The force of the film is not as profound as Shakhnazarov clearly intended, and The Rider Named Death is easier to respect than enjoy.

Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan milks the film's one joke for all it's worth - which isn't much - before settling into the rote rhythms of a buddy picture.

For a relentlessly violent and exploitive noir knockoff, Sin City is mystifyingly flat and static - cartoonish, even, if you want to get tautological about it.

Breck Eisner, son of former Disney mogul Michael and something of a protégé of Steven Spielberg, for whom he directed an episode of the miniseries "Taken," guides Sahara's big action set pieces with assurance, but would have been better served by a tighter script.

An elegantly told tale of obsession that, in failing to take on any larger meaning, rapidly becomes depressing to watch.

The cartoonish movie might have made for a funny half-hour short or sitcom pilot but runs out of track well before its conclusion.

Provides little insight beyond hanging out with its super-sized star and would not be out of place as halftime filler except for its nearly 90-minute running time.

Two movies in one, but it's no bargain. A charming romantic comedy... transforms awkwardly into a hedonistic crime thriller, with the two genres violently butting heads.

There are some inspired off-the-wall moments, but they are more than offset by a pervasive aura of tedium and the lack of any sense of the forward momentum necessary to sustain an adventure of this kind.

A threadbare comedy glomming onto the ample talent of its star, Will Ferrell.

If you're thinking of seeing it, and you're old enough to drive (or even read this), do yourself a favor and rent the original instead.

Instantly forgettable.

The strongest scenes are those between Elliot and Richard, which give Second Best a verisimilitude lacking in the rest of the film. The truest thing here is that these two guys have been friends forever and always will be.

Hurting the film is the fact that the central character, Anthony, is so self-absorbed.

The film might have worked as a taut, topical corporate intrigue thriller; instead, for all its ambition, it's just a routine mystery, despite a solid performance by Christian Slater.

For much of its duration the film is a case of intense fare done with an undeniable effectiveness and ingenuity -- until it lurches into a deplorable surprise twist.

Bruni-Tedeschi is a lovely actress, and whatever emotion is evident onscreen comes courtesy of her.

It's difficult, though, to see how this picture -- essentially chronicling a long car trip -- could mean much to anyone but the Wagners and their friends and relatives.

Fails to be anything more than a mild summertime diversion. Based on the Marvel comic book, it's a prototypical air conditioner movie.

Chases, crashes and explosions are thick on the land in the second half of this movie, but though they are expertly done, their size, frequency and increasing disconnection from what was once a coherent story leave you feeling pummeled rather than exhilarated.

Increasingly perplexing film, which is more concerned with being clever than satisfying.

Director Mike Bigelow maintains a mercifully swift pace, and while the film's humor is deliberately as crass as humanly possible, it is not truly mean-spirited, even though Amsterdam is depicted as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

A plodding, squeaky-straight Time-Life tribute to the greatest generation, the movie plays like a commemorative plaque.

Unfortunately, although Gilliam has always had a taste for the outre, he has allowed it to get out of hand here and swallow the picture whole. There's an excessiveness, an unwelcome too-muchness to "Grimm's" creepy moments.

That the acting is stilted and that the filmmakers and especially Pla take themselves so seriously serves to make Eternal deliriously silly camp fare.

It's an acceptable film, but the story of family ties and forgiveness simply cannot manage the emotional connections it is desperate for.

Muddled tale of faith and reason.

Serves up a lot of bone-crushing violence in an offbeat context with considerable style and energy, but the steady diet of brutal street fighting makes it all but impossible to connect with this picture, despite whatever visceral appeal it may offer.

There are moments when it is possible, with effort, to forget the plot and its tired premise and enjoy Witherspoon and Ruffalo's chemistry and imagine they are in another movie. But never for long.

Any time you're watching a film in which the statistics in the voice-over have more intrinsic drama than the protagonists' lives, you know you're in trouble.

Sweet but dramatically inert.

The movie loses some of its initial atmospheric tension as paranoid thrills give way to Rambo high jinks.

To watch the film is to marvel at the cast's virtuosity at fleshing out the shallowest people in England, and the observable intelligence and talent of all those involved doesn't make Separate Lies any more compelling, or its characters more resonant.

Paxton and Frost lay the schmaltz on thickly, but the deal-breaker is the overuse of special effects, which make the game in question look more like pinball than golf.

The teenager's journey through a nightmarish reverie presents hallucinogenic imagery that simultaneously dulls the senses and hot-wires the imagination, but it never fully engages emotionally.

Pure, unself-conscious macho camp, but it's not like Pacino and McConaughey don't know it. They're pitching tents and romping around in the grass like Jerry Maguire on steroids.

A mess of a movie -- but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience.

Turns into a film that is too ostentatiously pleased with itself, so in love with its own cleverness it doesn't notice it's darn near worn you out.

Chicken Little, though it has its moments, mostly just feels anxious and overreaching. It tries to be all things to all people and fails to be anything to anyone.

As much as we intellectually admire Jarhead, it's a cold film that only sporadically makes the kind of emotional connection it's after.

Although The Dying Gaul tries to evoke the pathos of Greek tragedy and the stars strive heroically, there's none of the requisite grandeur in this trio of creeps to make it worth caring what happens to them.

A motion picture with one foot in artistic expression and one in pulp fiction and commercialized violence. It wants the respect that goes with a quality production, but it can't resist providing the brutality and exploitation the film's core audience expects.

In the end, his (Patrick) disaffection make him a singularly uninvolving character, and his disengagement makes him seem alternately shallow, selfish and perverse.

As it is, Mrs. Palfrey seems to suggest the Claremont is located somewhere in the Twilight Zone. Where are the televisions? Where are the chain stores? Where are the immigrants? I see the buildings, but where is England?

What creeps in is the dramatic simple-mindedness attendant with a purity-of-purpose mind-set.

Not having a way to capture images of the machines at work means that too much of Butler's film -- his credits include "Pumping Iron" and the Imax film "Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure" -- is disappointingly made up of computer simulations.

The film is well intentioned and mildly diverting, but in attempting to modernize its story it has lost many of the things that make the original so memorable and not gained much in return.

For though it is a reasonable facsimile of a successful thriller, this film (named after a barrier that protects computers from hackers) never manages to be more than mildly effective.

This family adventure about a team of sled dogs abandoned in Antarctica naturally invokes the traditional shout of "Mush!" urging the canines to go faster, but it's also an apt descriptor of both its shameless sentimentality and ineptly structured story.

As good as the leads and the supporting cast are, and as much action as gets packed into the film's relatively brief running time, none of it draws us in dramatically.

Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker look and act, quite attractively, like grown-ups, and their easy rapport makes them convincing and appealing as an on-screen couple. So all throughout Failure to Launch, I found myself wishing they were in a different movie, maybe one as sophisticated as "The Philadelphia Story," which the movie references, but doesn't remotely live up to.

Strictly for the very young who will find giggles in the anthropomorphic mash-ups and won't be too distracted by the predictably mawkish sitcom plot.

Much of Craig Chester's good-hearted love story Adam & Steve is silly and contrived, but the film boasts four engaging actors.

A performer of formidable self-absorption, Johnston has inspired a film with the same trait, and the results are about what you might expect.

Lucky Number Slevin is an attempted cinematic sleight-of-hand that has its moments, but is finally just plain annoying, wearing its influences too broadly on its sleeve.

Likké should be applauded for tackling a subject that's bristling with sociopolitical thorns and that raises some provocative questions, particularly about what we find attractive in other people and why.

What this is remains mysterious after a single viewing, but not so mysterious as to inspire a second.

Works up a decent amount of solid, creep-show atmosphere in its first act before making some absurd decisions of its own in its second.

Harron has said she was determined to be nonjudgmental about Page, to do justice to the woman's "mystery and ambiguity." In practice, however, that attitude plays as coldness, and Page, for all her remarkable zest, comes off as a not terribly interesting person we're given no incentive to become involved with.

In an era when so many films are cynical, cash-grabbing mechanisms of global corporate culture, no more and no less, it is frustrating to come across a work such as this, in which the grasp-exceeding reach and reckless vision of its creators become the biggest drawbacks rather than the film's greatest assets.

Any charm and character ascribed to Carl Hiaasen's bestselling book have been homogenized in Wil Shriner's flat screenplay and direction.

Too dark to be very funny, too mushy to be pitch black.

More than characters, dialogue and lighting, here Petersen is interested exclusively in suspense of the will-he-or-won't-he-be-crushed-by-that-falling-flaming-elevator variety.

The disappointingly pedestrian computer-animated Over the Hedge will be more entertaining for little tykes than their older siblings and parents, and would not seem out of place on Saturday morning television.

I'd be happy to see it listed in an in-flight magazine, but "Annie Hall" it's not.

The result is at once familiar and disconcerting, meta-Keillor done in Altman's desultory, distracted style.

The Conrad Boys reveals little cinematic instinct or imagination but has a deeply personal quality that becomes engaging.

This third installment of the popular series about fast cars and the posturing boys who love them is best viewed as an energetic cartoon, an unintentionally amusing, head-shaking guilty pleasure that will divert those not in the mood for anything more profound than gleaming metal and preening women.

A chronological brain-teaser confounding enough to keep you busy trying to figure out whether those holes are in the story or in your logic. But ultimately the movie is more interested in the love part of the equation than in the whole crazy, madcap physics part.

As its plot thickens, Waist Deep gets more outlandish. The whole mess empties out into an overextended car chase through Los Angeles.

With a title nicked from "Breakfast at Tiffany's," Two Drifters styles itself as a classical romance, albeit one in which half the couple is either deceased or deranged.

A film that never quite manages to justify its existence.

Intermittently fun and high-spirited, Dead Man's Chest sags under the weight of its own running time.

Doesn't aspire to be much more than a serviceable summer comedy, and the script displays the engineered precision of a theme park ride.

Lacks originality.

Edmond does, on the surface, seem very much a contemporary tale of urban terror. Yet despite the best efforts of all concerned, what seemed explosive and provocative two decades ago now comes across as schematic and artificial.

An uneven effort overall that when it is working has a strange, engaging energy that is often overturned by an uncertain staidness.

The problem is not so much that World Trade Center is an attempt to make a feel-good movie about a ghastly situation, it's that the result feels forced, manufactured and largely -- but not entirely -- unconvincing.

While Amma's teachings of love, inner peace and Karma, or action, resonate in the film -- obviously, Amma is a woman called to God -- her background remains pretty much a mystery. Less National Geographic and more personal history would have added a dimension to "Darshan."

The result is not quite a horror movie (too cheerful and can-do) or a thriller (too cheerful and stupid), nor does it parody itself or take itself seriously, thereby canceling out the camp factor. It's more like an improv sketch at 30,000 feet.

So grimly determined to be even-handed that it never generates tension.

Intermittently fun and occasionally witty, with just the right touch of self-awareness.

Even with satisfying performances from the principal actors, Poster Boy is longer on energy than focus.

The actors gamely keep up their spirits, but the male characters are too one-dimensional and the female characters too bizarrely divorced from reality to be at all engaging.

Patton and Benjamin can both hold the screen and are great in their musical sequences, but sorry, they aren't actors -- Terrence Howard, as the villain Trumpy, blows them into dust when he's on camera -- and their limited expressiveness detracts from the film's hallucinatory edge. The plot fails them too, as it takes turns we've seen in a dozen melodramas.

In the end, LaBute's remake is an interesting idea that never transforms into a particularly satisfying movie.

A few scenes are worth the price of admission for their inspired camp alone; Shaw happens to be in two of them.

Subtle it is not. Well-intentioned it certainly is. No one but the youngest in the family will care very much about it, though. And they may well be filled with wonderment trying to figure out what this big Babe person is all about.

Feels terminally generic and tone-deaf.

Most successful in capturing the emotional elements of its story, the film relies on its excellent cast to balance out sketchily drawn characters and the unfortunate obviousness of its plot.

The overly familiar plot points also make the film feel a little dated.

This may be a just-for-fun comedy, but that shouldn't mean that it must entirely disconnect from the world.

This is not a slick, jokey horror movie in the post-"Scream" mold, but a genuine attempt to strip the coating from the audience's nerves. It's nasty and brutish, if not particularly short.

The Marine is bad in just the right way, a mindless throwaway that's at least smart enough not to take itself too seriously.

The problem is that the first half of Infamous is nowhere near as comic as McGrath intends. Instead the picture gives off a tone of arch stylization that plays as artificial, overwrought and off-putting.

Tideland is equally evocative of the pastoral mystery of an Andrew Wyeth painting and the looming menace of "Psycho." The disparity is fitting, because as Tideland unfolds, it's difficult to tell if you're watching a fantasy or a horror movie, or one superimposed on the other.

A technically inventive, thoughtful, but otherwise not particularly earth-shattering movie.