It’s all headed for a showdown, of course, and duly delivers, though Crudup and Taylor are the only ones who really seem to have a handle on the New Yawk accent.

Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.

Argentine writer-director Juan Solanas’ fantasy romance Upside Down is such a gorgeous wreck that I could almost sense Terry Gilliam somewhere muttering, “Wait a minute, I should have been the one to screw up this idea.”

When Neeson engages in bare-knuckle fisticuffs at the climax of the cartoonish Taken 2, I honestly couldn't figure out if the 60-year-old actor was actually present at all except for the close-ups.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders looks great and has a promising opening, but this atmospheric Spanish psychological thriller is otherwise pretty underwhelming.

If Wonder Park were a carnival attraction, it would be the merry-go-round. The animated movie has animals, relentless positivity and the most predictable journey ever. You must be no more than 4 feet tall to ride this one.

Detention does have imaginative editing and a stylish, candy-colored look - that is, so long as no one's vomiting, an activity that takes up an ungodly portion of the running time.

Step Up 3D is strictly 1D. Tired choreography and moldy hip-hop gestures accompany insipid characters.

If you go, be sure to stick around through the closing credits. By far the funniest part of the movie is a blackly humorous fantasy sequence starring Merchant.

The movie teaches us that you can flip your car down a mountain 15 times and walk away from it with two Tylenol.

Destined to enchant the slumber parties.

Director Marvin Kren delivers a lot of cheap scares, but the film doesn’t approach the dread-soaked suspense of the 1982 version of “The Thing.”

First-time director Kevin Bacon (Mr. Sedgwick) cleverly maintains a balance of discomfiting and familiar by jumping nimbly around Emily's life.

The fresh-faced Noonan tries very hard to rise above the material, but it defeats her and her fellow cast members.

Has moments that are eerily beautiful and genuinely moving -- and some that are surprisingly vulgar.

Overripe dialogue and a fevered score fail to inject any real tension, and the accentless English spoken throughout a film set entirely in France is ludicrous and jarring.

Mostly, Freak Weather is just pathetic.

Rambling, schmaltzy romantic comedy.

At its best, Shanghai Calling is mildly diverting.

Dividing its loyalties between documentary and fictional narrative, it lacks the advantages of belonging to either side.

Do not see this movie if you like children, dogs, hands or Hungarian folk music. The Prodigy, the latest in a long, increasingly lousy line of bloodthirsty kid movies, might spoil all of the above for you.

Compelling drama it is not.

The considerable charms of Miles Teller and Analeigh Tipton elevate this middling rom-com.

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?

Among cheesy sci-fi movies meant to make you think, I'll take Surrogates over "District 9." Both are highly derivative, but in the course of recombining the basic chromosomes of "Blade Runner," "The Matrix" and especially "I, Robot," Surrogates nudges the robo-thriller in an interesting direction.

Stone praises Latin America for turning toward "government of the people" (yet ignores Castro's lack of interest in democracy). But it's no wonder he's in such a sunny mood: We see him grow increasingly giddy while chewing coca leaves with Morales (a coca farmer who wants to make cocaine legal).

A lame comic tribute to the dwindling band of "Star Wars" aficionados, is one of those be nighted projects whose back story turns out to be significantly more compelling than the movie itself.

Take away the shaky cam, the indie-film sheen, the “brave” close-ups of Lively looking wretched, and what’s left has all the depth of a 1970s B movie.

Here the characters aren't compelling enough to ask viewers to give their brains a workout to determine exactly what's going on.

This loopy farce has the feel of a wacky off-off-Broadway play with more energy than wit, but it has its moments. And the laid-back acting of Hoffman (son of Dustin) just about holds it together.

It was supposed to be a lark. And then, almost immediately, it went off the rails. I’m not referring to the mother-daughter vacation gone wrong in Snatched, but rather the experience of watching it.

There isn’t a moment of I’m Not Here that didn’t have me fervently wishing I wasn’t here.

Could be an overwrought mess if it were in less capable hands. But Webber and Moreno are so good, it's hard to believe they're not really deeply and meaningfully in lust.

A cheerfully trashy, dead-on spoof of the B-movie genre, boasts the kind of cheese-tastic effects, overcooked dialogue and rigid performances that would make Ed Wood proud.

You can't get much more perverse than asking Julia Roberts to wear fright wigs, do her own frumpy makeup and costumes -- and then shoot her scenes in eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

Martin's most adventurous film in many years, may be next best thing to a quick shot of nitrous oxide.

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

Never rises above the level of a soap opera, although the steamy sex and Lo's abundant nudity might make it worthwhile for some viewers.

A lazy and uninspired knock-off of the hilarious 2002 movie "Road Trip."

A sluggish meander through the life of the man considered by many to be a deity of golfing.

Viola Davis lets her Charles Bronson flag fly in Lila and Eve, a ludicrous revenge thriller that should have been called, “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”

R0bert Duvall as a pee wee soccer coach? Great idea, but Kicking and Screaming should have had him roar, "I love the smell of juice boxes in the morning."

Unlike many films that hope to be called black comedy, it does not skimp on either the black or the comedy.

Too bad the story is so predictable and the big wedding scene, in which women dressed as angels dangle from the church ceiling strumming harps, is cornier than an Orville Redenbacher factory.

Even worse than the hacky chick revenge fantasy now showing on channel 186 of your box.

[Reitman] finds the perfect tone here . . . He’s also skilled at getting genuine performance out of young actors, as he proved in “Juno,” and balancing humor with stakes — essential for comedy-horror like “Ghostbusters.” The jokes are very funny and Wolfhard and Grace make life-threatening peril look like a ball.

“Pieces” becomes just like every other addiction film, relying on colorful addict characters and torture-porn scenes to arrive at a hopeful end.

In the hands of the formerly promising director Joe Carnahan, this stylish, nihilistic, hugely derivative mash-up of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie (before wife Madonna ruined his career) is fun for roughly half an hour.

Accomplishes a near miracle -- this British import makes you yearn for Burt Reynolds, who appeared in a vastly more entertaining version of the same story.

Makes about as much sense as most dreams. But that's to be expected, because the video feature is a series of successive dreams.

Director Jacob Rosenberg makes heavy use of family photos and talking heads, but the person we want most to hear from, Way himself, is largely missing. Go figure.

This version, flatly directed and risibly written by Billy Ray, is saddled with endless coincidences, questionably motivated characters and an utterly laughable climax.

Patsy Cline. Loretta Lynn. Gwyneth Paltrow. If you buy that progression, you'll buy Country Strong, an unintentionally campy drama.

It’s big, bloated, and, if you give in to the familiar charms of its jacked leading man, not unenjoyable. (Alternately, you could easily just let it induce a little nap.)

It’s as if a ruthless gang of Richie Cunninghams terrorized the Fonzies of the world.

Incoherent, inept, testosterone-drenched mess, which is very much the brain-dead male equivalent of "Sex and the City 2."

It's Willis who delivers the goods in scene after scene, triumphing over a thin script, often bland direction.

S.W.A.T. boasts the kernel of a good idea - but it gets buried in the chaff of half-baked plot threads, partly realized characters and unstructured pandemonium.

Large chunks of the film seem like a record played at the wrong speed: The tempo of the dialogue as delivered doesn't match the lines as written, and the filmmakers are too lazy or too inept to make their convoluted premise jibe with any recognizable idea of human nature.

A screwball farce that pulls off a pitifully low percentage of its gags, even with a star-crammed cast.

As About Alex moves toward its conclusion, it devolves into some plot resolutions that were a lot less predictable back in the ’80s.

Dicey entertainment, indeed.

The film gets one star from me for the admirable brevity of its running time and another for the definite article in its title, seemingly an implicit promise that there will be no sequel.

Starts out as a thriller inspired by that city's 2005 Tube and bus bombings but gets bogged down in a family soap opera.

The surfing sequences are some of the best I've ever seen in a film, and the re-creation of Jay's climactic battle to ride El Nino-driven waves is real white-knuckle stuff...But neither Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") nor the fellow veteran director who replaced him when Hanson took ill, Michael Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist"), can do much with the hokey sequences on land.

As mechanical and predictable as a cuckoo clock, it shouldn't work half as well as it does.

First-time director Ed Solomon has corralled a stellar cast for his indie drama Levity -- and then put them through paces as plodding as a draft horse's.

The shooting sprees are full of razzle dazzle. The final gun battle -- between Kong and the police -- is especially effective.

Unfortunately, Scorpion King has none of the qualities -- epic sweep, relative originality and heartfelt bloodthirstiness -- that made "Conan" so trashily entertaining.

There's 80 minutes of mawkish, overacted melodrama - laced with gratuitous violence and profanity - before we get to anything more than the briefest snippet of a dance number.

Like the reanimated corpse of a teen queen, this would-be cult movie looks the part, but has little going on inside.

Steve Carell is fatally miscast as an arrogant, flamboyant third-rate magician in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, which by all rights should have been a second-rate Will Ferrell vehicle.

As the fourth entry of a painfully uninspired series, this version features new actors portraying the trio of adolescent warriors. [10 Apr 1998, p.49]

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo of “Avengers: Endgame” fame, the well-worn drama gets high marks for style and proficiency, but you don’t have to be Nostradamus to know exactly where it’s going every step of the way. At the movies, stories like this one are a dime bag a dozen.

The only conceivable reason for Warner Bros. to (barely) release this mush is as a favor to Clint Eastwood, whose daughter Alison directed.

The story is so contrived and the dialogue so stilted that no amount of talent could save Exist.

A blast from the 1980s, when the idea that men were essentially rapists and women rapees was a popular way to score chicks on campus.

Any Christian movie dealing in miracles is likely to be too sweet for some but this one is gently moving rather than pushy about its religious elements.

School for Scoundrels teaches one important lesson: Avoid any thing carrying the banner of The Weinstein Co., which is to the multiplex what bagged spinach is to the produce aisle.

Has its heart in the right place -- and in a season filled with somber or goopy Oscar contenders, it makes a perfectly decent date movie.

Worthwhile mainly because of "Inside Out," a 28-minute autobiographical film written, directed and starring Jason Gould, who not-so-incidentally is Barbra Streisand's son.

Kalem's grasp of dramatic storytelling is no firmer, and the disorderly film merely chases its tail for the second half, going nowhere fast.

Self-indulgent folly.

There are two things that make the flawed Mapplethorpe worth a watch: Matt Smith’s dedicated performance, and a reverent inclusion of so much of the artist’s work.

Save your money and wait for the new 3-D version of the 1939 classic that Warner Bros. has promised for later this year.

Latifah, a formidable actress who's almost always better than her movies, easily dominates this hokey cross between "Glee'' and "Sister Act.''

"Rush Hour" was acceptable. It was to "Rush Hour 2" what McDonald's is to White Castle. "Rush Hour 2" is to Rush Hour 3 what White Castle is to cat food.

I laughed more at Seth MacFarlane’s sendup of ’60s Westerns than I did at all the other comedies I’ve seen this year, combined.

Make no mistake: Casuistry isn't easy to watch. Cat lovers might be especially turned off. But Asher had every right to make it, and you have every right to see it.

Drifts awkwardly between popcorn entertainment and angsty mood piece.

Too crude for serious audiences and too serious to be good exploitation, Coming Soon is a teen sex comedy that's predictably getting a token theatrical release prior to its imminent debut on home video.

Manages to be excruciatingly unfunny despite the presence of Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson in the lead roles.

Ultimately Unicorn Store shows little appeal beyond, perhaps, a young-adult audience with a very high tolerance for glitter.

Graham is funny and adorable in this endearing little romantic comedy.

A non-thrilling occult thrillersolame and unoriginal that it would be an embarrassment for any director, much less a talent like Roman Polanski.

Goes down as smoothly as a pint of Irish ale.

This poorly done, digitally animated work, directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo, might be of interest to die-hard fans of anime. Others should pass it by.

Generally rises above the easy clichés you find in most such movies.