Hokey and forced as it is, What Happens in Vegas eventually settles into a rhythm, maybe because Diaz and Kutcher actually look like they have fun together.

A dreary experience.

The gift of Unsettled is that it enables us to feel that we were right there, experiencing the sound and fury for ourselves.

You've see this movie before, but you haven't seen it filtered through Madsen.

Though Iron Man is diverting enough in the comic-book-movie mode, there is one thing it doesn't have, and that is dramatic unity. Unlike the irreducible element that is its namesake, Iron Man the movie is an alloy, a combination of several different and disconnected components that don't manage to unite to make a coherent whole.

Hopscotching time on film is never easy, but Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa handles it with skill and care in Fugitive Pieces, his lovely, absorbing adaptation of Anne Michaels' lauded novel about a circumspect writer haunted by his traumatic past.

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.

While it's full of arresting, indelible images, Mr. Lonely remains mostly on the level of abstraction. You get it but you don't always feel it.

Ejiofor brings a calm magnetism and a beatific serenity to his roles that have the effect of knocking you flat -- there's something about this guy that's messianic.

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.

The genitally ambiguous as well as transsexuals and gay people deserve more than XXY's good intentions.

Subtly acted, with Aridjis showing remarkable trust in her performers, The Favor is that rare film that at every turn exhibits good taste and a sense of restraint.

While writer-director-star Anna Biller often strikes an uneasy balance between camp and spoof, milks the jokes either too much or too little, and isn't a good enough actress to play a bad one (the performances here are purposely arch or vacuous), she's concocted a curio that's as watchable for its intended awfulness as for the morbid curiosity it prompts about what will come next.

The movie hardly allows itself any sharp moments at all -- it's much too sweet-natured to be cruel, and much too cheerful to be angry. It probably could have pushed a few more buttons, but Baby Mama aims to please and succeeds.

Deception would be laughably bad if it weren't so rotely inert.

The freshness and originality that flow through Roman de Gare now burst into full flower, revealing the director's depth and perception.

Focus is really the heart of Morris' unsettling film, which strikes a remarkable balance between art and disturbance, between beauty and pain.

There's something about Hunt's put-upon persona that grates, and it would be nice to see her for once in a role that doesn't call on her to be so angry, short-tempered and disappointed all the time...Still, all in all, Then She Found Me is a warm, entertaining and well-made little movie and an auspicious debut for Hunt the director.

One of the real pluses of Up the Yangtze, aside from its empathy with its subjects, is its striking visual quality. Beijing-based cinematographer Wang Shi Qing has an impeccable eye, often coming up with haunting images that show both the beauty and uncertainty of this pivotal time.

The direction by Gil Cates Jr. is inept at best, and the script by Cates and Marc Weinstock seems to operate under the assumption that trafficking in flabby clichés -- the kindly call girl, the scrappy youngster, the angry dad -- will somehow smooth over the underdeveloped characters.

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.

The movie's big revelation, though, is Brand's Aldous, whose idiot-Lothario exterior masks a frank, accidentally wise and Yoda-like interior, and whom we grow to like more and more despite getting to better know him and his faults. The same can be said about the movie.

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.

Though atmospheric and occasionally suspenseful, its gimmickry keeps it from being transcendent.

A nasty, naughty little film, a delightfully disagreeable horror-thriller.

Filmmaker-gadfly Morgan Spurlock is back with the warm, amusing -- and decidedly mistitled -- "Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?"

Zombie Strippers is a B-movie whose ideas and wit set it well above the great unwashed of the genre.

As a work of nonfiction filmmaking it is a sham and as agitprop it is too flimsy to strike any serious blows.