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.