This schizoid college comedy veers between gross-out humor and earnest coming-of-age drama.

The set-up is tediously slow, while the later murders are packed so tightly it's like watching a blender on high speed.

The formula works just fine on a more modest scale, without having to carry all the glittering casino sets and A-list movie stars.

The scenes of his incarceration and escape from the place are gripping, thanks mainly to Michael Bowen as the hard-ass staffer who wants to break him. But the movie slides toward melodrama with some stale business about the hero spreading his late father's ashes.

This is pretty thin soup, but the players are spirited and the jokes generally offbeat.

Actor Justin Theroux makes an impressive directorial debut, aided by David Bromberg's mordantly funny dialogue.

An exquisitely structured drama.

Hawke’s script is admirably light-handed in showing how the hero’s unreasoning passion is fueled by his parents’ painful divorce, and despite the story’s date-movie aspects, its most penetrating observations come not from the kids but from the young man’s estranged father and mother (Hawke and Laura Linney, both superb).

Pistol-packing De Jesus evokes Pam Grier in spots but certainly holds her own.

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.

The characters are instantly reversible--the bratty kid turns out to be a sweetie pie, the mother just needs to be told off. Only Giamatti, as the cliched businessman husband, is irredeemable.

Treacle takes over in the last act, but most of this fact-based story by screenwriters Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett takes the inspirational sports drama into unexpected and morally complex territory.

This doomsday scenario takes up the first third of the movie, after which the tension dissipates badly and the husband and wife, now separated by plastic sheeting, wait for help to arrive.

The villainous turns by Jon Voight (as a hard-hearted Mormon bishop) and Terence Stamp (as a bloodthirsty Brigham Young) would have been more fun if they weren't part of such a clumsy campaign to lay this tragedy at the church's doorstep.

Routine crime thriller.

Eschewing special effects, Moreau and Palud reinvigorate the classic haunted house premise by paring the plot down to its essentials.

If your taste runs in this direction, you're bound to be amused.

Scenes of harvested frogs provide an apt metaphor for Brazil's miserable have-nots, so apt that Kohn can't resist beating it to death.

The movie loses credibility with the arrival of Rogen and Bill Hader as two uniformed patrolmen who are drunker and crazier than any high schooler could ever get, but the variety of complications thrown at the three pubescent heroes raises this a cut above most raunchy comedies.

Though the filmmaking isn't everything it might have been (the opening montage is especially clumsy), their argument is compelling, absorbing, and urgent.

The third remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) may not be a patch on the original, but it does have a few things the other versions lack.

Purports to give us the lowdown on Manhattan celebrity life, yet it depends so consistently on plot contrivances and other movies (The King of Comedy, Midnight Cowboy, even All About Eve) that it often comes across as wannabe muckraking.

Unfortunately the movie's more interesting and challenging social aspects, which imply more than one "British-Chinese gay experience," are often overtaken by its smarminess--including an aggressively banal score and the way some actors have apparently been encouraged to overwork their eyebrows.

Among the many offhand virtues of Julie Delpy's first feature as solo writer-director is the fact that she's as attentive to French foibles as American ones.

Quietly written and convincingly played, this coming-of-age story mines its rueful laughs from a thick vein of performance anxiety, in both senses of the term.

Chan shows he still has the chops during a showdown at the Eiffel Tower, but you'd think the movie's reported budget of $140 million might have bought Tucker at least one side-splitting gag.

I'm a sucker for fantasies, but this one is so undistinguished and arbitrary that it left few traces in my consciousness, apart from the impression that the filmmakers resort to cruelty whenever they run out of ideas, which is often.

Like its methane-filled outhouse that explodes right on cue, this sequel to "Daddy Day Care" (2003) smells.