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

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.

Lichtenstein's putative switcheroo on the Vagina Dentata trope is to play it as some kind of token of female empowerment, but it's pretty clear that the writer/director didn't think things through on any counts, contenting himself that the putative outrageousness of the concept could see him through.

Nearly perfect in its own cotton-candy way.

Even if its premise weren't so achingly familiar, the film's bland humor and oddly conservative depiction of its central character, a flamboyant drag queen named Lola, would still make it seem like a museum piece.

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.

Ledger turns in another stellar performance and Cornish is heartbreakingly good also in this well-crafted film. But once that first plunger is pushed, the surprises are few.

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.

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

It's a brisk and lively getaway with genuine personality.

Touching.

Provocative, quietly erotic, deeply romantic, and slyly witty (a cameo by a giant of punk rock is funny at first sight, and funnier still when you figure out the joke it's making), Code 46 is a very effective antidote to summer blockbuster bloat.

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.

Like the original, Iron Man 2 is a good time from start to finish.

This is one unmarked van you just might want to take a ride with.

A wildly creative amusement, thanks mostly to Campbell, whose weathered yet still-taking-care-of-business Elvis is alone worth the price of admission.

A sports flick that’s a worthy addition to the genre.

Under the clichéd spell of rock-and-roll promiscuity and pills popped, Seigner shows astonishing range as the detached superstar who still fixates on her ex-boyfriend and has mood swings like a manic-depressive on fast-forward.

Green, the first feature Coupland's written, doesn't really make any innovations to the Almost 30-Underachievers genre, but it's an endearing, solidly-crafted example.

Hey, remember “fun”? If you’re sick of the apocalypse and tortured anti-heroes, then you need to see Sherlock Holmes. It’s a blast from start to finish.

Its climactic highway shootout, and much else in the picture, is rendered in the best Paul Greengrass manner that Hollywood money can buy. But where Greengrass pictures aim to keep one on the edge of one's seat throughout, the tension here, such as it is, is designed to stoke audience bloodlust. If that's your kind of thing, The Kingdom certainly satisfies.

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

Perfume is sure to annoy as many moviegoers as it entertains, but at least even the naysayers would find it difficult to argue that film is nothing if not a departure from the ordinary.

Duff is a charming heroine who carries the movie cheerfully, if not gracefully--the pratfalls come early and often.

All this stuff is enacted by a better-than-reliable cast (Griffin Dunne, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine O'Hara, Roger Rees, and more), so Game 6 is never a bore. But it's not much more besides never a bore.

One-dimensional fluff piece.

Director Julie Taymor's gargantuan all-Beatles-songs musical is that rarest of animals, the perfect disaster that fulfills expectations by defying them.

Shame is a welcome reminder that sex is sometimes too ridiculous to take so seriously.