In truth, the only reason this film was made was to allow viewers to ogle pretty young things behaving badly.

Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.

At times, Morgan's script inspires laughs; but at others, the witticisms seem forced

The film takes on unexpected weight when Christian cops to his intense personal loneliness. That's not the stuff of high comedy, but it's brave and, in these days of rah-rah, everyone's-in-love gay media, rather refreshing.

Between them, first-time screenwriter Carl Ellsworth and director Wes Craven don't come up with a single clever way to generate suspense, and the movie's onboard atmosphere is so phony.

Fortunately, everything comes together splendidly in the last act, and the kids and grown-ups are all first-rate.

Done as an all-out battle to the death, this could have been an entertaining mix of "Die Hard" and "The A-Team."

As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.

Despite the busy camera work, bombastic score and rapt attention to violence, director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can't mask the script's white-savior paternalism.

Nauseating, tasteless and offensive -- but in all the best ways.

Throughout, Sullivan and Braun shine, making for a match so sexy and appealing that it's a shame Swain avoids their love life, an approach that doesn't exactly advance gay liberation -- or cinema.

German filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky sticks to the formula that made his 2000 thriller “Anatomie” a German hit, offering up a who’s who of young German stars and plunging them into hot-and-cold color schemes, freewheeling camera work and diabolical master-race conspiracies. If Ruzowitzky were as good a storyteller as he is a stylist, he’d have something.

Watt seems to want to say something about the role of fate and happenstance in creating connections between people, but she never quite brings the strands of her ideas together.

Save for one startlingly staged battle sequence. . .might as well have been titled "Also Ran."

Everything that could go wrong does, but director Turner never musters the requisite manic energy that might get her proceedings off the ground.

Van Sant ultimately reveals so little about this odd couple that we frankly don't give a damn what happens to them. Nor, apparently, does he.

An entertaining trip, one for which fandom in the genre isn't necessarily a prerequisite, though it doubtlessly helps.

It plays out more like a 12-step program than a human drama.

While the film is not entirely successful, it still manages to string together enough charming moments to work.

Appealingly cheesy, a tribute to the hope that springs eternal in the hopelessly inept.

It is in the "serious" moments that the film's sentiments don't ring true.

There is, however, a more compelling, more melancholy story itching to break out here, one of two wounded people finding each other at the exact wrong moment in both their lives. But by the time Berri gets around to that idea, The Housekeeper is already finishing up.

The famously lovely mug of Tilda Swinton (cast as Kurtz’s wife) merely distracts, and I couldn’t help feeling that this potent story would have been far better served by a straight-ahead documentary.

At its best, this uneven film by writer-director Dave Boyle suggests that going a bit nuts is a good thing for the rigid paterfamilias.

Overly familiar industrial product, a big-budgeted entertainment defined by its putatively big concept (apes rule), an underwritten script and a few flashes of Burton's visual genius and gently askew worldview.

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 best that the good doctor (Murphy) can do, encumbered as he is by Larry Levin's screenplay and its low joke quotient, is discipline the dog, lay into the lizard and shtick it to the bear.

Compelling in fits and starts, actor-director Andy Garcia's The Lost City possesses grand aspirations but troublesome execution.

The movie is loaded with good intentions, but in his zeal to squeeze the action and our emotions into the all-too-familiar dramatic arc of the Holocaust escape story, Minac drains his movie of all individuality.

Going down with the Titanic was a picnic compared to what Leonardo DiCaprio has to weather (an Alice in Wonderland hairdo, for starters) as Louis XIV in this unwittingly nutso adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' 1850 novel.

Adds up to little more than a cynical marriage of marketable commodities -- Lohan, NASCAR and the durably profitable Bug himself.

More problematic is "Inside Out," starring Jason Gould, who also wrote and directed, based on his own experiences as the son of Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould.

Michèle Ohayon falls into the old documentary trap - the illusion that once you've found yourself a lovable eccentric to follow around with a camera, you automatically have a movie.

Posey and Rudd are the real deal, so it's almost sad when Priscilla and Jack are left hanging in the final act, their issues unresolved. It's as if the filmmakers lost their nerve when it came time to write the kind of intimate, revealing conversation that can make a sex toy unnecessary.

Woodley’s film mostly floats along on its melancholy drift, so well-attuned to the low-key rhythms of its beaten-down characters that it never quite summons up enough energy for the rest of us, who are along for the ride.

Only at the end, when one of the principals makes a decision you don't see coming, does Face fleetingly weigh in as a movie you haven't seen a thousand times before at ethnically correct film festivals.

The finale goes on and on, but the movie is nicely photographed (by John Bailey) and duly empowering, and should please the vast teen-girl audience for which it's intended.

The kids absolutely win your heart, but there's something off-putting in the film's lazy juxtaposition of unexamined Negro dysfunction tropes (absent fathers, violent streets) against an idyllic Africa tended by white benevolence.

No matter how tactful and sensitive Franklin's direction, he has made himself complicit in a polarization that panders to anti-intellectual populism even as it caters to women's movement backlash.

Promising, if uneven, first feature.

While some may bail early, those who stay to the end are likely to dwell on Zahedi's unwavering (some would say unrelenting) belief in his own artistry, as well as the film's many funny, quotable lines.

Only Williams makes any real emotional connection: I'm not sure I'd call his performance good, but there's something fascinating about seeing the man once heralded as "the black Clark Gable" three decades removed from heartthrob status, heavy and sullen-looking, weighed down by the burdens of time and age.

If none of it is particularly original or insightful, it's nonetheless executed with skill and economy.

(Ferrer's) performance as the sensitive private dick borders on beatific as he stumbles about a nighttime Hollywood Boulevard waxing lyrical about "love, sex and betrayal."

There's something oddly moving about the film purely as a love story between two people who were more alike than was good for them, yet somehow stuck it out. What we see in Frida is not Kahlo the painter, but Kahlo the love of Rivera's life, as he was of hers.

The director of 13 Going on 30, Gary Winick, was unable to infuse this material with either the sustained screwball cadences of his earlier "Tadpole" or an emotional resonance comparable to that of his superb "The Tic Code."

Exceedingly dry and precise and slow-paced comedy.

The film's start-and-go rhythm can be as maddening as the characters' amorality and sheer wallowing stupidity, but Clark has an uncanny talent for putting atmosphere on celluloid.

Sander has turned mediocrity into the triumph of the smug.

Beautifully designed, sufficiently choreographed, insipid but watchable, Elephants stresses that showbiz is about the maintenance of an illusion by any means necessary.

The film essentially grinds along in second gear. A promising debut, Dirt Boy nevertheless fails to fully deliver.

If the film's first two-thirds are dreary and preposterous, give Soref credit for a truly -- what's the proper cinematic terminology? -- batshit-crazy finale involving demented religious sects, ridiculously bloody face-offs and a gaggle of cross-dressing Mexican prostitutes.

Only Chris Klein, as the lovesick live-in boyfriend of Becky's sister, is given anything like an active emotional arc to play, and he runs with it so beautifully that he steals the movie.

Pressma's intermittently amusing screenplay, some good-natured cameos by a bunch of his famous friends, and an intelligent performance by Chess — playing herself opposite TV regular Alan Rosenberg -- save the day and the relationship.

Not terrible for a movie featuring John Travolta as a literature professor, but not too good either.

Watching Possession is a movie experience not much deeper than you'd get on your couch watching Masterpiece Theater or Mystery! -- pleasant enough, but oh so soft.

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.

Strip away the cavernous lofts, the minimalist art galleries and the pricey consulting rooms, and you have four characters unable to earn their keep with the audience.

In this lively romantic comedy from Canada, actors Wendy Crewson and Joe Cobden give off sparks -- in bed and out.

If nothing else, it's nice to see an action movie that takes Europe, not America, as its grounding point.

The real-life calendar girls were actual human beings, and here they're merely comic patsies, lacking the distinctive personalities that made the men of "The Full Monty" so endearing, their final act of revelation so peculiarly dignified.

Sternfield's direction isn't spry enough to handle the abrupt shift in genre when this moves from detective tale to social-problem film, and things bottom out with a town hall meeting tepidly shot as courtroom drama that stops the story's momentum dead in its tracks and leaves Meskada limping through its last half-hour.

Genially moronic, Road Trip will tide you over until the next slice of "American Pie" comes along.

iInstead of a buoyant, imaginative superhero movie on the order of Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" films or Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns," we get a lumbering, paint-by-numbers origin story.

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.

If the dialectics here are strictly Hallmark, the film is lifted by some nice location work - all of the Chinese scenes are shot around Shanghai - and deepened somewhat by the bleak depiction of the emotional lives of Katie, her family and her friends.

Cloying, unoriginal stuff, rescued -- barely -- by the easy affection that courses between Bullock and Connick Jr., and by the lovely cinematography of Caleb Deschanel.

It's nowhere near as funny, largely because of an exhaustingly hyperactive performance by Elizabeth Hurley.

It was a hellish encounter, as well as a portent of the 10 years to come, and as such deserves far better than Mel Gibson's glower and writer-director Randall Wallace's guns-and-Moses platitudes.

Cholodenko's new film relies on easy caricature over true character such that the film fails to build emotional momentum or resonance.

Devil is a Night Gallery reject worth experiencing only to gape at a "spirituality" that falls somewhere between Dostoyevsky and Jack Chick, and to laugh that such daring feats of narrative illogic were undertaken with a straight face.

The result is a Brooks Brothers comedy -- part Albert, part Mel.

It's almost foolish to review Hannah Montana: The Movie as anything other than the latest cog in a cultural phenomenon/mass-marketing juggernaut. The film itself certainly doesn't aspire to anything more.

Without a well-delineated political or social framework, Union Square offers little that we didn't already know.

Well before The New World's two-and-one-half hours are up, Malick's tree-hugging reveries have become suffocating, no matter the unquestionable tastefulness with which they're rendered -- more painterly vistas, more Wagner (and a little Mozart, too), ravishing re-creations of 17th-century London. Surely, only a Philistine could find any fault with this, or believe, perchance, that Malick's famous poetic beauty had turned poetically fatal.

Johnson clearly digs the idea of Daredevil as an agonized hero, slathering the screen with gloomy lighting and Catholic imagery, yet the movie has far less emotional weight than, say, "Spider-Man" (whose building-hopping pyrotechnics it often appears to be copying).

Mr. 3000, which starts out promisingly, squanders Mac's natural gift of salty gruffness by shoehorning him into a dull, heartwarming cinematic lesson on humility and the joys of teamwork.

Unfortunately, whenever Ledger isn't onscreen, Lords of Dogtown takes a spill.

Undone by its own malignant contempt for every one of its characters, except a pathologically candid grandmother who single-handedly kept my chin from dropping to my ankles. Even Bergman would be scrambling for his Prozac.

The laugh always comes first, and Myers' puppy-dog tenacity to that cast-iron tenet of low comedy, disarming and even somewhat charming in the first film, now has an air of careerist desperation about it.

The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.

Rich in lovingly assembled silent-film clips, as well as in intimate views of the magnificent Mole, this impassioned yet somewhat too precious fable from writer-director Davide Ferrario feels calculated to make a cineaste swoon, and yet . . . it never quite does.

Yet the movie, distilling into purest form the blend of viciousness and sentimentality that informs all Woo's work, winds up as emotionally bogus as it is viscerally overwhelming.

Flaws, double standards, strange detours and all, this is still the most entertaining WWE release to date.

It seems to have been made to delight European intellectuals and anyone else who believes that America is a land of bloodthirsty yet comical barbarians.

Generating gore-free unease through sound effects and scary faces is the specialty of director Takashi Shimizu, who helmed the original series (known in Japan as Ju-On). He creates some unsettling moments here, particularly a well-staged scene involving a body under the sheets and a man in a shower, but the evil ghost itself is a predictable, one-trick pony.

Tykwer may want meaning to go with his special effects, but the problem with his filmmaking, both here and earlier, is that he's more interested in his own bag of tricks than in actually saying something.

Making his directorial debut, Dunstan displays a knack for building suspense. And yet, weirdly, amidst all the requisite blood spray, one senses a reluctance on the filmmaker’s part to linger lovingly over the pierced skins and protruding entrails of the killer’s various victims.

For a film hinged on one of the more passionate art forms, it's all a little bloodless.

The family squabbles jangle the nerves while not hitting on insights or memorable emotion.

Yes, Joe Camp has gone meta. It's hard to not feel a measure of warmth for the determined optimism of his enterprise, especially since he hasn't lost the touch for cute dog antics.

If the trailer for this one left you feeling you'd pretty much got it, plot point by plot point, so really why bother.

Roaming freely between comedy (which mostly works) and drama (which mostly doesn't) before settling on trite sentimentality, the film may not be an altogether unpleasant way to pass the time, but, ultimately, the innocuous Captain Pantoja doesn't earn its stripes.

You can see what's coming five minutes into the movie, but capable acting lends it a certain superficial charm.

The Greatest Game mostly sits there limply -- it lacks the charming swagger Paxton dependably brings to his own acting roles.

If the great movie musicals are the ones that transport us to some heady superreality, the only place Rent takes us to is the Nederlander Theatre.

Gossip is trash, but it's well-written, slickly directed trash.

Despite some grace- ful performances, especially from Ruehl and Kazan, the result is a tepid repast at best.