Here's hoping Allen's static Hennessey is due to an extreme acting choice and not plastic surgery. It would be tragic to lose a natural smile to star in garbage like Death Race.

Enraging and inspiring. It boasts the miraculous quality of finding a letter in a bottle and discovering that its authors are alive.

Although the movie is unabashedly alarming, it's also intelligent fun.

Too bad it shortchanges the music and fails to provide much evidence for Wilson's appeal.

It's not exactly thrilling, and it doesn't cover much new ground. But young audiences will lap it up like ice cream.

It's a summery idyll: his most entertaining picture since "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994) or maybe "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999).

To Pellington's credit, the performers eschew sentimentality.

Go to enjoy the technical expertise, and take a first-grader (and not a particularly savvy one) along to find something of value in everything else.

At its best, Tropic Thunder wrings divine madness from wretched excess.

Kingsley dims divine Elegy.

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

Bottle Shock wastes that intriguing bit of history and some seductive Napa Valley settings on a bland script that's part period piece, part underdog fable.

It's like an Indiana Jones movie without rhythm, wit or personality, just a desperate, headlong pace.

Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.

A solid, satisfying movie.

The whole enterprise suffers from tired blood.

Step Brothers at its best is a smarter "Dumb and Dumber."

The documentary American Teen is the most realistic movie you will see all summer.

Jarrold's reduction of the story is so archetypal that it's indistinguishable from soap opera.

One of the favorite sayings of journalists and politicians is "You don't want to see how the sausage is made." Marsh's movie says you do want to see how a miracle is made, even if the details can be just as unsavory.

The genius of Garfield's performance is that he fills him with equal amounts of terror and wonder.

A handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.

Like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.

Del Toro stuffs the film with wit and wonderments. Yet, coming out this superhero summer, it plays like a lovingly crafted synthesis of every fantasy saga we've seen in the past decade.

It's a thrill ride not to be missed.

More palatable than "Norbit" but equally uninspired, Murphy's benign, pedestrian Meet Dave mostly gives us "Mr. Ed," with a bit of Crazy Eddie mixed in.

A funny, touching mood piece.