While the original was an art-house success, this English-language redo, now getting a one-week run after sitting on the shelf for a year and a half, doesn't measure up.

The indie road movie Janie Jones is billed as "inspired by the true story" of its writer-director, David M. Rosenthal. Impossible. No one's life is this boring.

Putting it as kindly as possible, this pitiful romantic comedy directed by Scott Marshall (dad Garry did "Pretty Woman'') peaks with its animated opening credits.

It's sort of like last year's "Blue Valentine" on Prozac -- the giddy highs and the despairing lows are muted, and a well-known side effect of that antidepressant pops up, too: Palpable lust is all but nonexistent.

Where Anonymous has it all over "Shakespeare in Love'' is its detailed evocation of London from four centuries ago. The rowdy audience for Shakespeare's first works at the Globe Theatre is especially colorful.

Michael Brandt's soporific thriller is making a token stop in theaters before its January DVD debut. Miss it if you can.

This future looks awfully passé: The stimulus didn't work out. Neither did 1917 Russia.

Relentlessly mediocre cartoon.

The legend of Thompson is immortal, though, and it'll fall to each generation to jam him into its own mold. Depp and Robinson's view is that Thompson was like a mullet: a party in the back but all business upfront.

There's a winning emotional truth in the father-son scenes in this Spokane-shot sleeper, directed with skill and sensitivity by Jonathan Segal.

This time the execs are lobbying us, yet the public grows increasingly furious as our tax dollars fund corporate welfare, bailouts and dumb ideas like the $41,000 golf cart that is the Chevy Volt.

This small movie carries great allegorical weight as it echoes the Manson Family, the long list of failed utopian communes that culminated in Bolshevism and the one-child policy that in China has prevented the births of untold numbers of girls.

Le Havre is warm-hearted and uplifting, without being schmaltzy or preachy. And, with its illegal-alien theme, it's dead-on timely.

Johnny English Reborn sounds like a reboot, but it's actually a tired recycling of something that wasn't exactly fresh to begin with.

This Muppet virtuoso is so visibly thrilled to work in Henson's weird and wonderful world, and so good at bringing joy to little kids, you'd have to be a true Grouch not to be moved.

Everything plays out exactly as you'd expect in a cheerful, well-meaning movie in the style of something made for the Disney channel.

Making a true story of social injustice into a gripping narrative requires more imagination than is contained in this well-intentioned but uninspired effort.

The shtick movie Paranormal Activity 3 is the horror equivalent of vaudeville comedy: a little patter, a little pie in the face, repeat.

Spacey does his best work since "American Beauty'' as a tired middle-aged corporate warrior whose greatest compassion, in the end, is reserved for an ailing dog he has to put to sleep.

Yearning for an exciting African adventure? Oka! isn't it.

Much lip service is given to the global village in Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death and Technology, yet it constantly drifts back into a Shlain family slideshow.

The Woman is disturbing, lurid and perverse, but that isn't necessarily bad: Horror buffs, especially fans of Ketchum, will be overcome with joy and excitement.

Cage and director Joel Schumacher, who has fallen so far from the A-list that he provokes a demand for new letters of the alphabet after Z, have each found their cinematic soulmates.

A dispiriting rehash of dysfunctional family clichés that seems to last longer than Thanksgiving Day dinner.

Make no mistake, Father of Invention is the hilarious Spacey's show all the way.

Basically "csi: East Texas,'' the debut feature of Ami Canaan Mann is long on style and short on coherent storytelling, not unlike numerous efforts by her director dad, Michael, who serves as a producer here.

Spanish master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar offers up a grisly Halloween trick-and-treat in his first full-out horror movie, an eye-popping and genuinely shocking gender-bending twist on Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo.''

Yet despite the efforts of an excellent cast headed by three top comedy names -- Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black -- and tons of beautiful scenery (mostly British Columbia and the Canadian Yukon), this movie stubbornly refuses to take flight, or generate more than a few chuckles.