Parts of it are colorful and imaginative, but the film flattens out toward the end.

At its best this 2005 feature wickedly satirizes the politics of pity--how healthy people buy off the dying with gifts and imminent death becomes a kind of stardom. But the sap begins to flow.

This movie is a clone itself, a far cry from "Total Recall" but vastly superior to "End of Days."

Matthew McConaughey injects some much needed life as the oddball coach who sets out to rebuild the football squad, and David Strathairn, Ian McShane, and Robert Patrick do their best with sketchy characters and artless dialogue.

My Sex Life, for all its virtues, was a bit conventional and bland, but The Sentinel is genuinely crazy and a lot more interesting, mainly because it has a meatier subject: the end of the cold war and what this means to French yuppies.

No movie star appears to have more fun in a crap movie than John Travolta, and his inimitable my-check-has-cleared! glee is the best thing about this lame espionage thriller.

Easy to take but ultimately rather aimless.

Originally a two-part film running about three hours, this treacle has been reduced by almost a third, though it still seems to run on forever -- a bit like life but much less interesting.

The movie is compelling now but unlikely to survive its moment.

There's some striking camerawork by Christopher Doyle (in 35-millimeter) and Rain Kathy Li (in Super-8), though this doesn't alter the overall feeling of random, nihilistic drift.

You may find it pleasantly diverting, especially if you like the leads, but mostly it made me want to see "Adam's Rib" again.

If you don't care about the first version, or what director Jonathan Demme's name once meant, the cast does an OK job with Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris's routine thriller script.

The premise is patently ridiculous, but the target audience of 12-year-old girls will be too charmed by the genre requisites to care.

Those who miss the wildness of his premainstream work will probably be only partially appeased.

Schrader is no Faulkner and no Gillespie, but in his third silly attempt to appropriate Bresson's form of story telling and his second misguided effort to remake Pickpocket, he has arrived at a pretty good offscreen narration.

The genuine sense of loss and nicely observed family details don't stand a chance against the generic buildup to the big game.

Despite some scattered moments of bad craziness involving the hero and his drinking buddies (Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi), the spine of the story is no strange and terrible saga but a conventional morality tale.

Solondz has grown so possessive of his characters, in fact, that he's begun to guard them jealously from any one actor.

It’s funny in a coarse, obvious way, and it probably would have been a laugh riot had director Edouard Molinaro possessed even an elementary sense of timing. Still, it’s not very honorable: this is one of those sitcoms, like The Jeffersons, that “explain” a minority to middle-class audiences by making their members cute, cuddly, and harmlessly eccentric.

As modern rom-coms go, this is trite but relatively painless.

It's the submarine barn and Richard Kiel's steel-toothed Jaws you remember from this one; the ostensible hero is just a fleshy blur.

Gainsbourg has some cute scenes with Johnny Depp, a debonair stranger she meets in a Virgin Megastore, but otherwise this is a fairly banal installment in the battle of the sexes.

While the actors show some sensitivity and Scott works up a modicum of suspense and involvement, the real interest of this picture is the radiance of the images—a mastery of lighting and decor second only to Scott's Blade Runner, with atmospheric textures so dense you can almost taste them. Unfortunately, this mastery bears only the most glancing relationship to the story at hand, and Scott becomes guilty of the sort of formalism that used to be charged (less justly) against Josef von Sternberg. But even though the movie doesn't leave much of a residue, it looks terrific while you're watching it: Manhattan has seldom appeared as glitzy or as glamorous.

The performances are perfectly distilled, but the traits I dislike in Bergman are all here -- self-pity, brutality, spiritual constipation, and an unwillingness to try to overcome these difficulties.

The film adopts, somewhat insidiously, the myth that life was simpler back in 1953 and '54, and it offers Murrow as a lesson for today.

Malick still has an eye for landscapes, but since "Badlands" (1973) his storytelling skill has atrophied, and he's now given to transcendental reveries, discontinuous editing, offscreen monologues, and a pie-eyed sense of awe. All these things can be defended, even celebrated, but I couldn't find my bearings.

Turns out to be entertaining but shticky.

Sadly, the technical logistics seem to have impeded the dreamlike flow a movie like this requires.

Unlike the Dardennes or the best practitioners of political cinema, Loktev possesses almost zero political acumen, and her film ends up resembling nothing more than a well-calibrated performance piece, as vacuous as its confused protagonist.

The good direction and performances seem wasted on limited material; despite a few interesting twists and ambiguities, the main revelation--that the reporter is an insufferable snob--doesn't seem worth the 84 minutes devoted to spelling it out.

Patrick Fabian is charming as Marcus, and director Daniel Stamm delivers a series of surefooted scares as the staged possession turns real. But the movie is still unsatisfying; in its eagerness to deliver familiar genre pleasures, it somehow misplaces its soul.

Argento is admired for his voluptuous use of color and his operatic bloodletting; this is lovely to look at, if you can stand to.

My pleasure in seeing Chicago's underexposed Humboldt Park neighborhood on-screen was gradually overcome by this indie drama's cliched treatment of a dysfunctional family reunion.

Well-meaning tripe from 1966, crossbreeding Swinging London and social consciousness as Sidney Poitier tries to educate some East End ghetto kids.

AnnaSophia Robb (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) is too subdued as the teenage heroine; one might expect more affect from a young woman fighting to overcome disability and return to competitive surfing.

Those craving more visceral kicks will be gratified by the endless crash sequences, but despite the perverse thrill of seeing guys fly off their motorcycles at 150 miles per hour, the crack-ups wear thin after the first hour.

Tries to be an audacious, irreverent satire about youth culture like "Lord Love a Duck," but most of the laughs get strangled at birth by the uncertainty of Siega's tone.

There's a discernible lack of enthusiasm from almost everyone involved, and Duff, who's gone from wholesome to haggard in two short years, is flat-out scary.

Most of the movie, about the search for a magical guitar pick, farts along at the level of a "Wayne's World" sketch.

In Shonali Bose's tightly constructed debut feature... the slaughter of thousands of Sikhs during the riots sparked by Indira Ghandi's assassination take on greater personal significance.

With Mallick as one of the producers, this Boogie Nights wannabe benefits from an insider's knowledge of how online commerce was born but suffers from a seemingly endless voice-over by the Wilson/Mallick character steering our sympathies in his direction (it's the sort of middle man the movie could have done without).

The movie is quite enjoyable as long as it explores the fantasy of a neglected little boy having an entire house of his own to explore and play in, but the physical cruelty that dominates the last act leaves a sour taste, and the multiple continuity errors strain one's suspension of disbelief to near the breaking point.

Jack Black is the title character in this thin adaptation of the Jonathan Swift classic.

As the bad guy, Jason Patric gets the funniest lines, but there are plenty to go around; though rigidly formulaic the movie is undeniably good-humored, if you don't count all those minor characters getting shot in the face.

I don't question the legitimacy of celebrating the courage of these individuals and their families, and I can even tolerate the hokey nostalgia for World War II epics. But I'm troubled that the filmmakers have elided so much else of what happened on that day, as if it were some kind of neutral backdrop.

Strives for comprehensive coverage of its theme of forbidden love.

The leads, Denzel Washington and particularly Will Patton, are so good they occasionally make you forget the material is shameless.

Another takeout—untidily slapped into a Styrofoam container—is more like it. Aimed at less discriminating viewers, this sequel to the 1987 Stakeout, again directed by John Badham, isn't too bad if you're looking for nothing more than good-natured silliness, low comedy, gratuitous tilted angles, and protracted dog jokes.

In some ways this 1932 item is the definitive MGM film, in which the direction (Edmund Goulding), screenplay (William A. Drake), and cinematography (William Daniels) all seem deliberately pale, the better to set off the glitter of the stars; they’re like jewels mounted in a deliberately neutral display case.

This shopworn premise allows for a series of improbable plot developments, resulting in a story that's about as geniune as Gooding's character.

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) seem to be after the gentle irreverence of David Gordon Green's buddy flick "Pineapple Express," but without his sensitivity and attention to character the movie quickly grows monotonous.

As "Kick-Ass" proved, there's a ready audience for the spectacle of a school-age girl who's a relentless killing (as opposed to texting) machine.

The film has little to do with art, intelligence, or values (except for the kind found in department stores).

Provocative but never challenging.

Sports films about underdogs overcoming long odds run the gamut from flinty intelligence (Million Dollar Baby) to mushy sentimentality (Seabiscuit). This Disney drama...falls somewhere in the middle.

Improved CGI renders the animals' bodies in greater detail, but the laughs aren't as sharp.

Some scuzzily noirish moments, thanks to Robby Müller's slick black-and-white cinematography, but once the deadbeat trio get thrown into their cell, the film comes to a virtual halt: it's minimalism reinforcing minimalism, with none of the subtle counterpoint between movement and stasis, environmental opening out and psychological shrinking in, that gave Stranger its small energetic charge.

Unlike many colleagues, I'm not a fan of "Amores Perros" or "21 Grams," scripted by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu. This conclusion to their trilogy is easier to follow as a narrative, but it's even more pretentious, generalizing about the state of the modern world.

Director Jay Russell (My Dog Skip) paces everything so slowly, and the story is so devoid of genuine conflict, that this seems to go on for an eternity.

Postwar Disney (1953) and not quite up to snuff. Disney's depersonalizing habit of putting different teams in charge of different sections of the story really shows up here, with work ranging from the flat and cloying (the animation of Peter himself) to the full-bodied and funny (Captain Hook and his alligator).

This contrived situation leads to a debate over the power of faith.

This limp 1998 comedy tries hard to be both irreverent and ethical by suggesting that deceit motivated by self-interest is OK as long as no one gets hurt.

Like some of Joan Crawford's and Bette Davis's studio vehicles, this soapy romance exists only for what Gong Li can bring to it: a certain amount of soul and nuance.

Even when his work is at its most contrived, which it certainly is here, writer-director Ron Shelton is the best purveyor of jock humor around.

For all its pretensions and avant-garde narrative dislocations, the star-studded cast...keeps this buzzing.

Director Joe Camp, the inspirational hand behind the Benji series, shows some remarkable logistic skills in setting up his scenes, and the wilderness photography is never less than impressive, but there ought to be more to harmless entertainment than following wagging tails across the screen. Some formidable displays of technique here, but the treacly anthropomorphism makes it all seem trivial and wasted.

Sometimes feels like one of those "disease of the week" TV movies from the 1970s.

Terra-cotta gnomes, the sort that decorate people's lawns, are the characters of this bizarre feature animation, which lampoons the British obsession with gardening and upholds a long tradition of cartoons pitched to tots and stoners.

Once again, Schrader tries to elevate a set of pimply sexual hang-ups to the level of Wagnerian opera; if this 1985 film were any heavier, it would probably crash right through the screen.

Despite Berlin's frankness about his personal love life and his preference for being watched when he's not having sex, the Garbo of gay porn remains elusive, largely because Tushinski doesn't seem to see the ironies and contradictions in his subject's life. He's much better when exploring Berlin's aesthetic and working methods.

The chills are functional at best and the attempts at pathos negligible.

After a while it becomes apparent that this movie is too eager to please, too willing to sacrifice its point of view toward its targets to sustain itself for the length of a feature.

Leave it to coproducer Jerry Bruckheimer to revive the Indiana Jones cycle without the period setting, the camp elements, or Spielberg's efficiency; director Jon Turteltaub just plods along, and the script by Marianne and Cormac Wibberley is equally poker-faced.

As long as Efron's shirt comes off, he could play an accountant and no one in the target audience would care.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the historical premise for this Indiana Jones knockoff.

Chicago native Steve Conrad, who scripted "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness," makes his feature directing debut with this low-budget comedy, which isn't as broad as its premise might suggest.

This romantic drama by director Mike Newell preserves the odd playfulness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's international best seller but sacrifices its eroticism and intricate nonlinear plotting.

Fickman mostly soft-pedals the play's homosexual panic, generating a comedy that lacks both the verbal sophistication of its source and the sexual sophistication of its target audience.

Never all it was cracked up to be.

Watching these endangered species evolve new approaches to hunting and shelter is fascinating, but the movie is seriously marred by a cloying screenplay and such kid-pleasing touches as shots of walruses belching and farting.

This 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle.

A stuck chairlift just doesn't exert the same primal terror as a roiling sea, and to make up the difference, Green would need a better cast and sharper dialogue than he has here.

This French kidnapping drama drags on for so long I'd have paid the ransom out of my own pocket just to wrap things up.

Has its awkward and square moments directorially, but it's also uncommonly honest and serious.

Isn't really a satire of Hollywood so much as a chance for Short's wealthy showbiz buddies (Steve Martin, Kurt Russell, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg) to poke very gentle fun at themselves and stick it to the press.

Director Kieron J. Walsh never quite figures out what to do with the numerous film references (he quotes dialogue, they reenact scenes), and the resulting uncertainty in tone, which sometimes treats the characters as parodistic products of mass culture, undercuts his later attempts to suggest that their love is authentic.

Somewhere in writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's overstyled movie, about a 12-year-old boy (Sulfaro) during the Italian fascist period who has the hots for a mistreated war widow (Belluci), is a pretty good short story about the fickleness of community and the cruelty of gossip struggling to get out.

Entertaining if superficial.

Watching these old pros play longtime buddies is a pleasure, especially since they're together in most scenes. But this thriller by Jon Avnet (88 Minutes) is mostly by the numbers, and its surprise ending, though effective, feels somewhat forced.

Time-travel cliches, female characters who exert authority only so we'll laugh at the pussy-whipped males, dialogue that's neither self-mocking nor serious, and an ostentatious though not particularly exciting production design keep the movie from taking off.

As in Christopher Nolan's Inception, the premise is so mind-boggling and fraught with implications that it tends to obviate the action mechanics of the last couple reels.

The filmmakers have created a pretentious extended "Twilight Zone" episode with obscenely high production values.

More memorable for its title than for anything else.

Another go-round for the premise of an overaged kid insinuating himself into a stranger's family.

This is eminently missable, though the mosaic design of Asgard, Thor's mythical realm, is pretty cool.

This concept comedy-drama would be even better if the intercutting among households had been timed to add dramatic content rather than simply advance the subplots.

Disappointing adaptation of Mamet's 1982 drama.

The script favors routine "Odd Couple" gags over the sort of comic contemplation of motherhood a writer like Fey might have brought to the subject.