The plot is more convenient than intriguing, the characters more cartoonish than iconic--especially the heroine, who grapples with feminism in a way that should have been fascinating.

The cast--including Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams, James Coburn, and Anjelica Huston--keeps this pretty watchable, and casting Mick Jagger as director of the escort service was inspired.

Appealing restaurant comedy.

Lately, most of Dustin Hoffman's roles have been grinning crackpots or talking animals, so accepting the 71-year-old actor as a romantic lead who could fetch the likes of Emma Thompson requires some suspension of disbelief.

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.

Novelist Douglas Coupland (Generation X) brings his millennial irony and middle-class angst to the big screen with this offbeat Canadian comedy about the lure of easy money.

If you're curious about the whole-foods movement, try Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food," which addresses the subject from a wider variety of perspectives and does so in a far less insulting manner than this extended infomercial, with its muzak score, entire sequences lifted from network TV news, and bar graphs illustrating every other scene.

It's a pleasant commercial undertaking, though everything about this $30-million production seems a bit overscaled: the stars are too big for their parts, the mystery subplot is too complicated to take a comfortable backseat to the romantic comedy, the special effects (which include two spectacular fires) are too big for the action, and even the wide-screen image is too big for the intimate, offhanded humor.

Unlike Michael Jordan, this 45-minute large-format movie demonstrates mostly unrealized potential.

There's something self-defeating about approaching an unconventional artist so conventionally, and the story becomes touching only insofar as it overrides much of what made Duras special.

Suffers from clumsy acting (mainly Hispanic amateurs), an obvious screenplay by Paul Laverty, and a simplistic view of the characters.

Eleven years on, someone in Hollywood has finally worked up the nerve to address the LA riots--but only on the slickest terms imaginable.

Fedja van Huet gives a fascinating performance as two very different twin brothers.

Jay Craven's stilted adaptation of a novel by Howard Frank Mosher lacks the urgency, the poetry, or the feeling for period that might have brought the material to life, while the cast seems to be largely squandered.

The cast is excellent--especially Kinnear, who's perfected his wounded everyman persona--and Marc Abraham's direction is elegant and understated. But their work is seriously undermined by the skeletal script.

With its black-and-white flashbacks and relentlessly earnest tone, this sometimes threatens to become a PBS documentary, yet its script is exceptionally fluid, tracing the tributaries of art, race, and sexuality that feed one's sense of self.

The comedy approaches true hilarity only when Meyers resorts to the surefire gimmick of having the oldsters get massively stoned at a party, though Streep's dilemma is handled well enough for the movie to accumulate some gravitas as it nears the two-hour mark.

The problem with all the time-travel high jinks, involving multiple versions of the major characters (a gimmick that Robert Heinlein handled much better in stories like “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies—”), is that in order to make the plot even semiintelligible, writer Bob Gale and director-cowriter Robert Zemeckis have to turn all these characters into strident geeks and make the frenetic action strictly formulaic.

One of the best of a bad genre, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Sweeping Historical Romance manages some moderately intelligent historical observations amid its lavishly re-created period decor and the puppy-dog pathos of the two central characters (Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman).

Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat) directs a sparking screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher (Stage Beauty) and Kimberly Simi; it starts as a frothy boudoir comedy but evolves into a masquerade by turns sweetly meditative and sharply satirical.

The very idea of handing him over to professional lad Guy Ritchie (who directed Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), to be played as a punch-throwing quipster by Robert Downey Jr., is so profoundly stupid one can only step back in dismay.

A throwaway comedy that really delivers.

Funnier than "Pecker" but a far cry from the best of Waters's Divine movies.

Greene delivers a wrenching performance, and like "Smoke Signals," the film ends with a cathartic, triumphant flourish.

Provides glorious escapism without asking you to turn your brain off.

The whole thing is rather forced and antiseptically cheerful.