Its abundant laughs are heavily reliant on the chemistry of stars Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson - who show once again that they're as fine a comic team as Hollywood has ever produced.

The gay sex scenes that punctuate Eloy de la Iglesia's limp Spanish comedy, Bulgarian Lovers, are frequent and graphic, and it often seems as if the lackluster story exists solely to showcase them.

Dire musical interludes are sprinkled throughout the sprawling mess Beloved, an uninvolving would-be romantic epic that spans 45 years in the life of a mother and her daughter, starting in the early 1960s.

Though the cast is a decade older, Zombieland: Double Tap is no less funny. Thanks to some new additions, it’s even more riotous.

Much has been made of the fact that Promised Land was partly funded by the enemies of our domestic gas industry - the foreign oil nabobs in the United Arab Emirates. But the film gets so cheesy that I suspect it was also secretly funded by Velveeta.

There are a few exciting battle sequences and the sets are lavish, but mostly the film meanders aimlessly for more than two hours. No wonder new sword-and-sandal movies are in short supply.

I’d like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he’s equally terrible when he’s only on the soundtrack. And yet Cage is the least of the problems with The Croods.

The frantic nuttiness of the stylistically dynamic Huckabees is often laugh-out-loud funny, but amid the pandemonium there's a sense of truly rigorous soul-searching.

So haphazardly written and directed that it barely qualifies as a movie, The House Bunny is watchable solely for the comic stylings of the blond veteran of the "Scary Movie" series.

Rendition has the depth of a bumper sticker without the brevity.

If the makers of Trolls must keep going, I won’t be present for the next entry unless it’s “Trolls Meet Smurfs.” With chainsaws. In the Thunderdome.

Would the Mayans have predicted the end of the world in 2012 if they'd known it would inspire not only "The Tree of Life'' and "Melancholia'' but an endless supply of more dreary depictions of end-times like this one?

This movie wasn't just made for 11-year-old girls; it seems to have been made by 11-year-old girls.

The film is narrated by Russell Crowe, whose star power is probably the only reason it's being released here.

Japan's Takashi Miike has the formula down pat, but Eisener has no idea how to give violence a touch of class.

If anyone in the store’s history ever had a bad experience there, you won’t find it in this movie.

Porno plus Parkinson's don't quite add up to sexy fun.

A chilling pulp movie told with a pavement-eye view of the dregs of humanity.

By far the film's most interesting subject is the king's eldest daughter, 18-year-old Princess Sikhanyiso, who likes to be known as Pashu. She's a self-styled rapper who goes to a Catholic college in California and acts like the spoiled rich kid that she is.

Johnny can't read, but he sure can rumba - and that's just fine with Take the Lead.

Young Goethe looks great, and the cast is appealing. But the story is riddled with clichés and fabrications.

Clandestine Childhood is the impressive first feature by Argentine director Benjamín Avila.

Darkly funny (par for the course with Miike), visually stunning and full of references to other films.

A sometimes insightful, sometimes absurdly devotional but steadily engaging film.

Though Valderrama gives a standout performance as the avenging Angel, brother of the late Jesus (Kareem Savion), two smaller roles are also worthy of note: Paz de la Huerta as a spacy bartender at Pianos, and J. Bernard Calloway as Dre, a bouncer who’s seen it all, and who can be reliably found eating a healthy salad as he sits outside his nightspot.

You could do worse for a date movie than Gurinder Chadha's campy, exuberant cross-cultural take on Austen's much-filmed 1812 novel.

A satisfying Irish stew made from very familiar ingredients.

Introduces a new Ferrara -- sophisticated and restrained. It's a look that becomes him.

Tautly directed by Kiefer’s longtime “24’’ helmer Jon Cassar, Forsaken greatly benefits from the poignant teaming of its father-and-son stars — as well as Michael Wincott as an especially elegant and eloquent gunfighter who has great respect for John.

A witty and wise midlife comedy, not only represents Peter Riegert's debut as a feature director but gives this gifted veteran performer his juiciest big-screen role in quite some time.

Redford's history lesson illustrates the old maxim that those who forget history are bound to repeat it.

Everything is still mostly awesome.

Jeff Goldblum is a hoot as Hatosy's pot-smoking shrink, who also happens to be his mom's boyfriend, but Dallas 362 is basically a road movie that doesn't really go anywhere.

An inoffensive but bland ode to the talky high school movies of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe.

The material, filled with peppy pop songs, is admittedly funnier than Murphy and his cast make it. Barry (played on Broadway by the brilliant Brooks Ashmanskas) was a riot onstage, but Corden’s bland performance is generically kind, fey and mostly joke-less. Someone like Nathan Lane would’ve made a meal of every line. That said, the story is more moving here than it was at the theater, which comes as a surprise.

Although this version is some 30 minutes longer than its predecessor, anyone looking for new story twists or, say, an inspiring backstory for the antelope that gets eaten, will probably leave disappointed.

It has no real reason to exist, other than to be a passable option for parents whose children are too young to handle PG-13 fare and feels like it.

Too strange and disjointed to attract much of an audience, but its astonishing visuals showcase a major new talent: first-time feature director and book illustrator Dave McKean.

The Astronaut Farmer stalls narratively in the third act, but rest assured it finally achieves liftoff. See it before it disappears into the ether.

There’s a fine horror film inside Tusk, but it’s only 20 minutes long. The rest is just blubber.

Unlike "Dirty Harry," this film doesn't particularly have an overt political ax to grind. But it thankfully strips away the veneer of glamour that Guy Ritchie and his imitators have applied to British crime films over the last decade or so.

The ugly, witless pair of clowns who flit through the movie are emblematic of everything that is wrong with this dull, monumentally pretentious mess.

Never really gets out of the starting gate.

Vastly superior to the small and independent films that have come out during the last six months.

Despite its treacly sentimentality, predictability and gutless evasiveness about the power of the church in 1950s Ireland, Evelyn manages to be an enjoyable piece of family entertainment.

It's depressing to see how far Herzog has fallen.

Bogdanich's film contends that the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO in 1999 was the result of blunders by the West, and that the forces supported by the United States in Bosnia and Kosovo are allied with Osama bin Laden.

A fussy piece of schmaltz that makes you long for "Stand By Me," a vastly superior coming-of-age tale from King's pen.

Although the jokes aren't as consistently funny as those in "Lock, Stock," once again writer-director Ritchie demonstrates a deeply pleasurable combination of verbal flair and visual wit while conveying the genuine, intimidating hardness of the English working class and its love of language.

Silly and pointless film.

Gets off to a worthy start, but falls apart about halfway through.

An earnest undertaking that unfortunately plays like a trite Lifetime movie.

Screamers, one of the most bizarre documentaries you'll ever not see.

Eerie and utterly riveting.

Ironically, what's lacking in Howard's stark, often brutal, late 19th-century chase drama is emotional punch.

It has cult item stamped all over it, and fans of (severely) experimental cinema might see it as a revelation. Most others will find that watching this movie is like having your senses beaten with a rake.

Liberal Arts comes to us produced by Josh Radnor. Written by Josh Radnor. Starring Josh Radnor. Josh Radnor is much like Woody Allen, except for the talent.

A taut thriller, The Good Liar keeps you guessing ’til its explosive end. Director Bill Condon’s film is based on the novel by Nicholas Searle, and builds much in the same way a book does. You gotta get through the first 30 pages to become fully absorbed.

The movie is essentially a theater piece in which Nolan (Walker) is mostly alone on screen, making use of what he finds a la John McClane, but without the smart pacing or inventiveness of “Die Hard.”

A crock - a pandering epic that's as phony as it is condescending.

Surely, if Fey herself had written Baby Mama, this mild cross between "Baby Boom" and "The Odd Couple" would not be so crushingly predictable.

What kind of hellspawn might result if "Saw" bought a copy of "Let's Go: Europe" and went backpacking across Europe to have a one-night stand with Dracula? Something like Hostel.

Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton have unexpectedly great chemistry in this warm and funny comedy.

Despite the generally talented cast of Anesthesia, its linked-lives format, which we’ve seen so many times before, is frustrating: Too much adds up to not quite enough.

The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.

It follows exactly the same path as both "Glory Road" (except that was basketball) and "Gridiron Gang" (football).

This is the sort of film that will admittedly make some people uncomfortable, and that’s sort of the point.

Some fine performances shine through in Joe Maggio's pretentious, credulity-straining dramedy.

Crippled by lame storytelling.

Sometimes gets repetitive and is slightly overlong. But it's got solid performances.

Rarely less than compelling, must-see entertainment, thanks to Farrell, Schumacher and company.

Ben Stiller's overbearing schtick officially reaches its expiration date with the desperate and puerile Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

A cheerfully crude, well-cast (and frequently uproarious) campus comedy in the tradition of "There's Something About Mary."

Slick as a pig and reeking of phony sympathy for recession-wracked consumers, The Joneses is a black comedy about stealth marketing made by a filmmaker who's evidently much too close to the subject to bite the hand that feeds him.

One of Miike's most violent and sadistic movies, filled with squirting blood, throat-slashing, limb-hacking and other forms of mutilation too gruesome to describe here.

Although it is a soft PG-13, The Adam Project is stylistically geared toward 5-year-olds who aren’t going to watch a movie about time travel and frayed parent-child relationships. Today’s teens and 20-somethings are too smart for a movie so dumb.

It’s refreshing to see a nonwhite lead, and the husky-voiced pop singer is likable as a brave-hearted kid searching for her mother. But man, is there a lot of Rihanna in this movie: She also provides what seems like the entirety of the film’s soundtrack, making it feel like a vanity project (is “vanimation” a thing?).

It's basically a series of music videos - a few quite good - strung together over two long hours and loosely connected by a weak story line loaded with anachronisms.

Tenderness and good intentions don't necessarily add up to a movie.

Plot? Who needs a plot? Certainly not neophyte director Matt Porterfield, whose Hamilton gets along just fine without one.

An open- and-shut case, but that doesn't mean it can't also be an entertaining one.

It’s never a good sign when the real people behind a movie’s story appear in the end credits and you’re stumped as to who’s who.

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is the first must-see film of Hollywood’s summer season, if for no other reason than its jaw-dropping evocation of Roaring ’20s New York — in 3-D, no less.

Leave her at the altar! She is “The Bride!,” one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job.

It accurately reflects the rage and alienation that fuels the self-destructiveness of many young people.

Despite a crafty premise and a clever kink in the tale that almost saves it, Connolly isn't dexterous enough to achieve the Hitchockian level of suspense the movie needs.

Ultimately, the immensely personable and talented lead actors manage to push aside the disquieting notion that this group of men are so emotionally stunted that they're happy to abandon their wives and children for the sake of a party.

The two leads have strong singing voices, but they're not helped by songs with titles like "It's Time to Disco."

The smart indie comedy Diminished Capacity deals with three kinds of dementia: those relating to aging, concussions and being a Chicago Cubs fan. Tying those three things together is a task that the witty script does with surprising adroitness.

Directed by journeyman actor Matthew Lillard, this tame and by-the-numbers effort never succeeds in making the outcast situation cinematic or interesting.

At the end, as I stumbled back onto the street as disoriented and grateful as a released POW, I thought I'd need a calendar to calculate the length of time I'd been away.

Familiar elements such as a dark family secret, a ghost and a Ouija board start to seem trite after a while, and the third act is a little ridiculous, but debut writer-director Nicholas McCarthy does a lot with a little and seems fully prepared to handle a big-studio horror project.

A campy erotic thriller that’s seriously short of, well, passion.

This messy, disappointing, self-important and utterly humorless version of the Marvel comic book character may be the toughest flick with a green protagonist to sit through since "The Grinch."

Alas, the film’s relevance — and ultimately sane upshot — is buried beneath a meandering and oftimplausible plot.

In To Rome With Love, Allen approaches the leitmotif in a strange, oblique and interesting way. I fear, though, that the Italian entry in his "Let's Go: Grab Some Euro-Film Subsidies" period will be remembered as being forgettable.

The entire script, which boils down to a hopelessly embarrassing lesson about "this beautiful place that can make people live again," seems to have been written within arm's reach of a bong.

All-too-familiar and schmaltzy territory for both coming-of-age films and movies with elderly actors.