The title is drawn from a verse Hannah wrote just before she was captured -- and that impulse is enough to sustain audience interest.

If you're only going to see one film about the Battle of Stalingrad — and there are many — Stalingrad would be the wrong choice. Russian director Fedor Bondarchuk's treatment of the World War II turning point is shallow and contrived, if sometimes impressively staged.

By and large, the tone is gentle, the music French, and the food shot so delectably that you can all but smell the freshly baked bread.

This slackers-go-gangsta comedy demonstrates that less than 90 minutes can be a very long time.

Silent House is smart about its scares as well as its delivery method.

The movie is crisp and contemporary enough to inaugurate another franchise for Statham.

It's all handsomely produced, but none of the characters (save perhaps Bettany's fire-juggler) has a distinctive enough personality to make much of an impression.

Though the film features Holmes' fiercest villain and a plot partially cribbed from "The Final Problem," one of Conan Doyle's most beloved stories, the sense of mystery has gone missing. A most heinous crime has taken place. The fun, too, is nowhere in evidence.

Director Neil Burger, whose last divergent character was the smart-drugged protagonist of Limitless, allocates more than enough of this overlong movie to details of life and society in future-Chicagoland. But he fails to make any aspect of the premise persuasive.

A slideshow of actual photographs by the Bang Bang Club during the end credits packs more emotional punch than anything that precedes them, displaying in their still frames the singular focus that the movie lacks.

If The Counselor is a failure, it's at least a fascinating one. Much of the reason for that is time spent in the theater examining why the film isn't working.

There are no laughs in Solomon Kane; the sole attempt at a joke doesn't score, but it's a bracing reminder that humor exists. Instead, Bassett and Purefoy, his charisma-impaired star, get down to the grim, colorless business of vanquishing evil in a world where it settles like a black fog.

So it seems like the next logical step in telling a story with a relationship to truth might be that if you're going to fudge things, at least make it entertaining. Please, pull an "Argo."

The plot fails to deliver a single surprise, however, and the characterizations are thin even by the standards of the tough-guy genre.

Presumably in response to criticism that "The Da Vinci Code" was static and talky, director Ron Howard has made Angels & Demons frantic -- and, well, talky.

One Day ends up fatally compromised by its glib recourse to death and cancer as moral wake-up calls.

As obvious and expected as this turn of events is, the filmmakers and Hollyman create such an endearing character in Sarah that one still wants to see her get there.

Where "About a Boy" was both funny and wise about urban alienation, Admission settles for skin deep.

An incestuous payoff might be expected, given the casting of Green; she first attracted widespread attention in Bertolucci's "The Dreamers," as a young woman who is unusually close to her brother. But whatever happens, Womb is more melancholy than erotic.

Perhaps the clearest evidence that Yelling to the Sky is based on Mahoney's own life is that the movie lets its most troubled characters off pretty easy.

Like "Eve's Bayou," her best-known movie, Kasi Lemmons' Black Nativity presents a child's view of a troubled family. The latter film is sweeter and slenderer, but that's only to be expected.

What possessed Liv Tyler to take a role in this sadistic, unmotivated home-invasion flick.

The film becomes particularly risible when family matters come into play. Since the young demigods, by nature, are raised in single-parent homes, their encounters with the gods are characterized less by wonder than by the therapy-speak of wounded kids with daddy issues.

By the end of the film's scant 72 minutes, the conceit is on the verge of wearing out its welcome, but by then, it's created so much stomach-churning, quease-inducing, uproariously embarrassing humiliation for Trevor that it's become all but irresistible.

It's silly and often laughable, but it's a sweet fantasy, too, produced in loving homage to the frothiest traditions of stage and screen.

McAdams glows, as always, but Bana looks drained: I guess all that time-shifting leaves its mark on the complexion as well as the soul.

That makes the latter portion of the film much more successful than what precedes it, an improvement aided by the fact that the POV device eventually feels less like the director trying to show off and more like an integral part of the story. But it's still not enough to save a remake that, rather than trying to fix the deep flaws of its source, just covers them in a shinier coat of paint.

A little focus might have helped. Or not: The Dry Land seems intent to tick off a checklist of PTSD symptoms without animating them with fresh details or creative life. It's cloaked in an earnestness that suffocates.