The movie doesn't hang together as a thriller, and the characters don't hang together as interesting people.

Highly formulaic, make-'em-laugh-then-make-'em-cry comedy.

Albeit slumming with style and a fairly sharp scalpel. Married Life delights in peeling back the bright postwar social veneer to expose the characters' hidden agendas, and if this is a mystery movie, the mystery is other people.

It's polished-looking, yet dull.

Slight but fascinating.

I left as frustrated as that band teacher is at the beginning of the movie. Enough with these meek, banal exercises, David Gordon Green. Hit me with the sledgehammer in your heart.

CJ7 is precisely the 80-something minutes of delirium and cheesy special-effects you'd expect from the man responsible for the chaos of "Shaolin Soccer" and the lunacy of "Kung Fu Hustle."

How are girls supposed to behave in a culture that tells them they're Disney princesses for the first 12 years and sex toys after that? Girls Rock! has one answer: Strap on a Fender and rage against the machine.

The movie is about hope and courage and fortitude. It's about beating the odds and defying expectations. But Lucy Walker's movie is also about whether the trip was a good idea in the first place. The answer is compellingly complicated.

The movie has a dramatic thinness, breezy tone, and unconvincing happy-ish ending that make it feel more inconsequential than anything about killers and imperiled children probably should.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Not good enough to take seriously and, sadly, not bad enough to be any fun.

This story could have gone in a number of more inspiring allegorical directions but winds up your average bedtime story instead.

The problem with Semi-Pro is that it keeps forgetting it's a parody of sports movies; the final scenes are supposed to be uplifting (sort of) but they're not fooling anyone. The film's much better when it just lets the guys gas and sass each other.

The film's case against overdevelopment needs to be, and could be, aggressive, airtight. It should play to the unconverted. Instead, The Unforeseen gives us . . . poetry.

Everything about Chop Shop is modest - the movie's scale, the characters' ambitions. Another director might have tried to nudge the film's grim detours toward tragedy. And that might have worked, too. But Bahrani is a refreshingly deceptive director in that sense.

What the movie lacks in technical polish (it's not very handsome-looking) and dramatic perfection, it makes up for in unusual social sophistication.

The Signal is like a Romero zombie movie in which the zombies aren't dead, they're just really temperamental. Evil here is technology-born. Maybe our cellphones and satellite dishes are giving us all the crazy.

It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."

Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.

The result is a movie that's both clever and stupid - an interesting feat.

It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.

The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.

Horror movie Rule #1: The only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in the brain. George Romero himself laid this maxim down with his first film, the endlessly influential 1968 gutter classic "Night of the Living Dead." Forty years later, with George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the venerable filmmaker has done something almost as startling: He has put brains back into the zombie genre.

It really only comes alive in its shots of people in the neighborhood sitting around their television sets. What we're really talking about here is a problem in scope. In Hamburger's film, the world is no bigger than a cup.

Maybe writer-director Adam Brooks has made a fluffy Woody Allen pastiche here, but it's arguably more pleasing than anything Allen himself has done lately.

But what can you do with Hayden Christensen? He's as close as we have to an android actor. It's all a chore for him. He never looks sufficiently scared, impressed, or surprised by any of this.

It's a good movie for its type, but it rarely stops to let us marvel at the world it creates.

The current, much better Canadian movie "How She Move" has a more realistic grip on the racial politics of hip-hop-dance.

It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.

A tedious adventure-romance.

You've seen dozens of movies like this on cable in the wee hours.

Fiennes's energy gets the film over the finish line.

The movie's amiable, impulsive, intense, and scattershot, and since those are qualities associated with Vaughn himself, in the end it's a fair representation.

This is one of those your-roots-are-showing family circuses where just about everybody seems like a clown.

Warmly shot (by Yves Sehnaoui) and comes with a strong, burbling soundtrack of Arab pop; it slides down easily and occasionally too easily.

Their movie is watchable - never more gratuitously so than when Alba is filmed showering and slipping into a tank top. But we've been here before, no?

She has boundless energy, a wardrobe that won't quit, and enough real teenager in her to come across as more than a mere Disney creation.

Over Her Dead Body is to romantic comedy what Spam is to meat. But at least with Spam, you get cool packaging.

There's an honest, unfiltered quality to what you see and hear.

By far the funniest part of Strange Wilderness is the trailer for "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" that's running before it.

This is the epidemic from love's point of view, a story as much about how the disease can ravage the heart as it does the body. It is also Téchiné's best film since 1998's superb "Alice et Martin," and 1994's even better "Wild Reeds."

Rambo isn't dull. It is, however, often murkily directed, a real shortcoming in an action movie. In the big rescue-the-prisoners sequence, it's very hard to keep track of who is doing what to whom where.

When the cast starts clomping atop a car, their synchronized bodies joining with the booming cross-rhythms, we're sold.

The best thing in Meet the Spartans is the swift kick in the bombast it delivers to the oh-no-not-us homoeroticism of "300."

It's a warmed-over suspense thriller that's more disturbing than it is surprising or scary.

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu confirms the Romanian cinema renaissance while creating a paradoxical marvel: a bleak tale of illegal abortion that powerfully affirms one's faith in people.

They may not be as cool as Bono's fly shades, but the plastic yellow glasses required for viewing U23D supply an amazing fly-on-the-amp view of the Irish rockers in their natural habitat.

Teeth is the "Incredible Hulk" of sex satires.

The movie is actually a softer treatment of the similar sibling anguish in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Allen isn't enough of a great dark artist to pull off a full-scale tragedy the way Lumet does.

Cloverfield is content to be a creature feature; that's what makes it bearable and what keeps it from greatness. The genre, not the script, does the psychological heavy lifting.

This is the feistiest Hollywood movie about American women and their thankless jobs since "9 to 5."

A sporadically entertaining cupcake of a movie.

The film quickly becomes one of the most powerful, carefully researched investigations of the moral-legal side effects of current American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's terrifying in a way that sneaks up on you.

A sorry excuse for a ghetto SOS.

This is the sort of movie where men stand blankly over dead loved ones, then start digging. Masculine stoicism or emotional botox? You decide.

Simple without being simple-minded, warm without worrying too much about being cool. It's agreeably silly fare for the very small set and not so noisy that parents can't either follow along or take a quick nap.

One Missed Call was originally a so-so Takashi Miike freak-out. Now it's a worse-worse American eyesore.

Has John Sayles finally lost his mojo? How anyone could take a subject like the moment the Delta blues went electric and suck the joy and fury out of it is anybody's guess, but the talky, dull "Honeydripper" represents playwriting rather than filmmaking. And didactic playwriting at that.

The Orphanage gets by on mood and a mournfulness that's not easily soothed. Sadness and loss, it says, are the threads connecting the spirit world and our own, and women, who bring life into the world, understand that far better than men ever will.

There Will Be Blood" is anti-state of the art. It's the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense, the movie is idiosyncratic, too: vintage visionary stuff.

The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.

They're both tales of growing up in the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism, but Persepolis is everything "The Kite Runner" is not. It's a personal memoir rather than fiction, coolly observant instead of melodramatic, female rather than male in sensibility and sense of humor - it has a sense of humor.

In The Bucket List, Nicholson is human-ish. And Freeman is so human.

For a film about the power of speech, it's the quiet moments of rapture that say everything.

If you want to take the kids to a cockle-warming tale of humans and computer-generated critters, do yourself a favor: Skip the singing rodents and head for the baby Loch Ness Monster in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep.

Blithely inept.

Is, in its way, an apolitical comedy about politics. Or at least a naïve one, since those weapons likely eventually made their way into the hands of Al Qaeda.

Often as noisy, dippy, and enjoyable as 2004's "National Treasure," and when it's not, it's just another sequel, more absurd than most.

Sweeney Todd comes as close to raging at normalcy as Burton has dared. It's no coincidence that the rage is borrowed from a greater artist.

The first 30 or so minutes of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story condense the entire Hollywood biopic genre into a sweet chewable tablet. It's the Flintstones vitamin of spoofs.

Like most family movies these days, "Alvin" is torn between the glitz that sells and the homilies that endure. It's a load of Ting Tang Wallet-Wallet Bling Blang.

It's neither a neat little allegory about faith nor a transcendently entertaining one. I Am Legend is actually about the last man on earth played by one of the last real movie stars on earth. To be honest, Smith was all I was thinking about while I sat through I Am Legend.

I'm of two minds about this. A movie that held on to all the breathless tearjerkery of the novel would probably have to star Bette Davis as Amir, but as amended by Forster the story is now touching and somewhat dull.

At its best, the movie's crazy in unexpected and poetic ways; at its worst, merely preposterous.

You want to make lemonade from this, but even the lemons stink.

Thorough and sadly engrossing documentary.

The movie never goes as deep as the novel (no movie could), but it's a worthy approximation: a Merchant-Ivory movie that turns in on itself with a lucid and painful sigh.

At times you feel Weitz flipping the pages and dog-earing wildly, and that's a shame: This is a movie that needs to be lengthy and discursive, the better to duck into the back alleys of its invention. A visionary is required. This director isn't one.

The latest Guy Ritchie shoot-em-up, is a joke. You laugh with it but mostly at it.

That smart, hip, human comedy you've been waiting for all year.

He even calls the majestic view from one of the hospital landings his Cinecittà, after the legendary Italian film studio. The movie is a Cinecittà of the mind.

The movie tries going for a laugh or two. It even makes stabs at irony. But since none of the story is suspenseful, remotely believable, or, at the very least, cheaply entertaining, who cares?

Amazingly, no one seems steeped in the salubrious self-explication of therapy. They just sound like very good storytellers.

Smartly written and beautifully played, The Savages is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane.

A gentle collection of scenes that work and scenes that don't.

The Hollywood version of one of those fawning "60 Minutes" segments about musical prodigies. For most of it, I could hear the congested awe of Morley Safer.

The sight of Adams gliding and beaming and chirping in this movie - a self-mocking cartoon that transforms into an inspired live-action musical farce - is just about the happiest time I've had watching an actor do anything all year.

There have been plenty of movies adapted from video games before, but Hitman may be the first one that actually feels like a computer wrote and directed it.

The strangest thing about Todd Haynes's new movie isn't that he cast six actors to play the various faces and phases of Bob Dylan. It's that he needed only six.

The Mist doesn't provoke further thought; it provokes active annoyance at being punished in the service of a pulp morality tale with pretensions.

One of those overstaffed, overstuffed "when do we eat?" holiday dramedies. Call it a double-extra-strength episode of "Soul Food."

Not all of it works - and not all of it works the way the target audience of jacked-up young males might want it to - but the movie is hugely provocative fun, and I'm pretty sure that's on purpose.

Little of the fragile wisdom with which García Márquez imbued that idea has survived this timid Hollywood treatment.

A broader work than Baumbach's last movie, and it's funnier, too, even as you gasp at the misbehavior.

About a magical toy shop, but it has some of the sadder moments I've seen in a movie all year.

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.

The Coens also understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details.