Neale's cameras and broadcast footage of various races place the audience in a position to experience the participants' need to go faster.

Despite its high craft level and Washington's participation in it, this movie's showy violence is finally as deadening as the over-emphatic violence in these kinds of films generally is.

The film's septuagenarian director deserves his share of the credit for bringing this human story to the screen with engaging B-movie modesty and no small measure of chops.

The plot hinges on Jenna's horrified realization that her adult self is a witch, but 13 Going On 30 -- works foremost as a vehicle for its rising star.

Penning's feature directing debut, which he co-wrote, has visual flair but lacks the tightly plotted storytelling this type of film requires. Relying on mood isn't nearly enough to make the outcome compelling.

It's an ideal film to open on Earth Day, for in the least preachy way possible it celebrates the natural world to make viewers pause and consider the profound importance of preserving the planet.

Surprisingly compelling viewing.

Michael S. Ojeda's film is so relentlessly shallow and excessive that it hardly matters whether Lana is eventually able to turn the tables on Darko. When it rains in Lana's Rain, it pours -- and what comes out is trash.

Few filmmakers love movies as intensely; fewer still have the ability to remind us why we fell for movies in the first place.

That rare comic book movie that actually feels like a comic book. Which turns out to be mostly, but not entirely, a good thing.

They are tremendously appealing, and under Stephens' direction, Anson Scoville as an Amish runaway and Paulo Costanzo as a closeted gay college fraternity man are also memorable.

The result is pure, unabashed and unpretentious entertainment of a sort once a staple of the movies but now rare.

Mackenzie has greatly tempered the story's brutality the old-fashioned way: He puts an appealing, sympathetic star at the center and surrounds him with beautiful visuals, with a darkly contrasting color palette of bruising black and blue.

A lot of uneven acting is also no small detriment to this frequently awkward film's credibility.

Graced with a shimmering visual style and sense of lyrical self-consciousness that owes a debt to French visionary Jean Cocteau, the modest film provides further evidence of Mexico's recent cinematic renaissance.

A clever and adroit B picture with A virtues, starting with its ensemble cast.

The result is a deliberate conflation of fact and fiction that yields unexpected emotional impact.

Embedded between all the sex and sunlight are some woefully underdeveloped ideas about American militarism and masculinity. Dumont doesn't bother to develop these ideas, principally because he seems to think it's enough to arrange his characters like puppets and tear off their heads.

What is disturbing and frankly distasteful about The Girl Next Door is how slick and shameless it is in its eagerness to blur boundaries, to squeeze as much transgressive material as it can into a nominally bland and innocent form, to serve up a benign, sanitized and exquisitely titillating portrait of the world of pornography in the cozy sheep's clothing of a teenage movie.

Disastrously unfunny sequel.

With a graceful confidence Salvatores has made a movie in which good and evil flow into each other as easily as day and night.

Driven by different agendas, history and movies often tell two irreconcilable stories, which is why, despite some glints of talent, Hancock has given us yet another film and another Alamo to forget.

Likely to cast its spell primarily on adolescent girls, while their elders might well find it more than a little tedious in its familiarity and artificiality.

An easygoing, earthy comedy that's a good showcase for the robust comic gifts of Cedric the Entertainer.

This Walking Tall does have the Rock, and that, both physically and metaphorically, is no small thing.

As meditative and beautiful as its title would indicate. What is a surprise is the extent to which it manages to be involving if you can put yourself on its wavelength.

A blandly diverting, chastely conceived and grammatically challenged fairy tale for our bland, chaste and grammatically challenged age.

This skillfully made Italian heart-tugger was a success on home ground. Its star, Marco Filiberti, in an audacious writing and directing debut, has lots on his mind and much in his heart, and as a filmmaker displays a Douglas Sirkian flair for finding substance in melodrama.