The film is a persistent spectacle of audio-visual mood and twee posturing: Strange musical currencies underscore almost every scene, and Logan's acts of scoping and cocooning, in and out of Joey's planetary-themed bedroom, are punctuated with fuzzy video of animals on the hunt.

The film -- buoyed by its cast of excellent actors -- loses its momentum in the final half-hour when it starts to take itself too seriously.

The film constantly teeters on the fulcrum of its own treacly good intentions and simplistic parable-like storytelling, and the extent that it stays balanced is largely thanks to its agile cast.

Being a "family film" may excuse many faults, considering the intended audience, but it's hard to think of a recent movie that has more determinedly married the engaging with the banal.

Howard seems to be in an altogether different and substantially more idiosyncratic film. When the story calls for him to be Patton, he plays Kurtz.

That's really what TMNT lacks most -- humor. Despite the doll-like cartoonishness of the human figures, the filmmakers seem to expect us to take this animated romp seriously. Too seriously.

The film becomes a dizzying descent into a world of contradictions, military illogic and ineffectual bureaucracy.

Zippy if forgettable, Meet the Robinsons keeps the tone mildly tongue-in-cheek and ends on a dutifully inspirational note.

Although Ice Cube is still happy to haul out his old snarl when it serves his purposes, he's clearly trying to reinvent himself as a family entertainer. But the milder he gets, the less confident he seems. What's a reformed gangsta rapper to do?

It is an acceptable enough thriller, neither the worst you've seen nor the opposite.

Has its moments... But does a kids' movie really need, among other similar touches, a Hooters joke? I, for one, wouldn't want to have to explain it.

Not as bad as Bobby's mother's lasagna, neither is Brooklyn Rules anywhere near the best you've ever had, though at times, it may remind you of it.

Creepy and unsettling, to say nothing of gory, but overall it's a little claustrophobic and uneven.

The film's long suit is the chemistry between the leads: Julian Adams, if occasionally stiff, has a strong, sometimes Matthew McConaughey-like presence; newcomer Gwendolyn Edwards shows spark as the beautiful Eveline.

Earnest, gee-whiz and foursquare, this simple and intentionally inoffensive sequel gets points for being easy to take and scrupulously avoiding obvious sources of irritation.

As it turns out, spending a couple of hours with emotionally arrested, socially moronic characters is not a whole lot more fun than spending a couple of hours with actual emotionally arrested, socially moronic people.

Carell is lovable as God's unwilling disciple. But the comedy is less than divine.

Klimt comes alive only fitfully at best, and it seems that for those occasional moments when it comes into focus there is an equal number that are merely silly.

It finally can't transcend the limitations inherent in being no more than a way station in an epic journey, a journey whose cinematic conclusion is several years away.

Reinforcing the adage that looks aren't everything, the live-action animal drama Arctic Tale arrives in an impressive visual package and even boasts a timely message, but its undistinguished storytelling is a big letdown.

Without insight, memorable dialogue or interesting characters, Fat Girls quickly wears thin.

For the most part, it's an uneven if amiable and occasionally inspired comedy about getting through adolescence that hits some false notes along the way.

There's murder, deception, cruel twists and plenty of scenes at night in If I Didn't Care, but writer-directors Benjamin and Orson Cummings lack the fatalistic glue of true film noir to hold it all in place.

Overwritten and under-directed by Maurice Jamal, the movie contains several honest moments but remains too awash in clichés and stereotypes to take seriously.

There's precious little that is fresh or new about the movie.

There is a guilty-pleasure quality to watching Atkinson at work even when Mr. Bean has overstayed his welcome. The film's lightness makes you wish you were the one headed to the beach.

The social bite of the popular novel fades into a generic chick flick.

A rare case in which one can't help but wish the film were somehow worse than it is, for it would then be easier to dismiss outright. Jon Voight's turn as a fictional local Mormon leader and, in particular, Terence Stamp's performance as Brigham Young have a strange, unnerving conviction about them, and give the film an oddly engaging pull.

Not as bad as it sounds nor as good as it might have been.

A lifeless pingpong comedy that ricochets from one flat gag to the next.

While there is the requisite amount of shorn limbs and splashing blood one might expect from the director of "Saw," Wan should be saluted for putting the coup de grâce off-screen.

An uneven coming-of-age comedy.

Dunne and Wittenborn, who adapted his book, work too hard at stressing just how ruthless the unspoken standards of the stinking rich can be, leading to a story-pivoting act of brutality toward Finn that careens the movie into a tonal wilderness that it never recovers from.

The characters in this somber film have the glum look of individuals delivering a Very Important Message to the world. And though this film in fact does have something crucial to convey, this is not the way to go about it.

A movie that commits sins of excess, except regarding Thornton. There's not nearly enough of him.

Though the film aspires to the epic with pretensions of deeper philosophical meaning, it ultimately settles for being the "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" of historical romances.

Overly earnest and roughly constructed, the film is bearable largely thanks to the performance as the daughter by Carly Schroeder, recently seen in the girls' soccer pic, "Gracie."

It's a more polished, high-fidelity version of a story that's played out on screen many times since 1978, but once Zombie runs out of subtext, he's right back to the same old slasher text: "Blood. Guts. The end."

A film whose reach exceeds its grasp. Hugely ambitious and not without moments of success, this indulgent 2 hour and 40 minute epic ends up as unwieldy as its elongated title. It's a movie in love with itself, and few things are more fatal than that.

James and Beth have fun in a grocery store pretending to be different characters meeting in the aisles. As they learn, sometimes the moment works, sometimes it doesn't. The same can be said for this unfailingly modest film.

The Good Night has flashes of bookish wit but never quite recovers from the metronomic monotony of its first half, which ticktocks between scenes of Paltrow braying and Cruz voguing.

The longer it goes, the more frustrating it becomes, as Bar Lev declines to come down on one side or the other.

Certainly a sweet, life-affirming picture, but it's just not authentic or captivating enough to justify its wildly concocted scenario.

This narrowly cast documentary focuses so exclusively on a publicity tour the former president took in the closing months of 2006 that a more accurate title might be "Jimmy Carter How I Sold My Book."

The result is that they never truly find the innate drama in Pimentel's story, instead simply recounting four or five decades' worth of events that shaped the man.

As lovely as some of the footage looks and as committed as are the three lead performances, they serve only to make Rails & Ties play like an exceptionally well-acted and well-made Lifetime movie.

In a movie where the timing of a squeeze bunt is presented as the thing of beauty that it is, and the eradication of small-town culture in a changing world is a genuine concern, the simplifying countrified morality of The Final Season is the real crying shame.

There's no real jeopardy. The stakes are low. It's a bee movie about nothing.

Taking a cue from David Lynch, Hopkins fractures the narrative from the first frame, but unlike Lynch he doesn't go far enough in establishing a context from which to deviate. If the story fragments we're watching spring from the same mind, in other words, it's not obvious.

Feels like the cinematic equivalent of being stuffed with fruitcake and doused with a gallon of egg nog, so if that's the sort of thing you go in for around the holidays . . .

Stone covers territory all too familiar to most Americans old enough to remember the JFK assassination.

That, after all these years of playing hard-to-get, the novel has made it to the screen in the form of a plodding, tone-deaf, overripe, overheated Oscar-baiting telenovela smacks of just the kind of deliciously ironic prank an 80-year-old Colombian Nobel laureate could really get behind.

While endearingly heartfelt and G-rated to boot, its storytelling suffers from a lack of locomotive force and characters that feel disappointingly two-dimensional.

The whole thing feels fusty and forced.

With its emphasis on its interweaving stories, the movie offers no commentary on the phenomenon of increasingly pried-apart privacy, positive or negative. Not that Look needs to be political, or even particularly deep, but that nonexamination, coupled with lack of real insight into the characters, leaves one sensing an opportunity missed.

Freeman and Nicholson make the most of Justin Zackham's script, but there just isn't enough substance behind their characters to prop up the carpe diem platitudes. The result is a semi-comedic, geriatric "Brokeback Mountain" minus the sex and with a Himalayan summit.

An uninspired if perfectly watchable drama.

Everything has been significantly amped up -- bigger, louder, further removed from reality -- but it also feels that much more forced. Cage and Kruger seem like they're not having much fun this time around, and Bartha still gets the best throwaway lines.

"Killing" never moves past a superficial understanding of its subject, whose transcribed ramblings may not be the best key to unlocking his fractured mind. The movie gets inside Chapman's head but never under his skin.

Adept at wringing maximum suspense and might have reached the heights of the Korean monster film "The Host" but for the limitations of the camcorder ploy. While it injects the film with a run-and-gun urgency, the device grows tiresome and ultimately leaves the film shortchanged.

Keaton and Ted Danson, who plays her husband, Don, are the comedic bright spot in the movie, not least because they are ridiculous.

27 Dresses dutifully privileges its formulaic plot over its stick-figure characters, slapping a happy ending on a setup that, say, "Happiness" director Todd Solondz could have gone to town on.

The wave-like "Rashomon" structure of the story, combined with the steady pace and moody look of Vivere are lulling, but in the end the situation is neither believable nor fantastic enough to be very compelling.

Jumper is all high concept with little invested in characters or story.

The movie suffers from the same malaise Romero diagnoses in society. It's just too mediated to be scary, despite its zeal for gore. You can't feel the characters' fear, and they don't seem to feel it either.

Not content to be a mildly diverting royal bodice-ripper, it spirals out of control into the kind of overwrought dramaturgy that's out of its league.

There's no real rigor or craft applied to this story -- just mood, tone, neo-gothic imagery and frantic attitude. If only Penelope knew what it truly wished to be and how to go about it. Which is probably what this overly coy fantasy's modestly appealing title character wishes as well.

Just to shake things up a little, I guess, the creators of the laughably over-the-top Doomsday thought it might be fun to turn the survivors of a deadly epidemic, rather than its victims, into maniacal murderers.

A disposable sports drama.

Terrific performances and a bleak, riveting look at life on the economic fringes eventually gives way to an overly familiar tale of abuse, denial and catharsis that feels like warmed over Sam Shepard minus the poetry.

Wilson is as sincere as ever at being insincere, though the sweet minor notes of his trademark melancholia seem here to be in search of a more boisterous presence -- say a Vince Vaughn -- to riff with.

This largely Spanish-language film brings on the waterworks because its core story is undeniably affecting. The whole movie, however, would be more convincing if the elements around that vital core were more multidimensional and less contrived.

Even his brief appearance onscreen as his most popular character, Madea, the sassy, tough-talking grandma, feels like a calculated addition rather than an organic necessity.

Snarkiness and sentiment are in constant battle for supremacy throughout Run, Fat Boy, Run with no chance of a comfortable draw.

What might have been a complex story dealing with greed and high-stakes betrayal among the young intellectual elite in America's gaming playground is instead treated as a slick, glossy romp.

The very act of writing critically about Superhero Movie inspires something of an existential crisis -- no one likely to turn out for it is reading this review, and anybody reading this review is probably not inclined to see it under any circumstances.

The use of recognizable movie stars doesn't help, r serve Wong's style. My Blueberry Nights" should have played like a memory, but its hard-living, luckless losers are too beautiful to be believed.

The premise, from the book by Wendy Orr, is terrific, but the execution seems designed to make all but the youngest viewers fling copies of the book at the screen in frustration.

The characters never evolve past mere functionality, and the adherence to certain tried-and-true horror tropes -- the good girl who doesn't want to go but does, the generic naughty kids who get it first -- feels workmanlike, robbing the story of any real suspense or surprise.

There's nothing really wrong with all this in theory, but the overall doofiness of the execution is finally too much to overcome. The filmmakers come off like their protagonist, wide-eyed tourists in an exotic realm. If you've been looking for a martial arts film to take granny and the kids to, this might be the one, but a Jackie Chan-Jet Li collaboration deserves better than that.

A poignant, ambitious romantic comedy that overreaches its premise with a hopelessly convoluted denouement; it plays like a last-minute attempt to pad out Tori Spelling's part to justify her star billing.

Not exactly bad, but it disappointingly never really discovers the movie that it wants to be.

If you're in the mood for seeing a Lothario humbled by true love, you're in luck. You may wish, however, that Made of Honor had given its stars something more of interest to occupy their time. And ours.

The super-hip style is groovy but doesn't mask the fact that Son of Rambow doesn't really go anywhere special or say anything much. For a film about falling in love with the movies, its insights on them are next to nil.

If you can get past the Eurocentric focus, there are worse ways to pass the time than to see The Children of Huang Shi, if only because the glimpse into the time and place are captivating and the images are gorgeous.

It doesn't help that Wahlberg, whose work usually ranges from solid to inspired, is bewildering off-key here, though it may have something to do with playing off Deschanel, who reduces the whole marriage story line to a parody.

Get Smart neglects the laughs and amps up the action, resulting in a not very funny comedy joined at the hip to a not very exciting spy movie. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

Ultimately, Journey to the Center of the Earth's minor-league visual pleasures will be most enjoyed by those with the smallest number of celluloid reference points, preferably those who have started going to the movies after "Jurassic Park" or, better yet, the Harry Potter films.

Brick Lane has been whittled down from Monica Ali's expansive 2003 novel into a glossy but overly efficient drama that, like Nazneen's husband, is ultimately too ineffectual to make much of a dent.

Though the filmmakers may have been imagining they were re-creating the old days of MGM musicals, it's the Village People's misguided "Can't Stop the Music" that comes to mind instead.

Emulating its hero's recklessly independent spirit, The Wackness aspires to be something more than your average psychiatrist-bashing, dysfunctional-parents coming-of-age dramedy à la "Running With Scissors." It snows us with more visual flash than it knows what to do with.

Instead of pushing for tough answers to difficult questions, this film is content to mythologize Thompson's bad-boy behavior, celebrating things like his willingness to drink a bottle of bourbon a day and go hunting with a submachine gun.

A dark piece of whimsy that enchants and befuddles in equal measure.

Although competently acted and directed, lacks a fresh point of view and its people lack individuality.

Felon is not a total bust. What does work is because of the strength of the actors. Dorff brings a visceral sense of desperation to his performance, though he does tend to go too big too quickly. Kilmer gives the film its center as an alien, still presence amid the chaos around him.

All dressed up with no particular place to go, this 22nd Bond film tries hard but ends up an underachiever.

The soul of the grape, that thing that elevates a wine to greatness, proves here as elusive on screen as in the bottle.

For the most part, The Rocker is content to simply keep the beat, marking time as the summer movie season moves on.