A credulity-straining thriller featuring a few good paranoid moments — and, perhaps most important, Rebecca Hall running in high heels.

Misshapen, malodorous and firing its grubby tentacles across the room in a feeding frenzy, The Thing reminded me of a roomful of journalists immediately after someone announces Open Bar. The movie's victims disappear like cocktail peanuts and without a whole lot more significance.

Not a movie but a live-action agitprop cartoon so shameless and coarse, it's almost funny.

In his directing debut Battle in Seattle, actor Stuart Towns end does an impressive job (on a shoestring budget) of re-creating the massive street protests that forced the cancellation of the World Trade Organization summit in 1999.

The Poison Rose doesn’t aspire to transcend any clichés, and judging from the flagging energy level of the actors, everyone involved knows it.

Calling Child 44 a mash-up of “Dr. Zhivago” and “Silence of the Lambs” doesn’t do enough to capture how strange it is.

A big, loud, proudly brainless popcorn flick that blows up cars, trucks, tanks, boats, helicopters and even a train.

An essential document of bad taste that needs to go right into the time capsule. History must not forget.

A cute, spunky found-footage thriller undone by a lumpy plot and a weak ending, Operation Avalanche revisits the urban legend that the moon landing was faked, with some fresh twists.

The majority of Dickie Roberts winds up looking like a tame episode of the "Brady Bunch" -- spiked with Spade-esque crudity.

Call it "The Doom Generation II." Gregg Araki's Kaboom returns to the trippy ways of his 1995 erotic head trip.

Middleton deals with the various male and female perspectives in an even-handed way, concocting a slice of New York life that's frothy as meringue pie.

Perhaps this year’s timeliest film — as well as, unfortunately, one of the hardest to sit through.

This one is essentially “The Firm” with smartphones.

Brisseau obviously aims to shock - and he does. Now shocking is A-OK with me - but only if it's part of a something bigger. Exterminating Angels is beautifully lensed and acted, but it lacks substance.

Make a movie about depressed people, and what do you get? A depressing movie.

Even if the movie had more shadings, though, Marshall's political point would undo his he-man action-flick format. If you're looking for a rallying cry to make the emotions sizzle, "Quagmire!" isn't it.

If you’re into seeing Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson play truly despicable government officials, have I got a movie for you!

There are so many monologues about obnoxious behavior that they begin to lose their luster - something I'd never have thought possible.

There are the makings of a funny movie here, but novice director-writer Anna Reeves isn't up to the job. While her cast is talented, Reeves doesn't concentrate long enough on any plotline or character to build viewer interest.

Sweet, funny, well-acted and nicely shot on locations in the south of France -- but on the dull side overall.

What's cutting- edge comedy for one generation can become generic filler for the next - that's the lesson to be learned from The In-Laws, a strenuous attempt to recycle a vastly funnier minor classic.

Ultimately fails to make its case that five teenagers were sent to jail for a crime they didn't commit solely because of institutional racism.

While Caplan works well in theory as an antiromantic-comedy heroine, director and co-screenwriter Michael Mohan just doesn't give her enough to do.

The banality of evil has met its match in the banality of Good, a Holocaust parable that barely registers a pulse.

I don’t know how many sex scenes featuring Winstone and Atwell you can handle, but the movie breaches my limit, which is a firm zero.

Roy Cohn was way more entertaining than the new documentary about Roy Cohn.

Go for Zucker was a smash back home, where it was hailed as the first German comedy about Jews since World War II. But it will take more than that to make American audiences laugh.