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.