Inception delivers dazzling special effects and a boatload of stars, but it sags and eventually buckles under the weight of its complicated premise.

George Sidney directed, a long way from the slam-bang vulgarity of his most entertaining work.

Slack and saccharine more often than it's funny.

An attempt to blend the war epic and the caper film that doesn't quite come off.

A suitable mainstream vehicle for Malkovich's bruised aloofness.

The only thing that keeps the proceedings bearable is the cast gamely rolling with all the shameless sitcom punches the script keeps throwing at them.

As in all Jerry Bruckheimer-produced summer blockbusters, the premise is paper-thin and the action sequences play out with assembly-line regularity.

Action comedy hurriedly cobbled together as a fund-raiser for the Hong Kong Directors' Guild.

Director Steve Bendelack and writer-producer Simon McBurney aim for the comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, relying heavily on sight gags and their star's pratfalls and facial contortions, but they vititate the comic payoffs by allowing scenes to run too long.

Starts off with a lot of promise and excitement but winds up 165 minutes later feeling empty and affectless.

The movie contemporizes teen-sex comedies like "Porky's" and "American Pie": when the witless nerd gets caught with his proverbial pants down, the footage ends up on YouTube with an astonishing number of hits.

The silliness only slows down for a few hokey romantic interludes. But if you like to see stuff crash or blow up, this is your movie.

The set decor is more intricate than any of the characters.

Newman does a remarkable John Huston impression, and screenwriter John Milius demonstrates once again that he went to film school.

Tinsel-thin seasonal folly (1945) about a newslady who has a GI hero over for Christmas dinner. Frolicsome in an artificially hearty sort of way, though it made its studio (Warners) a nice holiday bundle.

The film handles difficult issues of wartime morality, with clear parallels to the American experience in Vietnam, but Beresford's direction is so placid, distanced, and methodical that the film never admits any doubt or debate; it tends to seal up the issues rather than liberate them.

The true schism here, however, is between the brainless fun of the action plot and Stone's cheap exploitation of the cartels' real-life sadism.

Michael Curtiz may be the most hotly disputed director of Hollywood's golden age; his filmography includes such classics as Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Adventures of Robin Hood, but also a numbing succession of undistinguished contract pictures.

Director Clark Johnson (S.W.A.T.) has a flair for action, which compensates for the flattening effect of Gabriel Beristain's cinematography.

I found this sequel more tolerable than Sherlock Holmes (2009), though I'm not sure whether it's actually better or I've just accepted the putrid idea of turning Arthur Conan Doyle's brainy detective into just another quipping action hero.

Samson Chan's color-saturated visuals add punch to the absorbing narrative, but overall this documentary plays like slickly packaged TV fare, right down to the plugs for Nike.

Despite the lowbrow story, this is supposed to be tasteful; expect modest nudity, swelling strings, and plenty of water imagery.

Its labored goofiness seldom transcends the stale format.

Offers a steady supply of clever lines but suffers from the patina of self-loathing common to industry lifers and the unfortunate miscasting of straight-arrow Broderick as a depressed, cynical hack.

This adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stephenie Meyer never rises above the level of a teen soaper on the CW, and its pale, sulky boy toys (Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli, Jackson Rathbone) are more silly than scary.

Crary struggles to explain the eruption and influence of the extreme rock underground that began with the late-70s "no wave" scene and eventually generated acts like Swans and Sonic Youth.

The torture is strictly for kicks, which spoiled this for me, but less skittish viewers may enjoy this as a stylish and tightly wound genre piece.

Never really delivers on that promise, mainly because its scenes of two brilliant men discussing the nature of the subconscious can't compare with Cronenberg's visual rendering of that subconscious in earlier movies.

The famously oblique French director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) won a special award at the Cannes film festival for this existential comedy (2009), whose masterful technique fails to compensate for its glassy characters and mercilessly self-amused tone.

The beloved 1938 children's book about a house painter who becomes guardian to a dozen penguins has been turned into a standard-issue children's comedy with Jim Carrey.

At one point screenwriter James C. Strouse name-checks the brilliant Richard Yates, whose fiction similiarly perches between grim humor and utter despair, but the movie's hip detachment is a far cry from the unruly passions of Yates's chronic losers.

Occasionally provocative but frequently wearying.

Apart from McVay and Lea DeLaria (as a lesbian who befriends and advises the hero), the actors mainly come across as movie types rather than characters, and despite the obvious sincerity of the project, deja vu seems written into the conception.

The lead performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.

Assorted movie in-jokes should keep parents tolerably entertained, and Alan Menken's songs mercifully favor western swing over the expected twang pop.

The movie is so filled with such optimistic gestures that one wishes it were more convincing; the dialogue is riddled with cliches and the leads are too confident to portray teenage insecurities credibly.

This mild thriller's consistently dark atmosphere makes the scene-of-the-crime tableaux...transcend exploitation and even suggest a kind of feminist odyssey.

Most features composed of sketches by different filmmakers are wildly uneven. This one is consistently mediocre or slightly better, albeit pleasant and watchable. It helps that none of the episodes runs longer than five or six minutes.

Could be the work of any journeyman, give or take a few hundred gratuitous pop-culture references. Let no one accuse Zombie of stinting on the gore, however.

The travelogue sequences indicate how widely Middle Eastern cultures vary, but there are few revealing personal encounters in this well-intentioned but minor film.

This wacky Australian comedy about a struggling rock band is tolerable fun, neither as inventive as Bob Rafelson's 60s sitcom "The Monkees" nor as hilariously bad as Ron Howard's made-for-TV cult movie "Cotton Candy" (1978).

Five people worked on the script; if there was ever any inspiration behind it, there isn't now.

The twists and revelations of this rigorous noir reduce it to canned psychodrama.

This being senior year, Burstein can't help but capture some genuine drama, but there's a stage-managed quality to the movie that reminded me of MTV reality shows.

The movie clicks along pretty well until they launch their elaborate plot against the merchants of death, which seems to go on forever.

Standard-issue liberal feel-good fodder.

Robert Bolt's boring historical drama functions best as an anthology of British acting styles, circa 1966.

Like the incessant ringing of cowbells in the first two segments, the film may either hypnotize you or drive you stark staring mad.

Overlong, undercooked drama.

An agreeably shallow comedy.

The result is an uneasy mix of Coen-style laughs (particularly evident in the big comic close-ups) and Zhang's majestic imagery (in one shot the couple's divorce papers shatter into a burst of confetti).

Claudel commits the cardinal sin of withholding the full story until the very end, when it spills out in a histrionic scene between the two sisters and largely exonerates the older one.

It accomplishes what it sets out to do, and if slasher fare is your thing, you've seen far worse.

An open-mindedness in the plotting of this romantic comedy set on Ireland's Donegal coast adds a couple of mild surprises to the story.

Disturbing--if less sophisticated than the best SF (science fiction)-horror TV.

The script, which infantilizes one of the older siblings as much as the father does, undermines its own admonitions against parents and adult children meddling in one another's lives.

This is fairly satisfying, particularly a ghoulish episode in a Victorian insane asylum.

The first third is terrific...After that the movie settles into a series of ho-hum conflicts and complications, and the requisite slam-bang ending is perfunctory at best.

The lawyer is marvelously played by Evelina Fernandez, who wrote the screenplay based on her play.

A genial cast and moderately funny script prevail over the sort of sappy music cues and white-bread settings that have become the grating norm in Hollywood rom-coms.

Shafer (himself a former Playgirl centerfold) never quite manages the incisive social critique his story seems to require.

The whole thing's pretty cute and breezy, but don't expect logic or coherence.

Though its intentions are noble, it's hampered by a stock romantic subplot (Phillipe falls for his friend's squeeze, Abbie Cornish), a familiar structure (since The Best Years of Our Lives soldiers invariably come home in threes), and a lack of symmetry (some of Gordon-Levitt's story seems to have wound up on the cutting-room floor).

There's an uplifting message about heroism, dispensed in dialogue so familiar you can practically lip=synch it.

"Cut" is the most interesting of the three shorts because Park uses the opportunity to take stock of his career and the excruciating cruelty of his movies.

The sets are like islands floating in a void, juxtaposed with sepia shots of Rome and extraneous video clips of the singers and orchestra in a recording studio; the technique purposely draws attention to the movie's artifice, but the performances pull us into the story's elemental emotions.

Apatow and director Jake Kasdan deliver a fair number of laughs, though nearly every good idea is pressed into service as a running gag. The biggest disappointment is their survey of rock history, which has all the depth of a Time-Life book.

The animation is imaginatively conceived, but stiffly executed. A Fantasia designed for heads, the film does no more justice to the music than Disney's artists did. But Disney had the excuse of innocence, whereas this shrewdly conceived commercial project does not.

Blaise and Walker cleverly widen the aspect ratio as the hero's consciousness changes and make some lovely pictures of the northern lights, but the atrocious Phil Collins score (with a vocal by Tina Turner) filled me with evil spirits.

Though the idea of the therapy appears to be the demystification of sex, the filming, with its voyeuristic detachment and curious prudishness (no genitals are shown), serves only to perpetuate the familiar fetishistic mechanisms.

Jeff Lipsky invests this indie drama with admirable intelligence and insight, though these fine qualities are undermined by a sense of writerly artifice.

Eventually the shaky, grainy visuals grow tiresome, but director Nathaniel Hornblower (aka Beastie Boy Adam Yauch) keeps things lively with a variety of editing tricks and sly humor.

What sinks this one is the utter lack of the childhood insight and sympathy that really give the Disney films their staying power.

This tepid sequel to Harold Ramis's mobster-on-the-couch comedy "Analyze This" (1999) is partially redeemed by Robert De Niro's handful of scenes with Cathy Moriarty-Gentile, who made her screen debut as the teenage wife in "Raging Bull."

The movie owes more to reality TV than feature filmmaking, subordinating the various story lines to the simple question of who'll win the contest.

Despite a likable and varied cast—Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Ricki Lake, Traci Lords, and Polly Bergen, with cameos by many others—Waters's feeling for the mid-50s doesn't really match his sense of the early 60s (the problems start with the old-fashioned Universal logo at the beginning, which belongs to the 40s and earlier rather than to the 50s), and his plot moves seem increasingly formulaic. Otherwise, this is agreeable enough as a minor effort.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) are too preoccupied with hip cleverness to have much else on their minds, and the music is so-so.

Though it's full of striking visual ideas and actorly turns, it never fully convinces.

This 1958 feature is thin stuff, seriously intended but not involving.

The script is a lifeless succession of attorney-client debates and stormy horror flashbacks, though I had a good time watching Jennifer Carpenter, a comic Buffy type in "White Chicks" and "D.E.B.S.," hurl herself around as the title character.

The story is so packed with over-the-top characters (including a hit man and hustler played by Jamie Foxx) that no one gets a chance to breathe.

The European actors (especially Sartor) give commendably realistic performances, but the film suffers from an episodic script, which contributes to the sense of anticlimax when the battle finally arrives.

Marsh and cowriter Milo Addica (Monster's Ball) strive for gothic tragedy as they unbuckle the Bible Belt, but despite some credible performances (Hurt is especially interesting) the effort feels willful.

Marion Cotillard tears up all the available scenery in this overblown, achronological biopic of French pop singer Edith Piaf.

The approach isn’t new--the film’s already been dubbed “Molière in Love”--but the result is a wry look at the nature of acting and the power of comedy.

A few laughs and a lot of hyperbolic shtick make this a little better than formulaic before the standard-issue resolution.

Watching her (Blanchett) and Jones work together is the chief pleasure of this polished but self-conscious drama--Howard delivers some terse and coherent suspense sequences, but Ford looms over the story like a rifleman hidden in the red rock.

A major star in Mexico, Bichir is quietly affecting as the father, a humble striver who faces loss at every turn.

This intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects.

The film gets in trouble, as most contemporary comedies do, when it runs out of disassociated gags and casts about desperately for a story to tell; here, the lonely guy premise is dropped completely for a series of more-or-less conventional romantic misunderstandings centered on a dull Judith Ivey.

Director Cherie Nowlan steers the comedy to a feel-good ending.

The film is watchable as well as informative...But I wish I had a better notion of what story he's trying to tell.

Because so many female characters spend so much time trying to seduce Harrelson (usually successfully), the notion that multiplicity enhances intrigue is pretty worn out by the time any duplicity is revealed.

Lichtenstein dutifully unpacks the family's unhappy past, but he's so easily distracted by surreal dream sequences and colorful supporting characters that his main story gradually dries up into a sitcom.

Writer-director Spencer Susser and cowriter David Michod (Animal Kingdom) generate fresh hells at a surreally rapid clip but cop out with an incongruously sentimental ending.

Alan Rudolph's 1994 feature about writer Dorothy Parker and the famous Algonquin wits she hung out with in the 20s certainly has its pleasures, but someone should tell Rudolph that, for all his skill and charm, period movies aren't really his forte.

The involved backstory and Hartley's own generic music both prove burdensome; the main attraction is the cast's amusing way of handling Hartley's mannerist dialogue and conceits.

You won't find many surprises in the equally funny U.S. remake from producer and star Chris Rock.