Leigh certainly has a sense of cinematic style and Emily Browning possesses a fragile beauty that hides a remarkably resilient interior. It's a pity, however, that Jane Campion did not exert a more powerful sway on the result.

While A Thousand Words features some reverent flashes and even has the potential to touch audiences (a moment involving a mother with Alzheimer's particularly hits home), it suffers from being too broad.

A movie that ought to entice people to want to travel with Gulliver instead inveigles them to run from him.

So it's apropos that Forby's biggest misstep is his thin and careful script that can't carry us away on the same winds of fate that would put a sovereign republic's future in the hands of such a young woman.

Strictly for patient, gay-friendly audiences, this drawn-out melodrama about an ageing drag star in overstays its welcome.

An amusing turn from Steve Buscemi in the title role and some sporadically funny, off-beat dialogue provided by debuting writer/director Hue Rhodes make for a passable, if forgettable, little time passer.

To his credit, director Neil Burger either doesn't realize or doesn't care that the material is hokey to the point of unintentional hilarity-if not for the film's intermittent moments of hyper-stylization and its almost crippling sense of self-importance, Limitless might have been a truly unwatchable bore rather than just annoyingly silly and tedious.

If there was ever a horror film that made fans of the genre feel old, it's Scream 4.

While it never quite rises above the problems inherent in the material, The Spy Next Door does shine in those moments when Jackie and his stunt crew are permitted to do what they do best.

To say the franchise is coasting along on fumes suggests it once ran on a full tank, which may not even be true for "Meet the Parents," the surprise hit that kicked off this broad comic franchise.

Too introverted and gimmicky for its own good.

It's the sheer lack of investment one feels for the couple that truly sabotages the film.

As tales of troubled families go, it may have aspirations to be like "Ordinary People," but it falls way short.

It's a simple story that gets the gentle nudge it needs to reveal its greater purpose. Probably too subtle for most tastes, the novel's reputation and its unique idea should draw people to cinemas.

Green Zone is an exercise in commercial cowardice masquerading as a thriller about political bravery.

This archly self-aware coming-of-age tale fizzles, as the targeted Latino audience is upstaged by a culture more firmly rooted in the film's soggy Seattle setting.

There are no surprises in this tale, filmed with deliberately deglamorized handheld camera (yet inexplicably in widescreen); it puts the "adult" in "adultery drama," if by "adult" you mean joyless bores.

This is admirably ambitious, but Carnahan's not nearly good enough a writer or director to pull it off: the results are portentous, muddled and not nearly as entertaining as Neeson's usual face-punching antics.

That's My Boy has the same freewheeling appeal and potty-mouthed, go-for-broke mania of Sandler's earlier comedies. But there's a new undercurrent of energy that's likely the consequence of Sandler separating from his usual collaborators.

Hardcore genre fans will likely be quite disappointed to find a film that trades vision and originality for something best described as bland and inoffensive.

Even with a big name cast that includes three Oscar winners - Halle Berry, Robert De Niro and Hilary Swank - New Year's Eve is at best a pleasant diversion.

Gone starts off as a character study about a woman struggling to regain control of her world in the wake of a horribly intrusive event, but that sort of thing doesn't make for a fun night at the movies, so it quickly concedes to a Hitchcockian "wrong woman" riff, in which sexually motivated abduction serves as the worst MacGuffin in movie history.

From Prada to Nada might appeal to tweens but word of mouth won't be nearly as strong as Austen's parlor gossip.

While well known to many Down-Under fans, Bran Nue Dae has too much comic kitsch for U.S. specialty film audiences.

A movie that overrules logic irritates its audience; we don't like to be reminded that there's a writer pulling the strings. And here, the POV horror is a conceit as well as a distraction, a crutch to create suspense from shaky, dark footage.

Sex and abortion are the main topics of this installment, which tips between dullness and total camp.

Sadly, the documentary just doesn't have enough coherent passages to make anything about this now seemingly ancient journey compelling for contemporary audiences.

Tsui Hark's films aren't famous for their coherence, but Flying Swords of Dragon Gate is such a wantonly incomprehensible experience that it occasionally feels like an epic piece of outsider art.