The Family Stone may not be super-serious or even, well, sly, but none of that matters: this is a warm and engaging film that is sure to become a perennial Christmas favorite.

It plays on your knowledge of/expectations about generic horror movies and then either delivers the goods from an unexpected angle or pulls the rug out from under you.

The whole thing works, especially for the non-comic audience. Plus, the music is perfect, especially the opening montage set to Bob Dylan's, "The Times They Are a-Changin."

It's basically just another watered-down version of Dead Poets Society and countless other inspirational-teacher films, but its emotional impact is undeniable.

Lords of Dogtown may pop for the skateboarding crowd. It fizzles for the rest.

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.

The entire film is a thrown-together collection of gunfights and in-jokes. The film is more concerned with expanding this universe of seedy tequila bars and dusty city streets than it is in telling a narrative story.

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.

An intense New York-set thriller that manages to be both commercial and contemplative, kick-ass and quietly, disturbingly insinuating.

Wolfgang Petersen's Troy recalls an age when Hollywood not only gambled on but flourished with grandiose epics and casts of thousands, and brings megawatt star power to what is, at root, a brilliantly told story.

This is a pleasure to watch for everyone.

There are certainly some laughs to be had in Holiday (mostly of the "so dumb it’s funny" variety), but not much else.

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

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

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

Hathaway's proven charms work magic here.

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

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.

The film is punctuated by a literal knock down, drag out affair that has all the perverse curiosity of watching a "late career" Mike Tyson bout. But by the end, the real knockout is the discovery of this comic gem.

Camp may not be great cinema, but it's passionate and original enough to be special.

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

To be fair, Ouimet's story is pretty magical, one of the great sports underdog tales.

Director Dylan Kidd sneaks some pretty profound observations about love and life by us.

Too bad the movie was assembled by Hollywood types -- Joel Schumacher directed, Jerry Bruckheimer produced -- who like to have things 15 ways at once. Hollywood types don't like journalists, so while they're lionizing Guerin, they go out of their way to make almost every other journalist depicted in the picture despicable.

Features some of the best fight and chase footage you'll see all summer.

There were times watching this movie when I felt I was being force-fed 30 pounds of crème brûlée. Which isn’t to say I choked on every minute: I chortled heartily at the thread about the comeback of the washed-up rock star (Bill Nighy).

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]

Vince Vaughn is terrific as the baddie.

The result is by far the most original comedy of the year. Russell might alienate some audience members here--but it’s possible they literally won't know what they're missing.

If it makes anybody feel better, one character in the picture does point out that the whole "extraordinary rendition" concept originated with Clinton. So there's balance for you.

It’s very colorful, for sure, but the dialogue is lead-footed at best.

Still, the film actually earns the description of being inspirational, not only to those of us with a dream, but to those who thought the quality family film had died long ago.

Howard’s inclination toward graphic, gruesome violence, reminiscent of Ransom’s grisly denouement, The Missing is, at its core, a story well-told and built upon the solid foundation of Blanchett’s supremely capable performance.

Depends on how you're feeling about Tom Cruise--as opposed to the character he's putatively playing.

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.

The entertainingly unhinged Hostel reeks of kneeling reverence to the grisliest of psychotronica while simultaneously striving to out-gore and out-shock its predecessors.

Take it from someone who can still feel the hollow rubber tang! of old dodgeball scars: It feels great to be blindsided by a little movie like this.

A thin sprinkling of exuberance and a couple of choice cameos, that's about all this underwritten and overly choreographed spectacle has to tease us with.

An often highly amusing comedy in the vein of "Catch 22" and "Dr Strangelove," this lively satire looks destined for future cult status. Great soundtrack, too.

Lee’s use of split-screens and dynamic transitions makes the process of actively interpreting his monstrous vision a fresh and unrivaled experience.

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.

With a cast of well-chosen actors, a good script, and an eye for making ordinary suburban scenes visually heartbreaking, director Steve Buscemi's small story of failure, depression-and ultimately, love-in one Indiana town rings painfully true-to-life.

Mortensen proves once again that he’s an able, even intuitive performer, more compelling speaking Lakota Sioux than many others in plain English.

Marshall's Memoirs achieves something few other high-profile literary adaptations do: Rather than simply inspiring us to hunt down the source material, it actually stands alone as a film, rich in drama and star-crossed romance.

Though Melinda is no masterpiece, it’s also an Allen film that requires almost zero special pleading.

Alll in all, however, Estevez has pulled together the best political drama, fiction or otherwise, in recent memory.

It's the stuff of not quite dreams, and it's rendered with such accuracy and hilarity that I am tempted to call Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters the most successful full-on surrealist film since Bunuel and Dali's 1930 "L'Age d'Or."

The random and unpredictable nature makes it an extremely interesting film to watch.

The result is oddly schizoid, but also so insubstantial that to call it oddly schizoid suggests a weight it doesn't have.

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.

Strikingly shot with some wicked hand-held virtuousity, Assault is rivetingly suspenseful in how it toys with the morals of good guys flip-flopping to the dark side (and vice versa).

Most likely chosen for its shaggy-dog looks, Winn-Dixie is actually a great deal more special than you'd expect, a fitting analogy for a film no parent should be too quick to dismiss.

Vacancy could have been some sort of satirical masterpiece had this whole scenario been finally revealed as an extreme form of couple's therapy designed to get Beckinsale and Wilson back together.

Smushes together “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (the novel, that is), “True Believer,” and “Eyes Wide Shut,” only it does so without being nearly as good as any of the aforementioned.

The film, directed by "My Cousin Vinny's" Jonathan Lynn, is a fun movie which proves to be worth a look and a listen.

A charmless, vandalized version of a classic.

At its best though, the film offers a pointed critique of a youth culture that views someone like Jesse James Hollywood as a person to emulate.

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.

Ella Enchanted seems squarely aimed at 12-year-old girls, or, I don't know, maybe 8-year-old girls.

At the end of the movie, the only mystery left unsolved is where your time and money have gone.

It's all pulled off with a firm sense of the fun in being scared.

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

At heart, a light, watchable film.

Weinstein Co. honchos Bob and Harvey are chasing some of the old "Pulp Fiction" magic--and failing not only miserably, but kind of disgustingly.

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---.

The movie suffers from convoluted plots, turgid pacing, and strange disrespect for its source material.

I'd like to say that Flightplan is one of those white-knuckle, edge-of-your-seat thrill rides that critics are always raving about, but instead, it's more like a transatlantic flight with no clear destination, where the cabin noise makes it impossible to sleep and the in-flight movie is a rerun.

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."

Though director Irwin Winkler takes pains to accurately present Cole's life (unlike "Night and Day," the 1946 biopic starring Cary Grant), the film has its shortcomings. First of which is pushing the love story, when it's clear Linda's feelings aren't reciprocated.

I don’t quite cherish Thackeray’s novel, but a can-do feminist, multicultural contemporization of it strikes me as, well, unnecessary.

What could have been Solondz's most complex and challenging film winds up being a bit on the flat side. Still, the life-forms skittering over its surface are fascinating to behold.

We can only speculate why McConaughey chose to play the role this way, but in all honesty, it's a good thing he did. His loony performance is the only surprising thing about this otherwise paint-by-numbers inspirational drama.

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

Considering how much new additions Rosario Dawson (as Mimi) and Tracie Thoms (as Joanne) bring to the film, it's a shame Columbus didn't introduce more changes.

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.

Starts out strong and boasts a convincing picture of the post-war world as an anarchic desert. But it comes to ditch its fun stylization for vague themes of religiosity and morality, leaving you with a disappointingly muddled movie.

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

It is the overwhelmingly acrid sense of humor that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth at the end of the film.

For the most part, what it aims to do-amuse and uplift-it does wonderfully.

Dead Man's Chest is best summed up by the scene where Sparrow and Will battle each other atop a runaway water wheel. Like the characters, this movie is just running in circles.

Surely it’s a credit to this luminous cast that the characters can behave in such despicable ways yet still command one’s sympathy.

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.

Ultimately a valentine to the unsung heroes of the US Coast Guard and it's probably long overdue.

The problem here, which vitiates the picture's ingenuity and causes it, finally, to sink like a stone, is in the physical execution of the material.

The period sets and costumes and the arch dialogue are exaggerated as if to underline the movie’s satirical intent—but in fact it has none.

The Holiday is the type of welcome diversion that only Meyers still seems to specialize -- a romantic comedy where Barbara Stanwyck and Rosalind Russell would have been just as natural as Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet and where the one liners fly like confetti.

Perpetually wide-eyed and mega-snarly bedraggled, Christina Ricci prowls through Black Snake Moan looking like something the cat dragged in. If you're anything like me, you'll be very grateful to the cat.

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]

Can he (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson ) act? Surprisingly, for the most part, the answer is yes, and the film is a success for it.

Where the film falters is in Alejandro Agresti's overly deliberate direction, which threatens to drown the drama in amber sunsets and self-conscious camera framings. The film looks great, but it lacks spontaneity, an important element of the most memorable screen romances.

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.

Even as Dark Water's horror-movie component flounders, a different, arguably better kind of thriller emerges.

For the most part, Murphy is pitching somewhere between "American Beauty" and "The Royal Tenenbaums"; indeed, the characters Bening and Gwyneth Paltrow play in Scissors are, in a sense, inversions of their roles in Beauty and Tenenbaums, respectively.

Overburdened with themes and symbolism, Baltasar Kormákur’s latest effort seems more apt for a term paper than a movie review.

Nothing happens as you might expect it to, but the Pinocchio ending is definitely out.

Gondry might have been better off keeping his movie on theoretical/slapstick grounds, because, quite frankly, his attempts at sincerity just don't make it.

That it's so flat as an action movie probably has a lot to do with why people might prefer to jawbone over its putatively controversial aspects--there's really not much of a “wow” factor to revel in.

Parents might like the film, but will be too busy explaining the complicated plot to their children to really enjoy it.