Screenwriters Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne stick to Clancy's sure-fire formula -- building tension from the political infighting behind a worsening crisis.

Whereas "Posession" was relatively light on its feet, this is so overloaded from the outset that it can only sink.

Disposable teen romance.

Sicko horror flick.

There's wonderful use made of a Maine port town, and Ruben gets a dizzying thrill or two out of overhead shots, but the conceptual overload finally prevents this from coming together.

The general idea is to exploit a certain amount of role reversal, and Reginald Hudlin, who directed "House Party," does a fairly good job of making this fun.

The third remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) may not be a patch on the original, but it does have a few things the other versions lack.

The narrative emphasizes how much danger Spurlock is in and how noble he is to embark on all this while his wife is back in the U.S. expecting their first child; it's a little insulting to all the real reporters who've died in the field looking for hard information, not weak indie comedy.

How long do you have to be gone to make a triumphant return to the screen, and how triumphant can your return be when all three movies are duds?

Saldana makes this watchable, James supplies a fitful plausibility, and director Olivier Megaton (a former graffiti artist) keeps things racing along, preposterously.

This sequel to "Fantastic Four" (2005) drags in the Silver Surfer, who looks like a gigantic hood ornament and, given voice by Laurence Fishburne, has about as much personality.

Sheridan gives this a pacing and depth one doesn't often find in "urban" product, though Jackson, reliving his own life traumas, is handily upstaged at every turn by Terrence Howard (Crash) as his oddball manager.

Harrison Ford carries this talky, formulaic thriller by virtue of his authority, culled from years in front of the camera, but his performance can't obscure the obvious plot machinations.

This is one of those slick, violent, ridiculous Hollywood jobs that make little sense as a story, a comment on life, or a depiction of characters, but are moderately enjoyable in their spinning of movie conventions. There's even a good De Palma-style fake shock ending.

Like most of Perry's movies, this one oscillates wildly and shamelessly between raunch and pathos, leaving plenty of room for the performers to work. The lively ensemble includes a scene-stealing Cassi Davis as pothead Aunt Bam.

Though director Ulu Grosbard is as good as he usually is with most of the actors, the story problems tend to stump him too.

Despite a continuity problem or two, this is one of those rare contemporary romantic comedies that actually work.

Big, schmaltzy melodrama with mini melodramas.

The violence is suggested in a way that's neither overwhelming nor insulting to a child's intelligence as this crafty fairy tale ultimately finds a way for human and vampire characters to live and let live.

This sitcom setup is as bad as it sounds, and Cox never really surmounts it, though the characters deepen significantly after the missionary is caught caressing the waiter and sent home to be excommunicated and shamed by his family.

It's a powerful psychological conceit, but Samuell subverts it at every turn with his carnivalesque style and canned Gallic wistfulness.

It's ultimately hamstrung by storytelling that seems both underdeveloped and overdetermined.

The violence is minimal, and the humor is inoffensive enough for tots, but everything is damned soft--from the fuzzy backgrounds to the enemy's diluted Germanness.

The director of "American Pie" has set out to make a merciless satire of American media culture along the lines of "Network," but his ideas are so commonplace that nothing registers except the bile.

This story of a girl growing up in the occupied territories never finds its footing.

This is eye-catching and forgettable in the patented Bruckheimer manner, which means you should be entertained if you're not expecting anything new.

Alas, most of the surprise and the wit to be found here ends with the title.

This comic fantasy is the best vehicle he's (Sandler) ever had, a high-concept goof that gradually darkens into an emotional nightmare reminiscent of Capra.

This ends on an uplifting and philosophical note, equating moral blindness with the literal sort, which you'll probably appreciate if you haven't already slit your wrists.

Cate Blanchett returns to the role that made her a star, and though this sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) is less defensible as history, as florid costume drama it's just as entertaining.

This is the usual cartoon of hound dogs, roadhouses, antebellum mansions, and Civil War reenactments. Aside from that, it's not a bad date movie.

By the time [James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala] get around to articulating a story, the inhibitions imposed by their "good taste" begin to seem more like gutlessness, and what initially promises to be an exposure of American liberal doublethink about slavery winds up as a querulous wimp out on a subject that the underrated "Mandingo" is better equipped to deal with.

The filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets.

Director Jon Chu (Step Up 2 the Streets) ably exploits the 3D format, constantly moving the action forward and upward. The color and music also pop, as do scene stealers Martin and Facundo Lombard, Argentine twins whose comedic talents nearly match their dizzying footwork.

As in "Breaking Upwards," the best joke here is that the wives (Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate) wind up getting more action during the marital recess than their hapless hubbies.

Despite all the silliness the drift races are gripping, and director Justin Lin captures Tokyo's energy and glitter far better than Sofia Coppola.

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.

Lawrence Kasdan directed this fair-to-middling black comedy from a script by John Kostmayer, and although the pacing is sluggish in spots, people with a taste for acting as impersonation will enjoy some of the scenery chewing.

It reeks of unearned profundity, but I found it entertaining.

Not quite a thriller and not quite a character study, though with elements of both, the film is limited by its ambiguous relation to history.

Too dry to be very funny and too contrived to be outrageous, this movie has a tone so unusual it almost seems to have none at all.

An especially lame variation on Crowe's feel-good formula.

One can have a reasonably amusing time with this predictable sequel, which is a bit longer on action and shorter on wit and character than the original (hence less good, in my opinion), but still diverting and harmless enough.

The premise for this sci-fi actioner makes sense for about four seconds, after which you begin to wonder why everyone on the planet would willingly become a shut-in.

Unfortunately the movie's more interesting and challenging social aspects, which imply more than one "British-Chinese gay experience," are often overtaken by its smarminess--including an aggressively banal score and the way some actors have apparently been encouraged to overwork their eyebrows.

Hawke’s script is admirably light-handed in showing how the hero’s unreasoning passion is fueled by his parents’ painful divorce, and despite the story’s date-movie aspects, its most penetrating observations come not from the kids but from the young man’s estranged father and mother (Hawke and Laura Linney, both superb).

This isn't very good--the puritanical impulses of the slasher genre collide head-on with the sweet-butt requirements of gay exploitation flicks--but a gender studies major could have a field day with it.

This didn't make me laugh much, but I liked the music, a patchwork of samples culled from the various atomic-monster epics.

Catherine Keener is wonderfully weird as a vicious vice president of human relations, and Nicky Katt is brilliant as an actor playing Hitler in a stage play.

There's a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over.

Seems intentionally slapdash and stupid, but when one of them referred to Europe as a "country," I wasn't sure if it was meant as a joke or not. Even so, I laughed once or twice.

Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) gives a quietly focused performance in the title role, ably assisted by Brett Rice as Jones's father, Jeremy Northam as golf rival Walter Hagen, and Malcolm McDowell as sportswriter O.D. Keeler.

There aren't any big laughs, but there's a steady supply of small ones, and with his overgrown-kid persona Ferrell seems more comfortable in a family comedy than, say, Eddie Murphy.

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.

Perry's soap opera story lines are awful, with their nobly suffering sistas, gorgeous do-right men, and shamelessly materialistic dream endings. But the movie's message of gospel joy and racial pride couldn't be more sincere, and Perry gives an impeccable comic performance as the title character.

Based on this outing, writer-director Joe Carnahan (Narc) can't tell a story worth a damn--especially not a complicated mishmash like this one.

Mildly exciting sports-in-prison movie.

With a shamelessly cliched script by Amy Holden Jones (based on a novel by Jack Engelhard) that includes a speech plagiarized from Citizen Kane, the results are only for those who can take fare like "Valley of the Dolls" with a straight face and want to see Redford play Jay Gatsby again.

It has its moments, but not many, and generally speaking it runs neck and neck with Dune as the least successful and least interesting Lynch feature.

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.

Shana Feste's screenplay seldom rises above the level of daytime TV; the only actor who triumphs over her trite dialogue is Tim McGraw in a nonsinging role as Paltrow's husband and manager.

Francis Ford Coppola's gang film is as moony about death as "One From the Heart" was over romance; the film is unremitting in its morbid sentimentality, running its teenage characters through a masochistic gamut of beatings, killings, burnings, and suicides.

Stallone directs a bloodbath that borrows liberally from such male-bonding classics as Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" and Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," but offers not a whiff of the tragic fatalism and astute critique of machismo that inform those superior dramas.

Vigilant viewers may spend many of the 101 minutes fixating on tiny holes in the plot, but I was busy being moved by the premise and the filmmakers' confidence in the power of their metaphor: a little boy who's disappointed in the man he grew up to be.

As summer shoot-'em-ups go, this is pretty well executed, with plenty of macho posing and gunfire.

The plot contrivances that bring them together to torture each other are so deftly handled that I almost bought them, and the two leads are charming and funny enough to offset the characters' obnoxious motives.

This harmless comedy by Steven Mallorca comments wryly on America's weird hybrid culture, but the characters are too broadly drawn and the story drags in the last third, just when it should be hitting comic warp speed.

Director Colin Higgins plays foul with the audience, constructing some of the most dishonest suspense sequences ever filmed, and ends with a thriller that is obnoxious and manipulative in the extreme. If it were exciting, I suppose it wouldn't matter, but it's not: Higgins can't be bothered to bring the slightest bit of conviction to his plot, which takes nearly two hours to run its unimaginative course.

The plot of this character-driven drama is slender and the digital images rather muddy--apparently an impoverished indie feature can look bad and still not be very interesting--but to his credit, Thelemaque sticks to his minimalist turf. And the dogs are great.

Friedkin does a superb job of serving up the well-appointed script by James Webb and Stephen Gaghan.

Haven't we seen this already?

Better than slick, though it feels pointless -- another homage to a kind of filmmaking that's had more than its share.

Within the limitations of the genre, the film succeeds fairly well, with enough giddy sophomoric humor, stunning fights, titillating sex, and exotic sets and costumes to keep an audience entertained.

Alison Eastwood, whose good looks and last name have served her well as a Hollywood actress, makes her directing debut with this mediocre cancer drama.

Bartlett and Mevoli give appealing performances, and Bell adds to the authenticity by peppering their radical clique with real-life activists.

The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hiding—perhaps understandably.

Director Todd Phillips has become Hollywood's go-to guy for collegiate humor, and though this isn't as funny as his "Road Trip," "Old School," or "Starsky & Hutch," there are some choice sequences of the devious Thornton schooling his milquetoast students.

Not very believable, even in relation to its own premises, but if you were charmed by "Somewhere in Time" and/or Jack Finney's novel "Time and Again," this might charm you as well.

The best short on this program of five is Bradley Rust Gray's 18-minute "Hitch."

Writer-director Toni Kallem generates some touching moments (most of them involving Tom Bower as Taylor's wisp of a father), but this never surmounts the woeful miscasting of its two leads.

It's hard to enjoy the movie's charms when writer-director Todd Graff (Camp, Bandslam) keeps trying to shove them down your throat.

Chan shows he still has the chops during a showdown at the Eiffel Tower, but you'd think the movie's reported budget of $140 million might have bought Tucker at least one side-splitting gag.

Serreau directs for maximum freneticism, with her actors rushing around and regurgitating great torrents of imperfectly subtitled dialogue (a gratuitous subplot involving drug traffickers seems to have been inserted just to double the hysteria), and while there are more than a few laughs, most of them are laughs of recognition—seeing these gags again is like coming across long-lost (and vaguely embarrassing) relations.

Writer-director Walter Hill, known earlier in his career for his American versions of French thrillers by Jean-Pierre Melville (indebted in turn to Hollywood noir), specializes in tweaking much-used material.

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.

Director Jonathan Kaplan clearly has a feel for the material, but he's at the mercy of a pedestrian script by David Arata and producer Adam Fields.

So visually striking, so compulsively watchable as storytelling, and so personal even in its enigmas that I found it much more pleasurable than any of the Hollywood genre films I've seen lately.

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.

Failed romantic comedy.

If you decide to hit the concessions stand (where you're bound to have lots of company), I'd suggest going out for popcorn during either the first hour or the third, because the second features some pretty good big-screen effects involving planes, ships, and explosions.

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.

Maybury's art-world talents don't include storytelling, and his visceral bursts of fast editing and extreme close-ups don't yield any full-blown characters, narrative, or political vision.

A trio of stridently weird performances--from Nicolas Cage, William Fichtner, and David Morse--brighten this otherwise rote actioner.

A potent, moving, liberal-minded docudrama.

The movie's script and production values represent a big step up from the nearly unwatchable predecessor and make it suitable viewing even for people who aren't Twilight nerds.

Holding all this together would be enough of a chore even without the hollow black-pride message.

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

By accident or design, the resolution here is morally ambiguous and vaguely distasteful, which may be the reason I liked it.