only so that director Steve Williams can earn his nickname of "Spaz."

The movie is so determinedly lightweight that it floats above the fray, stopping only for the occasional mild chuckle.

As gripping as Hard Candy is, one can't quite shake the feeling that we're the ones being exploited by its mordant blend of kinky revenge fantasy and push-me-pull-you moral vision.

This movie will be remembered not for the notorious Bettie Page but for its showcase of the burgeoning Gretchen Mol.

If only La Mujer de mi Hermano had a dollop of humor and at least one character worth rooting for.

The whole movie is too predictable, its conflicts either forced or simplistic.

Features lots of cool dialogue but doesn't provide much of a movie in which to showcase it.

Put the tango in "To Sir, With Love," and you've got Take the Lead.

There's a self-loathing at the center of Friends with Money that makes it a tad unpalatable, as well as a sameness, a dependence on cliche, that makes it seem trite.

It's turned Stone's Catherine Tramell from a warning sign for the dangers of wanton sex into the last thing you'd figure - a bore.

Unlike so many movies directed at teens, ATL is not interested in exploiting its audience.

A Big Sleep with underage bozos, a Maltese Falcon where the stuff that dreams are made of rests in the lockers of a well-worn high school, Brick is a remarkable oddity, audacious and engaging.

The offhand wit and casual self-revelation of Johnston's best words draw you deeper into the mysteries of his character. Feuerzeig is a music-lover to his bones.

It twists in on itself mercilessly, rarely pausing to let the viewers catch up, but that's OK. A movie like this depends on staying at least a step ahead of its audience, and this one surely does.

Queen Latifah, the star of Barbershop 2 and Beauty Shop, and thus our reigning monarch of big-screen beauty stylists, should fund and narrate a sequel. Because The Beauty Academy of Kabul is good enough to make you want to know how they do.

Thanks to a combination of fluid camerawork and careful pacing, the Belgian writer-directors have produced a compelling narrative that sounds, if not a cautionary note, a worried one.

Find Me Guilty flat-lines early.

The surefire laugh-getter centers on using a tampon to stop a nosebleed. Watching this movie, I had to hope it could stop brain-drain.

The Wachowski Brothers once again they prove themselves our reigning masters of murk.

In some ways, Thank You for Smoking does not bemoan smoking as much as it bemoans people's willingness to be duped by smooth-tongued orators.

It rarely strikes the right tone and ultimately falls short of what one would expect from a collaboration between director Wim Wenders and writer Sam Shepard.

There's comfort in seeing actors we know doing what we've come to expect them to do. But more important, the film surrounds them with supporting characters who are less familiar to us, who act in ways we don't expect.

Ask the Dust is more than an amorous period piece. It's a strongly bitter, strongly sweet poem in prose and motion.

Almost everything that happens - and almost everything happens within Flama's apartment - is food for dry humor and very recognizable humanity.

As good as Willis is, he's no match for Mos Def.

Refreshingly, the movie never wavers in the importance it places on friendship over just about anything else.

Some of the movie's sunniest moments arrive as Chappelle ambles through Ohio. He's an observational comic with a drawling syntax that's almost as sly as Mark Twain's.

The result is an out-of-control, lost-in-the-funhouse experience.

The determinedly cynical needn't bother, but just about everyone else should love Eight Below.

Unfortunately, the waste of artistic possibilities dwarfs the human wreckage - and the human salvage - in Freedomland.

If you have a sneaky taste for the monstrous and a hearty appetite for the outlandish, the pulpy yet engaging Night Watch should leave you merrily sated.

It's an authentic, harrowing tale of heroism.

Some adults may find the film unbearably simplistic, or its pace burdensomely slow. But it would be a shame if movie audiences have become so hyper-adrenalized that they can't appreciate a charmer like Curious George.

Signs of fatigue are all over the film itself.

It's the wrestling match between the banker and the bad guy that fuels the audience's adrenaline.

Even the cartoon Pink Panther in the credits seems off - at once too glitzy and too fey, more Peter Allen than Pink Panther.

The result is a performance film that conjures a vision of American life as moving, funny and rueful as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

A masterpiece of psychological suspense.

It does offer that most pleasant and valuable of viewing experiences: A message movie in which story and character come first.

Gory overkill.

Bubble is the moviemaking equivalent of the worst narrative journalism. Every bit of "human interest" is so painstakingly planted, so determined to be applauded for its observation and sensitivity, it ends up seeming as slick and bogus as the worst Hollywood blockbuster.

It wasn't shot in Annapolis and doesn't have an original thought in its head. Other than that, Annapolis is a fine film.

True, the movie tends toward the treacly at times, and the children's mischievousness seems a bit forced. But Thompson's turn as a glammed-down Mary Poppins with an even more no-nonsense attitude is hard to resist.

Unapologetically cliched and determinedly upbeat (even when it shouldn't be).

Looking for comedy in Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy In the Muslim World is a fool's errand. There's hardly any there.

It's a topical, iconoclastic documentary with the warmth and pace of a first-rate personal essay.

The end result is more a lecture than a film; audiences may come away understanding what went on, but for most, the emotional connection will be lacking.

Latifah's performance and the film's gentle heart should prove enough to win over even the most churlish.

With Tristan & Isolde, the core must be a passion that enlarges two outsize characters and seems as momentous as the rise and fall of a kingdom. Too bad this film's Achilles' heel is its heart.

It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.