Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

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.

The admirable feminist agenda occasionally trips up the narrative, but the film's performances keep it on track.

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.

In the end, the movie's just the kind of enjoyably empty-headed fluff it celebrates and mocks. It sits up, it begs, eventually it plays dead, and still you want to pat it on the head. It's a good dog.

As demonstrated in his previous film, a plangent snapshot of subsistence called "Waiting for Happiness," Sissako is a poet, and the filmmaking in this new picture is stuff of a deserving laureate.

For better and worse, the movie is more attractive and competently assembled than its schlock peers. That's refreshing, but it hardly excuses the appalling lack of suspense, intermittent tastelessness, or shockingly low camp quotient.

The only recommendable thing about Norbit is that he's not as bad as every other person in this movie.

Hits far more marks than it misses. And no work has brought viewers deeper inside the psychology of war. [06 Apr 2007, p.D10]

A sloppily made bowl of reheated chick-flick cliches.

The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

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

If Woody Allen were a young, attractive gay woman, he might make something like this, or so Maggenti hopes. But it would probably be funnier, and it would definitely cut deeper.

It's an interesting, if dissatisfying rumination on the working people of industry -- how they labor, how they rest, what they think and feel.

A rousing, sometimes funny, frequently depressing documentary.

The ‘"unreasonable man" himself is interviewed, too, and he comes across as patient, articulate, and maddeningly uncompromising.

Entertaining in a B-movie sort of way, and you can't help admiring its earnestness about the philosophical issues it invokes.

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.

The willful sloppiness and retrograde gags make Epic Movie, which was not shown to critics, an inevitable byproduct of our Internet video era. It seems downloaded and projected onto the screen, a failing online-film-school project paid for and put out by a Hollywood movie studio. That said, very little on YouTube is this unentertaining.

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

The one thing going for Becket is actually two things: Burton and O'Toole.

A poignant, all-too-common tale of casual abuse in a workplace that is candidly labeled "better than most."

If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.

It's foreign, it's inspiring, it has an adorably resourceful kid; it depicts grinding misery in a land far from West Newton, and it holds out the possibility of clambering over all that misery to attain your dream.

Mafioso is the missing link in the mob movie arc.

As it escalates to a nasty conclusion, Alpha Dog doesn't have the moral or emotional weight of tragedy. These aren't the psychologically exploded youths of "Rebel Without a Cause," or even "The Outsiders." They're characters in a long, violent, unbleeped episode of MTV's "Cribs."

Primeval is a hoot if you're in the mood, though, and it gets points for trying to stuff a little globo-think into the minds of Friday night mayhem fans (who will probably rebel, since only one skull pops like a grape).