There may be an audience out there for any movie about gospel music, regardless of how bad it is, but as filmmaking or as drama, it's hard to imagine anyone singing the praises of this one.

There’s nothing new in the movie’s sociocultural insights, especially for those of us already interested in how identity is shaped by pop culture, but the breezy tone and obvious fun being had by the cast make Finishing the Game a slight, low-key cool cinematic essay on identity politics.

Action and ideas -- they get in each other's way, pal. And director Ron Howard didn't want to choose between 'em. Good impulse, not such a good result.

This new feature has replaced the original's benevolence, taste and wit with cynicism, armpit humor and manic, desperately unfunny padding.

The interactions between the realms of the magical and the everyday are carried off with an easygoing charm.

Chai's structure and pacing are disconcertingly slack. Missing the loose ends and ambiguities of actual conversation, the dialogue makes characters sound like they're delivering speeches rather than interacting.

Carrey's schizophrenic new effort gives you both at once -- it drowns his hilarious physicality in an ocean of sap.

It isn't only that there is a dearth of ideas in Hollywood Ending -- however hateful, "Deconstructing Harry" was at least about something -- it's that the whole thing is almost entirely devoid of pleasure.

German filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky sticks to the formula that made his 2000 thriller “Anatomie” a German hit, offering up a who’s who of young German stars and plunging them into hot-and-cold color schemes, freewheeling camera work and diabolical master-race conspiracies. If Ruzowitzky were as good a storyteller as he is a stylist, he’d have something.

A story that's so ridiculous you'll at least be entertained by the outrageous plot contortions to come.

If, during a quiet moment of reflection, you have ever thought, "Hey, why hasn't there been a film about Ray Romano driving and eating Subway sandwiches?," you’re in luck: Tom Caltabiano's stupendously uneventful documentary of his and Romano's eight-day comedy tour of the South has arrived.

Nightmare Man is all impenetrably dark nighttime shots, politely telegraphed shocks and limp, transparent misogyny masquerading as genre-savvy hijinks.

Director Christopher J. Scott hits all the technical marks with his look at the history and current status of snowboarding, yet he doesn’t find a strong enough hook to pull in any except the already converted.

This utterly beguiling foray into family comedy from Hong Kong director Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer) may be the tribute to Spielberg's "E.T. Extra-Terrestrial" the gleefully childlike filmmaker has had up his sleeve forever.

The direction rarely rises above acceptable, but anytime the camera’s pointed at Grant, it doesn’t matter. Like the currently ubiquitous pop song of the same name says, sometimes it’s a good hurt.

Gorier, meaner and uglier than anything Sylvester Stallone has made before, and as such damnably effective in rousing your blood lust, this wind-up groin kicker of a movie seems initially as wary of being pulled back into a dirty job as its reluctant hero.

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.

Sadly, The Break-Up is simply an exercise in confusion. To call it erratic would be to imply there was a course it went off, but the film's intentions are impossible to fathom.

Touch of Pink is really a big glob of "The Wedding Banquet," with some "Will & Grace" mixed in to remind us that gay people are actually quaintly neurotic and funny once you get to know them.

Creepy enough at first, this relatively gore-free film gradually becomes a stifling talk-fest in which superb actors drone on for so long about the nature of belief that one longs for a juror to spew a little pea soup.

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.

Sitcom humor substitutes for wit, and tedious angst supplies the drama.

Empty details pile up, awful performance art is doled out, talking heads are intermittently identified, and the late Brandon Teena is evoked to little real purpose.

Fleming's more than passable, often extremely funny remake.

Irish director David Caffrey and English screenwriter Jeremy Drysdale have, respectively, zero sense of pace and a tin-eared grasp of period speech, and together fail either to let us care about their characters or to create any sense of a living era.

Stevenson manages to deliver a few poignant moments of nostalgia for the pleasures of youth against the stunning backdrop of the Maltese coastline.

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

It’s a tantalizing idea - a little rom-com sugar to help the Big Pharma exposé pill go down -but Slattery-Moschkau is simply not a writer of the caliber necessary to pull off that delicate balancing act.