Inception delivers dazzling special effects and a boatload of stars, but it sags and eventually buckles under the weight of its complicated premise.

George Sidney directed, a long way from the slam-bang vulgarity of his most entertaining work.

Slack and saccharine more often than it's funny.

An attempt to blend the war epic and the caper film that doesn't quite come off.

A suitable mainstream vehicle for Malkovich's bruised aloofness.

The only thing that keeps the proceedings bearable is the cast gamely rolling with all the shameless sitcom punches the script keeps throwing at them.

As in all Jerry Bruckheimer-produced summer blockbusters, the premise is paper-thin and the action sequences play out with assembly-line regularity.

Action comedy hurriedly cobbled together as a fund-raiser for the Hong Kong Directors' Guild.

Director Steve Bendelack and writer-producer Simon McBurney aim for the comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, relying heavily on sight gags and their star's pratfalls and facial contortions, but they vititate the comic payoffs by allowing scenes to run too long.

Starts off with a lot of promise and excitement but winds up 165 minutes later feeling empty and affectless.

The movie contemporizes teen-sex comedies like "Porky's" and "American Pie": when the witless nerd gets caught with his proverbial pants down, the footage ends up on YouTube with an astonishing number of hits.

The silliness only slows down for a few hokey romantic interludes. But if you like to see stuff crash or blow up, this is your movie.

The set decor is more intricate than any of the characters.

Newman does a remarkable John Huston impression, and screenwriter John Milius demonstrates once again that he went to film school.

Tinsel-thin seasonal folly (1945) about a newslady who has a GI hero over for Christmas dinner. Frolicsome in an artificially hearty sort of way, though it made its studio (Warners) a nice holiday bundle.

The film handles difficult issues of wartime morality, with clear parallels to the American experience in Vietnam, but Beresford's direction is so placid, distanced, and methodical that the film never admits any doubt or debate; it tends to seal up the issues rather than liberate them.

The true schism here, however, is between the brainless fun of the action plot and Stone's cheap exploitation of the cartels' real-life sadism.

Michael Curtiz may be the most hotly disputed director of Hollywood's golden age; his filmography includes such classics as Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Adventures of Robin Hood, but also a numbing succession of undistinguished contract pictures.

Director Clark Johnson (S.W.A.T.) has a flair for action, which compensates for the flattening effect of Gabriel Beristain's cinematography.

I found this sequel more tolerable than Sherlock Holmes (2009), though I'm not sure whether it's actually better or I've just accepted the putrid idea of turning Arthur Conan Doyle's brainy detective into just another quipping action hero.

Samson Chan's color-saturated visuals add punch to the absorbing narrative, but overall this documentary plays like slickly packaged TV fare, right down to the plugs for Nike.

Despite the lowbrow story, this is supposed to be tasteful; expect modest nudity, swelling strings, and plenty of water imagery.

Its labored goofiness seldom transcends the stale format.

Offers a steady supply of clever lines but suffers from the patina of self-loathing common to industry lifers and the unfortunate miscasting of straight-arrow Broderick as a depressed, cynical hack.

This adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stephenie Meyer never rises above the level of a teen soaper on the CW, and its pale, sulky boy toys (Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli, Jackson Rathbone) are more silly than scary.

Crary struggles to explain the eruption and influence of the extreme rock underground that began with the late-70s "no wave" scene and eventually generated acts like Swans and Sonic Youth.

The torture is strictly for kicks, which spoiled this for me, but less skittish viewers may enjoy this as a stylish and tightly wound genre piece.

Never really delivers on that promise, mainly because its scenes of two brilliant men discussing the nature of the subconscious can't compare with Cronenberg's visual rendering of that subconscious in earlier movies.