Gets stuck in a rut. Hearing Santa say “f---” isn't nearly as funny the 50th time as it is the first 49.

The movie is a funereally paced downer.

Scenes stop and start abruptly, and the sub–"Lord of the Rings" action is more dulling than rousing -- and yet it can be funny.

The romance that ensues between Macy and Bello (both of whom are terrific) is exactly the kind of mature, sexy adult relationship that people complain doesn’t exist in movies anymore.

Where "Amores Perros" was a feast of energy, wit and imagination, 21 Grams is like a starvation diet -- a movie that wallows so profoundly in its own misery that watching it is like atoning for some sin you didn't commit.

Myers is the movie's fatal flaw, squeezing out the other characters who fatten the plot, mostly with an eye to parents.

Given her (Halle Berry) biggest part since winning Oscar, she responds with a zeal that's more than the movie deserves.

A reunion movie, and while it's often very funny, it has none of the self-satisfied piety or strenuous jokiness of "The Big Chill." Its mood shifts between defiant exuberance and wistful contemplation, but it's never mawkish.

More amiable than laugh-out-loud funny, the film pokes along, buoyed by the motel's bright Hawaiian color scheme, and a moonlit desert finale that's awfully pretty.

As a calling card for the stylistic talents of a new filmmaker, writer-director Anna Chi's first feature is a success. As drama, it's a dud.

What neither Howard nor his screenwriter, Ken Kaufman, seem to realize is that The Missing is that much bleaker and more unsettling when its horrors spring forth from the land itself and from the souls of wayward men.

The movie's chief liability, though, is Rose herself, who also co-scripted with first-time director Robert Cary and who registers several notches below Nia Vardalos on the totem of unlikely double-threats.

It is a dull and boring film, pretty as a Turner landscape and as sweetly becalmed as the glassy Sargasso Sea in which the men of the unfortunately named “Surprise” find themselves trapped for what felt, to me at least, like weeks on end.

The movie looks like it cost a fortune, with Dean Cundey's glistening widescreen compositions and Bill Brzeski's towering, storybook sets providing the backdrop for seamless visual effects. What's more, it's equally rich in ideas.

Needless to say, other voices -- any other voices -- would have given this legacy-obsessed film an invaluable context for such a fiery, scrutinized subject, but Tupac: Resurrection (with that fabulously unsubtle title) is intended to be more video bible than textbook.

It aims simply to relate a great and enveloping story -- one that may lead us to ponder the things that unite (rather than distance) peoples of differing belief systems, and may compel us to marvel at the many wonderful and horrible endeavors undertaken in the name of religion.

Bad movies can be a hoot, but rather than campy, Ameer appears to be dead serious; and it's hard to feel anything but fury toward a filmmaker whose opening title sequence intersperses black-and-white flashbacks of his sexy young lovers with actual concentration-camp photos of stacked, emaciated corpses.

What makes it enthralling is the younger Kahn's openness to a range of emotional responses (his own and others') to his father's life above and below board, and his readiness to turn his own predicament into both entertainment and a provisional kind of puckish wisdom.

Charmingly irreverent.

If you’re going to have your emotional responses shunted around like a gear stick, it might as well be by someone who writes dialogue as funny as Curtis does.

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.

There's a whiff of exploitation about any movie that claims the Holocaust as a “backdrop,” and Rolf Schübel’s treacly tale of three men lovesick for the same blue-eyed beauty fairly reeks of it.

The movie surely owes something to Polanski, Cronenberg, et al., in its use of an apparently placid, upper-middle-class setting as the background for perverse horrors, but De Van's fearless, high-wire performance is uniquely its own.

Nearly wall-to-wall climax -- an unwieldy, two-plus-hours third act of a movie, guided by the principle (incubated by "Reloaded" and fully grown here) that too much is never too much.

Rough-hewn, improvisatory and contentedly lo-fi, the resulting documentary should prove warmly encouraging to embattled progressives of all stripes, and incidentally offers the best political date-movie of the week.

As both book and film, The Human Stain comes to vividest life in its extended flashbacks, which offer the most compelling exploration of Roth's perennial themes of self-loathing and reinvention.

The main inspiration here seems to be David Lynch, though fans of Fred Walton’s 1979 hair-raiser "When a Stranger Calls" may experience a touch of déjà vu as well.

Predictably, the jokes are raunchy, yet they're few in number, as if the writer's sleaze well is running dry. First-time director Mark Rucker has a nice feel for period detailing but fails to build on his star's rare flashes of high energy.

Far and away the strongest performance in Shattered Glass is Peter Sarsgaard’s.

As kitsch, however, it's pretty enjoyable. Jolie and Owen perform with such conviction, and the film -- blissfully unaware of its own badness -- takes its paperback-romance shenanigans with such goofy gravity, that it's easy to get caught up in the whole, soap-opera thrust of the thing.

Harris tries his best to make something more out of his one-dimensional white-knight character, while Gooding plays his vaudeville Rainman routine to the rafters.

As in the late-period works of Mel Brooks, the very structure of the film feels irreparably fatigued.

Today's street-smart moviegoing kids don't need to be so shamelessly pandered to.

As lead Columbine investigator Kate Battan has herself put it, “Everybody wants a quick answer. They want an easy answer so that they can sleep at night and know this is not going to happen tomorrow.” And now they have Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

Those seeking anything resembling a real discussion of the issues had best seek elsewhere.

The problem for director Keith Gordon is that Potter's script pares down to virtual nothing the very narrative threads that allowed us, in the full-length version, to identify with his prickly protagonist, and knocks us upside the head with a hyperkinetic, disorienting first act from which audiences -- especially those approaching this material cold -- are unlikely to recover.

As a movie, it must stand or fall by intense chemistry between the lead characters. Sadly, as co-written by Campion and Moore, In the Cut suffers from a fatal emotional and erotic imbalance.

Still and all, the makeup special effects are as over the top as anything in Hooper and L.M. Kit Carson's 1986 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and -- for those of us without the sense to steer clear of this sort of thing -- that's saying something.

As in all his films, there's a sense that honest human emotion bores Fleder, but he gets points for packing the trial with fine character actors.

The execution is actually worse than the premise. Nonstop racial, sexual and cultural stereotypes parade across the screen with little wit or real humor to guide them.

A tougher, more experienced director may someday force Holmes to surprise first herself, then us.

Silly, derivative stuff.

The excellent cast is headed by Gwyneth Paltrow in the mood-shifting title role and Daniel Craig as the helpless, not-so-happily philandering Hughes.

For once, it's no stretch for Jerry Bruckheimer to turn a human life into an action movie. Give or take a pack of screaming clichés in Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue's screenplay, Joel Schumacher's propulsive thriller is also a smart character study, with Cate Blanchett as the jewel in its crown.

This latest offering from the Jim Henson stable puts a cheerfully broad new spin on the boy-and-his-dog franchise.

Intolerable Cruelty seems the kind of movie that results from two essentially erudite, anarchic talents playing down to the masses.

At once an astonishing piece of filmmaking and, quite possibly, an Olympian folly.

This feels like a movie that was grown in a petri dish -- poked and prodded with all manner of overcooked symbolism and thesis statements, but fatally absent the genuine human emotions about which it incessantly prattles on.

Ultimately, however, a too-earnest script that pins the future of this community on a school-district singing contest, undercuts the film's natural performances and its sedate, contemplative pacing.

By the end of this likely cult classic (only 80 minutes long), when Evie has an amphetamine-induced meltdown during her cable-access comeback show, these divas are as recognizably human as you and me, only sluttier, and with cattier one-liners.

Where Lehane's novel seethes with emotionally charged subtext, Eastwood's workmanlike direction feels static -- fatally tasteful, embalmed in gravitas -- while his sporadic efforts at dramatic heightening come off as vulgar cliché.

Tough and relentless, dazzlingly researched and crafted. At its core is compassion for those who are angry, violent and uneducated.

As reasoning, this is manipulative -- as filmmaking, it’s dull.

The movie is casually, glamorously multiracial, and Washington is great fun, but the final glory belongs to actor John Billingsley, who plays one of those rumpled minor characters plugged into thrillers to keep you guessing whether they're light relief or something more sinister, and who, in a few memorably funny scenes, shuffles away with the movie.

Still, the big-show musical payoff is good fun, and Black and his little doppelgangers have it all over "Daddy Day Care."

This filmed record is a musical bliss-out.

Quiet and meditative, Dinklage neatly sidesteps the trope of the angry dwarf, and Clarkson, even in pain and rage, is characteristically warm and sexy -- she's our very own Helen Mirren.

By the time the final gotcha plot twist unfolds, it's not the intended tears but a yawn that is produced.

The vaporous Wonderland never moves beyond its grungily romanticized view of the past.

Perhaps it is simply impossible, even with affection in your heart, to craft an evocative homage to the expansive musical melodramas of Bollywood on a small-scale indie budget.

Campbell is flat-out great, muting his beloved Sam Raimi shtick in favor of a genuine character turn, an act of transformation that makes you wonder why he's never been called on to interpret Elvis before.

Could have used two rangier lead players than Stiller (doing his patented aggrieved-yuppie shtick) and Barrymore (who's so perky you want to slap her); the 81-year-old Essell, however, is a wicked pleasure throughout.

Surprisingly airy, jungle-set adventure, boisterously winking at Huston, Peckinpah and the same Saturday-morning serials that birthed Indiana Jones. R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt's tongue-in-cheek script, a hybridization of "Midnight Run" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," provides lots of amusing byplay for its two mismatched stars.

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.

British director Eric Till’s ghastly Euro-pudding co-production (with all the international accents and badly post-synchronized dialogue that implies) manages to make a travesty of its title subject.

Sarkissian's script is both overwrought and undercooked, crammed with floridly senseless speeches.

The movie deflates, but you still can't take your eyes off Gershon, who does her own singing, is fearless in the one girl-on-girl make-out scene, and is mesmerizing throughout -- an underused Barbara Stanwyck in a Gwyneth Paltrow age.

My Life Without Me was produced by the studio of Pedro Almodóvar, and one sees the Spanish director's influence in the way Polley edges her Madonna with a touch of the reckless sensualist.

Enlivened by journalist Avner Bernheimer's delicately witty script and some lively ensemble performances under the direction of Eytan Fox, the film offers a haunting portrait of a generation forced to risk their lives in the service of military goals they're far from totally committed to.

Nielsen beautifully embodies the sadness and confused sense of unreality that attend our appetite for the Internet's cheaper thrills.

Meant as a return to the form and substance of Allen's far superior early work satirizing the equivocations and betrayals with which we ruin our lives. In fact, the movie only comes alive as a hostile critique of psychoanalysis.

Cold Creek Manor's prime reason for being seems to be a set piece involving poisonous snakes, directed by Figgis with a drunken gusto the rest of the film could use, and as a comeback vehicle for Stone, who tries hard at motherly warmth, but can't quite wash the Catherine Tramell out of her hair.

Formulaic but infectiously happy comedy.

Despite the considerable imagination that has gone into realizing period scenes on a modest budget, all the episodes (past and present) feel hurried and clipped, like they've been passed through too many impatient editing-room hands, and the picture never fully absorbs you.

Beautiful in its dark, contrasting blues and blacks, Underworld is nonetheless a remarkably humorless movie, and not even the adroitly hammy Bill Nighy, as the vampire king, can leaven the overwrought seriousness of it all.

The women are terrific -- they know a thing or two about modulating pathos -- and watching them is a pleasure, even if the lines they're speaking sound like those of a world-worried, first-time playwright.

The movie's staccato pacing, lent emphasis by Dario Marianelli's haunting score, evokes the cycles of tedium and terror that make the journey so unnerving.

More dispiriting than the caricatured Italian families is the sense that, by picture's end, the filmmakers have neutered Angelo, so that his sexual energy is dulled, made non-threatening -- the perfect son after all.

The film is exhaustive -- and ultimately exhausting.

To Be and To Have works in the grandest tradition of documentary filmmaking -- it keeps company with a small, specific place going about its business, and from it parses the whole world.

The film is naive in its glorification of violence and vengeance.

The result is something neither scary nor funny.

Its characters are as flimsy and expendable as the title suggests, while only the most gullible of viewers (i.e., those who've never seen a David Mamet picture) will likely be duped by the painfully et cetera who's-conning-whom antics or the mounds of forced sentimentality under which they're ill-disguised.

The movie is stolen by the gorgeous, droll and hilarious Depp. The movie crackles when he's onscreen and only fitfully sparks when he's not.

Milla Jovovich, as Steven's Yiddish-spouting punk-rocker friend, is so bad, she's downright entertaining.

Fraught with a deep sadness and sense of yearning. Yet, it is also an enormously -- at times, even uproariously -- comedic film, not because it feels any obligation to be "funny" in some contrived, screenwriterly sort of way, but because Coppola has set out to make a movie set to the rhythms of real (rather than reel) life.

Satoshi innovates not by pushing off into more extreme realms of adolescent fantasy, but by using all the resources of animation to tell complex dramatic stories, resources that in his hands seem almost limitless.

The protracted final sequence, which involves balletic swordplay worthy of the famous scene in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," will take your breath away.

There's a nice reunion of Martin Mull and Fred Willard as beleaguered Ohio parents, and a spacy turn from Henry Gibson, but the tentative muddle of the interlocking stories makes you wish that Craven could live up to his ambitions.

Far from an arthritic exercise in hippie nostalgia. There is a seasoned richness and vivid specificity to these lives, for all their hurts and losses. Yet the movie is shot through with an undeniable note of elegiac wistfulness.

Carnage is a film about the violence of living, of finding and keeping a place in the world, and though it's a work of preternaturally sophisticated philosophy from a director who's barely out of her 20s, this beautiful, bizarre movie could function quite well without its capable screenplay.

Occasionally funny, cameo-speckled marshmallow.

All the fine cinematography -- lots of beating wings and impossibly large dust motes floating through slanting beams of sunlight -- can't hide the sad fact that the second half of the film delivers none of the shocks and starts required of atmospheric horror.

There are moments of real power here -- mostly courtesy of Phillips ("Dawson's Creek"), who does a remarkable job of turning her caricature into a character -- but even more of astounding naiveté.

There's really only one reason to see Party Monster, and that's Seth Green's scene-stealing performance as former (and somewhat reluctant) New York club kid James St. James, the boy who would be queen.

Stellan Skarsgård's deceptively low-key performance as the beleaguered musician -- furtive, indignant, drowning in self-pity blended with a kind of ruined nobility -- pushes the emotional temperature to a quiet fever pitch.

Grisbi is hard (new subtitles bring out the chill of the gangsters' argot) and gray: a meditation on what we are left with when life has let us down, played out in the haunted eyes of Jean Gabin.

Mathews has obvious storytelling chops, and a sharp eye for absurdity. But there are sacred cows in hip, progressive America, too, and the truly fearless satirist has to be a carnivore.