Funny even when it relies heavily on age-old, old-age gags.

Feels like a cobbled collection of ideas and conceits rather than a stand-alone story.

Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker are supposed to pass for a married couple, but they have all the chemistry of two actors who just met and shook hands moments before the cameras rolled. They don't even seem to like each other much.

Whatever faults Avatar may have -- and there are many -- the movie succeeds in immersing you in a photorealistic, painstakingly detailed world more fully than any science fiction movie before.

Nine isn't so much a movie as it is a collection of standalone musical numbers, strung together by the thinnest of plots.

A nice set of drapes and a striking ballgown or two are not enough to provide this interesting love story any serious heft or insight.

Bridges brings his 50 years of acting experience to this one captivating, surprisingly moving performance.

The result is almost suffocating: a movie that has been tinkered and fussed with until there is no spontaneity left -- no warmth or life or messiness.

The result is earnest, admirable and more than a little dull -- a pedestrian movie about a remarkable subject.

Despite its downbeat theme, A Single Man is ultimately optimistic about the human capability to gradually make peace with seemingly insurmountable pain and tragedy.

Brothers is a collection of strong moments that don't add up to anything. The movie is all build-up.

Up in the Air is also optimistic about the perpetual themes that preoccupy so many movies that endure the test of time: Life is better with company. And everybody needs a co-pilot.

Literature lasts, but sometimes, The Last Station suggests, the ties that bind last, too.

The filmmakers capture enough of the book's essence -- and the power of its knockout, transcendent ending -- to more than justify the movie's existence.

This is minor Disney at best, forgettable at worst.

You don't go into a movie called Ninja Assassin expecting a hell of a lot, but this shockingly disjointed and relentlessly dull picture can't even deliver the martial-arts kick its title so plainly promises.

Nostalgia is part of the modest charm of this disposable but inoffensive picture. Old Dogs makes old dogs out of all of us.

What's missing is originality and story and inventiveness.

In the sequel, Weitz lays on a pop song and slow-motion during a critical scene involving the sudden reappearance of a fearsome villain, giving everything an MTV-slick, teen-friendly gloss and reminding you this is just a movie -- a somewhat silly and hollow one.

With this gorgeously melodramatic ode to cinema, the filmmaker comes dangerously close to losing himself inside his celluloid dreams -- and leaving the audience behind.

The last 40 minutes test your patience -- and intelligence -- in a way the rest of this big, dumb, crazy movie never does:

Mr. Fox's old-fashioned, hand-crafted animation is one of its main attractions. Another is Anderson's whimsical, dry humor, a natural for this tale of a crafty, dapper fox.

With the insight and sensitivity of an insider, The Messenger illuminates the sometimes invisible victims of war -- the survivors -- and a pain that is tolerated but never quite healed.

Pirate Radio does what it sets out to do. It rocks.

The Box is a mess, but it's a curiously haunting, intriguing, brain-tickling mess, and it delivers that "Donnie Darko" feeling in truckloads. Or should that be rocketloads?

This bruising, harrowing movie would be impossible to sit through without at least a hint of light at the end of its astonishingly dark tunnel.

While there are some genuinely creepy moments, it never truly ends up as more than an average "X-Files" episode.

Could there possibly be anything left to gain from yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens' tale about crabby old Ebenezer Scrooge and his life-changing encounter with three ghosts on Christmas Eve? In the case of Disney's A Christmas Carol, the answer is a surprising, resounding yes -- at least so far as the IMAX 3D version goes.