There's a funkier and more interesting movie in Maureen, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Maureen is a single mom, a massage therapist, and a dimwit California follower of every new-age theory out there. She's a nasal, needy wreck, and Catch and Release is torn between adoring her and making ruthless fun of her.

Sadly, more than an hour of this movie is given over to talking. And not the wink-wink Quentin Tarantino kind, either.

Overall the concept is strong and expertly fleshed out; it's just a pity that Hollywood tropes are allowed to invade.

Perry shelves his crowd-pleasing Madea character and aspires for the impossible mix of 1950s social melodrama, gospel-inflected public service announcement, soap opera, R&B video, girl-centric sitcom on the CW, and any episode of "Good Times," featuring Janet Jackson's oft-affronted Penny. Were Perry a visual director or a logical, patient screenwriter, that hybrid would count as a feat of singular ambition. Instead, it seems like the product of an abbreviated attention span.

Aside from pretty people behaving cutely, there's just not much here, and even devoted Francophiles may nod into their cafe crèmes.

This movie just seems like a scattered excuse to make political points without saying much of anything. Worse, it also fails to show us, with any vividness, how Mirit and Smadar think and feel as women.

It's a doughty movie, stuck halfway between Masterpiece Theatre and Classics Illustrated, but, to his credit, gifted journeyman director Michael Apted understands he's playing the long game.

The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.

Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.

Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.

The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.

This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.

The movie, instead, is a work of giddy self-sabotage that seems determined to matter and not matter at the same time.

The movie is a serviceable way to pass the time: Kids will cheer the bright colors and funny new words ("Kowabunga!").

The stakes in this story seem too low to justify its audience’s attention. If The Page Turner were a novel, it would hardly be a page turner. Why should we hold films to a lower standard?

The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

"Rear Window" never comes up in the Disturbia press notes, which is probably just as well since it steals that movie's premise but none of Alfred Hitchcock's wit, finesse, or seduction.

It's a charming disappointment that retains the elements that make the writer's novels so good without ever bending them into cinematic shape.

You needn’t actually see Fracture to know that if the charge is acting that winks, these two are guilty.

In the Land of Women sounds like a piece of cheap science fiction about the last man on earth. If you're the lovelorn mother and daughter in Jonathan Kasdan's first movie, a grating romantic drama, that's painfully close to the truth.

And while the young director tends to skip over many of the larger societal issues plaguing many of the HHP participants, his desire to honestly platform the emotional heartbeat of his subjects still rings true.

The early dilemma in "Rise of the Silver Surfer " is this: Save the world or marry Jessica Alba . Your conscience says, "Save the world." But the Maxim reader in you knows better.

The movie's fodder for tweener girls with indiscriminate Nick TV addictions, but there's just enough wit on display to make you realize it could have been worse.

Only in the last 30 minutes does Evan Almighty put his gifts to decent use. Epically hairy and biblically robed, Carell suggests at that point what a bolder, more psychologically serious treatment of religious conviction would have been like.

Despite moments of black comedy and some memorable images, this “debut’’ doesn’t offer a lot to love.

An intensely unpleasant killer-thriller mystery.

Technique is all you have to admire. There's nothing underneath the formal exercise. The film's coyness about what's happening is cheap.

The movie's banal fantasies badly chafe any anthropological consideration of what a girl should do with her career. This isn't life. It's Lifetime.