So slow the movie itself seems to be suffering from a hardening of the arteries.

This crude, deeply dishonest documentary does no such thing. David Russell's fictional "Three Kings" does a much better job.

This morbid and self-consciously literary adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer-winning novel is no crowd pleaser.

An unholy mess.

Wildly uneven, but contains moments that are right up there with "The Player."

The low point of the new Shall We Dance comes when Miss Paulina finally confesses why she's so sad.

Marchand capably builds suspense, thanks to a twisty script and nervy performances by Lucas and Quinton.

A British indie as tepid as yesterday morning's tea.

The gags vary - a tattooed-breast mystery kinda sags - but there are lots of laughs.

Sometimes there's a fine line between a labor of love and a vanity project, and The Lost City, Andy Garcia's heartfelt - but hackneyed and interminable - love letter to his native Cuba, repeatedly crosses it.

I Saw the Light is as vital as a two-hour shrug.

Interspersed with the gore is banter between the leads, who fall into a predictable odd-couple pairing of fussy (Reynolds) and gonzo (Jackson). Their rapport is amusing, but entirely, clumsily incongruous with the thuggish mayhem all around them.

These films take years to produce, so The Wild isn't exactly a ripoff - but it isn't exactly fun, either.

This serviceable remake sticks fairly closely and smartly to the same plot, with the same scary objects and even the line, “They’re here.”

Disaster movies, from "The Poseidon Adventure" to "Towering Inferno," are impossible to take seriously and "Day" is no exception - it's simply a fast-moving pageant of end-of-the-world eye candy.

Much of the action is strident and cartoonish -- but the romance at the core remains tender and true.

Nicely photographed and has impressive sets; too bad there's so little going on that it seems long even at 78 minutes.

The Italian film industry must be in sad shape when its latest import to the US is a tired bit of trash from 1997, To Die for Tano.

The will to live is missing from Netflix’s not-quite-sequel Bird Box Barcelona, and so is our will to watch.

There'll likely be more Z's in the audience than on the screen.

Director Boaz Yakin (“Remember the Titans”) indulges in an awful lot of gunplay for a PG-rated family film, but sure knows how to stage a dirt-bike race. The Belgian malinoises who play Max way out-act the humans.

Worse, it’s as funny as a political science class.

No worse and no better than the majority of chick flicks.

Filmmaker Alison Murray drew on her own experiences, but Mouth to Mouth would have benefited from more focus and fewer dance sequences.

I cracked up here and there watching this broad heist comedy, but it wasn’t laughter I felt great about. Director Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) has always gone for geeks and oddballs, but this film mostly punches down at characters for being poor, unfashionable and stupid.

The movie doesn't really begin or end. Whether the lights have just gone down or the credits have begun to roll, things are pretty much the same for Henry.

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.

Feels like a Greek version of "My Own Private Idaho."

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

May not set back Danish-American relations, but it's amusing to imagine how this schlock would have turned out under Denmark's most famous director, the American-hating Lars von Trier.

Where Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" radiates freshness and vigor, Man on Fire feels vaguely like something left over from the 1980s, when action heroes were one-note tough guys methodically picking off baddies.

The first “Sonic” worked unexpectedly well because it thrust the wisecracking alien into a small town filled with humans — a hog out of water — and gave Carrey the opportunity to once again do the physical comedy he’s best known for. Now the novelty has worn off, the charms of the original have evaporated and there’s nowhere for the series to go.

A wickedly sexy Daryl Hannah is particularly memorable as the Pilager family's black sheep Maddy.

Though Lohan doesn't embarrass herself in a film in which she appears in virtually every frame, this tepid tribute to girl power hardly represents a step forward from Lohan's breakthrough roles in "Mean Girls" and the remake of Disney's "Freaky Friday.

There is also something a bit off about CGI that makes these behemoths appear less sturdy and imposing. Oddly enough, the most gravitas comes from Hall’s all-business scientist.

The movie, told from the killer’s point of view, is genuinely unsettling and propelled by a terrific, buzzing synth soundtrack straight out of the early ’80s. But the only suspense is in which woman will be the next victim.

A gut-wrenching look at the human cost of war.

A fine cast headed by the underrated Greg Kinnear lifts this year’s third major religious movie, the fact-inspired Heaven Is for Real, somewhat beyond its Hallmark Channel-caliber script and visuals.

The Giver is at its best when Bridges expounds on civilization’s lost beauty and savagery; at other times, it’s strewn with implausibility: For a totalitarian society in which everyone is monitored constantly, our hero is able to sneak around an awful lot.

A plot? Tony Jaa don't need no stinking plot.

Plotwise, the movie can (like many a Brooklynite) barely be bothered to comb its hair. Just when the pace needs to pick up, everyone sits around discussing fruity drinks.

The plot goes nowhere glacially. Underdeveloped side characters are so far to the side, they’re out of frame.

Running and screaming may be essential to a lot of horror movies, but as Blair Witch shows, they’re not scary in themselves. For that, you need the stuff between the running and screaming.

Strictly summer schlock.

A serviceable animated movie about a soft-hearted Dracula.

Shankman's staging of the numbers - especially the leaden choreography and hackneyed locations such as the Hollywood sign - was far sloppier and less creative than for his last musical, the vastly superior "Hairspray."

Atmospheric and moves briskly, but it's basically TV writ large.

Unfortunately, the vehicle chosen for the corn-rowed cutie's Hollywood coming-out party is pretty lame.

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.

There's little action in this snail-paced bore, you'll need a high-powered magnifying glass to spot the comedy and the "buddies" have about as much chemistry as a pair of wet socks.

Every good joke in the movie is to be found in those trailers.

The real star, however, is Michael Simmonds, whose manic black-and-white camerawork captures the unique vibrancy of New York City. He helps turn one woman's obsession into a valentine to Gotham.

Thornton lends gravity, focus and humor that are otherwise in short supply in this serious-minded but meandering, talky and action-deficient epic.

Not just a shabby "Wall Street" knockoff clogged with dull, jargon-spewing trading-desk scenes that fail to advance the plot in any way. It's also a nondescript "Sex and the City" retread.

If the movie's story is anything but daring, it does takes guts to make a movie so shamelessly emotional as this one. Not that guts are the same as taste.

Goes up for the dunk and misses the hoop, the backboard and the point. Instead, it manages to both strike out and get sacked. Whose idea was it to remake "Slap Shot" a la Jerry Lewis?

The feature debut by hot, young Singapore director Royston Tan, 15, is a descent into hell -- a hell inhabited by five scuzzy 15-year-old boys whose world, as one puts it, "only consists of darkness."

Hathaway floats in the air a few times and the sides of her mouth are slit, a la Heath Ledger’s Joker, but even that deformation doesn’t make her frightening or threatening. You’re supposed to believe this woman wants all children dead, and instead, you believe she is sometimes rude to Bergdorf’s employees.

A comedy that forgot to install the funny.

Lakeview Terrace holds your interest, though the bad faith on all sides makes it something of an endurance test.

After seeing Everybody's Fine, Paul McCartney offered to write a song that plays over the closing credits. That may be because the whole movie is like a celluloid McCartney tune: warm and playful and sweetly earnest, but lightly funny, too, and crafted with consummate skill.

This mild drama plays out like one of those dull message movies that TV networks used to crank out almost weekly, but the earnestness is at times almost appealingly old-fashioned.

At 96 minutes, this vanity/insanity project runs a bit long; five minutes would have been plenty.

The documentary equivalent of a Southern Gothic novel.

A depressingly predictable journey of self-discovery.

With sub-par material, Levi pretending to be a kid and naively shouting and pouting has turned grating.

It largely consists of Franco musing about depictions of homosexual activity on film. As well as gay cast members speculating whether Franco will take off his clothes and perform in explicit footage. He doesn’t.

There's no real payoff - artistically or emotionally - in Gregory Harrison's gimmicky and tedious psychological thriller November, shot on ugly digital video.

Even a great British cast and obscenity-laden gangland dialogue aren't enough to make what amounts to an extended acting exercise into much of a movie.

Just Like Heaven isn't far short of a classic among romantic comedies with a teary chaser, sure to please fans of "Ghost" and "Heaven Can Wait."

Overlong, overblown and utterly forgettable.

A highly personal, provocative and in some ways riveting vision with an inspired performance by Jim Caviezel as Jesus.

There's a line between rogue and jerk, and Reynolds lives on the wrong side of it. As Dusty, Klein is such a smooth operator that he could have been - should have been - the lead.

Loads of fun, especially if you use the site yourself. But it plays too much like a paid ad.

Part of the problem is that the Finbar character is both underdeveloped and unattractive - you don't get a sense of why anyone would miss him, let alone go searching for him in the snow. [17 Mar 2000]

My only question: Why does Kleine -- who's married to Andre Gregory of "My Dinner With Andre" fame -- think that anybody outside her family gives a damn?

A rare film that depicts a skinny male in a relationship with a plus-size woman. And, small wonder, Brittain's sweet charisma makes her the most lovable big woman on screen since Lynn Redgrave in "Georgy Girl."

Funny and frothy sex comedy from Spain with a very appealing cast -- and mediocre musical numbers.

The story is also engaging and hip enough to make it a far easier sit for parents. And it's hard not to like a hero who takes public transportation to a showdown with the bad guy.

Comes perilously close to being a vanity production for the obscure singer Isabel Rose, who stars and wrote the autobiographical screenplay with neophyte director Robert Cary, based on her own struggles as a cabaret singer.

Your average episode of “Days of Our Lives” is less soapy (and performed with more restraint).

If the sight of naked, sweaty French hunks gets you going, well, then, Three Dancing Slaves is a must-see.

This indie, female-centric riff on “Deliverance” is spare, smartly written and shot through with moments of twig-snapping tension.

Harry likes Willie's white girlfriend, played by the Australian actress Rose Byrne with a riveting, sad sexiness. So much screen time is devoted to the men that her part is underwritten, but there are novels in her eyes.

The longest 85-minute road trip you could imagine.

Autumn wants to do for Jean-Pierre Melville what "Reservoir Dogs" did for Hong Kong cinema, but this new film is a joyless exercise in film appreciation.

The movie is much like a really long beer commercial - but a really dark one.

Mainstream moviegoers will be put off by the subtitles, and art-house fans will be insulted by the story's shallowness.

Thaddeus Bradley, narrating in tedious metaphors about how “there’s always more than what’s on the surface.” That’s one claim this shallow sequel simply can’t back up.

This would be a stultifyingly incestuous affair even if all the jokes about fertilization weren't so tiresomely lame and predictable.

This intense psycho-sexual drama doesn't easily lend itself to the camera.

This overlong, obvious and indifferently acted melodrama was written and directed by Luke Eberl, a former child actor, before he turned 21.

Clichéd stories, clichéd characters. All that's missing is Ed Burns.

Sex comedies work best with light touch, and as the ponderous title (a literal translation of the French term for orgasm) indicates, Australian writer-director Josh Lawson mostly doesn’t have it.

A well-acted, well-directed (by TV veteran Anthony Hemingway) popcorn movie with great aerial battles and solid dramatic scenes that hold your attention for two good hours.

All of the actors are enjoying themselves, and the movie is stuffed with history, atmosphere and vivid characters. What's in short supply, though, is laughter.

Desert Wind will be of interest to men - and especially to women, who might learn much they didn't know about the opposite sex.

Despite risible dialogue, Mercy is watchable because of Caan's physical presence -- and a couple of scenes with his real-life father, James Caan, as his cynical dad who pronounces that "love -- it does not exist."