All-too-familiar and schmaltzy territory for both coming-of-age films and movies with elderly actors.

Scrappy and unsettling, V/H/S puts the majority of today's mainstream "scary" movies to shame.

Besson is unable to weave the comic scenes together with the serious gory ones, so both seem increasingly jarring and unbelievable.

One part cabaret, one part travelogue, one part comic heist, one part romantic tearjerker -- and all pretty tedious.

A toe-tapping, booty- shaking look at Cubans' love of music that gets bogged down in political thoughts that go unexplored.

Alan Rickman holds the film together.

A flawed black comedy about two buddies who open a butcher's shop in a small Danish town.

Cutesy? My pain was acutesy as the entire plot yawned before me.

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.

The story of a guy who never goes anywhere or does anything. Until he goes everywhere and does everything, but he might as well have stayed home.

Marie’s Story will feel familiar, which is mostly a tribute to the enduring power of Helen Keller’s biography.

Starts to get a bit preachy as it works its way toward a climax heavily influenced by "Rushmore," but it's still well above average for this type of film.

Directed with sledgehammer subtlety by Dennis Dugan ("I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry").

Shepard, who directed "The Matador" and the pilot for "Ugly Betty," can't quite get the disparate elements of The Hunting Party to mesh into a satisfying whole.

F-A-I-L-U-R-E.

Full of appealing actors mugging like crazy, it’s got amusing moments, but the overstuffed visuals suffocate real emotion.

For all its CGI showiness, the fact that Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal signed on for this splatterfest is the film’s most impressive feat.

Strictly generic, it does little more than regurgitate the J-horror hits "Ringu" and "Ju-on."

"Dark World” is low-stakes, low-emotion, lowbrow.

After some early thrills, director Baltasar Kormákur’s movie ceases to excite because the creature has no more surprises left. He just jumps through the window — again.

Despising the British upper class is so utterly common, as we see in The Riot Club, a farcically heavy-handed attempted satiric takedown of an elite group of Oxford students.

One of those indie excursions to Loserville that lasts an hour and a half but feels longer than "Roots."

Sure, violence in movies isn't violence in real life. And when you combine it with intelligent dialogue and pointed social commentary (a la "Django Unchained"), it can be cathartic. But The Last Stand, absent either of these things, just seems to want to gin up a lot of high-fiving for a lot of shooting, and right now is the least palatable time I can think of for that.

This comedy is cringe-inducingly lame and the dramatic turns are visible as far in advance as utility poles on the prairie.

Contains too many weak performances and predictable lines to succeed, but it's probably the best rave movie so far.

Lacks the humor and charm that fills the book and makes it so much more than a catalog of suffering.

It's a lumpy and disorganized film that remains unsatisfying, perhaps because the fundamental oddness of having sex in public for money as a way of life remains just as mysterious at the end of the film as in the beginning.

There's really nothing new here, though, and lacking the drama and humor of "Fahrenheit 9/11," it is even more likely to be preaching to the converted.