The film amiably runs through all the standbys associated with vampire movies, putting a personal and goofy spin on most of them. Sharon Tate also appears, at her most ravishing.

The film clearly means to celebrate the power of imagination, but while younger kids may find it charming, some parents may begin to wonder if the girl's obsessive fantasies don't warrant a trip to the local shrink.

Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange and appealing in its undisguised incompetence.

At its core this is just another piece of big-studio nothingness. The characters are so underwritten they barely qualify as types, and the movie is badly paced, bookended by high-ordnance action sequences but painfully static in the middle.

Insipid, TV-bland drama.

The absence of any moral center makes this a bitter pill.

Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and cowriters Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger preserve some of the novel's storytelling flair, and Dustin Hoffman does a swell turn as the antihero's Italian mentor. But despite a fairly spectacular climax, the material's generic limitations eventually catch up with the plot.

I found it pretty entertaining, as well as provocative in some of its comments about contemporary life.

Definitely worth checking out.

Director Jim Fall smoothly paces the action while staying true to the girlie thrills (luxury hotels, scenic jaunts, a fashion makeover), delivering an empty-headed but enjoyable romp.

There's tenderness, humor, a gratuitous body double, and splashy lighting in this ho-hum action drama, which takes itself at times too seriously and at other times not seriously enough.

Maybe I've seen too many James Bond movies by now, or maybe the trouble with this 20th installment is that the filmmakers are trying too hard to top the excesses of the predecessors.

John Boorman's 1981 retelling of the Arthurian legends is a continuation of the thematic thrust and visual plan of his Exorcist II, though the failure of that bold, hallucinatory, and flawed film seems to have put Boorman into partial retreat.

This is a sensitive and at times gently humorous love-and-war story; the flight scenes are exciting and exquisitely crafted, the characters lovingly drawn.

Slower, more earnest, and not as gory.

Writer Barry McEvoy and director Barry Levinson might want to brush up on the use of metaphor.

A few of the set pieces are fussy or overly extended, but the rest is tolerable bone-crunching diversion.

To call this "Farrelly brothers lite" may be a little redundant, but aside from the odd vomit gag, it goes relatively easy on their usual working-class taboo busting.

The tendency that often sinks Angelina Jolie's performances - overemphasizing certain naturalistic behaviors at the expense of well-rounded characterization - more or less sinks her first film as writer-director.

Playwright Adam Rapp, making his feature debut as writer-director, details the family dysfunction to the point of hyperbole, but over the long haul he rewards one's observation and intelligence and a more interesting story emerges.

There's enough whimsy and Capracorn here to choke a horse, and things get even more complicated when the four dead people enter the body of Downey in turn—to help him help them. Fortunately the talents of the actors—especially Downey and Woodard—sometimes make this effective (i.e., funny or moving) in spite of all the goo.

If a bullet hadn't killed John Lennon, this Beatles-scored musical might have.

Debuting as director, Ayer once again points his loose cannon directly into the body politic: the protagonist of this sour but haunting tale is a crazed army ranger just returned from overseas (Christian Bale) who's so full of war that even the LAPD won't hire him.

All the characters are uniformly obnoxious, and director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) lingers over suffering even more than in his other features.

At their best, the Jackasses combine low-brow humor with delectable absurdity (one of my favorite gags from Jackass: The Movie had a guy creeping up on a cougar while dressed as a giant mouse), but here it's almost pure punishment.

Would be sweeter if the fair maiden weren't such a pill and more exciting if the villain weren't quite so nasty.

Characters remain stuck in their cliche profiles, and the direction -- by music video specialist Michel Gondry -- doesn't improve matters.

All the comedy, tragedy, and various obstacles to romance seem to have been contrived to divert the story from its tendency toward pulp erotica.