With all its cloying, tone-deaf attempts at genuine emotional warmth, all it really deserves is to be avoided.

It's seductive in its buildup but overall as subtle and, alas, as humorless as a hatchet to the brain.

In the strongest scenes, Ben Affleck gets his lead actors to extract the bitter juice from Lehane's wood-alcohol prose. The movie has its horrifying Gothic twists and turns, but it's never better than when it takes these two into places where the underclass goes to forget or be forgotten or get lost.

Painfully boring.

This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.

Wristcutters: A Love Story is a lousy title for a lovely-loony picture about an afterlife for suicides. It's an off-road "road movie" about people who off themselves.

As overstated and expository as a historical pageant, from the drippy music to a sputtering, running gag involving funky old jalopies to cliched speeches and teary-eyed deaths and a final voice-over crying out for peace. Why not add a song score and an exclamation mark in the title?

The best you can say about Owen is that no actor has looked better in thigh-high boots and puffed-out britches.

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

Even if you have no interest in Joy Division, this picture is worth seeing for the unsentimental empathy and passion of the moviemaking.

This Heartbreak Kid makes the mistake of trying to be semi-heartwarming.

Because Bar-Lev fails to go the extra mile either as a filmmaker or a friend, My Kid Could Paint That is at best "documentary silver."

The movie has a lot going for it, including wonderful sets and locations - in Bucharest, Romania! - that create a heightened-reality English hamlet with pub, church, manor and shops (make that shoppes!). And the lead actor, Ludwig, registers the growth spurts of the stripling hero with the sensitivity and precision of an emotional seismograph.

Anderson creates a deluxe train set, for sure. All he neglects is building up an electric current or a head of steam.

The final half-hour is like the not-so-grand finale for a silly-sticky sitcom. It's a college-town “Friends” with an unearned doctorate.

Berg doesn't let up on the tension, even when the action is bloodless.

Tang Wei brings a terrible and awe-inspiring purity to an impure character.

It's stupefying in its dullness and vulgarity.

A genuine odyssey: a journey to self-knowledge.

The result is a charmer that boldly marches where lesser movies - at least since the heyday of John Hughes - fear to tread.

First-time director Swicord brews an atmosphere of geniality and warmth and brings a modicum of momentum to a happily discursive book.

Disarming, discombobulating and disappointing.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

In the Valley of Elah is too inept and diffuse to be a howl against the war in Iraq. At best, it is a manly whimper.

Borders on poppycock.

The whole thing turns into trash with flash.

With Joan Allen bringing a crisp intelligence to the sharp, unsentimental narration, it's both awful and fascinating to follow Hitler's warped growth from frustrated painter to self-appointed arbiter of Germanic art.

The rousing new Western 3:10 to Yuma has the sweep of an epic and the economy of a stopwatch.