Another miscalculation by sophomore director Michael Mayer.

Perhaps it's fitting that a movie about the early CIA be tangled and opaque, but this drama loosely based on the life of uberspook James Angleton verges on incoherence.

I'm a sucker for fantasies, but this one is so undistinguished and arbitrary that it left few traces in my consciousness, apart from the impression that the filmmakers resort to cruelty whenever they run out of ideas, which is often.

Light-bodied comedy.

It's most entertaining for its stunt casting of movie stars as the president's family and advisers.

Filmmakers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds offer a damning chronicle of failure and chaos.

The movie hits a surprising range of emotional grace notes, including several moments of genuine regret, and concludes with an understated moral lesson about the value of self-respect over social status, something that would never happen in an Allen film.

The theatrical monologues come close to defeating him (Wenders), and only Jessica Lange, as one of Shepard's abandoned girlfriends, manages to avoid cliche.

Well-intentioned but obvious drama.

As a movie, this sort-of sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show ain't much—but then neither was the original, and we all know how much difference that made.

It's tempting to accuse director and star Kevin Costner of taking the idea of vanity production to a new level in this frontier adventure based on a book by David Brin.

The characters quickly succumb to stereotype.

Brian Cox does sturdy work as the minister who helps Obree combat depression, and first-time director Douglas Mackinnon gets a big assist from Obree himself, who doubled for Miller in some shots and filmed others with a camera strapped to his handlebars.

Jeff Wadlow directed this exploitation flick, which seems designed for students on spring break.

Promises more than it delivers.

This mild 1984 comedy about a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who falls in love with a New York City yuppie (Tom Hanks) isn't at all hard to take (John Candy, in a supporting role, is hilarious and original, and Hannah has a pleasant naive charm), but its appeal is based almost entirely on regression—a thematic regression to infancy (now endemic to the American cinema) and a stylistic regression to the most lulling kind of TV blandness. No wonder it's relaxing: it's a lullaby.

This pretentious 2005 art movie is somewhat interesting for its wide-screen photography of the striking locale, but the storytelling is awkward and confusing.

Despite some amateurish moments, Pulido displays genuine visual intelligence, using repeated static angles to emphasize the blandness of the family's anonymous tract house and moving with the characters as they try to individualize themselves.

Sam Wood's direction is limited to forced perspective compositions and hollow, incantatory line readings, but the craggy landscape shines under Ray Rennahan's Technicolor cinematography.

God save us when director Taylor Hackford decides to become a metaphysician and Al Pacino decides to demonstrate his genius by reading the phone book--or, to be precise, a script only slightly less repetitive and long-winded.

For a movie that consists almost entirely of real sex and real rock 'n' roll, 9 Songs feels remarkably conventional.

If you're happy to watch a thriller about a tenth as good as Alfred Hitchcock's, director D.J. Caruso and screenwriters Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth hold up their end of the deal, at least until the proceedings devolve into standard horror-movie effects and minimal motivations.

The comic scenes can be arch or shrill, but director Marcos Siega (Pretty Persuasion) does better when the story turns somber and the emotions feel genuine.

The film embraces proletarian chic but still gets its laughs by abusing waitresses.

Flat and unconvincing.

The filmmakers seem to think they can also manipulate us by combining the erotic with the disgusting. And they can--it's a foolproof tactic.

The current burlesque revival is a throwback to ostensibly more innocent times, and writer-director Steven Antin finds something redemptive in each character.

Writer-director James Mottern has a reasonably good feel for the textures of blue-collar life, but he pounds home the life lessons, underscoring them with poignant country-western songs.

First-time director James Gartner observes all the rituals--the coach busting chops, the team sneaking out to party--but the players are indifferently characterized and the civil rights story has a fake Black History Month feel.

The gags are slighted in favor of John Denver-style homilies, mouthed by John Denver, while the film collapses under the weight of missed narrative connections, the apparent victim of excessive recutting.

Thanks to Gina Prince-Blythewood's treacly screenplay and plodding direction, the movie quickly congeals into a mess of sentimental cliches.

Director Paul Greengrass has applied his jumpy, tumbling visual style to action blockbusters with Matt Damon and serious dramatizations of political events. This Iraq war drama makes a game attempt to meld the two, though manufacturing thrills takes precedence over any kind of journalistic insight.

All I got was this lousy movie. OK, it's not that bad, though in contrast to "Ocean's Eleven," which gave its megastars a neat little heist story, this sequel is both contrived and convoluted.

The force of the social criticism is diminished by contrivance and the inclusion of peripheral material.

The silly story is basically just an excuse for some thrills and goofy one-liners, but even if the more likable characters tended to get killed off too early for my taste, I wasn't bored.

The opening and closing passages of this 1954 adaptation of Lerner and Loewe rank with Vincente Minnelli’s finest, most purely cinematic work—magnificent orchestrations of textures, colors, and movements. What comes between is soggy: a stiff and literal interpretation of the book, filmed on obvious sound stages with a “natural splendor” you could put your fist through.

The movie's suggestiveness gives way to a certain thinness and lassitude.

Rather wan in its anything-goes spirit of invention, the movie has a surprisingly low number of laughs; some of the initial premises are good, but there's very little energy in the follow-through, and this time Murray's listlessness seems more anemic than comic.

Samberg can't carry this, though director Akiva Schaffer supplies some hilarious, "Jackass"-style wipeouts and there are nice supporting turns from Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers) as Rod's love interest and Bill Hader as one of his goofball friends.

Only the engaging lightness of the two lead performances prevents the film from falling into utter treacliness.

The special effects, for once, are witty rather than overblown, and director Nora Ephron, writing with her sister Delia, handles the material with some grace and confidence.

It's odd that a movie featuring a great classical director is notable for some extremely contemporary acting.

His story demands to be heard, though Tucker and Epperlein lack the material for a full feature and pad this out to 73 minutes with some incongruously playful elements (spy music, comic-book illustrations, scenes of Abbas frolicking at a beach).

While the film's premise is shamelessly hokey and Joe Nussbaum's direction is at best pedestrian, props are due the young cast, especially Bynes, whose can-do optimism seems genuine if ultimately overdone.

Watchable, if at times familiar.

Pine, who expertly approximated William Shatner in the Star Trek reboot, seems to have picked up some of the actor's air of self-serious buffoonery, and it suits him well; as Witherspoon's best pal, late-night TV comedian Chelsea Handler holds down what might be called the Nora Ephron part, dispensing an endless stream of bawdy man jokes.

The scenes between husband and wife are spectacularly awkward and arresting, though the movie grows more dubious the nearer the guys get to their shooting session in a local hotel room.

Dumb but harmless live-action comedy for kids.

The problem is that only a fan would be inclined to tolerate this dunderheaded mystery.

Martin Scorsese's first feature (1968), set in New York's Little Italy and starring Harvey Keitel in his first role, can be read as a rather rough draft of Mean Streets, down to the use of rock music and Catholic guilt.

By the end Smilla has become a formulaic action hero--equally at home in an evening dress and blue jeans--not a marginalized victim seeking to uncover the source of her wound, and the film collapses around her like glaciers of melting ice.

This is a smart departure for Chan, who's been wasting his talent in mediocre comedies; the other actors don't fare as well. The plot takes forever to get rolling, and the movie is hamstrung by numerous tourism sequences.

Powell had made The Red Shoes five years earlier; here he was clearly hoping to expand the style of the final ballet segment into feature length. But without dramatic grounding Powell’s voluptuous visuals seem empty, and his manic inventiveness operates in a void.

This is a killer idea for a political satire, and screenwriters Jason Richman and Joshua Michael Stern come close to realizing its farcical potential.

The performances, especially of Penn and Robbins, are so powerful and detailed (down to the Boston accents) that they often persuade one to overlook the narrative contrivances (particularly the incessant crosscutting), the arty trimmings (including Eastwood's own score), and the dubious social philosophy.

Adults won't find much to enjoy here, though the dog's high-octane action series serves as a perverse parody of Jerry Bruckheimer-style summer blockbusters.

Directed by Katt Shea Ruben from a script she wrote with producer Andy Ruben, this starts off with some spark and drive, in part because of the writing and playing of Gilbert's character, but gradually sinks into cliche and contrivance as the familiar genre moves take over, dragging down the characters, plot, and style.

Tries to break free of formula but finally succumbs to the warm glow of predictability.

A talking bulldog named Frank steals the show.

A typically overproduced 1956 Fox film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, with Yul Brynner as the king and Deborah Kerr as the British schoolteacher who comes to Siam to educate Brynner's army of children. Too long at 133 minutes, but the score is swell.

Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen is now serving a life sentence for his long career as a Russian and Soviet spy, but this rote thriller implies he should have done prison time just for being Catholic. As played by Chris Cooper, Hanssen is a humorless asshole who commits treason because the bureau won't give him an office with a window, and the screenplay scores countless easy points off his religiosity, which masks a weakness for sex tapes and sleazy chat rooms.

Very much a matter of shared taste and attitude, but cultural outsiders had best beware.

Peter Weir's 1986 adaptation of Paul Theroux's best-selling novel is literally that - an adaptation without much character of its own.

A Boy and His Dog lacks the density of a Peckinpah film—in spite of some clever ideas and a few well-wrought images, it seems too schematic and its satire too blunt.

Tykwer manages to negotiate this incredible coincidence without much trouble, though the movie slows to a crawl in its second half.

I was bored well before the end, but found the first half hour pretty funny.

The gilt-and-grime setting is eerily atmospheric, and screenwriter Dan Madigan has a nicely sick sense of humor.

The coincidences that make the destined lovers' paths cross aren't contrived with much finesse, but the characters get in some decidedly clever lines.

Grim, phantasmagoric view of recent and not-so-recent Russian history.

It's not your usual story line, but Widen makes it sufficiently plausible; unfortunately, the film's fireworks ending isn't as subtle or spooky as the rest of the movie.

Ineptly realized in everything but its chase scenes (which are, I'll admit, pretty good), the movie is rich in moments of inadvertent surrealism.

Another giggly gross-out comedy for teenagers.

Stone works some imaginative changes on the usual formulas of propagandistic fiction—Boyle is anything but the usual bland audience-identification figure, waiting around to be converted to the ideological position of the filmmakers—but as a director, he still didn't have the chops to bring off such an ambitious, multilayered project: the picture lunges into hysterical incoherence every few minutes, and Stone must resort to platitudinous simplifications to clear things up. It's lively, though, to say the very least.

Whereas the 1987 horror hit The Stepfather was top-notch drive-in fare, this perfunctory retread had a tame, made-for-TV feel.

This spiritual thriller is too wooden to be taken as seriously as was clearly intended.

More fun to think about than to watch.

It runs like a Swiss watch, though the plot continuously turns on Cage's liberal interpretation of ridiculously cryptic clues.

This sounds like a slender premise on which to hang a feature, but director Ning Hao is more interested in ethnography and landscapes than narrative and often holds our interest by concentrating on how folklore, technology--motorbikes, cars, trucks, films, TV--and imagination affect a nomadic way of life.

Director Zak Tucker is a bit too fond of jump cuts as signifiers of edginess. Still, when the material doesn't get in the way he's pretty good at getting across the emotional content.

Tiresome, blood-filled comedy.

It's ultimately a losing battle when the audience's lack of interest in eastern Europeans is assumed at the outset.

Glen's willingness to give the action sequences a certain weight and seriousness produces some genuinely exciting moments, yet his work is everywhere undermined by the flatness of the characterizations and the uncertain architecture of the plot. Still, Maud Adams makes a nice impression and Roger Moore has shed some of his smarminess.

This thriller largely succeeds in putting quotation marks around its use of genre conventions, mixing subtlety and overkill to create a pensive mood that transcends the plot.

What's most conspicuously missing is the kind of background information needed to assess many of Eichmann's statements.

This moves back and forth between slightly clever and dopey or silly, kept vaguely watchable by the charming leads.

This romantic comedy turns stereotypes inside out as the main character, whose sense of commitment is represented by a tattoo on her finger instead of a wedding ring.

It has been called both detached and loaded, unfairly slanted as well as balanced by some of its critics--I can only testify that I found the film both troubling and absorbing over two separate viewings.

Most of the humor is of the kick-daddy-in-the-shins variety, though Anjelica Huston has a few choice moments as "Ms. Harridan."

Aspiring fashion designer Jay McCarroll, who triumphed in season one of the Bravo reality show Project Runway, tries to "make that leap from reality-TV designer to real-life designer" in this irreverent documentary.

Scenes in which Ford meets with record-industry honchos and a manipulative producer suggest that the music business is almost as exploitative as the porn business.

Carell and Apatow collaborated on the script; it does manage a few laughs, but the characters seldom progress beyond the two-dimensional.

This screen adaptation never quite jells, veering from family drama to stale 50s consumer kitsch, but it's anchored by strong performances from Julianne Moore.

John Zorn wrote the percussive score, which is compelling throughout.

The facts of their grim treatment, often exacerbated by their estrangement from their countries of origin, sometimes recall the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The first positive portrayal of homosexuality in Russian cinema, a distinction that carries it only so far.

The consistency with which the plot turns on characterization instead of contrivance makes this movie better than many of its supposedly grown-up competitors.

In this lavish adaptation of Lisa See's novel, the complex chronologies of the parallel narratives are skillfully handled by director Wayne Wang, which makes his reliance on unbridled sentimentality all the more irritating.

The crazy color schemes and visual effects once made this a popular head picture, though you'd have to be stoned to tolerate the score, which includes The Candy Man.