Kidman, who speaks Russian for much of the movie, turns in a technically impeccable performance, but the movie gets far more out of her than she out of it.

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

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.

There's lots of half-naked flesh on display, and an enticing sense of hot action afoot (especially between the two gay guys), but the directors seem timid about sex, and really, what's the point of being Spanish if you're afraid to show the good stuff?

As [Roberts'] gay best friend, Rupert Everett is the only one with any backbone, any sense of humor or any decent lines.

In spite of its aspirations toward enlightenment, Naked in Ashes leaves its audiences bewildered.

Undemanding, unsurprising and really quite charming within conventional limits, Elizabeth Allen’s tween-coming-of-age feature debut is as realist as can be, given that, of the three nice Florida girls who need to grow up in the movie, the eponymous heroine (Sara Paxton) is a high-achieving blond mermaid with vaguely feminist leanings, a twitchy blue tail and the comic timing of an up-and-coming Cameron Diaz.

What's most grating, though, is how the film pretends to be an inspiring story about one ordinary guy's pursuit of a quixotic dream to meet his muse, when in fact Herzlinger's adoration of Drew is considerably less heartfelt than his infatuation with himself.

The movie's antique Rockwellian look is its greatest pleasure.

Noé calls Irreversible his "Eyes Wide Shut," though it's really more like "A Clockwork Orange."

In fairness, the movie isn't the absolute worst of its kind and there's a certain charm to Butcher's amiable, puppy-eyed performance. But Michael McGowan's direction is as flat as an asphalt road, and his script is gasping for air long before it enters the final stretch.

Mike Myers wrote the abominable script, plays both leads and is miscast in each.

A snappy, delightfully balanced bit of historic whimsy.

Manipulative filmmaking at its most gently persuasive.

His veiled misogyny and totally unguarded homophobia are unconvincing, and when he resorts to chestnuts like comparing how black and white people walk, he comes off as a Pryor caricature, rather than as a devotee.

At once illogical and insultingly stupid, filled with dead-end twists and the sort of dialogue that makes a mockery of actual adult relations.

A lovely wallow in the sweaty pains and joys of mostly gay adolescent love.

The Hard Word’s greatest betrayal, however, is of its cast, of Pearce (hamming it up as the charismatic antihero) and Griffiths (as sexy as ever, but more or less abandoned by the movie midway through), who give it their all but get very little in return.

A funny summer frolic.

I still believe with all my heart that no movie with real car stunts, a tough-chick hero, and a severed head that thunks directly into the camera can be all bad. But this is pushing it.

There's no excitement or terror in watching the 3-D execution of 2-D actors giving 1-D performances, just the steadily diminishing returns of the same eye gouge delivered ad infinitum.

Creation's power lies in its layers, in the way it makes distinctions between religion and faith, and the ways it beautifully (save for one clunky bit of overexplanation) lays out the similarities between religion and science.

Part dewey-eyed paperback romance, part acid-trip planetarium show, this extravagantly silly movie comes on like the second coming of "2001."

Largely, you get to watch a nice old guy waxing philosophical in his beloved vegetable garden, in his workshop or amid city traffic. If that switches you on, then plug in.

A maddeningly uneven triptych.

Three leads do their best with simplistic characters.

Only once, in a quick sketch of "Planet of the Apes" -- does the humor seem to spring from pure movie love. In nearly every other respect, the film is so lazy, solipsistic and overpleased with itself it's hard not to believe that this time the Evil Empire has won not just the battle, but the war.

For all the violence and breaking-up-to-make-up that go on, there's never really a sense of risk or exploration, and the film's pulse never rises above faint.

Meandering.

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

Doing The Most Dangerous Game is, for action directors, what covering "Satisfaction" is to bar bands; if you hit most of the notes, it'll do.

Slobbery wet kiss of a family movie.

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.

He (Berlanti) shoots for bland entertainment and scores.

Immensely exciting and funny.

The plot is slow and absurdly contrived, and if you're looking for a thriller, look elsewhere. If you love dance movies, Assassination Tango is worth a go.

IMAX magnifies everything, including flaws, which are legion in this listless, awkward prequel to the 1979 movie based on the novel by Walter and Steven Farley.

For a movie with a lesbian theme, My Mother Likes Women is absurdly coy about gay sex. It may be the most heterosexually minded film about lesbians ever made.

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.

Birth may be the most futile application of cinematic and acting skill I've seen all year. A little "Twilight Zone" flummery would have livened up the proceedings to no end.

After a lively first half-hour, the scenes start to feel heavy, as though Serrano suddenly decided he was actually making a meaningful drama, and the ensuing, halfhearted political satire is like an extra weight on top of that.

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

Fun, scattershot Hollywood spoof.

As a performer, Robin Williams has a wonderfully volatile range; as an actor, he commutes uneasily between over-sincere and over-sinister. Both modes are on full monochromatic display in this stolid noir thriller.

Neeson's tormented weariness lends an air of dignity to the film's pulpy, grubby nastiness, but as striking as he is in action-hero mode, the truth is that Taken doesn't need dignity.

Ultimately a wiser and truer film than its crass and cartoony beginnings would have us believe.

The Saint works. The reason why it occasionally soars is Kilmer, an actor who’s happiest when burying himself in eccentric characterizations, a trick he performs repeatedly here even as he fills the screen with pure movie-star dazzle.

Though director Jonathan Hensleigh (The Punisher) perks up when filming violence, the atmosphere throughout is past-prime, stymieing any strut.

For the first time in years, De Niro digs deep emotionally, perhaps because he's been stirred by the powerful work of his co-stars, including a subtle Frances McDormand and a ferocious Patti LuPone, as well as the heartbreaking (and achingly beautiful) Franco.

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.

Too long by about 20 minutes, the film drags a bit, but the acting--fine throughout--carries the whole thing.

So tapped into its audience's giddy schadenfreude that beyond a kinkier-than-usual jolt of black humor and some clever red herrings, the formula remains rote.

Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.

The camaraderie in the Eagle Shield Transport locker room is strained stuff, despite a capable ensemble cast that includes Matt Dillon and Larry Fishburne.

Though targeted to the same female filmgoers who flocked to the self-realization via food porn of "Julie & Julia," EPL is a comparative downer, letting viewers experience the rush of self-improvement without having to do any of the work. I cried. Mission accomplished?

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.

What Jackson's Shaft can't do is talk the talk, or much of anything else, in director John Singleton's feature-length insult to one of the more cherished modern screen icons.

It's so playful, wicked and unseemly, by the time you realize that the actual plot of this brilliantly sordid satire hasn't started, the party is already over.

Bose does a good job of keeping his melancholy tales loose with wry humor, and while not all of the episodes are successful, at their best they show real empathy for the complex lives of India's modern middle class.

Constantine, which opts in the end for what I can only describe as a kind of supernatural humanism, is not without its spiritual satisfactions.

If it registers at all, it'll likely be more because of the fuckability of Morris Chestnut -- a star waiting for a worthy film -- than any insights or memorable moments from the movie itself.

A surprise hit in Thailand, the film is nonetheless a reductive mess.

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.

Barely competent. The pacing never accelerates beyond sluggish, and Lesnick's script is an awkward pile of gag lines.

Brave, gifted, haunted and poor, these kids are so heartbreaking that you wish Shou had the good sense to give their lives the attention he lavishes on himself.

An appallingly crude film, with dialogue lifted off bumper stickers, characters stitched together from shorthand clichés (the brassy black drag queen; the fiery little Latin number) and a plot that's on cruise control from the opening credits.

Thankfully, the film, which skirts that rapidly deteriorating line between fantasy and reality -- Irwin as "himself" as croc expert as suspected international spy -- takes a tongue-in-cheek attitude even as it pushes the Croc Hunter agenda: Mother Nature? Don’t muck with her.

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.

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.

Marebito's ghoulish delight in gore will turn off the squeamish, but tougher souls will recognize that the over-the-top shocks are Shimizu's way of illustrating how terrifying the risk of human connection can be.

Dramatic failings are only exacerbated by D.J. Caruso's direction: He composes every frame as if for television -- despite the fact that the film is shot in widescreen -- and his visual style is about as cinematic as sports talk radio.

Each new superfluous Jennifer Aniston rom-com is already met with low expectations, but add some overcooked, middlebrow Indiewood quirk and you've got cinema's purest shade of beige.

Even as the psychological interdependencies of the two boys take the foreground, the movie gets more and more crowded with fun-house surprises and cliffhanging set pieces.

For a movie that preaches cultural understanding, it sometimes seems a little too comfortable perpetuating ethnic stereotypes.

Check off all of Perry’s motifs: vilification of the black bourgie princess, tough-love Christian messages, Academy Award–nominated actresses (Viola Davis, this time) managing to maintain their dignity.

Much of the film is as strange and oddly beautiful as one of Arbus' own photographs, bold in its attempt to find new ways of cracking the biopic chestnut and sensitive in its portrayal of a 1950s woman who, like so many of her contemporaries, finds herself imprisoned in a "Good Housekeeping" nightmare.

The film isn't really about much and so feels patchy and forced, with elements more calculated than inspired, more urgent than exciting.

Storytelling is no more likely than "Happiness" or "Welcome to the Dollhouse" to resolve the question of whether director Todd Solondz is a serious artist or a nasty little man with a perversely glum view of the universe.

Dazzling imagery and a grab bag of wry jokes, no matter how lively, can take a movie only so far when there's no emotional ballast attached.

Nary an original idea abounds in The Island.

A flimsy premise to begin with, it’s been punctured beyond repair by an amateur script from Bill Kelly and director Hugh Wilson (The First Wives Club), and by Wilson’s shocking ineptitude with dialogue, framing and pace.

A one-joke movie if ever there was, but the joke happens to be a good one -- a Tracy-and-Hepburn-style battle of the sexes in which Kate can fly and blast through walls -- and director Ivan Reitman (who made Ghostbusters) feels at home with the mix of screwball and supernatural.

Directed in humongous close-up by former dancer Jon M. Chu, Step Up 2 the Streets is suavely choreographed by Jamal Sims, Nadine "Hi Hat" Ruffin and Dave Scott.

Ultimately this is a radio drama made into a movie with a single set.

The film skews young, to be sure, and it isn't as memorable as the new Disney classics of the early 1990s, but there's still plenty here to hold the interest of viewers of all ages: delightful performances (particularly by Dench, plowing Angela Lansbury terrain), zinging comic dialogue and a soundtrack that's a wealth of sonorous riches.

Writer-director Richard Day, whose debut feature, the drag comedy Girls Will Be Girls, was shamefully neglected by critics and audiences alike, proves again that he's the new master of the catty one-liner, and he's also becoming a striking visual stylist.

The effects are terrific, from the two-and-a-half-minute opening sequence that tracks around the brilliantly lit liner from below, above and round about, to some amazing exterior shots of the groaning vessel rolling around in the churning sea like a giant, wounded whale.

Stuck for years playing young women who are the idealized object of male desire (Portman and Johansson)-- flaw-free and, in Johansson's case, barely conscious -- they come alive in The Other Boleyn Girl, as if being bound up in costumer Sandy Powell's exquisite gowns has freed them from the tighter constraints of their own beauty.

Milani has never been one for subtlety, but although her feminism remains refreshingly vital, Cease Fire comes down like a blunt instrument, hammering out the couple's kinks and flaws much too easily.

Watching this interesting, well-acted debut feature from writer-director Russell Brown, one begins to reason that what Nathan and Maggie have in common, besides desire, is a need for a partner who's not completely kind.

It isn't really a documentary about the porn industry but rather a documentary about the making of a coffee-table book containing posed photos of porn stars, fans and moguls. Director Michael Grecco is also the photographer making the book, so perhaps "infomercial" would be a more accurate description.

Unfortunately, none of the characters -- despite the film's strong cast -- ever seems worthy of the attention.

A slag heap of outrageous coincidence and shimmering be-all-that-you-can-be posturing, the film is for all intents and purposes another Top Gun retread, which is why its lies don't register as deeply or offensively as those put forth by films like "Mississippi Burning" -- it's too silly to take seriously.

Never lets up: A door can't shut without sounding like a bomb going off; mutilated bodies show up with clockwork punctuality, gratuitously underscored by a relentlessly overbearing soundtrack.

A mindless muddle.

An abbondanza of busy, situation comedy twists that snip one's suspended disbelief and send it crashing like a chandelier.

While the film frequently concentrates on the wrong story, the humanity of the musicians comes through in their own words and actions.

Pretty good as pretty good goes, with Jude Law turning in an efficiently chipper, if palpably less dark, performance than the one that earned Michael Caine his first Oscar nomination.