Although it wasn't quite the comedy we had hoped for, the idea behind it is pretty cute; we just wished the laughs weren't so awkward and forced.

This is a fun midnight movie. Horror fans, get your friends together and go see some gore and some naked chicks in three dimensions.

Angela Bassett is great as his strict, single mother; The soundtrack is great, of course, and the ending features moving archival footage of the streets of Brooklyn after Wallace's murder.

Sometimes the only funny stuff is in the trailers, but not so here. Kristen Johnson was especially adept at stealing some scenes.

The perfect antidote to the post-holiday blues. It's exciting, well-acted, touching, and genuine.

Revolutionary Road isn't emotionally engaging or moving; it's awfully similar in theme to Winslet's 2006 movie "Little Children."

Not charming, but not cynical, The Spirit is wholly unrecommendable, but made with greater care than many movies that are.

Naturally, Pitt and Blanchett are outstanding. Fincher's meticulous attention to detail is unerring, down to the light fixtures.

Russell Brand is absurd, funny and wonderfully out of place in a family movie.

Owen Wilson manages to break his customary comic relief persona and is adept at playing a little "Father Knows Best"; the yellow lab does a good job too.

Marketed as a combination of a popcorn-munching actioner, but that's somewhat misleading -- it's also a well-researched historical thriller. Unfortunately, it ends up not succeeding as either.

Dawson is lovely to watch, and when Smith isn't furrowing his brow and looking concerned, he's not so bad himself.

Rourke is getting tons of press and award nominations, but Marisa Tomei kicks ass too. Not only does the one-time Oscar winner look amazing and perform her own pole tricks, but she effectively humanizes what could be just another naked chick in a movie.

Winslet deserves an Oscar for her amazing performance.

A totally mesmerizing battle of the wills between the occasionally charming yet wily Nixon and the increasingly desperate Frost.

A disappointingly schlocky effort that gives up on trying to make a realistic Punisher movie, settling instead on a hokey, multi-colored-neon gun rave best enjoyed in Rob Zombie's family room.

Beyond Milk, few of the other characters are given much to do.

The religious symbolism couldn't be more obvious (or disturbing). Keep your religion out of our vampires, Hollywood!

A self-impressed epic with grandiose vistas, flat characters, and a subplot about Native Australians.

Quantum, thanks to a deft blend of exotic escapism and bare-bones modernism, is more than strong enough to be judged on its own. In fact, it's the perfect Bond film.

While Repo! is obviously no "Zauberflöte," it does offer up spectacle on an operatic scale.

Masterfully put together.

If you enjoy a cop drama, regardless how packed with trite and worn plot points, Pride and Glory should do the trick.

At turns as neurotic and nebbishy as any Woody Allen flick, as creepy and disorienting as your favorite "Twilight Zone" episode, and as steeped in magical realism as the most moving Márquez novel, Synecdoche may not be the feel-good date movie of the year. But for viewers up for the challenge, it may be the film most likely to stick with you.

One of the pleasures of the film is that the themes don't hit you over the head.

Scott doesn't bring much to the table as an action director, and his keen storytelling abilities go invisible here.

Sally Hawkins offers an Oscar-worthy performance as Poppy, the funny, kind-hearted, and mischievous protagonist.

Though the plot has a few too many holes in it, the sheer fun of RockNRolla makes it easy to overlook such quibbles. Butler will make you forget all about "Sparta."

The lack of insightful commentary keeps the spotlight focused on Maher. That's not restraint; it's a missed opportunity.

It's a fantasy of one night in New York City and all its insanity, grossness, romance, and glamour.

The result is an exhilarating narrative.

It's an empty-headed look at a national problem with modern surveillance society, but if everyone acted as stupidly as the incredulous screenplay would have you believe, then it's safe to say the movie inadvertently reflects, rather than critiques, the insanity of our times.

While the movie will definitely not be to everyone's taste, black-hearted romantics will find Choke easy to swallow.

While the journey is somewhat bumpy and awfully contrived at times, the characters making the trek are ones we don't mind being cooped with for long stretches of highway.

It was received at Sundance 2007 with a resounding thud. Not because of this controversial rape scene, but because, well, it just wasn't good. Unfortunately, even with over a year of rejiggering, it's still not good.

It would be sad if Tinseltown used this poorly executed remake as proof that there's no audience for female-driven films, because that's not the case at all.

To call Towelhead exploitative is to miss the point. What made Towelhead the novel so extraordinary was the honesty in Jasira's adolescent narrative voice, the genuine way she misguidedly, but honestly, conflates the sexual attention she receives with the parental affection she really needs. With the film, Ball, though he drops the book's first person narration, is faithful to that voice.

A remarkable and disturbing look at the personal stories glossed over by the headlines.

Allen does craft a fairly observant account of human behavior, so that the solemn aspects don't put a damper on the humor, or vice versa.

From Downey Jr.'s purposely racist embodiment of African-American anachronisms to Black's scatological humor, everything in Tropic Thunder qualifies as satire, not spoof. It's an important distinction. Pauline Kael once noted that "unlike satire, spoofing has no serious objectives; it doesn't attack anything that anyone could take seriously; it has no cleansing power."

The aptly-named Crash is played to a tee by West; in fact, his performance was so believable that he's currently on tour with the reformed Germs as the lead singer.

Never achieves greatness, but it has the right people in place to suggest the greatness that might have been.

Like any coming-of-age story, there's enough drama, comedy, and, of course, romance to be entertaining. But moreover, Sisterhood furthers an honest dialogue among young women.

It's equal parts shivery and silly -- eyeball popping in slo-mo!

The arc of the story mirrors "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset," but the writing isn't nearly as strong, nor the characters as believable -- or likable.

Step Brothers is a hard R, for good reason. While it's somewhat sweeter, if you will, than a typical Apatow flick, the ludicrous situations call for equally ludicrous behavior and statements.

Much of this story is indeed entertaining: there's a tone of lighthearted mischievousness to the plotting and scheming of an illegal act that is essentially harmless.

Nolan's strong suits are maniacal schemers and moody character-driven intrigue, both of which make The Dark Knight a sleek (if, at close to three hours, somewhat distended) detective story.

Before plunking down your cash for a ride on the Mamma Mia! express when it pulls into town, just ask yourself one question: Do I really dig ABBA?

This is one train that you shouldn't miss.

It's in the script, however, that del Toro the writer falls a wee bit short of del Toro the visionary.

The leaden performances (Erik Scott Smith is the worst offender), the unlistenable musical interludes, the amateurish caricatures, and the short stories' lack of overall cohesion make this a garden party you should take a rain check on.

It's difficult to enjoy a thriller in which the big reveal is such a clunker, but if there's an exception to that rule, Tell No One might be it.

When it works, it really works, but it's debatable whether its target audience will really enjoy anything more than the nifty robots. Which is fine, too. Robots are pretty cool.

If you're looking for memorable dialogue and gripping drama, then you better get in line for another flick. But if it's spellbinding special effects and high-wire acts you crave, Wanted should be at the top of your list for big budget thrill rides.

A disaster, representing a number of negative firsts for Shyamalan.

By handing the directorial reigns to Louis Leterrier, the Parisian filmmaker responsible for the breathless "Transporter" films, Universal reveals its desire to emphasize spectacle over story.

Fans of strange love stories and detective thrillers would do well to investigate this indie gem.

It was definitely a great idea to give Kung Fu Panda the IMAX treatment. The fight scenes, quivering whiskers and moist noses, foggy mountaintops, and fluttering peach blossoms are equally impressive on the huge, curved screen.

To find a comparison for You Don't Mess With the Zohan in Adam Sandler's filmography, you have to go back to 2000's "Little Nicky," a film with a fantasy slant that allowed for jokes of unencumbered silliness.

It gives you everything you ever loved about the series, and blows it out into super-size cinematic proportions.

It's clear the creators wanted to bring our hero back but were uncertain where to put him. Sadly, Indiana Jones is not relevant amidst the atomic blasts and disillusionment of the Soviet era, and he's not even recognizable in the pixilated universe of recent cinema. To quote the great Dr. Jones, "It belongs in a museum!"

There's a persistent surface level, one-off quality to the whole business that repels emotional involvement at every juncture and seems stylistically in keeping with Disney's reluctance to greenlight each new Narnia film until the last one has proven itself at the box-office.

This is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of NO reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators' whims.

The Fall is a movie whose every frame pulsates with the desire to be a transportive, transcendent work of cinema. And each one of said frames is full of visual bedazzlement and wonder. So full that one is loathe to sum up with the phrase "Close, but no cigar." But there is something, finally, kind of pushy about the film's desire to be a masterpiece.

It hardly adds up to much, but it doesn't mean to, and it'll leave you with a cleaner conscience than an Austin Powers picture.

Iron Man is the first Marvel Comics superhero movie I would willingly sit through a second time. This is the result not just of what the movie does, but what the movie doesn't do.

What to make of it all? Hard to say. Just to take in the fact that its soundtrack is made up of music by both J. Spaceman and Sun City Girls is to understand that this is a picture that's divided against itself in a way that's perhaps too hermetic to be comprehended.

For whatever its flaws, Redbelt offers up a good deal of Mametian red meat while also trying to break out of some of the strictures that Mamet's erected around his own work.

An exhausting 90 minutes of SNL-centric mediocrity that gives one the nagging feeling that Tina Fey's inability to cut the cord is going to quickly start to cool interest in her upcoming projects.

At the screening I attended, someone walked in wearing a shirt that read "I HEART BONGS," so that gives you a pretty good idea of the target audience. Maybe this time they will rouse themselves from the couch and make it possible for us to follow Harold and Kumar through more adventures.

It's distinctly Morrisean, as it were, and seeing his style applied to subject matter with which one is already somewhat familiar makes one... well, question the style a bit.

Yeah, it's pretty funny. And it's a pretty accurate depiction of a certain feature of male romantic humiliation. But it's also a little -- and this is one of my two misgivings about the movie -- expected.

While "House of Sand and Fog" remained (somewhat precariously) balanced on the knife-edge that can turn tragedy into bathos, this picture doesn't fare nearly as well, and begins weighing down the viewer with its putative significance only minutes after its opening credits.

Whatever planet these dance sequences are happening on, their cuckoo surrealism is the movie's saving grace.

Dennis Quaid is mostly lost at sea as Lawrence Wetherhold, the Carnegie Mellon lit professor; he apparently saw fit to tinker with his performance as filming went along, greeting us in some scenes as a noticeably swishy highbrow, while at other moments he's channeling the smiling, drunken menace of Nicholson's Jack Torrance.

If you’re looking for some big, stupid fun, you could do worse than Street Kings.

This is not a children's picture, although it touches on the imaginative powers and emotional resilience of children. It's another slice of Hou's distinctly poetic realism, and as such, also a kind of tribute to Paris -- the Paris of both today and of the older film.

If the raison d'être of Leatherheads was not to add something to the football movie canon but to have Clooney and Zellweger engage in a screwball banter-fest, then there's no excusing the paltry number of zinger missiles fired over the course of the film.

All this is frustrating, as the picture contains a few grace notes that remind one what an acute filmmaker Wong can be.

It's kind of amusing to see slinky Christina Aguilera sing the "Live With Me" line about a score of harebrained children, as she clearly hasn't got the faintest idea of what that means.

The heretofore nothing-but-delightful Simon Pegg stumbles in the long-anticipated feature film directorial debut of -- ta-da! -- David Schwimmer, who takes the sow's ear of a script given him by Pegg and Michael Ian Black and deep-fries it into a burnt pork rind of a movie.

There are moments where Spacey and Bosworth have their fun in spite of the film -- they both adopt Southern "characters" as disguises at one point, which is a hoot -- but overall, 21 is a busted hand.

Visually ugly, morally non-existent and a complete black hole in the departments of insight and wit, Chapter 27 is quite possibly the most godawful, irredeemable film to yet emerge in the 21st century.

What little anti-war critique Peirce presents -- and she has it in her, which makes it all the more dubious -- gets trampled over by jingoistic Rambo porn.

It's rare that a picture that deals with as much tragedy as this one also manages to convey as much warmth to its characters.

Presents nothing blindingly new for fans of Apatow- or Sandler-style humor and when watching it, one can hear the faint rustling of old scripts being yanked from drawers for a timely cash-in, but with his high-school memories now hopefully exhausted, maybe Rogen has a good college yarn to spin.

This is very much a French intellectual cineaste's idea of a B thriller, and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get. Which is not to say that Assayas deals in bad faith.

The interpersonal dynamics haven't been scripted out very thoughtfully, so as the final 20 minutes wind down, it becomes increasingly tough for Penn and his talented cast to mine humor from a story that mandates they actually play elimination rounds of poker.

Accomplished and well-intentioned to the extent that one wants to accentuate the positive, but the positive isn't the whole, alas; for every moment in the film that evokes classic neo-realism, there's another that's commonplace or overly sentimental.

The overall feel is Hong Kong to the core…which means CJ7, like the first 25 minutes or so of "Shaolin Soccer," doesn't make many allowances to Western sensibilities.

A nonsensical vision of pre-history that lurches randomly between "caveman vs. jungle beast" encounters -- Roland Emmerich's Shlockalypto -- and a rococo Stargate spin-off involving pyramids, slave uprisings and oracles.

The suspense aspect works like mad, but what's also noteworthy is the character component, which at times evokes a "Smash Palace"-era Donaldson.

A collection of Hitchcock character-types trample over each other to win at love in Married Life, a quirky but entertaining period murder farce.

Although McDormand's performance is consistently focused -- one would expect no less from the actress -- the movie itself can't settle on whether Miss Pettigrew is Mary Poppins minus the sugar spoonful or just plain Carrie Nation.

It's terribly strong -- in structural ingenuity, emotional pull, and particularly visual beauty.

All of these actors are incredibly fine, and as a confirmed Beckinsale non-fan, I'm obliged to say that she really knocked me out here.

The courtroom scenes are the animated ones…and said animation looks rather cruder than your average PS3 game.