The wrap-up's pretty charming, as are the performances, but the film's too heavy for its soufflé-ready ingredients.

Wacky, vividly conceived but mundanely executed cartoon fantasy.

A detective story without a solution and a coming-of-ager without discernable characters.

It's all well-acted and eerily compelling, but the shocker ending is patently implausible.

Given a decent script, they might make a fun summer movie. Given the script for Shanghai Noon, they've come up with a middling Old West oater that falls flat at least as often as it finds the funny bone.

Aviva Kempner's utterly conventional documentary plays like a lost chapter from Ken Burns' "Baseball."

For all its wit and sharp casting, State and Main is way too pleased with itself to be funny or endearing.

Pure, irrational, claustrophobic, gritty, unpretentious.

Strains our patience with overacting and photography so sumptuous you can't help but ponder why so much bloodshed and mayhem is being so expertly prettified.

Arresting, visually accomplished documentary.

As fascinating as the case is as history, however, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a TV show, not a movie.

Plays like "The Honeymooners" might have if Ralph Kramden were from Pakistan, but with less laughs and more ignorant spite.

Shower isn't a bad movie -- just a baneful sign of things to come.

The cast is largely nonprofessional, and the story has the simplicity of myth.

Mild as satire and completely unconvincing as tragicomedy.

This is, recognizably, an indie film, in the best sense of the term.

Far from creating a pungent portrait of a society gone mad with blood and greed, Schroeder's movie strives for political points while it's whiffing on simplicities like character, motivation, and believability.

The real reason to see it is Brian Cox, best known for being filmdom's other Hannibal Lecter (he played the role in Michael Mann's "Manhunter").

All of the filmmaker's fine work and good intentions cannot make this repetitive and finally tiresome saga fly.

If you're looking for refuge from summer movie bombast, it's frequently intoxicating.

Until he (Smith) learns the difference between what has meaning and what's meandering, what feels real and what feels contrived, he'd be better off sticking to the funny stuff.

It's amiable enough, but the only real opportunity here is to see Walken step out of the shadows.

As a portrait of a man barely qualifying for a cinematic portrait, Benjamin Smoke is a trifle, but when Sillen and Cohen turn their cameras on the weedy, workaday, hellhole America that Benjamin calls home, the movie comes alive.

It's Norton's movie, really, and he shines both as cocky Jack and as cerebral-palsied Brian.

Never the heart-wrenching emotional experience it seems intended to be.

Eventually succumbs to fatal overlength.

A cute, clichéd, coming-of-age comedy.

A modest project with an agreeably modest point of view, but it cries out for a sharp, believable naturalism Kusama simply doesn't supply.