A portrait of a family reeling with pain and resentment -- and rising to the challenge of dealing with it head-on.

At least LaBeouf makes for a likable hero. He's got the same kind of easy, natural charisma as Will Smith -- who, come to think of it, starred in another techno-paranoia thriller, "Enemy of the State," that Eagle Eye strongly resembles.

Predictable but amusing. The painfully awkward, stubby Gervais as romantic lead is a funny enough concept, but the actor's ongoing banter with Kinnear is engaging, and their styles mesh entertainingly.

The whole thing is so listless and mechanical, watching it is a curiously dispiriting experience. You start hoping someone whips out a bear suit.

It turns out to be a satisfying, if occasionally wandering, adventure.

Fans of period drama will find things to like about The Duchess; it's not as ludicrous as "The Other Boleyn Girl," for instance, and it's not overly long or ponderous.

Everyone in the movie is a buffoon or a dolt. No one is redeemable. The humor comes at the expense of the characters: You're always laughing at them, never with them. The Coens have never seemed this disdainful, this mocking, of their fellow man.

It's not every movie that makes you wish Vin Diesel would run in and start blowing up stuff.

The movie, which has more than 10 credited producers, feels like one of those slick, for-the-money projects Hollywood studios cook up via graph charts and marketing surveys.

The movie puts Jasira -- and the audience -- through the wringer, but it also makes the ride worth it.

It's a funny, even whimsical film about a man who survives tragic times, complete with Nazis, pratfalls and plenty of mugging.

Traitor is "Syriana" for dummies, a globe-hopping, multi-character look at the war between America and Islamic terrorists that keeps things as relatively simple as an episode of 24. Not that there's anything wrong with that: 24 is a really good show. But it doesn't pretend to be something it's not, either.

Much like the play within it, Hamlet 2 is lousy. The main difference is that the play is SUPPOSED to be awful. The movie about the play is supposed to be funny.

Cruz, who has never been able to fully show what she's capable of as an actress in an English-language film, takes to the role of the dark-haired hellcat with a sexy, bewitching fury.

A large part of the movie's appeal can be attributed to Wilson, more dour than he's been in ages and yet more interesting, too.

What saves Fly Me to the Moon from being a total wash is the actual mission itself.

The frustratingly uneven comedy Tropic Thunder has moments of full-on, bust-a-gut hilarity, along with long stretches where you can hear the crickets chirping in the theater.

As formidable as Kingsley is, Elegy wouldn't work if his object of obsession wasn't worthy of him.

Yes, Pineapple Express is exceedingly crude, but it's never mean or lewd, and for all the drugs and gore in it, the movie is also strangely, unrelentingly sweet, even when its characters are bleeding to death.

Bottle Shock often feels out of place on the big screen, but it would probably play a lot better as a weekly half-hour TV show.

Turns out to be a lot less tiresome than it sounds, aided by a wonderfully appealing cast and a strong message.

Tomb is the kind of movie you sit through dreading the expository scenes, because the acting is so bad and the dialogue so pointedly written to make sure the little ones in the audience can keep up with the plot.

Everyone, including the candidates, will recognize the importance of civic duty, leaving Swing Vote to end with swelling music and uplifting speechifying but on a completely unsatisfactory note.

I Want to Believe provides a welcome reminder of what made Carter's franchise a pop-culture gem.

It's a testament to their performances -- and the spirit of this surprisingly raunchy, decidedly R-rated comedy -- that by the end credits, you've grown to like them a little bit. You just wouldn't want to live with them.

Baghead will disappoint gore hounds or anyone looking for an extreme horror experience -- this is more of a comedy-drama than anything else.

This new Brideshead Revisted, though imperfectly revised, is not entirely regrettable.

As suspenseful as a full-blown thriller.

The Dark Knight is dark, all right: It's a luxurious nightmare disguised in a superhero costume, and it's proof that popcorn entertainments don't have to talk down to their audiences in order to satisfy them. The bar for comic-book film adaptations has been permanently raised.

As a story, Mamma Mia! is a sham, a narrative so rickety it makes "Grease" seem like Shakespeare. It fails as a musical, too, since only about half of the songs have any bearing on the scene that preceded them.

Unlike so many Hollywood thrillers, which too often rely on implausible or telegraphed twists, Transsiberian is carefully structured and designed to make sense when you replay the events in your head.

It's a dry, mundane title. It's also the only thing about the film that doesn't blow your mind right out of its comfortable, I've-seen-all-this-before rut.

A brisk, undemanding adventure aimed squarely at the family market, Journey is completely passable in 2-D. But viewing it through 3-D glasses not only quadruples the movie's entertainment value, it also explains why characters are constantly thrusting things at the camera.

Self-indulgent and needlessly complicated for what it ultimately delivers.

The real hit of the movie is the hilarious Bateman. His low-key humor makes you wish Hancock could have saved Bateman's short-lived sitcom "Arrested Development." Now that would have been heroic.

This is a beautiful movie.

The film hardly aims to be serious entertainment, and, to its credit, it's never uninteresting visually.

Full Grown Men marks the feature debut of director David Munro, who was born and raised in Miami and shoots Florida like a native.

Get Smart turns out to be a much more entertaining movie than its tedious trailers suggest. It's not going to redefine comedy as we know it, but it's amusing and briskly paced, busy with an engaging mix of supporting actors.

Insulting to anyone with a healthy sense of humor and the simple desire to laugh.

A thoroughly satisfying and engaging children's picture that never forgets those kids probably didn't get to the theater by themselves.

A slow-moving but heartfelt film.

Even when his scripts aren't working, Shyamalan knows how to frame shots and build suspense. The Happening, even more than his previous films, has a visual elegance and subtlety that helps to overcome the less successful aspects of the plot.

Closer in spirit and tone to the comic books that spawned it.

It's the overriding spirit of the movie that forms its greatest appeal: Here's a movie that isn't intent on conquering the world but simply entertaining you for a breezy 90 minutes.

Essentially, You Don't Mess With the Zohan isn't all that different in tone and sensibility from Sandler's previous films, but he's really trying in this one, and the effort pays off.

Oliver Stone tried encapsulating Alexander's life into one movie, only to discover the task was impossible. Bodrov knows better, using Mongol -- the first of an intended trilogy -- to center on Genghis Khan's formative years.

The film's refusal to take its characters anything less than seriously makes it cut deeper than a Will Ferrell lampoon.

It's more amusing than not, but some scenes outlast the humor in them.

Turns out to be a more disappointment than joyful reunion, a tedious and desperately drawn-out affair that tests your patience even as it brazenly courts (and often earns) your contempt.

You can only string an audience along for so long with scary masks and sudden appearances at the window, and after a while, the suspense starts seeping out of The Strangers, because you realize that's all there's going to be to the movie.

The script was kept under unusually tight wraps during filming, but the biggest surprise in the picture is how talky the whole enterprise is. Particularly deadly is a long stretch in mid-film where the heroes walk through caves, talk about what they're seeing, get captured and talk with their captors, escape and talk some more.

The movie is more somber and less wondrous in tone than the first film, especially since the lion Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson), who would have been instrumental in leading the Narnians to victory, has disappeared.

Its playful approach to chronology and voice-over narration serves to amplify its themes instead of coming off as a show-off trick.

Such a dull, clunky, joyless mess, it's hard to believe the people who made it understand much about movies.

It's the kind of movie for which the phrase ''you've never seen anything like it before'' was invented. The question is whether anyone would want to.

The overwhelming sensation of deja vu is exhausting and disorienting. You really HAVE seen it all before.

Made with an unerring visual dazzle -- its dark corners are shadowy, deep and melancholy, its brilliant seascapes the sparkling embodiment of why we must all find a reason to carry on.

It's a fantastic special effect because it doesn't look like a special effect: The movie sells the illusion that the suit could maybe, possibly, exist.

Don't waste your money.

In Redbelt, David Mamet enters the realm of sports drama and Rocky-underdog clichés and discovers it's a surprisingly good fit.

The film is filled with scenes about scrappy, cut-and-paste filmmaking, and the movie-within-a-movie that drives the plot also ends up as the centerpiece of the hugely affecting final scenes.

Just amusing enough to provoke a few chuckles and just short enough to keep you from glancing at your watch.

Never seen a murder mystery you couldn't outwit? Here is your movie.

It also leaves you pondering what you would have done if you had been one of the soldiers stationed there, fighting in an increasingly loony and surreal war. There but for the grace of God, and all that.

By focusing on his two young protagonists, Chang is able to explore the cultural differences between China and the rest of the world, resulting in sequences that are alternately humorous and eye-opening

This is easily one of the silliest, most preposterous thrillers ever made, and the only reason it didn't go straight to video has to be that it stars Pacino.

The Forbidden Kingdom may be nothing but disposable fun, but it is a great, heaping, overflowing helping of fun. If you're 10, it may also seem like "Citizen Kane."

It's terrifically funny and, for a few brief moments, poignant.

Smart People tastes as fake as a Wal-Mart corn dog. Besides, it doesn't even know the work is Faerie Queen, not ''Fairie.'' Somewhere, Edmund Spenser is turning in his grave. You don't even have to be smart to know that.

The picture may feel more than a little familiar, but Ayer knows how to cook up intense setpieces, and Reeves keeps getting better at the weary hero role he continually gravitates toward.

The Visitor is a small movie, but its emotions could not be writ any larger.

What makes Young@Heart such an ingratiating experience goes far deeper than the novelty of seeing old people singing hard rock tunes.

Leatherheads goes on a good 20 minutes too long, and there's very little in it that makes a lasting impression, but it's easy to watch while it's unspooling -- much like, you know, a lot of Cary Grant comedies.

It's beautiful to look at, but there's little there to savor.

The Ruins is, with one major caveat, about as good an adaptation of Scott Smith's bestselling novel as Hollywood was ever going to make.

Shine a Light provides the clearest and most intimate viewing experience of the band to date. It is also a happy circumstance that the group, now in their mid-60s, have rarely sounded tighter.

The heist in Flawless comes at the film's midpoint, but although Radford wrings some nice suspense from the sequence, the theft isn't his primary focus here. It's what happens next.

Except for Spacey's talent, elements don't add up.

An earnest and well-meaning but disappointing failure.

The film emits a subtle yet distinct John Hughes vibe.

Instead of delivering a pointed statement, this timely and energetic crowd-pleaser aims for -- and accomplishes -- something much more difficult: It makes you fall in love with its characters.

Horton Hears a Who wisely preserves most of Seuss' verse in voiceover narration, but the main dialogue, while it doesn't rhyme, preserves the author's humanistic humor and whimsy.

The experience of watching Funny Games, be it the original or this version, is never forgotten, whatever your ultimate impression of the film.

Essentially a rip-off of "Apocalypto" for audience members too young or squeamish to endure graphic human sacrifice and jaguar face-eating.

What The Bank Job ends up stealing is all your precious time.

Befitting a story about marriage, adultery and murder, all the characters in Married Life are constantly lying to each other. Sometimes they even lie to the audience.

The only thing missing from this winsome, madcap throwback set in London on the eve of World War II is an actual Brit in the title role.

The story of Paranoid Park may center on an extreme and unusual case, but it's Van Sant's understanding of -- and compassion for -- the hell of growing up that makes the film such a profound and lasting pleasure.

Six years after its release, "City of God" is still electrifying and fresh: It hasn't aged a bit. City of Men, though, already feels strangely stale.

Think "Cruel Intentions" in period costume, or better yet, Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," which managed to take its subject matter lightly and seriously at the same time.

At its best when it is at its most freewheeling -- when it tramples past logic, motivation and basic plausibility in its pursuit of a funny, whimsical kind of nonsense.

It is always intriguing as it follows the arrest and captivity of Salomon Sorowitsch (the terrific Karl Markovics), one of Germany's leading counterfeiters.

Diary of the Dead is at its best when Romero is just goofing off, like when he shows us home video footage of a children's birthday party.

One true gem is Daniela Piepszyk, Mauro's teen neighbor, who is a fireball and the leader of the neighborhood gang of boys. You can't take your eyes off her.

Maybe it's a measure of the numbing awfulness of romantic comedies in general lately, but Definitely, Maybe isn't nearly so bad as you might fear; it's actually fairly pleasant, a bit too off-color to be a family film but enjoyable just the same.

The best stuff in Jumper comes early, while the movie is still busy explaining its scenario. It's only when all the pieces are in place and the story actually kicks in that things start to fall apart, and quickly.

The movie is funny and scary and touching in all the ways the best children's pictures are, but it is also fast and compact, running a perfectly paced 93 minutes (including credits).