Predictable, rarely scary.

Too much of the film is taken up by creaky plot devices and one sibling vowing to track down and talk to another one to resolve a problem.

American Hustle is a movie that was built backward, or inside out: It puts actors’ needs before the audience’s. There’s no heart under those polyester lapels, and what all that Aqua Net is pasting together is a few sparse strands of wispy story.

After the first two “Captain America” entries, the finest comic-book movies of the last five years, this one is disappointing. The story doesn’t make sense.

Offers interesting views of ordinary life in Baghdad that Americans won't find on TV news. But the impact is lessened by the director's failure to let those who think the war is justified have their say.

A lame TV sitcom with big-screen ambition that's almost touching in its hopelessness.

Mines the increasingly fertile territory of aging boomer parents and chafing middle-aged siblings, but at irritatingly high volume, with the cantankerous voices of Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Dustin Hoffman nearly constantly talking over one another.

The surfing sequences are some of the best I've ever seen in a film, and the re-creation of Jay's climactic battle to ride El Nino-driven waves is real white-knuckle stuff...But neither Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") nor the fellow veteran director who replaced him when Hanson took ill, Michael Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist"), can do much with the hokey sequences on land.

Too bad the script is predictable at every turn.

For a sex movie, Norwegian Wood is about as dry as a pocketful of sand. Even for a film set in a land that considers paper folding an exciting activity, this is dull stuff.

Matthews is supposed to be the star here, but it's Englund's hilarious, over-the-top performance that keeps Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, by director Jon Knautz, from becoming another forgettable exercise in horror.

It’s a slickly plotted ticking-time-bomb thriller with a crisp look and one standout debut performance, by Hitham Omari as a ruthless leader of a terrorist cell.

Gorgeous surroundings don't make up for sulky, feuding travel companions.

Frothy, forgettable comedy.

Garage Days is fun, but it would have been even more entertaining if Proyas had taken an unplugged approach.

May be momentarily entertaining, but don't expect anything profound from the lightweight saga.

Unfortunately, “Arthur” is rarely at its best, bogged down in countless CGI sequences of battlefields or monsters.

Weds half-hearted thriller elements to the self-absorbed, no-budget mumblecore films pioneered by Katz in efforts like "Dance Party, USA."

Pleasant and has not a few laughs.

Wants to be a "Last Tango in Paris" for the new millennium, but its flaccid dramatization and hollow moralizing doesn't rise even to the level of last year's "An Affair of Love," let alone Bertolucci's masterpiece.

Merely a passably amusing excuse to pass a couple of hours in an air-conditioned theater.

While there are some giggles in the film-within-the-film (also called "Road to Nowhere"), the artsy-fartsy direction and flat-as-a-pancake acting (including a cameo by Variety columnist Peter Bart as himself) invites invidious comparisons to "Mulholland Drive."

A cheesily amusing prequel to the 1993 film which starred Al Pacino as a Puerto Rican drug kingpin in Spanish Harlem, in one of his most entertaining performances. This time around, Jay Hernandez delivers a serviceable impression of a much younger version of Pacino.

The Report, true to its no-nonsense name, does the admirable work of trying to interest viewers in the way that bureaucracy can be used to hide the most terrible truths. Alas, the movie gets as buried in paper-pushing as its characters do.

The silliest sci-fi movie since "An Inconvenient Truth."

A wonder to look at, even as its increasingly pretentious manga-inspired story line outstays its welcome.

Chases its tail for so long, it morphs from a whodunit into a who-cares.

Edward's a remarkable young gentleman when you consider the hell he's been through: It turns out he's always 17, his fate to keep repeating high school, forever and ever. If that's my only option, kindly burn me at the stake.