There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

Like "Sex and the City 2," Marmaduke features well-coifed bitches in heat, nonstop puns and its very own Mr. Big. Unlike "SATC 2," this one is harmless and, on occasion, mildly witty.

While it's not a disaster like Kasdan's last film, "Dreamcatcher'' (2003), Darling Companion doesn't amount to much more than a fairly painless way for the AARP set to spend an hour and a half watching a movie with stars their own age.

Lazily bopping around to exotic locales in France, Turkey and Qatar, it’s a generic collage of mega-yachts, luxe hotels, fancy parties, disguised identities and tame fights that add up to a big nothing.

On the whole, the film would probably be more at home on cable and at a reduced running time. I’d like to see a competition series of the same name, in which rival engineers compete to see who can endure having the hard-driving Cameron for a boss.

Panders to its audience by glorifying drug dealing and violence in all-too-depressingly familiar ways.

Sweeping, if exhausting, historical epic set at the turn of the 20th century.

Day’s performance is a beacon surrounded by mediocrity and mismanagement.

The static, claustrophobic movie is very much a filmed play.

What could have been a biting dark comedy is, instead, uninspired and generic. The contrived, everybody's-happy finale just makes things worse.

I know this is a teen-boy fantasy — it was produced by Michael Bay, after all — but the female characters in Project Almanac are lamely retro, little more than props in short shorts.

With cheesy-looking effects including a ride on the backs of giant bees and dubious literary references, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island comes dangerously close to giving books, never mind 3-D, a bad name.

While “300" maestro Snyder puts together some very striking scenes — which may be enough for many fanboys — they never really cohere into a whole. He literally throws in the kitchen sink in a film that frantically introduces characters and concepts while never clearly establishing the rules of the DC Comics universe.

The director of all this airiness comes as a surprise — Thea Sharrock, the British theater artist known for her Broadway production of the play “Equus,” in which a naked Daniel Radcliffe stabbed the eyes out of a stable full of horses. “Ivan” is about as far from that as you can get.

A cold, emptily stylish exercise -- and one that sorely lacks the speed and vigor that made "Lola" run.

Disappointing and surprisingly crude.

If I were a member of Generation X, I would be fed up with Hollywood's obsession with the idea that its men are genetically incapable of growing up.

As a distinctly not-insider, though, I would have benefited more from a broader portrait of the woman herself, and how she became such a legend.

Alan Rickman holds the film together.

As formulaic in its own way as anything mainstream Hollywood turns out, In Bruges is also a fish-out-of-water comedy.

Easier to sit through than the typical, earnest Christian movie.

Unfortunately, Angelou's detached and often superfluous narration lessens the film's impact.

There is nothing startlingly new in Resident Evil: Apocalpyse, but it is delivered with some panache and humor.

The debut film of Brandon Cronenberg deals out shivers and flinches in little hypodermic jabs.

Beowulf & Grendel has its moments, as well as its debits. Among the later is the grating Canadian accent of Sarah Polley, who plays a witch named Selma.

Simply not up to the task.

Starts out as a hilarious take on cop-movie cliches, then turns into Will Ferrell's own "Capitalism: A Love Story."

The New Black often feels like a polished but uninspired op-ed.

Rarely have filmmakers had a more wildly improbable happy ending forced on them. Well, you need all the help you can get, divine or otherwise, when your two stars - Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon - have no chemistry whatsoever.

Unintentionally funny is still funny, and the documentary A Decent Factory, had me giggling.

You can't help wondering how prisoners who practiced Vipassana fared as free men.

Debbie, for better or for worse, is the high point of the entertaining but lightweight film, which is better suited to public TV than the big screen. Oh, yes. If anybody should decide to open another beauty school in Kabul, be sure to leave Debbie in Indiana.

The idea of combining creature-feature invisibility with domestic-abuse gaslighting — playing with someone’s reality to make them think they’re going insane — is inspired. This middling horror film, regrettably, is not.

Lee's framing device - which ends with a head-scratching fantasy - doesn't work. At. All.

Pours on creepy atmosphere, but this dud is too intent on delivering its liberal "message" to actually deliver the kinds of scares it promises in the terrific trailer.

Not unpleasant, but you've seen it all before.

Superficial and hokey yet still oddly endearing.

Ryan's heart is definitely in the right place and his film has good performances and flashes of talent. But, overall, it plays like the world's longest — over two hours -- after-school special.

Kids will get off on Bugs! and then go home and have nightmares. Adults who accompany them may have to fight off sleep before they get home.

Gorgeous location filming on Italy’s Amalfi Coast and a voice-only performance by the great Claire Bloom as an elderly woman remembering World War II are the main attractions in Kat Coiro’s familiarly snoozy romantic drama.

Heavy on slapstick and may appeal to very young viewers who won't need to bother much with the subtitles.

Too often content to smile beatifically instead of delivering the necessary thrills.

Return comes briefly to life when John Slattery of "Mad Men'' turns up as an acerbic yet sympathetic reclusive drunk whom Kelli meets during court-mandated rehab. But it's not enough for a film that limps along to a pretty much preordained climax.

Zoey Deutch is fine in a non-demanding role as the requisite starry-eyed female student, and Danny Huston (“Wonder Woman”) gives us a softer side as Richard’s weepy best friend. But this is, at its core, a one-man show, and given the uncertain future of Depp’s career (being axed from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, for example), it might also have been titled “Johnny Says Goodbye.”

Winning performances by Roger Rees and Mary McDonnell, as well as colorful Virginia locations, lift Crazy Like a Fox slightly above the TV-caliber script by its director.

Plays to none of Rock's strengths (even though he co-wrote the film with members of his HBO team) and intensifies his tendency to mug and shout.

The writer-director, who goes by the name J Blakeson, keeps the suspense level high for the first hour or so, but he then indulges in a few plot twists that strain credibility.

Moves in a predictable path that includes some remarkable coincidences.

Nor does the movie try to use the game to make some larger point. Here's one: Even at its best and luckiest hour, Harvard can aspire only to equal Yale.

Paper Heart is like a really special five-minute YouTube clip that goes on for an hour and a half.

My Way is not, as the title might suggest, a Frank Sinatra biopic. No, it's an eye-popping, empty-headed World War II epic made in South Korea.

Fairly sexy and stylish. Alas, it's also quite silly and not especially scary.

The Sketches of Frank Gehry will appear this fall on PBS' "American Masters," which seems a more appropriate venue than theaters.

Has a few things going for it -- a winning performance by Luchini and a small role by Pedro Almodóvar favorite Carmen Maura. But these talented folks can't compensate for a plot that strains credulity and lacks badly needed social bite. Wait for the DVD.

Priceless provides lightweight, predictable entertainment that will make you yearn for the Tatou of yesteryear.

You rarely see movies as dramatically uneven as The Weekend, which has a dreadful, one-star first half - followed by an interesting, three-star conclusion.

Dysfunctional families don't come much more messed up than the one in Agnes and His Brothers, a comic drama from Germany.

Writer-director Steven Knight mixes a tried-and-true James M. Cain formula with a clever digital gimmick worthy of Christopher Nolan, but some of his dialogue is overripe to the point of rot.

Mind-blowing and headache-inducing. But the kids loved it.

Heavy on celebrity voices, pop culture references and rock tunes and low on memorable characters or imagination, Chicken Little is on a par with such mediocre but popular CGI films as "Madagascar" and "Shark Tale."

Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a boy who literally lives inside the clocks he manages in a grand Paris train station in the 1930s, embodies one problem that bedeviled even Dickens: He's boringly nice.

Generic variation on the overworked serial-killer genre.

Hanna doesn't go wrong immediately. It takes at least 2½ minutes.

Has some truly touching and funny moments. But it goes on for too long and bogs down in a surfeit of characters and unnecessary subplots.

Watchable even when what's going on makes no sense whatsoever.

There are some decent jokes along the way. And none of the performances is bad. But they are limited by the script, which allows each character only one comic note.

If Broadway shows had DVD featurettes, the unexceptional documentary Broadway Idiot would be perfect for one.

Basilone’s movie becomes an intriguing puzzle that frequently bugs you, but you’re nonetheless determined to make it to the end.

A Skinemax movie cloaked in art-house fancy dress, the sex thriller Chloe might have worked better as an out-and-out popcorn flick starring, say, Jennifer Lopez.

Generic memoir of lower-middle-class "white ethnic" life in the '50s.

I’m a sucker for films with great surfing footage, let alone wacky ’70s hairstyles. But this overlong, cliché-infested Aussie period drama tested my patience.

It's almost worth the price of admission to see Allen paying homage to "Singin' in the Rain" in the final sequence. Almost.

One of the big problems here is that, despite much exposition, the nature of Klaatu's mission on Earth isn't at all clear.

Your Highness refuses to take itself seriously, which is both boring and sort of charming to a limited extent.

Boasts some genuinely intelligent and funny sequences and some nicely painful scenes of domestic tension - as well as surprisingly strong performances from actors like Neve Campbell and Donald Sutherland.

As the movie drags on, though, it takes on a throbbing, sick monotone. This isn't a concert, it's a bass guitar solo, all thumping blackness.

Will Marcela (wonderful Ana Geislerova) opt for brains or brawn? The answer might surprise you.

This modest little film out of Africa suffers from largely rudderless direction, relying for any sense of profundity on the breathtaking beauty of Abraham Haile Biru's cinematography.

With stakes so high, the movie should pack a punch. But while it keeps its eye on the stars, its feet never leave the ground.

Only sporadically amusing. (review of re-release)

Even in an underwritten role, the delightful Madsen shines in her best performance since her comeback role in "Sideways."

At heart a cliché-strewn melodrama about a bunch of white, upper-class Manhattan kids who aspire to ghetto culture.

A not particularly revealing documentary.

Sweet but not especially original.

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.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a pretty silly idea. So why on Earth is this movie, based on the satirical book by Seth Grahame-Smith, not having more fun?

The horror flick The Uninvited is not unclever - but it is unoriginal.

Watching this movie is like listening to Michael Jackson tell you what real men are like.

An ugly-looking mismash of a fairytale.

At one sip per cuss word, though, few viewers will still be conscious for the ending, in which the three cops finally come to the same place, each for an entirely different but equally ridiculous reason.

From time to time, it works.

Even Oliver Stone would giggle at the notion that the CIA couldn't reach JFK through any means except via one of his blond playmates.

Although the movie is reasonably suspenseful for a while and has a few witty moments (of a first draft, the ghost says, "All the words are there. They're just in the wrong order"), it rings false.

Cardinale’s few brief scenes are the ones with the most depth; her facial lines really did come along with some wisdom.

A genially silly gay date movie.

Men are pigs! Women are psychos! One-percenters have it coming! Pick your moral in this nasty, single-setting thriller that’s ultimately quite tame by the standards of torture-porn director Eli Roth (“The Green Inferno”).

At the risk of sounding 100, I think it’s regrettable this film had to be shot in digital 3-D. Both those formats actually do a frustrating disservice to the depiction of the action, making them look choppier, more flickery and occasionally blurrier than they would otherwise.

Holland lets things peter out midway, but it's notably better acted -- and far less crass -- than some other recent efforts in the burgeoning genre of films about black urban professionals.