A charming midlife crisis of a movie that bottles the "La Femme Nikita" director's typically high-concept inclinations in a modest indie package.

Offers a charming distraction from the current campaign season by sidestepping real issues and making light of the process.

It’s tightly paced and confidently styled. These times call for more daring in our horror films, but for this weekend, this will do the trick.

There's nary a smidgen of adult humor, so parents might find things a bit on the dull side at times, but in the end they will likely thank Favreau in droves for making a film that is at least certain not to give them a headache.

Jarecki seems all too eager to buy into Toback's depiction of himself as the ultimate Hollywood outsider. Try telling that to the independent filmmakers who aren't on a first-name basis with Warren Beatty.

Apart from feeling misled by the trailers, it's a decent, middle-of-the-road adult thriller that competently goes through the paces.

While The Great Debaters' intentions don't lead it to movie hell, this picture is far more diffuse, commonplace, and predictable than the surprisingly convincing "Fisher."

If there was ever an example of a movie's visual language leaving its verbal and narrative components in the dust, this, unfortunately, is it.

Horror classicists may be upset at his tampering with monster mythologies, but everyone else will just be going along for the ride, and they’ll have a terrific time.

DiG! never delves deep enough to act as a true cautionary tale. It's an amusingly drunken PBS-worthy human-interest doc, unless you're too old or not cool enough to have played in the embarrassing hipster zoo, in which case DiG! may be the closest you'll ever get to the uncaged animals.

The real top billing, what audience-goers are obviously shelling out to see, is the computer-generated chaos, and as they should: Digital technology has caught up with our collective imaginations Now More Than Ever.

13 Tzameti is certainly nightmarish, but it's the kind of nightmare that fades instead of lingering on in the memory.

Manages to pull off an adequate amount of scares, when compared to most horror flicks in theaters this Halloween season.

Proves more irksome than moving.

Let's be honest: Whether it's Jessica Alba or Paul Walker you're dying to see stripped down to her/his sexiest swimwear, there's only one reason anyone is interested in diving Into the Blue.

This is definitely one to make you feel good all over.

For such a pedestrian exercise in Spielbergian sentiment, the somewhat stale Seabiscuit dunks into some gravy moments; the always dependable William H. Macy is three honks and six rattles of comic relief as the sound effects–happy, kooky radio reporter Tick Tock McGlaughlin, and the racing scenes themselves are spectacular.

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.

Despite its Latin flavor, there is nothing new or original about Chasing Papi's girl-power story line and ridiculously stereotypical characters. But the film's charm lies in its ability to see itself for what it is.

The new perspective Scott and Zaillian want to bring to this material never gels convincingly, and despite some effective set pieces, a cast of memorable faces and attitudes, and evocative cinematography by Harris Savides, this would-be epic feels tired and rote.

At times funny, and even occasionally witty, Alvin and the Chipmunks is a lively, entertaining romp that will certainly bring smiles to the young ones this holiday season.

It's been well-publicized that Affleck, going for as authentic a feel as possible, cast many genuine South Bostoners in both extra and speaking roles, and, while that's salutary, in some scenes his strategy backfires, yielding caricatures that are merely more vivid than the ones turned out by Central Casting Hollywood productions.

Winds up being rather fun. It's not great, but it's certainly not the worst monster movie that I've sat through -- that might be 2003's "Darkness Falls."

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

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, most intriguingly, nails what makes video games so much fun.

As unrealistic as the talking mannequins, but we’re pleasantly surprised by how good this movie makes us feel.

A lightweight but sincere coming-of-age story.

Scarlett Johansson looks lovely and hasn't much to do besides that, McGregor only starts having fun when he's playing the "original" of his clone.

Its punchline, imagining the worst that could happen to Auteuil's slimy exec, is weak and kind of dumb, but the rest of the film is genial, appealing, and brisk.

Riddled with ammunition for what Alfred Hitchcock called the "Plausibles"--those poor-sport moviegoers who insist on pointing out a movie's inconsistencies instead of simply enjoying the ride

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

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.

Its compelling cast and sincere matchmaking goals are reason enough to play along.

The movie falls flat at the end, unnecessarily linking all of the characters in what seems to be an attempt to show how it really is a small world after all.

Weisz infuses comic complexity into the ensemble, which is at times genuinely funny.

Law owns every scene he’s in--which is literally all of them--plus a decent supporting cast and dapper dialogue truly make for a breezy good time.

It's an overall heady conceit about image and invention, clever and fun with compelling lead performances -- especially Reynolds, who finally gets to show some chops in a career littered with Van Wilder–grade junk.

Unfortunately, the reach of The Return exceeds its grasp, and so this film of gruffly beautiful images didn't put a hook in me the way Zvyagintsev so ardently seems to want it to. [March 2003, p. 27]

If the resultant wreckage is a little underwhelming, and the film's coda useless and trite, the getting there is pretty absorbing.

Best appreciated as a rather amusing farce called The John Malkovich Show, the movie's every scene is anchored, then stolen, by the commanding thespian's Alan act.

Not bad for summer jollies, au contraire, but -- "Holy Raised Bar, Batman!" -- let's pray that the next installment measures up to the sequel summits of "Spider-Man 2" and "X2."

Ultimately all of the ado about men in shades and dark suits running around shooting and shouting at each other comes to a satisfying, if predictable, conclusion.

When Vantage Point is staying with Quaid and Fox as they hunt the suspected assassins (including the arrestingly beautiful Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer) it's a perfectly serviceable thriller with high production values and some better-than-average car chases.

Hobbled by weak argumentation, a character who winds up a complete muddle, and Sayles’s inclination to romanticize Latin American revolutionary types, Casa is as mixed an effort as the filmmaker has essayed in some time. [October 2003, p. 18]

This movie’s sole purpose is to make teenage boys high-five each other, and it’s faithfulness to that concept makes the cartoon carnage almost endearing.

It does deserve points for casting and some clever humor, but falls short of the classic high school movie canon.

Compelling and exasperating in pretty much equal doses.

Comic-book enthusiasts can breathe a sigh of relief: Brett Ratner hasn't completely ruined the X-Men series a.k.a. "The Franchise that Bryan Singer Built."

Touching.

A modestly scaled film on every level, but Hedges and company manage to ring true on almost all the material's sweet and sour notes.

So you'll laugh, you'll groan, you'll leave the theater singing "I'm gonna beat off….all my demons/That's what lovin' Jesus is all about" -- and isn't that, ultimately, a good thing? Yes.

It's a decent comic-book movie that delivers its goods with good humor and a minimum of bloat.

At opening night, with every seat in the cafeteria filled, you realize that the students have not only carved out a fledgling drama department in this sports-mad place, they’ve updated Grover’s Corners to Compton.

Sure, it's a pleasure to watch Thornton stretch his legs in Matthau's role, but I miss Tatum O'Neal as his firebrand daughter.

This incarnation of Spider Man seems to forget that its source material was a comic book that wanted to transcend its genre. This is a movie that's content to be pretty good within its genre, with the main distinction of being much bigger than any of its competition.

Time is more than reasonably diverting.

As a thriller, The Statement is relatively disappointing, but as a moral study, the movie proves far more promising.

Belongs to the same class of cotton-candy romances as "Chances Are" and "Somewhere in Time," although it steers its light-hearted subject into darker territory with the life support subplot.

It does move along at a nice clip, and delivers exactly what belligerent action fans on both sides of the political aisle want -- a wholly admirable figure blowing up a lot of bad s---.

Northfork feels like the work of a couple of ardent art students who, for whatever reson, are very keen on pleasing their teacher. [July/August 2003, p. 23]

The film's lack of focus leaves most, if not all, of the characters just a hair less developed than they should have been; the plot holes just a bit more conspicuous than they might have been; and the ending just a touch less poignant than it could have been.

Isn’t like a lot of modern horror movies. It’s not about torture, or dead children, or weepy vampires with great hair. It’s an attempt to reinvent the monster movie, which we're all about. It’s too bad it couldn’t have been contemporized. Period movies can so easily become parodies of portentousness, and that’s what happens with this one.

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

Subtly gaining momentum as it dexterously glides through pages of good-time, snappy dialogue, Criminal offers no time to catch your breath, let alone enough to think through its reality-stretching story flaws and subtext-lacking motives.

Understanding what McGrath is trying to pull off is not the same thing as McGrath pulling it off; as ambitious as it is, Infamous falters in execution too often to create a lasting impression.

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

Looks, feels, and tastes like a more accessible evolution of "Cremaster," so try to gauge your own tolerance for indulgent eccentricity (at 135 minutes, it could stand to lose 20).

This one aims for bleak and hits it.

After a slow start, this feel-good family film is a nice postcard from the Big Apple that may benefit New York and the Museum of Natural History as much as it does 20th Century Fox.

Ultimately, it is a serviceable, well-made thriller that earns its R rating.

Although mixing teen humor with sentiment will never be done as well as in "American Pie," John Tucker Must Die has just enough heart to entertain the "MySpace" set.

In the scenes where Efron isn't on screen, things tend to get boring. Plus, we could've lived without having watched so many scenes where Zac is showing off his basketball skills.

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.

On the plus side, there are these super-scary mechanical octopus-type things with a billion eyes and metal tentacles that fly in great awful swarms and look like the non-organic versions of the flying-brain-and-spinal-cord monsters that made the otherwise laughable '60s sci-fi flick "Fiend Without aFace" so cool.

Even the great cast didn’t make following the convoluted plot any easier. And all that jumping around makes the film feel a lot longer than it is.

Over the years, Pacino's Method has become his madness, and now, whether he's playing Shylock or Satan, he doesn't become the part so much as the part becomes him.

Sexy, stylish, and legitimately suspenseful.

An unexpectedly retro throwback to '80s actioners and '90s hacker movies, totally preposterous in both its heroic near-death escapes and abstract tech-jargon explanations for how anyone with geeky inclinations can remotely override any computer system with a few easy keystrokes.

It is a cute, silly romantic comedy, with little suspense and nothing particularly new to add to genre.

While 1408 is no classic, it is refreshing to see a horror picture that just wants to do its job rather than prove to its audience how ruthlessly nihilistic it is.

The family dynamic, paired with a few delicious action scenes, is engaging enough that we hardly notice the fillm's major flaw, a rather flimsy and sometimes jingoistic subplot having to do with California's independence.

The depiction of everyday life at the orphanage is far more compelling than Vanya's personal quest. It's unfortunate that once the Italian hits the road, The Italian loses its way.

There's much visual inventiveness and a good sense of fun here. But I was expecting something more spectacular.

Joyeux Noel is no gritty war film; this is more of a Christmas miracle movie, full of melodrama. Carion juggles a large, multicultural cast, and few of the characters stand out; most are there to represent the types who pop up in your standard war-movie battalions.

A tart, funny, moderately over-the-top hijinks-and-snafus yarn.

As a meditation of American life, Greendale is anything but coherent, but it is fluidly free-associative and shows bizarre wit, as when Young himself shows up to play Wayne Newton. [March 2004, p. 27]

As a superhero movie, it's something of an underachiever, missing out on easy opportunities to push the idea to the next level.

Aesthetically wild and otherwise mild.

For my money, if I'm in the mood for the kind of aesthetic and emotional experience Saints is selling, I'll just blast Jim Carroll's more concise (and rocking!) "People Who Died" out of my iPod.

Though this new Hills is both scarier and smarter than 95 percent of the other horror product out there, it's also indicative of everything that's wrong with horror movies today.

It’s surprisingly funny for another weak "American Pie" rip-off; Nicholas D'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen make a hilarious pair; If you're under the age of 25 you’ll like it.

The dynamic between Leonard and his lovers is uncomfortable and not in the good way like Ricky Gervais's dancing.

This picture reminded me of one of the things I like best about "All the President’s Men": It doesn’t give a good godd--- about Woodward and Bernstein’s personal lives.

It might have been better to have played it straight — small instead of epic, chronological instead of deconstructed — and to give his characters some explicitness in history instead of the bedroom.

Wisely unbiased-but also unfocused, uneducated, and underachieving-which makes for an occasionally hilarious, frequently anemic parody that misses its opportunity to permanently document a scathing critique of current events.

One of Cruise's most deeply cherished ambitions is to be a great actor, and this movie goes to great lengths to let him do that--sort of. You'll understand what I mean during the sequence in which there is more than one Philip Seymour Hoffman on the screen.

While brisk, informative, and entertaining, feels frustratingly sketchy.

As a fan and well-wisher of Coppola's, I wanted very much to like this movie, and I'll probably give it another shot once the DVD comes out. But, at first sight, Youth Without Youth's striving for exuberance reveals an almost desperate effort too much of the time.