Story is fairly conventional and not especially well told, though as usual Tran's images are so sensual and beautiful that I was rarely bored or frustrated.

The young heroine is rather humorless, but Gavras's intelligence and skillful touch are evident throughout.

An overloaded script by Heidi Thomas... defeats a fine cast

Nothing quite works as it should: the rhythms are subtly off, the pace is forced, the comedy overextended . . . and the surfeit of hommages—to the Keystone Kops and Laurel and Hardy and Jerry Lewis and all and sundry—threatens to sink it before it gets out of the starting gate. But there's something to be said for Edwards's insatiable overreaching, and at times the orchestration of pratfalls and comic pairings could hardly be more deft.

This originated as a late-night play, and the humor is correspondingly sophomoric, but I loved Dennis McCarthy's melodramatic score.

The Israeli academy showered awards--best picture, director, screenplay, editing, cinematography, sound, costumes, actress, supporting actress, supporting actor--on this coming-of-age story, which makes its modest whimsy even harder to get excited about.

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.

The humor's vulgar and the plot feeble, but this is a cut above the gross-out comedies aimed at male teens, and its heroine and her gal pals keep the high jinks amiable.

Feels particularly mechanical. The movie isn't a complete waste: it adequately re-creates the comics' Dickensian characterization, and every frame brims with clever details. But once the action begins, Spielberg's incessant, force-fed "fun" quickly gets exhausting.

This has some currency as ethnography, showing how tribal and interpersonal matters mesh with sports mania, but it remains a formidably dull account of an inherently exciting pastime.

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.

Vanessa Redgrave bails out this mushy Italian-postcard romance.

Unfortunately the allegory tends to overpower the characterizations even as it deepens them.

Watchable but not very illuminating.

Unfortunately, the relationship between Cobb and Stump as depicted here isn't very substantial or interesting, and the fictionalized Stump's offscreen narration feels rather concocted; what the movie has to say about Cobb mainly leaks through around the edges of this cumbersome apparatus.

Live-action stars take a backseat to CGI chipmunks in this uneven family comedy.

Pairing Jackie Chan and Jet Li would seem like a slam dunk, but this big-budget martial arts drama, which borrows liberally from "The Wizard of Oz," is something of a disappointment.

The three actors manage to get a lot of mileage out of the material: although one never quite believes that Tandy's character is Jewish, she is remarkable in every other respect, and Freeman and Aykroyd are wonderful throughout.

The connection between the two narratives is supposed to be a big, heartbreaking surprise, though I figured it out well in advance and spent the interim unfavorably comparing this greatest-generation hanky wringer to the British drama "Iris."

It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.

Tyler Perry grounds this sequel to "Why Did I Get Married?" (2007) in his trademark blend of comedy, soap opera, and down-home southern sentiment, though he lets up a little on the moral proselytizing, which aids the digestion considerably.

Joffe, a British screenwriter (The American, 28 Weeks Later) debuting as director, hits some of these notes in his adaptation of Brighton Rock, but the movie's religious flourishes seem more rhetorical than heartfelt.

The film is compelling to the extent that the subject is, but also unimaginative and unsurprising.

In some ways, for better and for worse, this is even more about Graysmith (Jake Gyllehaal)--who became obsessed with solving the Zodiac killings that terrorized northern California in the late 60s--than about the murderer.

Watchable if relatively threadbare movie.

Unfortunately I can't give this a thumbs-up or thumbs-down; I haven't yet developed an aesthetic that will accommodate a guy firing a bottle rocket from his ass.

As the aching spouse, Moore delivers what is for her an unusually sympathetic performance.

All three lead actors are adroit; but the story, adapted from a short story by H.E. Bates, is both contrived and not very well told.