After a slightly promising start, this great-looking but ultimately deeply confusing and unscary sci-fi/horror opus turns into a quite boring rehash of M. Night Shyamalan's post-"Signs" films.

To its credit, this remarkable film does not contrive a happy ending. Under the circumstances, even a mildly hopeful one seems like a triumph of the highest order.

The Fourth Kind has a clever gimmick and nothing more.

Unless the director was aiming for a Victorian "Black Christmas," though, he overshot his mark

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.

Boring.

Splinterheads might suffice some late night on cable, but that's about it.

There are a lot of grace notes in That Evening Sun, including Barry Corbin's hilarious work as Abner's neighbor, a vivid sense of landscape and a visually arresting climax.

Following the start of the war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in The Hague, the release here of the political thriller Storm couldn't be more timely.

Fitfully amusing.

The direction is never more than conventional, with a tear-inducing finale better suited to a TV soap opera.

You wouldn't call The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates.

Although the payoff is creepy, it takes a little too long to arrive -- and when it does, it's about as worn-out as the movie's title.

Has a split personality. It starts as a comedy but morphs into an icky family melodrama. It should have stuck with the yuks.

Neither a concert film nor a documentary but a ghoulish “event” offered just in time for Halloween, This is It is sadly -- and reprehensively, if you ask me -- the movie equivalent to the National Enquirer’s infamous post-mortem shot of Elvis Presley.

A sweet and endearing movie. Attention, kids: It's also packed with action!

A lazy coffee-table book of a movie,

Calls to mind Grandpa taking out his dentures and trying to put on a comedy monster show for little kids at Halloween: When he tries to be scary, he's goofy, but when he tries to be goofy, he's scary.

The movie (Untitled) is a tinny satire destined to go "(Unwatched)" because it is "(Uninteresting)."

Very few actors would have the courage to allow von Trier to put them through what Dafoe and Gainsbourg experienced in the name of art.

If Carrie Bradshaw ever trades her Manolos for sneakers and starts blogging about raising children, I pray she wouldn't be as tiresome as the heroine of Katherine Dieckmann's insufferable comedy Motherhood.

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

The performances by neophite actresses Olympe Borval and Lizzie Brochere make the film special.

Unlike the modern glamour-vamps of "True Blood" and "Twilight," this group of smitten and bitten men are no fun at all. That is, unless you like heavy breathing, underwear sniffing, cringe-inducing blood sucking, murder by stabbing or hanging, plus grainy, underexposed cinematography and stilted acting.

In their overly earnest attempt to flesh Sendak’s story out to 100 minutes, Jonze and his co-screenwriter, novelist Dave Eggers, have laboriously spelled out motivations (divorce is bad!), elaborated back stories -- and added reams of less-than-inspired dialogue.

At last, the missing link be tween "Phantom of the Opera" and "Saw." Welcome to the gonzo revenge saga Law Abiding Citizen.

If anything is frightening here, it's the scenes of the small children being indoctrinated into an organic lifestyle and being made to sing, at least three times, a song about the evils supposedly lurking in the environment around them.

Alfred Molina gives a warm and engaging performance as an occupying British soldier.