Better than bland but never quite rises above the level of a pretty good TV movie of the week.

It's certainly not a "breakthrough" comedy, unless the breakthrough is that women will flock to slobby, heartfelt romps starring Kristin Wiig instead of Seth Rogen. It's progress, sort of.

Writer-director Massy Tadjedin cuts back and forth between these twin temptations. Will Michael succumb and prove Joanna correct in her suspicions? Will Alex's French accent conquer all? Do you care? I didn't.

Foster seems blinkered and tone-deaf to what's actually appearing onscreen.

The flashback sequences sometimes come across like "'For Whom the Bell Tolls' for Dummies."

I prefer the goofier approach, which is why, even though Hemsworth isn't going to be cast in "King Lear" anytime soon, he's the best thing about Thor.

Rosen­thal serves up a hilarious documentary of his travails developing "The Voroniny," or, as it was known in development, "Everybody Loves Kostya."

These paintings speak to us; they both compress and elongate time. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog is reaching for ways to comprehend what he imagines to be the emblems of the birth of the modern soul.

A creaky and slow-going morality play.

This semiexpressionist fantasia is a botch.

For a movie about hard-driving pioneers, there is nevertheless much existential ennui in the air.

Any highfalutin interpretations of his new film only serve to camouflage what is, in essence, a scam about a scam.

The film's moral lesson – that violence begets violence – isn't exactly a showstopper, and the balm that is laid on Nawal and her riven family can't quite compensate for the poison that preceded it.

The film has a pleasing retro-ness that often mitigates the dullness.

Is there a moral objection to be raised about a movie that features a teenage girl as an assassin? I suppose there is, but I couldn't find it in me to object.

The openness of these people is often astonishing – and a sign of hope.

Essentially The Conspirator is a courtroom drama with occasional bulletins from the outside world. It plays out to its predictable end with the doggedness, if not the verve, of a "Law and Order" episode.

Capotondi keeps circling his movie in and out of dream states and waking states as the whodunit morphs into who-cares-who-dunit?

Courtly intrigue should be intriguing, and in that sense, The Princess of Montpensier – although it's somewhat wan and too cerebral for its own good – does a fairly keen job.

Hamilton is played, blandly, by Anna Sophia Robb, and her devoted parents, less bland, are played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt. The surfing footage, much of it shot off the coast of Kauai, is not bland at all.

It seems a bit cruel to cast Garner, who exudes charm, in such a charmless role.

Full disclosure: I have to say I did laugh during Your Highness. Twice, I think.

It is not the redemptive uplift that I am objecting to here. It's the way that Bier manipulates us in order to send us aloft. She wants the world to be a better place. Fine. But what she has concocted here is an arty version of the same old Hollywood dumb-down dramaturgy. It just has a higher gloss.

Nothing in this film approaches the boy's-eye view of war that, say, John Boorman achieved in "Hope and Glory," but it's an affecting, if somewhat flavorless, journey.

What Trust conveys, at its best, is that ultimately parental protections are not fullproof, and that is the greatest horror of all.

In Source Code, the new thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal, "Groundhog Day" goes metaphysical. Some people, I know, will argue that "Groundhog Day" was already metaphysical. Perhaps, but compared with "Source Code," it's "Caddyshack."

The casting of both Riegert and Allen may sound like an "Animal House" reunion, but the two have no scenes together.

For its first two-thirds, Potiche is a frothy delight.