At only 84 minutes, Phone Booth's brevity turns out to be its only saving grace.

It's the disease of Hollywood remakes that they nearly always lose sight of what made the original good in the first place. Where Alexander Mackendrick's film offered a delicately diabolical blend of the ordinary and the brutal -- the new Ladykillers bludgeons you with cartoonish gags about stupid football players, irritable-bowel syndrome and somebody accidentally shooting himself in the head.

The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.

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.

The main body of the film earns comparison with the military parables of John Ford, particularly "The Long Gray Line" and "The Wings of Eagles."

Just around the halfway point, something unexpected happens -- the movie actually gets good. You can chalk that up to the delightful Alan Rickman.

There are plenty of gorgeous real-life vistas for adults to look at while stuffing popcorn in their ears to avoid the oversignifyin' music and the hurtin' dialogue.

Visibly uninspired, Pacino gives a perfunctory performance -- though surely he must have looked over at Farrell and been reminded of himself 30 years ago, all jacked-up and beautiful, like a stallion at the gate.

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

If "Crash" grew a pair of cojones, it might look something like Larry Clark’s cheerfully defiant Wassup Rockers.

It may be a stretch to call this mugging moron sympathetic, but it’s surprising how enjoyable Mr. Bean can be when he’s actually given a hint of humanity.

As in many of his films, Jaglom establishes a striking intimate rapport with his female subjects, and as the funny and bitter revelations pour forth, an activity that many men may view as something done strictly out of necessity takes on unforeseen narcotic, romantic and therapeutic dimensions.

For this viewer, the climactic scooter-gang rumble, heavy on plot twists and empowerment speeches, felt eternal, but for many, the happy silliness of the film's first half should carry the day.

The characters...are so unlikable that one longs for a bit of cheap sentiment if only to make them palatable.

Suggests that had young Adolf Hitler managed to get his art show, the Holocaust might never have happened. This seems absurd, not to say insensitive.

The images -- including a giant robotic Colonel Sanders with an ax in its head that walks the streets of Tokyo -- reinforce every paranoid fantasy of a controlled future ever concocted.

The movie is monotonous, and by the time it gets to its climactic re-enactment of the Tate-LaBianca killings, it seems little more than the heir to "Survive!, The Zodiac Killer" and other unsavory 1970s horror cheapies that tried to turn a quick buck on real-life tragedy.

As with "The Blair Witch Project," one must swallow one's irritation at paying yet again for big-screen video -- but even so, the spectacle of an America falling apart is acutely and hilariously embodied by Dawn.

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.

The Terminal perfectly captures Spielberg's ambivalent worship of capitalism. His big boy's love of gadgetry is everywhere apparent in the security cameras, blinking computer screens and one-way glass walls.

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.

de Ayala is required to supply too much of the energy in a film that is, overall, far too staid for its subject matter.

A smoothly structured, earth-toned and well-drawn Japanese anime.

Even amid all the campy, uneven creepiness The Fog unleashes, you have to give it up to Carpenter for continuing his knack of making women just as ready as men to get into heroic, survival mode whenever some strange shit goes down.

Harris and Heche are simply electric together, and "Hill Street Blues'" Charles Haid is wonderfully brash as the venal bishop.

Playing something of a cipher who reinvents himself as the occasion demands, Wood is unusually well cast, but it's Hunnam, with a psychotic twinkle in his eye, who turns the movie on whenever he's onscreen.

A manifesto in the form of an enormously budgeted quasi-sci-fi epic, Cloud Atlas is evidently personal, defiantly sincere, totally lacking in self-awareness, and borderline offensive in its gleeful endorsement of revenge violence against anyone who gets in the way of a good person's self-actualization. The rest of the time, it's just insipid, TV-esque in its limited visual imagination, and dramatically incoherent.

Inglis offers complicated characters and uniformly worthy performances without falsely manipulating us into sympathizing with anybody but tries too strenuously to fuse his warring polarities of character-driven intrigue and plot-driven treacheries into an allegory of redemption. In the end, that feels like one or two big things too many.