Has its heart in the right place, and could have been an insightful rumination on corporate shortsightedness and mid-life obsolescence. Instead, it's another one of those Hollywood films whose feel for the workingman's life seems to come exclusively from other movies.

It makes for quite a rumpus, but the material never catches fire.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon makes Bicke suffer the greatest indignity: it turns him into a relentless bore.

Kids, except for the very youngest, are going to be bored.

In real life, Bacon and Sedgwick are husband and wife. Their scenes mark one of the rare times an off-screen couple's intimacy enriches on-screen passion.

Meet the Fockers? Avoid them would be a better suggestion.

In Schumacher's relentlessly arrhythmic and tone-deaf film, Gerard Butler plays the title role as if he were just plucked out of Monty Python's lumberjack chorus.

Enraging and enthralling.

Darger made art as if the lives of his subjects depended on it. That's how Yu has made her movie.

If you didn't know that Martin Scorsese made The Aviator, the enthralling new adventure-biography of Howard Hughes, you might think it was the calling card of a neophyte visual genius.

In Robert Gordon's script, Handler's hilariously literate bouts of psychological torture develop no consistent tone, voice or momentum.

As a romance, Spanglish is like a wholesome flirt who drags things out and becomes a tiresome tease. As a satire of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, it's a disaster.

The action is thrilling enough.

The best reason to see it is Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee.

The Sea Inside brings us outside and inside ourselves, and takes us to brave new aesthetic depths.

In a boxing soap-opera way, Eastwood is trying to do for himself as a performer what Sergio Leone did for him in a spaghetti-western way: douse his rough-hewn banality with reflected emotional coloration.

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

It's the strangest comic misfire yet from Wes Anderson.

The story is a comic-book tale at its most basic level.

The title captures this film's harrowing qualities, but not its energy, its limpid beauty or its spiritual grace.

The word "yuppie" has fallen out of favor from overuse, but Closer's young urban professionals are so vain and superficial they may bring it back as the ultimate putdown. This movie is a yuppie nightmare.

By turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece.

Guerrilla provides one huge compensation: the getting of historical wisdom.

The movie is a monument to egomania - and I don't mean Alexander's.

Christmas with the Kranks is so calculated that it's pathetic, a warm-hearted holiday greeting card with not one scintilla of honest emotion inside.

The best moments in Paper Clips - and there are plenty - come when it doesn't resort to mundane cliches or calculated emotions to make its point.

A wholesome, headlong extravaganza - a sort of North by Northeast sans high style and erotic innuendo.

If nothing else, it may make one appreciate the cartoon even more.

The movie gets as overblown and masochistic as the worst Joan Crawford vehicle. Its saving grace is that Bernal really does have his own deep-set, smoldering variation on Bette Davis eyes.

Salma Hayek merrily struts off with most of Brett Ratner's wispy caper comedy.

The glory of the movie is Depp, who achieves his own immortality.

Too bad Kidron, Fielding and company pay only cafe lip service to satire.

The movie dramatizes a social-sexual sea change with an out-of-control blend of cartoon farce and melodrama and clinical, often ludicrous sex scenes.

Like the coolest train set a kid ever had. It's not real and the faces on the toy people don't look human, but it has bells and whistles galore and will take you as far as your imagination allows.

True-blue Incredibles is a super tribute to the power of family and the might of imagination.

It's a shame his (Foxx) performance isn't surrounded by a better film.

This depressing look at love isn't quite worth enduring.

A film that celebrates the intricacies of life in ways both splendid and mundane, revealing it all with unflinching honesty.

The only character with any personality in The Grudge is a Tokyo house, but not to worry - it's got enough mean in it to keep any horror movie afloat.

Lightning in a Bottle has breadth, both in its multitude of perspectives and its spectrum of performances.

Proves that marionettes can be as foul-mouthed and profane as their cartoon counterparts, but not nearly as clever.

Bening's performance makes up for a lot of deficiencies.

A slick sci-fi thriller that comes complete with enough twists to keep audiences satisfied and enough moral quandaries to keep the thinkers happy.

In the end, this is a movie that doesn't respect its own power. Less of a stacked deck would have left Vera Drake to play a far more effective hand.

Too much about the game and not enough about the town, the players and everything else.

What makes the film work better than its nearly unbearable cuteness suggests is the casting of Christopher Walken as the son; the movie has yet to be invented that Walken can't improve simply by showing up.

The movie may be too precious for mass consumption, but its filmmakers' willingness to assume the best of their audience, combined with its Everyman origins, suggest a movie that deserves a chance.

In the end, viewers are left with a nagging feeling that this was a long way to go for the incongruous pleasure of watching 20th-century method acting on a 17th-century stage.

Taxi's only saving grace is an inexplicable, though delightful, turn by Ann-Margret as Andy's ever-tipsy mom. She's a stitch, and about 100 times better than her surrounding material.

Celebrates heroes without turning them into saints.

Shark Tale is "Finding Nemo" with bigger-name stars, far less heart and, the guess here is, about one-third the staying power.

Huckabees boasts an impressive cast, and every one of them is fun to watch. But there's a strong sense that no one really knows what's going on here.

There's a power to Woman Thou Art Loosed that transcends its limitations, a determined, heartfelt belief in the possibility of redemption.

Offers a welcome riff on a well-worn horror standard.

This is a movie that earns its suspense and validates its emotions, especially its examination of the bond between mother and child.

Lovely, heartfelt and unforced.

A Dirty Shame is certainly dirty, and maybe it's even a shame. But this is the John Waters we've come to know and cherish, and that alone is cause to celebrate.

The cinematic equivalent of a careless foot fault.

Gloriously retro, unashamedly celebratory of the joy of moviemaking and the love of old-fashioned heroism.

The performances of Luna and, especially, Reilly, make the film more enthralling than it perhaps deserves to be.

The weirdly exhilarating thing about Wicker Park is the reckless abandon with which it embraces the convenience of coincidence, and then the extreme measures it takes to reassure the audience that it's not a movie about coincidence at all.

Hero is a movie that lives up to all the nobility of its title, a gift to movie audiences who cherish the opportunity to be transported to a heretofore unimagined world and absorbed totally into what happens there.

Even in a world where stupidity mixed with cliche is all too often mistaken for humor, this movie barely meets expectations.

Congratulations, Renny Harlin. You've successfully exorcised all the horror out of The Exorcist.

It fails to dig beneath that surface picture and offer up anything in the way of explanation or motivation.

The result is a highly critical and impossible-to-dismiss examination of the administration's rush to war that is sure to move both sides of the political spectrum to apoplexy.

There's no character to root for in this movie, no potential triumphs or resounding failures, just the sense of people going through the motions because they can't bother to think of anything better to do. And that's not a lot to hang your moviegoing hat on.

Meandering, forgettable trifle.

If only all this wonderful talent wasn't in service to a story that pushes credulity beyond the breaking point, perilously close to the realm of farce. Too many coincidences, too much convenient timing, too little honest plot development.

The year's most unsettling movie experience - and in this case, that's a very good thing.

Partially financed by the liberal Move On.org, speaks most eloquently when it lets Fox News do the talking.

Washington is wisely cast as Marco; few actors command more instant respect, and the movie uses that to make his character both believable and sympathetic.

Making a live-action version of Thunderbirds is like rounding out the edges on a Picasso painting to render it more realistic.

It doesn't take a genius IQ to figure out the movie's final twist far in advance, leaving the attentive viewer to wonder only about how Shyamalan will pull it off and to hope the movie doesn't turn silly.

The real attraction is watching all these guys and gals on the train, so young, so dedicated to their music, so unconcerned about almost everything else.

In their formidable quest for junk food, Harold and Kumar end up redefining what the all-American protagonists of Hollywood movies should look like - and prove this comedy is not quite as brain-dead as it originally appeared.

Garden State is filled with characters you long to know more about, in situations to which almost anyone can relate. And that's as near a can't-miss movie formula as one can get.

A mess, but it means well.

It's a top-notch action film, albeit on the bloody side, complete with decisive action, mysterious characters and a nobility and sense of purpose that allows its excesses to be forgiven.

Greengrass has a fine sense of pacing, keeping events moving. It's rarely hard to guess what's going to happen next, but events unfold with such gusto that there's barely time to notice that.

Catwoman is a mess, there's really no other way to describe it... It doesn't work as high art, and it's too ponderous to be truly high camp. As a fashion shoot for the pin-up crowd, however, it's the cat's meow.

The actors here are uniformly excellent, and the story has a definite lightweight charm.

The story is without an original thought, the characters little more than caricatures (unappealing ones, at that) and the filmmaking so uninspired that it's hard to imagine anyone embracing it with anything more than a shrug and a wonder why they didn't wait to catch it on TV.

Moves along with great speed and verve, and it's got just enough of a sci-fi sheen to make things interesting, if not provocative. Philosophers and true believers may be disappointed, but for movie fans, I, Robot mostly delivers the goods.

The true heartbreak of Maria Full of Grace is that it never comes.

When it sticks to the subject, the movie is sad and affecting.

To discover why movie fans are screaming for more Will Ferrell, and to savor the work of improv wizards like Carell, go see Anchorman.

There's a dollop of charm and a deluge of formula in Sleepover.

You don't have to be a Metallica junkie to get this film.

The risks these guys take seem outlandish, their accomplishments otherworldly.

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

A vibrant emotional epic.

The Clearing reminds us what a riveting presence he (Redford) can be.

Schwartzberg sees the homegrown innovativeness and grit still standing beneath the glossy media version of the American personality.

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

To their credit, director Nick Cassavetes and screenwriter Jeremy Leven heighten the melodrama and seize on the most distinctive strokes of Nicholas Sparks' bland best seller.