There won't be a person in the audience who can't guess exactly how it will turn out. Yet it goes through its paces with such skill and charm that, yes, I enjoyed it.

Because it is slick and classy and good to look at, and the actors are well within their range of competence, you can enjoy the movie on a made-for-TV level, but you wish it had been smarter and tougher.

A dim-witted but visually intriguing movie.

One of the sly pleasures of Latter Days is the sight of this gay-themed movie recycling so many conventions from straight romantic cinema, as if it's time to catch up.

Perhaps because the film makes me feel so crawly, it is actually good. Yet still I cannot like it.

The movie is more slapdash than smooth, more impulsive than calculating, and it takes cheap shots. I responded to its savage, sloppy zeal.

One of the most profoundly stupid movies I've ever seen.

Like "The Exorcist," the best film in the genre, it is inspired by some degree of religious scholarship and creates believable characters in a real world. That religions take demonic possessions seriously makes them more fun for us, the unpossessed.

The movie is fun until they set sail.

Writer-director-star Angelina Jolie Pitt’s By the Sea is awfully pretty and mostly dreadful. It’s pretty dreadful.

The message of inspiration is strong and certainly qualifies as solid family entertainment. I only wish there were fewer trite truisms scattered throughout the script and less predictable dialogue for the solid troupe of actors to deliver.

The Paperboy is great trash, and as Pauline Kael told us, the movies are so seldom great art that if we can't appreciate great trash, we might as well not go at all.

On balance, I think it's an interesting miss, but a movie you might enjoy if (a) you don't expect a masterpiece, and (b) you like the dialogue in Quentin Tarantino movies.

Sniper expresses a cool competence that is a pleasure to watch. It isn't a particularly original film, but what it does, it does well. We've seen so many bad movies about guys walking through the jungle with rifles that it's interesting the way this one grabs us through its command of the locations and its storytelling skill.

It's not just sad, it's brutal. There's an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device.

Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.

Weighed down by its splendor. There are scenes where the costumes are so sumptuous, the sets so vast, the music so insistent, that we lose sight of the humans behind the dazzle of the production.

It follows the well-worn pathways of countless police dramas before it.

It is a fantasy, a sweet, light-hearted fairy tale with Reese Witherspoon at its center. She is as lovable as Doris Day would have been in this role (in fact, Doris Day was in this role, in "Please Don't Eat the Daisies").

The movie tells no clear story and has no clear ideas.

This is one of the craziest films to come along in a while and I can confidently say that anyone who sees it will either hail it is some kind of crackpot masterpiece or dismiss it as one of the silliest damn things they've ever seen.

The cast is uniformly capable and dead serious, and if you're buying what Luc Besson is selling, he's not short-changing you.

The movie is harmless and fitfully amusing.

The Distinguished Gentleman prefers to give us measured laughs at a leisurely pace, and then it settles for the sellout upbeat ending. Ho hum.

The movie is simply a failure of imagination. Nobody looked at the screenplay and observed that it didn’t try hard enough, that it had no surprises, that it didn’t attempt to delight its audiences with twists and turns on the phoned-in plotline.

For all the visceral depictions of hatred and violence and human destruction, it feels as if the director is chasing his own tail and forgetting about making it all mean something.

The plot of the movie is meh.

Lin takes an established franchise and makes it surprisingly fresh and intriguing. The movie is not exactly "Shogun" when it comes to the subject of an American in Japan (nor, on the other hand, is it "Lost in Translation"). But it's more observant than we expect, and uses its Japanese locations to make the story about something more than fast cars.

The result is an actor's dream, a film in which the truth of almost every scene has to be excavated out of the debris of social inhibition.

This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times. Now that I've seen it twice, I think I understand it, or maybe not. Certainly it's entertaining as it rolls along.

I don't require that a movie have a message, but in a message movie it is helpful to know what the message is.

It has elements of sweet romance and elements of macabre humor, and divides its characters between the two.

Nowhere near one of Crowe's great films (like "Almost Famous"), but it is sweet and good-hearted and has some real laughs.

Today's kids are learning from the Turtles that the world is a sinkhole of radioactive waste, that it's more reassuring to huddle together in sewers than take your chances competing at street level, and that individuality is dangerous. Cowabunga.

Even though of course we recognize the bravery and selfless heroism of the men on that train who risked their lives to save others, and even though there are a few pulse-quickening moments in The 15:17 to Paris, the movie is slow-paced and feels padded, even with that running time of just over an hour and a half.

Director Burr Steers...does a nifty job of rocketing from period-piece romance to gory bloodshed, with sprinkles of dark humor here and there.

Surrogates is entertaining and ingenious, but it settles too soon for formula.

The one element in the movie that is not standard and that does have some energy is the TV show itself, with Dawson's performance as the egotistical, sleaze-bag host.

Its primary flaw is that it's not critical. It is a celebration of an idiotic lifestyle, and I don't think it knows it.

Despite a game performance by Lively, The Rhythm Section is a junk pile of missteps, from the convoluted screenplay that hops from locale to locale in Advil-inducing fashion to the overly stylized directing to the self-consciously “cool” oldies pop music selections.

Told chronologically, it might have accumulated considerable power. Told as a labyrinthine tangle of intercut timelines and locations, it is a frustrating exercise in self-indulgence by writer-director Guillermo Arriaga.

Barr could have made an easy, predictable and dumb comedy at any point in the last couple of years. Instead, she took her chances with an ambitious project - a real movie. It pays off, in that Barr demonstrates that there is a core of reality inside her TV persona, a core of identifiable human feelings like jealousy and pride, and they provide a sound foundation for her comic acting.

The tantalizing enticement of Goldie Hawn pairing with Amy Schumer for a mother-daughter, road-trip buddy comedy has some moments, but never fulfills its promise. As their onscreen adventures and antics grow zanier and broader, the laughs actually grow softer and more sporadic.

What a magnificent presence is J.K. Simmons. What an authentic, weathered, world-weary face he has. What a tremendous gift he has for conveying so much with such little dialogue in the stark and unsettling I’m Not Here.

In The Hottest State, Hawke uses fairly standard childhood motivations for his unhappiness and reveals too little real interest in the Sara character.

The photography, the dialogue, the acting, the script, the special effects and especially the props (such as a spaceship that looks like it would get a D in shop class) are all deliberately bad in the way that such films were bad when they were REALLY being made.

A film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable.

A screwball film noir with a lot of medium laughs and a few great big ones,

Tells this story in a straightforward, calm way that works ideally as the chronicle of a man's life but perhaps less ideally as drama.

Davis (who was an executive producer on the film) gives a strong performance, as if she were acting in one of those many prestige projects lighting up her resume. It’s a noble try, but this dreck is beyond saving.

We find it hard to get invested in the fates of any of these characters, despite the talented cast and the undeniably interesting look of the film.

An entertaining family movie, and may serve a useful purpose if it inspires kids to overthrow their coaches and take over their own sports.

Lansky loses steam every time the focus is on somewhere other than Lansky.

When it’s time to answer the question of Who ya gonna call, Ghostbusters: Afterlife comes across as a well-intentioned and sincere but unfortunate misdial.

As a stand-alone work of cinema fiction, A Million Little Pieces is an effective blunt instrument of a film — a rough-edged, unvarnished, painfully accurate portrayal of addiction and rehabilitation.

Guy Ritchie, who started out as such an innovator in "Lock, Stock, etc.," seems to have headed directly for reliable generic conventions as a producer. But they are reliable, and have become conventions for a reason: They work. Mean Machine is what it is, and very nicely, too.

The movie is ingenious in the way it surrounds its essentially crass subject matter with a camouflage of romantic scenery.

What DOESN’T get lost in translation is what made “El Secreto De Sus Ojos” so effective: the visceral, devastating empathy we feel when a horrible injustice is committed and it ruins multiple lives; the haunted looks in the eyes of a trio of characters who will never be able to shake off the events of long ago; the lush and lurid film noir touches; and the air of melancholy hanging heavy over a pursuit of justice because we know there’s no such thing as true justice, not in these circumstances.

The central weakness of Cocoon: the Return is that the film lacks any compelling reason to exist. Yes, it is a heartwarming film.

Director Lucie Jourdan paints a vividly disturbing picture of Cline, using his own words and actions against him, but wisely and compassionately makes Our Father as much about the victims as the infuriatingly evil Cline.

Sleeping Dogs has pacing problems, and the direction is competent but not particularly stylish. What holds the film together, and what holds our attention to the very end, is the powerful performance by Russell Crowe as a man haunted by demons he can’t quite remember.

The Lonely Guy is the kind of movie that inspires you to distract yourself by counting the commercial products visible on the screen, and speculating about whether their manufacturers paid fees to have them worked into the movie.

I’m not going to spoil the epilogue in the slick but trashy and quite dumb Jennifer Lopez action movie The Mother, but I will say it’s so insanely off the rails, so bat-bleep crazy that I almost want you to watch The Mother just so you’ll know what I’m talking about. Almost.

Stella is the kind of movie they used to call a tearjerker, and we might as well go ahead and still call it that, because all around me at the sneak preview people were blowing noses and sort of softly catching their breath - you know, the way you do when you're having a great time.

Country Strong is a throwback, a pure, heartfelt exercise in '50s social melodrama.

A disappointing and murky mess of a film that feels like an uncompleted project and leaves the viewer frustrated, despite the gritty visuals and a game lead performance by two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank.

Rampage might not be the worst movie of the year so far, but it’s a contender for most pointless.

Coppola's teenagers seem trapped inside too many layers of storytelling.

Adventures in Babysitting seemed littered with unrealized possibilities. The movie has good raw material, but it never really was pulled together into something I could care about much.

Warm-hearted and effective.

One of the best cop thrillers since "Training Day."

I am just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love.

Strives hard to replicate the screwball comedy but ends up being a lot more screwball than comedy.

It fulfills every one of our expectations with a deadening safeness. It is about a man who wants a child so that he will leave something after himself, but it never convinces us that he has a self to leave.

The movie’s premise doesn’t work – not at all, not even a little, not even part of the time – and that means everyone in the movie looks awkward and silly all of the time.

If you’ve seen “The Big Chill,” you’ve seen this movie, with older grown-ups. Even if you haven’t, you won’t be surprised by much.

As in his previous film, Davis gets mileage out of supporting players who do not look or sound like professional actors and so add a level of realism to the action.

Chasing Mavericks is made with more care and intelligence than many another film starting with its template might have been. It's better than most movies targeted at teens. And the cinematography of the big Mavericks scene by Oliver Euclid and Bill Pope is so frightening that you sort of understand why Frosty stays on the shore, watching Jay with binoculars.

Works splendidly as a courtroom thriller about military values as long as you don't expect it to seriously consider those values.

An earnest but hopeless attempt to tell a parable about a man's search for redemption. By the end of his journey, we don't care if he finds redemption, if only he finds wakefulness.

Here is a movie that embraces its goofiness like a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Bootmen is the story of a young dancer and his friends who revisit the cliches of countless other dance movies in order to bring forth a dance performance of clanging unloveliness.

I’ve seen versions of the plot of “Necessary Roughness” in almost every other movie ever made about an underdog sports team - but I fell for it again this time, because it was well done, and because the movie doesn’t try to pump itself up into more than it is, a good-humored entertainment.

Perhaps this story would be better told in a limited non-fiction series as well, as Queenpins relies too much on scatological humor, farcical sequences and a not entirely convincing message that these women were feminist, Robin Hood heroes.

It's pretty good, in fact, with full-blooded performances and heartfelt melodrama.

This is also one dark and wickedly funny comedy.

Harsh times and heartbreak abound in the Russo brothers’ gritty addiction epic Cherry, but there’s poetry in the language of the script and in certain moments of wonder and hope, of dark comedy, of love and redemption.

I found the opening third tremendously intriguing and involving, I thought the emotions were so real they could be touched, but then the film lost its way and fell into the clutches of sentimental melodrama.

If the crime elements in K-9 are routine, the relationship between Belushi and the dog at least has the courage to be goofy.

Without question, this movie does elicit “feel-good” emotions — largely driven by Garner’s ability to exude genuine maternal devotion and the charm of young Kylie Rogers.

Meg Ryan does this sort of thing about as well as it can possibly be done, and after "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail," here is another ingenious plot that teases us with the possibility that true love will fail, while winking that, of course, it will prevail.

The movie is not a great dramatic statement, but you know that from the modesty of the title. It is about movement in emotional waters that had long been still. Taylor makes it work because she quietly suggests that when Evie's life has stalled, something drastic was needed to shock her back into action, and the carving worked as well as anything.

There’s an admirable commitment to absurdity, yet it belies the thoughtful coming-of-age journey for the five teens up until they hit “morphin time.”

Some of the surprises in Oz the Great and Powerful, the much-anticipated "Wizard of Oz" origins movie, are delightful. Others, however, sink the movie just below the point of recommendation, with the primary drawback falling on the lovely shoulders of Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis, as early versions of Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, respectively.

Joyful Noise is an ungainly assembly of parts that don't fit, and the strange thing is that it makes no particular effort to please its target audience, which would seem to be lovers of gospel choirs.

Once you realize it's only going to be so good, you settle back and enjoy that modest degree of goodness, which is at least not badness, and besides, if you're watching Rush Hour 3, you obviously didn't have anything better to do, anyway.

McFarlane goes as goofy as you’d expect, but there’s a fairly soft and traditional center lurking inside this hard-R candy.

It clearly aspires to be something more than another story about empty-headed teenagers in a remote cabin who get picked off one by one in gruesome fashion — but at the end of the day, that’s pretty much what we’re getting.