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

Anyway, the movie turns out to be hyperslick, quite well made in the technical sense (beautifully photographed and designed) and somewhat shallow, another exploration of that perennial and passionate teen theme, fitting in.

You have to grasp at straws to make even "poetic" sense of the narrative.

Dubowski's movie is an act of hope that the basic human needs of the gay Orthodox will someday be reconciled with their faith.

It's one of those movies whose appeal depends on the viewer's tolerance for watching French people suffer, smoke and sigh prettily.

Unwisely bills itself as a comedy.

"Everybody loved him. One woman understood him," goes the ad line. But the movie makes you wonder how anyone could love this screw-up and why anyone would have a problem understanding him.

It's a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its "originality."

Utterly lightweight.

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.

The movie includes a few good one-liners, but that's really all it is -- a forum for putdowns and sassy dialogues.

A feel-good us-against-them tale that panders mercilessly to its audience, yet displays a few moments of honest humor.

Denzel Washington does a cocksure turn in Training Day -- That may be enough to transform a shallow picture with delusions of grandeur into a crowd-pleasing hit.

Thank heaven for William H. Macy, whose portrayal of Happy's sheriff strikes the only honest note in a film that earns its laughs the cheap way.

Especially discomfiting is the stream of kids in peril.

It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip.

Watching a Pokemon movie is like drowning in a sea of cute.

His [Director Mike Figgis's] techniques do make the film at least watchable.

There's enough kinetic energy in Jumper to light a thousand houses. Unfortunately, there's no one home in any of them.

This slap-- sequel is primarily for the cognoscenti -- that is, for other teen-age mutant ninja turtles, or very small children. The rest of us it happily ignores.

This is a movie that falls short only because it insists on grabbing for so much.

Johnny English never builds any momentum, and Atkinson simply isn't a good enough actor to mine continued laughs from repetitive material.

Doesn't really go anywhere or amount to anything - a fatal flaw in a time-travel movie designed not only to keep you guessing, but to build genuine suspense as well.

The one perfect aspect of Jennifer's Body is its title: No one is going to like this movie for its brain.

It's hard to see Franklin's fingerprints on the material. It's as if he directed with his gloves on.

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.

Silly stuff, made all the more regrettable by the apparent skill with which the movie was made everywhere but in the screenplay department. The sheer lunkheadedness of Sebastian Gutierrez's script is impossible to ignore.

At the end of Napoleon Dynamite, you're glad the geeks have their day (even Kip's chat-mate turns out be a winner); you're also relieved to be rid of them.