Plusses and minuses work out about evenly, if you compare the sequel to "Sorcerer's Stone." The three young leads act with more assurance; Radcliffe emerges as a leader, rather than one leg of a triangle. (Too bad he no longer expects to make all seven of the proposed pictures.)

Impassioned concert sequences with Ben Harper, Chaka Khan, Gerald Levert and especially Joan Osborne prove the Brothers' balanced approach still works on Motown chestnuts.

Carrera directs with a light touch, letting the screenplay speak for itself.

The loosely autobiographical 8 Mile, an uneven but watchable drama about life in Detroit's slums, begins the shrewd transformation of vitriolic rapper Eminem into a mainstream figure.

A handsome tribute to an era as quaintly distant as tail-fin Chevrolets and A-bomb scares.

Disney's updated, animated version respects its source material while aiming at kids who grew up with extreme sports and edgy music.

The movie is as padded as Allen's jelly belly.

Starts as a tart little lemon drop of a movie and ends up as a bitter pill. I'm glad to have seen it, for I appreciated Campbell Scott's dominant performance and Jesse Eisenberg's breakthrough. But I hope writer-director Dylan Kidd mixes less acid into the next drink he pours.

The Truth About Charlie...is that this "Charade" remake is a lumpen bore.

Alfred Molina makes an excellent foil as the easygoing, philandering Rivera, whose public murals were the exact opposite of Frida's private canvases.

Technically, the film can stand with most releases. The cast includes veterans Hal Linden, Paul Rodriguez and Jennifer O'Neill, all of whom do good work.

Ghost Ship, which can best be described by altering one consonant in the second word, sustains the stylishness of its opening for exactly three minutes.

Hollywood hardly ever pays attention to such people, and the average moviegoer won't either. But Leigh makes an irrefutable claim that their lives matter, and that attention must be paid.

The film offers an unusually rounded picture of a Latino family. All the men work, getting up early to do blue-collar jobs that demand dedication and responsible behavior. (We don't see much of them, but they have a strong presence in the household.)

Passed as slowly as if I'd been sitting naked on an igloo, Formula 51 sank from quirky to jerky to utter turkey.

If your senses haven't been dulled by slasher films and gorefests, if you're a connoisseur of psychological horror, this is your ticket.

Paul Schrader's movies depict dark nights of the soul, but sometimes you feel like you have to end the dark night with a shower. Auto Focus is such a movie.

All are watchable, attractive people who haven't worn out their welcomes. But if they continue to go round and round like this, they may. Aren't more African -American actors waiting in the wings to play romantic leads?

And what of Roger Avary, the writer who shared the Academy Award for writing with Tarantino? He continues to plummet toward oblivion with The Rules of Attraction, which ranks with the Great Pyramid of Khufu as a monument to self-indulgence.

Totally underwhelming.

At its best, the movie powerfully indicts our violent history. A montage of bloody U.S. interventions in foreign affairs over the last half-century, most overthrowing elected governments we didn't like, left me shaken.

It's handsomely shot, acted with fervor and reasonably subtle in delivering its message:

I don't mean to be negative, but I want Orny Adams hung naked over a pit of snapping crocodiles. That said, Comedian is a lightweight but appealing backstage film about two performers.

The overwrought White Oleander may be middling drama, but if it bears any resemblance to truth (which I doubt), it's a brutal indictment of the L.A. County Department of Social Services.

Punch-Drunk Love buries a terrific performance by Adam Sandler under a heap of faux cleverness, meaningless symbolism and irritating mannerisms.

Blanchett is riveting.

I can't tell you if Red Dragon is more faithful to Harris' book than "Manhunter," which I haven't seen in 16 years. I can tell you it's less artful and atmospheric, a straight-ahead thriller that never rises above superficiality.

Speaking of sounding Southern, I have to admit that the accents didn't match, and half the actors couldn't even do accents. But since we all sound alike down here, that's no big deal.

Inside Moonlight Mile, an honest and heartbreakingly true movie is struggling to get out.

Hawn always appears to be acting with a vengeance, but Sarandon just breathes her part.

Kapur’s contradictory feelings about his material result in a movie that works against itself. As righteous and consistent as his anger may be -- it’s displayed from the opening title cards to the final shot -- it doesn’t blend successfully with the story.

Director Steven Shainberg and writer Erin Cressida Wilson argue that everyone deserves the love that makes them happiest, and that these two will remain miserable until they stumble upon each other.

Zomboid, convoluted excuse for a thriller is among year's worst.

Yet its visual surrealism, identity-bending and strong social/ecological message make it as much an allegory as a fable.

An unassuming, brief and cheaply entertaining boxing movie. It's long on punching and short on character, but you wouldn't go to a Hill movie to see "Raging Bull."

It's a fable that descends rapidly into nonsense.

Let me say, in my desire always to be positive, that Serving Sara is the funniest film I know where a man sticks his arm up a bull's rectum to massage its prostate.

Some movies need a suspension of disbelief. Simone requires a suspension bridge. And as fast as you try to build it, the movie keeps tearing it down.

Though the writing isn't always specific, Williams is. He differentiates between the murderer in "Insomnia," who wants a cop to understand his motives, and Sy, who realizes no one ever could.

When there's no dialogue, this film stays right in the pipeline. When characters open their mouths, it ends up in the tripeline.

If you liked "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," you're on safe ground here -- Next time, I'd like to see Gedeck serve up a hearty meal instead of a tasty but unfilling appetizer.

Can I admit XXX is as deep as a Petri dish and as well-characterized as a telephone book but still say it was a guilty pleasure? Because I have to confess, when special agent Xander Cage tossed two detonators onto a mountainside and outran the ensuing avalanche on a snowboard, I was digging the action.

Eastwood has two knacks as a director/producer: He casts smaller roles well, as he did here, and he can establish an atmospheric mood, often an ominous one. But he hasn't much visual style -- for an action star.

Doesn't have the daring lunacy of "Chuck and Buck," the previous collaboration by director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White. Yet it gets closer to the troubled, lonely soul of its main character.

You could dismiss it, as I do, as an impenetrable and insufferable ball of pseudo-philosophic twaddle.

The vigorous, unsubtle acting provides consistent pleasure, once you stop expecting it to seem realistic.

Evans makes a terrific raconteur, imitating voices and putting us behind the scenes.

The yarn itself is a winning one.

The funniest, crassest, wildest, most musical, most satirical and most scatological of the Powers trilogy. And you get to watch Britney Spears' head explode. What more could you want?

The lead actors come from America, Ireland, Iceland, England and South Africa. Who decided they should attempt Russian accents? Neeson forgets his, Ford wavers in and out, and real Russians in the cast make the others sound inauthentic.

Neuwirth vamps up a storm: She's like some silent-screen hellion sending lust rays out of bemused eyes.

The cheesier it got, the more I liked it.

Anyone familiar with the movies of Julio Medem knows where "Sex and Lucia" is going. Or, rather, knows that it's impossible to know.

The film delivers the goods, reptile-wise. Though the computer-generated villains look a bit clumsy at ground level, they're superb in the air.

Try as he might, (Hanks) is miscast in Road to Perdition, a partly satisfying gangster drama that amounts to less than the sum of its handsome parts.

The two leads don't have sexual chemistry together, but that's part of the point.

On the positive side, the four Worm Guys haven't lost their squiggly charm, and Rip Torn is always welcome as MIB mastermind Zed. On the minus side, you get two Johnny Knoxvilles, one of them a tiny head that protrudes from the big one's shoulder.

Lil' Bow Wow deserves a better-made film than this pleasant, sloppily assembled fairy tale.

Watching Lovely and Amazing is like coming into a long-running, well-written television series where you've missed the first half-dozen episodes and probably won't see the next six.

It's a drab jumble of meaningless action, dull characters and animation as flat and superficial as its story.

The supporting cast is almost uniformly good, from Conchata Ferrell as a sympathetic waitress to Erick Avari as a corporate type with a surprisingly big heart and a hidden silly streak. Turturro relishes his quiet overplaying and steals the bulk of his scenes.

Excruciatingly flat comedy.

Few white directors depict racial interaction in a thoughtful, non-exploitative way, but Sayles has always been one of them.

The film moves swiftly and unerringly to its conclusion. Spielberg remains under Stanley Kubrick's directorial spell.

Know how to tell if a war movie is mediocre? An outspoken bigot, usually a Southerner, abuses a patient member of an oppressed minority -- the Asian recruit, the African American or, in the case of Windtalkers, a pair of Navajo men from Arizona in his platoon.

The dangers in the lives of these Catholic teens are self-made; they spring from small-town boredom and lead to a conclusion that's meant to be emotionally crushing but is only slightly affecting.

Watching this comedy is like going out with an attractive blind date who runs out of conversation after a quarter of an hour.

One of those rare thrillers where the cops aren't fools, villains don't turn stupid at crucial moments, and career assassins seldom miss targets.

I took a 12-year-old along to Scooby Doo just in case I didn't get it. Our verdict: one paw up, one paw down.

The picture lasts 111 minutes, partly because of numerous false endings. Now, that constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

The movie's weirdness isn't organic; it's imposed, like barber-pole stripes painted on a prison wall.

A question: If you hire actresses from England, Kansas, Ireland and Michigan, shouldn't someone teach them all to do believable Southern accents -- and remind them to keep doing those accents as the film goes on?

If you're put off by deliberate filmmaking (or subtitles, though the movie doesn't have much dialogue), you're in the wrong spot. If not, you'll see why voters gave "Atanarjuat," as it's officially called, a 2002 Oscar nomination for best foreign film.

A middlebrow hybrid that should satisfy most fans of spy movies without blowing them away.

Malcolm Lee's brilliant documentary about American race relations.

Delivers the kind of vengeance fantasy women unhappy with their husbands may want: Vicarious satisfaction, however clumsily delivered, is better than no satisfaction at all. Just be sure to stop by the lobotomy clinic en route to the theater.

Less gloriously showy than "Memento," but it proves you can still craft fine art under the auspices of a big studio.

Parker's afraid that we'll be bored by the language alone, so he throws in absurdities.

If you used this guy's umbilical cord for fishing line, you could land a world-record marlin.

If the brothers Weitzes) don't yet have a defined style, they do seem at ease with this more sophisticated material.

Ryan Gosling's riveting as a neo-Nazi who was raised in Jewish faith

The saga regains its grandeur with a complicated but easy-to-follow story. The characters are as satisfying as the effects.

Heavy-handed symbolism permeates the picture, down to the leading lady's name.

A wild, self-indulgent but completely captivating extravagance.

For all the satisfying details in the script, the big picture remains hopelessly and intentionally trite.

I'll sum up my reaction in a word: Yawn.

It's cheerful nonsense from blithe beginning to obvious end.

Most of the actors keep an icicle-stiff upper lip except for Winslet, who darts around like a finch with a beak full of sunflower seeds, and Burrows, who exudes a musk of refined sexiness.

Vardalos is of Greek ancestry, which makes stereotyping permissible: She can tease Greeks, just as Italians can safely mock Italians or Jews can poke fun at Jews. But isn't it demeaning to reduce your heritage to clich?s?

The Rock isn't always comfortable delivering dialogue. He's handsome, physically sculpted and farther along dramatically than Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Conan the Barbarian," but he's still learning the simple acting skills an action hero needs.

There is indeed a murder - two of them, in fact - and the movie proceeds strictly by the numbers laid down long ago in some by-the-book Hollywood writing class.

Has more twists than the Pacific Coast Highway and more layers than a stack of silver-dollar pancakes. If you can wrap your mind around one unlikely condition, the picture provides unalloyed pleasure for connoisseurs of cinematic con artists.

Worthwhile IMAX look at the ways nations cooperated to build Space Station Destiny, and what they hope to achieve.

Feeble, vapid picture.

It's watchable from start to finish, despite lapses in common sense, and it boasts a terrific cast of over-40 actors.

You'll depart with memories of a well-crafted study in quiet horror, and with ideas whirling in your head about the nature of evil and what happens to children caught in its grip.

Bogdanovich adds touches to appeal to serious film fans.

Once, for no reason, Franklin whirled the camera around 360 degrees while two people were having an ordinary conversation. I suspect he must have been as bored by then as I was.