The economics of star casting aside, what would Take Shelter have been like with James McAvoy or Mark Wahlberg or Jake Gyllenhaal at its center?

Smith isn't up to doing anything other than setting up caricatures and then knocking them down.

Even if Dolphin Tale hits every note square on the nose - or maybe because it does - watching it is surprisingly pleasurable.

As Nathan, the teenage hero of Abduction, Lautner shows he's handy with stunts, many of which he clearly and impressively performs himself, and good with a fight scene. But when it comes to exchanges of dialogue, displays of emotion or just standing around, he's stiff and manifestly uncomfortable.

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

Gerard Butler, who's honed his screen persona as a brutish, charismatic jerk, isn't a bad fit for the role of Sam, even if he's more believable spraying bullets and stabbing hitchhikers than he is delivering a sermon.

Now that Pitt no longer has brash youth on his side, he's digging deeper and doing more with less. It's the kind of acting - understated but woven with golden threads of movie-star style - that gives us more to look at rather than less.

This new version of Straw Dogs, written and directed by Rod Lurie, has been contemporized, sanitized and stripped of all complexity, and what's left is as empty as a used piñata.

Tykwer is a director known for his visual inventiveness and style, and 3 has its imaginative moments, though they sometimes seem like attempts to goose up what's actually a fairly talky, cerebral drama.

After a while, you stop hoping she'll tell her family to suck it up and watch some TV and then drink a bottle of rosé all by herself, and instead settle for wishing she'd develop a smidgen of self worth.

The picture is so fluttering and tender, so guileless, that you almost can't believe it was made by an old hand like Van Sant. Then again, maybe you can.

That Bucky Larson's humor is stuck at a toilet-centric grade school level is less damning than how little of that or any humor it contains - the film, directed by Tom Brady (The Hot Chick), sets up scene after scene that wanders around in the general vicinity of a joke idea without ever approaching anything like a punchline.

Contagion's restraint is marred by one element - Alan Krumwiede, the San Francisco-based activist blogger played by Jude Law, a conspiracy theorist who wields claims about uncovering the truth like a blunt instrument intended to menace.

One of the most heart-wrenching and deeply felt films of the year.

Drive not only met my hopes; it charged way over the speed limit, partly because it's an unapologetically commercial picture that defies all the current trends in mainstream action filmmaking.

To describe what unfolds as a slow burn is to be awfully generous.

Despite this provocative introduction Love Crime isn't some Sapphic French answer to "Disclosure."

Shark Night isn't fantastic, but it's a good enough time, and it'll never be better than when it's watched with a rowdy crowd in a theater.

I've seen Detective Dee twice now, and I still don't think I've taken the full measure of the visual nuttiness, and lushness, Tsui has packed in there.

A few shots of full frontal and an actual devil to point to are poor substitutes for exposure and depth of character.

The Debt shortchanges itself severely with the weight it gives the portion of its story set further in the past.

Farmiga closes in on moments that express mood and character so lightly and perceptively that you don't notice them gently - sometimes too gently - moving the story forward.

Del Toro loves his creatures. Maybe he loves them too much: He always wants us to get a good look at them, and that's one of the things that saps the spookiness from this Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

It's the kind of movie whose value lies between the lines, not directly on them, and if the pleasures it offers are slender ones, at least there's something good-hearted about them.

Where Joffe purposely departs from "Brighton Rock" deprives his movie of the book's most revelatory element: Faith. Gorgeous, ambitious and daring as it often is, Brighton Rock has no soul.

In catsuits, swimsuits, and skimpy underthings, Saldana is as potently elusive as a shadow can be.

The film is being released in both 2- and 3-D, and from what I could tell the 3-D version is still almost 50-50. What use is made of the technology is hardly worth the effort, unless you've always wanted to experience a cascade of cheesies in 3-D.

We need to wait nearly 20 years for the romance in Lone Scherfig's One Day to get cooking, and for long stretches it seems as if we're watching this particular pair of nonstarters hem and haw in real time.