LaPaglia is a fine actor, but not even he can redeem such bathos.

At once over- and under-written, and peppered with tiresome coincidences and misunderstandings, Goldberg’s mechanical, joke-one, joke-two, joke-three approach to ensemble screenwriting soon betrays his TV-sitcom roots.

Like Percy himself, the film doesn’t have any traits that qualify as having an actual personality. Even so, as long as the kiddies aren’t too upset by the major liberties reportedly taken with the source material, it might be enough to distract them until Harry returns.

This low-budget horror comedy arrives via a lively trailer and a witty print ad, yet the film itself never quite takes off.

Despite some exciting visuals...Schwartzberg intercuts his segments with clichéd swooping helicopter shots of city skylines and desert mesas...undermining the quirky individuality he seeks to celebrate.

A rather standard out-on-the-road rock doc except for one unique and under-explored twist: The "24" star, after signing the band to his label, impulsively decided to accompany them on this barnstorming adventure as their tour manager.

As our warriors encounter the Kenyan equivalents of Cyclopes and Sirens, the languid pace and the lulling voice-over (French subtitled in English) make for a nice bedtime story rather than a window on primal struggles.

Title notwithstanding, Three . . . Extremes really offers only two.

I have the greatest respect for Kazuo Ishiguro, whose wonderful novel "The Remains of the Day" became one of the best films in the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre. But the combination of his stately writing and James Ivory's stately directing, even when pepped by Christopher Doyle's fizzy cinematography, makes for fatally low-key viewing.

As powerfully as the film lingers in the mind, one can't help wishing he were led just a bit more by his heart.

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.

Paycheck is too smart for a mindless actioneer, and too slick to capture the full moral weight of Dick's dystopia.

Fans of the TV series will again be happy to see some of the old Saturday-morning villains, and Bill Boes' excellent production design outdoes his work in the first film.

Compulsively watchable, with its fair share of effective sledgehammer shocks; it just isn't very good.

White and Monroe are terrific — their relationship, as well as its dissolution, is completely believable — but they’re limited by a script full of old tropes.

K-19 is so unnervingly square that it seems eerily like Party-sanctioned Soviet filmmaking: Its Motherland-loving sailors, myth-making shots of K-19 and displays of heroism are worthy of the Young Lenin Pioneers' Handbook.

Actress Amy Smart (Crank) has a knack for bringing a spark to mediocre movies, which she does again in this amiably dull dance drama.

Give writer-director team John Musker and Ron Clements (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules) credit for trying to update the formula and grow with the kids weaned on their earlier hits, though it's doubtful the "tweens" they’re aiming at here still embrace Disney, and little kids don't care about back story.

There are funny moments -- a cameo from Debbie Reynolds, an Evita sing-along -- but the film grows progressively more dispirited.

The film moves in fits and starts, and is way too long, but it may prove memorable, if only for the sweet, marvelously inventive performance of Kevin James.

There's more than a hint of self-pitying male-castration fantasy in writer-director Jeff Franklin's portrayal.

A tolerable thriller.

The photography is clear and colorful, the acting just fine, and the pace steady. However, the wan script by Geert Heetebrij imbues the brothers with so little personality that their respective transformations -- pack no emotional punch.

At full length it’s still pretty funny, but only for its natural 30 minutes, after which it grows repetitive and tiresome as only material meant for the short attention span can.

Eckhart has even less chemistry with Aniston than he did with fellow narcissist Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2007’s "No Reservations," going soft and gooey only when he and Martin Sheen, as Burke’s father-in-law, share a big cry.

It's exactly what you thought it would be: A plagiarized, campus-set "Single White Female" pitched to teens.

Albaladejo turns his film into a banal, mildly entertaining trifle of affirmation, eliciting a shrug more than any real emotion.

Beerfest bubbles with the cheeky irreverence of early John Landis and David Zucker. Yet, like just about every other American screen comedy of the moment, it's far too long in the tooth, with a scattershot final half-hour that seems the work of an editor battling a bad hangover.

Though sprung from the mind of a woman, the film plays like a hetero male fantasy of tortured love.

The less you know about the world of classical music and, specifically, about one of its more flamboyant denizens, the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the less the offense of Speaking in Strings.

This crazily ambitious film is saddled with a musical score that's often jarringly jolly and a screenplay so busy jumping from platoon to platoon that no single story ever takes hold. Yet, all is not lost. The photography and period detailing are excellent, and Taub, who displays real feeling for the innocent bystanders of war, finds the occasional small, surprising moment.

While decidedly green, at least isn't mealy or tasteless. And if the juice in tyro screenwriter Erica Beeney's witty dialogue can't quite flow through the hard tissue of underripe gimmicks and derivative set pieces, there's enough sweetness in the performances, and tautness in the direction (by Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin), to forestall any serious bellyaching.

Perry has great casting instincts, and in Elba and Union he's matched two gifted, equally gorgeous actors, both of whom seem ready to make sparks fly. If only their director would let them.

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.

Scenically beautiful, rhythmically uneven comedy.

Far too often, Douglas indulges his preference for the superficial over the substantive: The plentiful performance footage -- shot in overproduced, music-video fashion -- overwhelms the film, as do White’s purplish, faux-poetic musings.

Audiences will probably be miles ahead of the plot, but may not mind, since the cast bring a committed, lived-in quality to their performances.

So stuck is the movie inside the heads and hearts of its indisputably gifted makers, it never quite makes the leap into ours.

Rock's interventions can't compensate for excessive fealty to dumb gags involving watery poop and designer hallucinogens.

The two encounters with the beast WXIII -- first in a darkened factory, and later in an empty stadium, to the strains of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G Minor (Pathétique) -- elevate the disappointingly flat animation into a vivid fable of monster and morality.

The concept here holds more promise than the execution.

Director Simon Brand channels both "Saw" and "Reservoir Dogs" (good influences, both) to propel his main story forward, and even gets nicely twisty when the climax comes, but it's hard to escape the feeling that the B-story was added in to pad the film's running time.

The Reckoning proceeds with such leaden literal-mindedness that it never seems more than a stodgy (and, at times, blatantly silly) paperback affair.

For a film purporting to tell it like it is for black gay men, race is the most poorly handled aspect in Punk's equation; it's almost as if it had no relevance. That might have flown if its most telling moment didn't suggest otherwise.

With its chatty, overstuffed patter, Hoodwinked strains at the seams to look with it, like one of those dressed-alike Beverly Hills mother-daughter combos. Having said all that, the songs (yes, there are songs, too), mostly written by Todd Edwards, provide an unexpected bright spot.

Though the movie promises a Behind the Music–type look at the meteoric rise and tragic fall of the Cosmos -- a team (if the press notes are to be believed) overwhelmed by wealth, groupies, rivalry and power struggles -- it all adds up to a tempest in a tea pot.

Despite a hopelessly corny score, the movie is redeemed by a goofily touching final scene.

Benny Boom built his reputation directing music videos and commercials, and his first feature, Next Day Air, falls somewhere between the blunt-force visuals of the former and the focus-grouped formulas of the latter.

To no one's possible satisfaction -- the non-question of how Paige is to ascend to the throne and retain her personal integrity that The Prince and Me falls, finally and irrevocably, flat.

Director Volker Schlöndorff is ponderously out of his depth with comic pulp, and fatally heavy-handed with his actors.

The movie is affectionate without exactly being infectious, and Browne, who begins his film with the Michael Moore–esque revelation that Americans bowl in greater numbers than they vote, disappoints by not devoting more attention to bowling in its amateur incarnations.

Has the airiness of a well-made souffle, springing delicate small surprises at calibrated intervals.

Slight comedy, directed by Jim Field Smith, who tries with modest success to blend the sticky-sweet with the plain ol' sticky.

Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.

Without its cast -- the cream of France's female acting elite -- François Ozon's ambivalent musical-comedy homage to the 1950s wouldn't be much.

If Kaena's alternate universe isn't nearly as fully realized as "antastic Planet'," the 3-D imagery is often gloriously turbocharged.

The final match stirs briefly, but when it's over, the movie's energy crashes right back down again. Disappointing.

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.

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.

More of a Lifetime holiday special than a theatrical feature, writer-director Kate Montgomery's tale of love and mistaken identity at a Native American ski resort is too sticky-sweet to be memorable.

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

There’s something entirely ridiculous about rating a movie like this NC-17: Why should sniggering, infantile, adolescent humor be denied its natural core audience of snigger-ing, infantile adolescents?

Devotees of Motorhead frontman/certifiable rock icon Lemmy Kilmister will be in heaven watching this gushing love letter to the man who straddles rock subgenres, but anyone who's not already a fan will cry for mercy long before the nearly two-hour film ends.

Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.

An intermittently gripping, good-looking movie.

The whole movie is curiously distant and flat, like a museum object encased in extra-thick glass.

Incorporating surrealist humor and an ironic patina, Lord of War tries for irreverent satire, but the film (and especially Cage) is too muted and distant.

Director Roland Emmerich (Godzilla, Independence Day) knows his money shots: any time he throws some mastodons or giant dodos on the screen for a little beast-battlin’ action, he has our attention. But his lack of skill with actors really shows during the long moments of downtime in-between.

In spite of its sympathy, Derailroaded veers into reality-TV voyeurism whenever the former street singer bemoans his lack of fame or breaks into childish caterwauling.

The family flags palpable agony... provides the movie's only earned emotional tension.

Gavin’s story is typical teen-faces-bullies-and-gets-girl hokum, while Zerk is like a Mike Judge cartoon character come to life, with a revelatory slapstick performance from the often straight-laced Long.

Crowe, for his part, is decency itself, but unlike Amenábar he's a pop romantic with no stomach or aptitude for noir.

This overcrowded, overheated scenario, with many scenes repeated from the first two films, keeps us so busy tracking all the overlapping storylines, we have no time to imagine what they might mean.

It's difficult to see the characters as anyone but Barney and Björk, and the film's binary system, opposing hard and soft, East and West, male and female, etc., feels clumsy and simplistic. That said, there's creepy delight in seeing American consumption carried to its logical extreme.

Not even Altman's loose-limbed shooting style can redeem Cookie’s Fortune, a bafflingly pointless farce that belongs more properly in the vaudeville halls than on the director's sporadically lustrous résumé.

While The Business of Fancydancing is a thoughtful and complex work of sound and vision, it doesn't seem quite right to call it a film, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is plainly, if crisply, shot on video, with a bright, shiny surface that fairly screams low-rent. Second, the whole business is strangely non-cinematic.

Silberling and writer Robert Gordon have made the fatal error of trying to jolly up the novels, which are often funny but never, ever cute.

It's merely a trivial footnote to the popular franchise - though one that will no doubt satisfy rabid gleeks.

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.

It simply takes faith for granted as a motivating factor, and thus pulls off the neat trick of never making us feel we’re being preached at -- Yet, as directed by first-timer Adam Anderegg, from Jack Weyland's 1980 novel, the movie is too amateurishly square to make the most of its own ironic implications.

They do deliver on the gore and nudity fronts, and you don't often see such things in 3-D. The familiar title helps with the marketing, but hurts by inviting comparison with a classic; as a 2-D remake, it wouldn't pass muster. (Tom Savini's 1990 redo is far more respectable.)

Some of the performances are remarkably natural amid so much farce.

Dorian Blues is full of similarly rigged moments, but there are genuine chuckles, and a palpably heartfelt final scene between Dorian and his mom ends the tale on a powerful note.

The Sisters may be worth a look, however, for the work of the magnificent Bello and Tony Goldwyn, who's never been better than as the married man with whom Marcia has an affair. Their final clench is pure, guilty-pleasure melodrama, which means it's not the least bit Chekhovian.

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.

Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material. What should have been a small, independent feature without marquee casting -- the story's protagonists, after all, are meant to be the kind of people nobody ever notices.

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

And this may be the only film in history to have someone learn about egalitarianism at a British boarding school (!). Hawaii's dismal onscreen track record continues; bring back James Michener.

The great, and given Costa-Gavras' previous m.o., inevitable irony of Mad City is that even as it condemns the media for exploiting the situation, it's busy doing the very same.

There's nothing new about this sado-cinema, and nothing much worthy, either.

I can't think of another contemporary novel -- unless it be Cunningham's far more ambitious and less successful "The Hours" -- less suited for the journey to film under any direction but that of, say, Russian dreamer Alexander Sokurov.

If not for the race sequences and the intriguing presence of Caviezel, who made this film before "The Passion of the Christ" and who one hopes will take on even more roles befitting his peculiar sad-eyed charisma, the film would amount to a well-intentioned snooze.

The last half-hour is a decent enough ride, with Dafoe controlling the ship by Powerbook and product placement, while Bullock and Patric demonstrate the triumph of American gumption over high tech, the better to save all hands on deck.

A movie saved by great acting.

After half an hour spent drooling over its visual splendors, I found the movie every bit as sickening as its creators intended it to be, minus the kicks they so palpably got out of making it.

The Great Raid cries out for the kind of B-movie industriousness that Dahl brought to his early, low-budget films noirs (Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction), but instead it has dreams of sugarplum Oscars dancing in its head, and never stops mistaking spectacle for the truly spectacular.

As social satire, though, the movie is a nonstarter, completely lacking in the zany lunacy of "M*A*S*H" and "Dr. Strangelove," or the whacked savagery of "Catch-22."

The film has spunk. Unfortunately, the gore comes with brutal regularity, so that, despite Farmer and Isaac's attempts to liven things up, the film still just wears you down.