Complete predictability is avoided only thanks to its openness to the fluidity of sexual identity -- which isn’t enough to make this anything more than the most ignoble outing in bi-curious screen hijinks since France produced Poltergay.

When a movie opens with the diner scene from "When Harry Met Sally" as performed by cadavers, and later proceeds to sex scenes involving scalpels and needles, the actual plot is inconsequential. Fans of hard-R exploitation will love this; everyone else will likely be appalled. Screw 'em.

More farce might have served the film well; as Parise draws from a playbook of medical melodrama and romantic-comedies clichés, her moral about living outside the box becomes harder and harder to swallow.

McCormick and screenwriter J.S. Cardone don’t have one original thought between them, but they do appear to share an obsession with characters opening hotel-room closets in which the steel hangers gleam ominously.

Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.

The film’s appeal is at once sentimental and perverse: It’s not every day that you get to see a 92-year-old woman soloing on “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.” Not surprisingly, a feature remake is already in the works.

Is Meet Bill the worst movie ever? Probably not, but it's certainly incoherent enough to give "Gigli" a run for its money.

Despite its formula and flaws (chief among them Foster’s sitcom-campy performance), Nim’s Island is a perfectly pleasant, agreeably innocuous ’tweener adventure film.

First-time feature director Carter Smith, working with resourceful cinematographer Darius Khondji, pulls off the neat trick of using the wide screen to claustrophobic effect. And the actors give such a convincing display of starvation-fueled fear that they deserve their own private craft-service table.

To call Shine a Light a documentary doesn’t quite nail it; it’s more of a macro-mentary, shot in such tight close-up that you can see the fillings in Mick’s teeth and the sweat stains in the armpits of his sequined magenta top.

Predictable, flat, full of name-dropping, tragically unhip, and likely to make a decent amount of cash.

In this tense, lyrical and bone-spare slice-of-death drama by writer-director Jeff Nichols, Shannon gets a role tailored to his lanky Middle American boyishness and the demons peering from behind it.

Wright is a find, while Rowe may surprise those who dismissed him as a Brad Pitt look-alike when he first came to attention in "Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss." Here, Rowe displays new authority and confidence, as if lately he’s been looking in the mirror and seeing himself, rather than that other, more famous blond.

I still believe with all my heart that no movie with real car stunts, a tough-chick hero, and a severed head that thunks directly into the camera can be all bad. But this is pushing it.

Warm, playful and inventive, this tale of an elephant with a spirit as generous as his waistline comes juiced with the genially goofy animation of the folks who brought us "Ice Age" (and, less memorably, "Robots") coupled with a respectful doffing of the cap to Geisel’s exuberantly wacky visual style.

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.

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.

Lawrence's descent from hyperactive foulmouth to G-rated father figure has been in evidence for years now, but watching director Roger Kumble move from flawed but juicy projects like "Cruel Intentions" to pap like this is a depressing career development.

Stuck for years playing young women who are the idealized object of male desire (Portman and Johansson)-- flaw-free and, in Johansson's case, barely conscious -- they come alive in The Other Boleyn Girl, as if being bound up in costumer Sandy Powell's exquisite gowns has freed them from the tighter constraints of their own beauty.

Admirably unsentimental about the ravages of poverty and mental illness on the foundations of family. But soon the endless succession of heartaches that visit Gaita's brood -- including multiple suicide attempts and romantic betrayals -- becomes monotonous and unbearable, the cinematic equivalent of someone slowly pressing his thumb into your forehead.

If anything, as it lathers up into an abortive attempt at scarlet-woman branding and a goofy siege on the nunnery where a dazed and confused Antoinette has holed up, The Duchess of Langeais works best as the comic bondage fantasy implied in its deliciously sly French title: "Don't Touch the Axe."

Still, it’s hard to despise the movie, especially when Peter Stormare shows up over-enunciating the most brilliantly awful English accent of all time.

Jodhaa Akbar is clear and solid and absorbing, but not quite exhilarating.

In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.

It's a feature-length teaser for a never-to-be sci-fi franchise.

Directed in humongous close-up by former dancer Jon M. Chu, Step Up 2 the Streets is suavely choreographed by Jamal Sims, Nadine "Hi Hat" Ruffin and Dave Scott.

I’d be lying if I said that The Band’s Visit isn’t touching and uplifting and all those other audience-friendly emotions against which film critics are believed to religiously steel themselves. But in a season rife with movies (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grace Is Gone, The Kite Runner, et al.) that aggressively pry open viewers’ chest cavities and yank on their heartstrings, Kolirin’s film is the only one that plucks at them gently, tickling the funny bone as it goes.

It's a wit-free homage to Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan that, for all its slick presentation, never comes close to hitting the mark of its forebears.