This is essentially a student film offering nothing but absurdly contrived coincidence.

Extremely cool-looking in the manner of "Sin City,'' but clumsily staged, slackly acted and mind-numbingly dull, Israeli director Guy Moshe's English-language fantasy is set in a future when guns, and apparently coherent conversations, have been outlawed.

Recalling the lesson about bringing a knife to a gun fight, a British documentary filmmaker brings a spoon to a hatchet job in the film Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

It succeeds mostly thanks to stellar work by the wonderful Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who capably handles the dramatic heavy lifting, and Seth Rogen, who delivers big laughs as his raunchy bud.

No matter how charmingly loopy she is, Faris can't transcend the stale gender clichés and rehashed rom-com set pieces.

For a 90-minute movie, Margaret has a thin story. So it's unfortunate that it runs 2 1/2 hours.

It would be possible to appreciate Shannon's fabulous work in Take Shelter far better if the filmmaker lost a quarter of the two-hour running time -- there are many overlong scenes that make this a needlessly tough sit.

A protegé of Gus Van Sant, Archer -- who also makes short films and music videos -- has a wild imagination he has trouble harnessing. He doesn't know the meaning of "too much." But Barkin, in short, blond hair, is superb, as usual, and Aaron Platt's cinematography is stunning. Here's hoping Archer gets his s - - t together in feature No. 3.

Weekend is a gay riff on "Before Sunrise" (1995), in which a man (Ethan Hawke) and woman (Julie Delpy) meet and fall in love in one night, before going their separate ways in the morning for what could be forever.

Based on a memoir by Nigel Slater, a British celebrity chef who makes a cameo appearance, Toast also charts the budding chef's growing interest in hunky, scantily clad guys. Be warned: Some of the regional British accents would benefit from subtitles.

While the Kassen brothers do an impressive job for newcomers -- the film looks great and performances are uniformly solid -- there's some overly blunt dialogue and dead-end subplots that would have been pruned by more experienced filmmakers.

At its most entertaining when the parrot does the talking.

In Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler says, "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of that hurt a lot of people." But enough about "The Bounty Hunter," "The Ugly Truth" and "P.S. I Love You."

Even if Corben hadn't photographed Gatien with lighting that makes him look like a horror-movie villain, he'd hardly come off as innocent.

It's a shame that, after nearly 40 years of writing about rock, Cameron Crowe is receptive to the clichés of the genre.

A reasonably uplifting kids movie if you don't think about it too much. I get paid to think about things too much, and effective as the movie is, it nevertheless left me slightly put off.

A snarly Euro-thriller with crust under its fingernails and bad breath. It doesn't care if you like it, which is why I kind of do.

Actual abduction may be preferable to the movie of the same name, but only if your kidnappers don't torture you by forcing you to watch it.

A crowd-pleasing baseball movie for people - like me - who don't like baseball movies...Probably the finest baseball movie since "Bull Durham".

At a little over an hour, Silent Souls is hardly long, yet the camera's repeated focus on the wintry, gray country road they're traveling can feel somewhat ponderous -- like life itself, as one of the guys in the film might wryly point out.

The film achieves near-poignancy in its final act, when we finally meet one of the two elderly tipplers, plus a friend who occasionally stayed at their apartment and endured their shouting matches.

Tykwer exhibits a fondness for split screens and other eye candy but no interest in formalities like character and plot development. By the time we reach the kitchy final scene, we've had our fill of visual tricks.

Unlike Van Sant's grittier, less sentimental recent small films, it's twee enough to make your teeth ache. It's the director's biggest miscalculation since "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" 18 years ago.

Jane's Journey is an exceedingly graceful and dignified sleep aid.

Depardieu's days as a leading man might be over, but he has a bright future in quirky roles like Germain.

The main reason to see it is for the hilariously nasty uses it devises for a bear trap, nail gun, etc.

The good news about I Don't Know How She Does It is that it's so bad that it's another ovary-punch to the formula chick flick. Bring on more films like "Bridesmaids."

It's fun, but the script, credited to Hossein Amini ("The Wings of the Dove"), is short on characterization and long on plot twists and wisecracks.