What links all these characters is Myers's gift for antic, elfin burlesque. He's like a second-best Peter Sellers.

Preteen girls – and not just those who are already American Girl fanatics – should be entranced. And why not? Not many movies for that audience are as respectful as is this one.

For most of the movie, we feel as trapped as she does, and the lurching narrative seems anything but novelistic.

Jenkins has an admirable feeling for, as the French would say, mise en scène, and a gift for placing actors in naturalistic settings. What he lacks at this point is a strong story sense.

Even in a misfire like The Happening, Shyamalan has a fine feeling for dread. He knows how to creep you out. But he has a tin ear for acting.

Do we really need another Hulk movie? I was one of the few critics who actually liked Ang Lee's 2003 "Hulk," but it didn't exactly ring the cash registers or clamor for a continuation.

If you were a fan of David Cronenberg's "Crash," based on J.G. Ballard's book about people who get sexually excited by auto accidents, you might just be the target audience for Quid Pro Quo, a perverse psychological drama.

A supremely cranky and lyrical feat.

The animation is consistently sporty and there are some choice comic riffs on martial arts movies.

As hig concepts go, You Don't Mess With the Zohan" takes the cake.

Mongol is a throwback to a more respectable tradition. The largeness of its scope arises naturally from the material, not the budget. The movie earns its stature.

The film's parallels between Mohmed's travails and the Iraq war are forced, but overall this is a fascinating odyssey that never plays out in ways you would expect.

The film includes graphic omnisexual and incestuous couplings and has an air of free-floating dread but, especially given its subject matter, it's oddly vacuous – it rarely takes hold emotionally even when its people hit bottom with a resounding thud.

At times, the movie resembled nothing so much as Kabuki with Cosmos.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

Rappoport is a powerhouse performer but the movie is an unstable concoction of political melodrama, film noir, and weepie.

It radiates intelligence. Of how many historical epics can that be said these days?

It's a bewildering mix of very smart and very dumb, but the cast, which also features a hilarious Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd as the Cheney-esque ex-vice president, and Hilary Duff as a Turaqistan airhead pop star, is tiptop.

Crystal Skull is a fun ride, but if we have to wait 19 years for the next one, that's OK by me.

Intermittently powerful drama explores a cross-cultural estrangement.

Next time out, more dwarfs, more Aslan, and definitely more Reepicheep.

Clear away the annoying avant-gardism and you have a powerful movie about a writer, Phillip, who undergoes a mental breakdown and is pulled halfway back to health by his girlfriend.

So hyperfrenetic that, in the end, you wonder if the Wachowskis aren't trying to pull off an elaborate hoax – a deranged techno fantasia posing as retro-ish family fare.

Some of the set pieces are ravishing, more often they're ravishingly clunky.

The black comedy Noise may be a one-joke movie but it's a resonant one.

It's all a bit like "Girl Interrupted" shattered into a thousand shards, but Page somehow manages to come through with a performance despite the director's distracting technique.

Turn the River becomes a standard fatalistic misfits-on-the-run movie with more than its share of improbabilities. It's as if Eigeman didn't realize how good the best parts of his film were, and so went ahead and trashed them.

What Happens in Vegas is not only annoying, it's also incompetent – a bad mix.