An amateurish mashup of "The Butterfly Effect" and "The Family Man" (talk about unholy hybrids!) that strains patience from the get-go.

The movie charts a journey from belief to despair with occasional touches of humor, but by the end I was so deadened by its minimalist style and method, I could barely summon the energy to ask why.

Always good with actors, Hanson brings out a beaten-down charm in Bana that works nicely against the hotheaded authority the actor shows in the gambling scenes, while Duvall is, like the veteran card shark he plays, a master of subtle gestures. The low card here is Barrymore, somewhat awkwardly shoehorned into this boys' club to provide some romantic relief.

The satirical jabs at celebrity culture smell like rotted leftovers from "The Fantastic Four." The token ruminations on the tension between a superhero's public and private lives seem flown in from Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns" (to say nothing of Raimi's own, superior "Darkman"). Most egregious, though, is the way Raimi and the writers reduce Spider-Man 3 to the very sort of abject distinctions between virtue and sin that the series has heretofore studiously avoided.

A feather-light comedy about losing emotional baggage and finding love in upper Manhattan.

The concept here holds more promise than the execution.

Its 104 minutes of lukewarm-’n’-fuzzy comfort food will no doubt satisfy some, but those looking for deeper insight into our nation’s peculiar mating rituals will feel left out.

Washed in a honeyed 1950s glow, Waitress has a mildly puckish way with outlandish baked goods and pert dialogue, but the movie is memorable largely for the contrast between its innocent sweetness and the savagery of its maker's premature death.

Jindabyne wears its class politics lightly, weaving them into a ghost story about the intimate connection between how we treat our living and our dead that will hover around your shoulders long after you leave the theater.

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

And yes, you are supposed to take this all extremely seriously; it probably sounded layered and complex when the writers were stoned.

This ostensible comedy may be a new depths-of-hell low in the Emmanuel Lewis filmography, but for star Jamie Kennedy it’s par for the coarse.

Directed by Lee Tamahori with his customary flash and glitter, Next lives from one brilliantly executed chase sequence to the next, which is more than enough reason to stay the course.

This silly little flick is deadly serious. And seriously awful.

If you can't count on a British con movie to deliver at least a few moments of entertaining color, well, then what can you count on? Director Richard Janes' slight and wobbly Fakers comes close to shattering one's faith in a just and orderly universe.

The movie gives every cheerful appearance of having been shot with no time and less money, and it doesn't have much on its mind, unless you count the moral integrity supplied by local Apaches more by way of Mel Brooks than Howard Hawks.

Jacobs and his writers are notably more interested in creepy atmosphere -- and in contemplating the order of the universe -- than in jump-in-your-seat jolts. But well before day breaks, it's the movie’s plot (which would have made for an outstanding Outer Limits episode) that has come to seem stuck in an endless loop.

The film is so single-mindedly determined to be light and comfortable, to not raise a sweat, that it forgoes even the mildest surprises. The only things that get heavy here are the viewer's eyelids.

Outside of "Grindhouse," it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season.

For most of its running time, it's an enjoyably unpretentious celebration of the guilty pleasure we can take from a stupid-as-all-get-out car chase or from watching things blow up real good. Then, in its final half hour, Wright and Pegg ratchet up the absurdity tenfold and enter the realm of the sublime.

There is so much to admire and empathize with in Stephanie Daley that it feels almost boorish to quibble about whether the film needs to come packaged as a murder mystery.

Narrated with surprising empathy by John Waters, is a historically thorough and thoroughly hysterical examination of the big, smelly desert lake's formation.

Clichéd though it may be, this movie was clearly made with love.

For all its infectious, go-for-broke wackiness ATHFCMFFT never quite surpasses its opening sequence.

There is one redeeming skirmish -- the climactic fight involving a snowy cliff and an elaborate pulley system -- but from the guy who's directed videos for Cher, Amy Grant, Billy Joel, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony? We expected more.

The cars and stunt work are real, and so is the rather endearing retro cheesiness. This is the movie that really belongs with Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof."

So oppressive is Peggy's world -- Year of the Dog is the best evocation I've seen of how much worse it is to be depressed in a sunny climate -- that when she finally loses control, it feels more like catharsis than madness.

Yep, it’s Keyser Soze time.

In a film that quickly reveals itself to be a love letter to Wu, some of the best moments have nothing to do with that legendary hip-hop collective: Sage Francis taunting the unruly, increasingly tense crowd with his cerebral, political performance-art hip-hop; Redman playfully admonishing his young son to be good and then giving the boy a kiss when the paternal command wounds.

I suspect that Death Proof will throw some of its director's admirers for a loop, though it may be the most revealing thing Tarantino has yet done -- a full-throttle expression of a singular artistic temperament disguised, like so many gems of grindhouses yore, as a glittering hunk of trash.

For a little while, Fighting Words is a modest, agreeable character piece, illuminating those who ply their trade in an under-appreciated, intensely personal art form.

Not quite disturbingly forlorn, but forlorn (and overly literal) just the same, this latest entry in the doggy-acrobat subgenre of canine comedies has but one joke, and it comes early: In the Idol age, celebrity culture has gone to the dogs -- literally.

A viscerally effective thriller ends up a repugnant exercise in moral relativism, delivered with the grandstanding swagger of the self-styled provocateur.

Blades does capture the obvious eccentricities of the skating world, and is funny up to a point, but by now Ferrell & Co. have the formula for a mild comedy down pat. What they need is a little soul.

The Lookout is funny, tender and littered with elegantly written characters played by actors cast for goodness of fit rather than star wattage.

So cleverly executed that one forgives -- just -- the frenetic pace and absence of down time.

Evidently, this bloated piece of Oscar-nominated nonsense was a big hit in Denmark, which makes me think there's a glittering future in that otherwise discriminating country for several seasons of "Days of Our Lives."

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.

Now there is inconclusive but reasonable doubt, based on a letter that turned up in 2005 from Upton Sinclair, who had heard their disgruntled first lawyer say they were guilty. You'd think this nugget might show up in a new documentary about the case, but Peter Miller, known for his 2001 film about that other beloved song of the left, "The Internationale," has recast the story into a tale of prejudice against Italian immigrants and the violation of civil rights.

In more experienced hands, perhaps a great story could be told, but Ten ’Til Noon has two major factors working against it. First, the acting is wildly uneven...Second, once the conspiracy is more or less revealed, the story ceases to be interesting.

A capable, if modest, charmer.

First Snow has a fine sense of place and a small but terrific turn by veteran actress Jackie Burroughs.

Though The Page Turner clearly aims for ambiguity of meaning, you'd have to be blind, or deaf to the strenuously long-faced score, to miss the signs and portents that keep piling up in this dispiritingly transparent movie, which brandishes its foregone conclusion 20 minutes in.

Actor-writer-director Mars Callahan's diarrheal 10-character rant about modern relationships sounds like it was researched by eavesdropping on the restroom chatter at a high school prom.

Withdrawal From Gaza lacks both the nuance and the muscle of Yoav Shamir's excellent 2005 "5 Days," which probes far deeper into the relationship between settlers and the soldiers who came, on the orders of supersettler Ariel Sharon, to remove them.

At its best, Behind the Mask offers some, um, cutting insights about mass-media blood lust and the cult of the serial killer, and in Baesel, who is by turns charming, manic and thoroughly scary, it has a gifted young actor who clearly relishes a role he can sink his pitchfork into.

They only want us to play that tiresome guessing game: Is it all a dream or is it really happening? Instead, you may find yourself asking: Is this cinema or merely Cinemax?

Cosgrove and screenwriter Dean Craig aim for the kind of close-quarters chaos that John Cleese and Connie Booth turned into high comic art on "Fawlty Towers," but Caffeine's roundelay of sophomoric urination, masturbation and pedophilia gags isn't half as funny as the atrocious British accents of the largely American cast.

If it was simply a jokey commentary on the dangers of greed and religious fervor, Tortilla Heaven would be forgivable. But Hecht Dumontet deserves special derision for her hypocritical condescension toward Falfúrrias' simple-folk caricatures, rendering them as God-fearing dolts worthy of scorn until the patronizing finale, which tries for a spiritual uplift that's as disingenuous as it is incompetently executed.

Some will see this as a movie about how we're all God’s children. I saw only the misanthropic fulminations of Jensen's runaway ego.

The Host is a miracle of breathless play with form and tone that also seethes with attitude and ideas, from pure movie love to pointed sociopolitical commentary to a bleak existentialism about the inherent cruelty of our world.

Zodiac may be the perfect meeting of filmmaker and subject ­-- an obsessive's portrait of obsession that is, finally, a monument to irresolution.

Full of It abandons the de rigueur hot pastels of the average high school caper in favor of distressed browns and greens, but in the end, all the funky style masks little more than a Pinocchio retread for the adolescent grunge set.

Black Snake Moan is, at its core, a fairly straightforward variation on George Bernard Shaw -- "Pigsfeetmalion," if you will. One day, when he outgrows his terminal adolescence, Brewer might be the perfect filmmaker to tackle Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

Gröning makes us fully feel the rhythms of their lives, but for the same reasons that most of us couldn't or wouldn't last in such a stripped-down environment, the movie, at just shy of three hours, starts to feel oppressive after two.

The film is distancing and off-putting, more a feat of look-at-me-ma derring-do than something resonant, meaningful and just the slightest bit moving.

This is gloriously self-aware hokum, a fantasy movie that is, above all, about our need for fantasy and escapism -- and even our need for movies like The Astronaut Farmer -- to help us combat the depression and disappointments of the everyday.

Cerda's striking creep-show atmospherics, desaturated palette and off-kilter editing rhythms are a style in search of a movie: The muddled "Twilight Zone" payoff here is hardly enough to justify a sluggish two-character round-robin of "Don't look in the basement!" The last thing a filmmaker named Nacho needs is more cheese.

Pretentiously impressionistic, sloppy almost to the point of self-parody, Temple’s film is New Journalism without the journalism -- or, alas, the drugs.

Here is one of the best American actors (Chris Cooper) in one of his best parts.

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.

Antibodies is fairly riveting, thanks to Alvart's command of craft and tone. He's a director to watch.

This is a decidedly bizarre movie, nicely photographed and designed -- someone spent some money -- but built entirely around dialogue so stilted and unrevealing that it’s little wonder poor LaVorgna screams it.

Eklavya contains only one song sequence, a lovely set piece for leading lady Vidya Balan (Salaam-e-Ishq), but it embraces the imperatives of dynastic family melodrama as fervently as any classic of Bollywood’s golden age. This is robust storytelling, with blood and thunder pumping through its veins, and real whiskers on its face.

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.

Among its other sins, the disposable romantic comedy Music and Lyrics fluffs a golden opportunity to make hay with Grant's dark side.

This Hannibal is a stick-in-the-mud altogether lacking in the wit, gourmet appetites and romantic flair required of any surrogate for Sir Anthony Hopkins. By the end of two full hours, it's only Harris' head you long to see on a plate.

It's an astonishingly crass and vulgar film, crudely directed on a cut-rate budget by Brian Robbins, never more than almost funny or less than disturbing.

The movie would be all crisp surfaces without the internal combustion of Menon, as a man who bears down on familiar procedures in order to avoid being overwhelmed by his emotions.

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.

The end result looks heavily doctored: The Sam Raimi-produced feature is a badly acted, nonsensical patchwork of fake scares, crow attacks and wall-crawling CGI spooks, capped by a DVD extra of an ending that must have the real resolution gagged somewhere in a closet.

As ambitious in scope as it is interpretively timid, The Situation delivers the requisite incendiary climax, but collapses in on itself with daft speeches about the elusiveness of truth in something called "the fourth dimension of time."

Both the documentary and the candidate lose their naiveté along the way without abandoning the idealism that inspired the endeavor in the first place.

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.

An entertaining tour of this endearing, infuriating absolutist's life and legacy, guided by talking heads more pro than con, prominent among them the former Nader's Raiders who split over their leader's disastrous insistence that there was no difference worth talking about between Democrats and Republicans, yet retain enormous affection for his wit, integrity and incorruptible sense of mission.

If you care a thing about your evening's entertainment, you'll walk out of this howler before you ever buy a ticket.

Garner is no more than serviceable as the tightly wound Gray.

By the time this dud drops on NetFlix, it'll be as obsolete as a Chia pet jokebook.

There's much to be said for a film that, however cheesily realized, sticks in memory for four decades.

Never-hilarious but often-quite-amusing film.

Writer-director Carl Colpaert never loses his balance, despite the David Lynchian leap of faith he asks us to make midway, in a twist so bold as to be a backflip. If anything, this extra layer in the story effectively illuminates the moral choices Jesus must navigate.

That leaves little to fill 83 expendable minutes, which barely register as a movie even with snazzy KNB gore effects, critic-baiting clips from "The Birds," a splattery variation on the '86 "Hitcher's" most notorious scene, and some out-of-place Bruckheimerisms on loan from producer Michael Bay.

In his best film to date, Nick Cassavetes directs with ferocious energy, taking scenes past their logical stopping points and pushing his actors (particularly Foster, who can be as terrifying as Edward Norton in "American History X") to, but never over, the precipice of absurdity.

With a little camp, this could have been fun --see "Lake Placid" or "Anaconda."

Newcomer Short has charisma, charm and athleticism to burn, but it's mostly for naught in a movie that spends two tedious hours pulling out every stop in the gold-hearted-kid-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks- meets-gold-hearted-girl-who-values-true-love-above-privilege playbook.

The film is a triumph of casting: In a role that is often about the sheer steamrolling force of his character’s personality, Abishek Bachchan’s attention to detail makes Guru accessible rather than intimidating, admirable but also plausible.

It all sounds like a recipe for the most noxious liberal jerk-off movie since "Crash," but in the hands of writer-director Richard LaGravenese, Freedom Writers turns out to be a superb piece of mainstream entertainment -- not an agonized debate over the principles of modern education à la "The History Boys," but a simple, straightforward and surprisingly affecting story of one woman who managed to make a difference.

Cedric gets some help from a butt-kicking babe (Lucy Liu) who may or may not be his girlfriend, and if you believe this pairing could plausibly happen, you might be gullible enough to buy a ticket to this movie.

Pan's Labyrinth Like his terrific 2001 "The Devil’s Backbone," Mexican horrormeister Guillermo del Toro's new movie offers us both real-life and fantastical monsters, and if you know his work, you won't waste time figuring out which to root for.

Predictable and overly busy, this sci-fi adventure should nonetheless appeal to computer-game-savvy tots, especially those familiar with the source material, while boring their parents silly.

Sienna Miller captures much of Edie’s physical manner and some of her voice (though she’s nowhere near deep enough), but there’s nothing she can do with material that requires her to mope and pout for the bulk of her screen time.

It has a terminal case of the cutes crossed with the labored earnestness of a disease-of-the-week melodrama.

Queasily parked between halfhearted satire and overcooked melodrama, this adaptation of a well-received 2003 novel by British writer Zoë Heller offers the unhappy spectacle of a raft of acting talent trying to do right by slimy material.

The flashbacks are wittily gothic, and the present-day murder scenes have the absurdist, chain-reaction intricacy of the "Final Destination" deaths.

One of the year's most imaginative and uniquely exciting pieces of cinema.

De Niro is damned if he's going to make a standard thriller out of this view from within the CIA, which might be refreshing if his solemn moral parable weren't so lacking in any other kind of juice, and if its hero were less of a round-shouldered, whey-faced organization man.

McG's Marshall lies at the nexus of Thornton Wilder and Norman Rockwell -- it's David Lynch without the irony -- and if he overdoes things a touch, there’s nothing disingenuous about it.

Venus may be a leering male fantasy, but it is also, improbably but persuasively, a love story as tender as it is transgressive. It's a wry celebration of the tyranny of beauty, and the tragicomic way in which desire outruns the betrayals of dying flesh.