On the Road is rich with evocative period atmosphere and anchored by a trio of compellingly lived-in performances from Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, and Kristen Stewart. Nevertheless, it's another staid adaptation that misses the forest for the trees and confuses people into thinking that some novels truly are "unfilmmable."

Not sure if you'll enjoy Safety Not Guaranteed? Here's a quick litmus test: how do you feel about watching Mark Duplass, accompanying himself on zither (!), singing a heartfelt song about how "everyone in the big machine tries to break your heart?"

Don Hahn’s documentary is an animator’s attempt to invigorate what is otherwise a dry story.

Parents with restless, animal-loving children may as well throw it a bone.

Betrayals will occur and loyalties will be tested, but it's the audience that ends up ripped off.

It’d all be pretty ho-hum weren’t it for some decent chemistry between the leads and the effortless presence of Regina King and Forest Whitaker.

The result is an odd, very personal film that the pop star-turned-director has made with tender loving care, but the results of the final final film are mixed.

An industry that's lost 90% of its silent films and which has consistently demonstrated - montage lip-service aside - a staggering lack of interest in its own history can hardly be trusted to transfer films from format to format and keep them intact, let alone in good shape.

Essentially a sexually charged two-hander with blunt allegorical implications, Kôji Wakamatsu's one-note follow-up to United Red Army is a disappointing affair, visually indifferent and thematically simplistic.

Taken 2 is 91 minutes of "See Neeson kill-kill, Neeson kill!"

A black comedy lacking somewhat in both blackness and comedy-isn't a bad film, exactly, but it is undistinguished, in the sense that its ideas and emotional payloads are both safe and small.

Smarter than expected, even if it's too ragged to truly resonate.

The "Fab Four's" dramadies continue for the audiences who love them. Trouble is the surrounding story and its supposedly fun sojourns are as embarrassing as granny panties.

Hardwicke shows a strong grasp at epic fantasy with Red Riding Hood; her nemesis is not a man-eating wolf but an unsurprising script.

Void of subtlety and the gritty realism that's trademark for many Sundance dramas, Another Happy Day, from Mandalay Vision, may fail to win over many critics due to its histrionic storytelling.

Watching Driver peel rubber proves B grade action movies are a welcome diversion in the era of CGI blockbusters. If only Faster didn't fizzle each time Johnson put down his gun.

With a premise better suited to comedy than drama, The Freebie is more somber and less stimulating than expected.

Segal's film tries to straddle the line between darkly funny and just plain dark, but even with a game cast and an offbeat premise, Norman is a disquieting outing with little in the way of honest payoff.

The problems begin with Shyamalan's script, which is an orgy of exposition. The characters explain and explain and explain some more, points driven home with the subtlety of a jackhammer.

Stylistically dull, Crime After Crime proceeds from one talking-head interview to the next, sticking to sentiment.

Sappy melodrama, clumsy dialogue and heavy-handed proselytizing derail the inspirational story of teen surfer Bethany Hamilton.

The basic feeling you get out of this version is ‘been there-done that.’

Trapped inside the German film Vincent Wants to Sea there's an affecting father-son drama, an amusing road movie, a quirky romantic comedy and a non-patronizing take on mental illness. What we actually get - a homogenized movie-of-the-week set against the Alps and punctuated by anodyne English-language pop songs - brought out the cynic in me.

Typically, Carpenter thrives on modestly budgeted films like The Ward, but this one comes off as an amateurish misstep due to unoriginal storytelling from fledgling screenwriters Michael and Shawn Rasmussen.

Jovovich is on cruise control here and she fails to bring any kind of new life to a character that has been very good to her.

On the surface Monte Carlo is charming, oddly down-home wish-fulfillment, but it's riddled with unexplored class issues and generic filmmaking.

The glossy Manhattan footage, as hermetic as Woody Allen's rendition of New York, is engagingly expensive-looking at least, but the cast is barely given anything to work with.

A charmingly hardened Carla Gugino reprises her role as the titular porn star, still pregnant and now coping with retirement.