Singleton's sloppiest, laziest movie to date, springing to life in fits and starts, risibly mawkish and occasionally gripping, and often feeling like it was made up on the set.

With material like this, Samuel Fuller or David Lean might have fashioned an epic war movie for the ages, chock-full of hard-boiled characters and against-all-odds heroics. But in John Dahl's hands, The Great Raid never really lives up to its name, delivering everything you might expect from such a movie, but not an ounce more.

The film, with its uniformly terrific cast, stern Gothic overtones and steady but measured pacing, is a crisp, old-fashioned delight, eschewing cheap tricks for repeated tiny pricks of unease that work up to a continuous gnawing dread.

Herzog himself is one of the great lunatic directors of our century, a mad genius who repeatedly attempts to challenge nature and the gods in his own films.

The less said about Simpson's performance the better. From the neck down she fulfills all the requirements, but, honestly, I think General Lee might do a better job with the dialogue.

A haunting, poetic film, and yet it suffers two major failings. First, Murray provides too blank a slate for the audience to appreciate whatever insights a more expressive performance might have offered. Second, and far more troubling, is the way Jarmusch refuses to take his female characters seriously.

This long, gorgeous, occasionally maddening movie is the work of a hopeless romantic who knows there is no pain as bittersweet -- or as haunting -- as the pain of a broken heart.

But if My Date With Drew is what passes for filmmaking these days, the movie industry is in more trouble than we thought.

The sins of the inspirational Saint Ralph are venial, but they undeniably prevent the small Canadian film from stretching beyond the boundaries of an After School Special.

There's no denying the movie's visceral impact: It's too bad, though, that Jakubowicz isn't aiming for anything other than sensation.

Too slight to bear up under the weight of the final melodrama, and the film ends too abruptly, as if MacLachlan just ran out of things to write. Still, this visit to the old homestead is worthwhile, if only to meet its unflappable, charismatic women.

View it as a fat-free but tasty cinematic treat in the middle of the long, hot summer.

Stealth is basically the kind of movie a 13-year-old boy given an infinite budget and creative freedom might cook up between Xbox games.

For anyone interested in the art of comedy, it's a veritable primer on the vagaries of humor.

What makes the picture sail past its flaws is its earnest understanding of the desperation that drives people to regain control of their lives -- and the profound courage required to attempt it.

Unfortunately, The Island grows dumber as it goes along, gradually disintegrating into a generic good-versus-evil spectacular that not only defies all known laws of gravity and physics, but also suffers from the lack of morality that plagues Bay's films.

Linklater's Bears are even scrappier, fouler and worse-behaved than their 1976 counterparts.

An exercise intended exclusively for fans of the genre, another crude, hard-R bloodbath from the studio that brought you "High Tension" and "Saw."

Unless you're the sort who has a Che Guevara T-shirt tucked away somewhere in your closet, the needlessly long The Edukators wears out its welcome.

Van Sant's refusal to delve into his subject in anything but an abstract way renders the movie pointless and frustrating -- a lyrical, lovely tone poem, signifying little.

Cox's morose performance could not be less interesting, Harrison's visual stylings all feel borrowed from David Fincher movies and nine inch nails music videos, and the film's elliptical mysteries, which twist onto themselves a la Mulholland Drive, aren't interesting enough to ponder.

It's Depp's misfire that keeps the picture from becoming a genuinely sweet pleasure: As it stands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the equivalent of NutriSweet.

Explosively funny in spots -- this is easily Vaughn's best work since "Swingers" -- but it comes wrapped in a package so sweet and sugary, so tediously moral and conventional, it sabotages the laughs.

The excellent performances by the three leads, and the filmmakers' refusal to sugarcoat reality, elevate the film far beyond after-school special territory into something far more lasting.

Unlike "The Ring," Dark Water -- which features one of the mad, whispery ghost children who populate such films -- is never actually frightening.

Even if you can get past the acting -- and in the case of the beautiful, blank Alba, that's asking a lot -- the film just sits there, not exactly torturous, but never very exciting, either.

Murderball invokes fascination toward its protagonists, because it views them with the same confidence and acceptance they view themselves.

Saraband portrays a sad vision of aging, yet the film is never depressing. For those inclined to search for psychological twists, the film offers plenty of Freudian situations capable of provoking lengthy discussions.