For about an hour or so, 1408 has you thinking you're watching The Next Great Horror Movie: That's how good the first half of this adaptation of Stephen King's short story about a haunted hotel room is.

Evan Almighty may not be enough to make you shout ''Hallelujah,'' but it's not the cinematic equivalent of a plague, either.

The overriding tone of A Mighty Heart is neither indignant nor sentimental: The film is consistently cool, almost to a fault.

Broken English takes 30 minutes to do what most romantic comedies manage with a simple montage. That's a good thing, by the way.

Its candid conversations about sexuality are what places Lawrence's protagonist in a class by herself.

Leoni's presence adds a jolt of energy to a movie that, while not necessarily worth going out of your way for, turns out to be a lot more clever than it initially appears.

Even within the context of the superhero universe, the Silver Surfer initially makes for -- let's face it -- a somewhat silly-looking creation.

No rose-colored memories can improve this tedious interpretation of the famous girl detective's adventures. Nancy Drew falls somewhere between "The Haunted Mansion" and the live-action "Scooby Doo" movies in terms of quality but is more irritating than either.

Eagle vs. Shark feels like a low-budget, foreign cousin to Napolean Dynamite, less polished and sly. But it's definitely in the same family, lulling us into friendly acceptance with its persuasively silly rhythm and deceptively big heart.

A glittering, beautifully made goof, and the bulk of its fun comes in watching so many talented people chasing after such trivial, disposable pleasures on such a large, big-budget scale.

Guggenheim managed to turn a Power Point presentation into a crowd-pleasing Academy Award winner, but he can't do much to free Gracie from its constraints and clichés.

Knocked Up is filled with comic exchanges and bits of business that, while not essential to the central plot, keep the movie's comedic energy chugging (like Debbie's throwdown with a doorman at a popular nightclub who won't let her in because she's too old).

The kind of movie that rockets so far beyond the line of credibility and so deeply into the realm of utter stupidity, you start to wonder if the filmmakers aren't putting you on.

Love makes us do all kinds of crazy things, but in Crazy Love, crazy seems too mild a word.

Like Russia's answer to "The Matrix" and "Lord of the Ring"s trilogies, Day Watch offers the second chapter in an epic battle between the forces of Light and Dark, the result of which is a gaping gray area where nothing much makes sense.

Bug has an uncompromising, anything-goes daring: Friedkin, 71, has nothing to lose at this point, and he has made this low-budget, brazenly over-the-top picture strictly on his own terms.

The longest and talkiest installment in the blockbuster Pirates trilogy, At World's End doesn't even have the decency to provide a good action sequence until more than two hours in.

Virtually everything Americans know about Ellis Island they've learned from the movies, and virtually all those movies were American. Golden Door offers the other side of the story, the one that ends at Ellis Island instead of beginning there.

What does set Shrek the Third apart is the quality of its animation, which reaches a level of expressiveness in the faces that would make even Hollywood's heavily Botoxed live-action stars envious.

It's not quite layered or weighty enough to fill the aching hole left in our psyches by the end of "The Sopranos," and most of the developments are as obvious as sauce on spaghetti. Still, Brooklyn Rules is a decent, if derivative, movie.

I can't imagine anyone seeing Once and not instantly falling in love with it.

Those rigorously moral and humanistic underpinnings give 28 Weeks Later a kind of power that 100 Saws and Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes could never achieve.

Georgia Rule is so artificial, it feels like more of a flow chart than a slice of life.

If you're not a rabid fan of Texas hold 'em -- the poker phenomenon that swept the country a couple of years ago but is hardly cutting edge now -- you might want to step quickly away from Lucky You.

As this intimate, beautifully observed film unfolds, you realize that the story's themes -- the nature of love, the role of sex in relationships and the ways in which we learn to make peace with our guilty consciences -- are relevant no matter what age you happen to be.

This is a wonderfully imagined, heartfelt piece of pop entertainment that soars not only for its spectacular eye candy, but also during the moments when its protagonists simply stand still and talk to each other. How many comic-book movies can you say that about?

The Iceberg is a riot, a quintessential French comedy with an improbable plot and an unbelievable cast of characters.

One of the chief pleasures of Paris, Je T'aime -- is seeing how each filmmaker adheres to their assignment of making a movie about love in Paris but still comes up with a distinctly personal work that bears their artistic sensibilities.