Mostly, though, African Cats is extremely tactful about the truly harsh stuff that goes down in the world of nature.

Winterbottom’s version goes too far.

The Descendants is an ultra-polished picture in which every emotion we're supposed to feel has been cued up well in advance. There's nothing surprising or affecting about it. Not even Clooney, who works wonders with the occasional piece of dialogue, can save it.

The subject of Spurlock's movie is Spurlock, and while he may be reasonably affable, and sometimes extremely goofy, it's a stretch to call him controversial.

Like the recent "Perrier's Bounty," The Guard feels like it might play better at home than overseas.

A film loaded with interest that somehow fails to be interesting, La Soga is inspired by true events and not much else.

The picture, the debut feature of Irish director Gary McKendry, is rote and joyless, an exercise in disposability.

How, I'm wondering more and more often, do studios put movies like this one in front of audiences and assume they'll just buy it? The secret to making a great, or even just a good, thriller these days seems to have been lost.

The tragedy of The Fighter is that Wahlberg's performance suggests a character who wants more. And yet Russell barely seems to notice how much subtlety Wahlberg brings to his role, or to the movie at large.

The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre.

A massive wedgie of a comedy, which is to say it's a comedy of extreme discomfort.

Because his character is never clear, Manolo's choices lack emotional interest and narrative urgency.

This is good-for-you, arthouse-style horror. Which doesn't mean it's necessarily any good.

Relies almost entirely on its tunnel-vision, single-player style for its scares. It’s a strategy that stalls out halfway through, which means it works for twice as long as it should.

Dark and queer enough to catch your attention but lacking the story power to hold it, Metropia is an aesthetic in search of an author.

What he's missing in The Eagle is that spark of the insane - the slightly lunatic fever that makes us unable to keep our eyes off him (Channing Tatum).

It's got a great subject - the extraordinarily voluble comedian Jonathan Winters, whose constant rush of words can be like a blizzard: beautiful, maddening, exhausting and finally beautiful again. But it's not a great film.

Eclipse, while admittedly an improvement over last year’s barely coherent "New Moon," only adds insult to injury. Nothing so grand as a real eclipse, it’s more just a massive blind spot.

The Double does contain some delightfully over-the-top twists that make no sense but are great fun to consider.

In its empty-headed hubris, it's not much more admirable than the conniving, moneygrubbing elite it's trying to take down.

No matter how much good-hearted licentiousness follows in the rest of the movie, the opening sequence brings a unshakable sourness to the whole affair.

Virginia is like a box full of someone's long ago summer vacation keepsakes: pretty, but representative of memories and meaning no one else will be able to grasp.

The smugness of the film grows wearying long before the end. Just because the people on and behind the camera are willing to acknowledge what we're watching is ridiculous crap doesn't really change the fact that, well, it is.

Trespass is best received as an almost viable B-movie that just happens to have A-list leads.

Though based on the Hemingway novel published 25 years after his death, Hemingway's Garden of Eden feels more like the result of an ungodly alliance between Harlequin house writers and the cut-and-paste masterminds at A&E Biography.

It's a movie that needs to look down its nose for its laughs, which generally isn't the best place to find them.

This is a family movie, after all -- but you'll have to sit through some abrasively broad, unfunny exchanges to get there. Dialogue, alas, is the kind of thing that can't be enhanced by the wearing of 3-D glasses.

The film’s most impressive feat may be bringing a cartoon character to life while turning actual humans into 2-D cutouts.