The question for moviegoers: Would you rather get your dose of existenz-philosophie from Dostoyevsky or a slasher flick?

Breslin, so memorable in "Little Miss Sunshine," suffers the most. Skilled and reactive with humans, she doesn't quite muster the same engagement with her finned and flippered costars here.

As Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands reminded us, Burton always has been more absorbed by what his audience sees than by what his movies say. It's part of his unique talent as a filmmaker, but it leads him to ignore the flaws in the structure of what is, after all, supposed to be an exciting adventure film.

Both consoling and confounding.

The good news is that this daddy/daughter reconciliation story connects with the ball. The not-so-good: It's a blooper.

Dumb with a capital D, Blades of Glory takes its (almost) fleshed-out sketch-comedy idea as far as an ice-skating buddy movie with we're-not-gay jokes and a psycho stalker can go.

Their exhaustive tribute to hungry zombies, fast girls and faster cars is . . . exhausting, if intermittently entertaining.

Song One burns with genuine sentiment, charismatic actors, and good music. One wishes it were held together by something more than a series of moods.

It can be argued that Adam uses Asperger's as a kind of metaphor for the barriers that people erect to fend off strangers, to guard against intimacy. It can also be argued that writer/director Mayer is shamelessly manipulative.

Tennessee is drenched in melancholy, a trip through a tunnel of pain illuminated by a lone ray of light at the end.

There's a loose, vérité vibe here, and times when both Williams and Gosling root down deep to deliver something resonant and true. But this modern-day kitchen sink drama is ultimately too painful, too labored, to care much about at all.

Less like "The Waterboy" and more like "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," only funny.

As The Cable Guy progresses, its psycho-comedic tone gets sicker and its plot more predictable, until, by the end, we may as well be watching Ray Liotta as The Cop From Hell or Marky Mark as The Boyfriend From Hell. It's strictly generic, by the book, and downright exhausting. [14 June 1996, p.03]

This is a complicated story, but it's efficiently laid out by Poitras in this smartly edited project. She has posed Citizenfour as the final piece of a post-9/11 trilogy that began with "My Country, My Country" (about the 2006 elections in Iran) and "The Oath" (about Guantanamo).

Perfectly cast, if insufficiently dramatized.

A smart aleck-y kidnapping caper that whooshes around to a thumping electronic beat.

Central Intelligence is actually funny.

Arnold has a gem for the third millennium in End of Days.

Heartfelt and artfully shot, the movie - with little Rodrigo Noya, wearing big eyeglasses, in the title role - is too sweet for its own good, even as some of its characters do things that aren't terribly sweet at all.

Follows its heroines' rise and wising-up with a giddy, "Hard Day's Night" enthusiasm.

Well-written, gorgeously shot, and expertly edited, the film is also an exasperating exercise in good intentions gone wrong. For all its strengths, Genius often trades in tiresome clichés.

The tradecraft is there, the film craft is there, but the craftiness of a great concept is gone. Any way Bourne can go through Treadstone again?

Working from a story by Antwone Fisher, screenwriter Tina Gordon Chism is tender toward characters balancing where they come from with where they'd like to go. Fisher was the subject of an inspirational biography by Denzel Washington.

Like "Man on Fire," the previous collaboration between Washington and Scott, Déjà Vu is stunning but poorly paced, a film that manages to be both captivating and frustrating.

No one should be expected to endure 115 minutes of this nonsense.

Araki's films have never been known for their subtlety. Think Douglas-Sirk-meets-Johnny-Rotten. He tries to rein in his tendency for the baroque in White Bird in a Blizzard, but he pushes the story too far in the direction of the grotesque.

The second-best film parody (after The Brady Bunch Movie) of a '70s TV phenom that unaccountably looks better the further you get from it.

What is lacking in this version, with its hasty third act and abrupt denouement, is the surprise that their union may be the deepest love either will ever know.