Like oversolicitous lovers, the filmmakers are hung up on foreplay -- and not enough old-fashioned teenage raunch.

Ultimately just another celebrity bio-pic, and far less trenchant than, say, the more conventional "Auto Focus." For all their whirring ingenuity, Kaufman's scripts require a director who will tether his cleverness to reality.

Malick dangles his maddeningly innocent ideas about life and death and man's gift for self-destruction.

Burger at first toys with his unlikely premise, panning through the streets of this stuccoed suburbia as if meditating on the banality of evil, and indeed, our first few encounters with the assassin.

Between spy training and sensitivity training, the two (Murphy/Wilson) prove nicely matched comic foils.

This vision of Gotham is as fastidious as the cockpit of a BMW. But rather than sell luxury sedans, Deception offers a fantasy even big money can't buy -- Wall Street as a cross between a James Bond adventure and a Victoria’s Secret spread.

Doesn't seem to quite know what it is or where it's headed. So it goes anywhere it can while treading thematic water.

There is something quite heartening about watching these kids earnestly guide others around their memorial.

King Kong isn't terrible, but it's something that none of Jackson's previous movies ever was -- it's enervating.

Lee, acting through gritted teeth, barely musters the energy to yell “Alvin!,” but the chipmunks themselves -- voiced by Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler and Jesse McCartney -- are surprisingly appealing, though their newly R&B-tinged rendition of “Witch Doctor” is god-awful.

Mulan, like all the characters in this movie, is a cookie-cutter American prototype, lazily ripped off from the Disney boilerplate that fashioned Pocahontas et al.

A well-made but emotionally scattered film whose hero gives his heart only to the dog.

Relentless, infantile and impossible to dislike.

Taymor has done an inspired job of resurrecting one of Shakespeare's unruliest works, just in time for the new century.

In short, it’s a gift-wrapped part for Lohan, who plays her good-girl/bad-girl role with wit and an air of sly calculation.

The film's gadgetry is pricier, but the leering is strictly the Playboy joke page circa 1967.

The movie always teeters on the verge of something deeper, and Cheadle’s rendering of Greene’s stubborn refusal to be domesticated is funny, exhilarating and then quietly tragic. But Lemmons keeps pulling back into jive-talking shtick, and for much of the time -- I felt as though someone had trapped me in a time-warped episode of "The Jeffersons."

A fascinating tragedy, easy to underrate.

Although on the surface this is a modest comedy about the Catch-22 frustrations of the restaurant game (arcane insurance laws, backstabbing chefs), it is also a movie of some psychological depth, thanks to the understated precision of Dye's deep-welled performance.

In the end, neither the appealing cast -- nor the force of Scott's stunning imagery is enough to make us understand why these men died.

Inglis offers complicated characters and uniformly worthy performances without falsely manipulating us into sympathizing with anybody but tries too strenuously to fuse his warring polarities of character-driven intrigue and plot-driven treacheries into an allegory of redemption. In the end, that feels like one or two big things too many.

Made up largely of vivid aerial shots of those folks doing the things they do, the film is a less philosophical, introspective look at contemporary surfing than Dana Brown's recent "Step Into Liquid," and is pitched at a smaller, niche audience.

The causal combination of pop culture and Holocaust imagery is an arresting start to a film about contemporary European anti-Semitism, but the doc quickly turns to well-worn themes.

I warn you, I'm gonna continue whining about the movie. Just keep in mind that I liked it.

Sadly for dramatic purposes, Jones' achievements seemed effortless, and the movie could really use the odd Ty Cobb wig-out.

Shadow Magic is rich with detail.

Anjelica Huston, a gifted and sometimes extraordinary actress, has given herself the title role in her second outing as director---a bitof miscasting for which the director, and not the actress, must be blamed

Although Sandler's formula remains constant -- the downtrodden hero can do eet! -- what's new is his willingness to share the screen equally with a male co-star. Not that anyone could get in the way of that mugging steamroller Nicholson.

It all feels rather laddish and belabored, but it will eat up 90 minutes of your time without making you regret the loss.

I love what his films stand for -- inclusivity, tolerance, liberation and fun -- but I’ve always felt about his movies as I do about Monty Python: Half an hour is a riot; an hour and half starts to be a chore.

All of the riffs are twice and thrice removed, but the effect is lively rather than tiresome, largely on the strength of game performances, Sean Lennon's atmospheric score and writer/director Jordan Galland's clear affection for his sources.

Never-hilarious but often-quite-amusing film.

The visual effects are predictably excellent -- sometimes, in the case of a three-man free fall through space, unexpectedly lyrical -- but most of the movie's dramatic conflicts feel strictly pro forma.

It's fine acting of - and chemistry - between Paxton, Margulies and Mark Wahlberg that gives this film (written by Jim McGlynn, directed by Jack Green) its kick.

As before, there are moments, when Schneider is turned loose to do his anything-goes, creepy-funny shtick, that are crudely inspired.

It's pretty good, really.

The stars, despite having only a fraction of the charm and talent of classic sparring-but-meant-for-each-other duos, know how to mug for the camera and well up on cue, and somehow that turns out to be enough to carry this trifle.

If anything, as it lathers up into an abortive attempt at scarlet-woman branding and a goofy siege on the nunnery where a dazed and confused Antoinette has holed up, The Duchess of Langeais works best as the comic bondage fantasy implied in its deliciously sly French title: "Don't Touch the Axe."

As Willing moves the movie along its well-worn, Ruth Rendell–ish path, it accrues a certain fusty British charm, along with the requisite (and, for this reviewer, most satisfying) amounts of satanic symbolism, creepy mute children and abandoned gothic churches.

Even without the usual monster mano-a-mano, Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo does not lack for action, offering plenty of animated eye candy in the form of the usual big ships, impossibly futuristic technology and a pleasing, purple-heavy color palette. [23 Jan 2014]

Marshall isn't exactly a cinematic poet, but he does a fine job delineating each individual dog's personality, as well as the shifting hierarchy of power within the pack, which is why it's so exasperating that he and first-time screenwriter Dave Digillo are forever cutting away to dull Jerry and his stateside quest for rescue-mission funds.

Early on, sex addiction is called “a gaping hole in the soul” but Unlovable barely has us feel it.

Held together by the blues -- Brown's prose and Howard's performance, Big Bad Love is a mess, but it's a sincere mess, beautifully shot by Paul Ryan and faithfully adapted by screenwriter James Howard.

There's something overly studied, almost clinical, in how it all pulls together.

This The Other Side of the Wind has a haphazard “well, he shot it, so we better include it” vibe. One wonders just how much of the existing editing Welles got to oversee himself; the answer is: probably not much. There’s a tight, 80-minute feature trapped in The Other Side of the Wind, one that Welles most likely would have exhumed had he not run out of money while filming.

Like, you know, genius. But, like, you know, why?

Roger Nygards’ sweet, gently funny documentary about the wild and woolly fans of all things Star Trek doesn’t really reveal much about the original landmark series and its various spinoffs, nor does it ever really get to the heart of the shows’ enduring appeal.

Fly Away could have been stronger if its antiseptic visual style, which anchors it in old-fashioned TV movie mode, had been more adventurous in shouldering some of the weight of depicting the emotional and psychic anguish of the story.

In Supremacy, Damon is left to play basically one droning, humorless note, which, unfortunately, he does with his eyes closed.

A determinedly old-fashioned boxing/coming-of-age film, only perfunctorily hitting its marks.

That decade-spanning finale allows the three leads to age onscreen and demonstrate their impressive range, particularly Liu.

Kessler frames it all with an ironic eye (Stiller's misfit mogul holds court in cheap motels and burger joints) and with enough big-hearted tenderness to keep the humor from going sour.

A sui generis excursion into sex and race that is by turns terrible...and close to divine.

The film lapses too often into sugary sentiment and withholds delivery on the pell-mell pyrotechnics its punchy style promises.

Much meaner remake, starring Ryan Reynolds (quite good).

Chop Suey really captivates with surfaces; look away for an instant, and the spell is broken.

Struggles valiantly to keep its head above whimsy, and though the movie finally succumbs to an excess of heartwarming, it's a promising college try from a first-time writer-director.

While the movie does address white people’s thorny relationship with rap and cultural appropriation, it demonstrates how delicate satirizing that can be when it gets kind of serious near the end — a long, long end — and suggests that being the best at battle rap can also mean being the worst.

Somewhere buried beneath all this ballast something is being said, again, about flawed middle-aged men falling from grace and redeeming themselves. This time I'm damned if I know what that something is.

Writer-director Hernandez is comfortable with violent, perverse emotions, and can find humor in them -- a refreshing quality that keeps one watching long after her movie has jumped its own tracks and zoomed to a private world of obscurely motivated quarrels and uninvolving reconciliations.

The movie serves up a pleasant, if unsurprising, confluence of classic ballet with street dance, not to mention a seamless collusion of polite racial integration with savvy niche marketing.

Jaron Albertin’s mix of crisp realism and oblique dream logic results in a haunting experience.... Still, while his first feature (shot by Darren Lew) may be gorgeous, the characters in this rural family drama prove so amorphous that their struggles engender detachment instead of empathy.

Scorsese and his writers have saddled their dream with a corny plot apparently lifted from some old 1930s Warner Bros. film starring Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien.

Even as you're laughing, you get the uncomfortable sense you're being recruited, and not always honestly, to Moore's us-and-them point of view.

A little too familiar to be wholly satisfying. What makes it worthwhile is Julia Jay Pierrepont III's direction.

Frankel has cut, pasted and rejiggered the novel, mostly for the better. As adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna, The Devil Wears Prada is crisper, less self-righteous and mercifully shorter than its intermittently funny but interminable source.

Meandering.

El Angel is a crime spree as improvised reverie, one with a subject who is as quick to give away his loot as the director is to make the subtext explicit.

The all-Polynesian cast, many of whom developed this material as part of a theater troupe called "The Naked Samoans," bring so much energy and glee to the telling that one can only smile and hope they all profit wildly from the American remake that's reportedly in the works.

To their credit, screenwriter Dianne Houston and director Liz Friedlander (both making their feature debuts) go relatively easy on the urban-life clichés and instead stick tight to dance class.

The films, both narrative and nonfictional, range from the engagingly elliptical...to the simple-minded... to the cloying and incomprehensible.

Though The Cup is lovely to look at, it has none of the ceremonial rigor mortis of Scorsese's "Kundun."

What's most disturbing about this ineptly scripted, utterly implausible (and at the same time curiously likable) comedy of sin and redemption in TV's home-shopping universe is how close a committed cast and a talented director (Stephen Herek, late of Mr. Holland's Opus) come to pulling it off, to making us feel good about the 110 minutes or so we've just pissed away.

A spirited re-creation of the series that once ruled Saturday mornings.

Egoyan has always constructed dense ensemble films, and here again the writer-director hopes to reinforce his themes by piling layer upon layer of character. Unfortunately, the layers end up cluttering the story.

The movie is not without charm or humor, but it leaves little for Lane to do besides chuckle at setbacks as if they were naughty children.

What gives the movie its coltish charm is Harrison's scene-setting feel for the indomitable brio of kids.

The rough, watercolor washes of its city backdrops mark the film with nostalgia while its story carries us along at an amiable, buoyant pace.

Does have its charms.

Off the Black gradually establishes its own peculiar cranky rhythm, fighting to resist the usual male-bonding sentimentality. But despite some nice touches, this is the sort of too-precious indie film that gives its characters unnecessary quirks.

Plays more like a disjointed radio show with pictures -- The power of Chomsky's intellect and message are poorly served when pigeonholed by the hagiography of some of his supporters.

A near miss overall, but enjoyable in its littler particulars.

Doesn't offer much new in the way of news or analysis. What it does offer is inspiration from an unlikely source, via an unsparing look at one such victim.

The performers are a bright bunch, especially Snow (even if she's no sane person’s idea of a wallflower), Metcalfe, who has the cocksure swagger of a young Travolta, and McCarthy, who infuses her few scenes with a haggard dignity masquerading as optimism.

Schwentke handles the claustrophobic environment efficiently enough, though he dallies too long before letting anxiety give way to action.

Though the film overall is as disposable as a hot dog, it is just as enjoyable.

As a story it’s nothing much, but as eye candy it is world-class.

A fun movie. Not scary-fun. If you're a male over 10 years old, that should be enough.

For a movie that boasts a murder, a would-be suicide and the usual generous helping of screwing around à la français, Le Divorce is remarkably calm and contained even as it builds to its climax.

Nemesis never feels true to itself, its energy never fully engaged. Even with Earth on the line in its climactic space battle, the film seems embarrassed that it couldn't have found a better way to work through its issues.

While Slums of Beverly Hills may sound like a downer, Jenkins tempers the family's downbeat circumstances with sympathetic humor, a quirky camera style and lo-fi retro flavor.

Perhaps only a filmmaker from a country steeped in Catholicism could turn out a consistently sharp and profane "divine comedy" (the title means "blessed hell") that is also, for the most part, theologically correct.

Although he damn near slanders an entire country - expect poor Slovakia's tourism industry to take a hit - Roth is not an unskilled ringleader of gory crisis moments, or breathless escapes. The squeamish should simply stay away, but carnage queens will appreciate some of Roth's less grisly, even amusing details.

Relentlessly positive and optimistic, the film is also likable, in the most chaste way imaginable.

Recalls the structure of Danis Tanovic's 2001 black comedy, "No Man's Land," but not that film' hyperknowing urbanity or strident political savvy.

The sketchy, poorly colored, outsourced animation is dispiriting, but it's the only display of blatant crudeness, and in that, an obliging parent may find relief.

Among the film's other drawbacks are how conventional it feels in its structure and strategy, often misguidedly going for the epic high-key feel of classic NFL Films on a low-key, DV budget.