Some fine performances shine through in Joe Maggio's pretentious, credulity-straining dramedy.

Crippled by lame storytelling.

Sometimes gets repetitive and is slightly overlong. But it's got solid performances.

Rarely less than compelling, must-see entertainment, thanks to Farrell, Schumacher and company.

Ben Stiller's overbearing schtick officially reaches its expiration date with the desperate and puerile Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

A cheerfully crude, well-cast (and frequently uproarious) campus comedy in the tradition of "There's Something About Mary."

Slick as a pig and reeking of phony sympathy for recession-wracked consumers, The Joneses is a black comedy about stealth marketing made by a filmmaker who's evidently much too close to the subject to bite the hand that feeds him.

One of Miike's most violent and sadistic movies, filled with squirting blood, throat-slashing, limb-hacking and other forms of mutilation too gruesome to describe here.

Although it is a soft PG-13, The Adam Project is stylistically geared toward 5-year-olds who aren’t going to watch a movie about time travel and frayed parent-child relationships. Today’s teens and 20-somethings are too smart for a movie so dumb.

It’s refreshing to see a nonwhite lead, and the husky-voiced pop singer is likable as a brave-hearted kid searching for her mother. But man, is there a lot of Rihanna in this movie: She also provides what seems like the entirety of the film’s soundtrack, making it feel like a vanity project (is “vanimation” a thing?).

It's basically a series of music videos - a few quite good - strung together over two long hours and loosely connected by a weak story line loaded with anachronisms.

Tenderness and good intentions don't necessarily add up to a movie.

Plot? Who needs a plot? Certainly not neophyte director Matt Porterfield, whose Hamilton gets along just fine without one.

An open- and-shut case, but that doesn't mean it can't also be an entertaining one.

It’s never a good sign when the real people behind a movie’s story appear in the end credits and you’re stumped as to who’s who.

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is the first must-see film of Hollywood’s summer season, if for no other reason than its jaw-dropping evocation of Roaring ’20s New York — in 3-D, no less.

Leave her at the altar! She is “The Bride!,” one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job.

It accurately reflects the rage and alienation that fuels the self-destructiveness of many young people.

Despite a crafty premise and a clever kink in the tale that almost saves it, Connolly isn't dexterous enough to achieve the Hitchockian level of suspense the movie needs.

Ultimately, the immensely personable and talented lead actors manage to push aside the disquieting notion that this group of men are so emotionally stunted that they're happy to abandon their wives and children for the sake of a party.

The two leads have strong singing voices, but they're not helped by songs with titles like "It's Time to Disco."

The smart indie comedy Diminished Capacity deals with three kinds of dementia: those relating to aging, concussions and being a Chicago Cubs fan. Tying those three things together is a task that the witty script does with surprising adroitness.

Directed by journeyman actor Matthew Lillard, this tame and by-the-numbers effort never succeeds in making the outcast situation cinematic or interesting.

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.

Familiar elements such as a dark family secret, a ghost and a Ouija board start to seem trite after a while, and the third act is a little ridiculous, but debut writer-director Nicholas McCarthy does a lot with a little and seems fully prepared to handle a big-studio horror project.

A campy erotic thriller that’s seriously short of, well, passion.

This messy, disappointing, self-important and utterly humorless version of the Marvel comic book character may be the toughest flick with a green protagonist to sit through since "The Grinch."

Alas, the film’s relevance — and ultimately sane upshot — is buried beneath a meandering and oftimplausible plot.