Its smallness of scale, and undemonstrative nature, could make it a welcome change of pace from Hollywood bombast, especially for fans of the life aquatic.

Kind of a drag.

Intense, well-acted love story.

Hampered from the start by the numbingly formulaic additions by screenwriter James DeMonaco ("The Negotiator"). Toss in needlessly fussy visuals and a climax that is hilariously out of whack, and you've got an excellent excuse to stay home and watch the original.

As it goes on and on and on, Coach Carter becomes more patience-testing than soul-stirring, proving that you can overdose on good intentions as easily as you can on evil substances.

We end up with a piece of B-grade junk in which Elektra exchanges "banter" with the unexceptional Prout between fight scenes so badly shot that even Garner looks like a stunt double.

In the end, it's a perfectly decent, perfectly vaporous film, pretty but slight, predictable but never incompetent.

Boring and fundamentally silly.

A modest movie full of decent pop songs, three-dimensional humans and sharp observations about the male mind. It's also full of funny little ironies.

Even though it largely succeeds in putting a civil face on some unpalatable material, it lacks the heat and suppleness of the best Shakespeare on film.

The result is an exercise in emoting that features one of the worst Southern accents in recent memory and does about as much to establish the actor's range as "Battlefield Earth."

See it for the star. Penn makes a film that in many respects feels low scale and ordinary into something painfully human and real.

Why did they think anyone would want to watch a Fat Albert adaptation that can't answer a simple question: "Who is this movie for?"

Bacon's mature performance serves a story that's considerably less sophisticated than he is, making The Woodsman less "brave" and more a slightly better-made movie of the week.

How the mighty (De Niro and Hoffman) have fallen? More like how the mighty have pile-driven themselves into the solid mass of rock at the core of the Earth. . . .

It adds up to a truly taxing couple of hours: ham acting, visual noise, aural torture, elementary plotting and unconvincing emotions.

Cheadle's performance elevates Hotel Rwanda, making it a film that does justice to the tragedy it commemorates.

The Aviator, though, if not prime Scorsese, is the closest thing in a long time to the old Scorsese. What a splendid year-end gift!

Ends up being one of those heartbreaking movies that gets off to a promising start but never quite creaks to life, despite everyone's obvious best efforts.

Could have had charm if the characters had been more recognizable as human beings.

Ends up feeling like the sort of leisurely man's-man adventure movie you used to be able to catch on Sunday afternoon TV.

It's simply an awful, awful film.

If the movie is largely familiar, its passion and craft are noteworthy.

Imaginary Heroes feels like an endless series of wakes, awkward cocktail conversations and teen house parties, which would be fine if Harris wrote less cartoony dialogue.

A truly powerful, masterful work.

Is it style over substance? Absolutely. But as with "Ocean's Eleven," style wins -- only just barely this time around.

A fascinating, masterly, frustrating film, it only passingly touches on the heart and sharpness of Anderson's previous work and rather brings to mind the famous complaint of the emperor in "Amadeus": "too many notes."

Has a surprising number of problems: dire scripting, sloppy plotting and coffee-jittery editing, for starters. But its biggest problem is that Blade himself takes a back seat to a host of new and mostly uninteresting characters.