Solier delivers a performance of ferocious but frustrating reserve.

There are no great emotional revelations about the fearless, free-spirited athletes profiled in the film, but these tanned-and-toned folks' deep love of surfing and mostly cheerful demeanors prove enjoyably infectious.

Piranha 3D is trying so hard for the laughs and the allusions amid all the gore, and endless bloodbath of bare naked ladies, that it completely forgets to frighten anyone.

Director Bruce Beresford ("Driving Miss Daisy") knows how to tug heartstrings but as he moves the inspirational material toward its tear-jerker finale, it's often hampered by awkward melodrama.

The animals are impossibly adorable, but never threaten to upset the film's delicate balance between magic and a more sobering reality. It's a fairy tale in the best tradition.

Aniston and Bateman keep things both light and dark when they should, and Robinson's Sebastian steals everyone's heart.

A story that won't go away, won't leave you alone, won't let you feel at ease. Intensely dramatic, filled with elevated heroism, crass self-interest and blatant stupidity, it's a paradigmatic narrative of our tendentious, turbulent times.

There's no denying that Soul Kitchen is a film that delights in contrivance and improbability, but it does so with such a big-hearted sense of fun that it is hard not to be swept away.

If there is one constant in Eat Pray Love, the imperfect yet beautifully rendered adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir on a year of heartbreak and healing starring Julia Roberts - it is this: There will be tears.

If you want to see old-fashioned nonstop mayhem with stars so venerable that "The Leathernecks" (and I don't mean Marines) might be an alternative title, reviews are going to be superfluous. If you don't want to go, no review can change your mind.

Though the fun is not so much in who wins or loses the girl - it's the playing that matters, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World definitely has game.

Faultlessly acted by top Australian talent, including Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn and Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom marries heightened emotionality with cool contemporary style.

The ambitious Peepli Live manages to mine substantial dark humor from this tragic situation while offering pointed - and sometimes poignant - social commentary in the process.

It also features deaths by strangulation and immolation as well as a nasty bit with a flying severed limb.Kids may be less put off by all that, though, than by the film's uninspired hand-drawn animation, visual flatness and elongated running time.

Lee's young actors shine with talent and personality, but the film's gravitas lies in the wisdom and insight of Angela's loving father, so beautifully played by the distinguished veteran James Shigeta.

The result is a rich and detailed picture of the particular culture of this particular part of the South.

An exhilarating summer treat for all ages.

Here the filmmakers are in fine fettle, which goes a long way to make much of the low-brow silliness and slapstick infectious.

Flipped is the kind of small, special movie that wraps you up in so much warmth, humor and humanity that it will leave you wishing that stories like this weren't so rare.

A glum British kidnap movie in which writer-director J Blakeson manages to generate tension and some suspense, never rises above the mechanical and contrived, finally lapsing into the improbable.

What happened to these men on that ascent is fascinating, though factors like differences in gear between 1924 and today means that definitively answering the question of how far Mallory climbed is not possible. Which seems, somehow, just as it ought to be.

Consider Twelve its own memory-retarding narcotic.

Lebanon is not just the name of an excellent new Israeli film, it signifies a continuing national obsession that shows no signs of going away.

Nicolo Donato's bleak yet compelling Brotherhood, an unsparing neo-noir with the structure and inevitability of classic drama.

This most observant and involving film has three strengths: It shows that a strongly family-oriented, middle-class suburbia is initially hardly idyllic for gays; the arrival of Patrik reveals fissures in Sven and Goran's relationship; and that Lemhagen, who plays against predictability at every turn, maintains suspense right up to the final minutes as to how everything may turn out for the three.

Against all reason and expectation, the result is a distinctly unfunny film.

For now, Efron remains an unrealized dream and Charlie St. Cloud an unrealized movie, though judging from the "ooohhs" and "awwwws" from the audience, for his core tween-girl fans, that's more than enough.

Unfortunately, Berman skips past the darker implications of Hefner's sexual universe and omits discussion of how the periodical business -- and access to erotic imagery -- has changed in the Internet age. Still, the movie remains an involving look at an American icon as well as an adept snapshot of our national zeitgeist from the McCarthy era through the Reagan years.