If Steven Soderbergh taught Clooney how to act in "Out of Sight," then Reitman has taught him how to stop acting. This is the most vulnerable, the most playful, the most human performance of his career.

More bonkers Jackson-at-work moments would’ve helped, but mostly we just see the kid from Gary, Indiana, dispensing hugs and God-bless-you's to an awed cast and crew. Watching various dancers and guitarists grin irrepressibly during their one-on-one run-throughs with the man is one of This Is It’s few pleasures.

The jokes in Extract play almost like afterthoughts, the last-second add-ons of a former animator who, until now, has always treated his flesh-and-blood characters a bit like cartoon caricatures and vice versa.

Heigl and Butler have genuine chemistry, and the writers have given the duo some bitchy, snappy dialogue. They probably had in mind such workplace comedies as "Desk Set," starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, but in this day and age, witty banter and stars with chemistry aren't enough to catch an audience's attention.

Yes, the "Taxi Driver" parallels are intentional: Hill spells them out in the press notes, all but branding Observe and Report a Scorsesefied remake that reeks of stale Cinnabon.

Biblically classical, tastefully vintage with aerial shots of wet umbrellas and Homburg hats and not a little staid considering its sensational source material, Changeling isn't so much dull as it is an open book.

Mostly dumb, no matter how desperately and even valiantly it aims for "thinky."

Rare is the star vehicle that is as poorly matched to its star as Drillbit Taylor, which casts Owen Wilson as a homeless Army deserter and con man, able to fool people into believing he's both a substitute teacher and a master of hand-to-hand combat.

Statham's totally believable. He might yet become Bruce Willis.

A muddle—not amiably ambling, not affably shaggy, just a mess that gets messier till, at times, the whole thing looks improvised by amateurs more concerned with being clever than something resembling affectionate.

My Kid Could Paint That's about art—and it IS art, among the best documentaries ever made about that elusive process of manufacturing something out of nothing. But it's also a must-see for every single parent who believes their children are special, when all they want to be is your children.

The Kingdom is essentially "C.S.I.: Riyadh," starring Jamie Foxx in yet another movie his Oscar statue will watch with shame.

Overstuffed (three villains), overlong (at more than two hours and 20 minutes) and undercooked (plot points include amnesia and alien goo).

This Film Is Not Yet Rated has a refreshingly snotty sense of humor.

There's something almost refreshingly venal about a movie with no purpose other than to meet intentions this cheesy.

Without being too glib about it, World Trade Center is a most improbable thing: an upbeat film about September 11, one of the few stories to emerge from that day to come with a happy ending.

Whatever goodwill one harbored toward the first Pirates film is quickly dashed by its sneering successor, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which is less a film than a two-and-a-half-hour trailer for the final installment in this accidental trilogy.

What a breath of fresh air this stifling, claustrophobic, boldly uningratiating vision of an American subculture's last gasp imparts to its contrarian core audience. (Call me a hopeless addict: I've seen it three times.)

More "Pretty Woman" than "Working Girl," The Devil Wears Prada really lives to give its angel a high-class makeover.

The fanboy in me loves it, being wrapped in the warm projected glow of nostalgia for a movie I've memorized since age 9.

Here, jokes are just as likely to end not in punch lines, but in uncomfortable silence, impenetrable irony or stomach flips.

Not everything jells, but Click is funnier and more elaborately clever than anything Sandler's done in years.

Mostly it's just a sweet and lightly funny piece of highbrow piffle, as enjoyable as it is forgettable. There's no harm done, but there's not much else either.

There's a fascinating movie buried inside this story, but it's not the one the filmmakers decided to make. This Omen is simply too big for its britches.

Is The Break-Up worth your time? Let's put it this way: Whenever Vaughn is onscreen, it is. When he's not, it ain't. The movie's a comedy, but it's also about a breakup, so it gets a bit maudlin toward the end.

If this really is the last stand, it's a stylish farewell indeed.

All in all, a respectable and predictable adaptation.

By all accounts, Marsh has absorbed classic crazy-killer thrillers like "Psycho," "The Night of the Hunter" and "Badlands," but The King isn't likely to join such esteemed company.

The trouble with 12 and Holding, which pits four young protagonists in intertwining battles for spiritual (and, well, literal) survival, is that it's just too much.

Aside from a single jazzy image of Hunt taking a nosedive off a Shanghai skyscraper, Abrams' movie is too oppressive, too enamored of its brutality to deliver anything like real thrills; its deeply unpleasant tone nearly makes you long even for Woo's cartoon absurdities.

It works for a good while--probably half of the movie.

Your individual tolerance for Jimmy Buffett music will determine how well all the scenes set to his music go down.

A psychotic we can't help falling for, Edward Norton's beautifully drawn and richly nuanced dreamer could, in time, prove to be one of the most memorable movie characters of recent years.

Conversation is as meaningless as anything else in this barbarist take on "The Searchers."

May be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see.

A sweet-natured, immensely likable family film.

Deeply engrossing and deep in numerous other ways that one scarcely encounters at the movies anymore.

Once you notice Ejiofor, you won't stop noticing--and Kinky Boots ensures that you will notice, thanks not only to the nature of his role, but also because there isn't much else here to get excited about.

Neither a mock-heroic cockeyed success story like "Ed Wood" nor a "Walk the Line"-style hagiography, Mary Harron's facile but hugely entertaining black-and-white biopic seems most interested in its subject--a studious southern girl who became the world's most celebrated fetish pinup--as an object.

Smart, patient and ruefully funny... Yet because the film never digs too far into any single person's world, it doesn't build toward much.

Slither is what it is, unapologetically, and unlike Gunn's work on "Dawn of the Dead," it's probably too weird to be a crossover hit. Either you've got worms in your heart or you don't.

In many ways, The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a beautiful work, a painstakingly crafted portrait of a talented self-saboteur--a man consistently done in by a vicious mental illness. But it's not as compelling as one would hope.

Björk appears to have been a good influence on Barney: The soundtrack, which she supervised and participates in, is well worth the time for fans of experimental music. As to what the whole thing means, you're on your own.

Inside Man is irrelevant, another semi-high-tech mega-heist movie, the rhythms and tropes of which we are all as familiar with as we are with the wallpaper facing our toilets.

Bleak, minimal, bone-dry and hilarious, it creates a rich and layered world from deft strokes of dialogue and action.

Tough as it is, L'Enfant nudges both its protagonist and its audience toward unlikely affection. Tough as it is, L'Enfant commands our care by practicing what it preaches. No wonder the brothers call it a love story.

The characters may be based on real people, with much of the dialogue culled directly from court transcripts, but Find Me Guilty plays the whole thing as comedy, and as everyone knows, putting a self-serious egomaniacal movie star in a bad hairpiece is comedy gold.

From a fan's perspective, though, one might wish for a smaller budget and a truly uncompromising vision.

Farrell's performance possesses a touch too many mannerisms on loan from Tyrone Power and Clark Gable; you can almost hear the gears turning in his brain each time he cocks his head or raises an eyebrow in homage.

Keaton's so good you almost forget how wonderful Downey is as Steven Schwimmer.

Aquamarine will likely please its undemanding tween audience--especially if today's kids are as unsavvy a crew as 20th Century Fox seems to think.

The film, from its deadpan start to its languorous finish, provides the most joyous moviegoing experience in years.

But except for a few missteps, the movie is so beautifully and sensitively rendered in its particulars, in its characterizations of soldiers and officers, and in its dramatization of a nearly miraculous event, that the result is an affecting piece of cinema.

Packs an unexpected emotional wallop. Gavin Hood's film tells a story of violence and redemption that's even more remarkable when you consider that neither of the lead performers had ever acted in a movie previously.

A fascinating documentary by Bruce's longtime friend Rupert Murray, uses footage taken by both Bruce and Murray to document Bruce's harrowing, enlightening and occasionally hilarious experience. It's a wild ride.

Eight Below splits into two movies--the compelling tale of the dogs' struggle to pull together and survive and the much less interesting one about Jerry Shepard's emotional trauma and his search for redemption.

Freedomland manages a seemingly impossible feat: It's both turgid AND overwrought, eliciting the shriek that fades into a yawn without anyone ever noticing. It's a wholly dreary piece of work.

And remember, this is just part one of a trilogy. While all may not be clear yet, there's certainly enough here to make you curious about the other two parts.

Though we know the story's final outcome, the trial scene and its aftermath are no less shocking and affecting.

Ferrell and Warner, however, are distractions--the obligatory dose of "eccentricity" thrown in as seasoning to make the real story more digestible. But they serve instead as irritants; too much spice, if you will.

The movie is therefore better than it ought to be, but without Douglas, it ought not to be at all

Wacky, hodgepodge and decidedly homemade, CSA nevertheless is worth seeing. Sure, it veers off into nonsense, and there are times when the film loses its center. But the premise, the passion and the scathing political commentary ultimately keep CSA afloat.

Though it does cheapen itself with some dreadful moments of product placement, it doesn't instantly date itself with cheap pop-culture gags; it will play to our kids' kids tomorrow just as it does today, like something made for children who don't know to expect more from their cartoons than just pleasant, nostalgic mediocrities.

It makes it clearer than ever before that these films are comedy. Granted, the sick kind of comedy that involves laughing at stupid people being ripped in half, but we know there are plenty of you out there.

Its execution is stultifying, laughable and ultimately a little offensive.

An occasionally amusing but wrongheaded remake that arrives more than four decades after the original blazed across the screen.

The real fault with this movie lies less with the clunky screenplay from Himelstein than with the acting, of which there is very little of note.

Like most films of its type, Something New is not tough to sit through, but the thought of paying full price to see it isn't especially desirable.

Watching Cowboy del Amor is like sitting in a room with someone who's making funny racist cracks; you can't help but laugh, but you feel sullied by the implicit collusion. For that reason, the film tips over into the camp of tragedy. Or if it is a comedy, it's the Shakespearean kind, where the marriages at the end are utterly unsettling.

However you slice it, Bleep remains a work of naive invention and wannabe spirituality.

Bubble is a strong film with a gorgeously minimal script by Coleman Hough. Soderbergh has directed his actors to perfection, rendering them indistinguishable from their roles. And, though the story resorts to sensationalism for its conflict, the film is eloquent in its portrayal of silence, depression, repression, denial and the woes of the Midwestern white working class.

The best things about this numbingly predictable service-academy drama are its talented leading men.

This is a sequel so bad that even Cedric the Entertainer and Anthony Anderson didn't return for it, let alone Terrence Howard and Paul Giamatti.

Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine) directs with skill, Thompson's screenplay (this is a labor of love) is witty, and the classy cast includes Colin Firth (as the kids' baffled widower-father), Angela Lansbury, Imelda Staunton, and Celia Imrie. Good fun.

If you're going to fall for this movie, you're going to have to buy not only the idea that adultery is excusable if you're "following your heart," but also that following your heart amounts to falling in love at first sight, a formulation that seems adolescent at best.

Christopher Guest only wishes he could nail a parody/homage as smart and deadpan as this, but while his ensemble improvisation movies are increasingly full of mighty wind, Winterbottom's is consistently smart and silly without becoming caricature.

Zucker!'s a bona fide hit in Germany, where, apparently, there's been a shortage of Jewish comedies since, oh, 1939, give or take. But it deserves its imported rep; rare's the movie that has an Orthodox Jew tripping on Ecstasy while getting a massage from a Palestinian prostitute hours before his mamala's funeral.

A particularly painful event for those of us weaned on Brooks' earliest films, Saturday Night Live shorts and vintage clips of his deadpan standup appearances. It contains precisely two funny moments.

Adding to the film's underlying sense of urgency and unease is composer Robert Miller's haunting score, so reminiscent of Philip Glass' music for "The Fog of War."

As American history, Glory Road is by turns inspirational and thrilling. But, in keeping with Hollywood's gift for exaggeration, a couple of things about it are completely bogus.

If you really want to live life to the fullest, step one is to avoid wasting an hour and a half of your life in a theater showing Last Holiday.

In the end, the filmmakers strike a bad bargain between action and myth: In their obvious attempt to shoo everyone into the tent--romantic and roughneck alike--they don't serve either end of the spectrum very well.

Viewers still need a window into a character's soul if they are to connect on a deep emotional level. And that is missing here.

Match Point may well be a return to form but only for those who love "September" and "Interiors," movies populated by Bergman evacuees too inert and dreary to even crack a smile.

Writer-director Greg McLean, who has many shorts and commercials under his belt, makes a significant feature debut here, with unapologetic horror that doesn't compromise.

It's a sweet, silly and not unintelligent romantic comedy: For a period farce, you could do worse.

Stay away: Everything about the movie is rinky-dink, from its phony, lifeless dialogue to its drab, shabby sitcom look to its choppy editing, all of which can wear on you after 95 minutes that come to feel like an eternity.

At the heart of it all is an entrancing lead performance by the teenage Kilcher.

Instead of slick heroism, the saving grace of The Matador (which was obviously made on something less than a blockbuster budget) lies in the comic interplay between Brosnan's ignoble Mr. Noble and the hapless square he picks to serve his purposes.

It's too turgid and redundant to have any real impact. As a thriller, it barely thrills; as a lecture, it has nothing new to say.

It isn't your typical scary movie--there are no "boo!" moments--but it may gradually creep you out and perhaps even more after you've seen it.

These guys are laugh-out-loud funny, not because they're being belittled, but because they're finally getting a chance to show a sense of humor onscreen.

Everything that happens proves just as predictable as before.

Carrey's brand of exhausting physical comedy is a far cry from Segal's useful bewilderment, so this ride is both rougher and loonier.

This romantic tragedy has the measured gentility of the M.I. classics, but its sheen of crass melodrama is startling, and its many metaphors run amok in a tangle.

As ridiculous, as mawkish and schizophrenic as The Family Stone is, it's also surprisingly endearing.

Jones and Pepper are no Eastwood and Wallach, but the fact that one even thinks to make such a comparison speaks highly of the work here.

In the end, The Producers is an enjoyable romp, and at times--as when Hitler sings "Heil Myself"--it's hilarious. But it's not transcendent.