A big fat geek kiss to the movies of Steven Spielberg and his fanboys, Paul is a mild, meandering comedy.

Shows glimmers of great drama, but jettisons too much essential cargo (character development, relationships, plot, common sense) in an effort to be lean and clean.

Vacancy, in the end, simply offers a particularly aggressive brand of couples counseling.

Gritty, jumpy and rife with cliches.

The premise, which initially has a certain interior logic, grows implausible and then nonsensical.

The real problem isn't with the actors, it's with 1) the source material, a highfalutin romance novel with a clever literary conceit, and 2) LaBute's clumsy, uncomfortable efforts to telescope Byatt's book into a workable movie.

It's not original, but unlike some of this summer's movies (such as The Island and Stealth), The Cave knows its place. Its job is to deliver a few jolty thrills and a couple of laughs and wrap things up before it starts to get too dumb.

Relying on improv-y riffing and watch-them-coming-from-down-the-block-and-around-the-corner sight gags, The Campaign is intermittently amusing, but more often just interminable.

Begins with a scene of mass repentance, but the real sin here is a profligate waste of talent.

Overstocked farce.

The characters are (hand-painted) so flat that the film looks like a paper-doll convention at Epcot.

Driven is in both its script and its execution a paint-by-numbers affair.

What are you going to do when your lead actress offers a performance that's as unlikable as the woman she's portraying? Maybe it's the script (flimsy, formulaic), or filmmaker Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's conspicuous direction, but Tammy Blanchard's Nina, a waitress with a dour disposition and an unwanted pregnancy, pretty much sucks the life out of this well-meaning melodrama.

A raunchy romp through the peeping-Tomism, potty humor, raging hormones and social humiliation that are standard issue in the Hollywood high-school sex comedy.

There's nothing original, nor compelling, about Twist.

Not even Halle Berry, emerging from the blue Caribbean in an orange two-piece -- can bring this thing to life.

Feels more like a postscript than a probing, provocative documentary.

A silly melodrama.

It's not so much a miscalculation of his audience by Burton as it is a disregard. What lingers after Frankenweenie, far more than its stunning technique, is a sad suggestion of solipsism.

Far-fetched and utterly humorless, with a literally tacked-on conclusion (yes, more text on the screen), the only thing that's surprising about Unbreakable is how lame it is.

Like Clint Eastwood’s masterful 2006 WWII drama "Flags of Our Fathers," Lee’s film is as much about how we spin war stories as it is about war itself. Both involve a group of heroic soldiers sent home by the Pentagon to help drum up popular support. Both are made by filmmakers keenly aware that stories have the power to justify a war or turn the public against it.

Cute, cloying and catastrophically predictable.

This isn't a movie, it's an animatronic theme-park ride - an artificially processed, easily digestible treat for kids.Ho, ho hum.

It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.

The film's intimations of bisexual romance have a certain innate drama that no amount of bad acting or cornball rugby matches can completely erase.

The moral of Taken 2? If you're going on a family vacation, be sure that the human-trafficking ring you put out of business in that far more satisfying and suspenseful thriller from a few years ago doesn't know how to find you.

To do this kind of satire successfully, you need the kind of merciless and unrelenting wit of films such as Gus Van Sant's "To Die For" or John Huston's "Prizzi's Honor."

Firth is brilliant as a preternaturally patient man - every day he has to tell her the same exact story. But he has a creepy way about him. Is it love that drives him, or something darker?