A bummer.

Watts, who is one of the film's executive producers, brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person.

Tedious, ludicrous and harmless glimpse of the dawn of civilization.

Feels both absolutely of the 1970s and absolutely fresh.

The whole project is a cloying, artificial mess. The slapstick comedy doesn't bite, and the formulaic sentimentality doesn't grip.

None of these elements quite come together, and while the clothes and props look authentic, the acting doesn't.

A jubilee for McDormand and jolly good fun for most everyone else.

The fluid film cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, intercut with grainy Super-8 shots of park regulars, tracks the skaters in their free-flying, free-styling and free-falling grace. In these privileged moments, the film is close to transcendence, defying time, space and gravity.

Disturbingly good. The writing and the performances are such that as things go from bad (sad motel-room affairs) to worse (a 4-year-old gone missing), the film's characters get inside your skin, your soul. It's enough to make you want to cry.

In many ways, City of Men is like a Portuguese-language version of David Simon's "The Wire."

Given the filmmaker's privileged perspective of hindsight, to not consider the real-world repercussions of their theater, to not connect the dots between 1968 and 2008 is a squandered opportunity.

Feels less like an epic drama about power and the power of love than an episode of a Masterpiece Theatre mini-series.

Aimed at tweenage girls and mushy romantics of all age and stripe, Penelope has a quick gait and a nice comic tone.

Mildly diverting and utterly dispensable.

Beautifully observed, and beautifully acted by the novice thespian Polanco (culled from a New York City public school), Chop Shop is at once a heartbreaker and a story of hope and the American Dream.

With its rebellious themes and pharmaceutical props - Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax all get doled out - Charlie Bartlett isn't going to win any awards from parent-teacher groups. But the underlying message of the film, with its nods to "Catcher in the Rye" and - '70s throwback here - "Harold and Maude," is a good one.

The Signal has its share of things to say about urban paranoia, road rage, addiction - whether to sex, drugs or, more dangerously, consumerism. But it stands apart from other pictures of the same ilk by using its apocalypse as a backdrop to a bitter-sweet love story.

A charmingly off-the-wall little tale. Black doesn't do anything he hasn't done before (in fact, he's already done his remake of King Kong!).

Quiet, watchful, out for himself, Sorowitsch is a complicated figure - neither hero nor villain, and certainly no fool. The Austrian actor Markovics is riveting in the role; he is wiry, anticipatory, his eyes darting with intelligence and worry.

Rivette's slow-moving but seamless study of the rituals of courtship has a disarming grace, even as its downcast hero, Depardieu's Gen. Armand de Montriveau, limps around stiffly.

Because Vantage Point is really a concept movie, the actors are not much more than pawns on the chessboard: They move one square at a time.

Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.

This sweet, yet unsentimental film is about growing up, losing innocence, and longing for a place, and people, to call home.

Definitely, Maybe gets too coy in spots, and Brooks is a sharper writer at this point in his career than he is a director. But for a film with a half-dozen fully-formed characters that spans 15 years and works in a swell detail about a 1943 edition of "Jane Eyre" - well, it definitely works. No maybes about it.

Fast is a good quality in an action/adventure. But there is lightning-paced and then there is warp speed. Doug Liman's Jumper is the latter, a not-so-good quality in an action/adventure for the simple reason that the audience can't figure out what's going on.

The film underscores the power of reading, and applying what we read to problem-solving. The story suggests that we don't really see the natural world around us, and if we did our lives, like Jared's and his siblings', would be immeasurably richer.

First-time filmmaker Kolirin paces his can-we-all-just-get-along? parable as if it were a silent comedy, which for long stretches it is. This movie about musicians has no soundtrack. Its musical moments are few, but potent.

No doubt conceived as an underwater version of "National Treasure," Andy Tennant's film plays like a Three Stooges movie with scuba gear.